Tag: Duo

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2013: #15 Still Corners “Berlin lovers”

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True story: Back in 2006 or 2007, when this newfangled thing called the Facebook was still a relatively new concern*, I joined a Facebook group called “Shoegaze” and promptly forgot all about it.

And then at some point early in 2013, I started receiving a barrage of updates in my “News Feed” from this very group, which both surprised and delighted me. One such post was a photo of two new records, purchased in Waco, Texas, of all places, by two (at the time) recent shoegaze/dream pop bands that I had never heard of. They were No Joy and Still Corners.

Curiousity piqued, I immediately tracked down both of the albums with more than satisfactory results. Regarding Still Corners**, their sophomore album, “Strange pleasures”, was very much on the Beach House, Mazzy Star, and Cocteau Twins side of the dream pop spectrum. But where Beach House sounded at the time really like the work of the duo they were, Still Corner’s sound felt more developed and lusher.

Formed after a chance meeting between American expat musician Greg Hughes and English singer Tessa Murray back in 2008, Still Corners was signed by legendary indie label Sub Pop in 2011, on which they released their first two records. Where their retro and dreamy dream pop debut, “Strange pleasures”, wore their influences on its proverbial sleeves, the sophomore release, written directly after finishing the first, departed slightly, but only slightly, introducing synths and plenty of reverb the guitars for a more expansive sound. And though I’ve loved the four more albums they’ve released since, all on their own label Wrecking Light, my preference is for that particular time and place.

“We came from far
We follow the sun
We fell into a hole of love, yeah”

Halfway through the track list of “Strange pleasures” sits this sub three minute love song, “Berlin lovers”, the second single to be released from the album. It’s one of the more upbeat tracks in the bunch. Synth heavy, bouncing and jagged, skipping to the loo with the drum beat, all floating aloft airy wafts of washes and Tessa Murray repeating “so young, so young, so young”, over and over, in a voice that calls to mind an early Stars era Amy Millan. It’s the stuff of strobes and smoke machines and psychedelics – or just plain being in love.

*For me anyways. I know it was created much earlier but I’m not always up on all tech things.

**No Joy’s “Wait to pleasure” also started a different love affair that continues today… but that’s another story. 😉

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.

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Albums

Best albums of 2010: #2 Broken Bells “Broken Bells”

Broken Bells is a collaborative project between The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and über-producer/musician, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). I first came across Burton’s work care of his production efforts on the second Gorillaz long player, but I really stood up and took notice when he recorded an album with Cee Lo Green under the moniker Gnarls Barkley. Of course, I was already late to party at that point. Danger Mouse had already snagged the listening public’s attention a few years earlier with “The Grey album”, his infamous mashup of the obvious classic albums by Jay-Z and The Beatles. After the success of Gnarls Barkley, Burton was called in to produce albums by The Black Keys, Norah Jones, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, and Beck. For a while there, it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, including this album with James Mercer as Broken Bells.

In the case of Mercer and his band The Shins, on the other hand, I picked up on them very early on, well before they received the plug by Natalie Portman’s character in the film, “Garden state”, though, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her bold proclamation at the time. I never saw their music as life-changing but I definitely enjoyed it. Interestingly, I became a bigger fan of The Shins after listening to Broken Bells. It was as if his collaboration with Brian Burton opened my eyes to Mercer’s talents as a songwriter. Another golden win for Burton, I guess.

Indeed, I took to “Broken Bells” immediately, much like I did with The Postal Service’s 2003 classic, “Give up”, an album to which I’ve often compared this one. It bears the same mélange of organic and electronic sounds but where that album pushed boldly forward into futuristic space, “Broken Bells” felt more retro. Yes, there are nods towards science fiction but it isn’t the future we envision today, rather, it’s the present day that we imagined in the past. On many of the songs, Burton and Mercer seem to encapsulate the listener on a silver screen era rocket ship, jettison all of the technical laws of space travel since discovered, and return us to the romance of the thing.

This is the way of the entire album. It sounded like no other music being made in 2010, yet each song sounded instantly familiar, like you grew up listening to Broken Bells’ remixes of the music to which your parents’ parents listened. It is ten tracks of utter brilliance and yes, romance, employing all the cannons in their symphonic arsenal, reinventing the songs and their structures at a whim, a well-placed horn blast here and a shock of string flourish there, like the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting that shouldn’t work but does. You listen to it and find your way to the end of the album, not knowing how you got there, not really knowing anything except that you want to restart it all over again.

In case you haven’t listened to the whole thing already, here are my three picks for you off the album worth listening to right now.

“The ghost inside”: We start things off four tracks in. “Just like a whiskey bottle, drained on the floor. She got no future, just a life to endure.” The heavy lyrical themes of isolation and haunted introspection are subverted by falsetto vocals, handclaps, humming bass lines, haunting melodic synths, it all sounds so dark and disco, you just need to add smoke machine and the words fade away.

“Vaporize”: Track two starts off sounding like it could be an early Shins track, all Mercer and acoustic strumming, until the vibrating organs and that dirty, hammer-down rhythm kicks in and the speakers low end blow out like beautiful confetti. The words, though, remain thoroughly Mercer. “What amounts to a dream anymore? A crude device, a veil on our eyes.” The ideas dance and dare, play upon depth and angle slyly within the melody, unique and happily hummable.

“The high road”: My very favourite song from 2010 starts with pixelated frequencies that melt into a sliding mellow groove complete with jiving handclaps and there’s that wicked singalong bridge that leads you out of the wilderness. “The high road is hard to find, a detour in your new life. Tell all of your friends goodbye.” This is the opening track on the album and does a great job setting the stage for the tracks to follow. I’ve written before that this is hipster funk for martians but I don’t think this precludes us mere mortals from getting on the bus.

Stay tuned for album #1. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. Diamond Rings “Special affections”
9. Bedouin Soundclash “Light the horizon”
8. LCD Soundsystem “This is happening”
7. The Drums “The Drums”
6. The New Pornographers “Together”
5. Stars “The five ghosts”
4. The Radio Dept. “Clinging to a scheme”
3. The National “High violet”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2013: #25 Cayucas “A summer thing”

<< #26    |    #24 >>

Tomorrow is the last day of August. And although, technically, there’s still three more weeks left of the season, the passing from August into September always feels like summer is coming to an end. This is why the timing is perfect for this song to pop up and for me to share this very post. “A summer thing” by Cayucas was a great summer song back in 2013 but it could also be perfect for every summer since.

“The summer’s starting to drift away but you don’t want to let go.
Now you’re watching the rainfall by yourself from your bedroom window.
And I’ll be checking the mailbox for the postcards you said you’d send,
Telling me that you might stop by in the winter for the weekend.”

Zach Yudlin was originally making music by himself in the early 2010s under the moniker Oregon Bike Trails. By 2012, though, he had enlisted his twin brother Ben to the project, changing its name to Cayucas, and then, they signed to Secret Canadian Records. They’ve release four albums in all, the latter two were self-released but the only one I am really all that familiar with is the debut, 2013’s “Bigfoot”. It’s 9 tracks and just a smidge over 30 minutes of sunshine and surf and nostalgia for California, where of course, the brothers call home.

The real gem of the album is track four. “A summer thing” sounds unabashedly like The Beach Boys. Harmonies and yellow light filtered through a kaleidoscope and a music box playing “Sloop John B” on repeat. A bopping bass line and zipper-like guitars and ticky tacky drums. Even the most jaded of music fans or Beach Boys purists couldn’t hate this song. It’s faithful in its blue-eyed wonder and wistfully drenched in memories. It’s a song you just want to restart before it comes to an end because maybe, just maybe, it might delay that cold weather just a little bit longer.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.