NoiseTrade is a terrific site to search for new music. They offer thousands of free downloads by emerging artists and indie labels.
Today, they announced a label sampler by Nettwerk, which features pop and electronica acts such as Submarines, Ivy, Ladytron, and Sarah Mclachlan. Sound eclectic? Sure, but Nettwerk’s byline is “releasing music we love,” not “releasing music according to a tightly wound marketing strategy.” Got to respect that.
Here’s another Nettwerk artist you’ll likely love: Morgan Page, in a new video with a passel of guest artists.
As you probably know by now, Robert Pollard has reformed Guided by Voices with much of the lineup from its nineties lo-fi heyday. They appeared last night on on David Letterman, performing “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” the lead-off single from their new album Let’s Go Eat the Factory. And other than a little tumble by bassist Greg Demos partway through the song, they sounded just great. (Don’t worry, he’s okay!)
You can mail order the new LP now (as well as its digital equivalent) or wait ’til 1/16 to visit your local record-seller. But by all means, take the time to hear it: although some of them might be past the stage-diving portion of their careers, Pollard and Co. sound refreshed and inspired.
On their website, Toronto’s Odonis Odonis proclaim themselves “good postmodernists.” The band, led by principal songwriter and indie filmmaker Dean Tzenos, are also good rock historians. The melange of sounds they incorporate on Hollandaze (itself a postmodern pun!), their debut full length recording, are drawn from an impressive array of rock styles, ranging from garage and postpunk to shoegaze, proto-goth, and lo-fi indie.
Of course, juxtaposition of disparate sounds into hazy amplified gauze is all the rage today: what makes Odonis Odonis stand out from the pomo pack? Well, there’s the ineffable qualities of better songwriting and better stylistic blend: the music just comes together more organically than your average magpie band debut. It certainly helps that Tzenos has enlisted some of Canada’s alt-pop royalty to contribute to the proceedings, including Kathryn Calder and Kurt Dahle of the New Pornographers, Colin Stewart from Pretty Girls Make Graves, and Jon Drew of Tokyo Police Club.
But more than star power is at work. These are songs that, however dystopian, dig deeper than the surface impact of stylish sonics to find the grit and the underlying stories of their respective reference points. One of the most noteworthy, “Blood Feast,” not only makes an overt hat tip to premiere shoegaze collective My Bloody Valentine while appropriating their distortedly glazed palette. It’s also a reference to a 1963 cult film, an early example of the burgeoning interest in gore horror.
These multilayered meta-narratives aren’t just treasure troves for “good postmodernists,” either on the critical or practicing side of the equation. Hollandaze is a taut, at times disturbing, half hour of music making that’s both powerful and singular: historical sound cues notwithstanding.
Bad as Me, his first studio album in over seven years (the last was 2004′s Real Gone), is a musical homecoming of sorts for Tom Waits. While there are certainly plenty of songs that share affinity with various releases from throughout his body of work, from Frank’s Wild Years to Mule Variations to Alice, there’s also a conscious embrace of what one of my friends called “Hollywood Tom Waits.” By that, he meant the early years of Waits’s career, when he was both a Beatnik bard and aspiring film composer (and actor); one who’d duet with Crystal Gayle and collaborate with Bette Midler. The years before Waits’s persona became larger than life. And before he began to work with longtime partner and collaborator Kathleen Brennan. Brennan, a playwright, would urge and enable Waits to plumb the dramatic depths of his songwriting craft. So, pre-1983; pre-Swordfishtrombones.Brennan is still listed as coauthor on all the songs on Bad as Me, and the lyric narratives remain taut and clever. But she seems willing to take this stroll down memory lane with her partner.
And while calling Bad as Me “Hollywood Tom Waits” could have been leveled as a criticism, connoting a step backwards or a more superficial creative process, one needn’t – indeed shouldn’t – take it that way. Instead, it can be reckoned as a rapprochement between Waits’s latter day experimentation and some of the features of his earlier work: supple melodic writing, a penchant for good hooks and compact structures, and an ambiguous approach toward emoting: one that often leaves the audience unsure of whether he’s being satirical or on the level.
Thus it often is on Bad as Me as well. Waits can sing the refrain from Auld Lang Syne on “New Year’s Eve,” the album closer, without it seeming bathetic or mawkish. He can croon an ostensibly sentimental ballad like “Last Leaf” in a duet with Keith Richards (a longtime collaborator if a larger than life legend in his own right). But the sandpaper swoops of their combined voices make the performance’s bald emoting seem earnest, hardworn, andearned; a careworn moment of vulnerability rather than two old hands blubbering into their beers.
There’s plenty of edge and ebullient polystylistic experimentation on the CD too. While Waits recruits new band members to the fold – his son Casey Waits plays drums and Red Hot Chili Peppers’s bassist Flea plays bass on couple of tracks, a number of others are longtime collaborators. Marc Ribot and Larry Taylor create an angular backdrop for the barnstorming blues of “Raised Right Man.” David Hidalgo joins Ribot, Taylor, the younger Waits, and a horn section in the rollicking rockabilly of “Get Lost.” The title cut finds Waits channeling Screaming Jay Hawkins, abetted by saucy baritone sax and Ribot outlining an off kilter yet catchy tango rhythm. Things get stranger still on “Face to the Highway, ” a song that recreates the blurred edges of many a cut on 2002′s beguiling Waits record Alice. And “Hell Broke Luce” is a Harry Partch percussion-enabled howling and rap with motoric pulsations that ultimately devolves into skronk cum circus music. It’s easily the track on Bad as Me that displays the most avant attitude.
One is not only impressed with the suavely chameleon character of the CD’s supporting cast, but with a similar vocal suppleness from Waits himself. Not only can he still inhabit all sorts of characters, but the dynamic range he brings to bear, from delicate falsetto and hushed whispers to infernal rasping, bellowed sprechstimme and screams that, for less durable singers, would likely be polyp inducing. All in the service of a baker’s dozen of songs of equally durable quality; ones that can stand beside some of the best material in his catalog to date. Long live Tom Waits.
If you’re looking forward to Thanksgiving today, the folks at RCRDLBL have put together a suitable accompaniment to the festivities: a “Good Thanksgiving” listening list.
If, for whatever reason, your holiday seems more filled with dysfunction than normal, don’t worry – they’ve got your back there too.
Here’s an embed of the “Bad Thanksgiving” playlist.
What would we do without the folks at RCRDLBL, who seemingly anticipate our every musical mood? (sniff) It makes me thankful they’re around!
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate. Everyone else, have a grand Thursday.
By the way, for those of you braving the stores tomorrow, independent record sellers are holding Black Friday Record Store Day events, with special releases and other fun, to commemorate conspicuous consumption, record hound style.
Kate Bush releases 50 Words for Snow, a new CD, today via the Anti imprint. Below is an animated video accompanying one of the album tracks from her official YouTube channel.
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