A_Neg_Narrative: @eardrums I have replied. It's an unbelievably great idea and we'd love to be involved. Let's mush boundaries. Pushing them seems so passé 20 hours ago
Best Coast‘s awaited debut album “Crazy for you” is here, and it’s one great song after another, and there are 13 of them, including the bonus-track. Some of these songs are not easy to get out of your head after the first listen, and some are good enough to constantly run on repeat. As songs, they are fantastic, but put together as an album, I’m not that sure. She has her own way of writing songs, and sometimes she seems to use her own pattern again and again. But the songs, – oh, some of them are THAT good!
Her lyrics wander from fun to frustration. It’s often the duality between the super catchy, sunshiny melodies and lyrics full of loss, frustration, disappointment and complicated love, that really lifts a Best Coast-song for me.
I am also happy to hear that the fuzzed vocals we heard on her first singles are almost completely gone, and Bethany Cosentino good vocals really comes forward.
Songs like “Boyfriend”, “Crazy for you”, “Our Deal”, “Bratty B” or “When the sun don’t shine” should be on every single mixtape made this summer!
In exchange of an email address, Secretly Canadian shares a new Jens Lekman song with you! It’s a good one, so it’s worth your email and more, – go and get it from here:
These live-videos took my breath away today, so I just have to show them to you. It’s the Japanese artist Wool Strings, who have participated on our EardrumsPop compilations a couple of times, both as Wool Strings and as the collaboration Seasel. His beautiful music seems to be even stronger live. “Shirley Poppy” was on “A Good Crop” (free download here), and the live-version is quite different and very upbeat. Here are two more videos from the same concert. Wool Strings’ music is available to buy from his myspace page, and you will also find him on Spotify.
Special Benny is a London-based 6-piece band, with 5 music educated members and one who went to clown-school. Their debut album “Toys” will be released by the fine Proper Songs-label on September 6th, and you can already now get a download-copy or preorder the physical release from Special Benny’s bandcamp-page.
According to the press release, the band’s members have different taste in music, but they cite Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke, Sufjan Stevens, Battles, Frank Zappa and Steve Reich among their shared favourites. Their own music is warm, with great melodies, and with details and complexity that makes it really interesting to listen to it.
Looking Glass, the side-project from My Sad Captains‘ Jim Wallis, have made a song from their upcoming “The First Real Target” EP available for free download on their bandcamp-page. Like his debut-album (also available from Bandcamp), this is mostly kept in an acoustic style. In my ears this is even better than the songs on his debut (which I liked a lot), – a more developed sound and a really good song. Can’t wait for the ep, so I guess it will be a preorder for me (preorders get the downloads when the order arrives, and the cd a week before release). The official release is on August 16, on Infinite Wisdom.
