Category: Music

When I was first introduced to Rogue Wave, I got really, really excited about them after hearing the first two tracks from Descended Like Vultures, Bird on a Wire and Publish My Love. I mean like, really, ridiculously excited. And then as the album went forward, I kind of lost concentration. But in those first few minutes I told myself I was going to get everything I could by Rogue Wave, and I did.

And was terribly disappointed. “It’s all mediocre acoustic?” I thought to myself, and haven’t really listened much since. Bird on a Wire and Publish My Love have something to them though, don’t they? Nevermind that the latter was featured on an OC soundtrack or something; it’s really got punch, and I’ve been looking for a replacement for a long time.

In my last post, I mentioned (albeit briefly) Mew, in reference to what they have in common with Jeremy Enigk. This was before I bought Mew’s entire discography and discovered they’ve been around since fucking 1997. I have been pretty much listening to them nonstop, and it was only a couple days ago when I realized why: Mew embodies everything I wanted Rogue Wave to be, and then some. There’s this energy, this sound that just kills me. It’s ridiculously unpredictable and entirely enthralling.

Here’s the thing though: comparing them to Rogue Wave and Jeremy Enigk actually doesn’t really do them much justice, because that’s just a surface comparison. There’s an undercurrent of something that I can’t quite put my finger on flowing through everything that gives Mew an urgency and an ethos that’s elusive and exciting. Let’s put it this way: I needed this band to come along right now, and the fact that I stumbled upon them right at this moment makes me ridiculously happy.

And besides the references to other bands above, I’ve just realized that I haven’t even talked about what they sound like. This is difficult because there are so many different things going on in each song. There’s tremendous song-writing talent in Mew and their songs do not stand still long enough to be easily dissected, categorized and defined. The words flowing through my head right now are: wide, gentle, subtle, twirly, driving, open.

Imagine taking everything Rogue Wave, Smashing Pumpkins, Sunny Day Real Estate and Deathcab for Cutie could be but don’t have the balls to be, and rolling them all up into one.

• Mew – She Spider
• Mew – Am I Wry? No.

Buy everything you can by Mew on iTunes, right fucking now.

Update: Pitchfork does a better job of explaining Mew than I ever could. Also, I remembered something I wanted to mention when I first wrote this: if you were ever a reader of The Letters of Gary Benchley, Rock Star, Mew essentially sound what ostensibly Schizopolis was supposed to be, only Mew uses guitar.

By reading this blog, and this post in particular, you’d probably get the feeling that I have some kind of deep love for Sunny Day Real Estate, but the reality is, I totally don’t. I obsessed about Diary for the length of exactly one summer – one which happened to be like 8 years after the album’s release.

I could never get intrigued by the whole “the singer’s christian and he’s breaking up the band but now he’s not anymore and the band is back together but only kind of and this time they’re calling it The Fire Theft” thing. It never interested me. Also, The Fire Theft never interested me. I like the first track OK but it never grabbed hold.

You know that feeling I’m talking about when by all logic and reason, this album that you’re listening to should be like the second fucking coming of Christ, but really, you can take it or leave it? That’s been The Fire Theft for me and so when I had a chance to listen to and review a new solo album from Jeremy Enigk, the lead singer from Sunny Day Real Estate/The Fire Theft, I approached it with weary trepidation. After all, I’m not that big of an SDRE fan (even though I feel like I should be, and I’ve mentioned them a disproportionate number of times here) and the latest stuff from that direction seemed kind of, well, blah to me.

And then when the first few fading seconds of A New Beginning (the first track on World Waits, Jeremy Enigk’s second solo album) gave way to sweeping orchestral excellence and that building-drum sound you have to love so much – and the bells! There’s fucking bells! Anyway, when this musical knockout hits the kind of crescendo you don’t think you can live through without either breaking into tears or a gigantic smile, it stops. Everything fades away as quickly as it starts, and you’re treated to the beginning arpeggio of the next track. No (worded) vocals, no chorus, no singable hook, just a fucking musical smack to the face. You can feel it in your stomach when the whole thing hits, provided your headphones are turned up loud enough (as mine so often are).

And I would totally share that with you. I would give you that experience, except… Well, except then you’d need the entire album. You can’t start out with a track like this and not want to go all the way through. And since I can’t give you every track on this EP (well, 10 tracks, but it clocks in at a svelte 36.4 minutes), what I’ll do is this: I’ll give you track number 4, “City Tonight,” which can be taken on its own and enjoyed and should give you a good feel for what’s different here from just about anything else I’ve heard Jeremy record.

And then, because I’m nice, I’m going to pair that song with one by a lesser-known band, Mew, because they do a similar type thing as Jeremy, except they’re actually a little more a) indie and b) hummable.

• Jeremy Enigk – City Tonight
• The Fire Theft – Uncle Mountain
• Mew – The Zookeeper’s Son

Buy Jeremy Enigk’s prior album, The Frog Queen on iTunes
Buy Mew’s And The Glass Handed Kiss from iTunes
Flickr Photo Credit

Yes. It’s been a long fucking time since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy, and hey – I went to Vegas, so that’s gotta count for something, right?

Any-dang-way, I’ve decided (yes, all by myself) that the newest thing is going to be retro 60s music instead of retro 80s. Think about it. The sound has stood the test of time for way longer than 80s synths and wacky hairdos and tight jeans have, the dancing is awesome, and it escapes the bullshit, short-term-novelty of kinda sorta reliving something that you remember from when you were 8, but were actually in fact too into GI Joe and your BMX bike to properly remember and understand why it’s gone.

At any rate, the purpose of my rambling is that I’ve become enamored recently with The Pipettes and their combination of retro-60s kitsch and 2006 indie-chick attitude. I can’t get enough of “Pull Shapes” from their latest album “We Are The Pipettes.” I have to admit that some of that comes from the video (available here on Videoteque) but something about the line “I just want to move, I don’t care what the song’s about” just makes me giddy. Watch the video for the killer pose at the very end.

Sure, there are advantages to recording 60’s-style music in 2006 — such as higher production value and the subtle record-scratching effect used in at about a minute in — but the energy of the music is pure 1964. As a bonus, I’m including a track by Young and Sexy, which if it wasn’t recorded in stereo could almost pass as having been produced in the decade I’ve already mentioned too many times in this post to repeat.

• The Pipettes – Pull Shapes
• The Pipettes – Pull Shapes (iPod-ready video at Videoteque)
• Young and Sexy – Conventional Lullabies

Buy The Pipettes on iTunes
Buy Young and Sexy on iTunes

Oh, and thanks to this random Flickr user for the photograph. If so desired, I’ll take it down.

I know that 3 out of the 4 readers of this blog are in Denver, so I’ll just leave Phil out and post about how two previously posted-about bands are going to be in Denver in the next few weeks, both at the Hi-Dive, Denver’s – and parents of kids at Steele Elementary’s – favorite indie kid dive bar.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness will be playing on May 30, while Voxtrot will be playing on June 3. So if you live in Denver and you want to be cool, then come buy me a drink or twelve on both of these nights.

I also just want to point out that the home page here is officially completely made up of music-related posts. Yay! And only one Mac-related one! Did you ever think you’d see the day? I know, me neither.

As of right now, all MP3s hosted on Alternate are unavailable due to the fact that I’m raping Tai’s servers. I was hoping I wouldn’t, but figured I would, so this comes as no surprise.

Don’t worry, I’m not giving up. What I have done is signed up for a hosting service. Unfortunately, their interface blows, but hey, the price was right.

Either way, as a test, I’ll be making available to you a song I worship from a band I worship headed by a dude I worship.

The band is The Album Leaf, and the song is Twentytwofourteen.

If you’re an eagle-eared watcher of the OC, apparently it’s been a popular dramatic, introspective moment soundtrack. But I don’t watch that silly show, so I don’t know. Really. Ahem.

• The Album Leaf – Twentytwofourteen

Tool.

As a young teenager obsessed with all things Headbanger’s Ball, seeing the Sober video for the first time trememdously affected me. The way the feedback was intertwined with the guitar and the vocals quite literally gave me chills. I was 14 though, so I was in search of something to identify with my newly-found angst.

The album Undertow was the soundtrack to my 9th grade year, and I was drawn to everything Tool for years after. It wasn’t until they really started pushing the strange mysticism and quasi-religious-in-an-alternative way stuff that I kind of stepped back and realized some things about Tool that I was a little unhappy to see… Odd time signatures don’t immediately mean the song is genius, lots of shitty progressive metal bands write songs in alternating 7/8 and 9/8 time, the spacey interludes and odd tracks on their albums weren’t amazingly crafted, just kind of annoying until you learned to skip past them as they came up. Lots of really annoying teenagers and metalheads who I didn’t identify with were flocking to Tool by the truckload just as I was on my way out. Every time I wore my aging Tool shirt out (to my wife’s dismay), I had people coming up and saying “Tool! Right on!” and these were not people I really wanted talking to me.

But. I still cannot deny that when I was hanging out at the singer of my band’s house, when our friend came RUNNING into the house, yelling at the top of his lungs that a new Tool song was on the radio, we turned it way up and sat enthralled, even through the static of bad FM reception. The melody of the chorus of Stinkfist stunned me.

So here we are, looking at the upcoming release of Tool’s fifth studio album and the 14 year old in me had to get an advance copy of 10,000 Days, just to see. Just to hear if they’d done it again and made an album that I didn’t connect with me (Lateralus) or if they could repeat the awesomeness that is Undertow.

And the answer is… they’ve done neither. Are the staples there, the 11 minute songs full of time changes and long open sections where you’re not sure where things are going next? Yes. Are there the 1 minute tracks full of strange voiceovers and meandering guitar? Yup. But there are also a few gems on this album that hit the same stride as Sober and Prison Sex.

To be more precise, what I noticed as I grew as a musician and learned the intricacies of the two tracks mentioned above is this: They’re basically the same riff, played over and over. The same phrases, the same concepts, just played differently, with different tones in different contexts, to great effect. Because when they change it up, when they rock the fuck out, you KNOW. You get lulled into a complacency during most of the song, but when that shit changes, it punches you in the gut. Hard.

10,000 Days contains a couple tracks that match this description, the best of which is Right in Two. If you know how to listen to it, you can hear the same phrase done a million different ways, each slightly embellished from the last. The first single from this album, Vicarious, is alright. It’s more of the “let’s change the time signature 12 times, and show how badass we are” and really, you just want to go “hey, Adam, we know that you got the 9/8 to 5/4 switch down, we got it. Get on with the rocking.”

Fortunately, with this album, they do. When you buy it though, just remember to skip any song over 8 minutes or under 3.

The album is 10,000 Days, and it comes out tomorrow. If you’re a Tool fan, get it. If you’re not, well, it’s not going to change your mind.

• Tool – Right in Two
• Tool – Vicarious

More music coming soon, I promise. I’ve been getting so much lately I can’t decide what to post. Stay tuned.

Upon hearing that Beth Gibbons, former front-lady for 90s trip-hop pioneers Portishead had done a solo album with the former bassist from Talk Talk (currently naming himself Rustin Man for reason I have yet to decipher) I was intrigued. Portishead is one of those bands you had to have liked during, say, 1996 through maybe 1999, but after that I’d just say you were a little misguided.

Always open to giving former musical influences of mine a chance, I procured “Out of Season” and have given it a good solid listen. Unforunately, I agree basically 100% with Pitchfork on this one – the first two tracks are excellent, but after that, your attention wanders and you end up at the end of the album not realized you’ve heard the entire thing and can only really recall tracks 1 through 2.

Fortunately enough for you, I’ll be making these two tracks available. There’s a lot to like in these tracks and if you like(d) Portishead then you can’t possibly be let down by Beth Gibbons’s voice, but I’ll be sparing you the disappointment of getting sick of her by the end of this album.

• Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man: Mysteries
• Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man: Tom the Model

Buy Out of Season from iTunes

In keeping with my apparently unintended theme of “all Austin-based bands, all the time,” I feel compelled to post about Voxtrot. I’ve been listening to this band non-stop for the past week, and I seriously can’t get enough. It took someone on the interweb equating them to The Smiths for the reason to become clear to me: this is perfect independent pop music. I know what you’re probably thinking when I mention The Smiths, and I want you to know I was once in your shoes.

But this is not about Morrissey, this is about a quintet from Austin who makes poppy, bouncy, fun music that makes you wish you had a convertible and that it was warmer than 30 degrees so you could drive around town singing at the top of your lungs if only you could figure out all the words. I really, really wish there were more than a few EPs available, but I will definitely be watching this band extremely closely in the future.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching closely enough this week as I missed not one but TWO shows I wanted to see, Voxtrot being one (Rogue Wave with Nada Surf being the other). I really need to keep track of this shit better.

If you like: The Shins, The Smiths, any kind of music at all, really.

• Voxtrot: Mothers, Sisters, Daughters and Wives
• Voxtrot: The Start of Something

Buy all of Voxtrot’s music on iTunes. Every last song.

The reality of things is that I’ve been 80s retro since high school, so all you bandwagoners are just straight trippin. Okay so the last part isn’t true, but I have been listening to The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Morrissey, New Order, The Glove and on and on since I was about 16.

Which doesn’t make me cooler than you. In fact it makes me way, way less cool, because for many years instead of finding new music, I was depending on the old standbys to be there.

Which is why it’s so great to hear a band like White Rose Movement: they evoke the sensibilities of the aforementioned without directly aping the sounds. *Cough*The Bravery*Cough. Ahem.

Similar in ways to She Wants Revenge, White Rose Movement simply feels more… authentic. And plus there’s She Wants Revenge’s whole mission of making girls “…want to cry. Or dance. Or maybe both at the same time” that White Rose Movement doesn’t seem to have. Take that how you will. Either way, this is danceable but deep, 80s retro (but better) music. These tracks are from the forthcoming album “Kick.”

If you like: She Wants Revenge, VHS or Beta, Bloc Party

• White Rose Movement: London’s Mine
• White Rose Movement: Girls in the Back

White Rose Movement in iTunes