Thom Cummings

New Andrew Bird track is a little less fragile, at least on the inside out, than before, with a driving, rousing chorus.  Of course it leads to a little bit of whistling in the coda but what else are you expecting.  Limited edition vinyls available over on http://www.andrewbird.net/

Genesis by Grimes

New track from Grimes, preceding her third album Visions, is as ethereal, sensual and chic as ever. Maybe moreso.

shared from exfm

The new single from The Mary Onettes is a characteristically poppy affair but the Cure-ism has been dialed-up a notch.  This is taken from the EP “Love Forever” out on February 28 on Labrador.  Sounds like it could be a sappy affair but I kinda like it…

Order the 12” vinyl from their store (but be quick since there’s only 1000 copies)

I discovered Escort through a club remix of the first track on this album, Caméleon Chameleon, which first appeared on an NPR podcast and then in my SoundCloud feed.  Now I’m listening to the full album, thanks to the power of the internet.  These guys are funky as hell, rediscovering the old disco roots of Brooklyn via the medium of gloriously upbeat tracks mixed with a sly sense of modernism.  Officially tipping Escort as a live band for 2012…

Dear readers…. you may have noticed something of a winter hibernation here on HotSpotMusic.  2012 has brought about many changes and how we run HotSpotMusic will be one of them.  It has always been my intention to write about music in the way that I consume it - full albums - and to find music to share with others in a simple, unpretentious way.  And so it must continue.   

Since I neither have the time nor energy to maintain the both the quality and quantity of output that this blog and you deserve I am forced to choose….  Therefore, from this week HotSpotMusic will continue in one of two ways:

1. If you love the current format (simple album reviews, on time and on the money) then come write for us!  Demands are simple: love music, love writing and have time for both.

2. HotSpotMusic will change - I will continue to post but will increase the scope - not just album reviews but videos, playlists, single tracks, remixes and more.  From all over the place too, SoundCloud, exfm, 8tracks, Spotify, Rdio and more.  Reviews will be shorter but more plentiful.  It won’t be the HotSpotMusic we’ve come to know, but it will still exist and maybe there will be more new music as a result.

Got an opinion on how to keep things afloat?  Let me know!  Otherwise, get ready for some unfiltered, unadulterated, unbelievable tunes coming your way soon.

extensionfm:

It’s a whole new week which means we have a whole new batch of Tastemakers for your listening pleasure. Press play on this tasty ear candy!

The Recommender

Potholes In My Blog

Crack In The Road

 

1146 Miles

Hotspot Music

Popstache

 

Honoured to be included on the exfm tastemakers list.  

What better way to kick off the new year than a whole month’s worth of songs by this humble blogger’s favourite English troubadour, Mr Darren of Hayman.  This time last year, he was just setting out on a valiant quest: to write, create and record a new track each and every day during January, which you can still review over on the blog.  Accompanied by the talents of friends and artists alike, January Songs is a 31 gun salute to endeavour and to new years resolutions.  He’ll even be performing them all in a series of gigs this month so if you’re lucky enough to be in England, be sure to see it.

Now seems to be the appropriate time to be sharing this record, given its title.  The echo of the summer is heard louder than the echo of Sin Fang’s last album, Clangour, a delightfully scatty collection of ideas.  This one is more focused, more of an album and more folky.   

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 21 March 2011

Another one where serious questions have to be asked about this writer’s taste and dedication as to why it wasn’t posted 6 months ago.  Burst Apart is a sonically stretching follow-up to the cathartic Hospice (another of 2009’s sleeper hits) that elevates the themes to something less likely to make you bawl but soar instead.  The epic opener I Don’t Want Love sets the album off at the right pace as a heartfelt and yet self-undermining protest and the rest of the album continues just as brightly.  Great stuff.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 10 May 2011

The Rip Tide is an excellent album that, much like the rest of Zach Condon’s discography is something of a slow burn (whilst being characteristically recognisable).  Not sure why it took so long to get round to it here but with tracks like East Harlem and the title track, it’s strong enough to comfortably slot into the end of year lists.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 30 August 2011

I Want That You Are Always Happy is the full debut album of Australian septet, The Middle East.  It follows their sumptuous EP (cleverly titled The Recordings of the Middle East) from last year and follows that up with more downbeat folk that doesn’t sound dissimilar from what the blender would sound like if you threw a Fleet Foxes CD in there with a Low Anthem record and a Jet minidisc.  Just kidding about the Jet (ah, the fate of poor Australian bands) so maybe replace that with some barley.  Yes, that’d go quite nicely.  Much like this album.  Won’t hit the end of year top 25 but it’s a pleasant enough record.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 

Landing right at the beginning of this year, HotSpotMusic missed out on Anna Calvi.  Despite having the unfortunate albatross of one of the BBC’s Sound of 2011 acts hanging round her neck (although this was perhaps offset by Brian Eno referring to her as the best thing since Patti Smith), her tightly composed debut is a grand work.  There are definite elements of PJ Harvey but it is the dark, dense power of this album that makes songs like Desire and The Devil stand out amongst other contemporary female performers such as Florence & The Machine or EMA.  This has only spun a few times but it may well get a few more… and if that’s not enough, she’s covered Wolf Like Me too.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 17 Januaruy 2011

Trust Bjork to release her latest album not as a traditional record but as an ever unfolding series within an iPad app.  Always at the forefront of music and innovation, Bjork’s album was beautiful and somewhat revolutionary.  The music in it was less pioneering than the format perhaps, but that’s only because we set such high expectations on her.  Sumptuously constructed and genre hopping, Biophilia is an experiment in what sound represents in the third millennia and it delivers strongly.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 11 October 2011

Six years after Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!’s definitive, eponymous debut and four years after the disappointing, loud and nonsensical followup, Some Loud Thunder, came Hysterical.  A marvellous collection of quirky indie pop that returns to the lighter side of CYHSY! whilst bringing a more well-rounded maturity to the track list.  

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 

Much has been said of Real Estate’s ability to effectively simulate the halcyon days of the past.  But in today’s nostalgia-addled, originality whirlpool that is no longer the key skill - what makes Days really work is the consistently enjoyable songwriting.  Clearly a homage to early REM jangle as much as it is to the summer houses of their youth (and the guitar effects pedals that take them back to both those time periods), the ten tracks here are the equal elixir for memory and ignorance.  A great follow-up to 2009’s self-titled debut from the New Jersey based trio.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 18 Oct 2011

Soaring above the rest of its indie brethren, the bold, majestic eagle doesn’t have time to think about such trivial things as itself or the complexities of being alone.  It must fly to stay alive and it must kill to stay strong.  And that is why, the eagle is the not-so-indie-animal.

Click here: Not-so-indie Animal: The Eagle

A universally epic sound, gradually swelling songs in a rare-double length LP and the controversial use of a saxophone marked out M83’s return to the public sphere.  Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming could have been the album title for about 40% of all indie releases since the summer of 2010 but at least Anthony Gonzales’s effort tries to capture the urgency in the beginning of that statement whilst letting the latter drift as your imagination wanders the way of the second part of the album (i.e. into the distance).  

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 18 October 2011

When you have such a classic, long-awaited album such as Smile released why would you even need any more music that month?  Well, despite trying otherwise, a few more notable releases went up on HotSpotMusic including the bewitching debut effort from Still Corners, Atlas Sound’s Parallax and the sunniest record ever to be released in November, Summer Camp’s Welcome To Condale.

Click here: HotSpotMusic. - November 2011

Wild Beasts are one of those bands who have very slowly progressed into being silently quite brilliant with each album.  The British band’s sound has evolved from simple pop songs to rather complex and thoughtful compositions still backed up by the marvellous (and impressively replicable in a live setting) Jeff Buckley-style warble of lead singer Hayden Thorpe, only now with more nuance and subtlety in its delivery.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 10 May 2011

Oh Panda Bear, how were you ever supposed to live up to expectations on Tomboy?  The critical success of Person PItch weighed heavily and the seemingly-forever postponed recordings (due in part to the success of Merriweather Post Pavilion and Animal Collective’s touring) that led to the release of this album 4 years later didn’t help.  Tomboy is certainly not a bad record, indeed there are quite engaging tracks in there, but really not enough to keep you returning and certainly nothing nearly as inventive as he’s delivered before.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 11 Apr 2011

Genesis by Grimes

New track from Grimes, preceding her third album Visions, is as ethereal, sensual and chic as ever. Maybe moreso.

shared from exfm

Another one in my ongoing series of Reasons Why McSweeneys Rules.

hotspotmusic:

Dear readers…. you may have noticed something of a winter hibernation here on HotSpotMusic.  2012 has brought about many changes and how we run HotSpotMusic will be one of them.  It has always been my intention to write about music in the way that I consume it - full albums - and to find music to share with others in a simple, unpretentious way.  And so it must continue.   

Since I neither have the time nor energy to maintain the both the quality and quantity of output that this blog and you deserve I am forced to choose….  Therefore, from this week HotSpotMusic will continue in one of two ways:

1. If you love the current format (simple album reviews, on time and on the money) then come write for us!  Demands are simple: love music, love writing and have time for both.

2. HotSpotMusic will change - I will continue to post but will increase the scope - not just album reviews but videos, playlists, single tracks, remixes and more.  From all over the place too, SoundCloud, exfm, 8tracks, Spotify, Rdio and more.  Reviews will be shorter but more plentiful.  It won’t be the HotSpotMusic we’ve come to know, but it will still exist and maybe there will be more new music as a result.

Got an opinion on how to keep things afloat?  Let me know!  Otherwise, get ready for some unfiltered, unadulterated, unbelievable tunes coming your way soon.

And so it goes.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Effective Immediately, the Entire Northwest Sales Team Will Be Sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl.

(I should read more McSweeneys)

This is the oddest piece of spam I’ve received in a while.

eddieargos:

My Sharona/Formed A Band. My friend Micky Ciccone made this mix up of Formed A Band and My Sharona a million years ago, even before Formed A Band came out I think. I just found it in a hard drive Keith TOTP has lent me. So I thought I would share it with you.

I wandered lonely as a cloud (Taken with Instagram at Hamburger Bahnhof -Museum Für Gegenwart)

From the album Love at the Bottom of the Sea, out March 6 on Merge Records.

http://www.mergerecords.com/store/store_detail.php?catalog_id=847

Holy guacamole. This is beautiful. (via @miquagalore via APOD: 2012 January 3 - A Full Sky Aurora Over Norway)

1. Alabama Shakes (24)
2. Radiohead (13)
3. Flight of the Conchords (13)
4. Sean Na Na (11)
5. St. Vincent (11)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Family Xmas means reluctantly digging out the old board games. And I mean old: this one pre-dates the unification of Germany and the separations of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. (Taken with instagram)

Look what I just found on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/escort-records/escort-cam-leon-chameleon-club

Just like a forgotten cut from Off The Wall, this is funky as hell.

Fantastic collection of indie rock posters as a gift from my sister. This one is from one of my favorite songs of all time: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel (Taken with instagram)

1. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals (18)
2. Rilo Kiley (17)
3. The Specials (15)
4. John Maus (13)
5. M. Ward (13)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

I’m no petrolhead but that is one sexy machine from the future (Taken with Instagram at SoundCloud (UK) HQ)

Christopher Hitchens dies aged 62 | Books | guardian.co.uk

RIP Hitch - one of the most inspiring writers, orators and thinkers of our time.

weandthecolor:

Tree, line

by Zander Olsen.

More photography inspiration.

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Amazing.