Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti "Worn Copy"

Artist: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
Album: Worn Copy
Label: Paw Tracks
Release date: 2005
Genre: Rock
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Lo-Fi/Experimental Rock
RIYL: Animal Collective, Panda Bear

---

Tracklisting:
01. Trepanated Earth
02. Immune To Emotion
03. Jules Lost His Jewels
04. Artifact
05. Bloody! (Bagonia's)
06. Credit
07. Life in L.A.
08. The Drummer
09. Cable Access Follies
10. Creepshow
11. One On One
12. Oblivious Peninsula
13. Somewhere In Europe/Hotpink!
14. Thespian City
15. Crybaby
16. Foilly Foilbles/GOLD
17. Jagged Carnival Tours
Total running time: 76' 12"

---

[Ariel Pink - Jagged Carnival Tours - Video Clip]

---

[Ariel Pink - Thespian City - Live @ Tiny Creatures]

"Worn Copy deserves a place in a museum, stored in a vitrine and observed with hushed regard. It's indisputably a pure burst of unmatched, solitary creativity. The only question left is which one: the Folk Art Museum or the Museum of Television and Radio.

On the side of the short-wave buffs, Worn Copy is a premier example of the influence radio has had on American culture. The 75 minutes of song pastiche bear the influence of popular rock, dance, and soul from the latter half of the twentieth century, but not the clear sound of new vinyl on a hi-fi, or the blasting electricity of a live performance. This is an album written by someone whose primary source of music must have been a radio. The sounds phase in and out, their volumes changing as if the signal has briefly disappeared. The tones are fuzzy and muted, with the same lack of highs and lows that brought AM radio to its knees at the arrival of the sharper FM. Songs switch styles as abruptly as a listless hand surfing the stations.

The songwriter and musician, Ariel Pink, who created and recorded Worn Copy almost entirely on his own, mixes psychedelic '60s rock, '70s Californian jazz-funk, and '80s pop of Duran Duran and the Cars. These 8-track recordings can be both deceptively accomplished and then suddenly drop all pretense of technique, such as in the reverb-heavy "One on One", which feels like a meeting of the minds between the Velvet Underground and Jefferson Airplane.

Like most of us, Pink seems to have received the majority of his early exposure to popular music through radio, whether the faint sounds of college stations or the afternoon drive-time rock station. An impressive aspect of this influence is the incorporation into his songs of an essential element of commercial radio: the commercials. The track "Credit" turns a satirical commercial jingle into the song's core melodic hook, as inane and insanely unforgettable as any real one. "Cable Access Follies", a trashcan funk track with layered, bass vocals, emotionally glorifies the joys of cable TV.

His record might be a useful cultural artifact for the Smithsonian, but as an artist he clearly seems more comfortable in the realm of outsider artists rather than the gallery establishment. Pink seems almost begging to be labeled a "freak." The publicity photo that came with the CD showed Pink shirtless and strung out, his contorted face covered in what I have to assume is only stage blood. His combination of self- and mass-produced elements to create an original yet uncomfortably familiar final work makes for an easy fit with the outsider art of such visual artists as Henry Darger and Eugene Von Bruenchenheim. Like these solitary artists, Pink created hundreds of songs by himself. The lengthy Worn Copy is nothing compared to the potential magnum opus he might have arranged.

But Pink is not a freak. Outsider status is just like any other artistic authenticity debate -- cool, punk, and now freak are intangible labels that can really only be conferred posthumously. Pink is very much alive, and no longer a misunderstood loner. For one, he's enjoying some moderate recognition while still alive, something most outsider artists almost by definition never do. Darger and Bruenchenheim might never have been moved to create such vast collections of bizarre artwork if they had been given attention in their own time (Darger's drawings might easily have got him arrested, even). Like Devendra Banhart, another young singer crowned with the dubious appellation of "freak," a continuing, successful career as a musician almost instantly tarnishes the crown.

Worn Copy is a reissue of an older record, its material recorded in 2002 and 2003. His first record for Paw Tracks, The Doldrums, appeared last year but was recorded between 1999 and 2000. What can come next? The music of 1997 to 1998, or will Pink be able to return to his hermitage in California and, impervious to his recent shades of success and attention, create another epic ramble as compelling and singular as Worn Copy? I'm not sure what effect it might have on the man's sanity, but for the listener's sake I can't help but wish that he'd been left undiscovered for a few more years, able only to tune in to his own inner bandwidth for comfort." [PopMatters]

[Download(part1.part2).Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Love "Forever Changes"

Artist: Love
Album: Forever Changes
Label: Elektra
Release date: 1967
Genre: Rock
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Folk Rock
RIYL: Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, The Kinks

---

Tracklisting:
01. Alone Again Or
02. A House Is Not A Motel
03. Andmoreagain
04. The Daily Planet
05. Old Man
06. The Red Telephone
07. Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale
08. Live And Let Live
09. The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This
10. Bummer In The Summer
11. You Set The Scene
Total running time: 39' 22"

---

[Love - Alone Again Or + A House Is Not A Motel - Live @ Royal Festival Hall, London]


Bio

"Of the many lost classics produced during the creative explosion of the late '60s psychedelic heyday, the greatest may be the third album by the Los Angeles-based group Love.

In its startling originality, its elaborate use of symphonic orchestrations and its nods to the vast canon of music that preceded it, "Forever Changes" is everything that's been claimed of 1967's most heralded rock release, the Beatles' overrated "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." But while it has its optimistic moments, its overall vibe is far bleaker and much less hopeful than the hippie ideal of "All You Need Is Love."

Arthur Lee, Love's key songwriter, primary singer and driving force, was an African-American who never subscribed to the flower children's sunny visions. Ravaged by the tensions of the Cold War, the slaughter in Vietnam and the riots in the streets of America's biggest cities, the world that he chronicled was no utopia, but a dark and sinister place where the occasional ray of light nonetheless managed to penetrate the gloom.

From the beginning, Love thrived on the combination of two mismatched songwriters. Born in Memphis, Lee was raised in L.A.'s tough Crenshaw ghetto. Strongly influenced by Mick Jagger, he presented what pioneering rock critic Lillian Roxon called "an amusing paradox," an African-American singing like a white Englishman singing like an old African-American.

In contrast, Lee's partner Bryan MacLean was the son of a Hollywood architect who grew up swimming in his neighbor Elizabeth Taylor's pool. His first girlfriend was Liza Minnelli, and he was raised on classical music and Broadway standards. "You hear more of my influence on Arthur than his influence on me," he told the journalist Alan Vorda in the book Psychedelic Psounds. "What you have [in Love] is a black guy from L.A. writing show tunes."

Love also displayed a heaping dose of the Beatles circa "Rubber Soul," folk-rock via L.A. compatriots the Byrds (Lee originally linked up with MacLean because MacLean was a Byrds roadie and Lee thought he was likely to draw their crowd), and the lush, orchestrated soundscapes of Hollywood film scores. (The band's use of symphonic flourishes is the most influential element of its sound, with "Forever Changes" standing second only to the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" as the biggest inspiration for the so-called ork-pop or orchestral-pop movement.)

In 1966, Love bowed with a memorable self-titled album that opens with a snarling, speed-freak version of "My Little Red Book," a Burt Bacharach-Hal David tune from the soundtrack to "What's New, Pussycat?"

It became a minor hit and established the band as too-cool hipsters; the album cover featured the quintet scowling like angry young poets and fashion models posing before a broken-down chimney in a fire-gutted mansion that was said to have belonged to Hollywood's Dracula, Bela Lugosi.

The cover of "Da Capo," the group's second album, found an expanded sextet back at the same site. The sounds were becoming much more expansive as well, introducing an element of the baroque that would flourish fully on the band's third and best effort--a departure indicated by a radically different cover: A colorful drawing of the musicians' huddled heads, it recalls the similar images on the Beatles' "Revolver."

By 1968, Love was starting to fall apart as some of the band members turned from the casual use of psychedelics to harder substances such as heroin. Lee was also becoming increasingly bitter that the group had failed to hit the heights achieved by labelmate Jim Morrison, and he blamed prejudice. "I wasn't gonna go eat garbage like the Doors did," he told the Bob fanzine in 1994. "And then, too, I wasn't white. The cold fact of the matter is birds of a feather flock together."

Though he was only 22 at the time, the band's leader had become increasingly fatalistic, convinced that he was going to die and that Love's next album would be his final testament. (The back cover shows the singer standing with a cracked vase full of dead flowers.) Knowing that he couldn't compete with the searing electronic sounds of his friend, Jimi Hendrix, who had begun his ascent to superstardom, Lee decided to pare down for a quieter, more introspective sound.

The group recorded acoustically, sitting in a circle as if jamming in the living room. The tracks were augmented later with tasteful orchestrations evoking the varied sounds of life in L.A., from spicy mariachi horns to lulling strings to dissonant guitars that bring to mind the strangling and ever-present traffic.

"The funny thing about [recording] that album--there's a full orchestra [when] I walk in," Lee says in the liner notes to Rhino's 1997 reissue. "With the way I looked [and] the way I dressed, I was sitting there for about an hour before they figured out who I was! It was quite amusing, 'cause I wasn't going to tell them anything."

As singers and songwriters, Lee and MacLean could more than hold their own in the company of musicians from the L.A. Philharmonic, and session greats such as Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye, who started out playing on some of the tracks before Love bassist Ken Forssi and drummer Michael Stuart pulled themselves together to finish the disc.

MacLean contributes only two songs, "Old Man" and "Alone Again Or," but they are integral to the album. The latter, which opens the record, is a tribute to his mother's flamenco dancing, punctuated by a trumpet solo that brings to mind the Tijuana Brass (producer Bruce Botnick was also working with Herb Alpert at the time). At first blush, the driving and catchy number seems to be a love song, but the narrator scoffs at the hippie notion that he "could be in love with almost everyone." In the end he remains "alone again tonight, my dear."

Lee is even more cynical. He lampoons the psychedelic culture by chronicling its ugly realities ("Live and Let Live" opens with the line, "Oh, the snot has caked against my pants," which Lee wrote about waking up after a night zonked out on drugs). "The Red Telephone" takes its title from the nuclear hotline allegedly set up between Moscow and Washington, D.C.; the propulsive "A House Is Not a Motel" contemplates an unspecified holocaust ("And the water's turned to blood/And if you don't think so, go turn on your tub"), while another track is unambiguously titled "Bummer in the Summer."

"While the music of 'Forever Changes' flows with an almost narcotic consistency and deceptive prettiness, the words can be like an itch that you can never quite put your finger on," critic Ben Edmonds wrote. "The combination is thoroughly captivating and slightly unsettling--psychedelic in the truest sense."

Witness "The Red Telephone," the album's centerpiece and most striking studio creation. The tune builds from a quiet ballad to an otherworldly and somewhat paranoid nursery rhyme about an Orwellian world where unnamed forces stamp out any trace of individualism. "They're locking him up today/They're throwing away the key/I wonder who it will be tomorrow/You or me?" Lee chants as the song builds to its climax.

"We're all normal and we want our freedom," another voice responds, but it's never quite clear who prevails.

MacLean quit Love after "Forever Changes," which was a commercial disappointment upon its release (though in the decades that followed, it would eventually reach gold-record status). Lee made several more albums with a new version of the band, including "False Start" (1970), noteworthy primarily for a guest appearance by Hendrix. He dropped out of the music scene for much of the '70s and '80s, while MacLean went on to write songs for the likes of Debby Boone, Patty Loveless and his sister, Maria McKee, until he died of an apparent heart attack in 1998.

Lee's failure to produce much worthwhile music after 1968 has prompted some critics to put him in a class with cracked psychedelic geniuses Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson and Roky Erickson. In the mid-'90s, he was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison, thanks to California's "three strikes you're out" legislation, which qualified a string of relatively minor incidents as felonies.

Freed in 2002 after six years behind bars, he returned to the music world with the backing of a younger group of psychedelic-popsters called Baby Lemonade. (With the help of a 15-piece orchestra, Lee and the band will perform "Forever Changes" in its entirety Tuesday at the Park West.)

While Lee is talking about recording new material, it's likely that Love's third album will remain his crowning achievement--the enduring testament that he envisioned 35 years ago.

"'Forever Changes' were my last words of Love," he told Creem magazine in 1981. "My last words to the world, only I've been here ever since. Just like a guy saying goodbye, and you look out your front door, and he's still there 15 years later."" [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Faust "Faust"

Artist: Faust
Album: Faust
Label: Polydor
Release date: 1971
Genre: Rock
Style: Krautrock/Experimental Rock/Psychedelic Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Why Don't You Eat Carrots
02. Meadow Meal
03. Miss Fortune
Total running time: 34' 08"

---

[Faust - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

---

[Faust - Picnic On A Frozen River - Live in Lyon, France (2006)]

---

[Teaser of "Ist FAUST Schön?" Documentary]

"Ah, Germany in springtime. The leaves have returned, and the air is cool and of noble weightlessness. You can clearly see what the past has left behind in the medieval town squares, and hear the music of Bach's day playing continually from the opera houses and churches. Germans, like most of us, enjoy admiring nature. And since their cities have many parkland areas, it's no surprise to find the tourists crowding shops while the locals gaze in an auburn splendor. This is a country of quaint Bavarian villages and major metropolitan centers, majestic mountains and beautiful waterways, castles and culture. So, wouldn't it be nice if we dropped some acid, holed up like trolls and made an album?

Faust's records have never been the kind you dissect. The band seems to have some kind of plan at work, but not the type of plan left for others to follow. It's not the kind of algorithm that bears any scrutiny; yet, 30 years later, the music remains. And given the state of the boys in der Gruppe, that alone makes it worthy of reissue.

After spending several months in 1970-71 lazing, smoking, and existing rather superfluously (on Virgin Records' dime, of course), Faust moved their commune to Wümme in western Germany and decided to get serious. By serious, I mean they decided to put to tape the sugarplum visions in their heads. By sugarplum visions, I mean the acid-damaged prototypes of the New Solution for Music. By music, I mean their self-titled 1971 debut album and its contents, which consist of the music they played and processed using Kurt Graupner's infamous little black boxes. And by Kurt Graupner, I mean Faust's engineer, the sound wave savior who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for bringing the group's adventures in hi-fi to acetate.

"Why Don't You Eat Carrots?" gets the movement underway with a knall ("bang," my kliene Kinder). Actually, it's more like the wake of a small jet whose engine roar is panned out all over your speakers. In the jet's cockpit, we have "All You Need is Love" and "Satisfaction" blaring, if only to remind you that Faust were at one time human and listening to your music. Upon reaching an altitude of about 120 decibels, our captains decide to let the aerodynamic vehicle coast, dropping a vaguely Bill Evans-esque piano interlude before launching a vaguely Zappa-esque groove that features some vague kind of shinai solo (or maybe one of their homemade synthesizers). I wish I could translate the sheer romantic terror of the thing, but it's all rather vague.

"Meadow Meal" follows, and though the intensity has died down a bit, Faust still resides in the hall of mirrors. There doesn't seem to be much reason behind the stuff (other than the "wonderful wooden" variety), and though the by-product may be skewed art-pop along the lines of Throbbing Gristle or Nurse with Wound, the overwhelming vibe here is of playful curiosity rather than oppressive abstraction. After a mystical incantation ("And the guess I get it/ And the gate I get it/ And the game I get it"), they break into a trashy rock joint, shimmying like Monkees on parade. I suppose they couldn't have kept it down if they'd tried.

And that ends the program as Faust planned it: a total of about 18 minutes of music before running out of steam and/or money. What to do, then, but jam out the mother of all documented freak-outs. "Miss Fortune" is probably not Faust's greatest legacy, but it is a testament to some fairly unadulterated haze-charisma. Recorded live, it consists of two rock-esque instrumentals (again filtered through Graupner's little black boxes), and one fantastic piece of prose set to a ghostly backdrop of acoustic guitar and admirably understated shakers. "And at the end, realize that nobody knows if it really happened." And at the end, I say "amen."" [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Six Organs Of Admittance "Shelter From The Ash"

Artist: Six Organs Of Admittance
Album: Shelter From The Ash
Label: Drag City
Release date: 12 November 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Folk Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Alone With The Alone
02. Strangled Road
03. Jade Like Wine
04. Coming To Get You
05. Goddess Atonement
06. Final Wing
07. Shelter From The Ash
08. Goodnight
Total running time: 43' 03"

---

[Six Organs Of Admittance - Eighth Cognition/All You've Left - Video Clip]

"It’s been an exhilarating year of life for Ben Chasny, the heraldic presence behind Six Organs of Admittance, alternately thrilling and trying as he negotiated the ever-swirling path of Six Organs as well as the spin he put on Comets On Fire, Current 93, Badgerlore and even the band of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy for one golden European run. But nothing brought more pleasure than retiring to his aerie, far from the flies of the marketplace. There, he could see the future again — and stare in awe as his fingers traced an accompaniment even his very mind could not have imagined!

Shelter From The Ash features a most fluid combination of electric and acoustic Six Organs of Admittance styles. Chasny went into the studio with the songs both in his mind and also demoed out, a different way of working than in previous sessions. Sure, improvisations were still a big part of the sound; within the song structures, they create dynamic sparks from the other side of the inspiration. Additionally (if you must know), standard tuning played a part for the first time in history — but don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that Six Organs of Admittance has come in from the drone-storm — far from it! The man who was once “Torn by Wolves” in an unknown key is now “Coming To Get You,” no matter what it takes — with a tuning any man could play, but few would use as he does.

The session was conducted in the glamorous confines of San Francisco’s Louder Studios, where so many bands have had their hard and heavy essence redefined. Six Organs of Admittance was no exception. Additionally, the session featured such luminaries as The Magik Markers’ Elisa Ambrogio, The Fucking Champs’ Tim Green and Chasny’s Comets On Fire bandmate Noel Harmonson and gadabout-to-the-stars Matt Sweeney pitching in. Six Organs of Admittance has been a collaborative ground in the past, and what happened here is what always happens: an organic oneness, a record very comfortable in it’s many skins.

Seeking change and a fresh killing field at all costs, Shelter From The Ash fords fronts both dark and blustery, lucent and lithe, mining electricity, hydrogen and other elemental forces within." [source]

[Download[RapidShare.SendSpace].Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Akron/Family "Love Is Simple"

Artist: Akron/Family
Album: Love Is Simple
Label: Young God
Release date: 18 September 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Folk Rock/Psychedelic Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Love, Love, Love (Everyone)
02. Ed Is A Portal
03. Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead
04. I've Got Some Friends
05. Lake Song/New Ceremonial Music For Moms
06. There's So Many Colors
07. Crickets
08. Phenomena
09. Pony's OG
10. Of All The Things
11. Love, Love, Love 2 (Reprise)
Total running time: 56' 30"

---

[Akron/Family - Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead - Live for Fox Rox]

---

[Akron/Family - Of All The Things - Live for Fox Rox]

"When a band as talented and ambitious as Akron/Family claim they are trying, with their new album Love Is Simple, to better capture their live sound, it seems like a let-down. It is a such a banal, overstated idea. Many a band have sought to capture their live sound, and all too often this means more volume and less complication. But lucky for us, Akron/Family is smarter than that.

They know that their live show is a far cry from the work on their first, eponymous album. That album is thoughtful and well-wrought, beautiful in its frailty, but also stretches itself too thin at times, barely able to hold itself up. The sheer anarchic volume of the band’s live show has always gone a long way towards filling in those holes, and offering a surprising experience for any audience members who only know the band on record. The quiet guys you’d hear in the studio stand on stage and let their amps squeal and wear cymbals out and scream the stale air out of the bottom of their lungs. Clearly, the band has recognized how this energy could help their studio sound, and put touches of it on their mini-LP Meek Warrior.

But now, with Love is Simple, the studio band is coming full-on with the live band influence...sort of. While the band knows there is energy in their live act, they are also smart enough to know that it would not work as a direct translation. Instead, they’ve smartly taken elements of their live show—a heightened guitar presence, a more “electric” sound, energetic percussion—and meshed it with their ability to craft the beautifully quiet. The results are not only boot-in-the-ass surprising, but also the best thing the band has done to date.

The album opens with “Love, Love, Love (Everyone)”, an incantatory, chanting track that invites us, ever so gently, to go out and love. The band’s always been great at singing as a group, and the opener is no different, but it also serves as a build up to the second track, “Ed Is a Portal”. The fangs of the live band start to show here, as the song starts with distant gang-yelling and hand-clapping behind a plucked banjo until, as the vocals rise in the mix and crescendo, the song settles into a dance ‘round the fire anthem. It chugs along, full of sweat and blood, showing the band’s penchant for folk instrumentation, but laying it over drums stronger than anything on the first full-length. Eventually, the song ends with the band taking us through Ed, who we’re told is a portal, and we come out the other side into a spacey drum machine that makes the vocals that sounded so warm for six minutes now seem cold and vacuous.

These same changes come quick and in droves in the album’s two middle tracks. “Lake Song/New Ceremonial Music for Moms” starts as a murky folk song, full of bongos and scant xylophone notes. Like many of their songs, hoards of backing vocals come in and the song elevates, but just as it does everything cuts out but the percussion and the song spends the rest of its time breaking down into animal cacophony. It’s the most out-of-control moment on the record, with all that live-show shouting over hard-struck drums and sampled noises, and it serves as the perfect hinge into the next track, “There’s So Many Colors”.

“There’s So Many Colors” moves as many times as its predecessor, and stretches out over eight minutes; nothing new for an Akron/Family song. What’s different here are the musical touchstones and the cohesion of the song’s movements. With this song they start to tap into a classic rock vein that’s always been merely hinted at in their work. And not only is this song arena-rock big, it is a bonafide anthem. For half the song, it seems like their same ol’ almost-folk, maybe with a tinge of the Kinks in its hook, until a big electric guitar riff comes in and the boys straight rock out. “Sun rise, sun set, sun never set and rise, reach,” they sing over and over again, commanding a continuity from the world around them they clearly strive for in their music. More and more people join in with them, and there’s this trad-rock congregation all of a sudden, filling your chest with every repeat of the refrain until the song falls away at its highest peak into an exquisite, Brit-folk finish.

Those two songs take up nearly 20 minutes in the middle of the record, but prepare us for the variety found in the album’s second half. We get the back-porch ballad “Crickets” (as beautiful as Akron/Family‘s “I’ll Be on the Water), the cascading guitars of “Phenomena”, and even a successful shot at a sailor’s singalong with the arm-linking blast that is “Of All the Things”.

And in all this they don’t mind lightening up once in a while. “Phenomena” finds them concerned over people who argue over white rice versus brown, and then in the second verse they substitute Jesus for the rice and continue the argument. There’s a song here called “Pony’s O.G.”, and of course the aforementioned “Ed Is a Portal”. These guys know how to have fun, without dipping their toe too far in the cold waters of irony, and also without disrupting the tone of this beautiful album. They bring it all back together with the final track, a reprise of “Love, Love, Love”, and you can sort of feel the credits rolling, the band standing arm-in-arm and bowing as the song plays. That they seamlessly bring us back to the place we began shows their ability to take the most hidden of back roads at every turn and still get us to where we’re supposed to be. And what makes this possibly the best record of the year isn’t just that it gets us back to where we’re supposed to “go out and love”, but that now, after experiencing all the twists and turns, the swells and trenches of the album, it sounds like a challenge more than a request, like it is impossible—after hearing music so to the bone honest and generous—for us not to go out and love.

“Some might think this isn’t the right sound,” the band sings on “Phenomena”. And frankly, if anyone thinks that about Love is Simple, I don’t know that its possible to explain to them what they’re missing.

Doesn’t mean we can’t go out and try, though." [source]

[Download[pw:subsidio.blogspot.com].Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Animal Collective "Strawberry Jam"

Artist: Animal Collective
Album: Strawberry Jam
Label: Domino
Release date: 10 September 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Experimental Rock/Psychedelic Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Peacebone
02. Unsolved Mysteries
03. Chores
04. For Reverend Green
05. Fireworks
06. #1
07. Winter Wonder Land
08. Cuckoo Cuckoo
09. Derek
Total running time: 43' 31"

---

[Animal Collective - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

---

[Animal Collective - Peacebone - Video Clip]

---

[Animal Collective - Fireworks - Video Clip]

"On the back of Strawberry Jam, it might be useful to compare Animal Collective with Mercury Rev. Certainly, the latter band were once something of experimental proposition – fronted by the unhinged personality of David Baker and with a blurry and unfocussed sound to match. This formula frequently produced glorious records, but it was not made to last. Hence, in the late 90’s the Rev took a right-turn and cut their one bona fide classic, Deserters Songs.

In 2007, Animal Collective (that’s Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Deakin and Geologist) hold a similar position. After six albums of wayward hit-and-miss experimentalism, previous outing, Feels revealed a more linear approach to music-making. Not linear in the accepted sense of the word; but at times there was the definite whiff of ‘chorus’ and ‘verse’, even if these soon descended into a bubbling mix of chaos.

Strawberry Jam continues this evolution: influenced in equal measure by the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and the outer peripheries of freak folk, it mostly sounds like a hippy sect howling harmonies while trapped in a psychedelic wormhole. Songs shift continually, instruments come and go, and whooping war cries drop in and drop out.

On the likes of “Fireworks” and “Winter Wonder Land” the results are a never-ending cosmic jam session, while “#1” takes replicates the repetitive discipline of techno on real instruments. The ability to confound and surprise is retained, not only in the same song, but, in the case of lead single “Peacebone”, often in the same moment.

As a result, Strawberry Jam is never inaccessible, but will be recommended for anyone who likes music as a Chinese puzzle. Those wanting more lasting – though no less head-expanding - pleasures are best directed towards Panda Bear’s solo album of this year, Person Pitch. But this is one band who won’t be heading towards the road’s middle for some time yet." [source]

[Download[RapidShare.MegaUpload].Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Caribou "Andorra"

Artist: Caribou
Album: Andorra
Label: City Slang/Merge
Release date: 17 August 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock/Psychedelic Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Melody Day
02. Sandy
03. After Hours
04. She's The One
05. Desiree
06. Eli
07. Sundialing
08. Irene
09. Niobe
Total running time: 42' 59"

---

[Caribou - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

---

[Caribou - Melody Day - Video Clip]

---

[Caribou - BBC Collective Documentary]

"Sing it with me: Skyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Pie-lit. If on the first few listens to Caribou’s fourth album Andorra, you’re tempted to break into a shrill rendition of Eric Burdon and the Animals’ 1968 hit, forgive yourself. It took me weeks to get past that stage.

As an artist who brings new dynamics to each album while still keeping a smudgeprint all his own to his work, Caribou—aka, Dan Snaith, who recorded as Manitoba before a lawsuit by devoted Scrooge Handome Dick Manitoba forced him to drop the moniker—has placed himself in a pretty unique artistic foreground. If Start Breaking My Heart was his daybreak electronica record, then Up In Flames brought that sun to blind glare. Snaith’s gauzy vocals were, for the first time, layered with Krautrock breaks and myriad electronic gasps and heaves. 2005’s The Milk of Human Kindness, then, found him further embracing the rhythmic centerpieces of Can and Neu! and the deep-eared wealth of the Silver Apples, while toying with a newly naked sense of songcraft. He seemed to be taking to his voice, both in metaphor and application, sucking out some of the haze and linking it to his earthiest grooves to date.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, Snaith’s newest album, Andorra, merges Milk’s heady sense of immediacy with a clear and consumable swiftness. He further embraces California’s late-‘60s psych-pop and perhaps for the first time really lives up to the Brian Wilson tags of his early career. Unlike Milk—with its King Crimson samples left nude—Andorra is made completely of Snaith’s own material, patches of his own playing. His recent Ph.D. in mathematics may well have come in handy here actually. But though it’s tempting to consider its algorithms—was this passage of noise designed for this song or pulled from a thick series of such random snippets bound for anything—the end result is an album of deft manipulation of sound and place that gives new echoes to a pretty well-worn voice in time.

Still, as long as we’re allowing for out clauses, you’re going to have to accept that very voice. Snaith’s Day-Glo near falsetto has never been left so open—something many fans of his earliest work seem to be having a problem swallowing. After all, this newfound pop sensibility is the thing that first stands out about Andorra. “She’s The One,” with background vocals from the Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, is a seamless swell of bliss-out psych, building from stuttering vocal samples and acoustic guitar into its restrained martial drums and slow bleed Rhodes. Snaith hasn’t overlooked his talent for stocky drum rolls, certainly, but he’s comfortable enough with sense of collage now to allow them their place. “Desiree,” for example, begins shy and open, with just Snaith’s voice, a guitar, and tufts of strings.

Even when it goes kaleidoscopic, it’s clearly centered on a slow-footed intro, returning eventually to its bumblebee hush. Opener, and lead single, “Melody Day” meanwhile manages to perhaps best illustrate the changes at work with Snaith—combining Boredoms-big drum patterns with a wide-eyed wall of sound tipping over with guitars, ripples of electronics, and trilling flutes that still showcase his new focus on clarity—while “Sandy” takes the same largesse and fills it with lines straight outta the Haight in ‘67 (“Sometimes in her eyes I see forever / I can’t believe what we’ve found.”) But with Snaith—given how articulately he’s recreated the period’s psychedelic sway—they come off as devoted rather than saccharine.

Just as you’ve come to think of Snaith as Howard Kaylan Jr. or some shit though, he closes Andorra with some of the most intricately detailed sound collages he’s yet created. Sure, “Sundialing” is kissing cousin to the lysergic tribalisms of Milk—with its muffled drum charge, intertwining guitar loops, and rhythmic centering it really does sound like a b-side left off 2005’s Tour CD—but “Irene” features not only the album’s most gorgeous three and a half minutes but also its most beguiling. Fronted by a warbling tonal pattern and horns, Snaith allows the mystery to linger. And then his voice channels between the speakers, a moan, an utterance so bare of mouth. And then two minutes in, Snaith and his brokeneck love song are there for a moment, only to finish in a static burst. It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t; it’s a song of adoration voiced in academic terms, a hard duality to master—a broken radio pitched in time to a tuner’s smashed heart. And yet that strange verbal urging, and the addictively simple pattern beneath, seem so close to joy.

Closer, “Niobe,” takes this aural mash to even more perplexing levels though. The waves and tones are muttered out, almost inaudible. Bells up front, if anything can be said to be up front, chopped into sporadic drums and Snaith’s own voice. It all seems to crest and subside as soon as you take notice, to move somewhere else and sound new again by doing the exact same thing in patterns of ritual. Of course, and this is where the story goes widescreen, it’s the unraveling of all the fine patchwork on Andorra. Nine minutes mad and exciting—the former for its excess and the latter for its savvy undermining of Andorra’s own perfectionism.

And really, that’s why Caribou thrives in this artistic foreground I mentioned. He’s one of a handful of artists who actually live up to the oft-stale notion of evolution in windows of time that close so quickly. Even, sometimes, within a single record. But he does so without forcing the issue (see: First Impressions of Earth). I can’t beef with the White Stripes hammerin’ out “Ball and Biscuit” under five working titles, Interpol painting it black with black, or My Morning Jacket making me so happily at home with epic melancholia. But Snaith allows for arcs and pits that end with him ahead of us all. I guess he offers movement. In either case, it’s time to consider just what a rarity he is: an act you can grow old(er) with rather than growing old(er) to." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

The Earlies "The Enemy Chorus"

Artist: The Earlies
Album: The Enemy Chorus
Label: 679 Recordings
Release date: 23 January 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock/Psychedelic Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. No Love In Your Heart
02. Burn The Liars
03. Enemy Chorus
04. The Ground We Walk On
05. Bad Is As Bad Does
06. Gone For The Most Part
07. Foundation And Earth
08. Little Trooper
09. Broken Chain
10. When The Wind Blows
11. Breaking Point
Total running time: 49' 08"

---

"Though "These Were the Earlies" was the Earlies' debut album, it was also a collection of the EPs that they'd recorded over the span of several years. Keeping that in mind helps explain why their second album, "The Enemy Chorus", is a fairly drastic change from the mellow experimentalism of their first. While the band still sounds eclectic, their eclectic sounds are now in service of a much more organized -- and much darker -- set of songs. From the album title to song names like "Burn the Liars" to the tension that stretches through nearly every track, "The Enemy Chorus" is palpably, if not obviously, political and conceptual. Taut, Krautrock-inspired lock grooves and tense electronics dominate, giving the feeling of some impending conflict or crisis, particularly on the album's early songs. "No Love in Your Heart" opens the album with oddly majestic brass fanfares, martial drumbeats, and a relentlessly rolling synth bass; "Burn the Liars"' impatient rhythms and heavy keyboards suggest a sci-fi dystopia; and "The Enemy Chorus" itself delivers on that promise, painting pictures of "trees marked with Xs/waiting for the final cut." By the time the sweet pedal steel and delicate textures of "The Ground We Walk On" (one of the songs that fans of "These Were the Earlies" will probably like right away) roll around, it's a relief -- and shows how carefully considered "The Enemy Chorus"' ebb and flow is. The Earlies' ambitions are also reflected in more abstract tracks like "Gone for the Most Part," a collage of orchestral sounds and alarm clocks, and the meditative, Eastern-tinged closer, "Breaking Point." At times, the album feels more interesting than likeable, but "The Enemy Chorus" does include a few moments of instant gratification: "Foundation and Earth"'s bouncy rhythm and flashy brass feel directly descended from '70s AM pop, and "Broken Chain" is a twinkling mantra that also nods to "These Were the Earlies". "The Enemy Chorus" is a strangely formidable album, and in its own way, a daring one, too -- these songs of revenge, oppression, emptiness, and despair might puzzle some fans at first, but they certainly are impressive." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...