Posts Tagged ‘Rostam’

ROSTAM – ” In A River “

Posted: September 14, 2018 in MUSIC
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Rostam Batmanglij is a man of his word: The Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist who first came to fame as a member of Vampire Weekend recently teased the impending release of the first single from his forthcoming second solo album, and said single has indeed arrived. “In A River” is Rostam’s first new music since the September 2017 release of his acclaimed solo debut Half-Light, though the details of his follow-up album remain mostly under wraps. “In A River” opens only with bright mandolin chords and the idyllic intimacy evoked by Rostam’s vocals (“Slide into the cool mud / Underneath the pines / Somewhere to your right or left / Is my body you can find”), which are soon joined in the chorus by a thumping 808 beat. Like its eponymous body of water, the song slows and speeds at intervals, contracting and expanding its instrumental palette in a way that feels as unknowable as nature. The song’s core sentiment is as simple as its instrumentation is complex: “We are swimming / with no clothes on / in a river in the dark,” Rostam sings. “And I am holding / onto you, boy / in the faint light of the stars.”

 

ROSTAM – ” Half-Light “

Posted: September 8, 2017 in MUSIC
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The ex-Vampire Weekend songwriter and instrumentalist has worked all over pop music in the past few years—producing Charlie XCX, making an album with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, remixing Ty Dolla Sign, among many other projects. Now he’s throwing it all into his own debut album, Half-Light, with the big drums and singalong melodies we’ve come to expect from Vampire Weekend, filtered through a singular songwriter with as much potential as anyone working today.

Rostam’s “Bike Dream” from the album Half-Light, due September 15, 2017 on Nonesuch Records.

ROSTAM – ” Gwan “

Posted: May 7, 2017 in MUSIC
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Rostam has released a video and official audio for one of the solo tracks he’s previewed since leaving Vampire Weekend January 2016,The track  “Gwan.” It’s a pulsating, largely percussion-less ballad; the rhythm is in the string section. The lyrics are vague and somnambulistic enough to suit the chorus (“But all of these dreams keep coming back to me slowly”) except for a passing specific reference: “Your face against the glass/Across 11th ave.” It suits the video’s NYC scenery: Rostam, mohawked and beaming, stalks around Manhattan in slightly slowed-motion,

HAMILTON LEITHAUSER and ROSTAM – ” In a Black Out “

Posted: December 10, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The musical partnership between Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam Batmanglij began, as so many do, by disturbing the parental peace. The former lead singer for the Walkmen and former multi-instrumentalist from Vampire  Weekend are both originally from the city of Washington, D.C., and they’d meet up when they went home for the holidays. 

Leithauser, now based in Brooklyn, and Batmanglij, who was based in Brooklyn but now lives in Los Angeles, released their first collaborative album together,  “I Had A Dream That You Were Mine” ,

Written and recorded from July 2014 to February 2016, the record pairs one of rock’s great voices with a pop auteur . The result are lush arrangements and doo-wop tropes Batmanglij toyed with on the last Vampire Weekend album and fills them with another charismatic vocalist from indie rock band The Walkmen, Hamilton Leithauser, who brings his smoky croon and elegantly rumpled lyrics. 

The two first met in March 2008, when Vampire Weekend were in Atlanta to open for the Walkmen, Leithauser and Batmanglij didn’t start working on songs together until years later, beginning with “1959,” which turned out to be the final song on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine . Batmanglij ended up writing, producing, and performing on two tracks from Leithauser’s solo debut LP, 2014’s “Black Hours” (“Alexandra” and “I Retired”). “It was a progression from there,” Leithauser says. They recorded almost the whole album in Batmanglij’s home studio in Los Angeles making it the first LP cut there—except for the drums, played by the White Rabbits Stephen Patterson, which they did in an outside studio.

They decided to bill themselves by their names, rather than as another Hamilton Leithauser solo record that happened to be co-written and produced by Batmanglij  “We wanted to put the record out in that way that both of our identities would be intact, said Batmanglij .