Wye Oak

A fresh faced indie band of two, out of Baltimore - Wye Oak never ceases to amaze me. Into their third full length LP (Civilian, due out later this March). Jenn Wasner's voice, between her raspy intonations and more adventurous moments keep you riveted - and Andy Stack's compositions are every bit imaginative - they create a sound which is laden with mystery, with bursts of colour and full-blooded enough to make you forget it's just two people making it.

I had managed to chance first upon their last album 'Knots' - which despite its weakness had it's moments. Cold, cruel lines in the song 'Take It In' like - "I turn to smoke when you need air, I'm sorry baby, I don't care" haunt you long after you have heard them. At times they are decidedly frank in the 'Civilian'- " I don't think I need another friend, when most of them I can barely keep up with them".

There is no objective two-way about Wye Oak - I love their a-little-rough-around-the-edges music, and honest lyrics...

And they only promise to become better.

'The National' obsession

 

 

For a band which is made up of 2 pairs of brothers (Dessners and the Devendorfs) and a baritone (Matt Berninger) - there is something supremely efficient about The National's sound...like old hand mafiosos who go about their Sunday vendetta without a fuss, and still manage to turn up for church.

A bitter dose of confessional alternative to drown with your coffee, The National is not for everyone. Definitely not for everyone's Ipods. 

Halfway through High Violet - their 2010 album, "Sorrow" is National at its best - casting emotion as company, and pulling it off with style. Revelling in its confusion and sad bastard lyrics about love and life, National somehow manages to make sweet music out of all of it. If not poetry and occasional sense out of all of this...

Few bands make confusion sound grand. The National do. 

For their discography: http://www.americanmary.com/sound.php

Muffled Magnificence

These are the two words that came to my mind in order to describe The National - a band that exercise such an amazing restraint in creating such elegantly structured songs and somehow dont let themselves get carried away by the song - perhaps due to Matt Berninger's distincnt and sometimes melancholic baritone and maybe because the five piece band also has 2 pairs of brothers who probably understand each other well enough to keep it together...

its a Muffled Magnificence that makes Coldplay, sound like a loud American band - its like a giant pillow smothered over a nuclear explosion ...

Das Racist

speaking about Germany check out Das Racist (Ra ike the egyptian sun god) one of the uber coolest rap acts from Brooklyn - made of Himanshu Suri (" Im Hindu thug , Im Hindu kush" ) and Cuban Victor Vazquez... "these kids are gifted like a Christmas wishist" and" bright as alamp" , hyper -pop-culturally-referential, with so much happening in term sof beats, layers of music, and the most insanely wonderful, clever juxtaposition of words that rhyme though many times without reason - they tell you to "just pretend like you know what we're talking about ya know?"

on youtube you'll get rainbow in the dark an excellent intro to their style, spirit ( Pos-Vibes emanator) and their Sit Down Man album is like a multi-cuisine food fest that never gets boring from the marvellousy sampled and rhythmically African 'Julia' to the Oriental soundng smoothness of Rapping 2 U to the contagiously catchy poppy Fashion Party

references are as diverse as Illuminati, Neitzsche, Gandhi, Kalidasa, condenast, Costanza dicks like that show Seinfeld, the days of our lives, quarks and leptons, and so on and on... the album is also unique in that there are many collaborations going on..each bringing their own styleto the voice-scape and the feel of the song...

in the end an extremely clever, fun, critical band with some being true to their name happening .. deal with that later

Zoo Station

a long, lomg time ago I was pleasantly bludgeoned by Achtung Baby - easily one of the greatest and most seminal music masterpieces of our times/ my times and a truly defining moment in the trajectory of U2 - perhaps i would even say the maxima of that trajectory

anyways I was in Berlin end Sept 2010 and stayed at a hostel near the Zoologischer Garten which I realized is the Zoo Station - the distorted dream that begins the album

Interestingly the U2 train passes thru Zoologischer Garten so i did take a picture of the trainline

more about Achtung Baby later