forkcast tracks

Thursday, June 25, 2009

"One More Chance"

Bloc Party
"One More Chance"

[Wichita]

6

Is my mind playing tricks, like Scarface and Bushwick? Nope-- somehow the increasingly prolific and popular Bloc Party manage to distance themselves even further from Silent Alarm with new single "One More Chance", and not only that, even Intimacy and its donor child remix come off like a blip in the rearview. Fuck the past, let's dwell on that piano line that loops ovah and ovah-- are these guys leaving behind their futurist ideals for the original pirate material of old-school house?

At the very least, "Give me one more chance to love you" works as a better hands-inna-the-air mantra than "My mercury's in retrograde" or "You told me you wanted to eat up my sandwich" (that's what I always heard on "This Modern Love", anyway). But is Kele's voice really suited for this sort of thing? Neither unhinged enough for Luke Jenner-style ecstacy or contoured enough to handle the melody, "One More Chance" just falls shy of nailing the melody; and then when it when it comes to sex, Bloc Party has always been something like Magilla Gorilla-- encased and mostly harmless. Hell, Silent Alarm's earned them a lifetime of chances, but "Like Eating Glass"? "Better Than Heaven"? Just another Bloc Party single where they're so excited by a new sound that they hardly feel compelled to let it emerge into a good song.

— Ian Cohen

"Sunday Morning"

Beck
"Sunday Morning"

[Self-Released]

7

It's a novel idea, but certainly not a new one-- Dutch label Konkurrent's In the Fishtank series has for some time been marrying artists and giving them only 48 hours to record an album and see what sticks. Beck's less-creatively titled Record Club project works similarly, allowing Mr. Hansen and co. (in this installment, Nigel Godrich and, uh, Giovanni Ribisi) only 24 hours, a mere Earth day, to choose an album to be "reinterpreted and used as a framework" and then cut the thing. This time it's The Velvet Underground & Nico, and the first taste is opener "Sunday Morning".

The initial choice for an album seems a bit uninspired (also, if you hit the 22-hour mark and you haven't even started work on "European Son", does it end up sounding like shit?), but "Sunday Morning" is surprisingly engaging. Beck seems to be scratching at that old Sea Change itch, employing a somberness that his original music hasn't seen in a while. "Sunday Morning"'s lovely little rainy-day waltz is now filled with soft tambourines, beatific xylophone twinkles, and Beck channeling Reed in a respectfully honest way. So for now, I'll can my naysaying and just wait for my man.

— Zach Kelly

"Green River"

Real Estate
"Green River"

[Half Machine]

7

Long the home of outtakes, remixes, and material generally seen as secondary to the featured A, B-sides don't always get their due. But record geeks know the neglected B is also the best place to look for hidden gems, and "Green River", the flipside to New Jersey beach lovers Real Estate's recent "Fake Blues" 7", is proof of that. Following closely on the heels of the (quite good) Underwater Peoples Records Showcase (on which Real Estate are featured) and a handful of EPs and singles by the band, the crusty coastal boogie of "Green River" is one of the more accomplished individual tracks so far from the cluster of bands trafficking in this nascent lo-fi beach-pop aesthetic. At just under two minutes, the song gracefully shifts tempo from sparkly surf-guitar strumming to swirly atmospherics before a more forceful coda sweeps in at the finish. Its scruffiness, the lo-fi coloring that seems so ubiquitous these days, feels spot-on, adding warmth and texture rather than coming across as cloying or of-the-moment. And there's a real urgency here. You might expect a track like this to stretch itself out, to luxuriate in its UV rays for five or six minutes, but the brevity-- alluding to the fleeting, never-quite-long-enough nature of summer, I'm guessing-- is really what makes it work. Like the season itself, it's over before you've had the chance to truly enjoy it.

MP3:> Real Estate: "Green River"

— Joe Colly

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"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

"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

"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

Next Page >


Recently