Just got the new CD by one of my favourite Canadian bands:

I've been listening to Source Tags & Codes all day.

I was hoping this would be good but that is just not the case.

Elastico, what do you think of the assertion that the vocals on "Monsoon" make the song sound like Spoon?

this is never something I thought before. I guess they're more pinched/nasal than usual, yeah. Britt doesn't belt it like that though.

Well, yeah, the belting parts don't really support the comparison. But like, the earlier parts... the tone and melody are both very Brittish (see what I did there.)

Anyways, this album is really destroying me as of late. It's serious, dramatic indie rock, yeah, but it actually manages to kick ass all over the place (unlike, say, Funeral, which I now realize is simply Source Tags & Codes for pussies.) And the drama and seriousness actually manage to work because the music has its roots in post-hardcore and noise-rock (I mean, shit, "Homage" is just about the greatest Drive Like Jehu/Rodan/Unwound pastiche I've ever heard. Why can't more bands be this cool?), so the grand, cinematic quality of the songs and the major label production actually get a chance to act as a fairly legitimate progression of a specific sound/genre. Yet despite this and Leaves Turn Inside You providing us with what could have been the Daydream Nations of our generation, no one must have been listening 'cause no one really plays this kind of music anymore. Tragic.

So yeah, certified classic in the Pavement Ist Rad canon. It's official.

Source Tags spent some time as my favorite album of the decade. Definitely a high watermark for all recent rock music, and an expertly constructed album in an age where people are gradually caring less about the album as an art form. At least the SOMB still cares.

I loved Worlds Apart too, so fuck everybody.

i really like the cover for this. what's it like? is it heavy heavy really heavy metal with screaming all over or not?

Yeah, uh, it's not that at all. No Earth is, really.

Alright, Mr. "Wannabe Subversive Experimental Music Lover" Guy, let me tell you right now, on your journey through the world of people making lists made up of albums that are a bit more "out" than Elvis Costello or the Beatles, you will most likely encounter an album by Earth called Earth 2 from 1993, a major landmark in "stoner metal" or "doom metal." The line-up then was Dylan Carlson on guitar and Dave Harwell on bass (not for long, though), and what the album is is three tracks and nearly 80 minutes of the most down-tuned, low-end-heavy metal riffs played as slowly as possible. It's awesome! It's like ambient music made out of these fucking massive power chords. Bands like Earth and the Melvins were major influences on Eyehategod, Boris, Sunn 0))), etc.

Dylan Carlson's guitar playing style has, in recent years, been based less in the heavy metal riffage of days of old and has come to possess an almost country-style twang, very Morricone inspired. Hibernaculum isn't really a metal album. There's very little distortion. A lot of the times, yes, the guitars are playing doom riffs, but it's not loud or anything. There's even piano! Slow, beautiful shit. Relaxing, even. But it kicks ass. And "heavy heavy really heavy metal with screaming all over" is awesome. Remember that.

Those sand dunes look awfully familiar.

^ good post.




Idaho - We Were Young and Needed the Money
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther
Durutti Column - Vini Reilly
Flaming Lips - Transmissions From the Satellite Heart

Today:

Les Savy Fav - The Cat & The Cobra
Rodan - Rusty
U.S. Maple - Long Hair In Three Stages
U.S. Maple - Talker
Brainiac - Bonsai Superstar

I'm trying to listen to this but my soundcard keeps cutting out on me. I fucking hate technology! I'm gonna go live in a cave and make music with animal bones and rocks. It'll be lo-fi primal rock and pitchfork will give it an 9.8 anyway, the music sounds cool but the singer is just wailing a bit too much

Le Volume Courbe - I Killed My Best Friend

bizarre and awesome.

it would have been near the bottom, but I really should have put this on my top 100 of all time. Their best album, as well as their best-sounding album. The drums are kind of thin but the cheap synth tone is so perfect. I always thought the cover was the ocean, with a wave and a shark fin, but I looked closer and realized how totally wrong I was.

fake edit: "No Xmas For John Quays" sounds like getting hit with something.

definitely their best album. I have to stay up all night so I'm just gonna listen to this for another hour or so.

No joke I fell asleep before 8pm last night, it was out of my control...I got almost twelve hours of napping in, now I'm set for the week


captain beefheart -- safe as milk
my new favorite song? Abba Zaba. I'm going to drive everyone crazy with this record.


Earth -- Earth 2, and legacy of dissolution



Om -- Variations on a Theme

"When it's Over" is monolithic. If the entire album was just the guitar intro to that song, I'd be happy. How can you write a song as epic as "Youth of America", and then, on the same album, write a song even more fucking epic than "Youth of America"? And then have almost nobody hear it? Unfathomable.

hmm... I would really disagree with the Tobias Thomas choice, (it just didnt do much for me, but I am not done with it yet.)

As for Pantha du Prince it is a mighty awesome record. The Field is my #4 of the year, and I now have Pantha around #7, so it is not that one is far better than the other. I think Pantha might be a better record: more varied, more depth, more skilled, and shows signs of new places that he will go. The Field album no doubt, is a one trick pony, but he totally nails it throughout the entire record, and it is so compelling all the way through. So really this would just be an argument of best vs. favorite.

But i really got to check out those other two you recommended.

holler at me if you need 'em and i'll up 'em for ya

efdemin's album in particularly. i downloaded a couple of his eps and they're also pretty good for the kind of chill home listening.

I listened to The Modern Dance in an automobile last night.

This band was like, ridiculously ahead of the game, weren't they.

"Broke" is a masterpiece. Nicely structured, gorgeous melody, and some his most simple but most powerful lyrics. I hate how inconsistent this band is when they're so capable of turning out stuff like this.



yeah, who was doing anything similar besides like, This Heat? Barely anyone sounds like them 30 years later. All of the songs sound like they're gonna fall apart.

Ha, ha, nice post edit(s.) I was about to be like, "Huh, fucker?"

That comp is my favorite release of theirs. I remember during late 2005 when I kept trying to get into Wolf Parade and would end up just wishing that I was listening to "Other People's Lives" instead. That, "A Life of Arctic Sounds," "Interstate 8," "All Night Diner"... anyone who listens to the downright FIERINESS of these performances and even suggests that this earlyish mid-period isn't the most unstoppably great this band has ever been... the only ones who would think this are completely fucking soulless.

EDIT: Whoa, you really went to town with those edits. Anyways, yeah, shit, The Modern Dance was recorded during 1976 and 1977! That's fucked up. It's like, "We're not gonna wait to see the Sex Pistols on TV or the Ramones at CBGB's or whatever, lets just listen to our pretentious Brian Eno and Modern Lovers albums that nobody likes and go from there." Shit yeah.

I don't think I've ever posted anything that I didn't edit right away. It came to my attention that David Thomas probably doesn't predate David Byrne.

and yeah, you pretty much named all the songs I like off the album. This band could be so fucking good, but all I like is Lonesome Crowded West and some of this one. Then they had to do their Soft Bulletin and become worthless. Oh well.

Eh, I thought they were still good when they did The Moon & Antarctica. All it is is the sound of a great band (the same band that made Lonesome Crowded West and Building Nothing Out of Something) finally having enough money to make some totally headphones worthy epic shit. It's a lot better than The Soft Bulletin. Shit like "What People Are Made of" still kills it. Sure, the "THIS IS IMPORTANT, YOU MUST FEEL THESE LIKE SOME HEAVY EMOTIONAL SHIT" quality of the lyrics contributes quite a bit to the fact that I haven't bothered to listen to it since I was 14. Still.

And if Good News had been an album full of "Float On"s and "The View"s, they would have had quite the wonderfully logical turning point in their career. But alas, they blew it, lost a drummer, added a guitarist, got the drummer back, sucked royally, added another guitarist, somehow got to the point where they had SIX official members for no good reason, and man, it's tragic, isn't it. Like, redeeming themselves is gonna be a real pain.

I think they're too far gone to redeem themselves. It'd be hopeless to even expect them or want them to, because they were in their prime as a bunch of 20-something indie rock nobodies who had a weird and brilliant frontman as their secret weapon. Now they've crafted their Ambitious Sonic Masterwork, they're writing songs to reflect their current stage as totally unexpected celebrities, and there's no way they're gonna put together another album of sloppy disillusioned songs like Lonesome Crowded West. It's cool to see a band like this with a #5 single, but at the same time it sucks, because they have to cut ties with everything that I thought made them potentially great. Changes, man.

OTM. Masterpiece album.
If you haven't heard the Melvins cover "Youth of America", do yourself a favor and check that out. I can post it in a bit.

Alright, check this out:

Melvins - "Youth of America"

Ronnie Milsap - The Essential Ronnie Milsap

Terrible collection. I don't know how they can get away with calling any of this stuff "essential." I was having a hard time remember which of his songs I liked from my childhood, but yeah... "Let's Take the Long Way Around the World," "Pure Love," "I'd Be a Legend in my Time," all classics, all missing here, replaced by awful 80s & 90s songs that no one cares about and shouldn't. I couldn't even listen to half of this without getting sick. That's how bad this is.



Simply Red - Greatest Hits

I was pretty sure that I hadn't heard anything from this guy/band before, but that's ridiculous! "Holding Back the Years," "If You Don't Know Me by Now," classics of modern retail music. Apparently these were both #1 hits. Yeah, in America. Highly recommended for Michael Bolton/McDonald fans. "Fairground" starts off like a Royksopp song, and he kind of does this Erland Oye thing with his voice, sort of... this was in 1996. Otherwise, I think I'll be taking this back to the library today and never thinking of it again.



Royal Trux - Twin Infinitives

I normally don't bother posting anything other than new things I've bought/borrowed from people in this thread -- no downloads or old stuff that I've always had, otherwise I'd have to post all the time -- but I was reading the thread yesterday and was inspired to get this out again. I'd completely forgotten how the CD is broken into only 4 tracks, which is infuriating for me as a listener but also hilarious. The biggest difference between this and pure "noise" music is that I'm still stuck trying to listen for a song to form out of this mess. All the parts are there and it sounds like they're coming together, like an Aerosmith or White Stripes song is suddenly going to form, but it never does. And that's unbelievably frustrating. It's like that feeling you get when you feel a sneeze coming on, and it builds and builds for a minute but then it goes away. Or like the time I steamed a cup of egg nog at work to make an egg nog latte, and then spent over three hours on the toilet battling the most painful diarrhea I've ever come face to face with in my life. Anyway, this time around it gave me a headache. I had to turn it off and go lie down with a wet rag over my face for a half hour. Then I had an epiphany: this album is every bit of a monumental achievement as Loveless.

hahaha elastico just sent this to me a couple days ago.

God dammit The Wipers are a top 10 band.

Yeah, Youth of America is just about as good as music gets.

And yeah, as far as Twin Infinitives being as sonically mind-crushing as Loveless is, I would certainly agree with that. Even though it's a god-awful mess, and it doesn't sound like Neil and Jennifer bothered listening to any of the already laid down tracks when they recorded all the various overdubs, there's still so much stuff crammed into the mix that revisiting it proves to be rewarding on at least some level. Then again, it also makes your headache comments appropriate because really, there's an overwhelmingly excessive amount of shit to process at once and the fact that it's all arranged so haphazardly doesn't help one bit. Yet I keep going back to it.

Listening to "To Here Knows When" right now. This is even harder for me to make sense of than something like Twin Infinitives, quite honestly. I'm still shocked that the acclaim for the MBV record is as widespread and universal as it is, and that so many people who like it are people who wouldn't normally listen to such "difficult" or "out" genres as noise or black metal. 'Cause after all these years, I still can't fucking wrap my head around something like "To Here Knows When." It just completely fucks with my perception of what is pop, what is noise, what is music, etc. I mean, as crazy as it is, I "get" Twin Infinitives. Hell, I "get" Metal Machine Music. Even something like DI Go Pop. But man, shit, fucking MBV. Shit has me stumped like none other.

Glad you hear you gave the record another shot, Undo. I've been listening to it regularly since that post and nothing but good things have come from it. It's a record that I'm dazzled by, while not quite grasping it's entirety. Such a degenerate swirling chaos, it's something I find myself slowing picking away the layers with each subsequent listen. It's been a very gratifying experience and it's also one of the best discoveries I've come across in a while.


The Red Krayola - Introduction

Fascinating and very listenable.

plastic, have you heard Mayo Thompson's solo album? One of my Top 100 Of All Time! Very fractured and enjoyable attempt at early folk and blues.

No, I haven't. I'll be sure to check it out, though.

Yeah that'd great!

Hey Artem, what's your opinion on the new albums by Pole and Gui Boratto? I am downloading them both right now, and just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on either. I don't know how good either are supposed to be, but I have heard positive things about both.

still one of the best, most unique pop albums ever. He technically got 'better' since this album but he never wrote a stronger set of songs. Impossible to be in a bad mood after listening.

pole didn't do much to me. gui boratto's album has a few good singles, but nothing that's too different from his previous eps. they're just not the sound i go for in electornic music at this moment. cadenza had a few good releases this year with argenis brito and digitaline albums. that's the kind of stuff i'd recommend listening.

straight up. I was just listening to Worlds in Collision, it's not very good.

Jamie Lidell - Multiply

fuck, I really should have watched his set at Pitchfork. Great songs, and I can't imagine how intense the performance would have been.

Yeah, the first four albums are unstoppable. They pretty much lost me after that, though last year's Why I Hate Women is really good.

http://soundopinions.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=10491

Worst thread of the year so far.

Threads that are started in retaliation against P-Fork are generally shitty and unecessary, yeah. Remember the dude who was complaining that they reviewed Neil Young when they're an "indie rock" site? Embarassing.

Erlend Øye - DJ Kicks

This is so hitting the spot for me right now, after that long ass Lolla weekend.

Gilberto Gil & Jorge Ben - Gil e Jorge

Incredible album. This + all your Shudder To Think love lately tells me that you and I share a fine taste in music.