Thursday, November 26, 2009

Glumly Strummed Guitar Sounds & Ubiquitous Ukulele



Where do the cross-currents of the breezy Pacific and the cryptic coldness of the north Atlantic meet? Here, above the 49th parallel, in a city on the St. Lawrence named Montreal and, if you want to be very specific, with a group called Postcards.

Key reference points appear to be Felt, C86 cassettes, Young Marble Giants, and with Dark Clouds, maybe the Current 93/Death in June/Sol Invictus axis of post-industrial neo-folk. For all of you concerned about the steady undercurrent of Fascism in all glumly strummed music, I suggest that you can put your mind to rest with regards to Postcards - preliminary investigation on the group reveals much less ambiguous treatment of Fascist themes and imagery than the aforementioned reference points.

As befits the post-punk aesthetic, the group has a cassette available on Fixture Records. The stand-out track is Nowhere, which you can preview on their Myspace page.

If you're in Montreal, the group will be performing at L'Escogriffe for Toronto psych-poppers The Hoa Hoas' album release party along with Omon Ra on Saturday, December 12th. And coincidentally, they have a song called Postcards.


Trending! The Sounds of The Yogurt Commercial Ukulele!

It might just be a latent hatred of, but the too precious digital-age calypso mess of the embarrassingly intercapped tUnE-YaRdS (fuck, it annoys me to look at it, nevermind type it - I can practically smell the stale confines of a zine library at a liberal arts college) is really, really not doing it for me. Have any of you been subject to the broadcast television recently? If you have, you'd realize that every single yogurt commercial is scored by music like this. In many ways, I should really trust my judgement more - just as with Girl Talk, which I inadvertently listened to a couple of weeks ago after avoiding for many years and ended up absolutely loathing... After immersing myself in pop/indie music or what not for many, many years, it becomes relatively easy to know at a glance whether I'll like a band or not based on the aesthetic cues they leave scattered around, and so with tUnE-YaRdS.

3 comments:

maya glum said...

Hi! How do you post mp3s on a blog?
Postcards are gooood! thank you!

Jay Watts III said...

I currently upload mine to an FTP and then link to the MP3s from there, but there are a couple of options I used to use before that work, too. For example, sites like yousendit or rapidshare or megaupload or mediashare or zshare will let you post mp3s (you upload an mp3 to your account & afterwards it provides you with a URL to it) for either a limited amount of time or a limited amount of downloads.

maya glum said...

hey thanks! I'll try it!