Indie Rock Face Paint

I have nothing personal against Tuneyards, but I'm just wondering if there's a mission to antagonize me. First, with wacky intercaps, and now facepaint? The precious yogurt commercial music I can ignore, whatever: innocuous enough.

Use Ether To Subdue Robber

Pop Winds In Harmony

Montreal's newest Great White Hope for pop redemption, the Silly Kissers, will be launching their new 10" Precious Necklace this Friday in the definitely unromantic concrete-bunker of the Torn Curtain. Along for the ride will be Grimes (that's Claire Boucher, who just released a cassette of her own), and Pop Winds. I've already covered the Silly Kissers and Grimes, as well as the solo work of Sean Nicholas Savage in previous posts (here, here and here), so my focus right now is the trio Pop Winds, who seem to be cut from the same cloth as Air France, Lemonade, Tanlines as well as other Sincerely Yours groups: re-formatting Afro-Caribbean poly-rhythms for the less-than-temperate regions of the earth. As superficial as the sampling or adopting of these 'tropical riddims' might be, it's nothing to get your Bermuda shorts in a bunch about - it's pop music, and it rarely gets as lyrically distasteful as 10cc's Dreadlock Holiday or the Bill Wyman song I posted yesterday (Je Suis en Rock Star). If anything, the song that comes to my mind is Siouxsiee & The Banshees' Hong Kong Garden.

So yes, fine, there are the vocal acrobatics and loops of Animal Collective, and those rhythms, but the sentiments and songs are expressed through the production and composition techniques of two very much-maligned genres - 80's industrial and goth. Whereas the post-electric explorations of musicians of that time (Death in June, Current 93 et al.) led to them marching in the wilderness of a martial-pastoral folk almost anti-modernist in its adoption of acoustic instruments, Pop Winds are more comfortable with studio technology, and (in so far as I can tell) less inclined to fascist imagery. And yes, we have a saxophone. (Say what you will about the excesses of the sax-drenched 80's, there's a sonic place the instrument occupies that no other instrument can really move around in.)

It's appropriate that a lot of the lofts and re-appropriated workspaces that house these musicians and events are dank, ranging from the cavernous to the claustrophobic. It's the perfect place to dream of tropical escape in the middle of a bleak Montreal winter. If you're in Montreal, you can catch Kyle Bennett, Devon Welsh & Austin Milne of Pop Winds in just such a place this Friday.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Pop Winds are recording a new full-length right now at Master Tone in Montreal.

Silly Kissers / Grimes / Pop Winds
DJ sets by Why? Alex Why? and Rough Shape.
Friday, February 19th at the Torn Curtain

Leaked LCD Soundsystem 45:33 Remixes, early Lifelike .WAV files, Misheard Can Lyrics, et plus

Neighbourhood Romeo No, You Call Him
Fatback Band Yum Yum (Gimme Some)

Despite its giant floating plastic vortex twice the size of Texas, is my preferred fish provider and general all-around ocean. So, here's a little something from the close-to-the-coast duo Neighbourhood Romeo, comprised of Calgary, Alberta's Wax Romeo & Neighbour. Fun and crisp funk with a up-pitched Loleatta Holloway vocal sample that helps buoy oil city's reputation as a fine producer of super-slick sleeper funk hits. Grab whatever you can from these guys. Neighbour will be in Montreal performing at Studio Just For Laughs on Thursday, October 1st as part of Pop Montreal's Red Bull Mega Hurtz alongside Grahmzilla (of Thunderheist), Hovatron (aka Phil Aubin), Lunice, Megasoid, and uh, some sort of weird Burning Man hippie-techno-alien-rave DJ named JELO. Don't know who programmed that...

Okay, so the Fatback Band (later Fatback) were never from the West Coast, but they sound like it. Good enough.

THEO PARRISH 45:33 REMIX OF LCD SOUNDSYSTEM AVAILABLE HERE

LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 remixes got leaked. Eight in total, from Padded Cell, Pilooski, Riley Reinhold, Prins Thomas, Trus’me Prince Language and Theo Parrish. Stream them in 320 kbps on Feel My Bicep.

Vancouver's always generous promoter & DJ U-Tern puts up some .WAV files of early Lifelike vinyl-only releases. Thanks! His new weekly The Terrace is every Thursday at Republic Nightclub (958 Granville Street), which is great news - something to do during my next visit to Vancouver.

"Animal Collective in the house!" Dam Funk to sparse and skeptical East Coast funk fans, as reported by the New York Times.

Misheard Can Lyrics/Misheard Damo Suzuki lyrics must be collected into one archive for the betterment of mankind and an increase in human understanding.

Pan-Atlantic Pop & Dancefloor Dilemmas

John McEnroe & Bjorn Borg shake it up

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark Genetic Engineering
New Musik On Islands

I remember being really struck by OMD's Dazzle Ships album when I listened to it a couple of years ago - the typically English fascination with World War II and skewed glances at industrial progressivism (that continues to this day, think of British Sea Power) in a concept album were more appealing than Pink Floyd to me. British pop musicians from, let's say the late 1960's on to the mid 80's, loved to use children's voices in their singles for some reason. Here are two fine examples. Genetic Engineering was a single, but (strangely) New Musik's On Islands wasn't.

Funk is not just a sound, it's a taste. A taste of the good life.

Nick Straker Band A Little Bit of Jazz
The Gap Band You Dropped a Bomb on Me
Jungle Brothers Because I Got It Like That (Ultimatum Remix)
Michael Zager Band Let's All Chant
Ultramagnetic MC's Traveling at the Speed of Thought (Hip House Club Mix)

Nick Straker left New Musik to form his own project, which turned out to be more successful. For the longest time, I thought that the Nick Straker Band was a black R&B group, instead of a project fronted by a white kid from London who used to play in a wedding band. The Gap Band was, however, a black R&B group and proved their mettle in this fine display of special-effect-laden funk, as well as the bajillion other amazing songs they wrote and recorded over the course of their lengthy career.

I'm sure most of you recognize the Electric Light Orchestra song sampled on this remix of the Jungle Brothers. Best song to do the running man to, in my opinion. (For those romantic breakdancers out there, I suggest slow running man to Soul II Soul's Back To Life.) The Michael Zager Band's is a fine enough song, although Mr. Zager reveals an unseemly fascination with Gershwin during his baroque & klezmer brass-off towards in the latter half of the song. Nonetheless, there are hand-claps, disco calls, and that stellar bass-line - which make their way into this hip-house remix of the Ultramagnetic MC's Traveling at The Speed of Thought. Was hip-house as fun a genre as I think it is, or am I just inflicted with nostalgia for the early 90's, in the same way that people a couple of years my junior love Biggie Smalls?

A final thought: I would like to call a moratorium on anyone between the ages of 18 and 34 yammering on about Erik Satie. We know: you just discovered him, you love him, Parisian Bohemian Dadaist, etc. I hope they play Gymnopédie No.1 at your funeral. Did this just get added to Concordia's FFAR 250 curriculum recently? On an Animal Collective mix-tape I missed? I still claim he invented Muzak.