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The "wink wink" Thread 2010: This Time It's Personal

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KvP:

--- Quote from: tractor trailer on 22 Jan 2010, 09:18 ---
--- Quote from: KvP on 18 Jan 2010, 00:39 ---
Thighpaulsandra - I, Thighpaulsandra

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disc 1 is corrupt.

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I just downloaded and had no problems.

SWOON! at My Gravitas:
Made Out of Babies- The Ruiner


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Noise rock/metal that is heavy and scary and sexy as hell.


--- Quote from: Pitchfork, I guess ---Julie Christmas has one of rock's most versatile voices. Technical range does not necessarily equal emotional range, and Christmas is one of a select few who have both. Like Björk, Jarboe, and Diamanda Galas, Christmas can plummet within seconds from sweet nothings to feral growls. Even at her lightest, she retains an edge. Her voice is tart and taut, and her screams feel more like inevitabilities than conscious extensions of range. Unlike her counterparts in heavy music, who often replicate male roles, Christmas' presence is quite feminine; Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland comes to mind.

A vocal instrument as magnificent as Christmas' requires a suitable context. She has had problems finding one. Her main band, Brooklyn's Made Out of Babies, has been hit-or-miss. At best, they coalesce into fearsome heavy metal thunder. At worst, they devolve into aimless, plodding sludge. Christmas' other band, Battle of Mice, often has the same problem. Battle of Mice's last record, A Day of Nights, was musically earnest, lyrically honest, and virtually unlistenable. Christmas' projects have tended to over-emphasize her voice's abrasive side.

The Ruiner is the first record that truly harnesses Christmas' range. This is because it's the first that truly harnesses Made Out of Babies' range. Due to time constraints, the band's writing process fractured, with members working individually or in small combinations. This produced their most varied, nuanced record to date. For the first time, Christmas has a backing palette with colors to match. Guitars unspool jangly curlicues; drums and bass joust with the suppleness of Jesus Lizard. "Stranger" dangles eerie dewdrops of melody over abstract chords. The song perches precariously between dark and light, as Christmas lashes it with throat-shredding howls. "Peew" likewise plays with balance. Wordless cooings course over chugging riffs, which burst open with punishing percussive flurries. "The Major" recasts Björk as a doom metal diva, while "Invisible Ink" is a tour de force of melisma and major thirds à la Trent Reznor.

Noise-rock and metal comprise much of The Ruiner, but it's really the heir to PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. That record's Led Zeppelin-esque bombast (recorded by Steve Albini, who also engineered The Ruiner's predecessor, Coward) appears here in big, boxy drums and Christmas' dramatic vocals. Like Harvey, she sings, screams, and seduces all at once. In "Cooker", the words "Run, run for your life" repeatedly erupt from her throat like napalm. They feel like something Charlie McGee might have said in Firestarter before she set the world alight.
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gospel:
VA - Crazy Heart OST


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--- Quote from: the5913 ---From the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou to his work on the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration, T-Bone Burnett is the top producer for country and Americana “event” recordings. His latest event is the soundtrack for current awards show darling Crazy Heart, co-produced by the late Stephen Bruton.

The two movies couldn’t be more different, but the soundtracks have some striking similarities. Like the O Brother soundtrack, the songs here are split among classic recordings, originals from contemporary artists and a spattering of material performed by the actors themselves. Songs like “Hello Trouble” by Buck Owens, “My Baby’s Gone” by the Louvin Brothers and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” are classics in every sense of the word and should be a part of any country fan’s library. Added to that are tracks from Townes Van Zandt, Sam Phillips and Lightning Hopkins to represent the Americana side of the music.

Ryan Bingham, who also appears in the movie, chips in a couple of songs. The bouncy “I Don’t Know” is probably the most instantly accessible song that Bingham has ever recorded. There are two versions of it, with Bingham’s version trumping Jeff Bridges’ more laid-back take. “The Weary Kind,” written with Burnett, is deservedly getting the most notice, and the amount of awards it’s received have all but guaranteed it an Oscar nomination for Best Song. Perfectly suited to Bingham’s gravelly voice, the song captures the life of the hard-living troubled soul that’s central to the movie. More importantly, it stands on its own as a moving ballad, independent of any movie.

The bulk of the songs are left up to the vocal abilities of Bridges as main character Bad Blake. Bridges–who does have an album under his belt–has a warm, gruff voice with a bit of a soulful tinge to it. He’s ably backed by a band that’s more Americana than mainstream country (When was the last time you heard an accordion on country radio?), but the songs like “Hold On You” and “Fallin’ & Flyin’” are so instantly catchy that they might have become hits in the Outlaw Era. Bridges does a solid job on them, but the overall success of his songs are due more to the quality of the songwriters and the band than the singer.

The biggest surprise on the album is that Colin Farrell, who gets a song and a half on the soundtrack, could be a country star if the whole actor/international sex symbol thing doesn’t work out for him. His performance on “Gone, Gone, Gone” is better than most of the songs released by actual country singers over the past year.

Bruton, who had made a name for himself as a musician, songwriter and singer, died after a long bout with cancer in 2009. He co-wrote most of the original songs along with Burnett and a few others. It’s a fitting finale for a career that stretched more than 40 years and hopefully will shed some light on a man who spent too much of his career flying under the radar.
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The Magnetic Flowers - What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About


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--- Quote from: scenesc ---The Magnetic Flowers, who have to be near the top of nearly anyone’s list of best bands in Columbia, recently released their excellent second full-length, and in doing so raised the bar pretty damn high for the rest of this year’s releases.

The band plays a kinetic brand of literate indie pop with disparate folk, cabaret and psychedelic threads. Featuring a surfeit of talent in its four vocalist line-up (all of whom seem to pop up in the background, singing multiple parts, on pretty much every song) and the songwriting talents of Patrick Funk, Jared Pyritz and Adam Cullum, the group is nonetheless more than the sum of its parts. When playing together, their music seems to drip with endlessly layered melodies, hyper-literate wordplay and song structures that seem to positively burst from the seams.

The new record, entitled What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About [a play on the title of a Raymond Carver short story collection], sees the band delivering on the promise of their debut in spades, with potent versions of songs that have already become staples of their live show.

Opening up with the tribal thump of the band’s twisted adaptation of the traditional “I’ll Fly Away,” this scratchy, rough-and-tumble introduction still manages to immediately capture the essence of what makes the group so great: Every vocalist contributes to the layered sing/shout-a-long, with words and melodies offset to give the listener the feel of a tumbling, shambolic free-form exercise that magically makes perfect musical sense. Later the band will come full circle in a inverted, lush reprisal of the opening cut.

The first original on the record and a highlight of the band’s recent live shows is “Southern Baptist Gothic,” which showcases Pyritz’s spitfire vocal style that has gradually emerged from its near-mimic of Conor Oberst to become an assured, unique presence in its own right. This track also establishes the sonic template from which most of the songs on the record are derived from: interlocking electric and acoustic guitars, integral walking bass lines from Albert Knuckley, and over top of it all, the hyper-melodic keyboard lines (or accordion parts) provided by Cullum. Drummer Evan Simmons has his hands full just trying to keep all his bandmates together, but he still manages to give each song the dynamic tug and pull that keeps the listener on the emotional journey of the singer. Although the song features a lyric-heavy stream-of-conscious narrative, its power comes from the sheer confidence Pyritz exudes on the mic and the seemingly effortless fills and pick-ups the entire band engage in as the song sways from fast to slow and low to high across its five minute running time.

Another highlight, and the soulful center of the record, is the emotionally wrought “Northern Lights,” a ballad that exquisitely captures the jumble of confused thoughts and concerns that make up the average twentysomething’s psyche. The song, centered around a few simple guitar chords and a mournful accordion melody, is a coming-of-age song pushed ahead ten years, addressing all of the insecurities, demands and questions that life holds once you are actually suppose to start living it. It’s a beautiful, touching anthem that has the power to strike a chord right in the heart of the band’s intended audience.

Another song of note, “Talk Talk Talk Talk,” is Cullum’s first turn at lead vocals for the band and where the record’s title is pulled from. Whereas Cullum rarely shows the kind of restraint and control of the two frontmen, but he makes up for it by putting his all into every lyric he utters, from breathless exhalations to uninhibited hollering. The song is allusion-heavy, with provocative twists on both T.S. Eliot and Raymond Carver and ironic name-checks of Donnie Darko and Charles Bukowski. The song is built on a jazz-like vamp that suits the poem-song approach the band takes with it. It aims to be a “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for the modern-day hipster set, and hits it fairly well on the nose.

The album ends with “Reprise,” a wholly different adaption and take-off of the gospel number of the beginning. The original take is the shortest and most minimalist song on the record, with the band sounding slightly unhinged. The reprisal is the longest and most sonically lush, with every vocalist aiming for their tenderest performance. Chants of “Hallelujah” are repeated over and over with the upmost sincerity. It is the perfect way to end this roller coaster of a record, with a band utterly at peace after the musical, lyrical and emotional twists and turns that precede it.

On the whole, this is an impressive record that clearly draws upon much of the national indie scene of the past ten or fifteen years, yet forges a unique identity for this seriously talented group. However you feel about the state of music, locally or nationally, you should feel proud to have a band like Magnetic Flowers making music in your town.
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smack that isaiah:

--- Quote from: SWOON! at My Gravitas on 23 Jan 2010, 18:20 ---Made Out of Babies- The Ruiner

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I've had this album for a while now, it is so good. 

smack that isaiah:
Smackin' Isaiah - The Champagne of Bands... We Know Sexy

The amazing melodic hardcore/punk rock band A Wilhelm Scream from New Bedford used to be known as Smackin' Isaiah.  This is one of the EPs they put out under that moniker before the 2003 change.  This is while they were still developing the wonderful sound they currently employ.

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(Track 6 is a little wonky.  I may try going into Audacity and fixing it up)

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