ALTER.NATiON
Lake Street Dive, Mark Knopfler, Pearl & the Oysters, My Brightest Diamond, Art Brut, Oneohtrix Point Never, Alex G, Vessel, Laibach, Roine Stolt's The Flower King, DMBQ, DOG Power, Jacco Gardner
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| Lake Street Dive |
weekly favtraX
25-11-2018
A fascinating blend of jazz at heart, with a D.I.Y. sensibility and a passion for classic rock and British Invasion aesthetics.
Lake Street Dive -
Who Do You Think We Are from Freak Yourself Out
Boston's Lake Street Dive play a rich, genre-bending blend of neo-soul and pop/rock informed by their various jazz, folk, funk, and country influences. The band, comprising singer Rachael Price, drummer Mike Calabrese, bassist Bridget Kearney, and trumpet-playing guitarist Mike "McDuck" Olson, first met and formed at Boston's New England Conservatory around 2004. Named after a Minneapolis, Minnesota (Olson's hometown) street known for its numerous "dive bars," Lake Street Dive initially drew fans with covers of songs by such influences as Hall & Oates, George Michael, Fleetwood Mac, and more. Over time, they began writing their own material, drawing praise for their soulful, stylistically varied sound.
The frontman for Dire Straits is also a skilled composer, tuneful singer, and one of the most celebrated guitarists to emerge in the 1970s and '80s.
Mark Knopfler -
Back on the Dancefloor from Down the Road Wherever
...He’s also just announced a corresponding tour for the album, which will take place next year and find him on the road with a ten-piece band. “My songs are made to be performed live,” he said in a press release. “I love the whole process of writing them alone and then recording them with the band, but ultimately the best part is playing them to an audience live. I enjoy the whole circus, travelling from town to town and interacting with this group of players is a total pleasure. I’m really looking forward to it.”
French duo living in Florida makes a breezy, uplifting pop music that draws from space age pop, novelty music, and the classic sounds of their homeland.
Pearl & the Oysters' second album, Canned Music, combines the groovy sounds of '60s French pop, the zippy feel of '90s space age pop, the whimsical nature of the best novelty pop throughout the ages, and a joyful kitchen-sink approach to arrangements. The end result is a cheerful sonic treat that's frothy fun to the last bite. Multi-instrumentalist Joachim Polack and vocalist Juliette Davis may have deep musical training that includes degrees from the Sorbonne, but they aren't even the least bit interested in creating anything serious or important here. They'd rather make music that gives the sunshine in their adopted home of Florida a run for its money in the brightness stakes.
Mixing elements of opera, cabaret, chamber music, and rock, My Brightest Diamond was the project of singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Shara Worden.
My Brightest Diamond - Sway
from A Million and One
The daughter of a National Accordion Championship-winning father and a mother who was an organist for their Pentecostal church, Worden grew up in Ypsilanti, Michigan, listening to gospel, jazz, and classical music and performing in the church choir. She studied opera at the University of North Texas' music program, and after graduation, moved to New York City to continue her vocal studies. In N.Y.C., she became as involved in the world of underground rock as she was in the realms of classical music, becoming inspired by the likes of Antony and the Johnsons and Nina Nastasia and their intimate performances at venues such as Tonic, the Living Room, and the Knitting Factory. Worden began writing her own material, which had one foot in her classical training and the other in the avant rock she was discovering.
Irreverent British post-punk revival band earned its cult following in the '00s.
Art Brut -
Kultfigur from Wham! Bang! Pow! Let's Rock Out!
tuneful, zippy guitar pop!
Eddie Argos’s Bournemouth- and now Berlin-based band made a splash in the mid-2000s as exuberant, wordy indie-rock contemporaries of Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. Now rocking a remodelled lineup and even more exclamation marks, Art Brut’s first album in seven years is trademark zippy, tuneful guitar pop, although there is perhaps more of a nod to new wave and power pop than there once was.
The guitars and brass don’t exactly trouble the zeitgeist, but the harmonies and choruses are singable, and surely pop is richer for such a haplessly engaging character as Argos. Something of a deadpan, Jarvis Cocker-like antihero, his stock-in-trade is wide-eyed, drily humorous songs about pined-for girlfriends and dreaming of being on Top of the Pops, littered with affectionate references to pop culture.
Project for experimental musician Daniel Lopatin that expanded from synth reveries to complex, genre-defying works.
Oneohtrix Point Never -
Babylon [Sandy Alex G]
from Love in the Time of Lexapro
The project of Brooklyn-based experimental musician Daniel Lopatin, Oneohtrix (pronounced "one-oh-tricks") Point Never expanded from retro synth reveries to complex works that explored how history, memory, and music intersect. The flowing electronics of OPN's early albums -- which were gathered in the acclaimed 2009 collection Rifts -- suggested Lopatin was an heir to Tangerine Dream. However, he soon proved there was much more to his music with a string of releases that reflected his interest in high art as well as pop culture artifacts like video games, science fiction, anime, and advertising (which Lopatin sampled cleverly on 2011's Replica).
Bristol-based producer combining dub, house, techno, industrial, noise, and more into iconoclastic forms.
Vessel -
Glory Glory (for Tippi) from Queen of Golden Dogs
a gloriously weird electro-odyssey
The Bristolian musician Sebastian Gainsborough made their name with a strain of dance music that’s not really designed for the dancefloor. Their expansive, ambitious post-club compositions have drawn on everything from dubstep to post-punk in pursuit of an intelligent and often slightly contrarian sound. Their third album takes the template a step further, combining classical instrumentation with the clanging dissonance and glitchy, unnatural tempos of the internet age. The result is a record that feels pretentious – but in a good way: carefully considered and aiming towards something more philosophical than your average electro-odyssey.
Slovenian music and art collective mix agit-prop politics, Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and stomping industrial-rock show.
Laibach -
Sixteen goin On Seventeen from The Sound of Music
glorious silly covers are bright as a copper kettle
Following their versions of 14 national anthems, seven takes on Sympathy for the Devil, and cod-fascistic covers of Queen and others, the industrial troupe alight on their kitschiest reinterpretations yet: songs from The Sound of Music, amusingly rendered in stentorian synthpop and the guttural vocals of Milas Fras. This already high concept was sent into the ionosphere by their decision to debut it in North Korea in 2015, making them the first western rock band to play the country. The notion that isolated North Korean culture vultures would presume western rock bands are typified by gruff, bearded Slovenians declaring their love for cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels is hilarious, and Laibach get points for this masterful bit of culture jamming alone.
Gifted prog rock guitarist is a member of the Flower Kings and Transatlantic. He is also ex-Yes vocalist Jon Anderson's collaborator.
Roine Stolt's The Flower King -
Lost America from Manifesto Of An Alchemist
“Lost America is one of the longer tracks on my new album - it goes through a series of melodic themes and riffs - most of them familiar in style from the vast Flower Kings catalogue of course," Stolt explains to Prog of the new track. "The song, and much of the album, is interesting in the way it has fragments drawn from different periods of the last 25 years - song ideas that were never fully developed or utilized - even if parts may have been already on the table for both The Flower Kings and Transatlantic. This particular song is kind of two songs - the first a melodic prog jigsaw - while the latter is a more straight riff-based tune - I do the lead vocal but both my brother Michael and Hammond dude Max Lorentz do quite a bit of backing me up with hairy vocals - Marco Minnemann on drums and Jonas Reingold on bass.
Part of Japan's vibrant underground experimental scene, this group tended toward fuzz-damaged psychedelic hard rock.
DMBQ - No Things
from Keeenly
"There is no band like DMBQ. They are unique destroyers of sound, and lovers of sonic beauty, existing in the places between. Masters of harsh tone and psychotic rhythm. Keeenly is an alien planet type record, evoking images of landscapes and weather patterns found in other galaxies. Purple wind and green fire.” — Ty Segall
DOG Power was formed in 2017 by indie pop, singer-songwriter Sam Perry and experimental musician Henry Nicol in Christchurch, with Perry and Nicol relocating Belgrade, Serbia, out of a desire for the freedom to make their music their life.
DOG Power -
Not Human from Dog Power
...Intrigued by rock’n’roll, as well as non-musical and monotonous sounds, DOG Power’s music is rooted in their use of samples, live percussion, drum machines, synthesisers and guitars which lay a foundation for Perry’s deep, sonorous voice.
Taking equal ques from Sade and The Stooges, Serge Gainsbourg and Suicide, the seven songs on their self-titled recorded debut span genres, encompassing everything from industrial electronica to baroque pop, super-sonic rock’n’roll to something out of a seventies spy film… One directed by David Lynch...
The Dutch producer/multi-instrumentalist makes baroquely psychedelic music that's heavily indebted to the Left Banke, the Zombies, and their paisley ilk.
Jacco Gardner -
Privolva from Somnium
With his first two albums, Jacco Gardner was one of the missing links between the psych of old, the kind that was favored by the likes of Syd Barret led Pink Floyd and Incredible String Band, and the wave of revivalists in the new century. What distinguished Gardner from the rest was his deft touch in combining psych strands into something that was at the same time familiar, but still sounding like something that is coming out of today’s musical happenings.
A particular characteristic that defined Gardner were his excellent vocals, something that gave his music a particular tinge. Three years on from his second album Hypnophobia, a lot of changes came about for Gardner, which includes the release of his third outing, Somnium. A relationship took Gardner to Portugal’s capital Lisbon, where he resides now, but that also seems to have had a profound effect on his music, as evidenced on this new album.
Lake Street Dive, Mark Knopfler, Pearl & the Oysters, My Brightest Diamond, Art Brut, Oneohtrix Point Never, Alex G, Vessel, Laibach, Roine Stolt's The Flower King, DMBQ, DOG Power, Jacco Gardner
