Free Download Friday
Listen to this.
Pequeña Fiera!: Mountains were Monsters
2010, Error! Lo-Fi Recordings
This album is available as a free download here.

I am intrigued by the bigfoot-looking cartoon character on the cover of Pequeña Fiera!’s record, Mountains were Monsters.  I’m intrigued because I wonder whether it is the inspiration for this whimsical collection of lo-fi recordings or whether the character was created out of listening to the music.  His story certainly seems to be for me the story of this record.

It’s easy to draw parallels to bands like Sigur Ros or Deerhunter from listening to Mountains were Monsters, but there’s something different here.  There is whimsy in this music that feels concentrated and seldom boring.  That is not to say that there isn’t the old tricks of influences either:  small harmonies buried in mixes, hand-claps creating the rhythm section, and glitchy tape noise create a familiar ambiance to this music.

Obvious influences aside, I can’t help thinking about that big, cartoon bigfoot-like character, trampling through pine forests, trying to share his life, but finding himself alone.  Not being able to decipher the lyrics on this record is no help either (Portugese, French, English?).  Seeing him makes me think that the lyrics on this record are in his mysterious bigfoot-language, and this is his only expression in the world.

Sometimes it is the statement that is not being made that can be most powerful.  Mountains were Monsters gives my imagination the power to imagine characters like I was a kid again.

Mp3s and Cover Art via Error! Lo-Fi Recordings

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Free Music Friday.
Best New Music
Diego Bernal: Besides…
2010, Exponential Records
This album is available as a free download here.

This album just might be the coolest thing I’ve heard all year.  This is the kind of music you would imagine rolling through Danny Trejo’s head while he’s walking into the grocery store or something.  And yet, despite this “cool” feeling, there’s something warm and familiar about what’s going on here that makes this record special.

So why waste my time explaining to you the parallels that I could draw between 70s-era exploitation films or the kind of music curation that only Quentin Tarantino could pull off in one of his film’s soundtracks?  I won’t.  I’ll put it simply: I feel cool listening to Bernal extract classic funk horns and whirling psychedelic guitar licks against a backdrop of early 90s east coast hip-hop beats.  It makes me feel cool.

I have to admit, I think Tarantino is a dork; however, there’s something about those characters that he creates–outlaws, outcasts, nobodies that seems “real.” You know these characters, and you like their eschewing of society for their own psychological well-being.  We try to be like them, and somehow, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

I have to believe this is the appeal of folk music–real folk music in the vein of regional styles of the blues, appalachian mountain music, jazz, etcetera.  It’s stuff that we relate to and yet makes us feel that we are cared for, all at once, which makes the ‘warm fuzzies’ come out.

So why is Besides… so good?  Is it simply the existential freedom to become some outlaw-caricature that powers this record?  No.  Bernal is a ‘doctor of style’ in his presentation of the beat.  Besides… is less a club record than it is an execution of style.  He touches so many genres here (hip-hop, funk, soul, among others) that Bernal is making a stylistic collage that makes for a visceral listening experience.

The impact of the deejay on musical and aesthetic culture cannot be underrated.  In many ways, deejays are helping to preserve and invigorate modern American folk art.  Bernal samples almost nothing popular, yet remains completely familiar in all that he creates, unlike contemporary musicians like Girl Talk.  This is not to slam other artists working with these tools in the genre, but it does lend praise to Bernal for being a folk visionary, albeit in a very non-traditional way.

Mp3s and album art via Exponential Records

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Johan Lundin contacted me a couple weeks ago via last.fm about a release from his label by Azoora.

You can’t really know the netlabel world without knowing about 23 Seconds.  The label features a diverse set of musicians that doesn’t fit regularly into the electronic-music type mold that usually gets assigned to netlabels.  There is a wealth of genres represented, and this round-up of 23 Seconds’ most recent releases shares a fraction of what they have to offer.

Listen to this.
Flyafter: Extended Play
Download Here

Flyafter’s Extended Play was the release I sought out among the label’s many releases, largely because of the art on the cover.  An Indonesian band, Flyafter has a decisively mainstream feel, featuring strong synth melodies and a deep appreciation for strong hooks.  In many ways, the familiarity plays to the band’s advantage, providing a real alternative to top-40 pop. 

This is a release that feels a lot like where Ben Gibbard might go given the opportunity to incorporate more synth-like experimentation into Death Cab for Cutie.  This is to say that there are some very strong moments on this 25-minute EP, although there is little here that will feel unfamiliar.  The band’s remix of Sigur Ros’ “Njósnavélin” was an unexpected surprise, as well as the strong acoustic sound of “Sleep Beside Me;” however, there isn’t anything groundbreaking in the mix, just strong execution of pop song craft.

Best New Music.
Danish Daycare: A Story of Hurt (2010 Edition)
Download Here

Execution abounds on the re-release of Daniel Jönsson’s debut, A Story of Hurt (2010 Edition).  A member of another brilliant 23 Seconds Netlabel band, Emerald Park, Jönsson perfectly evokes the aesthetic strengths of 80s bands Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order on this full length.  Throughout the album’s eleven tracks I was consistently blown away with the strength and development of the artist’s aesthetic choice.  Clearly this is a musician anxious to relive and perfect the finest moments of 80s synth and guitar pop, while being aware of his part in the songwriting of today.

Too often artists invoking aesthetic nostalgia neglect the nuance of songwriting.  This is tragic for the music fan looking to see where the genre could go next, all-too-often finding that aesthetic choices are merely the remnants of a time gone by, a medium for sales rather than artistic exploration.  This is where Danish Daycare really thrives; from the album’s first track, “A Purpose to My Sins,” there are clear modern subtleties worked into the song forms, revealing songs that are as dark, lonely, and discontent as anything Trent Reznor is doing today.

There is much about this album that had to grow on me.  It is a dark record, filled with despair.  The cover alone detracts many from finding the beauty that is inside its 51 minutes.  This is a record that pays dividends with intentional listening.  It needs emotional investment, and with that, provides listening that feels anything but stale.

Ignore.
Azoora: Tension
Download Here

I cannot relate the total malaise that came over me after listening to Azoora’s Tension.  I couldn’t care less about this release, and I don’t know why.  All of the ingredients that would make something interesting to me are here: Johnny Marr-like guitar, female counter-vocal work, decent rhythm, and still, it falls flat.

The album’s second track, the EP’s title track, “Tension,” is a rambling mess of a song.  It feels aimless, with terrible lyrics repeated like, “my mind swirls.” It feels deliberate, but one has to wonder why.  There’s nothing interesting here and tracks like this one do nothing to increase the tension of the listener, they just move the listener to skip to the next track.

I want more from Azoora.  I feel like this is a band that has places to go musically, but they sound too much like a musical hodge-podge.  There are some decent instrumental moments here, but they are tracks that essentially feel undeveloped rather than something legitimately interesting.  It’s this kind of underdevelopment that truly drives me crazy as a listener.  I wonder what could have happened with more time, more editing.  This is a release that just feels pushed for the purposes of completion.

Mp3s and Covers via 23 Seconds Netlabel

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Free Release Friday
Best New Music.
Power und Beauty: The Gnome E.P.
2010, Peppermill Records

This album is available as a free download here.

The netlabel world is typically a world of ambient electronica experimentalism.  This is not a bad thing, but finding a brilliant little exhuberant acoustic-based E.P. like Power und Beauty’s The Gnome E.P., was a tremendous surprise for me.

Power und Beauty is a four-piece female band from Spokane, Washington.  The band makes four-part choral folk songs that are partly beautiful and partly unsettling.  One can easily recall Pavement and Fleet Foxes while listening to Power und Beauty’s four tracks on this E.P., yet the band has the ability to never feel derivative.

The band makes a special effort to create arrangements that are familiar and foreign, which plays well to the unsettling vibe on the record.  This reveals itself immediately in “Beggars and Felons,” the E.P.’s opening track.  Apart from the subject matter, the band introduces their music with an accordion waltz, hardly an instantly familiar song form for contemporary indie rock. 

Pair Power und Beauty’s grade school choir treatments with their unfamiliar song forms and you have the equation of a band that is likeably off-kilter.  You see this in the E.P.’s next two tracks, “Lavender” and “Peaches.”  Rather abruptly, the E.P. closes with the acoustic “The Author of Spring.” The choral arrangements are brilliant here, on par with anything that Fleet Foxes is doing, and it leaves the E.P. with a haunted feeling.

Power und Beauty are poised to make a remarkable statement to the folk community.  There is a tremendous gap between acoustic innovation and folk song forms that Fleet Foxes have only scratched in their self-titled debut for Sub Pop.  Pairing these lo-fi treatments to non-standard folk forms is truly a promising step in the right direction, even if it is a bit unsettling.

Cover art and Mp3s via Peppermill Records.

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Best New Music
Hanalei: One Big Night
2010, Big Scary Monsters Recording Company/Brick Gun

In the early 2000s, Chicago was a haven for Jawbreaker-esque punk rock bands that rocked.  Out of the scene came no less than the Alkaline Trio and the Lawrence Arms.

People forget the contributions of the other bands affiliated with the scene.  One of the contributing acts was Brian Moss’ ‘The Ghost.’ That band, as I remember it, was better known for the band that it came from, San Francisco’s ‘The Wunder Years.’ I had seen The Wunder Years on several cheap-o compilations throughout that late 90s and always liked what they did.  Brian never gained a huge following like Matt Skiba, the Alkaline Trio’s lead singer.  He never really had the cult following that Brendan Kelly, the lead singer of the Lawrence Arms, did either.

Sometime in 2004, I began to hear Moss record as ‘Hanalei.’ As Hanalei, he generally arranged songs acoustically, with small rhythm tracks providing environment to the recordings.  This setting really worked for him much better than The Wunder Years or The Ghost did.  It made sense at the time, since nearly every lead singer of every regionally-popular emo band was starting his own version of Dashboard Confessional and Hanalei was definitely no different.

But Moss was a different kind of presence than the rest of the Dashboard Confessional emo sweethearts.  The sweetness of his voice echoed his California beginnings particularly well, and everything that I heard from him was good in the sense that it wasn’t overdone.  Moss took care by understating his aesthetic.  He went full band on a second release, which bored me, and I didn’t think much about him again.

Somehow I stumbled upon Brian Moss’ Hanalei page on MySpace and read about this record, One Big Night.  The record is another understated acoustic affair sounding dangerously close to hastily arranged demos more than fully developed songs.  That being said, Moss has put forward a group of songs that is incredibly rewarding because they are so understated again.

The album’s crowning glory is the track, “Moth to the Flame,” a driving punk-inspired moment of hybridized screaming and driving rhythm, done acoustically.  This is textbook Jawbreaker inspired pop-punk of the finest kind, done without the gloss of the current production of Alkaline Trio.  It beckons Moss’ songwriting roots, but done in a way that is tasteful.  Somehow Moss is able to explore this territory without being unnecessarily nostalgic, evoking the urgency of the aesthetic but not the sound of the day.

Moss’ subject matter is also restrained; rather than going for the textbook Rocky Votolato combination of heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, Moss retains many righteous/unrighteous thematic elements throughout the record.  This is not foreign material to a Jawbreaker-inspired punk, yet Moss is able to create songs like “Scalpels and Saints” and “Neverending Cigarette” that aesthetically seem simple, and are thematically unrestrained.

It is this kind of attention that really legitimizes Hanalei on One Big Night.  There isn’t the requisite boredom that most singer-songwriters explore in their mid-career malaise.  There is real energy teaming throughout the release that evoke the sense of a songwriter with something to say and nothing to lose, but do so in such a way that don’t require glitz and glamor.

Cover Art and Mp3s via eMusic

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Free Release Friday.
Best New Music.
The Strait of Anain: This Wandering Winter
2010, Qunabu
This album is available for free download here.

Precision is the logical complement to delicacy.  It is the choice to be precise that reveals sensitivity to environment, which reveals what the artist is delicate about.  It is only in environment that truly delicate choices come through, because the delicate choices are the most emotionally effectual.

This Wandering Winter is a delicate exploration of ambient moods and electronic melodies.  One can easily see The artist’s clear influence of light upon his mood as the record meanders between euphoric melodies and subtle textural rhythmic structure.  The artist restrains himself as a subject throughout, resisting the easy impulse to break his songs into full dance-like electronica on the basis of his mood in relation to his environment, yet never fully giving his songs over to ambient expressionism.

On his site, the artist discusses that the intent of the work is to explore the ambient
moods and emotions of himself within his environment, which is filled
with light.  One can hear the grappling that he has between his own
artistic commentary personified in rhythm, and his environmental
exploration evoked in melody.  This juxtaposition keeps the listener
intrigued throughout, wondering what choice he might make while exploring
his theme.

Tracks like “The Air from Alaska” frame the artist’s desire to explore the ambient space and his emotional reaction to it.  Throughout the track, one can feel a refreshing feeling emanate from the ambient themes that bookend the track.  There is rhythm and structure in the middle that feel evocative of the artist’s feelings while working.  It is this comparison that reveals the delicate precision that the artist grapples with in his subject matter–environmental exploration or emotional impact?

The gentle pulsation at the beginning of “Light Reflecting” begs not just an ambient inspiration from clear influences like Jimmy Tamborello, but also evokes the kind of gentle lullaby of the theme songs of video games from youth.  The artist seems clear in his intent not just to evoke environment in his work, but to mine the well of emotional, both immediate and innate.

This grappling gives the listener a portrait of a delicate man at work.  This Wandering Winter invites the listener, but reveals its rewards upon intentional listening.  The record seems innocuously ambient, but reveals its rich blessings in the listener’s reactions to the artist’s emotional creation.

Mp3s via Qunabu.  Cover art via The Strait of Anain.

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Free Download

Socket Science’s second release, Ephedra, is a study in themes and hooks.  Each of the album’s three tracks study similar territory–poppy, danceable, moderate-speed electronic music that begs to be in rotation in most people’s iPods.

There are few complaints that I have with this record, other than the criminally small track number.  Socket Science’s studies of pop hooks and melodic themes sound short despite their anthemic time span.  The tracks are probably too long for the casual listener, certainly far too long for any kind of radio play, however the hooks are so solid you will want to hear their repetition constantly.

It is EPs like Ephedra that really ask the listener why netlabel music hasn’t become a larger part of people’s listening attention.  Netlabels are perfectly suited to microcultures.  Different than subcultures, microcultures are small communities that are based around specific media and neglect the full-fledged ideological development of subcultures.  Today’s highly fractured, yet highly networked society is especially condusive to microcultures, which begs listeners to broaden their horizons and pick up releases like this one.

Socket Science’s studies in themes and hooks are epitomized on “A Friend of the Family,” which features a seven-dwarfish whistle as one of the thematic hooks used in the song.  The whistle isn’t exactly inventive in its execution, but it is skilled in terms of its study.  Played close to its rhythm, like most of the great sample-based songs of the late 1990s, the rhythm pulls together the theme in “A Friend of the Family” to keep the song flowing freely.

It is this care and attention that epitomizes the worthiness of Socket Science to any electronic fan’s iPod.  The deftness and clarity with which the artist executes these three studies of theme and hook is a nice addition to any electronic collection.  It begs the microculture, “why not listen to this?” This music is enjoyable, it is marketable, and it definitely has its place.

Mp3s and cover art via Astor Bell

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Listen to this.
Samantha Crain: You (Understood)
2010, Ramseur Records / Thirty Tigers

Samantha Crain’s voice is a star.  She doesn’t sing in your typical Billie Holiday-faked warble, though she does have a throatiness that might remind you of that cliché.  She also doesn’t bubble and brim with bubbly glee, the other major trend for most female singer-songwriters at the moment.  What she offers is earnest songwriting with a rustic flair that is indicative of her Oklahoma roots, yet doesn’t pander to VH1 or the former staff writers of No Depression.  These are songs that are real and it shows.

As with most of the roots revival music coming from the southwest, there is some legitimate proficiency on You (Understood).  Crain’s band is as much a part of this record as she is, managing subtle flavors of indie rock beneath the rustic songwriting of Crain.  You (Understood) could have quickly become just another vanilla note in the rapidly-expanding menu of singer-songwriters putting out rustic songwriting, but Crain’s band is a competent backup to Crain’s distinctive vocal style.

Without a doubt, “We Are the Same,” a quiet acoustic number, is the standout track of this record because of Crain’s powerful vocals played against her delicately plucked acoustic guitar.  But there’s a greatness that is bursting from Crain that is featured in other tracks like “Lions” and “Santa Fe” because she doesn’t go for the female songwriter jugular by picking on every track on the record.  Crain develops her lyrics carefully here with her music, allowing for a subtle delivery that doesn’t push Crain toward a vocal warble.  Surely, acts like Bosque Brown and Sarah Jaffe have utilized the vocal warble brilliantly over the past five years, but Crain’s real skill is her phrasing.

“Santa Fe” comes across particularly strong in this regard.  Crain uses a sing-songy rhyme in the last syllables of each line that works on every level–rustic, yet not cliche–a device for managing rhythm and evoking a sense of time.  This is where I want to see Crain live as a singer-songwriter, managing the elements of song against the meter of the lyric.  It is in these moments that Crain’s band shines and the songs just saunter swiftly in and out of the listener’s ear effortlessly, and Crain is able to soar.

Cover and Mp3s via eMusic

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Rating: 8.3 / 7.5

The only appropriate adjective for Suns would be ‘savage.’ And while the term is appropriate enough, it wouldn’t do justice to the absolute immensity that embodies the intensity of the band on these two releases.  This set of free EPs, The Howl and the Many and Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program, mine the intersection of Dischord-era post-punk and Radiohead-inspired, postmodern ‘alternative.’ The reaction is nothing short of inspired and confounding–music for the imaginative, emotional listener.

The two EPs are disparate works, though they are the product of the first year of work of the band.  They span similar territory: thick, dark guitars and a hulking rhythm section ripple beneath the shimmery highs of harmonium and synthesizer, creating an atmospheric sound that would draw easy comparisons to their Radiohead and Sigur Rós inspiration.  But the immediate comparisons stop there, as the band’s backbone is an aggression that can only be compared to brooding post-punk acts like Fugazi or Jawbox.

The result is a band whose first two EPs feel truly imaginative and emotional, finding an appropriate depth and height that hasn’t been measured before.  The results are particularly interesting on The Howl and the Many, a basement-recorded affair that feels severe in only the best possible way.  The band employs an energy that has all of the effect of thin streams of blood running across a face after a fight, and echo all of the enthusiasm of the swift run to safety afterward.

Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program is a bit more controlled by virtue of its studio recording efforts, a ploy that streamlines the band’s sound, but increases the tension between the care paid to the songs and the restraint of the arrangements.  Clearly Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program feels like the professional effort, and it suffers from all the limitations that The Howl and the Many does not.  The brooding tension between the careful precision of the lead guitar and the rest of the band on Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program seems almost distracting in contrast to the unrestrained energy behind the loose arrangements of The Howl and the Many.

At their core, Suns have turned in amazing debut EPs and show amazing energy as a band.  These releases show not only promise, but hearken a musical identity that has not yet been born.

Mp3s and covers via Suns

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Best New Music
How to Destroy Angels: How to Destroy Angels
Self-Released
Available as a Free Download Here

Rating: 8.8

I am of the opinion that Trent Reznor is and remains a genius.  At the same time, I believe him to be an auteur, an artist with a highly developed aesthetic that essentially defines his work.

Reznor is an enigma.  At one time he was essentially a recluse, hiding himself from the world, supposedly tortured by the art that makes him so brilliant.  Five years between Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral.  Another five years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.  Six years between The Fragile and With Teeth.  Then Trent Reznor found an enemy.

His record label, Interscope Records, stopped putting the force behind Trent Reznor that they had in his glory days.  Records like The Fragile, a dual-disc concept record was essentially unmarketable.  Someone made the mistake in thinking that Reznor’s best days were behind him.  They heard a freindlier Reznor on Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth and mistook that as Reznor going soft.  They suggested that he work with hip-hop producers, probably under poor assumptions that Reznor had lost his edge.  What they didn’t know was that they made themselves fodder for Reznor’s creative genius.

In 2008, Reznor released The Slip free over the internet.  The album proved to bring a vitality to Reznor that he hadn’t had in previous incarnations of Nine Inch Nails on a major label.  He released the record, which sounded surprisingly commercial, on a slick pricing model that provided free and pay versions of the record in the digital realm.  This was Reznor’s version of DIY, and the record had all the enthusiasm of an early punk rock release.

Then Reznor sold it all.  He disbanded Nine Inch Nails as a touring entity and started work on a project with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, called How to Destroy Angels.  This release is signature Reznor.

How to Destroy Angels isn’t terribly different from a Nine Inch Nails record.  There is the requisite dark, sexual energy that is found on previous releases on “BBB.”  There are the long instrumental songs that meander between ambient and industrial on “A Drowning.” There’s loud, animalistic texture on “Parasite.”

That isn’t saying that there isn’t anything here that doesn’t sound fresh.  Reznor has, by far and away, been an artist that is too underrated for his own good.  The Downward Spiral feels as fresh as anything on any dubstep or grime playlist.  Reznor, along with the Dust Brothers, helped to create an audio aesthetic that was both highly produced and highly confrontational in the use of texture and rhythm against melody.  He departs from the Dust Brothers in his continual refinement of that palette.

So hearing How to Destroy Angels shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone listening to it.  But perhaps one ought to listen to it with new ears.  Even Reznor’s most arduous moments, his explorations into the ambient subgenre, have yielded incredibly exciting results.  The release’s final track, “A Drowning,” leaves the listener in this exploration between ambient and pop, creating a kind of magic that was never revealed in Nine Inch Nails.  Maandig’s vocals are both haunting and warm, inviting you to feel the destruction that Reznor flirts with on every release.

It is here that the auteur reveals his craft: work that has all the serenity of the Mona Lisa’s smile and all of the destruction of a nuclear winter.

Cover and Mp3s via How to Destroy Angels

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• The Strait of Anain: This Wandering Winter
• Socket Science: Ephedra