Sunflower Bean – BTR Live Studio [ep365] from BTR Live Studio. Like this? Watch the latest episode of BTR Live Studio on Blip!
Rock & roll was never dead, it has just been waiting to re-emerge. In their first year, Sunflower Bean has made waves as they relight the torch and bring rock into the future. Sunflower Bean live and yet again they managed to impress and improve upon all the previous performances. The trio of Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlen and Jacob Faber, just know how to lock into a groove and run away with it completely for 45-minutes straight. Although they’re still young enough to sport those pesky black x’s on their hands and are forced to stick to red bulls while on stage, the band run through their songs with the intricacy and confidence of a band well into their years. One minute they’re hammering away at sludgy Black Sabbatch riffage and then they’re weaving into stop-start psych-freak out jams. They may be young, but Sunflower Bean are a fully realized band that know what they’re doing, and their live show just keeps getting better and better. You’ll be pressed to find a harder worker band at the moment than Sunflower Bean, which is why they’re one of the best live bands you can see in New York at the moment.
It’s safe to say that Shana Falana’s recent release of “Set Your Lightning Fire Free” is knocking some socks off. That’s because each of the ten songs on her new EP are pretty much completely different from each other in terms of genre and general feeling. What starts as a lush, almost new age Enya reminiscent vocal chorus quickly morphs into post-punk revival and then to frenetic new wave dance tracks. It’s that sort of intense energy and versatility that makes for a great live show, TO HEAR MORE SONGS FROM SHANA FALANA and download please visit http://shanafalana.bandcamp.com
In the Light EP was released 17 August 2011 Written and played by Shana Falana
New Jersey / Brooklyn based quintet Hey Anna, aka sisters Anna (vocals), Erin (guitar) and Katie Rauch-Sassen (keyboard), along with Matthew Langner and Jamie DiTringo, are preparing for the release of their new long-player “Run KoKo” later on in the year, and have presently released a new single, “Island”, as something of a taster of whats to come.
‘Island’ opens with this swirling maelstrom of shoegaze noise, before this alt-indie breaks out from the middle. From there, sweetened by Anna’s delicious vocal, chugging guitars with seering swipes of guitar, it sweeps through any resistance you might have had, as the guitars recover from their initial spurned sound, adding more muscular lines to the accompaniment. As if to balance things up, as layers of noise and echo are added, a healthy dose of backing vocal is added, just for good measure before it shudders and dissipates to a close. stunning Recorded at Jesse & Mike’s studio at Cannon Found Soundation in Union City, NJ in January and February of 2015.
On April 21st, RhinoRecords will release “Live! 8-24-1979“, a previously unreleased 1979 live performance by the B-52’s. It features the band performing a bunch of songs from their first two albums (The B-52’s and Wild Planet). The concert, which was recorded at the Berklee Center in Boston, was found in Warner Bros. Records’ vaults. hear these two tracks here
The band says:
We opened up for the Talking Heads just six weeks after our first record was released. We were a little scared of the audience so we kept our heads down and focused – and we danced like mad when there was a break! Ricky [Wilson] was so fierce on the guitar – so intense – it was all so raw and live and we loved it.
Brooklyn’s The Downies are an underground supergroup of sorts. The band’s members play in an array of other bands and various projects, including Porches and LVL Up, and are by-and-large affiliated with the local SUNY Purchase alumni scene that revolves around the venue David Blaine’s The Steakhouse. an apartment that three-quarters of the band happen to live in and the one that LVL Up wrote a song about . Downies are believed to play incredible live shows, many of which occur at The Steakhouse and other surrounding venues, but the band hadn’t released any official recordings until “Widow” this is the first single off of Downies’ forthcoming EP, and it’s a welcome introductory taste of a band that’s destined to make a huge defined footprint in the local scene this year. This was the impetus for Downies beginnings and name, says fellow DBTS dweller / DDW-wizard Dave Benton, “All of the band members lived downstairs at the Brooklyn house-venue, DBTS, thus calling themselves ‘Downies’.”
The song itself is a short power-jam replete with a noticeably sunny vocal tone, splashy guitars, and an unabashedly song-driving kick drum pattern. Nearly every moment in the song feels like it cannot wait to get to the next phrase, making the track go by much faster than expected. The chorus features hand claps and tambourine that sound playful when compared to the respective discographies of the Downies members; there is a certain open-air tone that belies the crafted studio sound of both Porches and LVL UP’s most recent full lengths. This is not to say that those albums (Slow Dance In The Cosmos and Hoodwink’d respectively) are without breeziness or fun of their own, but there is a noticeable difference in sound on “Widows” that is hard to sum up in other terms.
When we first heard a few songs from the Brooklyn band Late Cambrian, we knew that we were listening to one of the great new under-the-radar indie bands of the year. Beginning with the latest songs from their newest release, we eagerly listened to the band’s back catalog of enjoyable singles, brimming with glorious power pop hooks, driving rhythms and harmony-lush choruses.
It’s the music that ultimately matters, and Late Cambrian have proven themselves, after four years of hard work and a growing discography, as a band to watch in 2015. Their latest album, “Golden Time”, released in January, is busting at the seams with amazingly melodic, uptempo songs. The title track is a great example thanks to a collision of blazing guitars and rhythms, soaring synths and perfectly delivered vocals.
Since its release last fall, the “Golden Time” single has received over 10,000 plays and more than 120 hearts on Soundcloud alone and scored a No. 1 spot on OurStage. The video for “Golden Time” was also the featured video of the month. Those are pretty good indications of the band’s trajectory as they win one fan at a time.
Late Cambrian’s frontman, songwriter and vocalist, John N. Wlaysewski, says the title track of their new album is really starting to catch on not just for how terrific it sounds, but also because of the lyrics. “It’s a song about a teenager’s perspective on clubs, looking from the outside in,” he said.
Another track, “Throwing Shade,” leaps right out of the speakers and demands attention. It’s fantastic guitar riff is one that Wlaysewski had been working on for some time, and waiting for just the right song to pair it to. “I’ve been wanting to make a slower groove-oriented song for a while,” he said, “and this is the first one.” “Throwing Shade,” he said, tells the story about “the weird mind games couples play with each other as a relationship is ending,” adding, “sometimes people see they have mental and emotional control over the other partner, and then use it to screw with their emotions.”
Golden Time marked a huge leap forward for the band sonically, Wlaysweski said. “The album was a big sonic departure for us. I really wanted to incorporate more modern sounds, synths and samples. I wanted the band to experiment more with structure. I’d been listening to a lot of Phoenix’s Bankrupt while we recorded this.” He said that the band members are all big fans of Weezer, Pinkerton, The Strokes and other acclaimed bands.
The band’s well-honed power pop energy, interesting and existential lyrics and soaring melodies accompanied by sweet vocal harmonies and fuzzy guitar riffs became more apparent on their sophomore release, PEACH, with songs like “Lovers Point” and “Ryan Gosling.”
Wlaysewski said that “Ryan Gosling,” named after the famous actor, is one of the band’s most well-known tracks, which is not surprising since it has a catchy, infectious melody and “woah-oh-oh” chorus, making it a perfect sing-along track. The song “details the struggle to make a meaningful connection with another human being in a fleeting New York City night life,” Wlaysweski said, while “Lover’s Point,” his personal favorite from PEACH, is “an incredibly romantic song for me…it’s about young love and having that feeling again when you’re older.”
The band’s discography offers one musical highlight after another. Taken all together, it’s easy to see why they were voted the best new artist of 2014 in a listeners’ poll. Late Cambrian has all of the makings of a breakout band that should kick up another notch in 2015 as more indie rock listeners in the U.S. hear their tracks.
Salt Cathedral is a Brooklyn-based experimental pop duo who originally hail from Bogotá, Colombia, Their name references a Roman church built in a Colombian salt mine. The title of their recent EP Oom Velt, on the other hand, is a phonetic corruption of the German word umwelt. Since we don’t sprechen sie Deutsch, we’ll take Salt Cathedral’s word that the term means the “individuality of experience” like how you and I could watch the music video for their previous single “Holy Soul” together but never get the same thing out of it. At the end of the day, we’re all on our own planets, man. Travelling In Paris is taken from Salt Cathedral’s ‘OOM VELT’ EP released 2014
“Holy Soul” has an ethereal, spacious quality with echoing vocal refrains that sound like a ghostly being talking to itself. The video was inspired by the lyrics “I am a holy soul in a foreign land,” says co-director Bradley Tangonan: “The main character feels like an outsider, both at home and at the country club where he works. In the time he spends at his job, he imagines he belongs in this strange place as a way to escape.”
Shana Falana may be gearing up to release her solo debut, but the Kingston-based psych goddess is hardly new to the game. Before she packed up and moved upstate, Shana Falana was cutting her teeth in Brooklyn and on tour, constantly working on volumes of material that clutched at the hem of various genres and wavelengths. Everything from chanting with an Eastern European lilt (she sang in a Bulgarian women’s choir for a bit) to increasingly undeniable wails to heady drum fills to distortion so fuzzy it puts Jim Henson’s whole output to shame make an appearance on Set Your Lightning Fire Free, out April 7th on Team Love Records, and it’s a strong new start for the incendiary indie talent.
Take “Go,” for example: While the latest track to be released from Set Your Lightning Fire Free hits the ear as a kaleidoscopic, trippy gem that shines as brilliantly in 2015 as it would’ve in a Berkeley drug den during the Summer of Love, there’s so much going on from start to finish that you can’t help but lose yourself in Falana’s crowing or Mike Amari’s pugilistic way with the drum kit.
Small Wonder is the brainchild of Brooklyn, NY native, Henry Crawford. It began as an outlet for creating more electronic based music but has since evolved into Crawford’s principle moniker for any and all material. The makings of Wendy began when Crawford dropped out of college. Over the course of two years, he rewrote and reworked the album several times before beginning the recording process. Crawford enlisted the bedroom production of friend and colleague, Jack Greenleaf (Sharpless), starting in his parent’s house in New York and eventually moving to Chicago to finish. Wendy is loosely based on the metaphors and imagery of Peter Pan, as a means of exploring Crawford’s own insecurities about coming of age, and the loss of youth.
The Brooklyn-based record label Mexican Summer will celebrate five years in business with a two-day, indoor-outdoor festival featuring label artists, alumni, and friends at Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook. With a lineup that spans from living legends Spiritualized, Ariel Pink to underground mainstays like No Joy, the Fresh & Onlys to promising up-and-comers Happy Jawbone Family Band, Co La .
We’d expect nothing less from Mexican Summer, which has established itself as one of America’s premier indie labels since beginning as a vinyl-only subscription service spun off from Kemado Records in Autumn 2008. Since then, over the course of almost 200 releases — a mammoth 40 records per year on average — Mexican Summer morphed into a full-fledged label, dropped the vinyl-only policy and released records from some of the most visionary and respected names in underground music, developing a hard-to-define but easy-to-appreciate aesthetic along the way.
They put out pivotal early releases by Washed Out, Real Estate, Kurt Vile, and the Tallest Man On Earth. They’ve done buzzing garage pop with the Soft Pack, droning psych with Peaking Lights and dark synth-pop with Light Asylum. Software, their experimental electronic imprint directed by Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, has showcased Autre Ne Veut’s blistering art-damaged R&B, Tim Hecker’s masterful ambient freewheeling and the galactic synthscapes of Fuck Buttons side project Blanck Mass. In Best Coast, they helped to launch a legitimate rock star.
It’s all pretty impressive for a company that began as, in co-founder and A&R man Keith Abrahamsson’s own words, a side project. Mexican Summer has surpassed its parent label in terms of cultural cachet and sales figures. It’s the primary focus of business at Kemado and Mexican Summer’s Greenpoint office, which also houses the label’s in-house recording studio, Gary’s Electric, and sits adjacent to the label-run record store Co-Op 87. The intention was never to relegate Kemado to a catalog label and bring Mexican Summer to the forefront, but by following their instincts, Mexican Summer’s founders ended up hitting a lot of other people’s sweet spots along with their own.
“The records that we were putting out just picked up momentum, and you could just feel that it was what people wanted to talk to us about,” Abrahamsson says. “More and more it became the focus, not just internally but from the outside. That’s what we were in touch with press about more. That’s what the sales were better on. You could feel the shift from all directions. It was pretty undeniable. We all knew it just was what was happening. We didn’t want to fight it.”
Mexican Summer was born during a Brooklyn label renaissance that also included brands such as Woodsist,Captured Tracks, and Sacred Bones. Rather than compete, the companies fed off each other’s creative energy, working with some of the same musicians and even sharing office space at times.
“The neighborhood is full pretty much with the majority of our peers, and each of us seems to be putting out records that have some significance,” Abrahamsson said. “We all work together in some capacity, or we have throughout the years. It’s a good thing.”
The magnetic camaraderie attracted locals and out-of-towners alike. Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles should know; despite deep roots in San Francisco’s garage rock scene, his band released records on Woodsist,Captured Tracks, and Sacred Bones before linking up with Mexican Summer for 2012′s “Long Slow Dance” album.
That’s the approach Abrahamsson had in mind when he and Andres Santo-Domingo spun off Mexican Summer from Kemado five years ago. Since its inception in 2002, Kemado had operated under a traditional model that involved signing bands to multi-record deals and rolling out heavily structured long-lead press campaigns. Abrahamsson was starting to feel constricted by that business model and was looking for a way to merge his omnivorous music geek tendencies with his work.
“I think the whole idea of Mexican Summer really just came because I wanted to try to develop artists in a different way,” Abrahamsson says. “I think there are a lot of records that I was buying or records that were being released maybe out of a bedroom, you know? People that were just putting records out, whether it be a single or a 12-inch or whatever kind of format, and it just felt a little bit less — I don’t know, like maybe less structure and less pressure? And it felt like a good way to develop bands.”
Running the label on personal taste went hand in hand with basing it on personal relationships. Jasamine White-Gluz of Montreal shoegazers No Joy noted Mexican Summer’s “family environment,” while Tamaryn and Ariel Pink collaborator Jorge Elbrecht, who lives right down the street, says he was drawn to the label by his friendship with the staff and respect for their taste. (Elbrecht’s former project, Lansing-Dreiden, recorded for Kemado.)
“It’s a boring answer, but the criteria really is only that we’re passionate about the music — and also the people behind the music, Abrahamsson offers. “Those two things, they have to click for us to feel really behind the project… There is a sound or an aesthetic that exists, but I leave that to people’s imagination a little bit more.”
The result is a record label whose artists feel supported but not smothered by a staff that’s hands-on in the best way. Miles said Abrahamsson requests to hear every Fresh & Onlys demo because he’s so stoked on the band, yet the band is more likely to turn to him for advice than he is to issue imperatives about taking the music a certain direction. It all sounds less like subjection to helicopter parenting than recording for the president of your fan club.
“They’re the best,” No Joy’s White-Gluz says. ”We’ve never worked with a label before, but in your head, you think labels are these people that tell you what to do or kind of like the bad cop to give you deadlines or whatever… For this latest record we got to record at Gary’s Electric, which is the studio in their building, and it was like the best creative experience we’ve ever had.
Having Gary’s Electric available in-house to record projects increases the sense of connection between artist and label; it allows the entire process of creating and selling a record to happen under one roof. (It also doesn’t hurt as an income stream when non-label artists rent it out.) Abrahamsson, Elbrecht, and White-Gluz all rave about the low-pressure, creativity-inducing environment.
Elbrecht in particular was enthused about the results when he and Ariel Pink recorded their well-received 2013 single “Hang On To Life” at Gary’s Electric: “That thing was a pretty magical experience because it was written, recorded and mixed within a weekend, and I just love the way it sounds. We didn’t fuck over it too much, and I just think it was a good lesson for me because of the ease of execution and how happy everyone is with it.
If this all sounds like the platonic ideal of an independent record label, well, yeah. It is. It’s exactly how this whole “indie” thing is supposed to work, and in the case of Mexican Summer, it absolutely has worked.
There is also a commemorative hardcover book coming this December, a limited edition of 1,000 at Co-Op 87 and online. Mexican Summer: Five Years reflects the kind of enthusiasm and creative care that the label has become known for: 250 pages, bound with an embossed cloth cover, with screen-printed craft paper wrap and three interior paper stocks. Most characteristically, the book includes a 10-inch record full of music that won’t be available digitally, including collaborations from Bay Of Pigs (Spiritualized, Soldiers Of Fortune, and Neil Hagerty), Jorge Elbrose (Jorge Elbrecht and Ariel Pink), Autre Ne Veut and Fennesz, BobbTrimble and Quilt, and the Lonely Sailor and Renée Mendoza Haran (members of Total Control, LaceCurtain, and Ashrae Fax). It’s an ideal artifact for a company that continues to thrive on carefully curated quality, personal interaction and boundless enthusiasm for music.
The Fat Angel Sings 