Just in time for the weekend…Live Eye Tv’s Mixtape #9 is an awesome collection of music to look forward to as we head on into those dog days of summer! Clockin’ in at just over an hour, much of this music will be released in September, some in October, and some of it’s already out! We got your limited edition, hard to find, and your fresh baked indie rock to go, with MP3s from Veronica Falls, Fresh & Onlys, Puro Instinct, Case Studies, Male Bonding, The War on Drugs, and so much more. Stream the MP3s below or download them as a Podcast…iTunes. CONTINUE READING
In anticipation of their debut LP Veronica Falls have a new 7″, Bad Feeling on Slumberland. In addition, the band recently posted the song “Come On Over” to their Soundcloud page! On it, some of the band’s creepy, “Beachy Head” crust has fallen off to reveal the fine, inner-workings of a 90’s era, indie rock band. While some might miss the basement spook of a track like “Found Love In A Graveyard”, the band’s warmed tones and newly added twang still cast a noir-palette across Roxanne Clifford’s insistent enticement’s. I could imagine finding a track like this back in the day on 7″ at my favorite record store…digging through some imports, taking a chance on some Flying Nun band I’d never heard, only to find my newest, most favorite group ever!
MP3: Veronica Falls “Come On Over” (Slumberland)
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Merrill Garbus and her project tUnE-YaRdS continue their meteoric rise to artistic stardom! Garbus recorded the songs for her first album, Bird-Brains, on a handheld digital recorder, and produced it using a free copy of Audacity. Originally, that album was self-released on recycled cassette tape, however it’s over-whelming success led to a worldwide release by 4AD, remastered at Abbey Road Studios by Christian Wright! This past spring Garbus released her second album for 4AD, w h o k i l l, and now we have an awesome 12″ of remixes for the song “Gangsta”. The record will include remixes by Cut Chemist and Ad Rock, with the original song and an a capella track. A capella track! You know what that means kids…time to make your own remix.
MP3: tUnE-yArDs “Gangsta (Ad-Rock remix)” (4AD)
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The Fresh & Onlys new 7″, I Would Not Know the Devil, will be coming out on the London label Sexbeat, September 5th. Hailing from San Francisco, and part of it’s prolific music scene, Tim Cohen and Shayde Sartin continue to deliver American rock gems built around their expert mix of melodic and distorted guitar work, Cohen’s rich, smokey vocals, and the pairs sharp, pop smarts. The result is fresh and vintage, and the band’s ability to craft these fully realized, singular tracks is well suited for the 7″ and 12″ format!
MP3: Fresh & Only’s “I Would Not Know the Devil” (Sexbeat)
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This month we fell in love with the video for Puro Instinct‘s song “Stilyagi”, which features the band’s good friend Ariel Pink! Puro Instinct are the sisters Piper and Skylar Kaplan, with Piper on vocals and Skylar playing guitar. The two share an affinity for the kind of kitsch-laced, lo-fidelity pop that Ariel Pink pulled off on home recorded albums like The Doldrums or House Arrest. Like their friend, Puro Instinst are drawn to a casual, what’s-at-hand methodology in their sonic creations, making a timeless pop sound that is hard to place, yet sounds well-worn, and like something you must have heard before. Watching Ariel Pink wander the night streets of Hollywood, and listening to Puro Instinct on the song “Silyagi”, which loosely translates from Russian as “style hunter”, one might imagine these artists as newly emigrated, slightly displaced persons wandering Hollywood Blvd., hungry to translate into their own language every tacky and gaudy joy LA might have to offer!
MP3: Puro Instinct “Stilyagi (ft. Ariel Pink)” (Mexican Summer)
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Male Bonding‘s second LP for Sub Pop, Endless Now, will be out August 30th! The London trio recorded this one in upstate New York at Dreamland Studios with famed producer John Agnello, who has worked recently with Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth. Agnello brings nearly three decades of recording experience to the table, and a track like the album’s opener “Tame the Sun” finds the band cleaning up it’s songs just enough to reveal how solidly they stand on inventive song craft and the creative interplay between John Arthur Webb (vocals, guitar) and Kevin Hendrick (vocals, bass)! Party like it’s 1993!!
MP3: Male Bonding “Tame the Sun” (Captured Tracks)
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If you like your punk desperate and with it’s proverbial back to the wall, I reckon your gonna dig the new Cover Girl 7″, Paris Burns, coming out September 8th on Captured Tracks. Cover Girl is a self-described “multi-gendered beast”, and it is made-up of members from several British art punk bands like Peepholes, Bloody Knees, Wetdog and Trash Kit. On the track “Paris Burns”, the band creates a genuine sonic panic full of snot and let’s-go-break-some-shit vigor, a perfect soundtrack for looting your local GAP. Now, go get what’s yours, kids!
MP3: Cover Girl “Paris Burns” (Captured Tracks)
Since the disbanding of The Dutchess and the Duke, Seattle musician Jesse Lortz has formed a solo project called Case Studies, releasing an outstanding album this summer, The World Is Just a Shape to Fill the Night on the label Sacred Bones. Recorded and produced by Greg Ashley of Gris Gris, who does a great job of keeping the tracks raw and naked so that Lortz’s voice and lyrics can travel the distance between love boozey and sardonic songs like “Lies”, to the heart breaking and deadpan emotional eviscerations of a track like “The Eagle or the Serpent”. This latter number sounding like some lost Leonard Cohen song, with Lortz’s tired but brave self-examination ruthlessly exposing himself verse by verse and reaching hard won insights, to which a synchopated beat is finally added, as well as a swirling chorus of female vocals to lift the heavy song into the air. Love on brother!
MP3: Case Studies “The Eagle or the Serpent” (Sacred Bones)
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Looks like we have a new album from The Drift to look forward to, Blue Hour, with a release date of October 4th on the fine label Temporary Residence Limited! This will be the bands third album, but the first since losing their good friend, trumpet player Jeff Jacobs, to a long battle with cancer. His passing came before the band was set to record Blue Hour, and in his honor they decided to forge on as a three-piece. This new track, “Horizon”, is dedicated to his memory, and it makes great use of a hardcore bass line that drives on unrelentingly through the course of the song, as the band tames its soaring and buzzing guitars into an intricate interplay of abstract, ear-bending tones.
MP3: The Drift “Horizen” (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
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The Silk Flowers have a new 12″, Days of Arrest, that just came out August 9th on Captured Tracks. The band continues to travel from it’s post-punk, lo-fi roots, and on the track “This Stays” the band finds itself in the hyper-crystaline realms of IDM. Beautiful, cold fetish abounds, as the track seems to ice skate around swirling strings inside a digital replica of a snow globe. Now, if the band could just get that guy to quit singing like Ian Curtis on Oxycontin, they might be onto something.
MP3: Silk Flowers “This Stays” (Captured Tracks)
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In October, High Places will release their third LP, Original Colors, on Thrill Jockey Records. High Places is the duo Rob Barber and Mary Pearson, and they recently relocated to Los Angeles from NYC. On their past albums, the duo’s organic approach to electronic music has allowed multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber to incorporate a slew of acoustic instruments into their home recordings, including 12-string guitar, banjo, and Kalimba, as well as household items like plastic bags, mixing bowls, and wooden blocks. To this odd collection of instruments, the band often adds driving bass rhythms, crisp beats, and Mary Pearson’s wide-eyed and starry vocals. On their new track, “Year Off”, Pearson’s spoken and sung vocals weave mystical dream tales to Barber’s club-crafted, pagan rhythms.
MP3: High Places “Year Off” (Thrill Jockey)
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With only 150 copies available you’re gonna have to act fast if you want to pick up the new Righteous Acid cassette Mellow Doses, out now on Cameron Stallone’s Sun Ark imprint. Righteous Acid is the solo project of Bakersfield, CA’s Alex Sarad, trap-drum player for The Invisible Astro Healing Rhythm Quartet. On the awesome track “Casa Zimbabwe”, Sarad slowly layers African-Psych guitar lines until they build into an all night jam session on the beach!
MP3: Righteous Acid “Casa Zimbabwe” (Blast First Petite)
Estonian “bedroom producer” and chanteuse Maria Minerva has just released her first full-length, Cabaret Cixous on Not Not Fun. The artist, whose real name is Maria Juur, relocated several years back from her birth city Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to London, to pursue a Masters in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. To alleviate home-sickness, she started producing her own music in 2009, often using chance methods such as entering a random word into a Youtube search, finding a video clip, and using it to make a loop which might serve as a basis for a track. Many of her songs have the strangest sense of structure, like this track “Kyrie Eleison”, which seems to be some sort of musique concrete of London’s vibrant night scene, drifting widely on the smokey wanderings of Maria’s bedroom vocals.
MP3: Maria Minerva “Kyrie Eleison” (100% Silk)
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It looks like HTRK‘s (pronounced Hate Rock) fast rise from a Melbourne based experimental music trio to international artists extraordinaire will not be cut short by Sean Stewart’s suicide last year. Original guitarist/programmer Nigel Yang and vocalist/percussionist Jonnine Standish have continued on, and will release Work (work, work) on the label Blast First Petite on September 12th. Give the track “Sweetheart (A. K. A. Love You)” a listen to hear some lost jam session between Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, where maddening and slightly ill sounding Heathen Earth tones meet the narcotic drone of slow motion beats and Standish’s asexual vocal delivery.
MP3: HTRK “Sweetheart (A. K. A. Love You)” (Blast First Petite)
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Find yourself pining for the ethereal harmonics and dreamy processing that the Cocteau Twins applied to Elizabeth Frasier’s vocals? Well then the debut LP Forever, by Austin band Sleep Over Forever might just be what cures that ill. Sleep Over Forever is the recording project of Stefanie Franciotti, and the band includes Christine Aprile and Eli Welbourne who have both worked with Austin’s Belaire. Live, the group also includes Jesse Jenkins, of yet another great sounding Austin band, Pure X! Forever comes out September 27th on the label Hippos in Tanks, and on the track “Romantic Streams” a warm, velvety night seems to envelope you while raining down tiny sparkling meteors, to the mercurial streams of Franciotti’s voice. Hard to argue with that!
MP3: Sleep Over Forever “Romantic Streams” (Hippos In Tanks)
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Adam Granduciel’s band The War on Drugs is quite an amalgam of improbable things…The artist left Oakland in 2003, relocating to Philly where he hooked up with Kurt Vile, and the two started playing as The War on Drugs, self-releasing a demo in 2005. The band would go onto release several EPs in 2008, Barrel of Batteries, a free release, and Wagonwheel Blues on the label Secretly Canadian. However, following that release, Vile left to pursue his own solo career, while Granduciel continued on as The War on Drugs. Granduciel and Vile are definitely cut from similar sonic cloth, and might even be mistaken for “brothers from another mother”, each playing the kind “plugged in” American folk that draws comparisons to Springstein and Dylan. Where the two differ, though, is Granduciel’s penchant for keyboards and sequencers, which on a track like “Come to the City”, off The War on Drug’s newest LP, Slave Ambient, adds strange, Blade Runner atmospheres to his Born in the USA musings.
MP3: The War on Drugs “Come to the City” (Secretly Canadian)
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Only In Dreams is the Dum Dum Girls second full-length, out now on Sub Pop, and on it the band makes a major leap forward, creating deeply affecting pop music. Previous records like I Will Be and He Gets Me High, were lo-fi gems full of burned-out tape hiss and neon sweet do-wop. The newest, finds singer/songwriter Kristen Gundred shedding her previous nostalgia for drug-laced teen dreams to deal with a heavy dose of reality, as she learns of her mother’s fatal illness. Confidence and maturity abound on the new track “Coming Down”, with Gundred’s searing lyrics becoming theatre-sized, while they are delivered with the damaged grace of a New Wave Patsy Kline.
MP3: Dum Dum Girls “Coming Down” (Sub Pop)
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