forkcast tracks

Friday, June 26, 2009

"My Heart"

Castanets
"My Heart"

[Asthmatic Kitty]

7

"Raymond Raposa tested out of high school at the age of 15 and traveled the U.S. via Greyhound bus off and on for the next four years," an oft-paraphrased passage from an early Castanets press release reminds us of the band's anchor, a peripatetic sort who hit the road early, maybe bound for glory or, at the very least, experience. Raposa has long downplayed that episode to reporters, telling one inquirer in 2005 that such biography barely mattered. "I'm not speaking for any greater populace or anything," he put it dismissively.

Alas, Raposa has always seemed unsettled and unsatisfied on record, surrounding his folk song cores with discursive sonic ideas-- a drone or improvisation here, a beat or noise blast there. He's seemed like a wanderer, passing through and picking up ideas quickly, grafting them to his own even if he's not sure how they really work. Maybe dilettante's too strong a word, but Raposa has unapologetically wrestled with ideas that are a bit too big for him. Sometimes, he's lost.

But "My Heart", the economically arranged highlight from Castanets' latest, Texas Rose, the Thaw, and the Beasts, feels a lot like a homestead: Using only guitars, bass, drums, and voice, Raposa washes into a low cloud of reverb, a second, slight layer of vocals chasing after his own. Impeccably timed, the song builds layer by layer, the drums rising only as the third verse collapses, pushing tension to a short-lived pinnacle. "My tongue is forming new words for you/ My lungs are calling like birds for you," Raposa offers for the climax, offering the best of his body to someone intent on using all of him. Considering this may be the most quintessential Castanets song to date, it'd simply be didactic to spell out the metaphor.


— Grayson Currin

"Tunguska"

Cymbals Eat Guitars
"Tunguska"

[Transparent]

8
 

"Tunguska", the first new track to emerge from Staten Island's Cymbals Eat Guitars since this year's Why There Are Mountains, does not stray too far from the band's taste for sprawling, dramatic indie rock, but its tone is relatively mellow and muted. As the song opens, Joseph D'Agostino strums a slow, gorgeous chord progression evoking lazy afternoons in wet summer hair, and sings earnestly enough to push his delicate, mildly raspy voice to the point of cracking. The sound is endearingly fragile, but the overall feeling of the composition is loose and breezy, particularly as it gains momentum and shifts into a more up-tempo passage. Though the influence of 1990s indie icons such as Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and Pavement is still very evident in the band's style, traces of 70s radio rock are also noticeable as D'Agostino's guitar work faintly echoes that of Lindsey Buckingham and Todd Rundgren. This bodes well for the group's future, suggesting that they can maintain their rawness and bombast while continuing to integrate touches of sophistication and elegance.

— Matthew Perpetua

"Make You Sweat"

T.I.
"Make You Sweat"

[Self-Released]

7

So. You're one of the biggest rap stars in the world, and you're about to go to prison for a year. And even though your lawyers managed to land you maybe the greatest celebrity sweetheart deal of all time, it's still prison for a year. Now you've got to crank out as much new material as possible so the world doesn't forget about you when you're in lockup.

If T.I. is feeling any sense of dread or desperation, it's not coming through in his music. It's just not. Not only does T.I. not get all emo on this brisk little mixtape banger, he taps into a confidence he hasn't displayed on wax since a couple of years back. "Make You Sweat" finds Tip spitting the vicious gun-talk shit he completely left off of Paper Trail, staying calm and steady-handed no matter how nasty how threats get: "Beretta 40 Cal leave you dead like Freddy/ Bet this lead bust your head like a young bitch cherry." (There's also a line about "as fast as Tom Petty" that I don't quite get. "Runnin' Down a Dream" reference? Or is he thinking of Richard?) The Zep-sampling beat is a bubbling electro thing that doesn't sacrifice depth for speed, exactly the sort of thing T.I. should be rapping over when he's in this kind of mood. Tip's output will probably barely slow while he's away, and we're all better off for that.

— Tom Breihan

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

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