6/29 - Timebox

Strangely enough, 2009 has been interesting for Mike Patto. His 1970s prog rock band called (easily enough) Patto saw their track "The Man" used in trailers for the creepy and uncomfortable film OBSERVE AND REPORT. And one of his earlier band, Timbox's popular singles has been repurposed into a surprising, and unneccessary radio hit by the European rappers Madcon. Granted, that song is "Beggin'" which Timebox themselves repurposed from the original outing by the Four Seasons - but the big difference here is that Timebox, as far as I'm concerned, vastly improved the original, whereas Madcon kind of rubbed stink all over it.

For a pretty solid part of 2007 and 2008 I couldn't stop playing Timebox's version of the song. I played it when I was getting ready to go out at night, I put it on mix CDs, iPod playlists, and I DJ'ed it relentlessly every time I'd fill in working behind the bar. The song itself is great - nearly a perfect slice of frenetic melody, with a beat that no doubt could have incited the Northern Soul followers to
knock the roof of the Wigan Casino back in the day (which was probably a Saturday). However, what Timebox really brings to the table here is the addition of a really amazing, pulsing vibraphone solo. Band member Ollie Halsall, who was also an incredibly skilled guitar player, rolled out the vibes in several Timebox originals as well as in this memorable cover, and it became a really unique signature in the band's sound.

Unfortunately, as is all too often the tale of woe in the music world, Decca Deram looked upon Timebox as a pop band, rather than the pre-prog/ heavy-psych/jazz-rock band that they were trying to evolve into. As a result, many of their harder and more experimental songs were left unreleased in favor of novelties like "Baked Jam Roll in Your Eye" (recorded as a lark when the boys were three sheets to the wind) and instrumentals like (the still pretty good) "Soul Sauce." Some critics, looking back, have made mention that Timebox might have been one of the first bands to present Jazz in a Rock context. This fact is supported by the band's initial discovery by Decca, playing the Windsor Jazz Festival in August of 1967.

It's hard to say what Timebox would have become if left to their own devices, but all but one member eventually made their way over to Patto, so perhaps that's our best answer. As it is, the guys of Timbox still left behind a handful of great tunes, and a bucketful of songs with great potential.

6/26 - The Magic Wands

The Magic Wands have been making their rounds on the internet for the last several months. Their current single "Black Magic" has already been given a couple of remix treatments, most notably by Crystal Fighters (a group for whom my jury is still out). But my jury was kick-in-the-ass unanimous on The Magic Wands since I first heard "Teenage Love" a couple of months ago. And while that song is both a romantic and a horny ode to boy/girl pop, with female lead vocals pinching your arm like a disaffected Debbie Harry, and some whitey-rap style agreement from the boy half of our duo. "Black Magic"...I just can't stop listening to it. It's the kind of perfectly catchy, crunchy guitar, electronic-hand-clapping, straightforward pop song that I keep finding myself singing loudly when I'm at stoplights on my scooter. Funny enough, no member of my unwitting traffic audience has even once said, "Hey, what's that wonderful song you are singing so horribly?" Fucking Los Angeles...so unfriendly! So what if my voice sounds like my cat doing Radiohead covers?

You know, another thing I love about Magic Wands is that they are just so adorable. Apparently the story goes like this: Chris and Dexy Valentine met after Chris found one of Dexy's songs on Myspace. That song, incidentally, was "Teenage Love." They started talking on the phone like the song's titular teenagers, and took a liking to exchanging gifts through the mail, and writing each other songs (Chris wrote Dexy "Kiss Me Dead," which would be their first recording as a band). Some time last year, Dexy left her home in LA, and moved closer to Chris in Nashville. They named their band The Magic Wands after Dexy's favorite present she received from Chris.

Now doesn't that melt your little black hearts enough to make you want to punch small woodland creatures? Because it sure does mine. And the best thing is that their music totally sounds like it comes from just this kind of sweet little pairing. And, man! I love it.

http://www.myspace.com/themagicwands

6/25 - Everything Everything

NME describes Manchester's Everything Everything as a band that has "spaghetti guitars." I can't say that I've heard this description before, but it does have a certain ring to it - bringing to mind a loose, tickling, noodly guitar line, much indeed like the guitars that back Everything Everything's two singles "Photoshop Handsome" and "Suffragette Suffragette." The band overlays this with brainy pop in the manner of, perhaps, XTC or Pinback. They don't shy away from either lightly plinking their instruments, or leaning into them and ripping them a new asshole. Time signatures are odd, the vocals shift rapidly from sing-along-ability to inscrutable falsetto pleas, but yet it all comes together in pleasing, arty mish mash that improves over several listens.

Plus, "Suffragette Suffragette" and "DNA Dump" could well be about messy, fluid-filled fucking, or I could possibly just have hopeful pervy ears that are determined to make anything dirty. The former sounds like it either asks, "Who's gonna sit on your face when I'm gone?" or "Who's gonna sit on your fence when I'm gone?" Whatever it is, it still makes me giggle like a boy who just found porn in the bushes by the local creek. The latter, well I can't understand what the heck they're saying in this song, but it sounds like it could be about something gross. And though I'm not saying that I need need any pasty Mancunians sitting on my face - not today, at least - I'll compromise with the boys and let their tunes sit on my ears for a while.

http://www.myspace.com/everythingeverythinguk

6/24 - Dolly Mixture

I hope you don't like this band too much. Because I love Dolly Mixture, and I don't need all of you adding value to their WAAAAAYYYY out of print records (or out of print re-release CD). So, please hate this band, and tell all your friends that they are terrible. Then maybe, just maybe, one day I can score a copy of one of their records without having to sell both kidneys and my extra special Gidget Fortune Telling board game, and then consequently have to live my life pretending like it's not depressing that bodily organs and board games are the most valuable things I currently own.

Dolly Mixture began its short tenure as a band in 1978. The three UK lassies got their first taste of the music biz singing occasional backup for Captain Sensible. Though they are often mentioned in the same breath as the C86 bands I'd call their sound part punk, part new-wave, and part Shangri-La's - perhaps even a more accessible Raincoats with a pop spin. Any of that is kind of a cheap comparison, though, because when I first heard the strains of "Been Teen" on a date's scratchy cassette deck, I liked it so much that despite my general lack of interest in him, I kept him around for more than a month hoping he'd make good on producing a copy of that mix tape for me. No such luck, though, and eventually the desire to receive the tape was far outweighed by his general undesirability. (Note to readers: no matter how much you like music, meeting someone with great music taste can only take you so far, even with the stereo up loud and the lights off) And here I am, a good six years later, still suffering the sad lack of Dolly Mixture in my collection.

One has to wonder how a band that once opened for the Fall, and had U2 open for them...who had a champion in Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley (who released 1983's DEMONSTRATION TAPES on CD in 1995), and whose name gets whispered in many a girl-rock fan's blog confessional would drift into such unavailability. However, it surely has. So, if anyone out there happens to have one of the 1000 original DEMONSTRATION TAPES (aka WHITE ALBUM) pressings and feels like making a humble blogger a mix CD, she (observe me pointing my thumbs in my own general direction here) sure would appreciate it.

For the time being, I'll just keep visiting myspace and listening here.

(not the best quality on this first clip, but hell, it's Dolly Mixture performing live...I'm just happy it's out there in any form)

6/18 - Peggy Honeywell

Let's shift gears a little bit, today, after yesterday's descent into psychosexual cults and manic, throbbing pleas for sanity. Today, we'll visit the very polar opposite in the form of burnished-silver-voiced Peggy Honeywell (aka Clare Rojas, as known in the San Francisco art circles).

Honeywell crafts songs stripped down twinkling acoustic guitar, or the occsional banjo and her wonderfully warm voice. I'd call it "alt-country" but I can't bring myself to call something that sounds like a direct descendent of Harry Smith's American Folk Music set "alt" anything. If this isn't roots, or real country, I don't know what is. Honeywell lays down the blanket of her songs like Loretta Lynn tucking you in at night - albeit a Loretta Lynn who didn't marry at 14 and might have been a hardware store owner's daughter instead of a coal miner's. There's innocence, playfulness, and dangit - it's just plain pretty. Just listen to the simplicity of "Sing Sang Sung" on the 2005 album FAINT HUMMS and tell me that it doesn't remind you of dusty roads and an America you've never seen outside of Steinbeck novels and local Opry broadcasts.

All three of her albums can be heard in their entirety here.

6/17 - Duchess Says

I think the moral of my day is "sometimes it's okay to just stop trying to understand something and accept that it is just nonsense." That moral applies to many things today - like the rule that I'll always start my period right before I'm about to go on vacation, or the fact that Quizno's is way more fattening than McDonalds,or for example, the band Duchess Says. I tried to read what Duchess Says has to say for themselves, and what I gathered was the following:

"Duchess Says was created to insure a faithful representation of the message of the Duchess (or spiritual budgie)...Duchess Says has the mandate to decontextualize the rock and to promote simultaneously their Church on the way."

What the hell are they going on about? Seriously, Duchess Says, don't fuck with me today. I've been listening to your song "Black Flag" and I think it's pretty damned amazing, but it's one thing to sound like a meth-thrash version of Karen O with her hand in a blender every now and then, but another thing entirely to walk around talking like one. Is this because you're Canadian? French Canadian? Or what?

So, I'm going to ignore all that spiritual budgie (yeah, budgie, like the bird) stuff, and I'm going to just channel my rage into your music, which, as it turns out, is kind of an easy thing to do. Especially when you are singing a drum track.

Speaking of being bananas, the video for "Black Flag" is made up of some pretty creepy footage of a cult from a documentary called FEAR IS THE MASTER about the cult of guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh up in Oregon a few decades ago. Yeah, those people aren't dancing to that song, they're just brainwashed, like Tegan & Sara fans only worse.







http://www.myspace.com/duchesssays

6/16 - We Have Band

Lord love technology! Just when I think that I've been impressed with how far a shoestring budget can take a determined fellow with a talent for electronics, something else comes up that makes me go, "What!?" We Have Band is a three piece out of London, until recently unsigned, who are the creators of a mere smattering of singles appearing on record labels like Kill Em All and 50 Bones Records (who? exactly)and a couple of Kitsune compilation exclusive. Yet, with essentially word of mouth, these former record industry employees have made a name for themselves with their salty savvy and delicious stew of disco drone and guileless 80s-esque boy/girl pop taunts.

But, the joyously jerky "Oh!" and the latest single "You Came Out" (with its hilarious employment of the phrase "turkey-basted" as a verb, aren't exactly what I was talking about up there. What I was really referring to was the fact that We Have Band has taken whatever resources were at their disposal and basically made me believe in the music video again.

The recent release of the "You Came Out" video shows us a ridiculously time-consuming and meticulous stop-motion version of the band and creeping face paint that apparently is composed of no less than 4,816 still photos edited together (all available on the bands flickr page, incidentally). In between each photo, the band members had to have the face pain cleaned off, and repainted. FOUR THOUSAND TIMES!! I mean, Jesus H. Christ, who can sit still for that long!? Let's appreciate their patience by watching this thing, shall we?





http://www.myspace.com/wehaveband

6/15 - The Hundred in the Hands

We'll entitle today's pick "One to Watch," because I can't rightly make any sweeping swaths of praise for a band that only has one 7" containing two versions of the same song to offer us. However, I will stick a brightly colored pin in The Hundred in the Hands (THITH to those in the inner circle) as a band I'll be keeping my eye on. The debut single, "Dressed in Dresden" is a thumping little jewel by Jason Friedman and Eleanore Everdell formerly of the band The Boggs. If the mention of The Boggs doesn't exactly prick up your ears (as it certainly didn't mine), it seems as though they were a "critically acclaimed" band that at one time or another also featured members of Holy Fuck, Enon, and Au Revoir Simone - all of whom I've not only heard of but even like to various degrees (a scale from quite a bit on the former, to "nice nap music" on the latter). A little research on The Boggs brings to light an interestingly avant-pop-rock band of the kind that you find pleasing, but probably won't make you faint with joy like a Japanese Michael Jackson fan.

THITH, however, seems to have a little more muscle, added by some very pleasing rhythmic, echoing vocals by Eleanor, and a great B-side called "Undressed in Dresden" that replaces the staccato guitars with some ear-hugging horns.

Additionally, the THITH pair have a pretty nice music blog/eZine on their site wherein they point you in the direction of some good sonic snacks, and offer up some tshirts that may one day give you that "chuh, I've had this shirt since, like, the "Dressed in Dresden" 7" " kind of cache. To boot, the shirt design is actually appealing, so there's that as well in case you also happen to be a fashion forward sort.

And for the thrifty music conoisseurs, THITH gets huge points for making both the A and B side of this single available on their website for 0 dollars and 0 cents per download. So, visit them at http://thehundredinthehands.com/thith-downloads/ today.

6/12- McCarthy

Twee pop music about Marxism named with ironic purpose after Communist-hunting politician Joe McCarthy. Sounds like a picnic on the beach, doesn't it? Ah, but strangely, it is. In the mid-80s Martin Eden and Tim Gane met in school in the UK. Martin was a staunch political leftist, and Tim was a drummer who shared his views. Martin taught Tim to play guitar, and the two started layering 12-string, Byrds-like sundrenched, happy melodies under scathing songs of political protest, sung with a complete lack of macho rasp.

When they released their first album, I AM A WALLET in 1987, the British music press was having a tug of war between the upstart hard hip hop exemplified by Public Enemy and the like, and a little (and some say non-existant) group of guitar strumming college kids introduced on NME's infamous C86 cassette compilation. Many would say that C86 was the beginning of "indie" music as we know it - introducing us to early genre luminaries such as The Shop Assistants, The Wedding Present, Primal Scream and The Pastels, who were providing the much needed counterpoint to hip hop, and a return to guitar music, fey as it may have been. Others would say that C86 didn't represent a movement at all, but was a manufactured group of poorly-representative bands of music that no one listened to, and no one liked.

Several months ago, "Mojo Magazine" from the UK ran a cover feature on this era of music, and included a CD titled "BELOVED," filled with songs from C86 bands, and their contemporaries. The thing that comes to mind listening to the disc is how radical some of the bands still sound today. It seemed to be a time when the aesthetics of punk were driven into closets and bedrooms, and existed in isolation from the outwardly visible trends of music.

And while punk music itself channeled anger and aggression through loud, screaming passion and underachievement of their instrumental mastery, the feel of this remained with the British indie bands of the late 80s. The underachievement was still there, but now it was coupled with a quiet protest against new pop, politics, and the rigid masculinity of rock music. Indeed, this era was one of the first to break the gender line by featurning women as essential members of the bands, bowing to them as creatrixes of influential 'zines, and relying on them as managers, label heads, and bookers.

McCarthy came of age during this heady time. Sales figures were inverse to the music's glowing praise, but nonetheless, there was a following. McCarthy was joined on their third album by Gane's girlfriend, Laetitia Sadier, and soon after, called it quits. Malcolm Eden felt that they'd hit their creative apex on the last release, and drifted to other projects lost in obscurity by time. Gane and Sadier carried the political torch over to their next project, the much better-known indie giant Stereolab. It's not hard to hear the seeds of Stereolab sprouting in the music of McCarthy. Both the pop and the politics sound younger, more idealistic and untrained than the droned, spacefunk loops of latter-day Stereolab. And as such, McCarthy is an important part of our modern indie pedigree - presaging the gleeful intellectual tweeness of the likes of Belle and Sebastian, and more recently The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Videos of the band are a great time capsule of washed-out super8 splendor. It was another time, for sure.

6/11 - Solid Gold

When I went to SXSW last March, you have to understand - I did my homework. I must have listened to 700 new bands trying to find the ones I liked the very best (that also happened to be playing daytime shows that required no passes or wristbands and preferably had free drinks, food, or merchandise of some sort). There were a ton of bands that I stumbled across in the course of this OCD insanity, and Solid Gold was one of my very favorites. These boys from Minneapolis are creating some of the nicest, warmest guitar/electronic hybrid pop music around today. Their songs are catchy, ear-pleasing, and clever. They make you want to dance and sigh off into space with equal delight. Their rhythm section is sharp, clean and pulsating, while the vocals are husky, reedy and melodic. Sounds like a tonic to my ears.

Solid Gold played a day show at SXSW, following up Goldilocks (who will certainly make a later apperance on this blog) and preceding/overlapping Juliette and the New Romantiques playing in the outer tent. I was one of a crowd of maybe 20 people milling around the stage, and undoubtedly the most excited of the bunch - partially because I managed to get my hands on an original formula Sparks (who the hell is drinking that shit without the crack-like energy infusion!?), and also because I had just received a text message saying "You still have a job" informing me that I'd dodged a massive layoff at work. So, quite possibly, my Sparks-infused and layoff-dodging enthusism that spawned me to yell boisterously at the band from a nearly empty room, scared them a little bit. Or I'd guess so judging by their nervous smiles in my direction, and a kind of half-wave-look-away move executed by the guitarist.

But it certainly didn't stop them from playing a great little set, and making an even bigger fan out of me.

Note: the video for Bible Thumper makes pretty funny use of an old Fabulous Thunderbirds video, so you can put the phone down and let the fashion police investigate another case.





http://www.myspace.com/solidgoldband

6/10 - Discovery

There's not a lot of indie-blogger love for Vampire Weekend nowadays, it seems. The hype, stratospheric popularity, increased douchebag-fan contingent, and all the... people-like-it-so-I-hate-it-even-though-I-loved-it-yesterday attitude has taken a toll on everything, it seems, but album sales. One might guess that the guys in Vampire Weekend might not be as concerned at this point about their dayjobs, or at least not so concerned that it would keep some of them from participating in this nifty little collaborative effort with one of the guys from Ra Ra Riot.

The same blogs that promoted then mocked Vampire Weekend are going apeshit over Discovery. When the songs "Osaka Loop Line" and "Orange Shirt" showed up online, there was a trail of drool connecting many a lip to the nearest QWERTY. I wouldn't go so far as to say that my spit glands were that out of control, but they are a pretty tasty little treat, those songs. "Orange Shirt" has almost a blue-eyed soul quality to it, with some slow, deep, echoing booty beats thumping underneath to add a little lowrider-sexuality. "Osaka Loop Line" take a little more of a shimmery, zippy looped approach to back a vocal that wouldn't sound out of place on a Vampire Weekend album, until it slows down and breaks down into a jerky, pulsating bridge.

These two tracks, plus two other equally fun tracks are available for listening on the band's website, and for embedding on, it seems, any blog not hosted by this site. Instead, here's a view from our trusty pal YouTube.






http://www.dscvry.net/

6/9 - The Golden Filter

Oblique lyrics, shimmering vocals, and glittery remixes. The Golden Filter is kind of a mystery at this point - a collective of New York artists and musicians that reach into other peoples' songs and make them ominously gorgeous, and shapeshift them into somthing brand new. There're no stuttery vocal scratches, and tired old loops in these reformed gems, either. Their remix of Little Boots' "New In Town," sounds like two songs battling for dancefloor dominance. It starts with a deep and dark disco tsunami, and ends with a joyous layered chant of the chorus.

With their remix dance card overflowing, The Golden Filter has generated considerable anticiapation for an album of originals. The first single, "Solid Gold," halts all that embarrassment you feel over kinda-sorta starting love disco again dead in it's Fiorucci tracks. If this collection of blissed-out dreamy vocals (harking in a manner, the sensous first third of Blondie's "Atomic") and hedonistic symphonic beats is disco, then screw it, I'll take it. It's music from a different decade of New York - half a soundtrack to key parties and dark corner feel-ups, and equally a soundtrack to an anti-gravity outerspace cocktail reception. From the sound of the demos on their Myspace page, it seems as though the rest of the album will bring much of the same.

Sure, why not?



http://www.myspace.com/thegoldenfilter

6/5 - Billy Nicholls

It's raining here on the West Coast today, so I thought I'd feature something lush, warm and occasionally melancholy to match the weather. Billy Nicholls is a woefully overlooked and under-appreciated songsmith from the UK whose late '60s debut LP "Would You Believe" tragically coincided with the collapse of his label, Immediate Records. As a result, the album - a true gem of occasionally folkish psychadelia - wasn't available for consumption until the 1990s.

When I first read about Billy Nicholls in Ugly Things Magazine around about 1998 or so, I embarked on quite a little quest to obtain a CD copy of this album, and after a mere 3 years of looking, ended up instead with a disc of Would You Believe demos called Snapshot before I was finally able, another 2 years down the line to procure a copy of the actual album. Funnily enough, I think I like the sparsity and candor of the demos even better than the slicked-up psych operas of the finished product. But either way, this stuff is good. As well it should be given its pedigree. Billy's studio pals for the album include label mates Small Faces and Steve Mariott.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it's a hell of a lot easier to find Billy's work nowadays, and in fact, you can get it directly from his own website: www.billynicholls.com. Sadly, I can't locate my favorite Nicholls song, "Kew," to share with you, but I did dig up these fun YouTube contributions, including my second favorite, "Cut and Come Again," which is exactly the sound I wanted to hear instead of my screeching alarm this wet morning.

6/4 - Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears

New soul, thankfully, has finally veered away from the silky smooth bedroom ass-tapping come-ons of the 90s. There's a good number of young soul bands out there that dialed the clock right back to Memphis' hot-as-fire Stax sides, and the emergent funk of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul himself. With Sharon Jones out there strutting the stage for the ladies, Joe Lewis seems poised to pick up the mantle for the men. Lewis fronts Austin's Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears like a mushmouthed preacher of garage soul, generating enough energy on stage to light the White House christmas tree. And he does it with a heavy dose of humor and no shyness for occasinal profanity (as evidenced by the stellar track "Bitch, I Love You"). The Honeybears, for the most part, are a group of young white guys. But, don't hold that against them, because a little band called the MGs back in the day could boast the same, and much like the Honeybears, they could really make those horns sing.

While the 90s might have been about Vandross style sex-you-down lovemakers, the best kind of soul, for my money, is the kind that comes in hot and sweaty, like an urgent quickie, then flips you over and gives it to you again. Black Joe Lewis'll give it to you that way any day of the week.

The embedding for the video of "Sugarfoot," the first single off their album Tell 'Em What Your Name Is is disabled, but can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UOJUbiWC5M
Check it out, and see them live if you can. They'll be opening for the New York Dolls all Summer in the South, the East Coast, and Canada.

http://www.myspace.com/blackjoelewis

6/3 - The Lady Tigra

"We're Tigra and Bunny and we like the Boom!" Ah, 1988. I'm sure there were other things going on in the world, but I was only 13 that year, and I didn't give a crap about anything but making mix tapes by holding a tape recorder up to the radio. Due to the pitfalls of this recording method, Lady Tigra and Bunny D, the Miami teens that made up L'Trimm didn't like the "Cars that Go Boom," on my mix they liked the "Cars that go SHHH! Gahh mom! I'm like recording!?" This may or may not have been worse than the unfortunate unintentional Lionel Richie karaoke I had on another masterpiece mixtape, but since these gems are long gone, I guess we'll never know.

The girls of L'Trimm were hot stuff back in the late 80's to my crowd of teens and tweens, because not only did they pump out some catchy rhymes and wear some dope clothes, but they were also under the age of 18. This doled out a lot of hope to metal-mouthed youths such as myself that superstardom could, good lord, be right around the corner! Although theoretically descendants of the Miami Bass style of rap, L'Trimm (possibly because of their youth) were considered to be better representations of radio-friendly pop music. They knocked out a couple of albums, never finding anything with the hook to follow the success of "Cars With the Boom," and drifted into the mysterious purgatory that houses all one-hit-wonders and the socks you lose in the dryer. Bunny D got married and had four children, and Lady Tigra stayed active in music by managing clubs in Miami. Until recently...

Lady Tigra, sans Bunny, older and wiser, is back on the scene. The odd and perhaps wonderful thing is that her music and style has scarcely changed one iota from the original L'Trimm sound, save for the barest evidence of vocal maturity. Despite this, it sounds shockingly modern. I guess that everything eventually comes around again with fashion and music, and our Lady Tigra happened to be savvy enough last year to recognize that her time is back around. Welcome back, I say, though a little belatedly.

http://www.myspace.com/theladytigra

6/2 - Chew Lips

Kitsune. Boy is that a word I've been reading a lot lately. The fact that this France-based electronic music label is an offshoot of a hipster clothing line, would probably be really annoying if the music they were putting out just wasn't so damn good. I'll admit, I'm drinking the Kitsune Kool-aid, because more often than not, I find myself pretty excited about the bands they choose to support. Anything from French booty electro punk hotshots Yelle to radio-ready La Roux, Cut Copy, Digitalism, A Trak, etc. etc. is fair game. If it thumps, jumps or humps, and it's brand spanking new, Kitsune might snag it first.

No doubt I'll pick some other Kitsune-approved artists for my Daily Bomb at some point down the road. It's as inevitable as Kenny Rogers' beard staying grey, I dare say. But, first up, I choose Chew Lips. Patterns speak for themselves, so if you've read any other entries here, you may have guessed that I favor a girl singer. No exception here. Honeydripping vocalist Tigs croons over Will & James' warm electronic soundtrack. They describe their own music as "drone disco/space synth pop," and I suppose my ears can back that claim. However, what makes them stand out is that Tigs' vocals take a front seat to the spacedronediscopop, and carry a strength that outstrips a lot of her wispy-voice-as-subtle-instrument contemporaries. Although their tunes are worthy of some sing-alongs, they also don't try too hard to slap you in the face with any kind of sloganeering. It's pop music alright, but is happily lacking in pop's disposability.



http://www.myspace.com/chewlips

6/1 - Emil & Friends

Welcome to another episode of Musical Mysteries and Rumors No One Actually Cares About. In this episode, I present to you the upcoming group Emil & Friends. Buzz around the internet, and by buzz I mean nearly inaudible hum, suggests that this group is either A) a musical project of "internationally famous" actor Emile Hirsch, B) actually just one guy with no friends in sight, or C) maybe a band who "plays music inspired by what we believe is God's message to everyone." Well, folks, it's okay to come in off the ledge now, because I think I can shed some light on this worldwide conundrum.

First, I can't imagine that anyone believes that if Emile Hirsch was actually making music, it would sound anything like this at all. Because, probably, it wouldn't. And what Emile Hirsch's (I like to keep repeating that name, because I'm betting that most people reading this are going, "who?") music might sound like, the world may never know, because this isn't it. Secondly, for the time being, according to an interview on asianmandan.com, Emil is friendless. He's just a guy, namely Bostonite Emil Hewitt, playing on his own. But a man likes to keep his options open for a good jam session, right? Thirdly, one only has to guess that these guys: www.emilandfriends.com, who are playing churches and coffeehouses for Jesus are not the same Emil, and probably not his friends either. Though I almost wish that they were. Could you imagine hearing something great on a blog only to later find out that it was played by three guys that look like your dad's old cop buddies from 1987? I think I'd love that, actually.

So, the real Emil & Friends...well, I'm not sure what to call this music. Sometimes, like in "Short Order Cooks," it sounds like something that you'd hear played before an Ashford & Simpson concert. Sometimes, like in "Downed Economy" it sounds like grimy guitar disco with spacepop vocals. Let's just call it a collage and call it a day, shall we?

http://www.myspace.com/emilandfriends

5/31 - Peggy Sue

Formerly known as Peggy Sue & the Pirates, this band has been around for just shy of four years releasing singles and EPs and touring with some UK indie folks like Kate Nash. A few weeks ago they released a new EP called "Lover Gone, " which you can buy from iTunes, or get in a nifty special edition CD that comes complete with a DIY shadow puppet show, whatever that means. Reportedly, they spent some time here in LA working on putting together their first full length album, release date still unreported as of this writing.

Peggy Sue is mostly two honey-voiced lassies named Katy Klaw and Rosa Rex, now joined permanently by a cute skinny boy drummer they refer to as Olly Olly Olly, most likely named such on a drinking binge, which is something the two ladies reportedly enjoy. Their songs, for the most are sweet confections of half-plucked warm guitars, the occasional uke and accordian, upbeat rim-clicking drums, and are dominated by earnestly duetted ruminative and sometimes funny vocal stokes. For whatever reason, it all comes together in a way that makes me want to use the phrase "quite nice" and mean it. Besides the fact, their sparse endeavors into blogging (http://www.peggywho.blogspot.com/) hint that they might be the kind of ladies that might get you soused then break out guitars and make you cry wino tears, then make you dance stupidly until you fall down. Everybody needs more friends like that, really.





http://www.myspace.com/peggysueandthepirates