Please do not confuse Mus, the delightful Spanish duo of Fran Gayo and Mónica Vacas, with MUS, short for Memphis University School, the all-boy prep school I attended from 7th through 9th grades. First of all, Mus has a female, and there were no females at MUS. Mus use the soaring female voice as an instrument, highlighting their minimal approach, be it coolly electronic or calmly acoustic. And that voice sings in Asturian, from the Principality of Asturias in northwest Spain, making Mus as mysterious as a girl at an all-boy prep school.
A Fancey Magical Summer
Boom Bip
It’s gonna be really hard expressing in words how much I like this track. There’s an undeniable Kraftwerk vibe at work here and more importantly Boom Bip manages to hold his own. “The Move” is the 2005 version of “Tour de France” sans all the huffing and puffing. I obviously have a thing for songs that sound as if they could accompany a sporting event. Having remixed tracks for Mogwai, Sonic Youth, Her Space Holiday, and Lali Puna, I’d be a bit surprised if you weren’t already familiar with his work. If not, start here and dig deep!
Art Brut
Sardonic, Mark E. Smith-esque romps which, as my dear British colleagues say, “take the piss” out of “Top of the Pops” and other beloved mainstream icons. Unfortunately, these tracks are demo versions of sorts — several versions removed from the album takes, wherein the guitars typically come out in full force. Also on the Art Brut site are some really interesting remixes/mashups/covers (“Brutlegs,” as they call them), including a rap version of their uncharacteristically tender love song, “Emily Kane,” and “My Sharona Formed a Band,” which is fairly self-explanatory.
Martha Wainwright
The Wainwrights are the most prolific multi-generational musical family this side of the Carters and the Guthries. And those families never made their own travails quite so voyeuristic: listening to the Wainwrights is a bit like watching a whole season of Six Feet Under in one sitting. Martha’s brother is Rufus, her father is Loudon III, her mother and aunt are Kate and Anna McGarrigle. You can hear the family resemblance in Martha’s sweet supper club number “How Soon” — Martha’s melancholy is almost uplifting. But the languid, atmospheric hum of “I Will Internalize” is proof of a student who has moved beyond simply parroting her teachers. And “BMFA,” whose acronym of a title we’ll let you figure out for yourself (and which she’s dedicated to her father in concert), is the most alluring piece of profanity since Liz Phair traded in her diary for a gold lamé tube top and designer jeans. Let’s hope Martha keeps her current pants on.
3hive Does Portland
The Earlies MP3-less
Octant
Octant are Tassy Zimmerman, Matthew Steinke, and an automated acoustic drum machine called the AD3, which looks like the kind of drum a one-man band would use only it has a motor instead of a man powering it. The result is a broken android new wave thing that kinda makes me nostalgic for the simple days of the Cold War.
Xiu Xiu
My high school was severely fractured, socially speaking. You had all sorts: jocks, preps (a distinct group from the jocks, although crossover was allowed), skaters, punks (who didn’t skate; no crossover with the skaters for some reason), nerds, freaks (the Southern term for the the heavy metal crowd), and couple of others. If Jamie Stewart, the driving force of Xiu Xiu, had gone to my school, there would have been another group: Jamie Stewart. Individual, honest, passsionate, what you hear is what you get. He does it his way, and there’s definitely no posing. “Bog People” is from the just-released La Forêt.
Dressy Bessy
I don’t use the term “hit of the summer” lightly, so believe me when I say… Dressy Bessy’s “Side 2” with all that sass and swagger, not to mention Tammy Ealon’s sexy rasp of a voice, is the perfect accompaniment for pool swimming, steering wheel drumming, corn-on-the-cob grilling, limeade swilling — all your favorite warm weather activities. And once I’ve worn that track out, I’ll just move on to the next one. ‘Cause the new album, my friends, is a veritable “hit parade” (another term I don’t use lightly, if at all). “Just Once More,” from their self-titled 2003 release, ain’t half bad either.