Reposts of music from Tumblr
Jun. 4th, 2009 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaWith downloads, as promised a while back. Plus new stuff. ...Do any of you guys actually read my Tumblr, besides the two or three of you who post there? ^^; Having multiple blogs pretty much just means that they take turns experiencing benign neglect, but I wish I had a better sense of who sees what first.
Pet Shop Boys - The Way It Used To Be (Left of Love Dub)
Had no desire to listen to Yes after the (still uninspiring) single, which made the record one of the top pleasant surprises of the year once I did get around to it… I’m one of the minoritarians who think Very is vastly overrated and Release criminally underrated, so “best album since Very” was never the magic formula I was looking for, but - for the record - it does sound like Very. Expansively and effortlessly upbeat, like now that the other shoe has dropped on the socio-politico-economic disasters they’ve been murmuring about since the eighties, they’ve come to make us feel better, bless’em.
You can tell this is a Xenomania cowrite by the “Biology”-esque structural twists and dodgy I-geddit-but-what-does-it-actually-mean lyrics. (Also it basically makes the same point as “Bad Times” by Annie.) Can hear Johnny Marr’s little guitar licks in the dub version; unexpectedly reminiscent of Electronic.
Gorillaz - Electric Shock (Radio 1 Demo)
Cis and I were discussing how the - inevitable, between the lot of them these guys barf out an album every eight months rain or shine so why would a band reunion make them stop - eighth Blur studio long-player will turn up in late 2010 - early 2011 and sound “kind of like Grizzly Bear”. As opposed to Gorillaz 3rd**, which will hitlate 2009 early-2010-but-they'll-start-on-the-website-first, and sound “kind of like Beirut spliced with Jean-Michel Jarre and a Jazmine Sullivan guest vocal”.
(NB Jazmine Sullivan not actually on this track)
** Korean pop classification system somehow apposite
The Tears - Imperfection
“It’s ‘defects’,” she said. “By the way.”
“What?”
“He sings ‘defects’. ‘The defects in your soul’, not ‘the T-Rex in your soul’ like you told me. It’s not as bad as that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well… it sounded like ‘T-Rex’.”
“I was relieved,” she said.
ADDENDUM: I feel like I should say something about the music too. XD; I randomly downloaded this album, listened to it once, thought "What on earth," and assumed I'd never listen to it again. Then I really got into it. There was one day in February? March? I went inner tubing with J and his friends - beautiful blue-skied day, the air so clear on the slopes it felt like there was nothing separating one from the sun - I listened to this over and over on the headphones I re-purposed as earmuffs. The instrumentation sounds snow-pristine, layers upon layers of guitar piled onto what are basically Suede songs (I know nothing about Suede but there is something really distinctive about the chord changes). Feels very "eighties", whatever that means. I have a distinct memory of telling![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pere_chan, many moons ago, that I wished they would sound more like "Everything Will Flow", which probably means at this point I should try listening to them again.
Fever Ray - Seven
Fever Ray - Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Karin Dreijer Andersson reportedly wrote these songs while up with a new baby, which makes sense as Fever Ray is now my 2AM-5AM go-to album.** 20% as levelgrinding of the soul (as Cis says), when the short term memory buffer overflows and one dreams awake. I was just going to up “Keep The Streets Empty For Me” but LIKE EVERYTHING I OWN is larger than 10MB.
My favorite experience relating to The Knife occurred the night of the day I purchased the deluxe version of Silent Shout, which happened to be (LOL) Halloween 2007. Halfway through the second costume party of the evening I stuck the concert DVD on the large living room TV, reasoning it would provide an appropriate soundtrack for the occasion. It was past midnight, everyone was a bit drunk, and by “We Share Our Mother’s Health” a whole bunch of people just got up and started dancing - and proceeded to dance through the whole thing. Not people who had any idea who The Knife were to begin with, either. As far as I was concerned that put paid to the claim that Silent Shout is too moody to dance to (obv baffling to me, but I’m willing to countenance that I’m out on the tail of the curve).
Listening to that album again, many of the melodies/rhythms are very… salsa? Bossa nova? Señor Coconut stuff. Stuff one’s heard elsewhere, re-MIDI’ed into unretrievability.
** followed by the Grizzly Bear and Graham Coxon leaks, but those are more soothing than “neural network pileup”.
Patrick Wolf - Damaris
Not the best song on the album, but the one that sounds most like the ending theme of a fantasy anime series about gothic lolitas piloting bio-mecha fighters named after Talmudic angels, i.e. awesome and familiar (rather than weird) with my fannish background. I can picture the visuals, yanno? XD; It’s got black feathers and sparkling tears carried away by the sea wind... Patrick Wolf’s always had his Ali Project/Gackt side but this pushes the dial to 11, complete with Tilda Swinton in full-blown “dub seiyuu” mode. I can’t really think of non-Japanese stuff with which to compare it, actually.
Oh, right: when my sister and I first listened to Viva La Vida we remarked on how some of the better tracks from that album sounded remarkably like Patrick Wolf had arranged them. That is, the tunes were dissimilar: if one picked out any Chris Martin melody versus any Patrick Wolf melody on a piano it wouldn't be hard to tell which was which. (Other than “Cemeteries of London”, which just sounds literally like Patrick Wolf.) But the sonic structure, the Celtic-tinged strings and the stuttery percussion and the sense of windswept open spaces... If the comparison bothers you, by the way, feel free to lay it at Brian Eno’s door, and anyway it’s more a compliment to Coldplay than a diss of PWolf. :P But it does serve to back up how 1) I really like Viva La Vida despite no previous Coldplay song ever making enough of an impression on me to elicit judgment, I literally cannot remember them and 2) Patrick Wolf sounds totally mainstream pop to me, not artsy-weird. But again, my taste in music is built on anime ending themes.
Full disclosure: I’ve given Patrick Wolf about $60 this round for a digital download, a limited-edition signed CD with a photobook in, and a percentage of revenues from the album. So I guess I have a vested interest in plugging the thing ahaha.
k-os - Burning Bridges (The SoundCrate Remix)
Went to a free k-os gig last Thursday (i.e. May 14th) - it was sponsored by a phone provider company. Ironically it was the first time in years I saw more real lighters raised in the crowd than cellphones, and not one of them was used to light a normal cigarette. That shiz is illegal indoors don’tcha know.
On top of the theatre-wide hotboxing I was still jetlagged and had trouble staying awake (the sound was also crap, muddled and over-loud). Have been enjoying the remix album they gave out, though, over headphones. It reminds me of Stars’ Do You Trust Your Friends? in that P4K will probably be like “this suxx compared to the original” and I will be like “omg p4k stfu u r ded 2 me”.
Peter Doherty and Dot Allison - Sheepskin Tearaway
It only occurred to me recently that people I know might want a decent copy of this.Which, uh, they would get off the compilation post I’m due to make on LJ, but anyhow. And that was written two weeks ago!
I can’t remember how I got hold of Afterglow and We Are Science, but those albums were a key component of my personal experience of “electroclash” (a bracket that was broadly misapplied at the time to all sorts of heterogenous shiz, which is how I like my genres - the less accurate the going terminology, the more freedom people have to experiment before the critics move in describing and circumscribing). I used to wonder what had happened to Dot after that; it transpired that she spent like a year touring with Babyshambles. Peter Doherty, that little f**cker! Nobody feels my pain.
Supposedly this song isn’t about them, it’s about mutual friends. Or something. Collaborations are always fascinating when one knows both sides of the equation, I can hear which bits of the melody are Peter and which are Dot… thinking about it We Are Science was mostly about heroin too, figuratively or otherwise. The woozy, tender, diaphanous Sunday morning feel is endemic to Grace/Wastelands, a great album though not necessarily a harbinger of better to come. (Then again, there’s a known full album’s worth of songs this good still metaphorically gathering tarnish in dude’s attic, waiting for Stephen Street to break out the silver polish.)
Saint Etienne - Method of Modern Love (Richard X Join Our Clique Mix)
I'm starting to feel like an ass for sitting on this, so here it is. XD; Pure sugar rush though I find it oddly elusive - there's one bit a few minutes in where I invariably and suddenly realize my attention has been drifting. It's like the neurasthenic delicacy of Richard X's filagree structures has been refined to the point of vaporousness, perhaps of diminishing returns. Or maybe a magnification effect in conjunction with Saint Etienne, no strangers to delicacy themselves.
Grizzly Bear gig tonight! Ed Droste just tweeted saying Le National is one of his favorite venues, bless (it's where I went to see Bebel Gilberto last time round).
Pet Shop Boys - The Way It Used To Be (Left of Love Dub)
Had no desire to listen to Yes after the (still uninspiring) single, which made the record one of the top pleasant surprises of the year once I did get around to it… I’m one of the minoritarians who think Very is vastly overrated and Release criminally underrated, so “best album since Very” was never the magic formula I was looking for, but - for the record - it does sound like Very. Expansively and effortlessly upbeat, like now that the other shoe has dropped on the socio-politico-economic disasters they’ve been murmuring about since the eighties, they’ve come to make us feel better, bless’em.
You can tell this is a Xenomania cowrite by the “Biology”-esque structural twists and dodgy I-geddit-but-what-does-it-actually-mean lyrics. (Also it basically makes the same point as “Bad Times” by Annie.) Can hear Johnny Marr’s little guitar licks in the dub version; unexpectedly reminiscent of Electronic.
Gorillaz - Electric Shock (Radio 1 Demo)
Cis and I were discussing how the - inevitable, between the lot of them these guys barf out an album every eight months rain or shine so why would a band reunion make them stop - eighth Blur studio long-player will turn up in late 2010 - early 2011 and sound “kind of like Grizzly Bear”. As opposed to Gorillaz 3rd**, which will hit
(NB Jazmine Sullivan not actually on this track)
** Korean pop classification system somehow apposite
The Tears - Imperfection
“It’s ‘defects’,” she said. “By the way.”
“What?”
“He sings ‘defects’. ‘The defects in your soul’, not ‘the T-Rex in your soul’ like you told me. It’s not as bad as that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well… it sounded like ‘T-Rex’.”
“I was relieved,” she said.
ADDENDUM: I feel like I should say something about the music too. XD; I randomly downloaded this album, listened to it once, thought "What on earth," and assumed I'd never listen to it again. Then I really got into it. There was one day in February? March? I went inner tubing with J and his friends - beautiful blue-skied day, the air so clear on the slopes it felt like there was nothing separating one from the sun - I listened to this over and over on the headphones I re-purposed as earmuffs. The instrumentation sounds snow-pristine, layers upon layers of guitar piled onto what are basically Suede songs (I know nothing about Suede but there is something really distinctive about the chord changes). Feels very "eighties", whatever that means. I have a distinct memory of telling
pere_chan, many moons ago, that I wished they would sound more like "Everything Will Flow", which probably means at this point I should try listening to them again.Fever Ray - Seven
Fever Ray - Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Karin Dreijer Andersson reportedly wrote these songs while up with a new baby, which makes sense as Fever Ray is now my 2AM-5AM go-to album.** 20% as levelgrinding of the soul (as Cis says), when the short term memory buffer overflows and one dreams awake. I was just going to up “Keep The Streets Empty For Me” but LIKE EVERYTHING I OWN is larger than 10MB.
My favorite experience relating to The Knife occurred the night of the day I purchased the deluxe version of Silent Shout, which happened to be (LOL) Halloween 2007. Halfway through the second costume party of the evening I stuck the concert DVD on the large living room TV, reasoning it would provide an appropriate soundtrack for the occasion. It was past midnight, everyone was a bit drunk, and by “We Share Our Mother’s Health” a whole bunch of people just got up and started dancing - and proceeded to dance through the whole thing. Not people who had any idea who The Knife were to begin with, either. As far as I was concerned that put paid to the claim that Silent Shout is too moody to dance to (obv baffling to me, but I’m willing to countenance that I’m out on the tail of the curve).
Listening to that album again, many of the melodies/rhythms are very… salsa? Bossa nova? Señor Coconut stuff. Stuff one’s heard elsewhere, re-MIDI’ed into unretrievability.
** followed by the Grizzly Bear and Graham Coxon leaks, but those are more soothing than “neural network pileup”.
Patrick Wolf - Damaris
Not the best song on the album, but the one that sounds most like the ending theme of a fantasy anime series about gothic lolitas piloting bio-mecha fighters named after Talmudic angels, i.e. awesome and familiar (rather than weird) with my fannish background. I can picture the visuals, yanno? XD; It’s got black feathers and sparkling tears carried away by the sea wind... Patrick Wolf’s always had his Ali Project/Gackt side but this pushes the dial to 11, complete with Tilda Swinton in full-blown “dub seiyuu” mode. I can’t really think of non-Japanese stuff with which to compare it, actually.
Oh, right: when my sister and I first listened to Viva La Vida we remarked on how some of the better tracks from that album sounded remarkably like Patrick Wolf had arranged them. That is, the tunes were dissimilar: if one picked out any Chris Martin melody versus any Patrick Wolf melody on a piano it wouldn't be hard to tell which was which. (Other than “Cemeteries of London”, which just sounds literally like Patrick Wolf.) But the sonic structure, the Celtic-tinged strings and the stuttery percussion and the sense of windswept open spaces... If the comparison bothers you, by the way, feel free to lay it at Brian Eno’s door, and anyway it’s more a compliment to Coldplay than a diss of PWolf. :P But it does serve to back up how 1) I really like Viva La Vida despite no previous Coldplay song ever making enough of an impression on me to elicit judgment, I literally cannot remember them and 2) Patrick Wolf sounds totally mainstream pop to me, not artsy-weird. But again, my taste in music is built on anime ending themes.
Full disclosure: I’ve given Patrick Wolf about $60 this round for a digital download, a limited-edition signed CD with a photobook in, and a percentage of revenues from the album. So I guess I have a vested interest in plugging the thing ahaha.
k-os - Burning Bridges (The SoundCrate Remix)
Went to a free k-os gig last Thursday (i.e. May 14th) - it was sponsored by a phone provider company. Ironically it was the first time in years I saw more real lighters raised in the crowd than cellphones, and not one of them was used to light a normal cigarette. That shiz is illegal indoors don’tcha know.
On top of the theatre-wide hotboxing I was still jetlagged and had trouble staying awake (the sound was also crap, muddled and over-loud). Have been enjoying the remix album they gave out, though, over headphones. It reminds me of Stars’ Do You Trust Your Friends? in that P4K will probably be like “this suxx compared to the original” and I will be like “omg p4k stfu u r ded 2 me”.
Peter Doherty and Dot Allison - Sheepskin Tearaway
It only occurred to me recently that people I know might want a decent copy of this.
I can’t remember how I got hold of Afterglow and We Are Science, but those albums were a key component of my personal experience of “electroclash” (a bracket that was broadly misapplied at the time to all sorts of heterogenous shiz, which is how I like my genres - the less accurate the going terminology, the more freedom people have to experiment before the critics move in describing and circumscribing). I used to wonder what had happened to Dot after that; it transpired that she spent like a year touring with Babyshambles. Peter Doherty, that little f**cker! Nobody feels my pain.
Supposedly this song isn’t about them, it’s about mutual friends. Or something. Collaborations are always fascinating when one knows both sides of the equation, I can hear which bits of the melody are Peter and which are Dot… thinking about it We Are Science was mostly about heroin too, figuratively or otherwise. The woozy, tender, diaphanous Sunday morning feel is endemic to Grace/Wastelands, a great album though not necessarily a harbinger of better to come. (Then again, there’s a known full album’s worth of songs this good still metaphorically gathering tarnish in dude’s attic, waiting for Stephen Street to break out the silver polish.)
Saint Etienne - Method of Modern Love (Richard X Join Our Clique Mix)
I'm starting to feel like an ass for sitting on this, so here it is. XD; Pure sugar rush though I find it oddly elusive - there's one bit a few minutes in where I invariably and suddenly realize my attention has been drifting. It's like the neurasthenic delicacy of Richard X's filagree structures has been refined to the point of vaporousness, perhaps of diminishing returns. Or maybe a magnification effect in conjunction with Saint Etienne, no strangers to delicacy themselves.
Grizzly Bear gig tonight! Ed Droste just tweeted saying Le National is one of his favorite venues, bless (it's where I went to see Bebel Gilberto last time round).
