Category Archives: Music

Music

Wild Moth ‘Patience’

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Wild Moth’s cranked out 2 of the better EPs this year — this is trodding on some of my fave ground, exhuming & dusting off some old 80s SST/Homestead-ish riffs that have been ignored by cretins by a few decades… there’s a Joy Division thing going on & some Daydream Nation-ish sounding breakdowns… the bassline is totally awesome… This is the video to ‘Patience’, the b-side to their ‘Morning Glory’ 7″ (2nd release)… if this don’t make you wanna thrash, check your pulse or you might’ve just been born too late…

Wild Moth linkys:
WM blog Bandcamp record label

Music

heavy rotation: Garmonbozia

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another gem from last year’s deep dive into punk sounds.. Minneapolis’ Garmonbozia, a crust punk band with a cellist front and center. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about them, and can’t recall how I ended up finding out about them :( and most of the information I can find online is just copy & paste from the same 1 or 2 press releases…

And I don’t really know anything else that sounds like this… maybe like GYBE with Tom Cora doing Rudimentary Peni covers? I’m tempted to describe their music as ‘atmospheric’ — but that may be misleading: those atmospheric conditions would be storm clouds gathering… Garmonbozia end up being a lot more gloomily melodic than what I would usually associate w/ ‘crust’, largely because the cello parts are front & center, not just filigree…

As best as I’ve been able to determine, their discography is entirely composed of the 2004 self-titled 7-song mini-LP on Profane Existance, an Amebix cover on thew 2008 Profane Existence comp Global Rebellion, and one side of a posthumous split LP with Silence Means Death from 2011 entitled A Cessation of Thunder.

Listening to their s/t album gives me chills…

Handy links:
Myspace Discogs Last.fm
{in addition to the lack of info on Garmonbozia, there is at least one other band using that name, and most searches on the name would turn up Twin Peaks references…}

Music

heavy rotation: Hedgehog’s ‘Sun Fun Gun’

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Hedgehog, 3 piece noise poppers from Beijing, China. On their Facebook page, the list their influences as “Can/Joy Division/Nirvana/Jesus And Mary Chain/Spacemen 3” & their genre as “indie classic rock shoegaze,” while on their Bandcamp page they said: “in this new album, we want to create a new sound feeling of Hedgehog, we called it Sonic-Rock. it combine Punk/Pychedilic/Noise with Hedgehog’s unique C86 sound&power.”

link to Hedgehog’s Sun Fun Gun on Bandcamp

They basically sound like a bunch of my favorite bands passed through a completely different culture’s filters… Hit that link and drop the needle on “Heart on Fire”. Some awesome melodic bass lines, trem’ed out fuzz gtr, and whispery Chinese/English hybrid lyrics… It is pretty satisfactory, as far as I’m concerned.

Handy Hedgehog links:
Discogs Last.fm Bandcamp Myspace Facebook Twitter website

Unfortunately, only about half their songs are actually streamable from their Bandcamp site, and their albums don’t actually seem to have US distribution that I’ve been able to find so far :(

Music

heavy rotation: Westkust ‘Junk EP’

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I end up listening to an awful lot of new music. I mean a LOT, and by new I don’t mean “just released”, I mean I’m always seeking out music that I haven’t heard before. This ends up panning out something like: about 80% makes we want to smash my head against a wall and stab out my own eardrums; about 16% I think is not so terribly bad but doesn’t really move me in any kind of positive sense; about 3.9% makes me very happy up to and including releasing massive amounts of endorphins, instantly frying my synapses, and/or melting my face off; and about 0.1% (1 in 1000? eh, it’s a guess) has me scrambling to figure out how to buy it within seconds of me hearing it.

2011 turned into a banner year for scrabbling up tons of new music ie actually adding it to my collection, which is partly due to me finding out about stuff I’d missed from 2010 (and maybe a little 2009) as well. Such that, for the first time since about ’93 I’d felt like making a year end top 10 list – and it was flippin’ hard, because so much great stuff had come out. It’s looking like 2012’s top 10 list will be hard as well, but not for the same reason – I’m worried that I won’t be able to find 10 things to list!

Sorry, what was the point… AHA! the point is just this: this freakin’ record was the first 0.1% BUY THIS F&^%^$er RIGHT F@&$#ing NOW record in quite a while… Look – just go listen to it…

OK, it is very easy for me to summarize what I’ve found I like in music – beautiful melodies spot welded onto tons of guitar distortion & feedback. (I have a slightly expanded summary, but I’ll save it for a diff review.) (…and I don’t make excuses, I just accept it.) And, see, Westkust has what I need IN SPADES. Sonically, we’re relatively in the neighborhood of early Slumberland, I’m thinking Black Tambourine, some Scar-era Lush, maybe a bit of just-pre-Creation MBV (paint a rainbow)… They’re from Sweden, singer sounds like Claudine, the drums motor on with plenty machine gun fills, and there is just an isolation chamber wash of wonderful, jangly, f’ed beautiful guitar.

This is special and awesome.

Here is their video for Alan Life:

Handy links for Westkust:
Bandcamp Facebook Myspace Discogs Last.fm Luxxury

Music

93MillionMilesFromTheSun videos

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there’s supposed to be a new 93MillionMilesFromTheSun video (off their upcoming album) releasing tomorrow, so here’s a rundown of their official videos (some of the more appealing shoegaze from recent years):

Darkestar (which appropriates the riff of MBV’s I Only Said, apparently):

Take Me Away:

Before You Leave:

Waiting There:

When You Come:

Sorrow Song (Instrumental):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdYT4-GDbKE