So I really hate to do another one of those manic fanboy posts but one of our favorite bands just remixed one of our other favorite bands and it sounds fucking awesome.
The serene, dreamlike wonderland that was the centerpiece of Native Speaker just climbed on board a hyper-glitched noise-techno spaceship, captained by none other than Born Gold (who were no strangers to remixes when they called themselves Gobble Gobble) that takes Braids vocalist Raphaelle Standell-Preston's ethereal vocals and chops them up with a kaleidoscopic–but no less psychedelic–finesse. The overall style actually reminds me a lot of some of Asura's remixes on Unreleasables.
Go buy Native Speaker. It's an incredibly beautiful album.
Then go get Born Gold's album Bodysongs for FREE. It's some of the most forward-thinking and experimental music I've ever heard, and it's catchy-ass dance-pop to boot.
THIS DUDE IS ONE OF MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE BEAT PRODUCERS. GO GRAB DAYPASS, OR NOMAPS IF YOU WANT A LITTLE MORE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK. BUT SERIOUSLY, PEEP THIS DUDE'S WARES
SOME REALLY NEAT EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONIC SHIT FROM THE DUDE WHO CO-PRODUCED THE DIRTY PROJECTORS' BITTE ORCA. REALLY DIGGIN HIS STUFF LATELY, GRAB THIS MIX HE DID FOR ALTERED ZONES IF YOU DIG
Levert - Davis Serengeti (left-field rap shit) dropped mad rhymes on some matthewdavid (experimental/ambient/beat shit) tracks, and you can get a whole album of this awesomeness for a mere $7. I suggest you do, if you consider yourself a connoisseur of the strange like ourselves...
Cecil Frena's future-apocalypto-pop project Born Gold (until now known as Gobble Gobble) just released another track from their debut LP, Bodysongs, which comes out in little more than a week (Sept. 20) via Hovercraft (their collective with Purity Ring and Kuhrye-oo) and Crash Symbols. I preordered that shit on vinyl, so I'm lucky enough to be downloading the mp3's as we speak. That means a review is coming, so GET READY.
*ahem.*
For fans of "Lawn Knives," arguably their "hit" thus far, "Decimate Everything" is gonna sound pretty familiar. It's in a similar tonality, at a similar tempo, and even the wordless croon of the hook isn't all that different. But there's a hell of a lot more intricacy to the production on this one, and it incorporates some really neat switches between dancey techno and two-steppy half-time.
So you get the point. Get the track, go preorder the vinyl if you can't wait two weeks for the mp3's (you now get an instant download if you grab the wax) and accept Born Gold as your new deity. Or just "like" them on Facebook.
Love this one. Dark, deep, and driving, with more than a sprinkling of house influence. Who cares if "Decimate Everything" sounds like "Lawn Knives," they've never done ANYTHING like this track. Alabaster Bodyworlds - Born Gold
Updated take on some classic Gbl.
(( also, you can now like Crustacean Cognition on Facebook! GO DO THAT SHIT!! ))
This is pt. 7304857 in a series of posts entitled, "Patkins is a lazy fuck and El Langosta feels obligated to keep up appearances." (he's actually been out of town at some awesome music festival, so I really can't blame him. it's just really fun)
Stepdad are an awesome synthpop group from Michigan. Their lead singer is known only as "Ultramark." Their song "My Leather, My Fur, My Nails" has been stuck in my head for a month now, and my eyes are continually dazzled and delighted by the accompanying video, which you may watch below.
Today, I found that my craving for more Stepdad had boiled over, so I caved and dropped the $1 (!!!) necessary to procure their Ordinaire EP. And man, am I impressed. This was just what I wanted: a cornucopia of fun, catchy, and colorful pop tunes, with a few splashes of 8-bit and a healthy dose of the 80's. They've got a great sound and they do a lot with it. But Stepdad are no one-trick ponies: every song comes with its own feel and a unique set of sounds; sometimes I hear the spectre of Gobble Gobble's ecstatic dance-pop melodies, at other times I hear shades of fellow Michiganers Tally Hall in the vocal production...basically, this EP impresses the hell out of me.
Grab this if nothing else. Maybe after a month you'll wind up doing the same thing I did and getting the EP out of sheer craving for more of this badassery.
They're working on an LP, Wildlife Pop, which is being produced by none other than Chris Zane. If that doesn't mean anything to you, let's just say that Patkins and I have an unhealthy obsession with Passion Pit, whose INCREDIBLE first album, Manners, was produced by Chris Zane. So you can imagine how excited this makes me.
So you should really go grab the EP. It's essentially 8 slices of epically good pop music, and you only have to pay $1for it, though you're allowed to pay more. You will not regret it.
A lovingly curated compilation of laptop-crafted 21st-century jams, leaning towards the electronic/colorful/poppy side of things, this mix should serve as the ideal soundtrack to the neo-pagan post-rave bacchanalia of the future, after the bombs have stopped falling and the human race has re-emerged from hiding to rebuild...and party. Also reflects the ecstatic mood of early summer break. The focus here was more on track selection than super-impressive translations (and at the end I sort of just gave up, as you'll see), but I did my best.
Check our archives/artist labels (on the right side of the page) if you hear something you like and want more. I can safely say I've been listening to every one of these artists WAY too much recently. :D
1) The Upside - LandLord 2) All This Evil - Newman Wolf 3) End of Days - Gobble Gobble 4) Wherever We Are - Human Life 5) Folds In Your Hands - Passion Pit 6) Talamak - Toro y Moi 7) In Heat (Javelin Remix) - HEALTH 8) Cathode Drama - Exeter 9) My Leather, My Fur, My Nails - Stepdad 10) Lawn Knives - Gobble Gobble 11) Over (jonwayne's analog world) - Drake 12) Pillz (jonwayne's drum circle) - Gucci Mane 13) Post Atmosphere (Baths Remix) - Shlohmo 14) Eat Sun, Son - Gobble Gobble
So this past weekend included what might be the pinnacle of all Fridays, ever (hence Rebecca^). Namely because my little, middle-of-nowhere Ohio college town was blessed by the presence of three giants: Rich Aucoin, The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!, and Gobble Gobble. If you've ever seen even one of these bands live, you'll know that all three of them playing on the same night wasn't just cathartic, it was borderline orgasmic.
If you read this blog, you already should know who Gobble Gobble is, and if you don't then would you kindly go and get all of their music for free? Oh yeah. They put it all on mediafire JUST FOR YOU. They are, in fact, that awesome.
On to the other folks:
Rich Aucoin is an electro-pop artist from Canada, and he's got a hell of a live show. It's interactive, energetic, and millennial-friendly: almost every song starts with a remixed or otherwise chopped-and-screwed viral YouTube video (Bed Intruder, Goat Talks Like A Man, etc.). It doesn't hurt that the man utterly SHREDS on that microkorg (and the vocoder!!!). I'm always impressed by live electronica acts that manage to achieve that perfect balance between energetic stage presence, singing, and actual technical skill. Seriously. He can do this vocoder melody, LIVE, fucking PERFECTLY:
Next up was The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt!, who absolutely killed. If Aucoin's set was interactive, theirs was borderline communal: frontman Neil Fridd invited everyone to put on a costume, and the singalongs were beautifully effortless. I didn't see him step out of the crowd once, he was so perfectly engaged the whole time. Left me singing the chorus to this song over and over again for the next three days...
Grab their album on David Byrne's (!!!!) label, Luaka Bop. Costs money but meh. So does food. And you can't live without that shit.
Then Gobble Gobble played, and fucking murdered as usual. But (for the aforementioned reason of posting too much about them on this blog) in their place I'm going to introduce a group that actually played with them on this tour, though at another show:
Stepdad is, to follow the theme we've got going here, a colorful, talented, and EPIC synthpop group with a taste for epilepsy-inducing myspace pages (see Gbl's for comparison, or Terror Pigeon's). They have an EP out called Ordinaire, and it only costs $1, though you can pay more if you like! Their debut album, Wildlife Pop (due out this May), is being produced by Chris Zane (Passion Pit, Les Savy Fav), which gains them automatic awesome points in my book. This is a video for the single "My Leather, My Fur, My Nails:"
Not only is this an incredibly epic video, the song itself is infectiously catchy. Grab it for free, courtesy of the band:
This shit will get stuck in your head. Go get their EP, $1 is fuckin nothing for 8 awesome songs!!
Again: if you get ANY chance to see just ONE of these bands live, DO IT. Most life-changing, incredible live shows I've ever been to (Stepdad excepted, since I've never seen them. but they're probably awesome!)
These guys, from LA, are pretty much their own genre. Describing Nguzunguzu's sound is about as easy as saying their name (its not). Suffice to say it is clubby, hot, tropical, heavy electro. Its very odd in many ways and you need to be in the mood for it.. but they are fascinating. Watch out for them for SURE (along with Canblaster).
Walking With A Ghost (Tegan And Sara Cover) - The White Stripes (Removed)
Now that they broke up we have to celebrate them!
Avantcore - Busdriver (Removed)
This is mostly here for El Langosta, because we both love indie rap. Busdriver is a member of the Nobody/Nocando cadre. that means its awesome. i mean, the track in this is essentially a piano jig with clever and light lyrics on top. loveeeeeeee
Caught A Ghost is a new side project of Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jesse Nolan, frontman of Red Arrow Messenger (formerly The Cheat), which may or may not still exist. He's also just an all-around awesome guy. But this is no typical singer-songwriter venture. This is some forward-thinking shit, and it's making me really excited.
These guys make dazzling genre experiments that confuse and delight at the same time. Which comes as no surprise to me, seeing as the last time I ran into Jesse Nolan (and Ghost backup vocalist Marushka Mujic) was at L.A. genrefuck/beat scene club Low End Theory (with Take and FlyLo, which we reviewed HERE), and it seems like he's taking his music in a logical direction: there's some blue-eyed, old school soul, there's the solid indie rock chops I remember from his earlier work, but now he's doing some impressive production as well, incorporating elements of dubstep, electro, and beat music into his songs. And it's awesome.
They've got a little 3-song release out (the Cag Mixtape), and each of its tracks are completely original and innovative in their own little way.
"Sleeping At Night" reminds me a bit of Kele's solo stuff/Bloc Party's electronica adventures on Intimacy (cf. the horns on "Mercury").
"Sugar In My Coffee" is what would happen if Free The Robots and Take decided to make some gritty chain-gang-work-song blues. Best song on the tape, the sound they got here is just incredible. Really makes me respect Nolan's production chops.
"Time Go" is like downtempo 90's alt-rock meets ambient electronica textures. Really neat song, another favorite of mine.
The point is, I am mega-pumped for what the future holds for this project. You should really get it on iTunes, it's only $3. And it's not everyday a 3-song EP comes with this diverse and interesting a sound.
Lobster Out.
BONUS VIDEO:
Fun Fact: this video was handmade with little more than an iphone. Impressive!
You may not have heard of him, but The-Dream is one of the most prolific Top 40/pop songwriters of the past five years (e.g. "Single Ladies," "Umbrella," "Touch My Body," "Baby"). He's also done some solo stuff, most of which tends towards the absurd (e.g. "Falsetto," in which he boasts that his sexual prowess causes an instantaneous upward pitch change in the voice of his beloved, and which features an electric guitar solo on the bridge). "Nikki" is one such solo effort, a bitter message to an ex-lover, here covered by one of my favorite artists, Canada's Gobble Gobble. While it's a tad odd at first to hear Cecil Frena trading his usual vivid, grotesque lyrics for "shawty, I been making love to Nikki," this jam still delivers a healthy dose of brilliant-but-off-kilter production, and for the umpteenth time proves Frena a mad scientist, but one reanimating dead pop music instead of corpses.
Another oddball indie take on standard pop music. Here it's more chillwave-does-Top-40-Hip-Hop, saturating a familiar-sounding (i.e. you've definitely heard it before) beat in reverb, synth washes, and ethereal vocals. Oh Fortuna ftw! [[I got this (as well as the next 3 tracks) from a really cool //free// compilation arranged by none other than Gobble Gobble, in honor of the artists they toured with this year. You can grab that HERE.]]
Glasser comparisons may be made, but Braids comes across as a little less tender than my co-blogger's recent muse, at least in this track. Awesome Indie/Synthpop track. Really cool production, and epic vocals. (Braids is also about to support Baths and Star Slinger on probably one of the coolest fucking tours to grace the surface of the earth, so check the dates here and get on that shit!)
An otherworldly, gorgeous intro of colorful synths paves the way for a hushed lullaby punctuated by magical synth strings being plucked underwater...all with a distinctly classical feel (and real strings at one point!). It's kinda like the intro to The Shins' "Sleeping Lessons," reimagined by a very shy baroque-pop group (how's that for an analogy?). This is a standout track from the mixtape, I can safely say I have never heard anything like it before in my life. Really cool production and composition going on here, even if it's not the catchiest tune ever. Check out Candy Claws, I know I'm going to.
This one's a fucking jam. Glitchy as fuck, but with a wicked bassline and a hard-hitting beat; it's like SebastiAn + 80's bass synths + soul...Old Arc is another name I will be looking further into.
Love these guys. Found em' on Apes With Barrels, who have great taste in electro-pop artists as well as their more rave-oriented counterparts. Funky, catchy well-produced; and that fucking lead after the chorus gets stuck in my head every time I hear it. Hooray for Human Life!
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So I really hate to do another one of those manic fanboy posts but one of our favorite bands just remixed one of our other favorite bands and it sounds fucking awesome.
