Cloud Nothings

Turn On

Don't be fooled by the minimalist album art, there is a lot of scuzzy-hot goodness going on in this album. I could (and have) listen(ed) to "Hey Cool Kid" all the livelong day.

What are the lyrics??? What are they SAY-ing?? No one knows! But it sounds super rad, so who really cares anyway, right?

Window View

I couldn't have dreamed a more appropriate companion for the best song on Beach Fossil's forthcoming full-length than this vintage home video footage. It's got a late 70's Woody Allen-style romantic melancholy quality that makes your stomach and your heart seem a little further away from one another. Get the LP from Captured Tracks on May 25.

Beach Fossils // Window View from Wooden Lens on Vimeo.

Myspace // Last.fm

Green Bricks

Vacation Dad

VDLIVEIMPROVSHIT

Vacation Dad made a Soundcloud page and uploaded a 20-minute excerpt of a live improvised set. I asked him if I could split it up into separate tracks. He said yes. You can download it from the link above. Or download the whole thing in one track here. It's pretty killer either way.

There's also a sweet new song on his Soundcloud page called "ihopeyrfavoritecoloriseverywhere." He wrote it "for a girl" who is "the best." It reminds me of a melted fun-size candy bar and when you're done eating it you bite the wrapper and scrape the rest of the chocolate off with your teeth but your fingers get sticky anyway.

Myspace // Last.fm

Lush Cola

Lush Cola

Didn't know about Weed Diamond until a few days ago, so I was pleasantly surprised when Patient Sounds (same label that put out the M. Pyres and Smelly Magic cassettes last year) sent this little beauty over. Lush Cola is an old project of Weed Diamond's Tim Perry. The sparse, minimal arrangements often lean on his calm ghost harmonies and drum machine beats, occasionally joined by a guitar or bass that sounds like it's being played in the basement with the door ajar. Perfect music for driving at night down a road surrounded by forest but close enough to the city for you to be able to see a faint glow through the brush. Watch a cool video on Get Off The Coast, put together by Jheri Evans himself, and preorder the cassette from Patient Sounds below.

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Parallel Pyres

Parallel Pyres

Distorted drums and organ, sometimes looped and layered, with the occasional garbled vocal echo. Those are pretty much the only sounds heard on this self-titled release, but it's the kind of basic structure that can easily amount to more than the sum of its parts. Here, that means subverting pop and new wave in a way that's just as catchy as anything Wet Hair and Vacation Dad have done. Could totally be a cassette on Not Not Fun. Visit All, Everyone, United to watch a few music videos he made.

Myspace // Last.fm

Beach Fossils

SELF-TITLED FULL LENGTH

Click here for track 8, "Window View," if it's corrupted in the link above.

This is almost too good to be true -- at long last, the full-length debut of a band that I think about name-dropping roughly every three posts to describe another band has arrived. The album I haven't been able to stop anticipating since the first notes of "Daydream" licked my ears like a tide coming in and a foam seems to rise right out of where the sand meets the water and then you squint up and see orange and purple smudges just above the horizon and you remember sorbet Push-Up Pops with the Flintstones on the package and then you remember light refracting and how comforting the science behind sunsets is.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah. One of the most deservedly buzzed-about bands last year, whose only other release to date is a 7" and whose hazy surf-pop gems have been slowly trickling one-by-one out of rifts between HTML codes since last summer, finally has something more substantial for hungry listeners to prematurely nibble on -- or swallow whole. This thing doesn't even have a release date, official artwork or a tracklisting yet (EDIT: nevermind, I numbered the tracks and posted a new link), but that doesn't matter -- like any other album this good, the music speaks for itself.

Thanks to the angels at Late For School for somehow getting their hands on this.

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Gauntlet Hair

(link contains all three songs from their myspace)

I'm too in love not to post this. If you haven't heard this band via GvB or P4K yet, you're in for a surprise. Listen to the track "I Was Thinking..." via everyone's fav bilingual blog or on their myspace (link below). When I posted it on my tumblr earlier, I described it as "a snowball made of sunlight and wrapped in glass, floating in a hall of reverb. It probably also has a Cadbury Creme center, for all I know."

The story so far is that they apparently played Todd P's MtyMx festival and blew a lot of people away. They sound like a cross between Japandroids and Band Of Horses. No one knows much about them, except they're two dudes from Colorado and they're apparently writing their debut right now.

Myspace // Last.fm

Hooray!

Mixtape Memories

Swell stripped-down solo shoegaze. Reminds me of Atlas Sound, but the more songwriter-y stuff. And not as emotionally draining. Carefree, but still kinda heartbreaking. There's intimate lo-fi noise-pop hooks and a definite Underwater Peoples Records feel. Way better than the generic exclamation of his namesake may imply.

You can download another couple of EPs on his myspace, while you're at it.

Myspace // Last.fm

Pill Wonder

Jungle/Surf

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Perfect tropical lo-fi noise-pop. This 8-song EP is criminally short at only 18 minutes, but accomplishes enough in that time to compel you to listen repeatedly. Reminds me of No Age but more chill, or the Ruby Suns but more playful, or Islands but more noisy and good in general. This is poised to be the soundtrack to anyone's early summer.

Horsepital

All Stills

If that link doesn't work, try this one.


Horsepital (now known as Gem Jones) reminds me of a stop-motion animated adaptation of The Little Prince that I watched with my 3rd grade class in the library and it scared the shit out of me. This cassette is not that creepy, but it does recall the image of a clay doll catapulted through space and all the planets have faces and some of them might be smiling. And then the clay doll lands on a swamp planet that smells like Jolly Ranchers and joins the slimy fluorescent natives for a game of ping-pong.

You'll dig this if you like Ducktails, Wet Hair, Emeralds, Big Spider's Back.

Myspace // Last.fm

M. Pyres (Pt. 2)

Yay, finally got around to posting this! You may recall M. Pyres from the post I made about Cast Off / Cold Months. Pretty awesome ambient/post-rock album. The following albums stray far from that -- but not too far. All three are totes srsly recommended. Apart The Echo is kinda like Meneguar and Wavves or No Age or some other lo-fi punk/noise band but really into 90's indie rock and still with the ambient ideas floating around. & New Past Tense, which hasn't been released yet, is like a cross between Apart The Echo and Cast Off / Cold Months, integrating the post-rock ideas into the noisier punk songs. Consider Me, Ghost is a collection of their early demos, but almost all of it is as good as the newer stuff. Get into it, dudes.


Apart The Echo -- Buy it!


& New Past Tense


Consider Me, Ghost (demos)

Myspace

Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind EP (2009)

Well, shit. (320k)

Preorder.

Yakuza Heart Attack II

Yakuza Heart Attack - Yakuza Heart Attack II

Instrumental band made up of 8bit/noise-loving keyboardists usually described by music media as "keyboard-driven art rock." I would describe it as compositional genius. Please do yourself a favor and listen to this.

Myspace

Panda Bear: Live @ ATP

This is a link to a rip of Panda Bear's live set this past September, when he performed at All Tomorrow's Parties. It was pretty much his only solo show this year, I think? It was broadcast by WFMU (there are some significant glitchy sounds in parts, but overall it remains tolerable), recorded to a computer and then split, tagged, and EQ'd by Collected Animals user Maxwell Hell. I can't believe I haven't posted this yet, because it's quite amazing -- better than the other live bootleg I posted a while ago. It's a totally different set of songs as well, including his "remix" (which is actually more of a rewrite) of The Notwist's single, "Boneless", as well as "Ponytail" and "I'm Not" (two songs he didn't perform on his last tour) and two new songs. And a reworked version of Chores, with an intro that some speculate may represent the vocal melody that will be on "I Think I Can", the last track on Animal Collective's upcoming EP, Fall Be Kind. Have I given you enough incentive to download this yet?

Best Coast

Myspace

Remember Pocahaunted? How you couldn't go two months in 2008 without finding out they were releasing something new? And then it all stopped for some reason? And then Bethany started writing songs with a heavy 60's pop influence and recording them in the sunny California heat with the lo-fi haze of her former band? And how it was really awesome? I forgive you if your memory of this isn't as strong as mine, because for me it just happened yesterday.


Make You Mine 7"


Art Fag 7"

ULTRAPOST2

Okay, I guess it's been long enough, and boy (or girl), have I got some tunes for you. I hate to present them like this, but really, I don't. Enjoy the noise.

Magic Markers - Balf Quarry (192 kbps [VBR])
Myspace
A few of the tracks here are like nothing they've ever done before, in such a good way. And yeah, this is probably their best release so far.

Nodzzz - Nodzzz (320 kbps)
Myspace
Quick, summery noise-pop. This is how No Age would have sounded in the 80's. Totally recommended, obviously.

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There Are Mountains (256 kbps)
Myspace
Half of these dudes are my age, and they already got "best new music" from Pitchfork. Here I am sitting on my ass blogging about it. This is some pretty transcendental indie-rock. Kind of sounds like Arcade Fire and Titus Andronicus, but that really does it no justice.

Magic People - You Are The Magic People (256 kbps [VBR])
Myspace
Kind of a spoken-word, mewithoutYou-style vocal, but there's no guitar involved, only analog synth and awesome distorted bass. I got addicted to this album while playing Donkey Kong Country 2.

Inverness - Forest Fortress (128 kbps)
Myspace (includes sendspace link to 320 kbps version)
Kind of a spacey, underwater Deerhunter/Atlas Sound feel. But more expansive, in a post-rock way, in that it'll make you almost forget about the impending apocalypse by predicting something entirely more painless. Plus, they're from Brazil. How exotic is that? Makes you want to jump into the South Atlantic and find out how deep they went to record this.

Pocahaunted - Passage (128 kbps)
Myspace
Another sweet, swirling set of tribal slow jams from the best of them. If anyone has a better quality version, help me out!

Snowing - Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit (320 kbps)
Myspace
Killer five-song EP from ex-members of Street Smart Cyclist and Boy Problems. If you don't remember them, think about Cap'n Jazz, Algernon Cadwallader, Braid, etc. I also get a shout out on one of the tracks: "I did some funny things with my best friend Patrick." John, I'm honored. Really.

Kickball - ABCDEFGHIJKickball (192 kbps)
Myspace
I've seriously been meaning to post this for over a year, no joke. It's kind of like minimalistic post-punk, with a vaguely Bobby Burg-esque vocal. Erm, yeah. They're friends with Paul Baribeau, if that helps you. Did I mention it might also change your life?

I was gonna post the new Dirty Projectors album, Bitte Orca, as well. But since they're on Domino now, I guess the links for it have been taken down just about everywhere. If I were to post it, though, I'd have to be pretty clever about it.

Deerhunter Live @ Noise Pop 2009

This is pretty recent, posted on Youtube a little more than a week ago. Maybe you've seen it already anyway. Four new songs are in here. Pretty good audio quality, even if the video is somewhat lacking. Go to the Youtube page for the rest of the setlist.

Wavvves

320kbps, all 14 tracks.

Myspace
Buy it!

Here We Go Magic - Here We Go Magic (2009)

An interesting debut from a new band from Brooklyn. The first four songs are catchylofipoppy songs, three of the next four are strange ambient noise tracks, and the last is an odd, bluesy piano ballad. The first four tracks are excellent, especially "Tunnelvision," - download this for them.

Myspace
Link removed at the label's request. :/
Buy it!