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Words Archive
Old Time Relijun: Catharsis in Crisis
Old Time Relijun
Catharsis in Crisis
2007 | K Records
So, there's this chick drummer, and a guy who looks like he's a bible
salesman hooked on to a stand up bass, and then there's this hillbilly
guy with a beard who's stripped down to his underwear that kind of
howls into the microphone... This is how Old Time Relijun was first
described to me. Not much has changed. They've added a full time
saxophonist, the line up has gone through a few different people, and
although their new press photos would have you believing they were in
the Mob, they are still putting out some raw, almost frighteningly good
music. Their latest release Catharsis In Crisis is the third in a
musical trilogy, but can equally be enjoyed even if you are not
familiar with the other albums.
The
opening track "Indestructible Life!" starts with these resonating
pluckings from a guitar while that howl I was told to watch out for
announces who you are listening to, in case you needed to double check.
And then comes some of the catchiest, syncopated beats that move like
murky water and just suck you in. Arrington de Dionyso's voice both
carries a melody and sounds as if it can rip flesh apart. This is the
trend throughout the album. Each track carries some of that heaviness,
that psychotic-ness that ties the album together. The lyrics present a
dual nature, someone questioning their existence, their sanity. As de
Dionyso sings "I got lost in the wilderness, I got lost in confinement"
alongside ideas of stolen flesh and borrowed bodies, a thin line breaks
between man and his demons.
Not every song is so heavily laden
with foreboding lyrics though. "Garden of Pomegranates" is a velvety
song that uses an undulating bass line as a sexual tonic. While "Dark
Matter" (although some lyrics at the end) feels like the most UN-pop
surf guitar song I've ever listened to, and I don't mean that as
negative.
The last striking element on here is the ability for
Old Time Relijun to both sound frantic and paced at the same time; a
controlled chaos. I recommend Catharsis in Crisis all the way through,
but I especially recommend listening to "Indestructible Life!", "Garden
of Pomegranates", and "Akavishim".
-Elana Rintala
(Looking for something similar? Try these bands: Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits)
Fri Oct 26 2007 · Posted in Reviews on littleradio.com
Band of Horses: Cease to Begin
Band of Horses
Cease to Begin
2007 | Sub Pop
Band of Beards, I mean Band of Horses' sophomore release Cease to Begin
segues nicely from their last record with the opening track "Is There a
Ghost". That track could have sat well on Everything All the Time.
However that dreaded sophomore slump has wormed its way into the
subsequent tracks. This album has proven that I can still have a
love/hate relationship with a piece of music. Ok, well maybe hate is
too strong of a word. Listening to the lyrics though sometimes I had to
shake my head. "Ode to LRC" is a perfectly acceptable song, catchy
even, until Ben Birdwell starts to sing out the words "..the world is
such a wonderful place..la tee da." Then it feels strained and cliched.
Maybe he just rushed through the song, or he was having an amazing day
when he wrote it, but the word choices are jarring from his usual
lyrics that feel a little grittier. That's the problem with some of the
songs, bordering on a mediocre approach that seems to only hover on the
surface and not go further.
But
then I have the love part of the album too that still makes me want to
listen and give them a try. Birdwell's voice still holds that sad, soft
quality to it, and it has a sharp uniqueness to it that still draws me
to listen to him. I'm also a sucker for songs you can clap along to and
stamp your feet ("Lamb of the Lam (In the City)"). The accessibility
towards a wider audience is here, and yet it is obvious that they are
still trying to do a "Band of Horses" album and not completely re-work
their material into something foreign for them. I can respect that.
Overall the album is polished, but in that over scrubbed way. I'd
recommend "Is There a Ghost", "Marry Song" and "Lamb of the Lam (In the
City)".
-Elana Rintala
(Looking for something similar? Try these bands: Neko Case, Wilco, and Neil Young.)
Thu Oct 18 2007 · Posted in Reviews on littleradio.com
Interview: The Besnard Lakes
Before the Besnard Lakes melted the audience on Friday night I had a chance to talk with frontman Jace Lacek about their stunning second album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar).
The performance? As epic and larger than life as you'd expect. The band
played some incredible versions of "Rides the Rails", immediately
sliding right into the pulverizing "Devastation". "And You Lied to Me"
was also massive as guitars soared beneath the vocal harmonies,
saturating the entire club in overdriven bliss. The encore was a nice
surprise as the quintet covered Fleetwood Mac's "You Make Loving Fun" with drummer Kevin channeling his best Christine McVie. I felt privileged to be there.
Wed Oct 17 2007 · Posted in Interviews on littleradio.com
Iron and Wine: The Shepherd’s Dog
Iron and Wine
The Shepherd's Dog
2007 | Sub Pop
When the first single off Iron and Wine's latest release The Shepherd's
Dog hit the web several months ago, there was this odd shock that Sam
Beam was letting go of the hushed, dreamy folk-type music that he had
done well up to that point. The single "Boy With a Coin" first off
sounded more produced than what I was familiar with. However, even with
the addition of the hand drums and clapping, the song didn't come off
as this poppy piece that I was expecting to hear. That is until I
finally was able to listen to the whole album.
There is a
blending of the slow, melodic folk music with a very present Indie Rock
sensibility. Sam Beam's voice still has that masked quality to it but
is surrounded by a much more fuller sound. Sometimes the layered
effects of Beam's soft voice with the band work, sometimes not so much
as they inadvertently muddle each other. I found this to be the case
with the first track "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car". I did enjoy the
upbeat, sunny quality to the song, but I found the actual mix was, at
times, drowning out what I find to be one of the best qualities about
Iron and Wine, his voice.
The second track "White Tooth Man"
mixes bluegrass pickings with a world music beat. Although an odd
pairing, the end result is very fluid and feels right. Maybe it's the
drumming. "The Devil Never Sleeps" is an upbeat number that
incorporates electric guitar and a piano for the combined effect of
some 70's classic rock jam that feels like an unspoken force on this
album. Following that classic vein, "Peace Beneath the City" adds some
psych elements. There's something about it that kept making me think I
was going to start hearing "Black Magic Woman" or "Planet Caravan"
though.
"Resurrection Fern" and "Flightless Bird, American
Mouth" work best for me for not straying so far from what Iron and Wine
used to be. Soft meandering tracks where the vocals, although subdued,
really stand out and complete the songs. Although this really is a new
direction for Iron and Wine, it is not so different as to turn away
older fans, and is more approachable for a somewhat wider audience. I'd
recommend: "White Tooth Man", "Resurrection Fern" and "The Devil Never
Sleeps".
-Elana Rintala
(Looking for something similar? Try these bands: Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, and Nick Drake)
Mon Oct 15 2007 · Posted in Reviews on littleradio.com
Devendra Banhart: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
Devendra Banhart
Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
2007 | XL Recordings
Devendra Banhart has always conjured up something far away and other
dimensional for me. His leaning heavy on the folk side biased me
towards lumping it in with those freak-folk people that have been
popping up in clusters everywhere. I didn't dislike it, I just felt
detached from it. However, on his 5th studio release Smokey Rolls Down
Thunder Canyon, the simplicity has been pushed aside for a greater
flowing mix containing elements of Marc Bolan to the Stranglers and
from countries with sultry languages.
The
idea of the meandering album is still here, what with the time spanning
over an hour. But it feels more like a musical journey as opposed to
the feeling of a never-ending 'concept' album. The first track
"Cristobal" still shows Banhart hanging onto the lo-fi sound, combining
very sweet melodies amid tropical sounding instruments and soft,
echoing vocals. This style carries into the next track "So Long Old
Bean" while feeling a bit on the "old-timey" side with a sprightly
piano tune in the background. From here the idea of the musical
"journey" takes off as he travels from a Samba to a more folk inspired
song that feels heavily influenced by the Strangler's "Golden Brown".
Banhart seems to be trying to cover a lot of area on this latest
release, however the tracks still work together because he keeps
similar style elements present throughout. When tracks like "Bad Girl"
seem to have sprung from an alt-country vein, and "Tonada Yonmaminista"
suddenly jumps into a feverish, sing-a-long, it may take listener's
heads for a spin. And yet, the up and down tempos feel perfectly placed
as a whole, and Devendra Banhart's vocals all have that singing from
inside a bathroom quality to them that strings the songs along.
Occasionally
the slow songs seem to feel too slow and drag a bit. Like someone
should have told him to wrap it up a little quicker cause he was
getting too caught up in the moment. But then he'll have found someway
to channel Marc Bolan and make him play funk ("Lover"), and it's easy
to forgive him for overindulging. I'd recommend "Seahorse", "Tonada
Yonmaminista", and "Lover".
-Elana Rintala
Tue Oct 9 2007 · Posted in Reviews on littleradio.com
Looking into the Future of Online Music with Someone Who Knows More Than You Do
Hello. My name is Ian Rogers. I’ve been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and have been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently I work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music.
First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service
Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”
Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.
Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.
I caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 I wrote to everyone I knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.
Well, we (you included) did lots of other things instead. While running “New Media” at Grand Royal I released the first day/date digital/physical release with At The Drive-In’s “Relationship of Command”
But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999.
Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based
experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks
from Amazon (Kevin Drew
8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.
Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.
Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly. Yahoo! is the world’s #1 Internet destination. Hundreds of millions of people visit Yahoo! each month. Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors. Between 10 and 20 million people watch music videos on Yahoo! Music every month. Between 5 and 10 million people listen to radio on Yahoo! Music every month. But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions (sorry, we don’t release subscriber numbers, but the aggregate number proves the point), even after years of marketing by all three companies. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.
But this isn’t news, nor is it particular to the digital age. History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses. [check Fredric Dannen’s comments here]
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.
By way of illustration (and via exaggeration), in a manner of speaking iTunes is a spreadsheet that plays music. It’s context-free. You just paid $10 for that album — who plays drums? I dunno, WHY DON’T YOU GO TO THE WEB TO FIND OUT, BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE CONTEXT IS.
But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to GorillavsBear.com, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.
So we have media consumption experiences with no context (desktop media players) and an incredible, endless, emergent contextual experience where media consumption is a pain in the ass, illegal, or non-existent (the Web). FIX IT. Your fans are pouring their music-loving hearts into blogs, Wikipedia, etc and what tools have you given them to work with? Not much, unfortunately.
This is what I’m vowing to devote my energy, and Yahoo!’s energy to.
Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.