Thursday, April 20, 2006
Listening to...
Lately, I’ve been heavily listening to Belbury Poly and Canyon Country
Both links have sample music available. I highly recommend checking them out.
Canyon Country has a member from Freescha!
Belbury Poly is very Boards of Canada like.
Labels: cd, music, recommendations
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
New CD's!
Yessssss. My tonevendor order was waiting for me in the mailbox today. I ordered:
- Lowlife – Eternity Road
- Ceremony – Self-Titled
- Skywave – Synthstatic
- Biosphere – Dropsonde
All amazing albums. One track on Lowlife, entitled “Hollow Gut” sounds strikingly familiar to Joy Division. It’s almost like Ian was resurrected and called the band for a reformation.
If you are a fan of noisey shoegaze, electro stuff, I highly recommend the Ceremony album. Before Ceremony, there was Skywave… a Jesus and Mary Chain rip off, almost. Ceremony has more of a New Order feel. Only 7 tracks :(
The latest Biosphere is amazing! As always… I wouldn’t expect anything less. The man Geir Jenssen is the ambient king. He continues to evolve his soundscape. I will always love Biosphere. When you can’t sleep, listen to Biosphere. When you need peace, listen to Biosphere. When all else fails, listen to Biosphere.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Astrobrite - Pinkshinyultrablast CD
So it’s been a few weeks since I got this CD. I never heard Astrobrite before this, but when I read the review of this CD I immediately had to get it. It’s $20, includes 13 tracks of pure sonic bliss and a video of track three: Orange Creamsickle.
Most people that I have let hear this, immediately refer to it sounding like My Bloody Valentine. While I somewhat agree, Astrobrite trancends any shoegaze artist out there by destroying the fuzz/noise boundaries setup by previous shoegazing albums. They manage to make the most beautiful and melodic noise you’ll ever hear. You’ve probably never heard anything like it. This is beauty underneath the skin. This is what makes things beautiful. It’s all the chaos and tragedy of the process.
You can read a (much better) review on tonevendor and buy it as well.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Vera Violets - Sunshine Dust CD
Got a Vera Violets CD from Tonevendor (psssst. it’s only $7!) and it’s damn good. My interpretation of the style would be a sort of shoegazing Beat Happening.
I love how the vocals are amateurish in that they are pure, unfiltered, and unaffected. Too many bands/artists these days rely on effects to make their vocal tone perfect. There’s only too much perfection I can take. It’s just like reading an alphabetized list of your collection, you’re bound to miss something by knowing what order it’s in. When things are too perfect, you start taking for granted the little things inbetween.
Overall, it’s well worth your money. There’s nineteen tracks!
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Monoland - Ben Chantice CD
This isn’t your ordinary shoegaze. This is shoegaze with a twist. And the twist lies with the drums. It’s a clever way to deviate from the shoegaze genre of the past, while maintaining that ever-so-loving distant, isolated, shimmering guitar. Lots of sampled loops make this album some kind of electrogaze.
The poppy vocals will slip up on you. Sometimes not even making a presence until a few minutes in. A beautiful mix of up-close-and-personal lyrics with not-so-personal whispers lies within.
There’s a lot of ambient solitude mixed inbetween songs. Like a train working to get up to speed, some tracks take a while to break out of the intro into a beat.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Galerie Stratique: Horizzzons (CD)
Pygmalion on eBay
I was looking for Pygmalion on eBay and found this wonderful review of the album:
Stock review by Ned Raggett 10/99 Bliss. Out. This one might as well be called the death of shoegazing for the simple reason that it did more or less herald the end of a certain era where ‘Creation’ = ‘MBV and after.’ A couple of months later Oasis scored its first UK number one single, and from then on it was left to the North American, European and Australian obsessives to fly the flag on their own. To a great degree they’ve succeeded; from Bethany Curve to Silvania to Sianspheric, it echoes on and on and along.
Ned Raggett 10/99 But this album, then. Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell turned their back on electric guitar wash firmly after this point, forming the not bad at all but nowhere near what it could be Mojave 3 instead. The overdrive of their early singles was long past. Here was nothing much if you called Sheer Outright Beauty nothing much. Opening track “Rutti” doesn’t immediately give as much away, even if it is a spacious, empty track that takes up a full fifth of the record’s running time. And it is nice, to be sure. But then “Crazy for You” hits and you remember if you were me why the Scene That Celebrates Itself wasn’t just Steve Sutherland japing in the pages of Melody Maker as you searched for something mindblowing with Manchester being a joke and Nirvana and Suede being unknown nonentities. If you were me, you were Anglophilic to a fault and didn’t damn well care how bad things might really be over there or not, because you were in LA and hearing albums that sounded like gentle storm washes and grey post-goth moodiness were exactly the difference in style and scene you needed, so you thought. You were probably right too. And is it any coincidence that a song on this record is called “Visions of LA”? Or is that “Visions of La”? Works either way. “Crazy for You” builds and builds and builds, but never amps up; the feedback reverbs and echoes and reverbs again, the drums quietly but firmly pound along, there’s a lovely acoustic riff repeating itself that you can hear if you listen carefully, and Neil gently sings the title again and again and you feel lovedrunk if you really are and transported away even if you’re not. It makes you wish that they had toured instead of breaking up, you cling to the regrets. You have to. The tunes are generally simple, minimal, lost and calm. They have gentle guitar pluckings at the center and oceans of reverb around them; cue the music critic metaphor overdrive! Caverns, fog-bound forests, it’s no wonder Slowdive were post-goth, for what else could fit what they were really doing (and what could be expected from a band named after a Siouxsie song and that worshipped at the feet of the Cure and New Order by their own particular confession?)? Rachel’s and Neil’s voices get exquisitely lost and dislocated as much as the music, and what more could I want in the mid-decade? The most basic of guitar strums sound momentous in context, thus the start of “Trellisaze.” Wonderful, wonderful. Gregg Araki had the good taste to license “Blue Skied an’ Clear” for The Doom Generation soundtrack, ensuring that at least something made it over the States officially. I would have just gone ahead and done the whole album. Music for Fitzgerald adaptations if he was from the 90s. And why not? I’m into beautiful, resigned loss. Love the drama.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Jessica Bailiff + Dave Pearce (Rural Psychedelia)
Two of my favorite composers have collaborated and produced one hell of an album. Intertwined is Jessica Bailiff and Dave Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack) forming Clear Horizon. Created is an elegant and isolated soundscape perfect for the upcoming cold winter daze. This album was created with true and pure dedication and love over two years of sending tapes overseas to each other.
This is something I’d love to do one day. With broadband becoming more of a commodity, it’s so easy and convenient to record something on your computer, upload it, and send it to your friend to work on. Don’t forget how it used to be!
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