March 2009

The Archives

• 03.09.09
  ‘A toast to the last of a dying breed…” – Tokyo Police Club   Bands (3)

  

  I’m not entirely sure why I like Tokyo Police Club the way I do. The core building blocks of the band are pretty straight forward: metronomic indie rock drumming, jagged, occasionally reverbed guitar and a thin but emotive lead singer. All the elements separately wouldn’t stand a chance , but together they coalesce and creates something that exceeds expectations.

  Tokyo Police Club – Your English Is Good

  
  

  When the tempo is pushed forward, the songs are at their best; propulsive head-nodding pseudo-anthems that catch you in their wake and pull you along. Tracks like ‘Your English Is Good’ stomp along with all the fervor of punkrock’s grandchild, but with an added attention to shifting detail. The song is littered with touches; the keyboard line glues together the clicking of the drums and the steady, fuzzy bass. It’s not repetitive; the riffs concise and incredibly efficient.

  Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave

  
  

  I’m not the type of listener who reacts to the lyrics. I tend to process the minutia of the sound production rather than respond to the worlds described by the singer. Dave Monks is an exception as very early in my discovery of the band I found myself looking up the lyrics and additionally, the meaning behind the words to ‘In A Cave’.

  The phrasing isn’t always perfect, but his choices create something that is earnest and visual. The narratives twist throughout the song, fragments of images appear and guide you along. I think the almost awkward positioning of some of his word choices are the things that draw me in. The times my ears get confused cause me to only listen closely and examine the narrative better. Like with The Ghost’s Brian Moss, the things that I initially found offputting about some of his lyric choices evolved into the things that I found most endearing about the band.

  The Interface has a few fantastic in-studio acoustic performances up as video and for MP3 download. Plus, Monks has a Maps and Atlases shirt on…you know how I love those guys. Always nice to see people you like have good taste as well.

  You can download the full set for download as an single MP3 from The Interface, but I took the liberty of chopping it up into individual tracks. Far more useful that way:

  Tokyo Police Club – Live at The Interface (Acoustic)

  01. Tokyo Police Club – Tessalate:

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  02. Tokyo Police Club – The Harrowing Adventures:

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  03. Tokyo Police Club – The Nature of the Experiment –

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  – VIDEO
  04. Tokyo Police Club – Centennial:

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  – VIDEO

  The four songs as a ZIP (Sendspace)

  Elephant Shell is a great example of quality from a young band that will only grow as time moves on. The songs they’ve presented us are smartly produced, contemporary indie rock that is driving without being lofty or overly anthemic. The live, acoustic cuts strip away the layers and show something of exceptional craft at the core. What they do next will no doubt be well worth the listen.

  Bonus downloads:

  2007’s Daytrotter Session

  Ra Ra Riot’s stellar remix of Juno

  2007 Brooklyn Vegan Interview

• 03.06.09
  Portland Social Scene – 03/06 – 03/08 (Foundry Field Recordings, Fujiya Miyagi, Gaslamp Killer)   Social Calendar (0)

  

  Hello! Another Portland Social Scene is here. All via by Leigh Friedman, who keeps you updated on all the fun that Portland, OR has to offer.

  Again, I’ll be doing the uncool thing and watching the free screening of Battlestar Galactica at the Baghdad. Maybe there won’t be a line ’cause of the Watchmen opening. Fingers crossed.

  I’d like to recommend The Gaslamp Killer at The Crown Room. He’s one of the resident DJ’s at LA’s Low End Theory which I mentioned earlier this week. He always spins a good set.

  As well, Foundry Field Recordings will be doing a free show on Sunday at Rontoms will also be a good show.

  I’m curious about the 10th Anniversary Tom Waits party, but that could be a little scary for a ton of reasons…

  Anyway, remember that this list is a truncated version of the Life Is A Party list, provided weekly

  Drop an email here to get the full list!

  Enjoy your weekend!

  HIT THE JUMP FOR THE LIST OF THIS WEEKEND’S PORTLAND AWESOME

• 03.06.09
  Epic! – Mario Paint Plays ‘Paranoid Android’   Video (0)

  

  While I had intended for this to just be a blip on the old TTM Twitter, as I made my way through the entire rendition…I realized that this needed to be on the site.

  Youtuber & musician Adolfo Baez loves Mario Paint…loves it to a somewhat sick degree.

  He loves it enough to take a 17 year old SNES game and program it to perform one of Radiohead’s best and most complex songs. Here it is in all its glory:

  
  Adolfo Baez plays Mario Paint plays ‘Paranoid Android’

  Riffs built with dog barks and guitar solos crafted out of what I can only guess are cats meows. As epic as epic can be.

  Check out his youtube channel for more classic video game covers as well, Katy Perry’s ‘Hot ‘n’ Cold’.

  Well, they can’t all be winners.

  Previous love for an odd and interesting Radiohead cover:

  60 Belgian Women Sing ‘Creep’ – Scala & Kolacny Brothers

• 03.05.09
  Schneider TM – Sublimely Swirling German Electro-pop   Singles (2)

  
  
  Germans have an interesting concept of pop music, especially when electronics play in to the mix. I’ll credit them with always having a strangely coherent grasp of melding the organic and the inorganic into something that felt more natural than when other nationalities took a stab at the same thing.
  
  Schneider TM, the recording name of Dirk Dresselhaus, is a guy who has a masterful grasp of a solid songcraft, threading “Slide” with a warm comforting melody that intermingles violin, vocoder, and dissonant guitar ambiance with a thin semblance of looped percussion. As much as the song has a somber overtone, there’s something genuinely uplifting about the song as a whole.
  

  Schneider Tm – Slide

  
  Buy it on Buy it on
  
  2006’s album Skoda Mluvit is a much more realized album when put in context with his earlier work. While his earlier stuff is certainly good…(you can’t really go wrong with 2000’s “Reality Check” there’s something more evolved about the production this time around. It’s cleaner and much more confident, and the whole album is far more cohesive as a result.
  
  As a bonus, here’s the charmingly nonsensical video from the lead single off Skoda Mluvit, “Pac Man/Shopping Cart”:
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• 03.03.09
  Low End Theory has a Podcast!   Singles, Social Calendar (0)

  

  Quite possibly one of the most fun things I did while in LA was to attend Low End Theory, a gathering of local and visiting electro-glitch-hop performers that was worth every penny.

  Given the schedule, I held down while in LA I rarely did much of anything, but managed to hit up Low End Theory a few times…which says a lot. I got to see Daedelus do an amazing and varied set on his magical Monome, as well I got to see Jel (a member of both Subtle and Themselves) destroy on the MPC. It’s a chill atmosphere, with the wide back porch stage and additional upstairs DJ space. Plus, the outside sound system is one of the heaviest I’ve ever had the joy to experience. During Jel’s set, I was standing at the center of the stage and the bass dug in deep…every article of clothing I had on was buzzing. One of the friends I was at the show with got quite sick from the vibrations. Serious business.

  Just today, they’ve released the first of what will hopefully be many podcasts. They’re waiting for approval from Apple to get the thing listed up on iTunes, but for now you can grab it directly from their site:
  
  

  
  

  Low End Theory Podcast Vol. 1

  
  
  This month, resident DJ Daddy Kev and the always excellent SAMIYAM split the 50 minute set. The whole thing is a fantastic blur of patented LA glitch and spacey post-Dilla hip-hop.

  Since you just missed the awesomeness of Daedelus & already TTM.com loved Nosaj Thing on the 25th, here’s two upcoming at Low End Theory nights noting:

  3/11: DJ NOBODY BIRTHDAY DRINKING CONTEST – with Free The Robots

  4/23: LAZER SWORD

  I enjoyed both of them alot last year. Santa Ana’s Free The Robots is probably one of the best beat smiths to hit my ears in a long while. He’s got the same brilliant ability to craft real songs, the same that pulled me in when I first heard DJ Shadow all those years ago. His Free The Robots EP (iTunes link) is a fantastic piece of work that easily outshines a lot of his contemporaries. He’ll be hitting Portland on May 1st at the Crown Room

  
  

  Free The Robots – Diary

  
  

  Finally, grab this free download of Lazer Sword’s Blap to the Future mix:

  

  Free downloadable mixtapes are my favorite things lately. What mixtape do you love the best?