Spotify Saved My Life/Faith In Humanity

A friend from across the pond recently brought something incredible into my life: the peer-to-peer music streaming service Spotify.

I was a little skeptical when I fist heard about Spotify. If you're like me, you enjoy hunting down new music from around the world on your own using blogs, word of mouth, and a plethora of downloading tools, to grow your tastes and personal mp3 library. As a rule I generally avoid things like LastFm and Pandora. For me they take a lot of the fun out of it.

Thankfully, Spotify is nothing like those programs. What is Spotify then? I'm so glad you asked!

Ever had one of those nights where the only thing you want to do is throw caution to the wind, go to a Chinese restaurant and completely lay waste to the buffet line? Help yourself to plate after ungodly plate of every piece of Chinese food you can think of? Start with some General Tso's chicken, gently work your way over those spring rolls, stay away from that nasty-looking pudding, and finish up with an unhealthy amount of crab wantons/rangoons/whatever you call those things? Perhaps you even want to go out on a limb, and discover something new (if such a thing exists in Chinese-American dining) along your journey? If you know what I'm talking about, and I think you do...Spotify is kind of like that. Only with music. And without the utterly pride-destroying, post-Chinese binge eating hangover.

Spotify is a service which gives you, via a small downloadable client, access to a surprisingly rich (and rapidly expanding) library of music. That library is fully and easily searchable by song title, artist, album, genre, popularity, even record label. There is also a radio function, but to be honest I really haven't checked that out. All this at your fingertips, with a simple and sleek user interface not unlike iTunes. In fact it's almost like someone put tens of millions of songs on your iTunes while you were asleep.

Then there's the playlist function. This is the part that really got me interested: with one click you can take a song from your search results and add it to a playlist. Spotify lets you create tons of playlists, and it saves them so you can access and change them any time, almost* anywhere. You can share playlists with other people, and even create collaborative playlists with others. This minuscule, perfectly unobtrusive element of social-listening really pulled me in. There are no profiles to create, no interest sections to fill out, and no annoying status updates. The idea of collaborative playlists and sharing sealed the deal for me.

Though I didn't think I would like it at first, the related artist features are actually really handy, especially if you are searching for specific types of music from around the world. For instance, Spotify has been hooking me up with suggestions of great Norwegian folk and folk-rock bands from the 1970's and 80's all night. "Femøres Fridtjolf" and "Steinaldersjel" by Nøkken are nothing less than amazing songs, if you can ever check them out.

I mean, some of this stuff is music I potentially would have had to spend many hours digging around dusty corners of the internet for, just to get artist names, let alone find more than one or two songs if I got lucky. It's not like stumbling on some indie band from Brooklyn on a blog at random and checking them out. There's really no way I would I have been exposed to this stuff if not for Spotify.

However, I will say Spotify's world-beat/African area is slightly lacking. I searched for Franco and they didn't even have a single song! They do have lots of Fela Kuti, some Tinariwen, and other bigger names in African music (but no Franco? WTF). Doesn't look like they have much from the World Village Music label just yet. I think they will start get more African and indigenous world-beat music on here as the service evolves.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven't stopped using Spotify since I first got it, which must have been about five days ago. I am completely, 100% addicted to Spotify. That said, here's a list of some pros and cons I have found over that period of time.

Pros:

-Excellent sound quality, the best streaming quality I have ever heard.
-No perceivable buffering, even on a bad internet connection. The worst I have experienced is a small, two or three second delay between songs. Streaming as close to flawless as it gets.
-Insane, easy-to-access library.
-Instant access to your music with limited (you can set the size of Spotify's cache) minimal usage of hard drive and space. I use Spotify on my small netbook running Windows XP with 1GB memory/160GB drive, and just as a test I opened Spotify, iTunes, Photoshop, MS Word, and Firefox all at once and found I had no problems.
-Fully legal and licensed. That means artists and labels are paid.
-Easily navigable interface
-Free. The free version does have advertisements (the premium version does not) but they are minimal. I have found them not the least bit annoying.
-Play queue! Something I have always wanted in iTunes.
-Related artist features.

Cons:

-The big four record companies, as a result of agreeing to license their music to Spotify, own a large share of the company. Not sure how this effects what gets added or left out from Spotify's library.
-Some smaller artists are not yet a part of the Spotfiy library (only one Iron and Wine song!?!?). But I feel like this is going to change as the service evolves. Eventually, it would make sense for Spotify to allow artists to willingly upload their music with the consent of their label to increase exposure. An upcoming artists feature or something. In the meantime, it would be nice if Spotify let users upload their own tracks to fill in the gaps (strictly for personal use).
-Unless you buy the premium subscription, you don't have offline access to your playlists.
-You need an invite to get the free version...for now. Or maybe a good friend to let you test out their account :)

And now for the one really big, annoying, problematic con for most of us "yanks." Remember that asterisk I placed next to the "almost" a few paragraphs back? Brace yourself.

*Spotify is not available in America...yet.

Yes, it is true. Making it possibly the best thing to come out of Europe since socialized medicine, Spotify is currently only available in 6 European countries. But that is reportedly set to change this fall. Spotify has briefly flirted with open, invite-free access to its eligible countries, and my guess would be that soon after it comes to America, it will go permanently invite-free.

So how did I get Spotify? It's actually kind of fun. First off you need an invite. This is the most difficult part. Comb the web, sign up for some invite lists, or talk to some friends. Then you just go through a proxy-server to fake your IP address so that Spotify thinks you're in one of its eligible locations, and sign up from there. Spotify has a 14 day travel restriction, so you will need to fake your IP once every two weeks to get around this.

I know this sounds like a lot of work. But it's much easier than it sounds, and it's totally worth it. If you're up for it, TechCrunch outlines exactly how to do it in three easy steps.

If you don't feel like being a covert American early-adopter, you can always wait until it hits the States. I might even consider buying the premium subscription when it does. That's how much I like this thing. It's great for me, because the size of my mp3 library is ridiculous, my 80GB iPod is full, and I don't need to keep adding to my library unless it's absolutely necessary. That's why Spotify is so great. But don't just take my word for it.

Check it out for yourself.

Tinariwen: Aman Iman (Water is Life)

Tinariwen
Aman Iman (Water is Life)
World Village; 2007

This is going to be a relatively short review, and for that I apologize in advance. Most importantly, this is music that speaks for itself. Much less important is the fact that today is the nicest, warmest day we've had yet this year, and I intend to enjoy the remainder of it outdoors.

Tinariwen are one of the most successful African music groups of all time. They are a collective of musicians and singers spread across five north African countries, most of whom were displaced by conflict from their homes in the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. They formed in a refugee camp in Libya around 1979. Ethnic Touaregs, their people are semi-nomadic, and in their native tongue of Tamashek, Tinariwen means "deserts," or "empty places."

It's an appropriate name. Their music evokes desert imagery in every sense. Tinariwen's music has often been described as "desert guitar," and this seems like an appropriate classification. Their sound is a mix between the modern and the very old, blending traditional Touareg rhythms with electric guitars and a sometimes bluesy feel. But even their guitar style dates back to the traditional styles of west Africa. Driving the rhythm section, and twisting like a snake through almost every track, is the pulse of the traditional Tinde drum.

Aman Iman is among Tinariwen's best selling albums worldwide. It is an album that simply rocks. It will make you want to weep, it will hypnotize you, and it will make you want dance. The guitar brings to mind great American blues artists, and others like Jimmy Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. The rhythms are extremely complex, with lots of hand clapping and winding percussion. The singer's voice expresses both unknowable heartbreak and elation, and Tinariwen's lyrics, albeit sung in a beautiful but unfamiliar language, are very much in common with American blues singers: themes of loss, suffering, love and anguish. The album's opening track, "Cler Achel," ("I Spent the Day") a song of displaced peoples and lost love, contains the words, "You've gone, Mila, you've already gone and I've plunged deeper into my dreams/ Whatever my thoughts, she occupies them all, and my heart cries out still." My personal favorite track, "Matadjem Yinmixan" ("Why All This Hate Between You?") asks the powerful question, "Why all this hate between you which you teach your children?/The world looks at you and surpasses your understanding."

Although almost everything about Tinariwen is unfamiliar to Westerners, this music has an undeniable, visceral quality that makes it seem as if it comes from a place existing somewhere within all of us, some place old, untapped for a very long time yet still somehow intact. Not primitive, but inherent. This is music that defies the boundaries of country, time, and language. Although it speaks to you in a foreign tongue, if you're listening at all, you understand. Aman Iman is a mesmerizing, urgent album I am very pleased to tell you about. I hope you listen to it, and cherish it as I do.


Tinariwen - "Matadjem Yinmixan"
Tinariwen - "Cler Achel"
Tinariwen - "Imidiwan Winakalin" (Youtube video)

An amazing ten minute video about Tinariwen with an in-depth look into their history.
Tinariwen: Music of Resistance

Tinariwen's Website

Beach House: Teen Dream

Beach House
Teen Dream
Sub-Pop; 2010

I am so glad I decided to review this album. I picked it because it was released in January, and for some reason I haven't listened to it until just today. Apprehensive at first, I was afraid to be let down by Teen Dream. But to the contrary it has quickly become my favorite Beach House release to date. On one hand I am kicking myself for waiting until now to listen to it. On the other hand, spring has come to my area of Michigan, and Teen Dream is a welcome breath of fresh air. This is an album better suited for a walk down the shoreline, the low sun glistening white off the bay, and a mild southern breeze, than it is an album for the cold north wind and icy glow of January.

This is really a spring and summer album. Perhaps that's why the second track "Silver Soul" opens with the sound of a small stream of running water, almost as subtle as the sound of melting snow, with a few chirping birds in the background. In fact Teen Dream's subtleties express the very anticipation one feels this time of year, waiting for the weather to agree with the shorts you've had put away for the last five months. Watching the temperatures climb each week in small, sometimes painful increments. It's an album perhaps best appreciated by those who have spent time on the beach, absorbing the dreamier twilight hours before and after sunset. I know how awfully trite and corny that sounds, and maybe I am just too anxious for summer's arrival. But listen to this album, the first track even, and tell me the reverb-drenched cymbal crashes don't recall the sound of waves.The sound waves make when you've been down on the shore so long they all seem to blend together into one fluid song. I have always thought there was a clear reason they named this band Beach House.

I was first turned on to Beach House at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival. It was sweltering hot and I hoped to secure a good position at the small stage (back when it was over in that paved area and not under the nice shade trees of Union Park's opposite corner) for the Fujiya and Miyagi set later. Luckily for me in so many ways, mellow duo Beach House was playing to a relatively small but calm and extremely hot crowd, and I was able to easily maneuver to the front. Beach House played an awesome, carefully crafted set, which happened to be exactly the relief I needed from the heat and expensive bottled waters. On stage they were humble, and completely absorbed in their craft. It's as if they are playing just for you, and including Teen Dream, their albums maintain that personal, intimate feel.

In the subsequent years Beach House remained relatively static, but never to their detriment. The Baltimore dream-pop duo's third release, their first on the Sub-Pop label, Teen Dream doesn't alter the core framework of their great prior releases. What it does accomplish, however, is an improvement on that core sound-- not and advancement but an enhancement. This record is really, uncommonly exquisite. If you liked them before, you're going to love them now. The minor differences in no way constitute a dis to their hardcore fanbase. If you've never listened to Beach House, there has been no better opportunity than right now. This is Beach House, fully realized.

Teen Dream represents three distinct, relatively minor differences from their past releases. In terms of sound, you still get the same unique reverb-dream Beach House aura, the same chamber-pop feel, but a noticeable increase in production and recording quality takes those qualities up a notch. The sound is fuller, more expansive, and consequently more affecting. It's a more romantic, more imaginative sound. At times I even detect, under all the reverb and dreaminess, a certain folky Fleet Foxes quality. Every instrument sounds fuller on this album. I am wondering if their switch to Sub-Pop made this possible. On Teen Dream, Beach House brought in engineer Chris Coady, who has worked with TV On The Radio and Grizzly Bear, among others. They holed up in a church in New York state to record this album, and its echoing, robust feel brings to mind the vast acoustics of a cathedral. The best example of this is the whirlwind keyboard arrangement on the song "10 Mile Stereo," which becomes so enveloping it feels like the gentle ringing in your ears from the pressure when you dive deep underwater and turn to look through the blue-green space to the sun beaming above the surface.

The second difference I have noticed is that singer/keyboardist Victoria Legrand, to her great benefit, seems to have fully embraced the wholesome, earthy Stevie Nicks side of her voice, the opposing Nico half being marginalized and relegated to the background harmonies and various "ooohs ah-ah-ah-ah's." That Nicks vs. Nico dichotomy is especially apparent on the album's first single "Norway," and I am very pleased to see the more mature Stevie Nicks side win this particular battle. And Legrand has range, too. At times delicate, soft but never flimsy, as on the piano-based track "Real Love." In contrast, Legrand can wail, like on "Lover of Mine," "Walk In the Park," and "10 Mile Stereo." Throughout the album's entirety her voice is always stable, always possessed of an unwavering confidence. On the track "Better Times," that very strength and command in Legrand's voice shows when she sings, "Been a fool for weeks/'Cause my heart stands for nothin', and your soul's too weak." This is absolutely Stevie Nicks territory. Legrand seems comfortable with this maturation as a vocalist, and the result serves especially well in the context of their sound to enhance Teen Dream's overall atmosphere.

Each song is still as carefully arranged and constructed as their previous releases, each song still crafted to evoke a certain mood. It's hard to describe, but Teen Dream feels like a happier album to me. For the most part, the vaguely haunted lyrics are still here, as on "Walk In the Park," in which Legrand sings the chorus, "In a matter of time, it would slip from my mind/In and out of my life, you would slip from my mind," and later, "The face that you saw in the door, isn't looking at you anymore." There's an excellent remake of their 2008 single "Used To Be," which still evokes the helpless feeling of lost love. Opening track "Zebra" compares love to a "stag in the white sand," and asks the question, "Don't I know you better than the rest?" Legrand sings "We don't need a sign to know better times," on the song "Better Times." Despite all this, there is a more cheerful element permeating the composition of these songs than on any past Beach House release. It must be Teen Dream's crisper recording quality, more glittering and ethereal than ever before, that even among Legrand's sometimes tortured laments allows for this subtle happiness.

I can't think of one thing I dislike about Teen Dream. This is my favorite kind of record, one that evokes in the listener a varied range of feelings. As I listen to this album I cannot wait for summer in northern Michigan, and everything that entails. This is music for looking over Lake Michigan from a 400 foot cliff at the edge of the sand dunes. Or for taking in an ideal sunset, and sticking around to watch the colors that light up the horizon afterward. Teen Dream is a great victory for Beach House. It shows what fantastic band they really are. I heard through the grapevine that Beach House has started to "blow up" recently. That is absolutely fine by me. That would be wonderful in fact. This is a band and an album that will enrich your life. Dream pop, for the masses! Soak it up.



Beach House - "Norway"
Beach House - "Silver Soul"
Beach House - "Walk In The Park"
Beach House - "Better Times"

Buy It (Amazon)
Try It

Brian Eno: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

Brian Eno
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Island; 1974

(Buy/DL links end of post)

"In my town, there is a raincoat under a tree/ In the sun, there is a cloud containing the sea/ In the sea, there is a whale without any eyes/ In the whale, there is a man without his raincoat."

I don't think I can say anything about Brian Eno that hasn't already been said time after time. What I can say is, when I think about Brian Eno and his career, I start to feel small. Really really small. If you aren't familiar, on top of his own work, take a look at a list of artists Eno was involved with, from performance to production and beyond :

David Bowie (his best three albums no less,) David Bryne with and without Talking Heads, Devo, Grace Jones, seven albums with U2, Roxy Music, John Cale, John Cage, Genesis, Nico, Robert Fripp, Phil Collins, Robert Wyatt, Ultravox, Phillip Glass, Coldplay, remixes for Depeche Mode and Massive Attack albums. Not to mention he composed that classic 3.8 second masterpiece "The Microsoft Sound," aka that little sound we heard as kids when we would turn on out computers and "boot up" Windows '95, '98 etc.

I can't think of anyone alive today, except Brian Eno, who is more prolific than Brian Eno.

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) is rarely counted among Eno's best work. In fact it's chronically underrated. Which is odd, considering the majority of its reviews are for the most part positive. Personally, this is my favorite of Eno's four major pre-ambient albums. It's diabolical, schizophrenic, very cluttered, and most of the time confusing. It's also inertly English. It's named for a Chinese opera about thugs, spies, and of course Communists. Not quite a concept album, Tiger Mountain is loaded with references to China, espionage, insanity, and God knows what else, ie. "In the haze of her morning, China sits on eternity/and the opium farmers sell dreams to obscure fraternities" from the song "China My China."

I love this album for a few reasons. Most importantly, despite its noticeably dark lyrical content, this is clearly Eno's "pop" album. It's his second solo album, his last before 1975's groundbreaking Another Green World. Back then, in the immediate post-Roxy Music days, I think Eno was supposed to be this gender bending, Bowie-type deviant sex-fiend guy or something. Which doesn't seem that weird today, and probably didn't in 1974 either. But I could be wrong on that.

So here's Eno with a name already made for himself, free of all pent-up Roxy Music baggage, having a good clean bit of psychotic English fun before turning the world on its head and completely revolutionizing modern music as we know it. I think that's another reason this album is so endearing.

The stage is set with the phenomenally weird opening track, "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More," about a girl named Regina (pronounced more like a female organ than the singer) who left a message on the door about having just left for China. Eno sings, over vocal harmonies, swirling reverb-soaked guitars, a bubbling bass-line which seems to permeate the entire album, and the slow driving of what I think is an impeccably well-recorded snare, "I somehow can't imagine her just picking rice all day/ Maybe she will do a bit of spying/ With micro-cameras hidden in her hair."

Brian Eno - "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More"

"Back In Judy's Jungle" is up next. It sounds like a happily demented carousel ride and begins by immediately shouting some insane demands at you: "These are your orders, seems like its do-it or die." The middle of this song has this mild Phil Manzanera guitar solo and I honestly don't think I have ever heard a guitar sound quite like it. This is a testament to the brilliant and innovative production talent of Eno and friends, a talent which in 70's became increasingly more evident in everything Eno touched.

I can't figure out if "The Fat Lady of Limbourg," being only the second most psychologically menacing track on Tiger, begins with a bass guitar Eno rigged up to sound like a seriously deep electric organ, or if it's the other way around. But if I were a betting man I would put a hefty sum on the former. Apparently, this song is about a mental institution whose population was greater than that of the town in which is was located, and the song contains this lyrical gem, "I assume you understand that we have options on your time/ And we'll ditch you in the harbor if we must/ But if it all works out nicely, you'll get bonus you deserve/ From Doctors We Trust." It all becomes more troubling when Andy MacKay's saxophone comes in and Eno starts singing about singing about a duck who lays an sought-after egg, which eventually melts into a candle. No idea what that's about.

I mention the lyrics on the album so much because Eno claims they were all scribbled down at the last minute, not at all premeditated, in a sort of self-imposed panic. This is also when Brian Eno began developing what I think was one of his most ingenious innovations, the Oblique Strategies. These are literally a set of cards you pick from to determine what to do in a dilemma situation. Examples include "Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element," "Listen to the quiet voice," and "What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate." Who comes up with this stuff! Apparently Phoenix used the Oblique Strategies on their album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

Later in his career, Eno pioneered something amazing called Generative Music, a concept similar to the random sounds produced by wind blowing against wind-chimes, applied to electronic music. You have a set of predetermined outcomes, the use of which is then determined by your input. For Eno, this concept began to develop here, on Tiger Mountain, with the his use of the Oblique Strategies.

I have a hard time believing that Brian Eno did not premeditate the song "Mother Whale Eyeless." This song contains one of my all-time favorite lyrics. In the middle of the song, the music changes to this jaunty, downward spiraling keyboard, and a woman sings "In my town, there is a raincoat under a tree/ In the sun, there is a cloud containing the sea/ In the sea, there is a whale without any eyes/ In the whale, there is a man without his raincoat." Added bonus: Phill Collins as guest drummer, absolutely tearing it up toward the end of this song. And the hilariously subtle lyric "I'm wasting fingers like I had them to spare."

I could only find this song online in a Youtube video. The video is just the album cover with the song playing. Right-click and open it in a new tab. You'll be glad you did! You can download the whole album from my file at the bottom of this post.

Brian Eno - "Mother Whale Eyeless"

I realize that this review is probably fast becoming longer than you're interested in reading. So I am going to do you a favor and shorten it up a bit, (I'm new at this music blogging business, give me a week or so to figure it out before sending any angry emails).

Eno's technical prowess as a sound engineer, and the incredible talent of the musicians assembled for this album, in fact the most stable lineup of bandmates Eno ever had, are no more apparent on Tiger Mountain than on the insanely hyper, proto-punk, non-stop overdrive track "Third Uncle." If you can, put your headphones on before you listen to this one, and turn it up loud. Pulsing bass guitar sets the tone for the track. Guitars oscillate wildly from right to left. The drums and percussion on this track must be heard to be believed. Really, Robert Wyatt is absolutely slaying on percussion. If you were being chased by opium-crazed bandits through the thickest jungles of China at 100 miles per hour, this would be the soundtrack. This is Brian Eno laying the groundwork for Joy Division.

Again I apologize for the Youtube link. Download the album from my mediafire file if you want to hear the whole thing album in decent quality.

Brian Eno - "Third Uncle"

"The True Wheel" is I think the most pop song on the whole Tiger record. It starts out like any great modern synth-pop tune, squealing and oscillating and twisting and turning. Lyrics are great, even funny at times. "Looking for a certain ratio/ someone must have left it underneath the carpet/ Looking up and down the radio/ Uh oh! Nothing there this time!" This is probably my favorite number off the entire album. Again, crappy Youtube link.

Brian Eno - "The True Wheel"

Any fan of strange, English prog/pop music is going to love Taking Tiger Mountiain. If you don't know much about Brian Eno, if maybe all you know about him is "Isn't he that weird, bald, ambient music guy?" then I would highly recommend giving this album a chance. If you have a high tolerance for dark and confusing songs, or insanity in general, you're going to enjoy the hell out of this record. Brian Eno's talent for recording studio wizardry only escalated immensely from here, I could babble on about it but I will spare you. The album's closing track, "Taking Tiger Mountain," a gently, piano-laced soft number, informs but couldn't begin to glimpse the musical territory Brian Eno was to later traverse. I can think of no better way to end a review of Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) than with this particular track.

Brian Eno - "Taking Tiger Mountain"

"We climbed and we climbed, oh how we climbed. . .over the stars to take Tiger Mountain"


Buy (Amazon)
Try (my file)

Spring Break Listening Project & Sound Opinions

Greetings. I am currently on spring break, and have decided to take on a little project. Full disclosure: this idea came from personal friend, modern-day Renaissance man, and the man behind Man With A Megaphone, Mr. Justin Drabek.

I have picked five albums. Starting tomorrow I am going to listen to one per day, all day, meditate on them, analyze them, hopefully not get sick of them, and report to you my findings via this blog.

The albums I have chosen for my listening project are:
(In no particular order)

Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

Tinariwen - Aman Iman (Water is Life)

Beach House - Teen Dream

Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

Z-Ro - Relvis Presley Mixtape

So there you have it. I have tried to pick from a variety of styles of music that I enjoy. From 1970's prog-rock to modern dream-pop, from desert guitar world music to dirty, dirty southern rap. Not sure which album I am going to start with tomorrow. I guess it will depend on how I'm feeling when I wake up. So stay tuned.

On a side note, if anyone is interested in SXSW '10, NPR has a great music criticism/news/features show called Sound Opinions. It's on IPR every Sunday at 9 pm if you're in the Traverse City area. They just did an awesome show this week about SXSW, and they also review the new She and Him album. If you want to check it out, and you should, you can follow this link to their website. Once you're there, it's show #226 under "Previous Shows" right on the front page.

Peace!

Highlighted: Avi Buffalo

--Hello everyone. This will be the reoccurring section of my blog where I intend to highlight interesting new bands and artists I think you should know about. Pretty self explanatory.

Here's a young upstart band from Long Beach, California called Avi Buffalo. Fairly standard back-story: musically inclined high school kid in California learns to play guitar, starts band with evident west coast sound. Band records a few songs, puts them on Myspace, gets picked up by west coast record label Sub-Pop.

Well, in my opinion, whoever signed Avi Buffalo to Sub-Pop deserves a gold star. Or a beer. Or something. These kids are young, and I mean young. By the time their self-titled debut album comes out this April 27, the band's singer, guitarist, and founding member Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, also known as the Avi half of Avi Buffalo, will be a freshly-minted 21 years old.

And it shows. The music of Avi Buffalo is fresh, relieving. It's nothing brutal, but it is rock and roll. Check out this 7:28 (doesn't seem that long) track, "Remember Last Time," just released off their upcoming debut:

Avi Buffalo - Remember Last Time

The song has a few things I really love when it comes to this type of music: dual male/female vocals blending together nicely (keyboard player Rebecca Coleman also sings,) a tight and technical rhythm section, interesting chord progressions, the perfect amount of "jangly guitar" sound balanced with ample distortion at times. Sweet, but not entirely inoffensive. Singer/guitarist Avi sites avant-garde guitarist extraordinaire Nels Cline as his primary influence, which makes total sense when the song's climactic guitar solo starts to kick in.

I don't think I need to point out the obvious Built To Spill and Shins and Modest Mouse comparisons which have already been made, and will continue to be made once the debut comes out next month. Here's the first single from that album, "What's In It For."

Avi Buffalo - "What's In It For"

Again with the jangly guitars, interesting chord progressions/vocal harmonies. I don't seem to mind somewhat childish lyric, "What's in it for someone with nothing to do/ what's in it for me." In fact I rather like the youthful, inexperienced sentiment expressed therein.

As you can see, Avi Buffalo fit right in with the rest of the Sub-Pop catalog. A match made in heaven. And because these young up-and-comers seem so driven, I think we can expect a series of great Sup-Pop releases from them well into the future. I am very much looking forward to it. It all really begins for them April 27.

Another miscellaneous Avi Buffalo track:
Avi Buffalo - Where's Your Dirty Mind

Did I mention they are touring right now with Japandroids? Japs, incidentally, have an awesome new song called "Art Czars," which is paired with a cover of Big Black's "Racer X." I think Japandroids should make awesome role models for Avi Buffalo, and I am insanely upset that I won't make it to any of these shows.

Saturday Re-edit Club

I've been listening to a bunch of cool re-edits today, which are basically recontextualizations (also known as remixes?) of existing songs. They range from dramatic changes to simple reworkings or repetitions. Here are a few of my favorites. They're not necessarily "new" or anything, some of them go back to 2008. You can right-click "save link as" if you want to download them, and make you Saturday night a bit more danceable. PS the Rolling Stones and REM ones are totally awesome, and the Breakbot ones are just cool remixes.

Rolling Stones - "Under My Dub" (Todd Terje Re-edit)
REM - "Nightswimming" (Kissy Sell Out Re-edit)
Dianna Ross - "Love The One You're With" (Todd Terje Edit)
Stealers Wheel - "Stuck In The Middle With You" (Todd Terje Edit)
Fatback Band - "Street Dance" (Todd Terje Edit)
The Beatles - "Get Back" (Bonar Bradberry Edit)
The XX - "Crystallized" (Rory Phillips Edit)
New Young Pony Club - "Chaos" (Rory Phillips Edit)
Paul Simon - "Diamonds Dub" (Tangoterje Edit)
Bee Gees - "You Should Be Dancing" (Tangoterje Edit)
Air - "So Light Is Her Footfall" (Breakbot Remix)
PNAU - "Baby" (Breakbot Remix)

What Is Chillwave, Anyway?

This month, the city of Austin TX played host to around 2,000 bands at the annual SXSW festival. Easily the most important/fun festival of the year for music lovers. Once again, to his regret, this particular music lover was in absentia.

So on this particular Friday evening I was listening to a show on NPR, the topic of which was this year's festival highlights. I knew it was coming: inevitably the host and his critic cronies broached the topic of "chillwave" music and the slew of new "buzz bands" at this year's SXSW.

It took me back to last summer-- I am aware of how cliche that sounds-- after the "chillwave" floodgates had seemingly ruptured, spewing forth into the vast expanse of waste called the internet an onslaught of new "chill" bands. Chances are you probably have too much of a life/were too high/don't care enough to have noticed this particular trend. That's alright. For those of us who, for whatever reason, actually pay attention to this type of thing (read: new music in general), the chillwave explosion was unavoidable. Even if you don't like the music, in its own right this is a rather interesting phenomenon you should care about. I aim to tell you why.

The following paragraph is not the interesting part.

A reading from the book of Wikipedia reveals that chillwave is "also referred to as glo-fi," and is "a response to 2008's day-glo scene." Having trouble deciphering that? Not to worry, it is not only irrelevant but, in my opinion, an essentially flawed assertion.

"Chillwave," as it has been superfluously labeled, is basically mellowed-out electronic music, often containing simple, gently looped melodies, samples, and almost always utilizing a series of filters and effects peddles to create a muddied, lo-fi sound of varying degree and intensity. This can, in many cases, create an eerie but not inherently dark textural effect that compliments a track marvelously. Other times, it can turn an otherwise decent track into absolute rubbish. Sometimes you don't really even notice it. Some chillwavers like Ducktails (who I didn't realize until recently was even labeled as such, but is nonetheless a great artist) make use of guitars and non-electronic instruments and arrangements as well.

Here is example of a great chillwave song:

Washed out - "New Theory"
Here is an example of a great Ducktails song, "Landrunner"

So you have a feel for what a majority of this music sounds like. Now for the interesting part, the part that you, as a 21st Century media consumer and internet user, ought to take notice of if not actually care about: chillwave is purely a product of the internet itself. An emerging sub-genre, one of the first of its kind, that owes its very existence to the internet-- specifically the Web 2.0, social networking side of the internet. Chillwave: created by and for internet users.

Many people will tell you the term "chillwave" was essentially coined by whomever the psycho is behind the blog Hipster Runoff. Whether or not this is entirely true, (speculation abounds) as a viable sub-genre label it was thence spread and adopted by internet users to describe a growing trend in independent electronic music.

A critical aspect of all chillwave music is that it is widely perceived to originate primarily from lonely, twenty-somethings in their bedrooms, nostalgic for their 1980's childhood. This is important to a carefully maintained image or aesthetic of the genre. Low budget music created on computers by the most independent of bros, made available to other bros via the internet. The image, aesthetic, culture and most importantly the music of chillwave were all founded, spread, adopted, upheld and perpetuated through various Web 2.0 channels of media consumption, information sharing and social networking. Think about it:

Some (by no means all) chillwave acts can't even play shows because of the constraints of their music, a fact which should not deter one from listening. There have always been great bands who could never really play shows (see: East River Pipe). At any rate these are real independent musicians with, initially, little in the way of means of playing out. Many labels won't pick them up at first, so how are they going to spread their tunes around? The internet. Who then will consume their tunes? People who use the internet to look for music. Where are consumers going to talk to their friends/contacts/followers about these tunes? The internet. Blogs and now institutional music sites like Pitchfork generate massive hype, on the internet, for these bros and their one-man sound projects, and soon enough they are being thrust into the internet spotlight and asked to play actual shows. For the better chillwavers this works out fine, they adapt and often the show goes off without a hitch. Washed Out are touring right now with another chillwave outfit called Small Black (tongue-in-cheek reference to the band Big Black?) as their backing band, and by all accounts this has been working out well. But for the lesser artists the resulting show can be disastrous, like when Salem got booed off stage this year at SXSW.

So for many chillwave artists now and to come, the internet is the primary means of diffusion. This is important because, to be clear, the essential sounds of chillwave music have always been around, in whatever quantities and mixtures. Going back as far as the band Suicide, through scores of 80's groups like Tears For Fears, arguably even Brian Eno, to 90's groups like Nine Inch Nails, (forgot about them already, have you?) the roots of the musical seed that is chillwave run deep through the strata of electronic music accumulating since the 1970's. The global proliferation and widespread democratization of Web 2.0 applications to the masses are the sun, the soil, and the nutrients that allowed for the germination of that very chillest of seeds. It is exactly these web-based channels and modes of rapid diffusion that allowed for a seemingly obscure sub-genre like chillwave to arise, because through these channels a community with a sense of identity can foster and grow among a wide and eager audience of media consumers.

If Web 2.0 and its media channels had existed in the 80's, chillwave would now be almost 30 years old. Admittedly, one can presume the name would be much less foolish, but we live in an age of terrible sub-genre classifications, and I would rather be listening to chillwave then anything called "jamtronica." So with that in mind, I submit to you, the reader, that chillwave is in fact not, as claimed by some, a "reaction to 2008's day-glo scene," whatever the hell that means. Rather I would argue that chillwave is around today, at precisely this moment in time, because of Web 2.0's course of evolution-- thereby making it a more important sub-genre than it would be were it a mere "response to some other BS sub-genre." It took six years, from 2004-10, for Web 2.0 to produce its first very own sordid lovechild of a musical sub-genre. I think we will see many more spontaneous sub-genre outbursts like this in the coming years.

On a side note, is Delorean a "day-glo" band? If they are I don't care, I am down. They are so good. I can't wait for their new album this June.

Here are a few more choice chillwave tracks. Decide for yourself whether or not you enjoy them, but don't pass them by. Frame them within the context of our age of constant information-sharing. And lo, for I am reminded of a phrase I heard recently somewhere on the internet: "When they're not selling a product, but they're still making money, the product is YOU!"

Toro Y Moi - "Master of None" (this song is awesome)
Small Black - "Despicable Dogs"
Memory Cassette - "Sleep On The Roof"

First Post!

Basia Bulat
Heart of My Own
Rough Trade; 2010

Hi friends,

Last night I decided to create a blog. It's primarily going to be a music and arts blog, I am going to do album reviews and post (hopefully) monthly mix playlists starting in April. But I'll have some other stuff too, probably some essays, short stories, crappy poetry, things like this. For my first post I wanted to point you all in the direction of my favorite album of 2010 thus far.

That record, from Canadian singer songwriter Basia Bulat, is Heart of My Own. It was released in the US on the Rough Trade label in late January. I thoroughly enjoyed her first album Oh, My Darling, which came out in 2007, and I would by lying to you if I said I wasn't thrilled to see that album's quaint, 1:12 opening track, “Before I knew” used in a 2009 Subaru commercial. You know the one: some chill alt-bro guy misplaced his sunglasses, so he and his girlfriend retrace the steps of their weekend camping/surfing/whatever trip, only to discover that in the end the sunglasses were on the guy's head all along. Not sure how that relates to the lyrical content of "Before I knew" in any way, and in that regard they should have picked some turd-rag Jack Johnson track instead, but Basia's is a brilliant little song that I was glad to hear on TV.

One reason I didn't mind hearing her track in a commercial is that, in the opinion of this newly-minted blogger, Basia Bulat is one of Canada's most egregiously underrated artists. Oh, My Darling, with its endearingly idiosyncratic, folk-waltz vibe, garnered her some attention: a Polaris Music Prize nomination and some love from indie-savvy NPR reviewers. On Heart of My Own, Bulat smooths out the edges and expands on that sound-- the result is everything I was looking for in her sophomore effort.

Basia Bulat has a voice that sets her apart from any other singer-songwriter I can think of. It is robust, unapologetic, has a sometimes dualistic quality of being at once thunderous and whispering, as on the track "Go On. On the title track "Heart of My Own," and throughout the album, Bulat does not shy from exposing her own fears and flaws in a manner of taste uncommon to many singer-songwriters. Take a listen to "Heart of My Own," and one can see why the album cover's picture-- Bulat walking on the side of some gravely, presumably Canadian road, rolling verdant hills and overcast sky in the background-- seems to fit so well with title track itself: the picture and the song are the same artistic sentiment expressed via two different mediums.

Basia Bulat - "Heart of My Own" (youtube link)

Hear of My Own is an immensely diverse album, instrumentally and musically. An extremely talented drummer, Basia’s brother Bobby expertly heads up the rhythm section, providing at times exactly the desired kick to keep the album steadily rolling along. The album also boasts an organic mix of banjo, violin, cello, dulcimer, horns, foot-stomping, piano, organ, etc. On sparse tracks like “Hush,” (no instruments, just soulful singing and foot-stomping here) or the haunting “The Shore,” with very little but carefully arranged instrumentation, the power of Bulat’s voice is spotlighted. The album has its softer, folksier tracks, like “Sugar and Spice,” “Once More For the Dollhouse,” and “I’m Forgetting Everyone,” all of which are more akin to Nick Drake than the inevitable Joanna Newsom comparisons. Present here too is the waltz-y folk sound of her first album, like on “Go On” and “Run.” One of the album’s standout numbers, “If it Rains,” much like on “Hush,” has a compelling gospel feel. In many of these tracks, I think it could be said that a “Diamonds and Rust” era Joan Baez influence is evident.

The album’s more upbeat tracks are kicked along by the drums, like on the galloping “If Only You,” with its horn section and clunking piano, or “Gold Rush.” “Walk You Down” is an all-out folk-rock track that would not be out of place on an Okkervil River record, and you really picture Will Sheff singing this song perfectly. It has swirling Doors-ish keyboards, and choir-sound harmonizing on the wonderful if not obligatory “ooohs” and “ahhhs.”

Basia Bulat excels brilliantly in the realm of many of today’s fine Canadian pop folk artists, and Heart of My Own is an album that rewards and encourages multiple listens. Every track here is meticulously and affectingly arranged, with poignant, introspective lyrics. Bulat can be self-lacerating without straying into overwrought melancholy. She and her band put their all into the craft of songwriting and arrangement and it shows. It’s an album that successfully traverses the broad spectrum of traditional to modern folk music. I haven’t stopped listening to it yet this year, and I would recommend Heart of My Own to just about anyone.

Basia Bulat on Myspace

Buy It (amazon)
Try It (my file)