If you’re resolved to improve your self-defense this new year, may I suggest The Martial Arts. They may not improve your karate kicks or your break-bricks-with-head skills, but they’ll do wonders for your cardiovascular health as you find yourself bopping around the room to their bouncy rhythms. Their timeless throwback pop sound is influenced, according to their myspace page, by “Partridge & Moulding” (XTC) and “Holsapple & Stamey” (the db’s). It’s rare for young bands these days to name such pairs as influences, rarer still to pull off a comparable tune, but Paul Kelly & Co. have succeeded in doing just that. Surprisingly, the band (Scottish themselves) is only beholden in Sweden to Groover Recordings. This is one band I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes and, more importantly, my ears on in 2008.
P.S. The band was offering their album, Your Sinclair, as a free download through Christmas, but guess what? It’s still live. So grab it while you still can!
Let me end 2007 with hollAnd, one of my favorite all-time bands, who I first wrote about on 3hive in May 2004, although it’s not so much a band as it is one Trevor Kampmann, musician/producer/former-child-TV-actor extraordinaire. A dozen (or more, depending on how you count) releases, along with even more production credits, over the last dozen or so years. From the day I bought the Sea Saw (his first moniker) seven inch Stereo on a whim at No Life Records in LA until the recent release Love Fluxus and my new favorite hollAnd song “French Grass” (replacing his cover of Human League’s “The Lebanon”), I’m man enough to say it’s been a love affair.
Today’s selection is actually a nice bookend to Lisa’s Hello, Blue Roses post yesterday, albeit 4Hero has always been more of a sweeping club fave than an electronic bedroom dweller. Way back in 1999, I took a job in Los Angeles and drove down the very next day in my Chevy Sprint Turbo (yes, turbo), and 4Hero’s Two Pages, which came out a few months before, was about the only cassette I had that would play in my cheapo radio. Unlike the CD release, the promo segregated the darker drum’n’bass onto one cassette and the more chilled-out, string-laden fusion stuff onto another. As the title suggests, one was a great antidote to the other. In the central Utah mountains? Time for Ursula Rucker’s smooth spoken-word over lovely breakbeats and sweeping strings. Trudging the home stretch through the Mojave? Bring on the sci-fi jungle. Since that bygone era when we were all going to be dot-com millionaires, 4Hero has gravitated more and more toward the groove, and “Morning Child†has the feel of both a return to form and a culmination of the form. It also sounds like a lithe and lovely summer song, so perhaps it’ll warm up your new year a few degrees.
Today I will be brief in favor of yet another satisfying nap. I love slow, electronic-ish, mixed-voice fare. I really, really love it, actually. And from this vantage point, Sydney Vermont and “her man” [direct quote from Myspace bio, interesting…] Dan Bejar (who spends some time with Destoyer and the New Pornos as well) are yet another antidote to seasonal indulgence. This one was recommended by my dear friend Seth, who will leave New York City this week for more verdant vistas. How appropriate and delicious the melancholia.
Have you ever pursued a particular boy or girl because he or she was hot in a way that another particular boy or girl was hot, but for whatever reason the former boy or girl avoided your clutch? Well that’s the situation in which I currently find myself. Musically speaking. It’s been over a year since I’ve heard anything from 
My friend Sam (as in Sam, one of the founders of this website) is a huge sucker for Christmas music. In high school, I remember caroling around his neighborhood with his family (all ten of them!) and it was just so… good. So this post is all about you, S’mee. Benji Cossa has released a whole X-mas album — Merry Christmas to Friends and Family — on Serious Business Records, with every song available for free and legal download. Alex Chilton’s “Jesus Christ” is here, along with a bunch of the classics and a Benji original, “Friends and Famly.” I hope you like ’em, Sam. Maybe one or two will show up on your annual Holiday CD Cleaner? Oh, by the way, can you send me your address? Your tin of cookies is probably getting stale in the back of my car.
While I respect 
Having previously confessed my love for Mark Robinson, founder of 
Despite my penchant for cheerful pop I do enjoy moody sounds more than occasionally. The Bell joins fellow Swedes, 
There used to be a bunch of MP3’s available for Stephen Malkmus so that you could get a great sense of what the erstwhile Pavement frontman has been up to for most of the last decade — and if you haven’t been keeping up, you’re missing out. We’re down to one: the sprawling, guitarilicious Randy Newman cover (!) “Baltimore,” all 6 minutes and 37 seconds of it. The new album is called Real Emotional Trash and as far as I can tell there is no release date yet, so don’t wear out this stocking stuffer too soon because it may be all you get for Christmas.
We’ll go Detroit local for today’s post, and check out New Grenada’s punky rock riffs and rips, boops and bips, toy instruments and just about anything else they dig out of the closet. Like a lot of awesome indie rock outfits, John Nelson, Nicole Allie and Dave Melkonian seem to make a lot more sound than you’d expect from so few people. With three LPs and a handful of 7″ and other recordings to their credit, New Grenada seem to be about to hit the sweet spot (even if their photo suggests they’re survivng solely on the kindliness of others). Check out their latest tracks — “Emergency Brigade” and “Meat is Murdermobile,” from the 2006 release Modern Problems — for a sense of their sonic range.