Seriously, my sincerest apologies to Jim and his posse for shellin’ out their new songs while rehashing an old review of the band. They deserve better. They deserve so much more. But, alas, this is all I could muster in the middle of night when I should only be doing ONE thing: sleeping. Besides, you can read up on the band and their label and all the good things they got going on down there in Athens, GA right here.
Hare Lipped Bust [MP3, 3.4MB, 192kbps]
I Had a Good Idea [MP3, 3.9MB, 192kbps]
White Rat [MP3, 5.6MB, 192kbps]
File under: Better Late Than Never. [ingenting] may mean “nothing” in their native tongue of Swedish, but this wonderful single, a favorite of mine since Labrador offered it for free, oh, about 11 months ago (see first sentence), is anything but. The post-punk guitar, the keyboard-driven simple melody, the disco bass, and the crisp drumming are awfully catchy and do not deserve to be horded by me any longer.
This is the band I want haunting my garage this Halloween. Their simple ch-ch-chunking staccato chords, the wailing organ, the sultry, slightly off-kilter vocals teasing from down low in the mix send shivers down my spine. And oh, that fuzz! Makes me wanna shimmy and shake all night long. Bear with my L.A. bias when I say Tiger! Tiger! would make cute kissing cousins with X, Mary’s Danish, and The Gun Club. They pare down that punk-twang to its garage origins circa 1970-something. Tune into their myspace page for more fine examples.
For the longest time you’d have to dig up classic Z-Trip mixes by way of some friendly shared drive somewhere. Now that Z-Trip has sobered up from his major label affair (only one album…who saw that coming?), he’s his own boss. And that means, among other things, a website with downloads to die for. I’ve included a couple of his original compositions (featuring the inimitable Chali2Na and Lateef the Truthspeaker). But if you haven’t already heard such classic mashup mixdowns as Uneasy Listening, Live at the Future Primitive, and The Anti-War Mix stop what you’re doing right now and pay a visit to 
I really wanted to post something about Reunion Tour, the new album by The Weakerthans, and it looks like there are two tracks from it on the Anti Records website, but I’m still a techno illiterate and am unable to link these babies up. Instead, here’s a blast from the 1990s, from John K. Samson’s solo album Little Pictures, rereleased by G7 in 2006. Samson is like our own (Canadian) Woody Guthrie, a social activist lyric genius. John K.’s guitar kills fascists too, I bet.
The 
Things are always bigger in Texas, right? And Tulsa’s in Oklahoma, which is next to Texas, and thus things should be a little bit bigger there too. Um, yeah. This Tulsa’s actually from Boston, but they’ve got some big sound, and lots of it. The three songs below, from the recently released album I Was Submerged offer up a good idea of what the band’s all about. Some shimmer here and some crunching guitar there, understatement in one track (“Shaker,” which might be my favorite of the bunch) and a little 1990s Brit-rock swagger in another (“Mass”) — good stuff to fill the wide open spaces.
It’s only been about seven months since I first posted Efterklang, but they have a new album out and a fantastic, playful, M.C. Escher-esque video and, well, it’s all very exciting. Both “Cutting Ice to Snow” and “Mirador” (the video track) showcase Efterklang’s beautiful knack for creating soundtracks to films that haven’t been made — though I guess in the case of “Mirador” that’s only half true. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a sublime way to add a lilting soundtrack to your own never-ending film. Oh, and for those of you in Europe, Efterklang will be on tour all season, so go to their website and see if they’ll be near you…