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.