4 posts tagged “album”
The new Darkel album is due out the 18th of September, 2006. Darkel is Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the French space-rock/electronica duo Air. For this project, JB sheds his Air band mate Nicolas Godin and strikes out on his own with Laurent Griffon on guitars and bass and Earl Harvin picking up the drumsticks for a couple of the album's songs. Check out the Darkel myspace site for more tunes from the new album.
Air's 2004 release Talkie Walkie [shown below] is a fabulous record and the new offering from one half of the duo looks to be interesting and similar on some songs to the Air sound and a departure from the norm on other cuts such as At the End of the Sky, available for preview via the official Darkel site and with the spunky TV Destroy which is a bit more rockin' and rollin' than drum machine programmin' style of music Air fans have become accustomed to.
The Air myspace.com site has a blog news blurb about the Charlotte Gainsbourg album that the duo contributed to as well as the release info for the new Darkel album scheduled for this month. The blurb also mentions that the finishing touches are being applied to songs for the next Air album scheduled currently for release in the Winter of 2007. Michel Gondry's new movie "The Science of Sleep" that Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in is also mentioned in the blurb along with a link to the movie soundtrack's myspace page.
I can't wait for the new Air album but the Darkel release will quench the thirst for now. The complete MP3 of the song At the End of the Sky and a video for it are available at the myspace.com Darkel site.
I'm bored with the political internet banter and RSS feed frenzy so it's time for some new music reviews. I was just perusing the latest XLR8R magazine and discovered a band that many people probably already know about but that I just discovered. Couch, a German Post Rock band featuring Stefanie Böhm, Thomas Geltinger, Michael Heilrath, Jurgen Söder, have released four CDs and one LP [the first, self-titled on Kollaps circa 1995] and several remixes and compilation albums have featured the Kraut Rock-inspired band that has been around for over a decade.
Some of the iTunes reviews of their latest offering, Figur 5, are less than spectacular but it looks like people have come to have pretty high expectations from this band of musicians. There are also some reviewers who say that the people poo-pooing the latest effort must have terrible taste so, I leave this one up to you and your personal taste. If you like Brittany Spears and K-Fed, well, this might not be music that you'll appreciate. Likewise, if you're into Death Metal, Speed Metal, or hard core DIY punk rock, this group might not float your boat.
If you're into hazy, lazy atmospheric Post Rock, shoegazer-ish rhythms and lush dense multi-instrumental tracks, Couch might just be up your musical snout. Fans of Kraut rockers Can, Sigur Rós, Tortoise or even some of the more guitar-focused arrangements of M83 will feel comfy in a musical chair with these guys.
Robots in Disguise is a while different enchilada. Currently comprised of Dee Plume (taken from "Nom De Plume", French for a writer's pen name) and Sue Denim (a play on the assumed name word "pseudonym"), their drummer Ann Droid, and rotating duty on bass usually by Noel Fielding or Chris Corner this band has attitude, swagger and some teeth to bite you with. The band's popularity in the states is still growing in the nooks and crannys of the musical underbelly but Robots are particularly popular primarily in continental Europe and especially in the UK where the two have starred in BBC television's comedy Mighty Boosh. The two electro-punk band members starred in a couple of episodes of the show including the appropriately titled "Electro" episode as two electro girls in a band called "Kraftwerk Orange". I wish I could say that I've seen it but it sounds pretty funny just from the name of the band on the show.
Robots have a myspace site and the profile has upwards of 30,000 friends so apparently, a few people have heard of them. I'm always late to the party I guess. Robots have previously released an EP: "Mix Up Words And Sounds" [not available on iTunes] and two albums: "Robots in Disguise", and "Get RID" [iTunes has two albums with the Get RID title including a new version that was released this year with more songs on it]. iTunes also has the single of theirs DJ's Got a Gun and the Turn It Up EP released this year as well but who would actually buy anything from iTunes with iTunes copy-inhibitor "FairPlay" anyway?
That's all I've got for now. Let me know what you think of my music picks in the comments...
So, I was bored the other night and decided to fish through the new releases on iTunes and found a number of bands that I liked. Not that anyone should feel compelled to buy DRM'd music from iTunes but these artists can be found at your local record store or favorite online destination [Amazon, etc.].
First up:
ISAN - Plans Drawn in Pencil [Morr Music - released June 16th, 2006] - The music on this album compares in some respects to many of the thoughtful moments induced by Cliff Martinez's work, the soundtrack composer most famous for his ambient, tingly treatments of scenes in the Steven Soderberg movies Traffic and Solaris, the latter of which is a sleeper favorite of mine, and some of the glitchy elements of the West Coast techno movement without the baleric beats that can be grating and repetitive to sensitive, discerning music fans.
There are lots of tastefully engineered clicks and pops here and there and even some old-DX-7-ish FM sounds at play here but the tone and candor of the music is not completely bleak and without texture, theme or feeling like so many of the glitch movement's artists are notorious for producing. Many of the songs on Plans Drawn in Pencil make me think of a soundtrack for snorkeling the barrier reef or floating in space while repairing the space shuttle, were I so lucky and talented to have actually executed either of those tasks.
The next artist I stumbled upon was Fous De La Mer. Their new album Ultramar is not available yet on Amazon, or if it is, I can't find it there yet but they also released an album called Stars and Fishes [pictured at left] in
Fous De La Mer and ISAN's music is not by any stretch, hard music for those of you familiar with all of the new metal, goth and rock offerings, some of which I've profiled here. It seems more often with new music these days, I am constantly fighting a bi-polar battle with myself between the youth-infused, angst-ridden guitar music of the day against the soothing and somewhat theraputic music released by favorite artists Air and their latest album Talkie Walkie, or the folky, blues-inspired Zero 7's When It Falls albums. I seem to be developing a split musical personality. Hopefully, any of you actually reading this silly drivel will be able to keep up with my changing moods and the constantly mutating musical menu served up here.
The Recalcitrant Engineer [aka, Darin Marshall]
Just before I was laid off at Tribe.net , I made plans to go to Coachella with a friend and after the layoff, my friend and I made the trek in a rental Kia to Indio, CA . The drive was pretty boring but we had lots of CDs and luckily the rental vehicle had a CD player in it. What a concept!
When we finally got there, the line to get to the parking area was backed up all the way down the long road that leads into the massive Polo fields that host the Coachella festival , as well as the parking and camping facilities. A good time was had by both of us at the all-day long walk-athon marathon, even though I'm not getting any younger and had to take occasional breaks once in a while to keep from passing out from heat and sun exposure.
Most of the people in attendance for Saturday's Coachella 2006 line-up seemed to be between 18 and 30 and most of them looked younger than 25 if I had to take a wild guess. When we got there we were lucky enough to get in just in time to see the Wolfmother set. We inched our way further and further into one of the three desert-themed tents where they were just starting to play to get close to the band and to away from the beating sunlight on the backs of our un-sunscreened necks.
Wolfmother
seemed to be one of the more popular bands at the festival with the young ladies although lots of them kept streaming out of the crowd with a guardian boy in check looking like they'd swallowed something that didn't sit well with the constant dry heat and sunlight of the desert. As they succumbed to the heat, we the benefactor's of their choice of poison slowly moved closer and closer but never without being surrounded by sweat-covered people trying to get a glimpse of the band up close and personal.
Wolfmother's members were all making the most of the desert heat with Chris Ross , the bassist/keyboard player rhythmically rocking and tilting the keyboard towards the audience in time with the band's cut-down, classic rock-influenced, old-timey rock-n-roll tunes. The lead singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale 's curly fro'd hairdo was making the girls swoon as he belted out the lyrics to "Mind's Eye " and "Love Train ", two of their tunes that I'd heard on our local radio station here in the Bay Area prior to seeing the band in Indio at Coachella. Stockdale's vocal style reminds me a bit of Jack White here and there with more of a slant towards Robert Plant from the early days of Zeppelin. The song's structures and tones on Wolfmother's debut album are straight up, throw-back rock and roll with late 60s early 70s-style guitar riffs and mystical, magical lyrics and song titles like "White Unicorn ", "Mind's Eye " and "Pyramid ".
I hope I don't have to start growing out the chops, find my Brain Salad Surgery record and get the Frank Herbert books out again but the band definitely brings back a lot of fond memories for me of when I was living with my grandfather in Chula Vista, CA as a wee lad listening to my uncle Dave's Deep Purple, Kansas and Boston albums. Wolfmother's first effort sounds a lot less produced than some of the previously mentioned band's later efforts with the production credits on the album going to Dave Sardy of Red Hot Chili Pepper's, Marilyn Manson and Oasis fame.
Stand-out cuts on the album include:
Mind's Eye
Dimension
Joker & the Thief
Pyramid
Love Train
Members:
Andrew Stockdale (vocals/guitar)
Chris Ross (bass/keyboards)
Myles Heskett (drums)
