Bless Sean West’s (Dealmaker Studios in Nottingham) email earnestness and his consistant harping on us all summer, trying to open our eyes and ears to Lone. We’re listening! and loving it! Lone is one Matt Cutler, beat-maker, audio-cut-and-paster, and all-around sonic-magician. Cutler lays down hip-hop beats then layers the tracks with illusory flourishes, broken chords, and dream-inducing 8-bit melodies. This is the music I heard in my head when I read the Chronicles of Narnia (before current literature to screen trends began destroying young imaginations). This is the music I imagined the band of lizards playing in Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music. Give it a try. Do your own mini mash-up of Pinkwater Vs. Lone to see what I mean. Youthful, imaginative, and sweetly psychedelic Lone will likely conjure up visions of rainbows, sparkly unicorns, Mozart playing lizards, magic wardrobes or any other mystical apparitions floating around in your subconscious.
+/- (Plus/Minus)
+/- has always given me the impression that they know exactly what they’re doing. Even as their catchy pop has matured, like the members themselves, their songs are still crafted in fine detail; there is no filler, no fluff, and definitely no songs that were mere afterthoughts meant to only take up space. Now that is not to say that there is no passion in +/-. Au contraire, they’re only showing us the passion that they want us to see, dispensing their drug in controlled doses. Xs for Your Eyes, their new LP. will be out October 21st.
Original post from June 30, 2004:
Continuing our tour of former members of the late great Versus (and 3hive’s tour of bands with non-alphabetic names), we now hit +/-, a.k.a. “Plus Minus.” Combining the finer points of electronica and jangly (even emo) pop with their well-honed skills of crunching guitars, +/- purvey a progessive indie rock that’s catchy, hooky, and rockin’.
Paul Westerberg
I’m sorry, but I get so sick of new music sometimes. It’s not that I want to live stuck in the late ‘8os or ’90s, enveloped by the past, but I need to see where I’ve been. Not to get all Nick Hornsby here, but I want access to the personal history that comes with MY music. Case in point: Sam and I went to see The Wedding Present on Thursday night in Pontiac (where, apparently, Elvis split his pants playing at the Silverdome), and it was awesome. David Gedge has been making music since 1985, and we’ve been listening to it for almost long, and it felt so good to hear him rip through “Kennedy” and screw up the lyrics to “Crawl” and play half of the Seamonsters album and turn “I-5” into the most intense therapy session. So with this post, I wanted to tap into similar memories, like walking up the Lake Michigan bike path from Hyde Park to Grant Park to see Paul Westerberg play the 1996 Chicago TasteFest wearing a bright yellow suit. I’ll keep the rest of my stories of Westerberg and The Replacements to myself, and let you know that, 1) Paul has been recording and releasing single, studio session length MP3s recently, and 2) a bunch of Replacements albums were remastered and rereleased a week or two ago. Also, for anyone still reading, I can offer one of the best songs ever recorded in the whole history of music (“We May Be The Ones”) and a handful of other tracks kindly provided by Vagrant Records, so you start making some of your own history.
Frank Hoier
There’s nothing like a good protest song. There are plenty such songs—heck, whole bands, that just aren’t any fun. They take themselves so seriously and make music for people with no sense of humor or joie de vivre. That ain’t me, ‘coz I get the joie, baby! So does Frank Hoier. I bet if he watched the U.S. Vice Presidential debate last night, he started strumming “Jesus Don’t Give Tax Breaks to the Rich†about halfway through. And I bet if his bandmates the Weber Brothers were there with him, they started strumming and picking right along. And I bet that if anyone else was there, they all clapped and stomped their feet and sang along. And I bet instead of getting angry at the people who might rule the free world in a couple of months, they all smiled, laughed, and felt the joie!
Ernest Gonzales
Hip Hop producer Ernest Gonzales drops his Theory of Everything moniker and tinkers out 8 bit lullabies for his soon-to-be-born daughter. I was a bit hesitant to listen to such an intensely personal project. But when I heard these playful, dreamy compositions I felt privileged to have been invited to this musical expression of one father’s hopes and dreams for his child. That said, children are not required to enjoy this 80s-era synthesized study in dream pop.
Polara
While it had been a few years since Polara’s last release, Ed Ackerson did put out a solo album last year, following it up this past May with the new Polara album Beekeeping. It continues the time-tested, 3hive-approved Polara formula of throbbing, wah-soaked mod psych fuzz-pop.
Original Post 4/9/2005:
Ed Ackerson, the main man in Polara, had an earlier mod/power-pop band called the 27 Various. I first bought an album of the 27 Various just because of one sentence on the back cover. They proclaimed their avoidance of a certain musical equipment manufacturer under the song listing by declaring “The 27 Various are proud to be {manufacturer’s name removed} free.” I didn’t like that company’s amps anyway, so I bought the CD. Ed moved on to bigger and better things with Polara, whose song “Counting Down” from their album Clean is still one of my favorites. Polara’s got a new EP out to whet our appetites for a full length LP in the fall; unfortunately no MP3s, so in keeping with Citizen Bird from the other day, here’s some earlier examples of Polara’s soulful fuzz-pop. And Ed, if you’re reading, I’m still {manufacturer’s name removed} free!
Addendum: New EP means new MP3! Polara’s now offering “Thirty Seconds” from their new EP. Enjoy!
Leila
On her myspace page Leila lists her influences as “life…noise…stuff.” I’d just add “beats” to that list for a quick summation of her sound. These tracks her label has generously offered for your downloading pleasure demonstrate Leila’s controlled cacophony as she gathers audio odds and ends, samples of this horn and that vocal clip, and masterfully stitches the sounds together into something you can dance to and something you can chill to, respectively. It’s pastiche-core in the vein of Solex. Leila brings in a hodge-podge of guest musicians to add their own noises and stuff like Martina Topley Bird, Terry Hall, Andy Cox (The English Beat/Fine Young Cannibals), and her own sister Roya Arab. Blood, Looms, and Blooms is just the latest in her decade long recording career. Leila has worked with Björk and Aphex Twin and recorded as Grammatix and Little Miss Specta. Admittedly, I’ve got some homework to do as I’ve missed out thus far on her earlier efforts. Shame on me.
Jenny Lewis
So, I think it’s great and all that Jenny Lewis is now on Warner Bros. The thing is, the WB has this super-duper security thing going on with their advance copy CDs, and I can’t play the promo they sent me of Jenny’s new album, Acid Tongue. I tried it on my computer, I tried it in the car, and the players just kept spitting it out. Yes, it’s important to protect one’s recordings from piracy, but it seems you certainly can reach a point where there’s too much security and not enough liberty. In this case, I’d love to hear more of Lewis’ arresting voice, especially in collaboration with Elvis Costello, Benji Hughes and everybody else the publicists say is on the album. If the one free and legal download is suggestive of anything, it’s that I totally want to hear more. I trust that you all can fill me in on how the rest of Acid Tongue sounds.
Peter Broderick
Peter Broderick’s new album Home isn’t much more than a guitar, his voice, and occasional percussion. Anything else frankly would get in the way. At a moment in time when most of the industrialized world is bent on multi-tasking themselves to a living death Broderick sheds himself of distractions and focuses on his precision finger-picking guitar playing, his lush vocal washes, and his zen-like compositions. If you’ve been feeling like you’ve been swept up in a figurative hurricane, or if you’ve been cleaning up after Ike himself, let Peter Broderick breathe a soul-cleansing burst of pastoralia into you. Let him be the eye of the storm of life. Be sure to check out Broderick’s band Efterklang.
Now, Now Every Children
How many of us were in a band in 10th grade? And for those who answered yes, how many are still in that band? Cacie Dalager and Brad Hale started playing together in 10th grade, and, having finished school, last year added two other members to round out their lineup and begin doing this band thing for real. Cacie’s innocently earnest voice steals the show, while the music swirls around her, managing to push her higher still. That’s the danger with their formula; can the music match the level of the singing? Now, Now Every Children make it sound simple, by keeping it…well…simple. Now after listening, for those who answered no, how many of us wish we had been in a band in 10th grade?