Although there is still one full month left, I am pretty sure that my number one album of 2009 will be The Hazards of Love. Remarkable, as I am usually torn between at least 6 records.
And while I am waiting for someone to pick up the storyline and make it into a proper movie (I somehow envision old-fashioned special effects, done by the Henson studios or with some great claymation…) the Decemberists had help from four filmmakers to make the experience of Margaret and William even more enchanting – by visualizing it remarkably.
By the way, I am planning on posting the whole story-line as far as I interpreted it before New Year’s Eve. I’ve already done it in German and only have to get myself to translate it properly. I am not sure it is perfect but I am absolutely convinced that it beats Ben Sissario’s (negative) review who got pretty much everything wrong. Maybe with a little help of my friends (meaning you, dear reader), we can assemble the best interpretation of this beautiful folktale.
To be quite honest, although many have tried, until three days ago I thought there is no one who can adequately cover Justin Timberlake with the same professionalism and drive. Because all the covers that are out there are pretty immature “let’s just make it a screamo version hahahaha”-failures that have no innovation whatsoever.
BUT THEN they came and wowed me with their version of “my love”.
I am talking about White Hinterland, aka Casey Dienel and Shawn Creeden.
Although they come from Portland, their music sounds incredibly French which might stem from Casey’s incredibly French sounding singing voice.
Their music is creepy, old-fashioned, dissonant and sounds a little bit like Beirut now and then which is something you should be proud of (damn proud).
Casey was a beloved solo artist before but decided to do White Hinterland things with Shawn Creeden who is an awesome artist (I don’t mean this metaphorically in the sense of music but literally, he draws incredible pictures) and probably drew all the nice pictures on the homepage. He even has his own homepage (OMG!). On there he also says that Matt Meyer is part of the band but as he is not mentioned on the official Myspace-Page, I can’t vouch for that information.
Anyway, White Hinterland are exciting, experimental and through that even humorous. And they can cover Justin Timberlake – what a band.
My Love (JT cover, yeah, that’s what I call him, because he is my bro)
(Usually I would put up an original song of the band but this is just too good)
Oh dear, it is very difficult not to go all groupie on this band as it is led by Zach Shields and Ryan Gosling who girls love because of the teary eyed “The Note Book”. But I didn’t see that movie, so I am safe from drooling all over Dead Man’s Bones (gross!) just because of him and furthermore, I only fell for them because of the incredible song “My body is a Zombie for you”. Those 50s tunes of pure heartbreaking misery underlined with this great kid’s chorus (which is the Silverlake Conservatory of Music children’s choir) is incredible.
I remember that my friend showed me the band a couple of years before, because she was one of those Notebook-addicts and she was pretty disappointed because instead of endearing ballads and schmaltzy lovesongs, she faced a band that was creeping with tales of the crypt, dirty folk and enough gothic tunes to scare any emo away.
So yeah, in contrast to trainwrecks like “30 seconds to mars”, this actor’s band is pretty awesome and oozes southern American folk, cheeky details (including the forementioned kid’s choir) and the grandness of the 50s (The Shangri-Las anyone?).
My body’s a Zombie for you (seriously, how often do kids give you a reason to like them? Right, never, but in this song I love all of their ghoulish faces)
They just got a new album out, so get up and spend some money!
Although I am currently very much into innovative weirdos and cheesy 80s metal, I have to say that Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard have done a mighty fine job with their soundtrack for the Jack Kerouac documentary “One fast move or I’m gone”.
The lyrics are actually taken from Kerouac himself, so this music is super-beatnik, although it sounds a lot more relaxed than you would imagine beatnik music to be (I don’t know, I always have irritating bongos and a shouting man in a black turtleneck in mind).
As one who really appreciates the thought of this movement but is secretly too conservative and self-conscious to live by it, I really appreciate this laid back beauty of a soundtrack that actually managed to calm me off after a really bad day.
I think everything that keeps me from bellowing at old ladies who walk too slowly in front of me is a thoroughly good thing.
These roads don’t move (by the way, they might look like it but they are not related in any way)
What a brilliant combination, nearly country-esque guitars or hymnal pianos that remind of The National mixed with the surreal vocal style of bands like TV on the Radio or Celebration. AU from Oregon are perfect to drift in and out of sleep. Their music is etheral and dreamy, yet never irrelevant and there is a brilliance in the dramatic assembly of the songs. It is as if you are on a ship on the sea and ride on the highest waves and you don’t notice from your standpoint because your on top of them but you feel that there is something significant going on and you feel the rush of the moment.
I am having high hopes that this trend of bringing elements of African tribal music into contemporary Indiemusic might get into 2010 because bands like Yeasayer, BLK JKS and forementioned TV on the Radio and Celebration are definitely showing that this can’t fail to amaze us all.
The only thing that fails to amaze me is the bandname: STOP GIVING YOURSELF NAMES THAT CAN’T BE GOOGLED PROPERLY! It’s a pain.
RR vs. D
(don’t watch this video if you’re drunk, this will not make it a better experience. It might, however, be a better experience with being high but you never know how the drugs work maybe you end up being totally paranoid hiding in the closet with your shoe as your only weapon to kill off the colours that definitely wanted to get through the screen and kill you – so stay sober and watch it or do whatever you want and just listen while looking at something unthreatening like…erm, kittens)
I feel like I’ve already said everything about this band since I’ve discovered them in July 2008. And since October 2009, their debut album “Sigh No More” finally* is available for our hearts and souls and moreover our ears (which are pretty necessary to enjoy this gem).
One might assume that their rural folk sound is carrying songs full of melancholy and despair but listen closely, Mumford & Sons offer glimpses of hope in songs like “The Cave” or “After the Storm”. Carried by banjos, accordeons and Marcus’ warm voice the band gives ways out of the dark in which we tend to get lost.
And so they hold hands and glue hearts together – preferably with violins and harmonic background vocals because it’s just too good.
Songs like “Thistle and Weeds” or the insanely powerful “Dustbowl Dance” are then again nearly violent, roaming through the room like wild animals. You can hear rainstorms gashing against your window when you listen to lines like “Seal my heart and brake my pride I’ve nowhere to stand and now nowhere to hide” with a roaring drum-solo at the end.
In the present folk scene Mumford & Sons are like a band that has travelled through time to give us those old tunes that will never lose their appeal and can inflame hearts and souls to help us through winter.
So here I am again, quite cheesy and teary-eyed because they continue to make my day and hopefully yours as well.
*FINALLY!
If you want to read more cheesy teary-eyed bits about Mumford & Sons, here they are, I shockingly wrote about them on a freakishly regular basis.
Yeah, everything that sounds like Timbaland wasn’t even in private-plane-sight of the production is already roaming myspace and the hip music magazines, there are hints of shoegazer coming back on the radar and of course, the quirky and raw soundbites of experimental postpunk and freak folk.
The band with the unforgiving name* “Woods” will therefore hopefully get a piece of the action because their music is a nicely carved out nightmarish vision of psychedelic guitar-fondling, overpowering atmosphere and great songwriting with music that avoids cheesy attitudes with contorted melodies and dissonant vocals but still manages to get you all emotional and teary-eyed with songs like the wonderful “to clean” or “rain on”. With the latter they do remind me of John Frusciante’s painfully intimate “To record water for only ten days” which is probably one of the best references you can get.
They belong to the New Yorker label ” Woodsist Records” that apparently is a new haven for off-putting yet great alternative music.
To Clean (yeah, they got a video for that song! And it makes me feel weird…don’t know if that’s good or not)
*Try to google that name, it’s a nightmare and you will have killed at least one kitten out of shear frustration before you find something related to the band.
It’s not new but it has been a while since they have been in the spotlight. I am talking about quirky solo-acts, especially male ones because the females have pretty much flooded our playlists this year, that there probably was a secret testosterone-meeting at which it was decided to get going next year. And they already popped up here and there, Dan Deacon, Windmill, Kid Harpoon, Boy eats drum machine, Ramona Falls etc. The magic word is, however, not just ballsy men-songwriting but unique, weird stuff that might seem off at first sight but grows on you bit by bit until it reveals all of its beauty in a breathtaking epiphany. Ok, maybe a bit less dramatic. But there is this trend of opening up all limits of genres, styles and instruments, which makes artists like Boy eats drum machine so awesome because you just don’t know what comes next and isn’t this the most amazing feature of music, when it can surprise you over and over again? This doesn’t, of course, exclude quirky and weird female artists (I actually think that it is fantastic that there is such a vast amount of exciting women out there who don’t flash their panties repeatedly to cover up bad songwriting) but the males really have to prove themselves, so we don’t return to My Brightest Diamond, Joanna Newsom and Bat For Lashes and never look back. And after a long search, I also found a male solo artist whom I haven’t introduced already. Pew.
John Vanderslice
I am a huge fan of music with grand gestures. That’s why Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens are very dear to me. John Vanderslice shares those gestures, however, with electronic sweets here and there which turns his songs a bit askew, small dissonances, sounds and (scripted) glitches that punch cheeky holes in the otherwise dramatic compositions. Mr Vanderslice calls his sound occasionally “sloppy hi-fi” which has potential to make it into my music-almanac. Furthermore, he earns the term songwriter because his lyrics are highly referential to our culture, politics and society, so if you want to learn something just listen to him.
Fetal Horses (This must be one of the best song-titles I’ve ever encountered)
Sometimes, I could just hit myself in the nuts, that is, if I had nuts. We had Ramona Falls at the radio station since weeks and because it was inbetween shitty bands, I didn’t really pay attention but alas! It’s Brent Knopf, my favourite Menomena voice and apparently the man behind the haunting piano tunes. His solo stuff is a bit softer but just as Menomena so much more interesting than 99% of the present music scene AND it is beautiful beyond comparison. It’s actually quite sickening how talented Danny, Brent and Justin are, together and solo. Brent worked with dozens of people on this project which got its name from a waterfall of Brent’s childhood memories. Because there are so many people involved, I won’t name them, Wikipedia and probably the album cover will take care of that. Let me just say that I am in awe of Mr Knopf and his musical ideas and that I already cherish every single note of Ramona Falls. This is the kind of music that is so good that you actually feel as if you’ve just fallen in love when you listen to it. His album “Intuit” is out, so get it because it won’t get better than this.
Here’s some stuff with him and his Digital Loop Recorder making it look as if what you see and hear is totally easy and not awesomly brilliant
And here’s the first single “I Say Fever” (I get excited even thinking about it)
Here is a poorly written BEST OF of my favourite songs used in Horror movies, plus one that is not used in any horror movie but is just awesome and kinda fits the theme.
Ode to the 80s – Gerald McMahon – Cry Little Sister
Because The Lost Boys is the best Vampire Movie for teens and Twilight sucks pumpkins in comparison.
(I did the big mistake to fall into the great Sisters of Mercy mix-up that circulates around the internet, of course, it’s the multitalented Mr McMahon who performed this song for “The Lost Boys”)
Artie Shaw – Jeepers Creepers
I love the first 60 minutes of the movie. However, when you see the “monster” it goes downhill from then (it’s the good old “let’s completely overdo it”-mistake) and please,
never ever watch “Jeepers Creepers 2″, I died because I wasn’t drunk enough to laugh off the bad acting and the horrible script.
Muse – Newborn
If you haven’t watched “High Tension”, I dare you to, it’s so well acted and horrific that it is already a classic of the French cinema.
Also, I always thought that many Muse songs are perfect for depicting a mental breakdown.
PS: If you haven’t seen the movie but want to, rather wait with this music video as it may contain spoilers
Grandaddy – A.M. 180
Not only are they used for the intro of Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn (and we all know how brilliant Mr Brooker is), no, they made “28 days later” even more edgy. Apart from that, you all should have their albums at home because they rule.
The Andrew Sisters & Glenn Miller – Mr Sandman
To be quite honest, the first Halloween movie is creepy but I hate the ending because somehow, it doesn’t really have an ending. It’s as if the editor had enough of it and quit before assembling the last 5 minutes. However, the soundtrack is one of the best horror movie soundtracks ever made.
This is the one without the movie, but it’s about ghosts and stuff, you know…
Menomena – Ghostship
I can’t praise this band enough, they are inventive, weird and manage to really make you think about their music. I take it as a compliment that my superior once told me off for putting “The Pelican” into the day-playlist of our radio station because he thought it was too disturbing and weird for the common radio listener. Well, they breed emotions, whether you like them or not, which essentially is the main goal of music, isn’t it?
