forkcast tracks

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

"GBG Belongs to Us" [ft. Roos]

Air France
"GBG Belongs to Us" [ft. Roos]

[Self-Released]

7

Probably the best way to review the newest project from beatific duo Air France would be to go live in their hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, and make a movie (or a message in a bottle) about the experience. "GBG Belongs to Us" is just the musical component of Air France's three-part multimedia love letter to their Scandinavian West Coast city, along with a glimmering video and heartfelt text. "For us, geography and architecture are essential elements of pop," Air France write, positing their project as a sort of urban manifesto: City-dwellers of the world, unite and protect your public spaces from commercial takeover. The price of freedom, as some American indie kid is once reputed to have said, is eternal vigilance.

It's appropriate that "GBG Belongs to Us" greets us this summer alongside a reissue of the 1991 debut album by Saint Etienne, who are among Air France's biggest heroes. "Foxbase Alpha sounds like a band trying to reimagine the city as a dreamy Anglo-continental metropolis," Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing once wrote. So, too, "GBG Belongs to Us"-- almost certainly named after St Et's "London Belongs to Me"-- a sunny piano-house banger that's part 90s London, part 90s Ibiza, and 100% 2009 Gothenburg. The colorful sounds of a bustling port city open the track, before fellow G'burger Christina Roos (of likeminded electropop duo Cat5) coos a tribute to the squares, the avenues, the cliffs, and the coast, all atop sun-glazed synths. Sure, this could be a jingle in a tourism ad, but it would be a pretty great jingle.

MP3:> Air France [ft. Roos]: "GBG Belongs to Us"

— Marc Hogan

"David"

The Radio Dept.
"David"

[Labrador]

4

After some line-up changes mid-decade, the Radio Dept. switched from a live rhythm section to drum machines, wrapping their songs in tastefully gauzy production. On "David", the second single in a year from their upcoming album, Clinging to a Scheme, they set a skipping bass thud against a sampled tambourine and predictable synth stabs to create a beat whose distorted fills intrude on the melody and vocals. Of course, the Radio Dept. are the rare 1990s Swedish pop act that relies more on dreamy atmosphere and less on vocal hooks to put a song over, but for that to work, it needs to have a specific mood (for which I always go back to "Pulling Our Weight"). Otherwise, the airiness just sounds empty. With its listless melody, "David" sounds too general and therefore slightly anonymous, even when the guitar tries to lift the song higher into the sky. The song never soars. It just floats there, inert.

Stream:> The Radio Dept.: "David"

— Stephen M. Deusner

"Shape of Your Head"

The Binary Marketing Show
"Shape of Your Head"

[8088]

6

We'd love to get through this without mentioning Animal Collective, which has become the indie-focused writer's Beatles or Brian Wilson-- a comparison so overused that it's meaningless. But what can you do with a song that sounds like a deliberate effort to record a slender yet vital hidden track for Strawberry Jam? Brooklyn's the Binary Marketing Show display admirable restraint and directness on this song: They could have named it "Phrenology", but went with "Shape of Your Head" to save us a trip to Wikipedia. They could have named the album something pretentious like Forms Repeating Through Time and Space, but they cut the shit and went with the plainly descriptive Pattern.

And they could have piled on effects and bobbins until the core song effectively vanished, but there's no safety net here: "Shape of Your Head" air-walks a single iridescent arch, as taut kick drums and toms goad a shivering digital loop toward an ecstasy of cyclical, chiming runnels. A heavenly monotone whines in the background like God's vacuum cleaner. In the foreground, stuffy-nosed vocal harmonies fall in and out of step, glowing murkily, like neon lights in heavy rain. It seems like such a meticulous diagnostic of the digi-tribal aesthetic that it can be hard to hear it as its own entity. With "Shape of Your Head", the Binary Marketing Show prove they can make an impressive Animal Collective song. Now that they've gotten that out of their systems, they're primed to make an impressive Binary Marketing Show song next.

— Brian Howe

Monday, June 22, 2009

"Ntende Uli"

The Very Best
"Ntende Uli"

[Green Owl]

8

Hearing Esau Mwamwaya ringing out over M.I.A. and Hans Zimmer on Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are the Very Best was a fine introduction to one of the new standout voices in international Afropop, but it wasn't just the reinterpretive novelty that made the Very Best shine. Credit for that hinges primarily on Mwamwaya's voice, quadrilingually adept and textured like steamed sugar, though the upcoming official debut full-length, Warm Heart of Africa, should also provide further proof that his pairing with the European production team Radioclit can thrive as an original collaborative movement. "Ntende Uli" foretells good things: Radioclit provide a beat that gravitates almost entirely around a melodically minimal but impactful bassline out of the Tangerine Dream playbook, scattering percolating electronic chirps and car-door-slam drums over its surface for a bit of stripped-down rhythmic footing. And Esau just soars over it, gliding with a sleek aerodynamic multi-tracked lushness and darting smoothly from drawn-out melodic warmth to brisk, punchy intonations that trump the beats themselves for rhythmic impact. I believe it's sung in Chichewa, as if you should care about a language barrier.

— Nate Patrin

"Kaufman's Ballad"

Megafaun
"Kaufman's Ballad"

[Hometapes]

7

Megafaun don't just catalog American musical languages, they breed them. Who else could pull off a song that sounds like the buxom man-folk of Crosby, Stills and Nash, but moves with the finesse of Reichian process music-- a song, no less, about the desert immolation of Gram Parsons' corpse? As the story goes, Parsons wished to be cremated in Joshua Tree, but after he overdosed, his stepfather arranged a private ceremony in New Orleans. Phil Kaufman, Parsons' road manager, stole the body and drove it to Joshua Tree, then doused it with enough gas to create a spectacular explosion. Just like the tension between the stepfather's conservatism and Parsons' libertinism ended in flames, the collision of the conventional and the progressive on "Kaufman's Ballad" creates plenty of heat. Restrained energy flickers, gradually intensifying, around a hard-flecked banjo melody. Some bowed terror buzzes around like a fighter pilot, or a mosquito-- scale is tricky in the desert-- and gradually assumes a needling omnipotence, like those bugs in Carlos Castaneda books that always turn out to be spirit guides. Rainbow-streaked vocal harmonies pour into solo lines that squeak on rusty hinges. Drummer Joe Westerlund carves the roiling mass into sculptural planes by inescapable degrees, until everything locks together, and you realize you've been waiting for this the entire time-- the instant when the fuel touched the flame.


— Brian Howe

"Dream About Me"

The Depreciation Guild
"Dream About Me"

[Kanine]

6

I'm sorry, Mario, but our princess is blissed-out. Again. The Depreciation Guild first delivered us their surprisingly complementary combo of videogame blips and shoegaze ethereality on 2007's self-released In Her Gentle Jaws. The Brooklyn band's frontman, Kurt Feldman, also happens to be the drummer for a little band called the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who've managed to level-up successfully this year. The new single from Feldman's main band upgrades their debut album's sound with the confidence generated by that kind of experience. It's wispy dream-pop about dreaming-- but it's solidly wispy.

As with Pains, your mileage with this stuff may depend on whether you can hear the music through the reference points. In either case, it's worth the effort. On "Dream About Me", the Deprecation Guild's 8-bit elements are mostly there in the arcade (pre-Fire) synths. The drum sounds have more of that heavy thud from Loveless. And where Pains work in the noisy twee-pop milieu of earlier My Bloody Valentine or my beloved Rocketship, Depreciation Guild are slower and just a touch more sensitive. In fact, this song's combination of reverb-saturated guitars, electronics, and the androgynous whispers sent me scrambling through iTunes for my Field Mice comps. Hey influence-spotters, remember a few years ago when Brazilian electro-punks CSS suggested "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above"? Well, let's kiss and make up and download an emulator for "Mike Tyson's Punch Out".

— Marc Hogan

Friday, June 19, 2009

"Daydream"

Beach Fossils
"Daydream"

6

Oh, that hook! Immediately familiar, yet impossible to place; a riff so warmly nostalgic it feels classic upon the first listen. Brooklyn's Beach Fossils make good use of it, putting it right up front, repeated sans vocals, shimmering in its summery glow. A simple drumbeat joins in the second go 'round, muted and underwhelming, working as little more than a toe-tapping cue-- but that's hardly a problem. The guitar line makes the song. At some point the singing starts echoing about, as if piped in from some forgotten era, but it's inconsequential: the words, the verses, they're all indistinguishable and, quite frankly, not that important. In the wake of Wavves and his no-fi brethren, it's easy to cast the beach-bleached vocals aside as so much trendy trash on the shore-- when he starts sighing "Daydream" at the end, he might as well be moaning "I'm so bored"-- but Beach Fossils' music is much more straightforward, and it's all the better for it: A guitar line like he's got here doesn't deserve to get buried under so much sand and tape-fuzz detritus. Now if he could only beef it up with some truly memorable lyrics, or a knockout chorus, or even some harder-hitting drumbeats to give the song some dynamics, some tension, some sort of propulsion. Then again, it's hard to complain when it's so warm and inviting-- sometimes a nice lolling track to relax to is enough.

— Sean Redmond

"F Kenya RIP"

Highlife
"F Kenya RIP"

[New High]

7

Unlike fellow New Yorkers and shameless cultural imperialists Vampire Weekend (j/k!), Sleepy Doug Shaw doesn't beg you to perform tricky postcolonial calculus or diagram the ethical implications of paternalistic blah blah blah. His solo project Highlife-- busman's holiday from druidic folk combo White Magic-- is so candid and specific about its artistic inspirations and faithful to those sources, it's basically a tribute act. Highlife, of course, is a genre prevalent in West Africa, characterized by rippling guitar lines and seesawing time signatures. And "F Kenya RIP" namechecks F. Kenya's Guitar Band, ripping its central refrain, "Madame Zehae Ala", from the song of the same name. But what "F Kenya RIP" lacks in imagination or ambition, it makes up for with an easy-going, summer-suited sprawl, with tuck-and-roll guitar lines like kids on a grassy slope, tip-tapping percussion breezy as a white linen shirt, and backing singers so sanguine in their hums and coos and "woos," they can only be supine in swaying hammocks.

— Amy Granzin

"Autumn Beds"

Modest Mouse
"Autumn Beds"

[Epic]

7

"Autumn Beds" is the A-side off Modest Mouse's second 7" in a month, backed with recent set-list staple "Whale Song" (like their last single, it's slated for release in limited-edition vinyl). The new track is a particularly accomplished showcase of Isaac Brock's preternatural ability to write a sing-along chorus. Although "We won't be sleeping in our autumn beds" is delivered sweetly, it's a bit of a cryptic message, equal parts lullaby nonsense and unsettling equinoctial prophecy. Brock's voice aptly reflects this duality, since-- depending on the accompanying arrangement-- it can easily transition from a boyish innocence to a menacing howl. The arrangement reflects this tension. The lighthearted banjo is balanced at times by a hollow, insistent drum and an undercurrent of burbling noise, emphasizing the protagonists' dire situation: "Our case is drawing to an end/ They said guilty so many times/ All I heard was just the buzzing lights." It's a summer song that gives the listener pause, one that reminds you darker, colder times wait in the wings.

— Susannah Young

Thursday, June 18, 2009

"Going Down"

Ty Segall
"Going Down"

[Telephone Explosion]

6

Ty Segall has been kicking around the Bay Area scene for a couple of years now, first as a member of the Traditional Fools and Sic Alps and more recently as the kind of one-man-band solo act that gets more attention for playing so many instruments all at once than for playing so many styles all at once. With one album out and another one on the way, he skirts gimmickry because he doesn't use lo-fi to apologize for catchiness, energy, and a debt to 1960s source material. Instead, as on "Goin' Down" (from a split LP with Black Time on Telephone Explosion), the skuzzbucket sound enhances those qualities, even as he buries his vocals deeper in the mix than any of the other instruments. A musical palindrome, "Goin' Down" ends just like it begins: with a "Wipeout" tom roll and a garbled Ross Johnson-ism that makes Segall a particularly good fit for Memphis' Goner Records. In between, the song stomps vigorously, part Nuggets revivification and part fuzz-pop trendiness. Oh sure, he could be compared with contemporaries like Wavves and No Age, but "Goin' Down" toys with so many pre-punk influences that Segall sounds more like the a blasted-out Surfaris.

— Stephen M. Deusner

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