recently heard
0 comments Saturday, October 27, 2007

It is Saturday morning - Boston is rainy, drizzly. I am coffee, yogurt, watercolors. The sound is Caribbean jazz with trumpets. I am reminiscing Chick Corea the night before and drumming out of this world at the Lily Pad. The weather puts me in a reflective mood and I harken back to my friend's post about rainy day music. So in an effort to pair sounds with moods - here are several songs and bands I've enjoyed in the past couple weeks.



HEALTH - The song Glitter Pills kills me. The mix here is just right. Blunt and subtle. Robust and fragile. They are friends with Dan Deacon (or so MySpace tells me) and I really like that Electro Punk Sound. See also Pterodactyl.


Birds and Batteries - I don't know, was it the 'Light Bright' picture? This song - Turnstyles - just struck me. It has some ELO style grandeur (guilty pleasure), but also a healthy dose of irony (another vice). Then the end of the song takes a twist and gets really weird.


Portugal, The Man - has that nice, classic, throbbing rock sound - I like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and so I like this band. Here are two songs - Marching with 6 and Stables and Chairs.


Posted byTobias
at7:35 AM

0 comments
 
musical segregation?
0 comments Thursday, October 18, 2007


I'm not one hundred percent sure how i feel about the 'A Paler Shade of White' article by Sasha Frere-Jones. I was hooked by the critique of recent Arcade Fire developments. But I stayed for the soul, to find where the soul came from. This article serves as a fine lens to view the way music has grown, and what it needs now.
There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.


Posted byTobias
at6:37 PM

0 comments
 
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)