Amanda Mair :: "House"

It is both the year of Kate Bush and the year where an astute observer can rightly ask, "Can someone be inspired by Kate Bush if they were born in 1995?" New Labrador signee and one without a driver's license, 16 year old Amanda Mair spins a percocious and delicate web on first single, "House". What begins as a lilting, anti-lullabye shifts into higher gear, trading reverent hush for rolling drums, surging strings and a melody that easily could have cracked Bush's The Kick Inside in 1978. Of course, today Bush is preparing to release an album of remastered material, backed by a troubled single, "Deeper Understanding" which features a terrifying autotuned chorus and truly bizarre lyrical content addressing our intimacy with machines. Kate Bush isn't even Kate Bush anymore. Amanda Mair will carve out her own version of this legacy of big, orchestral pop, making it less the year of any of set of influences and more the year of whoever is bold enough to pick up and re-light the torches.

Listen :: Amanda Mair - "House"

Fucked Up :: "Queen Of Hearts"

Has rage ever sounded so sweet? Or has love ever sounded so angry? The last of the the four pre-release singles from Fucked Up's coming 18-track punk opera, David Comes To Life, "Queen Of Hearts" is undeniably the most romantic of the bunch. Of course, the word, "romantic" is used loosely, as Damien Abraham screams lyrics like, "Hello, my name is David," an introduction to the central character in a story about lost love in an lightbulb factory town in Thatcher-era Britain. Abraham continues in brutal didacticism, "Your name is Veronica. Let's be together 'til the stars go out," a bristling roar before the arrangment shifts gears and gives way to the same intoxicating (and lilting) female vocalist, Maddy from Cults, also featured on "The Other Shoe". She offers a term of engagement no less terminal than "til the stars go out", singing, "let's be together until the world swallows us." The arrangment rips along like a terribly serrated Hold Steady track, only with Craig Finn held hostage in Abraham's basement, traded out for road gravel vocals and a blurry, narrative love story. But, love is nothing if it isn't yelled at the top of your voice; no one said it had to have an ounce of melody.

Listen :: Fucked Up - "Queen Of Hearts"

[Elevator] Theme Park :: "Milk" and "A Mountain We Love"

An exciting and very new band out of the UK, Theme Park have only been making their exotic pop since the beginning of this calendar year. However, the first two available songs, "Milk", available for stream and download below and "A Mountain We Love", the video for which you find above and rife with 1990s found footage, represent one of those intensely strong entries that we find ourselves linking back to 18-24 months later. Put as a simple English sentence: Theme Park isn't on anyone's radar right now (a cursory search of blog aggregators reveals that this will be the first post about the band), but they are about to be. The flavor is that miasma of international style that David Byrne (Talking Heads fans will either find this music charming or offensive, always hard to tell) used so successfully, with the same bright guitars and poly-rhythmic impulses with which Two Door Cinema Club more recently architected their rise out of Northern Ireland. The arrangements dilate and weave themselves together like one of those dexterous little girls doing Cat's Cradle over and over and over. You will be hearing a great deal more about Theme Park, popsmiths with a slight eye for the weird and hooks that are only just beginning to take hold.

Listen :: Theme Park - "Milk"

Interview :: Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event [5.3.11]

Mikel Jollett, writer and singer behind Airborne Toxic Event, charged into the crowd no less than three times last night at Piano's, possessed with all of the energy of the same guy, though then considerably less traveled and famous, who took the stage in the same place three years ago. As part of the band's "origins" shows, they've returned to all the small clubs they played when they were first touring as a band, you know, before KROQ added "Sometime Around Midnight" and before everyone had the same thought all at once: Is it possible he wrote this song for and about me? Earlier yesterday, Jollett reflected to us about life in his band, making his new and outstanding record, All At Once and what it means to make music. Our questions and his answers after the jump.

On The List :: Lord Huron @ Mercury Lounge [4.28.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery's House List blog.

It was after 11 p.m. at a rapidly filling Mercury Lounge and we were at least three layers down in the world-music permafrost. The first dulcet tones of Lord Huron’s stunning single “Mighty” played over the PA as the band marshaled itself slowly and even a little deliberately to the stage. The sound was post-colonial, of the same type that Paul Simon used so effortlessly on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints—the same beautiful simulacra of Eastern and Southern Hemispheres that Vampire Weekend used later, although with an admittedly updated set of influences.

Lord Huron, an L.A. band I’m certain a hack music publicist would describe as Silverlake Soweto, proved to be both of and above this venerable cannon of White Guys Playing World Pop. “Mighty” swelled big enough, like many of the band’s compositions, to melt any frosty comparisons to old bands, even if the derivation was obvious and unhidden. The crowd rollicked to the band’s first two songs, the aforementioned “Mighty” and the upstroke “Into the Sun.”

The sound was very nearly too big, given that many of the melodies rely on group vocals of two or more members, in addition to some of the delicacy of the recordings turning into more punched-up electric numbers live. But Lord Huron slowly screwed themselves into tighter and tighter progressions, shedding some of the early muddiness for clarity and crystalline Afrobeat guitar lines. On “Son of a Gun,” vocalist Ben Schneider turned a pedantic cliché into something meaningful, his brand of graciousness and earnestness not necessarily practiced and also entirely intentional. Most important, given the tradition of world music being co-opted by the West, this didn’t feel a bit dishonest, even if the themes were unapologetically neocolonial.

Listen :: Lord Huron - "Mighty"

They Might Be Giants :: "Can't Keep Johnny Down"

There was a time in my life where I knew every lyric to They Might Be Giants first six studio LPs. It was the mid-90s and I was in the full embrace of the band's nerd-rock empire. This all culminated at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island on the night of my 14th birthday when the band played a life-altering set of songs I knew by heart and I pogo'd up and down next to my best friend while my parents stood in the back and watched and supervised. It was miles from the grunge rock I had just missed by age (you were either a teenager for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in 1991 or you weren't, and I wasn't) but it spoke to the upwardly mobile desires of an over-educated, upper-middle class kid. I wanted to be whip smart and culturally relevant, and still be able to make fun of being whip smart and culturally relevant. Thou shalt not take yourself so seriously, I would have thought during the chorus of "Birdhouse In Your Soul" as my adolescent calves tried to rocket my body to the ceiling.

That night the band most certainly played, "Ana Ng", a catchy power-pop number that once went to #11 on the Alternative Rock chart. Meaning, roughly, They Might Be Giants have always existed in this liminal space between being critically acclaimed and just weird enough to keep everyone at bay, always with an outside chance of mainstream crossover. So, it is this band that returns with a quirky, and desperately singable song, "Can't Keep Johnny Down". John Linnell's trademark nasal vocals spin a tale of big dreams in small towns (or it could easily be some post-Breakfast Club anthem for all the kids who made you feel terrible in high school), while the band with a Swiss Army repetoire sounds like, well, a nerdy rock band. It will stick in your head instantly, as if it was 1996 again and your brain was so full of their lyrics it hurt. They Might Be Giants return in earnest this summer with a new LP, Join US. Until then, we will explore the the trench of nostalgia between here and our adolescence.

Listen :: They Might Be Giants :: "Can't Keep Johnny Down"

Team Me :: "Dear Sister"

Team Me stumbles out of Norway with the kind of looping architecture that seems to be all the rage at the moment. Like a seriously punched up Loney, Dear, Team Me relies on a critical mass of delicate instrumentation all layered together, creating something edging toward cacophony but never with the full anarchist impulse to embrace outright chaos. There is organization in this sea of backing vocals, chiming loops, xylophones, delicate guitars and shimmering synthesizers. The main reveal, "I guess I fell in love with a state of mind," is neither particularly damning nor guilt-ridden, given that it comes wrapped in such a complex and catchy package. Perhaps inevitably, "Dear Sister" ends up in an unfinished crescendo which counts as the exact moment before all this started.

Team Me - Dear Sister by Anorak London