26-08-2018 10:47 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX [from the recent past]

Belle and Sebastian

26-08-2018 10:47 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX [from the recent past] # Belle and Sebastian, Chicano Batman, PJ Harvey, Moon Duo, Samara Lubelski, ShadowParty, Prettiest Eyes, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Cigarettes After Sex, Halo Maud, Palm, La Luz

M U S I C

pres_perf_mix # The player always plays the latest playlist tracks. / A lejátszó mindig a legújabb playlist számait játssza. 

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A band that takes its name from a French children's television series about a boy and his dog would almost have to be precious, and to be sure, Belle and Sebastian are precious. But precious can be a damning word, and Belle and Sebastian don't have the negative qualities that the word connotes: they are private but not insular, pretty but not wimpy; they make gorgeous, delicate melodies sound full-bodied. Led by guitarist/vocalist Stuart Murdoch, the seven-piece band has an intimate, majestic sound that is equal parts folk-rock and '60s pop, but Murdoch's gift, not just for whimsy and surrealism but also for odd, unsettling lyrical detail, keeps the songs grounded in a tangible reality.
Belle and Sebastian
I'll Be Your Pilot (Belle and Sebastian) 4:15
Best Friend (Carla Easton / Belle and Sebastian) 3:41
from How To Solve Our Human Problems (Parts 1-3) 2018
On the eve of launching Belle and Sebastian's project How to Solve Our Human Problems, leader Stuart Murdoch explained his band's decision to release a series of three interlocked EPs instead of a long-player with this: "I think these days when an LP comes out, it's kind of disappointing. Nothing seems to happen, and I thought, 'We've got to do something different.'" Murdoch's way to combat the digital grind harks back to Belle and Sebastian's earliest days, when the group released a series of three EPs between 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister and 1998's The Boy with the Arab Strap, but those releases were spaced out over the course of 1997, where each of the installments of How to Solve Our Human Problems arrived in succession in the first months of 2018. Consequently, all three Human Problems EPs feel cut from the same cloth, all buzzing to a stylish good vibe pitched halfway between '60s modernism and '70s disco...

Alternative Latin band with a psychedelic hybrid sound who have opened for Alabama Shakes and Jack White.  Chicano Batman source their high-spirited alternative Latin synthesis from tropicália, West Coast psychedelia, and late-'60s/early-'70s soul, among other styles. Eduardo Arenas (bass, vocals), Bardo Martinez (lead vocals, organ, guitar), and Gabriel Villa (drums, percussion) made their recorded debut in 2009 with a self-released, self-titled album.
Chicano Batman
Passed You By (Chicano Batman / Bardo Martinez) 3:27
Freedom Is Free (Chicano Batman / Bardo Martinez) 4:03
The Taker Story (Chicano Batman / Bardo Martinez) 5:27
from Freedom Is Free 2017
Hitting the good groove may seem like a simple thing, but it's not. (If it were, anyone could have been James Brown, and a quick spin through his catalog confirms that's impossible.) And the ability to move the crowd can be used to say any number of things. Musical shape-shifters Chicano Batman have drawn from a rich variety of sources for their third album, 2017's Freedom Is Free -- Brazilian Tropicalia, Latin funk, vintage American soul, and R&B, shades of Afrobeat, and psychedelia of all sorts. But the way the band gracefully navigate the nexus between the passionate and the laid-back sides of their musical personality is what makes Freedom Is Free stand out. Just as Funkadelic's classic early albums indelibly merged rock guitars with funk grooves, Chicano Batman make music that makes your hips sway, but with a purposefully easy tempo. They give their music a vibe that's powerful and sensual all at once, merging their influences in a way that doesn't cancel out any of the elements...

The most challenging singer/songwriter to emerge in the '90s, her brutally honest lyrics match well to a progression of raw musical styles.  During the alternative rock explosion, several female singer/songwriters rose to prominence, but few have proved as distinctive or as widely praised as Polly Jean Harvey. Over the course of her career, Harvey established herself as one of the most individual and influential songwriters of her era, exploring themes of sex, love, and religion with unnerving honesty, dark humor, and a twisted theatricality.
PJ Harvey
The Community of Hope (PJ Harvey) 2:23
The Orange Monkey (PJ Harvey) 2:47
The Wheel (PJ Harvey) 5:38
from The Hope Six Demolition Project 2016
On 2011's Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake, PJ Harvey connected World War I bloodbaths with the 21st century world in harrowing, moving ways. Its follow-up, The Hope Six Demolition Project, feels like a companion piece with a wider focus and more urgent mood. For this project -- which also includes the 2015 book of poetry The Hollow of the Hand and a film -- Harvey and her Shake collaborator, war photographer Seamus Murphy, emphasized documentation: The pair spent years researching in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, D.C.; later, Harvey was literally transparent about the recording process, making Hope Six at a recording studio behind one-way glass for public audiences at London’s Somerset House. Befitting its origins, the album's sound is blunt and raw, mixing rock, blues, jazz, spirituals, and field recordings into the musical equivalent of photojournalism...

This San Francisco group featuring Wooden Shjips' Erik Johnson plays Krautrock-tinged psychedelic jams.  A project of Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson and Sanae Yamada, San Francisco's Moon Duo are a psychedelic Krautrock band with chilly electronic underpinnings and drones inspired by Spacemen 3, Silver Apples, and Suicide.
Moon Duo
New Dawn (Moon Duo) 6:05
Sevens (Moon Duo) 6:46
from Occult Architecture Vol. 2 2017
...Occult Architecture Vol. 2, their fifth full-length, is their sweetest spot so far. It’s intended as a brighter counterpart to the darker Vol. 1 released in February, and while the two albums aren’t radically divergent, *Vol. 2 *is definitely the lightest, breeziest Moon Duo record to date. Everything flows ahead at mid tempo, with no tangential digressions or disruptive curveballs. Nearly half the album is taken up by two instrumentals that suggest the band jamming on a sunny, worry-free afternoon. It’d be easy to say music this pleasant is also fleeting, but just because Moon Duo indulge a sweet tooth doesn’t mean *Vol. 2 *is weightless. Think of them as sonic pastry chefs: you can’t live off their songs alone, but they’re not all empty calories either...

Violinist, singer, and songwriter Samara Lubelski’s experimental indie pop is wispy and web-like, nodding to both classic '60s psychedelia and 21st century freak folk aesthetics.  Since she began making music in the early '90s, Samara Lubelski has split her time between being a member of bands Hall of Fame, the Sonora Pine, and Tower Recordings (to name a few); a respected contributor on violin and guitar with Fiery Furnaces, MV & EE, and White Magic; a busy recording engineer; a member of avant-garde outfits; a guitarist in Thurston Moore's band Chelsea Light Moving; and a solo artist who has crafted a series of compelling albums that delve into light psychedelia and acid folk.
Samara Lubelski
Black Dots 3:30
High Rise 2:39
Tunnel Visions (Station the Spectacle) 3:50
from Flickers at the Station 2018
Since she released her first solo record in 2014, Samara Lubelski has made a string of under-the-radar gems that mix darkly psychedelic sonic textures with gentle melodies, knotty guitars, and Lubelski's mystical lyrics and tender whisper of a voice. As a former member of Tower Recordings and the Sonora Pine, as well as a collaborator with Thurston Moore, Lubelski has been part of a lot of interesting albums, but her solo work is where she really shines. Released in 2018, Flickers at the Station is another installment of baroque pop laced with intricate guitar figures, vintage synths, and haunting melodies, not far in style or quality from her other solo albums...

Synth pop supergroup featuring members of New Order, Devo, Primal Scream, and the Verve. 
ShadowParty
Celebrate 3:35
Reverse the Curse 4:34
from ShadowParty 2018
Boasting an impressive pedigree, rock supergroup ShadowParty channel the '80s new wave/synth pop spirits of their main gigs and update them for the 21st century on their eponymous debut. The band -- whose core quartet features vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Josh Hager (the Rentals, Devo), vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist/bassist Tom Chapman (Bad Lieutenant, New Order), guitarist Phil Cunningham (Marion, New Order), and drummer Jeff Friedl (Devo) -- sticks close to the sounds of New Order, executing with bright synths, elastic bass, and detached vocals, while sprinkling in the dark digital grooves of Joy Division and Depeche Mode...

Los Angeles trio forging a wild mix of garage, punk, Motorik, and psych.  
Prettiest Eyes
Don't Call 3:30
Pools 3:24
Uncut 3:18
from Pools 2017
Bold, lacerating, anarchic noise for the new generation of psych-rock listeners. Prettiest Eyes will polarise listeners because of the outwardly dissonant sound on Pools. John Dwyer of The Oh Sees has suggested they have a bit of The Birthday Party about them. Certainly, they share the abstractness and feral genealogy. The searing atonalism on Pools is equal parts narcotic invocation, and dissociated garage punk. I suppose some will call it art-rock but that would assign to it an intellectual connotation far removed from its beastly physicality...

Folk-informed indie pop guided by Thao Nguyen, whose songwriting tends toward the musically playful and lyrically heavy-hearted. 
Thao & the Get Down Stay Down
Astonished Man 3:29
Nobody Dies 3:48
Fool Forever 3:08
from A Man Alive 2016
Having constructed prior albums with the likes of Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, Camera Obscura) and John Congleton (St. Vincent, FFS), bandleader Thao Nguyen enlisted longtime side project collaborator Merrill Garbus to produce her band's fourth LP, A Man Alive. A match that sounds as good on the final product as it does on paper, Garbus brings the musical moxie associated with her tUnE-yArDs outfit and reinforces that same quality in Thao & the Get Down Stay Down for an especially muscular outing...

Ambient pop collective started as a recording experiment in an echoey hallway.  Ambient pop collective Cigarettes After Sex were formed almost accidentally in 2008 by songwriter and bandleader Greg Gonzalez. While living in El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez was experimenting with capturing the spacious sounds of recording songs in a four-story stairwell at the University of Texas.
Cigarettes After Sex
K 5:20
Flash 4:34
John Wayne 4:18
from Cigarettes After Sex 2017
After a slow start, Cigarettes After Sex saw their fortunes swiftly reversed by a whirlwind of YouTube hits. Although they formed in 2008, CAS waited nearly a decade to release their debut record, and rather fittingly it unfolds at a lethargic pace. The music that Greg Gonzales and his fellow bandmates produce is slowcore in the extreme. The shimmering guitars, placid percussion, and wistfully delivered vocals also reveal their debt to dream pop and shoegaze. More than anything, early supporters of the band have praised Gonzales' unashamed sentimentality and dyed-in-the-wool romanticism. You don't have to venture beyond the opening track to experience his hazy passion...

Psychedelic pop with touches of proggy and space age indie played by French musician Maud Nadal and friends. 
Halo Maud
Wherever 5:23
Je Suis une Île 2:3
Dans la Nuit 4:11
from Je Suis Une Île 2018
Lots of bands were making ethereal, hypnotically drifting, modern psychedelic pop in 2018 and lots of them were really good at it, especially those fronted by women, like Death and Vanilla and Gloria. Add to that female solo artists like Gwenno, Jane Weaver, and Melody's Echo Chamber and the field starts to get a little crowded. To make a record that stands out next to all the high-quality work of those artists, one would need to go a little outside the lines to add something extra. On her debut album, Je Suis Une Île, the French artist Halo Maud (known to her parents as Maud Nadal) does just that. With the help of producer/multi-instrumentalist Robin Leduc, Pablo Padovani from Moodoïd -- a band she played in in the early 2010s -- Benjamin Glibert from Aquaserge, and the members of her live band (Olivier Marguerit, Stéphane Bellity, and Vincent Mougel), Nadal crafts a sound that is indebted to the epic psych-pop of the '60s, but also adds some oddball prog touches, a little bit of electronica here and there, and a hefty dose of the kind of space age indie that bands like Broadcast and Stereolab did so well in the '90s...

Experimental outfit formed in the 2010s who offer a warped take on math rock.  Formed in the early 2010s by college undergrads in Upstate New York, Palm is a four-piece with a warped and circuitous take on math rock.
Palm
Walkie Talkie 2:33
Shadow Expert 2:16
Trying 2:30
from Shadow Expert 2017
Shadow Expert is the Carpark Records debut of Palm, who formed in the early 2010s and formulated their own warped take on math rock. That take is full of what sound like contradictions: a lack of recognizable song structure that is nevertheless followed with precision, a loose performance demeanor that's still notably exacting, and songs built from a relentless four-part counterpoint that they often make sound breezy. The quartet is led by guitarists Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt, who also act as co-vocalists. Drummer Hugo Stanley should not be overlooked, however, nor should bassist Gerasimos Livitanos; there's no room for slacking here...

Seattle-based quartet that mixes up doo wop, surf music, girl group sounds, and indie rock into one smart package. 
La Luz
Floating Features 2:13
Loose Teeth 2:47
My Golden One 4:14
from Floating Features 2018
La Luz had their formula firmly in place on their debut album, 2013's It's Alive, and they're a group who've managed to grow and mature without major changes to their aural signature. Their fusion of vintage surf sounds, garage rock, and smart indie pop sounded clever and well-crafted right out of the box, and there's been a certain sense of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" in their subsequent recordings. That said, their third full-length, 2018's Floating Features, is a step forward from their first two albums, if not an especially dramatic one. Musically, La Luz sound tighter and more emphatic here, with the performances boasting a bit more muscle, Alice Sandahl's vintage keyboards taking more chances, and the harmonies revealing more sparkle. Guitarist and songwriter Shana Cleveland has always believed that surf music doesn't have to be silly or facile, and her lyrics on Floating Features are intelligent and thoughtful...