Video: Astronaut, etc. – You Can Yell
Astronauts, etc. aka Anthony Farrar, has just released a video for his latest single “You Can Yell.” The 21-year-old Berkeley student blew up the blogosphere earlier this month with the release of “Mystery Colors,” a hauntingly electronic tune with similarities to artists like Bon Iver, Beach House and Grizzly Bear. His soft vocals and wistful melodies relax your brain and melt away your tensions like a good illegal drug. The kind that should be legal.
“You Can Yell” takes you on a cosmic journey through the simplicities of human life and experiences of the past. I’m pretty sure the video was shot on an old VHS camcorder but I’m not sure how video creator, Ben Smith, got that into space. Astronauts, etc. releases his first EP, Supermelodic, on September 8th and it’s probably going to be pretty melodic. And awesome.
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Video: Grizzly Bear Perform ‘Two Weeks’ & ‘Sleeping Ute’ On The Colbert Report
Grizzly Bear and Stephen Colbert have been becoming the best of friends in the last couple of weeks after the band performed at Colbert’s music fest Colbchella 2012.
Tonight he aired footage of the festival performances where the band played their huge hit “Two Weeks” from 2009’s Veckatimest, and the first track “Sleeping Ute” from their new album Shields.
Shields is released on September 18th. You can watch both performances below and check back for their interview with Colbert.
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Listen: Grizzly Bear - Yet Again
Before they’d even released any new music from their upcoming album Shields, excitement was starting to build around just what the new Grizzly Bear music would sound like.
Then they dropped “Sleeping Ute”, the first taste of new music from the band in three years, and it was instantly adored and become a firm favourite as one of the best tracks of the year. Today they premiered another new song from Shields on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio One show, “Yet Again”, which you can now listen to below.
Oh, Dante, how you doubted them.
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Review/Listen: Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan
I often wonder why bands regularly take well over three years to release an album. I’m shocked that it takes musicians several years to make shit like this. But after one listen of Swing Lo Magellan, I immediately understood why it’s taken over three years to follow up the wonderful Bitte Orca, because this is the some of the most elaborate and complex and beautiful music I’ve ever heard. On the other hand, Swing Lo Magellan is also very playful, and the band makes it seem like making this stuff is something they could do in their sleep. It’s as if they just threw it together in a few hours. This album is so playful, in fact, that a couple of songs include recorded studio conversations, which don’t actually sound like much, but for a band with such intricate melodies who obviously work so hard to perfect just one simple riff, they are really letting down their hair.
Most indie frontmen don’t simply sing - not even the big ones - many shout (Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse), many talk fast (Dave Portner of Animal Collective) and many whisper and mumble (Conor Oberst). David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, on the other hand, is one of the few frontmen with an absolutely breathtaking and jaw dropping voice, and he definitely knows how to use it. Amber Coffman, who also shares vocal duty, does an amazing job making us all totally forget about Angel Deradoorian (who left the band before the recording of Swing Lo Magellan) with her angelic voice. The one track that Amber fronts, “The Socialites”, is also a big standout on the album.
This album reminds me a lot of Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear; each song has its own musical style and goes down a different path; every song is warm and has interlocking arrangements featuring singers that care almost too much. But, the primary reason I make this comparison is to prove that this is real, beautiful music with no studio trickery, just good musicianship and beautiful voices. Plain and simple.
Dirty Projectors are known for their avant-garde musicianship, but with Swing Lo Magellan the approach is much more straightforward, which is why it’s so weird that the music is more affective and striking than ever before. There are so many moments on Swing Lo Magellan that just make me excited to be listening, and there are so many elements that go into it. The very opening of this album isn’t the sound of a rusty gate, but what actually sounds like a Timbaland-produced beat, which is a massive surprise to hear within the opening seconds. But don’t get used to the grandeur that dominated Bitte Orca, because Swing Lo Magellan quickly goes from big to modest, which is a good thing. These songs don’t need to be expanded with epic, immense moments.
This collection of songs holds up both as single tracks and together as the most well crafted Dirty Projectors album to date. Before listening, you can’t imagine that it’d be as amazing and the almost perfect listening experience that it is. Somewhere within the vastness of the ever changing album themes, intricate guitar riffs, and la-di-dah instruments I’ve never heard of, there’s got to be one sound that’s just a bit off, just one moment that isn’t perfect. It’s difficult to find one. Like The Walkmen’s Heaven, this is some of the most pleasant, desirable and inoffensive music ever created. With similarities to Paul Simon, David Byrne, and a ton of pop music, how can anybody not like this?
Grizzly Bear Reveal New Album Title ‘Shields’ + Cover Art
It’s been just over a month since Grizzly Bear revealed that they’d finished their new, then-untitled fourth album, and threw us a bone with one of the best songs of the year in “Sleeping Ute”, the first new music from the band since 2009’s LP Veckatimest.
Today the band revealed that the album is now titled Shields, and the cover art is above. Clubs and spades. Maybe it’s an album for gardeners who like to rave? Who knows, but I do know that if every song is as good as “Sleeping Ute”, it’ll be the number one album of the year come December.
Shields will be released via Warp Records on September 18th, and below you can listen to “Sleeping Ute” if you missed it the first time around.
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01: “Sleeping Ute”
02: “Speak In Rounds”
03: “Adelma”
04: “Yet Again”
05: “The Hunt”
06: “A Simple Answer”
07: “What’s Wrong”
08: “gun-shy”
09: “Half Gate”
10: “Sun In Your Eyes”
Listen: Grizzly Bear - Sleeping Ute
Announced via Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio show, Grizzly Bear will release their upcoming new album on September 18th via Warp Records.
Also played was the worldwide first play of their brand new track “Sleeping Ute”, taken from the 10 track album and below you can give it a spin. Also below is the tracklist, and the I can’t wait to hear “gun-shy”.
I’m loving the vocals, and the overall gruff sound of the track as it then makes way for Daniel Rossen’s powerful, pining, heart-warming voice. Let us know what you think, and start getting fucking excited!
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01: “Sleeping Ute”
02: “Speak In Rounds”
03: “Adelma”
04: “Yet Again”
05: “The Hunt”
06: “A Simple Answer”
07: “What’s Wrong”
08: “gun-shy”
09: “Half Gate”
10: “Sun In Your Eyes”
Listen: DIIV - “Doused”
Listen below to the newest DIIV single, “Doused”, off their upcoming debut, “Oshin”.
Beach Fossils‘ Zachary Cole’s second band returns with a new single, a new sound, and a new name. The group, formerly known as Dive has just changed their name to the more google-able DIIV, and has just released their first single under their new name, “Doused”, which will appear on their debut, “Oshin”, due for release June 26th via Captured Tracks.
The bands final release under their former moniker, “How Long Have You Known”, was laden with dreamy surf pop, while “Doused” is a lot darker, drawing more comparisons to gloomier bands like Grizzly Bear and Beach House rather than Real Estate and Tennis.
[Listen] - Wildeflower - “Good Girl”
Listen to “Good Girl” by Wildeflower, out May 14 via Stella Mortos.
Wildeflower is a new band that hails from Surrey, England, that I reckon will get a few people to throw some Grizzly Bear comparisons around.
The vocals by Max Kingforn-Mills go really well with the piano, and the harmonies really sound neat in their debut singe “Good Girl”, which comes out May 14 via Stella Mortos. Listen to it below.
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[Review/Listen] - Daniel Rossen - “Silent Hour/Golden Mile”
With a new Grizzly Bear album reportedly in the works, “Silent Hour/Golden Mile” is a blessing for fans in need of a Daniel Rossen fix. Even though this isn’t Rossen’s most inventive work, he reminds listeners why he’s an integral part of Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles while expanding his own repertoire.
[Introducing] - Flights
Laced with piano, steeped in landscapes & sugar spun with Eric Hillman & Brian Holl’s perfectly complementing vocals, “Anywhere But Where I Am”, the debut album from the group entitled Flights is the type of music that fits a rainy day. But it isn’t completely melancholy, it just has the same soothing qualities of a deliciously grey sky and the soft pattering of rain on the window. This record is panoramas of acoustic longing and hopeful sighs, the title suggests a desire to fly from where you are, as does the band name itself, and the songs certainly are imbued with a sense of movement, travel and desire to leave.
Flights is often compared to Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear and other airy-voiced, floating guitar and harmony-infused music, but they seem more focused in on the practice of examining a physical space and attempting to convey it lyrically and musically. Beginning with “From The Lake To The Land” a song that buzzes in and out with surprising extremes of gentleness and severity, allusions to nature, and the contrast between relationships and physical setting are drawn in a poignant and original ways.
Echoing with emotion, the record continues on into the absolute shock of human growth and how we can change without even realizing it sometimes on “Taller”. Always on this album, the reflections on physicality contain emotional and spiritual connotations just under the surface. As the lyrics lament and question “How am I / How am I / Taller?” I relate to this not just in a bodily sense, but in an expanding emotional and spiritual growth that finally finishing college and striking off on my own in a new city has brought about.
My favorite track on the album is easily “So Many Foreign Homes” which falls smack dab in the middle of the record. Their songs possess these tiny little elements that combine together to make a larger picture, the auditory equivalent of a mosaic. Anyone who has moved and felt themselves suddenly fragmented into loving more than one place will relate to this song. Anyone who has wondered at the millions of cities, towns, countries and locations they could find home aside from where they presently live will understand the questions and longing found in this song.
Hillman & Holl are originally from Wisconsin, but now inhabit Nashville, so if anyone understands the sense of movement, the longing for a home that is very different from where one now lives, it is the authors of this stunning song. The idea that these two feelings could meld into a real place that contains both the desire for new horizons as well as the comfort of what home feels like seems captured in “Perfect Home” a haunting ode to the questions that the title to this song inherently contains.
This record is so soothing and delicate, many of the songs will remind the listener of a music box. The childhood kind that promised safety and security somehow, the kind that might be magic if played at just the right moment. “Names And Races” especially exhibits these qualities, opening with very quiet but insistent guitar and vocals, much simpler than many of the other tracks.
Please don’t write this album off as a Bon Iver sound-alike or just another indie album. It grows in depth and beauty with the quiet dignity that truly thought-out and passionate music contains. It grows in subjectiveness until you feel like every track has been written for you, all the while expanding in universal application.
