Here’s a bliss-tering new song from Nothing called “Downward Years To Come,” which is the title track from their upcoming EP due out this fall via A389 Records. It was produced and engineered by Kyle “Slick” Johnson. You can listen to and download “Downward Years To Come” for free below.
Check out below the May Episode of Weathervane Music & WXPN’s Shaking Through with bluesy, psychedelic ROCKERS Purling Hiss as well as an interview with this month’s curator The War on Drugs’s Adam Granduciel, who also helped out with engineering/producing duties alongside Jon Low at Miner Street Recordings. You can take a listen to and download the fruits of their labor “Lolita” for free HERE. Enjoy! (Photo by Peter English)
The Philadelphia Folk Festival committee announced at Johnny Brenda’s yesterday this year’s lineup for its 51st annual event that will be taking place on August 17 - 19 at the Old Pool Farm in Upper Salford Township, near Schwenksville, PA. Locals that you should set aside time during the weekend to catch are Strand of Oaks a.k.a. Tim Showalter (it should be interesting to see if he’ll be picking up the guitar again or giving the diehard folkies a taste of the synths that he’s mentioned being obsessed about lately), Chris Kasper and Griz. We were treated to sets by the latter two at yesterday’s announcement. National touring artists like Wanda Jackson, Steve Earle and the Dukes, Little Feat, The Wooden Sky, City & Colours, Arborea, Chris Bathgate and many more will anchor down the weekend. Individual daily tickets start at $52.00, including the 20% Early Bird Discount, or you can attend all three days for $116.00. Add in tent camping and you get an additional concert on Thursday night for a total of $156.00. You can purchase your tickets as well as view the rest of the festival’s lineup and info HERE.
True Widow from Texas returns to Kung Fu Necktie tonight with locals Psychic Teens and Dreambook. Dreambook is a new arrival to the Philly indie music scene. This will be their first show, and it’s a good one to be on. Dreambook has an airy quality to their music with ominous undertones that may seem a bit more nightmarish than dreamy as fuzzy guitar sounds sprinkled with bits of angst stand forefront in their demo tracks. “Stay Inside” could easily fit in the soundtrack of a ‘90s TV Show (for fans of the Adventures of Pete and Pete think Polaris). And there is no doubt Deli faves Psychic Teens will bring the horror to your REM cycle. If you didn’t hear any of Tuesday’s thunderstorms, Psychic Teens will make up for that with thunderous deep bass lines and distorted, wailing guitar riffs. Both should prove to be fitting predecessors to this evening’s headliner. Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 8pm, $10, 21+ - Maura Filoromo
Check out the new sonic assault called “Ghost In A Mirror” from the reconfigured Grimace Federation (who is currently a trio)! You can download it for free below, and catch them live in Philly next on Tuesday, June 12 at the TLA opening for Battles.
Below is a floaty new space adventure music video for the track “Balloon in the City” from Cheers Elephant. It takes advantage of YouTube’s 3D setting. You didn’t know that YouTube had a 3D setting - did ya? Yeah, neither did we. So throw on those cardboard glasses or the fancier plastic ones from your junk drawer that you stole from the movie theater. (BTW: Is it just us? This 3D function doesn’t seem to provide the pop that we are used to.) The video was directed, edited and effected by Ryan Suits.
One of the more compelling narratives mewithoutYou’s career has lent itself to is the band’s quest to find solace in its faith. At first, they seemed utterly lost in it; their first two records, [A-->B] Life and Catch for us the Foxes, are feverish, frantic post-hardcore albums characterized by heavily distorted guitars and Aaron Weiss’s panicked poetry on the conflict of faith in a secular world. They revisited this conflict on Brother, Sister, but with a sense of triumph deftly characterized in its final lyric: “I do not exist, only You exist.” Still, this surrender that made Brother, Sister a record of cathartic victory swallowed It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright. The very title of their fourth LP suggests the born-again zealotry that defines it. Drawing inspiration not from conflict but from joy and folk tales, the post-hardcore sound totally eschewed in favor of Jeff Mangum-esque storytelling and vocalizing. It’s All Crazy! was a hugely divisive record, and more importantly, one that seemed to mark the end of an arc - mewithoutYou were no longer mewithoutYou as we knew them.
Which brings us to Ten Stories, and also begs the question: What will mewithoutYou do having now escaped this narrative that has defined the band for their entire career? Nothing too crazy - Ten Stories finds them as they always have been, playing upon their past without bowing to it, the result being a record that sounds both distinctly theirs and unlike anything they’ve done before. The opener, “February 1878,” is a riff on one of the classics in the band’s back catalog, “January 1979,” but though mewithoutYou have given specific songs sequels before, “February 1878” isn’t a sequel. It has verses with Weiss’s once-prominent wild-sermon delivery, but its riff is lighter; its chorus more demure. “January 1979” details a car crash Weiss witnessed, and the apathy he couldn’t escape from feeling. “February 1878” is about an elephant in a circus train. The link between them is analogous to how Ten Stories fits into mewithoutYou’s catalog. The sound on Ten Stories bears traces of mewithoutYou’s more aggressive roots but is too light to truly align with that phase in their career. At the same time, it’s also nowhere near as insistently folksy as It’s All Crazy! What we have is a wedding between the two eras, a little rugged, but also a little inspiring as Weiss’s intricate lyricism is brought out not over chugging rock or campfire songs but gentle, mostly straightforward indie rock.
And about those lyrics: Ten Stories is what it says it is, a collection of fables populated by animals and Weiss avatars, and though the stories themselves are confusing to make sense of without the aid of liner notes, they’re too well-orchestrated and articulated to glaze over. There’s a dense record here you can make sense of with a little extracurricular effort, but there’s also a powerful one you can simply hear and get. Exemplified in the cyclical closer “All Circles,” Ten Stories is a record whose strength lies in its catchiness. Weiss sings of many things on Ten Stories, but he signs off with one triumphant realization: “All circles presuppose they’ll end where they begin, and only in their leaving can they ever come back round.” It’s a simple message that resounds over the preceding record and is almost too explicit to not apply to the band itself. As mewithoutYou have entered a new phase in their career, “All Circles” reminds us that though they may have arrived at one answer in their journey, they aren’t done searching. And though Ten Stories is packed with worthy additions to mewithoutYou’s catalog (particularly on its wilder second half), Ten Stories is defined by the future it promises. Itmay not be as drop-your-jaw stunning as Brother, Sister or [A-- >B] Life, but it is good - very good, actually. Enough to make you believe that with this new sound, they can create something of that caliber again. Until then, enjoy Ten Stories for what it is. It will reward you. The album is available for purchase HERE. - Adam Downer
You might be familiar with Dave Hartley’s work from The War on Drugs, Buried Beds, Sondre Lerche, The Lindsey Buckingham Appreciation Society, or whatever rad music project needs the assistance of his sweet low end. Well, in between his time on tour and writing about/tweeting/breathing NBA hoops, he works on his solo project Nightlands, which is also part of the Secretly Canadian family. Hartley will be bringing his multilayered soundscapes to Kung Fu Necktie tonight when he opens for the second installation of The Spinto Band’s residency. It’s his birthday, and War on Drugs bandmate Adam Granduciel will be shredding next to him on stage this evening so there will be a lot to celebrate! Expect a new album coming out from Nightlands soon too. Also on the bill is Brooklyn four-piece Via Audio. Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 8pm, $8, 21+ - Q.D Tran
Last week Sunny Ali & the Kid introduced their new track “Chai” to the Internet. Well, the duo is back with its music video, which premiered earlier today via Stereogum. The black & white rooftop/hallway sessions were directed and edited by Jan Reiser and Imran Ali Malik (The Kominas).
“In celebration of the 12th year anniversary of Making Time I’ve compiled a 24 hour playlist of some of my favorite futuristic sounds from Making Time RADio from the recent past, the present and of course…..the future…..for NPR Music.” - Dave P.
Also, you can win 2 free tickets to every Making Time for the rest of 2012! Just share “your raddest, most mememorable Making Time experiences” HERE. Best entries will be posted on Phrequency. Submissions must be in by noon on Thursday, May 17, 2012. Good Luck!
Lushlife, a.k.a. Raj Haldar, has been dropping mixtapes since 2005, when he released his debut entitled West Sounds, which was a mashup of The Beach Boy’s classic Pet Sounds and Kanye West’s College Dropout and Late Registration as well as his own verses. On his first label release Plateau Vision (Western Vinyl), Lush continues to develop his eclectic style, combining ‘60s psychedelic, experimental indie and golden era hip hop sounds to create the grandiose, maximalist soundscape beats that he rhymes over.
With his latest LP, Lush establishes himself as a unique artist who is able to take influences from various genres, sounds and eras of music to develop a completely original style that has one foot in classic hip hop and the other through the doorway of the future. This distinctive style is displayed immediately on the album’s opener “Magnolia.” The track combines a beautiful harp sample over a hard boom bap beat with lyrics that reference composer Burt Bacharach, the graffiti culture of Wild Style, Citizen Kane’s Xanadu and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” through his gritty Nas-esque vocal delivery. In “Hale-Bopp was the Bedouins,” which features Das Racists’ Heems, Haldar references his technique as “half-Delorean, half-rap historian.”
Plateau Vision boasts an impressive guest list of artists including Andrew Cedermark (Titus Andronicus), Styles P and Shad amongst others, but Lushlife always shines through as both an emcee and a producer. The first feature comes from Styles P (famous for his work with ‘90s hip hop crew LOX) on “Still Hear The Word Progress,” one of the LP’s standout tracks. Lushlife trades bars back and forth with the iconic emcee at a furious pace without losing a step over a dense synth and 8-bit beat. Towards the halfway point of the album, Lush shines brightly with fellow Philly emcee and former Atlanta native STS on “Glistening,” and he hands over the mic on “Gymnopedie 1.2” to critically acclaimed Canadian emcee Shad while crafting one of the most interesting beats on the Plateau Vision by sampling one of 20th century French composer/pianist Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedies,” which fades out under a clip from Busy Bee and Kool Moe Dee’s classic emcee battle, tying Haldar’s classical and jazz upbringing with his “fetish” for golden era hip hop culture.
Lushlife is definitely one of the most interesting artists in hip hop today. He continues to push the genre’s boundaries with his production while remaining true to its culture through his vocal delivery and preservation of its history throughout his lyrics. Plateau Vision is available for streaming HERE, and you can purchase the album via Western Vinyl. - Dan Brightcliffe
