forkcast tracks

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"Purple City"

Joker
"Purple City"

[Kapsize]

8

Welcome to UK club music 2009, in which the remnants of garage and house and trance and, then, dubstep and grime have been Ginsu-chopped so many times that the idea of adding some mids and highs to the ubiquitous lows is enough to fuel everyone's pirate-radio, urban underground fancies. Trade in the right electronic music circles and you can get to legend making: "There's this 20-year-old kid in Bristol with a couple of synths in a shit apartment and He. Is. Ridiculous." That rustling in the background of said Bristol kid Joker's "Purple City" is the sound of 10,000 message boards whispering. Get yourself in on the ground floor of something that was just named, folks.

Forget, for a moment, what everyone will be calling watered-down in 2011 and invest in Joker's massive, pugilistic sonics. A collaboration with fellow, um, purplist Ginz, "Purple City"'s bass gobbles all the black your EQ's got and takes a good hunk of red, too, rumbling tank-like out of your speakers. The drums are modest in comparison: tinny, echoing pings and strong but not overbearing kicks. The gents are apparently interested in video game music and garage melodies, but to throw out something more abstract: "Purple City" melody sounds almost Western, like someone mangled and twisted Ennio Morricone into vaguely threatening synthspeak. The end result isn't violent or aggressive but rather kind of summer-blockbuster fun, everything big and communal and made to please. The only challenge it faces on dancefloors is finding enough like-minded weirdos. You know where to find us.

— Andrew Gaerig

"Beggar's Bowl"

Polvo
"Beggar's Bowl"

[Merge]

8
 

Between the fawning over the new Dinosaur Jr. and attention paid to Trent Reznor's personal dealings, it's conceivable that Polvo might have just thawed out and haven't yet realized what year this is. They hit the snooze and went to the studio in business-as-usual, time-to-release-our-next-record-cuz-it's-1995 mode. That's when their Chapel Hill brethren were clamoring to be on labels like Merge, and labels like Merge weren't making commemorative DVDs. And aghast, rock was still getting held back in math class year after year. But these early warriors of let-x-equal-x reappear in a time where something called doom metal not only exists but is maxing out its credit options over choir-vs.-orchestra dilemmas formerly reserved for like, Live. Polvo used to sound like Drive Like Jehu or Les Savy Fav or least one of those groups whose riffs zing-zang into a wall and then crawl up the ceiling rather than banging into it over and over. These days, they'll apparently settle for banging. With higher production values now easier to attain, Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski up the dynamics and reach for a new metallic crunch. The punishing "Beggar's Bowl" has clean, echoing tones laid on top of the heaviness, and here, vocals are less essential than the drums or guitar overdubs. They may not give a reunion like Mission of Burma a run for its money, but if Polvo occupy a weird space nowadays, it's because they still sound so much like themselves.

MP3:> Polvo: "Beggar's Bowl"

— Dan Weiss

"Waterfall"

Daniel Rossen
"Waterfall"

[American Dust]

7

The original version of "Waterfall" exists only in demo form: Shortly before her death in 1979, L.A. folkie Judee Sill recorded a number of tracks at a friend's home studio, including this comparison between the rush of love and the roar of the falls. It's a rough setting for her rippling melody, clear and curious vocals, and chorus-less song structure, but the straightforwardness of the performance creates an intimacy that makes her ideas sound clear and rapt. Today, it's available as a "lost song" on Water Records' excellent 2005 retrospective, Dreams Come True, which makes it fairly obscure even for a Sill fan.

So Daniel Rossen's pick for his contribution to the forthcoming tribute album Crayon Angels suggests a diehard's familiarity with the unswept corners of Sill's small catalogue, and his sensitive reading proves his familiarity with her idiosyncrasies: The Grizzly man knows why these songs continue to inspire 30 years later, so he retains the delicately picked guitar as an anchor for the simple melody and uncynical sentiment. He doesn't add much, but the few new elements sound purposeful and non-intrusive. A second acoustic guitar, acting almost as a bass, creates a darker undertow, while Rossen's slurry vocals flow with the current, occasionally joined by a chorus of voices conveying the wonder Sill expressed so easily. If Sill was awed by love, here Rossen sounds awed by her.

MP3:> Daniel Rossen: "Waterfall" (Judee Sill cover)

— Stephen M. Deusner

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

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