Thom Cummings

Brian Wilson famously approached the vocals as just another instrument, a critical one unquestionably but one which could be blended and moulded much like any other colour from his palette.  And for me it’s been quite a critical element to latch onto, to understand the song and to embrace the melody.  I’ve never been able to quite enjoy instrumental music as much (with the exception of some exceptional contemporary classical pieces by Max Richter, Steve Reich and the like).

So it’s a nice surprise to find William Tyler’s debut LP, Impossible Truth, quite so engaging.  It’s perhaps the Wilson-esque approach to making lush soundscapes where rich harmonies are created by multiple guitar lines instead of men.  Tyler has been plying his trade as a musician for Lambchop and the Silver Jews amongst others over the years and he takes those influences and hints at others (there’s definitely some Strokes and Grizzly Bear style riffs in Cadillac Desert) to weave a beautiful record.

An exclusive new track from Hot Chip alongside the bizarre but somewhat excellent collaboration between David Lynch and Lykke Li feature in this weeks miscellanies.  Also, watch out for a nice Jens Lekman remix too…

Today on Sunday Sermons we’re celebrating “Wild” BIlly Childish, perhaps the most prolific artist since Leonardo Da Vinci.  Poet, artist, photographer, film maker and most importantly, for this blog at least, legendary cult garage rock icon.  Since 1979, Billy Childish has put out dozens of albums with almost as many collaborators - writing, recording and releasing at lightning pace.  

For those unfamiliar with his catalogue (and there must be few, including the man himself, who are familiar with the entire thing) then My First Billy Childish Album is a great place to start.  His songs are simple and thunderously effective.  It was Da Vinci who said “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” after all and Childish boldly espouses that, never letting complex chords, pretentious song structures or unnecessary instruments get in the way of the raw emotion and power of his songs.

Darkstar’s roots are in dance music but their present lies firmly in a genre I can only describe as ambient psychedelic electronica.  A fancy title perhaps but with the closest touchpoints to News From Nowhere, their second full release, being Panda Bear’s Person Pitch or the under-appreciated High Places, it’s quite apt.  Taking a light and fun approach to experimentation, this record keeps you on your toes with variety, colour and, unlike many false princes of this genre, enough hooks to keep this trick fresh and exciting.  An interesting release that could be the foundation for something great next time around.

When Vampire Weekend first burst onto the scene in 2007 with their peppy and preppy A-Punk sound, many would’ve been forgiven for thinking their mix of afrobeat with angular pop hooks was destined for that most ignominious of destinations: the brief but forgotten zeitgeist.  Their debut album fulfilled on the promise of the early EPs and become one of the records of the year but it was never clear how their sound would evolve.  That became relatively clear on their follow-up album Contra, a solid record which did little to diminish nor grow the band’s scope or reputation.

On Modern Vampires Of The City, however, Ezra Koenig and team lift that burden spectacularly with a profound and rich album.  It’s an album full of great pop tunes but the variety and maturity of the songwriting on show here is deeper than the first two records led you to conclude.  It’s more honest and heartfelt, not ashamed to slow things down at times or crystallise the melodies without getting too cheesy.  A potent realisation of Vampire Weekend’s talents, this is a great album.

A nice little cover-version one-two kicks off this week’s miscellanies.  Daughter’s version of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky is just lovely as is the follow-up that you’ll just have to listen to to figure out what it is.  Other than that, Splashh and King Tuff lighten up the mood. 

Make sure you stick around for the last couple of tracks on this week’s set of monday miscellanies - a couple of lovely songs by Sweet Baboo and Jim Guthrie to brighten up your day.

Deerhunter have always been a band that I’m just on the verge of loving.  Microcastle and Halcyon Digest never quite made it to constant repeat status, despite both being excellent albums.  And on Monomania they seem to have managed the same trick.  After a few lineup changes in the intervening years between albums, they’ve come back with a slight but welcome regression in their sound.  Monomania is a raw record full of sharp guitars and Cox’s rasping voice, something they call “nocturnal garage” - an ode to the darkness, also evident in the sleeve art.  Neon Junkyard, Leather Jacket II and The Missing for a great crackling start to proceedings and the night glow remains throughout.  And so whilst I remain teetering on the edge of adulation, it’ll either be that residual slowburn or the sheer volume of quality now residing in their discography that pushes me over the edge.  

Short and sweet, much like the summer you’re probably enduring whilst reading this, Cayucas’s debut record looks on the sunnier side of life.  What started out as a project (originally titled Oregon Bike Trails) that took samples from 60s classic songs and mashed them together with Zach Yudin’s original instrumentation, has now morphed, thanks in no small part to the input of Richard Swift on production duties, into a full band and sound.  But it’s the essence of summer and Californian coastline living (hence the renaming to Cayucas) that still permeates his songs - seemingly simple but with a pang of ennui, echoing that other great West Coast-based beach group.  While nothing on this record quite matches the sublime first single Swimsuit, it’s an endearing set of songs that you can’t help but enjoy.

A typically epic new song from the Polyphonic Spree marks this week’s Monday Miscellanies.  

If Muchacho only contained Song For Zula, the single that preceded the full-lengther, it would be majestic.  That song alone (surely a contender for one of 2013’s best) is soaring and quietly epic, managing to sound simultaneously striking and vulnerable.  That’s Matthew Houck’s talent and Muchacho is very much a continuation of his previous steps into the realm of sumptuous country rock, begun in earnest on 2010’s Here’s To Taking It Easy.  Alongside the earnest heartbreak, however, there’s also the stomp (on two-edged tracks such as Ride On / Right On and A Charm / A Blade) and the two sit warmly side-by-side on this richly produced record.

A hazy mix of goodness in the 42nd miscellanies collection.  Wardell and Wampire, Hookworms and Houses…. this was an attempted shot at an playlist of alliterative pairs, foiled fairly early and easily.

In the modern music era, when 9 out of 10 bands sound roughly the same and it’s hard to differentiate between them all as their records are pushed out fast enough to sate the desire of rabid blogs and fans, it’s refreshing to hear a band like Savages who’ve not only taken the time to create a sound, image and manifesto but fiercely stick to it.  It’s a manifesto of brutal ferocity, honesty and a rejection of anything that disconnects you from what really matters.  Their live shows push this manifesto onto the crowd too where audience members are told to get into the show or get out - no camera phones allowed.

All that on its own would be an incomplete part of the overall artistic performance, or just bluster, if it wasn’t backed up by the music.  But their music not only defends the manifesto but emboldens it and grabs you, forcing you to listen.  Whilst their influences are clear - Gang Of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus amongst others whilst singer Jenny Beth is more than a facsímile of Ian Curtis - they are never derivative, moulding musical inspiration with cinematic and literary references into something powerfully captivating.  Something uniquely savage, one might say.

For a band that’s been together little over a year, they sound amazingly tight, even moreso in concert.  Individually, they’re superb musicians with Jenny Beth the perfect, engaging vessel for their message.  This is a thrilling debut album, one that dares to stoke the fire and add intelligence back into the rock world, a distillation of their power and their manifesto.  As such, it might be a pivotal album for the times, encouraging listeners to refocus away from the disposable or ephemeral and towards music as a powerful medium and serious art.

Monday Miscellanies are back from an extended holiday break with a collection of newbies from oldies.  New tracks from Gold Panda, These New Puritans, Surfer Blood and a great omen for the new album from the Love Language included.  Happy Mon-Wednes-day.

This week’s disjointed theme is that of nostalgia.  Hear it live in Theme Park, Wire, Bell XI and more…

More miscellanies…. this week featuring songs with extremely long titles.  Mostly.

Under Suspicion is the latest HotSpotMixtape… plucked from the finest miscellanies of the past three months.  Enjoy!

My favourites in this week’s miscellanies include a new Woodkid track (his album finally came out last week), a great one from Fear of Men and a Grimes-esque  Butterclock.

Yes folks, it’s new column time. This time: Monday Miscellanies (aka weekly playlists).

Whilst the focus of this blog will return to album reviews, just as nature intended it to be, there’s always a few tracks here and there that simply must be shared.  So instead of simply opening the firehose at ya, they’ll be wrapped up and every Monday plonked into a lovely playlist for your enjoyment.  They’ll mostly be new discoveries or upcoming singles but who knows, it’s a beginning of the week experiment…

By Mattias Heiderich

Buy here: http://matthiasheiderich.bigcartel.com/product/color-berlin-mosaic-1

Pretty cool

hotspotmusic:

…This is a thrilling debut album, one that dares to stoke the fire and add intelligence back into the rock world…

Needless to say, I’m quite a fan of the new Savages album.

Reading means resisting.

(via Designer Creates Arrested Development Record Sleeves :: Blogs :: Awesome of the Day :: Paste)

I do not fear death - Salon.com 

A poignant read from Roger Ebert

laughingsquid:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Post Sign at Concert Asking Fans to Put Away Phones & Cameras During Show

Yeah.

I remember the first thing I ever ‘programmed”: it was a very, very basic calculator (I think it could only handle addition) aptly written in BBC BASIC on a school computer in the early 90s. 

10 LET x = 5
20 LET y = 20
30 PRINT x+y 

… and so on and so forth…

The calculator, incidentally, has been something of a recurring motif for my undeveloped programming skills charting flirtations with Java (at university), Visual Basic (first through VBA at my first job automating reporting at an insurance call centzzzzzz…..) and a brief but ill-fated attempt at iOS programming (I was, and still am, convinced Angry Calculator® could be a massive hit). 

Being a man of the Internet I have, and have had, countless websites and blogs over the years.  But, despite having a mountain of ideas, the best I’ve ever been able to do with them is some light facelifts involving changing colours and adding links using scraps of HTML picked up from a lot of trial and error.  I was a flimsy backstreet plastic surgeon, at best.

So, having previously looked at, but never had the will nor inclination to invest time in, some online classes, I enrolled in General Assembly’s Front End Web Development course this January.  [Sidenote: at SoundCloud we have benefits for career related learning (another great reason to work at the ‘Cloud) so all I had to do was convince a few people that me coding was a good and not potentially disastrous thing for SoundCloud.]

The first week was a bit of a revelation – all of these basic definitions, syntax elements and developer tools that were previously obstacles now made sense.  I mean, who knew the difference between a CLASS and an ID and that to change the colour in an entire website meant a tactical choice between the two.  Before long we were even making our own websites (mostly based on an infamous cookie monster template that came back to repeatedly haunt us). 

Classes tended to take a usual pattern – some theory interspersed with practical examples.  During these examples I’d usually get distracted by some obscure and irrational thing that I wanted to do to change the exercise which usually required skills which at the time seemed far out of reach, yet in hindsight were usually no more than 3-4 classes away.  Beginning to see how sites were actually put together and slowly being able to do it was sparking my curiosity.

The toughest thing in this first section was probably complex CSS selectors (I still have very little idea about preceding classes or child elements) whilst the most interesting was probably learning the basics of designing for mobile with responsive or adaptive design.  Being introduced to boilerplates and frameworks was a dangerous but seductive shortcut.

Using Twitter’s popular Bootstrap framework, I built my first and biggest project to-date: Rumsfeld, an internal knowledge base for sharing Insight within the company.  After multiple iterations I even made it look “on brand”.  Here’s a screenshot but, for obvious reasons, I can’t share the whole thing… not least because it’s yet to be deployed internally (something about the codebase being a mess) but I’m holding out hope…

Then it was onto the fun stuff.  Javascript appeared to be where the magic happened… when you could actually start interacting with the pages and, eventually (after learning about AJAX and JSON in our penultimate lesson) with other services’ APIs.  Whilst on the surface it seemed harder than HTML or CSS, it’s still a fairly logical language so it’s quick to pick up.  I also found a ton of JS libraries and demos to borrow, use and break.  [Another sidenote: the JQuery documentation is an excellent example of how to write technical documentation for a beginner].

It’s with Javascript that I made some of my other hacks (including, of course, a calculator).  You might remember me from such hacks as:

1. Super Simple Sets – a bookmarklet (inspired by SoundCloud’s new moving sounds) that strips out all of the noise around a SoundCloud set and leaves you with a simple way to view and enjoy.  Drag THIS to your bookmark bar and then apply to any set on SoundCloud, my new HotSpotMusic mixtape, the new Beach Fossils album or Eric’s set of relaxing sounds.  (Note: It does not work and will make everything go a bit wrong with anything other than a set).
2. Discography – an unfinished project that uses the last.fm API to cleanly list all the albums of any artist you choose.  Ignoring some minor aesthetic differences (i.e. mine’s very ugly for now), it’s basically no different to the album view on last.fm but I have big plans for this.  Also, it looks nicer on mobile.
3. iMondriandom – my favourite but not quite functioning project.  Inspired by a trip to the Bauhaus, this serves up a completely unique Mondrian-esque web painting every time you load the site, thanks to some basic but nifty javascript randomisation.  Some work out prettier than others – keep hitting refresh.

This is just a couple of my unfinished, unpolished projects.  I have plenty more ideas that I can now work on, not least the next evolution of my music blog.

Many people have said that being able to code is the 21^st century literacy standard and I firmly believe this.  After doing this course, I’m proud to say that I’m beginning to comprehend and, whilst I still don’t really know what I’m doing, I’m no longer completely ignorant about how to do it.  For example, I can actually do something at our next hack day instead of being a self-proclaimed “ideas man”.  And much to the amusement of some of my colleagues, I now have a github profile with commits. 

Thanks a lot to Daniel, Samuel and Leonard for teaching the class.  Needless to say this was a lot of fun and I learned a great deal.  Inspired by this, my next challenge will probably be learning Ruby.  Let’s see how that goes…

Course details for GA’s Front End Web Development class are here: https://generalassemb.ly/education/front-end-web-development

“We were so into the net around the time of Kid A,” he says. “Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as ‘content’. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this ‘content’ which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?”

hotspotmusic:

A collection of big ones this week with new tunes from Phoenix, Johnny Marr and Kurt Vile…. not to mention some great new finds in Lady Lamb the Beekeeper and EAT SKULL.  

This is probably one of the best miscellanies in a while….

Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See

‘Death To Everything That Is Not Guitar Music’ by Eddie Argos and The Lo Fi Punk Rock Motherfuckers is my new jam.

nevver:

Daily Chart

Goat’s World Music has cultish overtones - a dark foreboding nature that binds a madness of sound together as one psychotic but defining and sharp experience.  It takes in influences from all over the musical genresphere with elements of psychedlic rock, tribal rhythms, funk and post-punk all coalescing to an enrapturing cacophany.   Whilst that might seem like just throwing out genre labels in a vain hope to try and capture the essence of Goat, it’s this very oppressive mix that grabs you and somehow, somehow manages to make sense of the madness.  When you find out that the band themselves hail from a commune in the North Swedish hamlet of Korpilombolo you wonder what else is going on up there, starved for sunlight.  Listen to World Music and you might just feel compelled to follow the chants and beats to find out, it’s really that fantastic.

Here are some photos I took during a few weeks spent in Myanmar over the holidays.  ’tis a beautiful country, as I think you’ll see.

This is a pretty accurate story of the Burma I discovered.

Lots of great photos here on Best of the Best: Life In LoFi’s Top iPhoneography of 2012 » Life In LoFi: iPhoneography

Righteous angle

Hang on a minute

Bow down.

Double trunk

Shoot up.

Sand Set

Right Platz Right Time

Sun set on solitude

Captured spirit.

Broccoli tree

Awesome autumn.

At Least They Can’t Divide The Heavens

The Birdman of Alcatraz

Dinner in the mirror

Three dimensional

Climbing up that wall.

Just feet away.

(First photo courtesy of the USA Today)

Stranger in the sand.

K-Bombed.

Tranquilo.