Listening to The Silent Years takes me back to my oh-so-glorious college radio days. We were on the AM frequency and didn’t have an FCC license so we couldn’t broadcast off-campus, which wouldn’t have been so limiting if it hadn’t been a commuter campus. The quietude afforded us time and space to make mistakes, build playlists with no real agenda, and explore the piles and piles of promo CDs stacked around the studio (despite signs asking that everything go back to from whence it came). The Silent Years is like a band I may have found in a pile, an earnest young outfit with vaguely nihilistic lyrics sung, possibly ironically, with great emotion, and riffs that made me nod my head but weren’t obnoxious enough to cause consternation. Coulda been Texas is the Reason, or Ash, or any of a dozen others. I would throw it in the rotation, maybe play another song at the top of each hour, and be fully obsessed before my timeslot was over. Anyhow, The Silent Years give me fond memories and have the potential to become an aural obsession that I’d like to tell the world about, or at least those of you who get the signal.
The Inner Banks
I’ve never been to the Inner Banks…or the Outer Banks, for that matter. In fact I’ve never been to North Carolina. But I’ve wanted to go for a long time. And, I’ll be hogtied if this Brooklynite composer David Gould (The Bootleg Remedy) and his partner/wife/vocalist Caroline Schutz (Folksongs for the Afterlife) don’t make me want to go to North Carolina even more than ever before. Something about these songs — they’re warm, resolute, timeless, pretty — and how they mirror what I imagine North Carolina will be like. Who knows? Maybe I’ll hate it there. But I doubt that. So I guess I know what I need to do (book a flight). And I guess you know what you need to do (listen to The Inner Banks). Their self-titled debut comes out in December 2006.
Play It As It sLays #257
Rainer Maria
I remember my friend Tim Ortopan was so excited after he bought Rainer Maria’s latest (well, April ’06) album Catastrophe Keeps Us Together that he had me listening to it within 24 hours of purchase. It’s a shame there don’t seem to be any free, legal and full-length MP3s from Catastrophe… available to post here, because they’d be a good fit at the top of our list, showing the all-important change over time (“delta” from science class, right?). If you can’t hear the development and maturity of a band while working bottom-up through the selection of songs below, go get your earwax cleaned out! Obviously, I think Catastrophe… continues this trend with wonderful results. From pounding drums and entwined screaming voices back in the ’90s to today’s complex and melodic sounds, Rainer Maria just makes good music.