Pitchfork

Sufjan Stevens is no stranger to ambitious numerical concepts-- his 50-state strategy, like Howard Dean's, has generated no small amount of disbelief-- but the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter has tended to keep even his epic songs to around the 7-minute mark. Then there was last year's half-hour BQE project. Stevens' new cover of Asthmatic Kitty signees Castanets' dark-hued Cathedral duet "You Are the Blood", recorded for the Dark Was the Night compilation, clocks in around 10 minutes, and it's an impressive encapsulation of his past musical directions as well as those that could be still to come. (An edited version is on the Dark Was the Night MySpace today).

With the rhythmic complexity and noisy IDM experimentation of Radiohead's early-2000s work, "You Are the Blood" glides seamlessly between the electronics of Stevens' Enjoy Your Rabbit material and the grand symphonics that brought him to his widest audience yet with Illinois. Furiously rocking sections give way to intricately melancholic piano passages. Woodwinds whirl and feedback wails atop crunching digital beats, right before tumultuous horn fanfares fit for the soundtrack to some old violent movie that everybody takes too seriously. It's refined and cacophonous at once, working as much within the classical and jazz traditions as folk and/or rock-- Gerswhin meets Yorke, maybe? Then there's the song's portentous central metaphor.

Stream:> Sufjan Stevens: "You Are the Blood" (Castanets cover)
[from Dark Was the Night; due 02/17/09 via Red Hot]

If the next phase of Sweden's plan for world pop-music domination involves a shift from melody to rhythm, President Obama might want to increase our defense spending. Like, now. First Peter Bjorn & John made beats Kanye West called "crazy". Then former the Knife labelmate Jenny Wilson started bumping and grinding around minimal electro-R&B production on "The Wooden Chair". Next up is Stockholm's Name the Pet, about whom I know next to nothing.

Except: Her (their?) new song, "Get on the Bus", is sweltering, mesmerizing dance-pop that would entice even Kriss Kross to wake up a little earlier. The drum programming is stupid-simple, the jagged synth-bass line can't be more than two or three notes, and the higher-pitched squeaks that come in around the chorus have probably been played out since sometime around "Yeah!". Like a good Kylie Minogue song, though, I can't get it out of my head-- even if I can't remember much of what Name the Pet is singing about. (Her boy is with another woman, I take it. Maybe Rosa Parks?) Name the Pet also has a St. Etienne-style club banger with the Sound of Arrows, but I'm riding for "Get on the Bus". Please Jemina Pearl, don't hurt me.

Stream:> Name the Pet: "Get on the Bus"

Oh, and there's an American Apparel-ready video. You know, for the kids.

[from MySpace]

Everything's coming up Jersey. Real Estate have roots in the Garden State and they're led by singer/guitarist Martin Courtney and feature guitarist Matthew Mondanile (the latter known to some for his work in Ducktails). They've played shows with both Vivian Girls and Titus Andronicus, but "Black Lake", from their debut 7", doesn't sound much like either of those bands (who also don't much sound like each other). Instead, it's a fuzzy, sweetly simple sea chantey (or in this case, I guess a "lake chantey") that reminds you of how awesome that last bonfire of the summer was, until the cops showed up and you had to run for your life. The song wafts in on a slinky bassline playing all by its lonesome, and then a sleepwalking slide guitar (ready for a couples-only dance on prom night), tapping cymbals, and Courtney's reverbed voice complete the picture, leaving plenty of open space to stick your head inside of. "Black Lake" is a jangly, hazy slice of nostalgia for those of us who still have love for America's forgotten playground.

MP3:> Real Estate: "Black Lake"
[from the Real Estate 7"; out now on Underwater Peoples]

The entire blogosphere chewed this one up and spit it out yesterday, but we had some techincal problems so we missed it. It's Scarlett Johansson, she of the Tom Waits covers, taking on another alt-rock sacred cow, this time for the soundtrack to the film He's Just Not That Into You. I wouldn't dare do anything to offend Jeff Buckley fanatics-- they're a scary lot-- but I've never been able to understand exactly what made him so special. Amazing voice, sure, but I've never found much in his songs to connect with, and when he rocks out his music tends to dissapear into the post-grunge ether. But that's me. In any event, "Last Goodbye" is one of his best-known songs, and ScarJo strips it down and turns it into a lite radio piano ballad. And you know what, it sounds pretty terrible. Her uncertain sense of pitch and general lack of vocal charisma weren't a liabilities on the best songs on Anywhere I Lay My Head, and in fact her zombie-fied persona added a sort of dark undercurrent. But here, with just this piano and her voice and a song that (let's face it) needs someone with a lot more talent to bring it over, well, we're getting into the territory of Don Johnson's music career here. (via Stereogum)

Stream:> Scarlett Johansson: "Last Goodbye"
[from the He's Just Not That Into You OST; due 02/03/09 on New Line)

The run of new music from the Dark Was the Night comp (which benefits the the Red Hot Organization) continues with one of the best songs on the record. "Service Bell" is a collaboration between Grizzly Bear and Feist (they showed up on some stages together a while back, maybe this is how the hook-up began) but it's a GB tune all the way-- in fact it's a re-work from the early 4-rack record Horn of Plenty. It's all baroque and spooky and atmospheric and Feist inhabits this world completely, going into trilling faerie mode while Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen harmonize behind her.

Stream:> Grizzly Bear and Feist: "Service Bell"
[from Dark Was the Night; due 02/17/09 via Red Hot]

It's been a big winter for Bruce Springsteen, what with the new album, word of a reissued classic, a new Greatest Hits set, that Super Bowl gig this coming weekend, and then a tour with the E Street Band. It's become clear in the second half of this decade that Springsteen's influence has extended beyond the stadium rock mainstream, and that songwriters of all kinds have drawn inspiration from his music. Springsteen's label provided us with a few interesting videos that feature artists from a different generation talking about what his music means to them and then covering one of his songs. First up is Ted Leo, who has been playing "Dancing in the Dark" in his live set for several years. And then we have Brian Fallon from the Gaslight Anthem, whose 2008 album The '59 Sound fuses Springsteen-style rock'n'roll romanticism with terse punk rock. He talks about the role of the Boss' music in his life (not surprisingly, it's huge-- dude was born and raised in New Brunswick, N.J.) and then does a solo version of Born to Run's "Backstreets".

Ted Leo: Interview

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

Ted Leo: "Dancing in the Dark"

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

Brian Fallon: Interview

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

Brian Fallon: "Backstreets"

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

The Katherine Nolfi-directed video for "So Fine", another track from Telepathe's upcoming Dave Sitek-produced album Dance Mother, is, appropriately enough, all about the dancing. There's a little mini-shimmy happening in the frozen food aisle of a grocery store, a (kinda, sorta) "Thriller"-style throwdown in an alley, and then everyone winds up at a rocking party, shaking it to -- what else?-- "So Fine".

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

from Dance Mother; out now on iTunes; physical copies due 03/10/09 in the U.S. on IAMSOUND and 01/26/09 in the UK on V2/Cooperative]

Atlanta's Black Lips like to portray themselves as don't-give-a-fuck party-rockers dancing on the edge of the abyss, the kind of band that puts on chaotic shows in underground Tijuana and gets run out of the second most populous nation on Earth (er...). But the funny thing about all that is how simple and approachable their music is on record. "Short Fuse", a single from their new one 200 Million Thousand (and which debuted today on KEXP) is a hair quicker than mid-tempo, with a cheap jangly guitar playing a simple riff, doubled voices hitting something close to harmony, and a boogie-with-Stu-type piano break to keep the rollicking tune moving forward. There's nothing too crazy going on here, in other words. "Don't light me up because I've got a short fuse," they sing, but they don't really want you to keep your distance-- you get the idea that they enjoy mixing it up just for a laugh and no one is going to get hurt.

MP3:> Black Lips: "Short Fuse"
[from 200 Million Thousand; due 02/24/09 on Vice]

Photo by Jimmy Hubbard

It begins with what sounds like a banjo, but you realize quickly that this isn't the new Sufjan joint. Instead, it's Mastodon's "Divinations", the first single from their album Crack the Skye, which is streaming now at the band's MySpace. To my ears it sounds like an especially melodic slab of metal riffage from the Atlanta band, with a clear and soaring chorus, and it's also tightly constructed at three and half minutes. The chugging high-speed bass/guitar doubling on the bridge deserves better than this stream can give it, but OK, new Mastodon, and it rocks pretty hard.

Stream:> Mastodon: "Diviniations"
[from Crack the Skye; expected Spring 2009 on Reprise]

Photo by Jonathan Snyder

San Francisco's Mi Ami are carrying the same calling card that a lot of bands are liable to wave in 2009: drum-centric punk with Afro-pop leanings, punched up with noise and lo-fi experimentalism for good measure. And that's not a slight, for this band who caught our attention with an excellent remix of Telepathe's "Devil's Trident". Two years after the dissolution of their D.C. punk outfit Black Eyes in 2004, guitarist and vocalist Daniel Martin-McCormick and drummer Damon Palermo started Mi Ami, adding bassist Jacob Long in 2007 to round out the trio. "Echononecho" comes from the A-side their new 12" of the same name, and dares to make sense of their MySpace's awesome-yet-dubious name-checking (Minutemen and Don Cherry both get shout-outs). The track is no doubt jammy, sounding something like Ponytail tripping out on last year's Nigerian Special compilation complete with dubby bass grooves, banshee yowls (yes, that is apparently Martin-McCormick on high-pitched vocals), and squealing guitars rising from a primordial soup of polyrhythms. As for the debut full-length Watersports, consider our interest piqued.

[from the "Echononecho" 12"; out now; also from Watersports; due 02/19/09; both on Quarterstick]