Christians and Lions

Christians and Lions - Everybody So Gorgeous (right click, save link as)


After disbanding sometime around 2007, a nebula favorite Christians & Lions have reunited and released a new EP entitled Bird's Milk. They'll be touring around the country through August with a few letter pressed and hand numbered copies for sale.

Above you'll find a streaming track from the EP called "Everybody So Gorgeous." It features the fortune cookie wisdom phrase: "things don't fall apart they just give up on being what they are." The recording technique on the vocals is unique to this song and it gets a little free form jazzy in the bridge.

2005's More Songs for Dreamsleepers and the Very Awake was startlingly beautiful, somber and joyous all in the right spots. Lyrics were as imaginative and seemingly random, yet deeply meaningful as Neutral Milk Hotel with an all analog acoustic sound. They've also got philosophical influences including Helene Cixous, Louis Althusser and Marshall McLuhan.

All reasons why Christians & Lions have been one of the best things I've heard come out of Boston and a follow up album is highly anticipated.

All of their releases are available to download for FREE at christiansandlions.com. If you do download, make sure to send those guys a donation. They work hard for it.

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Bright Eyes is Dead...

The Omaha World Herald reported that Bright Eyes was found dead in his apartment in New York today, surrounded by clocks and calendars. The coroners have determined that he died from a sudden fit of vanity.

When departing on the Conor Oberst solo vision quest, Bright Eyes commented that he could only write so many songs about being lost. For many of his listeners that were uplifted by and identified with that indeterminable indecisiveness, lost is how Bright Eyes will remain. Shoeless, in the middle of the woods, surrounded by circling wolves, calling out to his fabled Arienette. Apparently, the sound of lonliness wasn't what made him happy anymore.

In his rigor mortis stilted hands he clutched what seems to be his requiem, a final album that will be released in the fall of 2010.

We all wish Mr. Bright Eyes luck clawing his way up from that chalk outline.

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MONSTERS of Folk

Monsters of Folk - Say Please

The first ever Monsters of Folk album will be released on September 22nd (on Shangri-La in North America, Rough Trade in Europe, Spunk in Australia, and P-Vine in Japan).
The band is Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, My Morning Jacket's Yim Yames (much more folksy than Jim James) and M. Ward's M. Ward, produced by Mike Mogis.

Here's the first look at the album, the song "Say Please." M. Ward and Mr. Yames are the heaviest vocals in the tune that the group has warned "isn't very folky." It sounds kind of like Oberst's last self-titled release, with an arena rock, 'session band' sort of sound that Oberst has been fond of since Cassadaga and Jim James has been fond of forever.

Our generation has been in desperate need of a good super group and this is the best we could possibly get. At the very least, it should be a fun little folk (or maybe not folky at all) album.

monstersoffolk.com

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Timber Timbre

with high quality modified microphones Brian Eno would be proud.


Diego Stocco - Music From a Tree

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Brand New's brand new album (i make no apologies for puns)

Brand New have announced that their latest album will be called Daisy, to be released on September 22.

With their last album from 2006, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, the band took great strides to claw themselves away from a certain blasphemous genre which they helped to define. Influences and homages to Neutral Milk Hotel, The Velvet Underground and even The Jesus Lizard are present on the album. The result was an extremely unified psychedelic and intense sound, with unconventional song structures and honest, troubled lyrics. The album showed promise for the band to defy the fleeting trend of hot topic shopping from the early aughties.

Daisy was originally going to be called And One Head Can Never Die (perhaps a Herculean, seven headed serpent reference?). It'll be out on their own label, Procrastinate Music Traitors!...with the help of DGC/Interscope. Their official press release states that the album will "delve into new musical territory that will astonish both critics and fans alike." Maybe this means the album will sound like their UK only surprisingly playful piano single "Fork and Knife."

Jesse Lacey told Kerrang! that the new album may be "exhausting" and "dense," because the songs "don't always go in the most obvious direction" and may "require you to put some work in." He gives some examples, "sometimes we’d do something in a minor key where you’d expect something bigger" or "have feedback instead of something that might be more pleasing to the ear." The reason for this is the band wanted to write songs the way they'd want to play them live.

It sounds like an experimental, anti-pop, intellectual album conceived to replicate the spontaneity of a live performance. So...it should be amazing.

Lacey also said "I’d almost like to release it like an old school vinyl album, have two number ones through six," so that the listener could have an intermission. I wish they would and can't see why they don't.

No statements were made about this being the last album, but Lacey said, "I think a lot of the record is about us trying to make decisions about how long the band should go on. When I listened back to it, I realized how many songs are about something coming to a close, or knowing when it's time to put something away and move on." ...wink, wink...

www.fightoffyourdemons.com

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