Paris can be an intimidating city when it comes to navigating independent music, especially since there’s really no other city like it in France and “electro” tends to drown everything out. Wandering into the small boutique called Balades Sonores can be like opening the door into another hidden Paris. For one of the biggest cities in the world, it offers an unmatched intimacy and not just because the place is really tiny (in the typical Parisian style of ultra-small shops and elevators). Located in the area called Pigalle in the 9th district of Paris, it’s crammed full of music and oddities like crocheted pillows that look like vinyl records and T-shirts custom made by the shop’s house designer and artist, Chicamancha.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Sleep-Hiking Bastard Mountain
Traveling to Edinburgh for just a few days, it was hard to imagine that the namesake for the group Bastard Mountain wasn’t in fact Arthur’s Seat, the city’s highest crag with a patchwork of yellow wild flowers and spotted with bunnies darting from stone staircases, behind broken fences and into the bushes. Or to imagine that the grassy field of spirits from “Meadow Ghosts” wasn’t actually hidden around the overgrown river walkway along the banks of the Water of Leith. The music’s lingering, winding guitar parts, the rumbling, hum of the accordion and the subdued voices and harmonies are a perfect companion to the moist green city with black-stained castles and cathedrals.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Bent Shapes and the Art of Feeling Weird
Bent Shapes has strong connections to the band’s hometown of Boston and the music community there. Listening to the record almost drops you right into the streets, brick buildings everywhere and rats scurrying around corners. They’re the kids that worked behind the counter of the local thrift store, hocking treasures and oddities from lost decades. Or the kids in the coffee shop that you recognize from the basement show the night before and that you have a supremely awkward conversation with, almost as if “Fight Club” rules applied. However, they’re just the same type of socially clumsy dudes that embody the title of their debut LP, Feels Weird.
The project began with guitarist Ben Potrykus writing songs under the name of Girlfriends. The trio, including Supriya Gunda on bass and Andy Sadoway on drums, teamed up (oddly enough) through musical basements and working at thrift stores. On Feels Weird, they all share the microphone with each member singing at least one song. For a few years now, the group has been consistently releasing solid EPs and singles on cassettes and vinyl. Their debut Girlfriends cassette was a group of songs that complemented each other well, recorded in a more lo-fi style that really lent itself to the content of those particular songs. A few of their singles were released as flexible vinyl 7″ discs–translucent squares that appear as if the manufacturer forgot to pop the record out that can be flexed in half (or maybe it’s better to say it could be bent in a plethora of shapes).
Thursday, May 02, 2013
GREG MULLEN AND A TOUR OF COSMIC AMERICA
Published on thebomberjacket.com.
Greg Mullen snubbed out the joint he’d been smoking just as the bus pulled up. He was wearing a cowboy hat with the sides curled in and big white, heart-shaped sunglasses. He was traveling with only a suitcase and a guitar. High and exhausted, he took his seat and the mystical voice of the bus driver came through the speakers. He said, “Let me be the first to welcome you to the future,” and then the image of everything around doubled, splitting apart horizontally into the cyans and magentas of a 3D image. The bus took off, bringing Mullen to a strange and wondrous place hidden somewhere under the surface of the everyday USA.
On Greg Mullen’s second record, There Are AMERICAS Beyond This America by Greg Mullen and the Cosmic American Band, he assumes the role of the “Cosmic American Bus Driver,” musically guiding you through a land you know well but have never seen before. A place where sculpture gardens grow in backyards and your pockets are full of shooting stars, a place where dogs can laugh, a place with devastating 15-foot waves of molasses, a place where Joan of Ark rides the subway with Mr. Clean and Commissioner Gordon, a place where devils hide in the mountains waiting to snatch your tongue, a place where the Seine, the Charles, and the Zambezi rivers converge into one steady trickle, a place where you can digitize the whole experience on social media websites to make your ex-girlfriend jealous…a place called “Cosmic America.”
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Barcelona’s Famèlic Family
Read the whole post on thebomberjacket.com
Exploring live music in Barcelona led to overhearing every once in a while about a group of crazy dudes from a place called Vic. I first heard about a collective called Famèlic when speaking with the Barcelona band Mujeres. The name Els Famèlics is Catalan Spanish that actually means “the hungry” rather than the false friend, “the family.” It seemed like an elusive group of kids playing music and doing things their own way, similar to a lot of D.I.Y. collectives in the U.S., which is something rare to find in Spain. The members live in Barcelona, but have shows in a suburb called Vic, because it’s much harder to book venues in the city. They also operate an independent record label and have releases from the bands L’Hereu Escampa, Mates Mates,Ohios, Regalim, and they work with Vic Goddard & the Subway Set. In addition to these groups, they’re also working with some of the best bands in the country. Eduard Vila and Aleix Vila are two members of Furguson, a band that THE BOMBER JACKET recently interviewed, and are also co-founders of the collective. TBJ spoke with Sergi Egea, the third co-founder who manages a lot of Famèlic’s ventures, about the group and music in the Barcelona area in general.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Maragitas for Eskimos on the Atoll
Photo By Marian Campoy
Album Cover for Explota El Cuerpo
Read the whole post on thebomberjacket.com
After the drums kick in at the beginning of the album Explota El Cuerpo (Blow Up the Body) by the Madrid-based band Margarita, the guitar melody shoots out quickly over a dark night sky with prismatic colors streaming down to Earth from its tail. Stray notes twinkle here and there, passing through stars’ phosphorescence as the shooting song splits into alternate dimensions of inverted colors where Eskimos build sand igloos volcano-side. All the way through to the last track, every single tune is laced with whooping non-verbal melodies that crescendo and dive into quick, pleasantly chaotic succession.
At times it can sound like someone stripped the vocals from Sung Tongs, translated them into Spanish, and layered them over The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place after boosting the tempo. THE BOMBER JACKET spoke with vocalist and guitarist Hugo Sierra and he says, “we weren’t trying to sound like Animal Collective, which is a very cool band, but we tried to go further with our vocal harmonies in our own way. We started with ideas from Parque Mágico (their first record) and went deeper into the melodies to find an outer-space feeling.” The two albums are distinct, becauseParque Mágico is a lot heavier in comparison to the playful Explota El Cuerpo. In response to the latter Explosions in the Sky reference, the band shot back, “No way! Are you kidding? We don’t like that band at all.” They prefer psychedelic bands from the ‘60s, saying, “We wanted to have a sparkle going on all the time, full of colors and with spaces for listeners to fill themselves.”
Thursday, August 02, 2012
New DESAPARECIDOS: Interview with Conor Oberst from Huffington Post
Not too long ago, Conor Oberst wrote a song and filmed a video at the Arizona country border in protest against the state's immigration enforcement laws. The tune was "Coyote Song" and you can check it out here. The Huffington Post just published an excellent interview with Conor Oberst about the resurgence of DESAPARECIDOS. If you haven't heard their album Read Music/Speak Spanish, (which came out ten years ago apparently!) check it out right now. It's one of my favorite albums of all time. Hopefully, this anger at injustice will fuel another record.
Read the article from the Huffington Post below.
"I'll never understand how destroying families through deportation benefits our society."Conor Oberst, the singer-songwriter who was the voice of a generation well before Lena Dunham took a stab at it, is now 32 years old. And though he's best known for Bright Eyes' aching and somber folk songs, he's angry.
He's angry because America is "destroying families through deportation," and because Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. is proud to be compared to the KKK. And when Oberst is upset, he doesn't rally a militia of Minutemen or over-zealous officers, he writes a punk-rock song.
And so, in the process of striking back against Arizona's continued harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants, Oberst recorded some new music with some old friends. Joining the lead singer on "MariKKKopa" -- which is debuting today exclusively on HuffPost Entertainment -- are Landon Hedges, Matt Baum, Denver Dalley and Ian McElroy. The original lineup of the Desaparecidos, Oberst's early-2000s post-hardcore band, is back.
The single -- which is available for purchase August 2 and is accompanied by "Backsell," another track -- features Oberst adopting the voice of anti-undocumented immigrant groups. The lyrics approach bloodthirst ("Drag them from their beds / Cause it's their turn for someone to get hurt") and offer a haunting look into the mentality Oberst suggests drives Sheriff Joe's police department.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
"There Is No Nature," Mount Eerie Under the Clear Moon, Part II:: The Interview
Below is the transcript of my conversations with Phil Elverum that inspired "There Is No Nature," Part I, found here.
I had brought a tape recorder with me just in case and switched it on before ever time I went out, so luckily I was able to capture our discussions. Read them below.
MANGO NEBULA: Do you think there’s a difference between Phil in the music and in real life?
Phil Elverum: When I make records, they’re not about me. They kind of are by default just because I write in the first person and there aren’t very many other people in my songs. They’re not songs about interpersonal relationships or anything. At least, usually not. Not lately. Not for the last ten years or something. Yeah, in my mind it’s not about “Phil” necessarily, but I think culturally, outside of the albums themselves, just as part of the mechanisms of making records and being a public figure and playing shows, this character of who I am, “Phil Elverum,” like playing shows, Mount Eerie guy that person is different from who I am when I’m at home living my life. Which I think, you know, everyone has multiple versions of themselves. I’m giving a really complicated answer, but it’s a really complicated question.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
"There Is No Nature," Mount Eerie under the Clear Moon
Read the transcript from the interview with Phil Elverum in Part II: here.
Mount Eerie loomed in white with curtains of mist surrounding it that were too low to be clouds and too high to be just fog. Water hung in the air, constantly threatening to condense into rain, but it hadn’t yet. The mountain appeared to be ever-changing and darkening, continually obscuring the peak. I had come to the mountain following a bright Clear Moon, or what I thought was the moon. That shield of grey made it hard to tell when day ended and night began without a watch.
I was looking to commune with nature. I had packed granola and trail mix with chocolate candies in it. I was looking for a story I had heard. Stories that had been floating around the country for more than a decade about a man living in the woods of Anacortes, Washington. Some said he was the spirit who guarded the mountain. Some said that he was just a guy who liked camping.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Real Fairy Tales of Fanny Roz
Photo by Konstantina Tomoska
Once upon a time there was a musician named Fanny Roz. Her story involved snail races, tree houses, smokey French jazz bars, magical beaches in Chile, and a tale of two cities. It was the best of times…yeah, okay, it all really sounded like it was pretty much the best of times…
The whole story of how a French musician that studied in Toulouse ended up on a label in Barcelona (Bcore) is one that Roz has nicely divided into four chapters and posted to her websites. She has just released Prend Son Souffle et Saute!! (“take a breath and jump”) and just as her tale has many parts, each track tells a different story. She sings them while plunking a piano or plucking a guitar with a myriad of tempos, shifts, and vocal oddities tht make it hard not to think of Regina Spektor. The influences of the two places are evident all over her record, as it’s sung in French with a few dashes of Spanish.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Sones, the Strange Ones
Good local music can be hard to come across in Barcelona unless you know where to look. The city is a little bit fragmented as there’s a bigger draw to drunken discotheques, heavy metal bars or jazz and flamenco. “Indie rock” bands can be hard to find, because there aren’t too many of them and there are even fewer places to go see them play. There are only a handful of places where bands can get gigs or afford to get gigs, as most venues are reserved for acts passing through on an international tour. Luckily, there are a few independent labels that are helping to cultivate a music community, like Sones.
The record label and management company released records from a bunch of bands THE BOMBER JACKET has covered in previous issues, including Mujeres, Manos de Topo and Za!. As for international artists, they even released Dirty Beaches’ Badlands, an excellent dank and dusty, lo-fi, cinematic album from last year. They’ve also helped book and promote acts likeWavves, Bill Callahan, Dan Deacon and more. Sones even has a partnership with Minimúsica, which is an organization backed by the government that is dedicated to making the live music experience available for kids. A lot of Sones artists play these kinds of shows, tailoring their sets to a younger audience.
Listen to a Sones sampler below:
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Reading Horoscopes with Aries
The sheer giddy pop force of Aries is undeniable, regardless of whether or not you can understand Spanish. For a band that’s as mystical as their astrological name might imply, the music is less of a psychedelic trance and more of a meditative celebration captivated by main songwriter Isabel Fernández’s fresh and colorful melodies and harmonies. The overall sound is so immediately contemporary, with subtle samples and just the right amount of echo creating a bright ambient aura, that you hardly notice the classical Spanish guitar and castanets backing it all up. It’s pretty impressive how Fernández is able to reinvent a traditional style and make it her own. What’s also impressive is how, along with her sister Virginia, just two people are able to make so many sounds, to incorporate so many instruments and effects.
Fernández’ last act was called Charades and she played with a full band. The music had a few more decorations and experiments, but Aries shows her progress as a songwriter, as she more tightly conducts pop and synthesizing styles. The Charades records, particularly Revolución Solar, are fun to explore if you like Aries.
THE BOMBER JACKET spoke with Aries about astrology, Spain and the band’s latest record, La Magia Bruta.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
Furguson’s Swindlers and Cross Country Runners
In THE BOMBER JACKET’s interview with Barcelona’s Mujeres, the group mentioned a little town outside of the city called Vic where they said a makeshift D.I.Y. music community had formed. Such types of spaces are great at producing creative (or extremely weird) acts. Furguson is an example and they are part of the Vic collective Famèlic, although they’re from the village’s neighbor, Gurb.
What’s immediately noticeable about the music is the fusion of punk rock and electronic elements. The singer’s voice barks with a grit similar to Minor Threat or At The Drive-In and is guided by overdriven power riffs, but it’s backed by 8-bit synthesizers and effects. Even though the songs are in English, the vocals are as distorted as the guitars, making the grumbling shouts sound like it could be in any or all languages. It’s a fresh sound and the music is full of pop experiments listeners wouldn’t expect. And true to the suburban area that it comes from, listening to the music makes you think of friends in a small town with nothing to do, piling into a car on a Saturday night and speeding off down a dusty road.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Beach Niche
Photo by Adrià Cañameras
The sunny island of Mallorca is in the middle of the Mediterranean and is a part of Spain. It has some breathtaking beaches that you would think only existed on postcards or computer desktop wallpaper, some awesome caves (complete with dragons) and a tourist hotspot called Palma. Yet, the guys from Beach Beach said that actually living on Mallorca can be kind of boring, especially in the winter. Their solution was to start a band.
If you didn’t guess, its beach music poised to stave off the winter. Yet, their songs delve into a bit more depth than just surfing, maybe because surfing in the Mediterranean sucks. It’s great music with a subtle, charming Spanish accent, perfect to listen to from the trunk of your car while you sit around a beach fire and drink Beach Beach’s favorite, a Pomada (read on to find the complicated recipe!).
The Spanish island of Mallorca is pretty well connected to Catalonia, the region where Barcelona is. The band is also similarly connected, as their record Tasteless Peace (listen here) was released this year on Barcelona’s La Castanya. The label is also a joint booking venture and is responsible for supporting several cool bands and organizing interesting events around the city.
THE BOMBER JACKET talked with Beach boys Pau Riutort and Tomeu Mulet about their music, La Castanya, and the perfect beach drink.
If you didn’t guess, its beach music poised to stave off the winter. Yet, their songs delve into a bit more depth than just surfing, maybe because surfing in the Mediterranean sucks. It’s great music with a subtle, charming Spanish accent, perfect to listen to from the trunk of your car while you sit around a beach fire and drink Beach Beach’s favorite, a Pomada (read on to find the complicated recipe!).
The Spanish island of Mallorca is pretty well connected to Catalonia, the region where Barcelona is. The band is also similarly connected, as their record Tasteless Peace (listen here) was released this year on Barcelona’s La Castanya. The label is also a joint booking venture and is responsible for supporting several cool bands and organizing interesting events around the city.
THE BOMBER JACKET talked with Beach boys Pau Riutort and Tomeu Mulet about their music, La Castanya, and the perfect beach drink.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Mujeres, Mujeres, Mujeres: Putting Their Fists Down
Photo by Ivan Montero
Luchador Records is down the street from the MACBA, Barcelona’s contemporary art museum where you constantly have to dodge skaters who are making videos, doing tricks off of the entrance’s ramps, staircases and the ample open space of the white stone plaza. More often than not, they’re also smoking weed and drinking a few San Miguels. At the beginning of the record shop’s sparse street that only houses one other record store, a clothing outlet and a fruit stand, I stopped for just a minute to read a Spanish poem scrawled on the wall called, “Ways to Kill.”
I was going to interview Mujeres at the store the bassist co-owns and that is their secret lair of sorts. Upon entering the place I saw a bunch of records on the walls that I surprisingly recognized, which was a nice change for being in Spain, and it immediately reminded me of DIY music spaces I had come across in the US. There were zines, random art projects like boxes of rolling papers with poems written on each paper, cassette tapes of local bands, patches for the “Pizza Army” and even one floppy disk of what undoubtedly couldn’t have been more than one song. What was more, as the band led me to the back space, past the huge Japanese arcade game, where we would do the interview, they told me that they had shows there every once in a while.
Besides being a great bopping rock and roll band with wavey surf riffs and fuzzified garage intensity, they have the potential to be an influential force for the future of Barcelona’s DIY and “indie” music. They explained that there weren’t many bands like them in the city and it’s true that on any given night there aren’t a ton of places to go see music or even music to go see. If more groups pop up with a mentality like Mujeres, places like Luchador would be perfect nesting grounds for music collectives. Either way, the spot is a cool one to visit and Mujeres is a band not to miss live.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
In the Belly of the Woodrow Wilsons
Jamaica Plain, a part of Greater Boston, is home to many talented musicians that are constantly creating unique and/or bizarre events and contributing greatly to the personality of the city’s DIY music. One such band from the area that has been playing for a few years without laying down a record is The Woodrow Wilsons. It’s made up of some of the nicest and most genuine people you could ever meet. And just like a conversation with one of its members, the music radiates this ineffably positive feeling of warmth and empathy, subconsciously comforting and convincing you that everything is going to be alright. They all play a wide array of instruments, one of the main components being ukuleles that vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Chris McCarthy built himself out of a cigar box. In addition to bass, guitar and drums, the arrangement also includes glockenspiel, horns and a singing saw. The vocals are shared and harmonized between McCarthy and Laura Smith and the collaboration emphasizes the band’s open minds and open arms.
The Woodrow Wilsons recently released its first proper full length, Devil Jonah. The name references the biblical story of Jonah and the whale and has strong motifs of the East Coast and the ocean. As the group explains, the Atlantic seems to have strange powers over them (or at least over Smith). They associate the endless vastness with death and loneliness, but at the same time it’s something irresistible that calls them to get lost in it. It’s this sort of conflict or juxtaposition that is threaded throughout the album. Although one might think Jonah was doomed to be digested in the whale, it was actually the whale that saved Jonah from drowning. Likewise the music is a pleasant balance between somber and joyous. It has ballads and relaxing tunes, but it also has its share upbeat and irresistibly catchy songs like “Anthropomorphism” and “It Always Never Boils (The Kettle Song).”
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Cymbals Have a Merciless and Insatiable Blood-lust for Guitars
- Photo by Josh Goleman
Brooklyn born Cymbals Eat Guitars take their name from something Lou Reed once said about The Velvet Underground. Yet, it wasn’t an overly whimsical metaphor like “my band sounds like cymbals eating guitars,” but instead something more musically technical. Reed was asked why the drummer, Moe Trucker, didn’t crash down on the cymbals a lot on their records. Reed responded that it was because the noise of cymbals eats, or drowns out, the guitar and he was apparently concerned about a purer tone from the instrument.
When explained like this, it sort of drains all the magic out of what a listener imagines when the phrase is plucked out of context. Like a swarm of floating cymbals, roving around a trashed underground nightclub savannah in search of it's prey. A centrifugal hum reverberates around the metal of the crash cymbal pack leaders as the muted high-hats let out a few taunting chatters. A guitar is spotted through the reeds of the tall amplifiers and a vicious, bloody onslaught ensues on the concealed pack of instruments. The cymbals mercilessly shred through fret boards and splinter hollow bodies easily. The stage becomes an out of focus mess of flying scraps of wood and metal. As the violence reaches its end, pick-ups are tossed into the air and swallowed whole into invisible stomachs and guitar strings are used to floss the remaining flecks of flesh from their teeth. Lou Reed might not have used the phrase to describe his band, but as for Cymbals Eat Guitars, the image represents their music pretty well.
There are more concrete ways to describe the band’s sound. Some bands wait until the end of one of their songs on a record to play with guitar effects and feedback to produce a random musical experiment for about thirty seconds. Maybe it’s at the very end of a show when they’re smashing their guitars on stage and they just go nuts, shouting and playing whatever. Well, for Cymbals Eat Guitars, those moments are present all throughout their music and are joined together by catchy hooks, sleazy keyboards and straightforward rock.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Walking Under Picore's Balls
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| Photo by Arianne Picón. picore-picore.bandcamp.com |
Picore say they work hard to make their music “suggestive and danceable” and there are always people moving around at their shows. However, there’s still something about their style that seems like every once in a while it would have to be met with slack jawed staring and drooling while you oozed off into space.
The Spanish band (from Zaragoza) use a few superfluously hyphenated self descriptions that play with the idea that their songs and lyrics could be hymns. For example, “angular-rock-with-sermons” or “danceable-but-not-hype-rock-with-prayer-lyrics-in-Spanish.” The meandering guitar and sluggish tempo force singer Dani Jiménez to chant more often than sing.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Emperor X, Music Scientist Ph.D and Transdimensional Explorer
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Some records have lyrics so ambiguously specific that one can’t help but
notice hints of a storyline or something that ties all the mysterious
pieces together. Such albums inspire listeners to spin the record
endlessly, trying to decode the messages into some kind of concrete
interpretation or narrative. Emperor X's latest album Western Teleport (Bar/None) is a perfect example.
It only makes sense considering their creator Chad Matheny’s own sci-fi affinity for imagining alternate realities. The concept is omnipresent in every aspect of his music. For fourteen years, Emperor X has been releasing independent records and going on guerilla tours across the US. He’s even in another dimension when it comes to promotion and marketing, as he has been burying demo cassettes all across the country for a number of years now.
It only makes sense considering their creator Chad Matheny’s own sci-fi affinity for imagining alternate realities. The concept is omnipresent in every aspect of his music. For fourteen years, Emperor X has been releasing independent records and going on guerilla tours across the US. He’s even in another dimension when it comes to promotion and marketing, as he has been burying demo cassettes all across the country for a number of years now.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Spitzer Space Telescope Invents His Own Video Language
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| Album Review of Spitzer Space Telescope's Debut |
published on thebomberjacket.com
Dan MacDonald masquerades around as Spitzer Space Telescope and has come up with a creative (one might even say revolutionary) new way to present his music. The Telescope’s first full length album was released in 2009 and painted the personage of a lone folk minstrel, stomping his foot as he sang antiquated stories and wove fantastical mythologies. McDonald said his new project “is going to take a slight step away from spinning wild tales and images and instead be modeled more closely to historical folk music,” but that’s not the inventive part. What makes this new idea so interesting is that it is going to be completely digital interactive ten track video only album. MacDonald has set up a kickstarter the help raise funds for his surgical transplantation of a few traditional styles into one of the most modern forms possible.
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