DOWNLOAD: Tussle - Night Of The Hunter
Four-on-the-floor kick drums in rock songs are, to me anyway, the holy grail of percussion. Who doesn’t love stammering along, looking like Joe Strummer caught in a discotheque, all poised upper body and constantly jacking legs. The heartbeat metaphor is too easy, but it’s also hard to avoid, the drum's constant pulse infecting the veins of those listening or watching like a rhythmic disease. Tussle’s “Night Of The Hunter” rocks one of the best four-on-the-floors I’m jamming too right now, buffering it with two-note bass drone, sampled piano and reversed bites of sound. Halfway through, the beat cuts and all that’s left is the echoing feedback of looped samples, which drift away until the drums come back, the bass goes lower, and the song turns into a shuffling disco freak out. It’s one hell of a journey—and an instrumental one at that—but it’s a healthy preview to the San Francisco troupe’s Cream Cuts, due August 26 on Smalltown Supersound. As the headline on their MySpace says, “Give the drummer some <3”.
Sounds like: Nisennenmondai, Battles, Crystal Antlers
STREAM: Fuck Buttons - Bright Tomorrow
Oh techno, how can I do you justice? I hate you so much. But once in a while there's a band, and I'm talking about Fuck Buttons here, a band that breaks down those walls of prejudice and opens your heart. So to all the M83s, the Orbitals, the Ratatats and now, the Fuck Buttons, I salute you. They're from Bristol. The UK. And they make such overwhelmingly huge sounds, such lung-paralyzingly mesmerizing music, that you can't help but take a knee.
DOWNLOAD: Ecstatic Sunshine - Little Big Dipper
If Beethoven had a.d.h.d. and tourette's and an advance copy of Please Kill Me, maybe "Fur Elise" woulda been "Little Big Dipper" instead of a McDonald's commercial. Reinforcing the "Baltimore got something in the water" theory, Ecstatic Sunshine virtuosically shred and shit on everything that came before them with playfully violent instrumental send-ups and throw-downs of classic punk ragers, playing with form like Lennie played with mice. It looks like this. It sounds like this:
FEATURED: Johnny Greenwood x There Will Be Blood
Over the weekend we went down to our local multiplex to check out the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, There Will Be Blood . The film was on top of our must-see list for two reasons: 1) We love Paul Thomas Anderson and 2) Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead (whose credibility has been restored with their great new album In Rainbows) scored the entire thing. Not every day do you see a movie in which the score (and not just chosen songs) plays such a huge part in the story and overall aesthetic. Greenwood used swells of electric guitars and strings to create the brooding undertone of the film, which made it all the more enjoyable. The Swill Merchant felt the same and wrote a piece on Greenwood and There Will Be Blood today.
To The End Of The World With Sigur Rós
When you listen to a Sigur Rós track it's like you're visiting the end of the world. In fact their music could be the end of the world. The band has been written and talked about by everyone under the sun and for the past several years their fanatical following has grown and grown. Now they've collaborated on a film. And it's wonderful.
Last week the band played an up-close and personal show at the Vista movie theater in LA. It was the LA premiere of the documentary Heima and needless to say the performance was spectacular. There are the obvious references to Bjork and all things Icelandic but there's something equally as special in Sigur Rós. It could very well be something in the water. And if it is? Then we want some. In fact water features in such an important and prominent way in the gentle yet brutal landscape of this film, that it makes you want to visit Iceland.
The film features a series of magical free concerts that the band threw as a thank you to the people of Iceland. In a way, the band used the shows to help them reacquaint themselves with their "heima" or home, the settings are equally as incredible as the band’s music and together they border on a religious experience. If you've ever seen the band perform live in a big venue imagine capturing that energy in a disused Icelandic herring factory in front of 30 people.
If you blink you might miss it but underneath all that beauty and power is a David Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en, Fight Club)-like noise. It's as if he got hold of the film and infiltrated a sub text to it that is Sigur Rós. There's something lurking underneath as these gentle, incredible souls warm you to their home of Iceland.
Directed by Dean DeBlois, who very strangely also made Lilo and Stitch, this is a layered and beautiful noisy film.
Heima is in cinemas on November 2 and on two disk DVD on November 5. Disk one is the film and includes two exclusive new songs "Guitardjamm" and the traditional "A Ferd Til Breidarfjardar 1922". The second disk contains extras and all the songs from the film. There's exclusive new performances, and the brand new track "Heima".
Check out the trailer
Also worth checking out is Screaming Masterpiece, a compelling doc on the unique Icelandic music scene.
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