Ivory Towers

04/08/2017

Here's a thing I like. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqoervsGyE

Order: http://nowflensing.com http://planningforburial.bandcamp.com Artist: Planning For Burial Track: Warmth of You Release: Below the House

08/18/2015

08/08/2015

Hey there. Sink your teeth into this crunchy number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvbJY2CjrUI

The track "Iron Moon" from the forthcoming Chelsea Wolfe album "Abyss," out on August 7, 2015 on Sargent House. iTunes pre-order includes "Iron Moon" Instant...

02/06/2015

R.L. deserves a little praise, too...

02/06/2015

Thanks, Phil, for making 2015 look a little brighter. Still have some 2014 reflections to offer here. Be back soon.

12/18/2014

#17. Alvvays – Alvvays
Even though, like a derelict, I did not include Chad VanGaalen's new album in the crème de la crème of this year's new music, I did manage to love the s**t out of a record that he engineered and produced. The self-titled debut by Toronto band Alvvays (pronounced Always but spelled in a Google-friendly way) is a gently seething, masterfully crafted beacon fire of literate pop music that establishes the young band as a force to be reckoned with in the indiesphere. A far cry (but not too far) from VanGaalen's space folk operas, Alvvays is a worthy torchbearer for the quintessential twee-pop movement of the 80s and 90s, primarily in the U.K., that spawned bands like Talulah Gosh, Orange Juice, and Belle & Sebastian. If previously reviewed A Sunny Day in Glasgow is the nervier and more emotional American answer to Ireland's My Bloody Valentine, then Alvvays is the more deadpan and angst-ridden Canadian answer to Scotland's Camera Obscura. Their eponymous album is flat-out filled to the brim with candied melodies and bittersweet lyrics, all delivered at light speed with grace and intelligence and soaked in just the right amount of drifting sci-fi effects and studio compression. The fact that the record is so razor-sharp and focused and is only the band's first offering (and sired by one of the most industrious and talented songwriters/producers currently working, to boot) speaks volumes to how much potential is on display here. Songs like “Adult Diversion” and “Marry Me, Archie” lay everything on the table at the gate, displaying a surefooted commitment to infectious melody and lyrical ingenuity that is rare in a modern era filled with so much driveling radio fodder. Here's hoping more like-minded nostalgia-centric bands (such as Polyvinyl labelmates Saturday Looks Good to Me) receive the same kind of general acclaim currently being rained down on Alvvays, and that the bright summer day of an international lit-pop revival is only just dawning.

Sh*t's even better live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZiFFLMnOQ

12/17/2014

#18. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
Of course, no member of this band is from Scotland. Although the principal players in A Sunny Day in Glasgow are mainly from a quintessentially American town (Philadelphia), the group draws so heavily on the late 80s-early 90s U.K. shoegaze/dream pop sound (specifically the pitch-shifting, fuzzy blanket aesthetic of probably the most renowned shoegaze band of them all, My Bloody Valentine), their name could easily be changed to A Sunny Day in Dublin. But really, either name is fitting considering the beautiful contrasts on display on the band's new album, Sea When Absent, which pits driving backbeats, soaring but playful synth/sample work, and scorched earth guitar wizardry against the velvety, confessional, and seamlessly interlacing pop vocals of singers, Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson. To my knowledge, this is the first album released by the band that features such decipherable, upfront vocals and lyrics, and the band benefits greatly from the change of pace. Songs like “Crushin'” and “MTLOV (Minor Keys)” exemplify this beefing up of delivery as well as the re-contextualization of the classic verse-chorus-verse format that the band has been known to subvert on earlier material. The songs are still very circular and undulating, but their parts are highly distinguishable, even narrative at times, and the yearning R&B-influenced (think Cranberries-meets-Sade but much, much sweeter and cooler than that) dual-vocal attack solidifies the emotional core of the album. For an album with so much sonic diversity and so many quirky production techniques, the tender bedroom pop conceit of the whole affair is the most important takeaway here, which leaves the listener to ponder his/her own state of emotional well-being and reconnect with certain somesthetic notions—the feeling of ascending a great height alone and shouting into the abyss as if to claim some kind of dominion over nothing and no one, the feeling of laying one's soul bare, of singing to one's self across great distances for all to hear.

Soundcloud sample: https://soundcloud.com/lefse-records/crushin

12/16/2014

#19. Ariel Pink – Pom Pom
It's not easy for me to like a guy who is most recently known for antagonizing one of my favorite experimental pop musicians (Grimes – check her out). Based on his acerbic, trollish personality alone, it would be relatively easy to dismiss Ariel Pink as a lavish and cunning prankster who gets his proverbial kicks from pushing our collective pop cultural buttons over and over, almost to the point of inducing psychopathy in the most masochistic (read: faithful) among us. But if you're willing to approach his new record, Pom Pom, from a purely musical and humanistic standpoint, you'll most likely find that it has more to offer than meets the eye with its colorful outsider mythology, dynamic pacing, and kaleidoscopic pop candor. Now, I know that “candor” probably isn't the first (and most certainly not the last) word one would expect to hear thrown around in talking about Pink or his music, but Pom Pom actually does succeed at establishing Pink as a more serious musician and, more precisely, a genuine songwriter who values both economical storytelling and magnanimous melody with equal regard. Breezy but emotionally charged tunes like “Put Your Number in My Phone” and “Picture Me Gone” elevate Pink to a plane of musicianship and songwriting akin to Mike Patton from Mr. Bungle's California days, both writers coming at their craft with a critical eye towards commercial over-stimulation/saturation/infatuation and, more importantly, a pendulous empathy for the deep loneliness and mental anguish of the fringe individuals that pop capitalism creates. The comparison is also apt in regards to the sheer number of genre exercises employed throughout Pom Pom's hour-plus running time, ranging from lounge, polka, proto-punk, new wave, psych-folk, funk, glam, and pure pop. Some might say the album is bloated and in need of critical editing, but if you have the time to spend (and face it, we all do, or else we wouldn't be so bored piddling on our iPorps all the time, waiting for notification of some new dystopian distraction and/or Words With Friends invitation), you might find that the album is simply a dirty mirror in which to view the psychological demons resident in all of us—our collective class/race/gender/sexual biases, cultish cravings, and floundering consumer fetishes—that when taken at face value might seem frivolous, spastic, and ego-maniacal but when picked apart and examined closely between the smudges elucidates a few bright flashes of hope for humanity, of mortal acceptance and genuine concern for our tenuous and ever-searching souls.

Music video for “Put Your Number in My Phone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYoQ6WLuMq4

12/14/2014

#20. Earth – Primitive & Deadly
What a giant, punishing, seductive, and beautiful album. It’s difficult to talk about Earth’s music without utilizing a w i d e s c r e e n, ALL CAPS approach that showcases just how vibrant and irreducibly mountainous this band’s legend and corresponding catalog has become since their conception in 1989. Early albums such as Earth 2 and Phase 3 were touchstones in the burgeoning genre of drone/ambient metal, while more recent material such as the organ-heavy The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull zeroed in on dustier, more cosmic-country terrain. Their new record, Primitive & Deadly, finds the band revisiting their heavier roots, encapsulating everything that is so glorious and powerful and dead-on about the band’s career-long ability to cultivate deep desires and passions in a listener that may have otherwise remained dormant for a lifetime. Yes, the album is undeniably apocalyptic in scope, size and ex*****on, but the band’s palate here is so rich and evocative that you can’t help but be hypnotized by its dreamier aspects. Bright, ringing harmonics and wooly, perfectly sustained open chords abound on this album, and with the long overdue addition of vocals courtesy of gravel-voiced, one-time grunge rocker, Mark Lanegan, and fresh-faced psych chanteuse, Rabia Shaheen Qazi (of Rose Windows), on key tracks, the record proves to be a melting pot of swaggering, soulful, and ultimately transformative heavy rock music. When Shaheen Qazi sings “it’s all over now” on the saturnine centerpiece “From the Zodiacal Light”, you hope the band’s resurgence as the most potent of doomsayers/slingers has only just begun.

Soundcloud sample: https://soundcloud.com/earthseattle/earth-from-the-zodiacal-light

12/11/2014

I look forward to this list all year long. It never disappoints. http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2014-favorite-cover-art-of-2014

Lists are like dreams and fingerprints. No two are exactly alike. Print that out in Comic Sans and stick it above your desk. 30 Aphex Twin - Syro STUDIO: MITDR™ [Warp] The immaterial transaction of listening and the economic activities of the music industry are explicitly foregrounded in this work o…

12/11/2014

#21. The Antlers – Familiars
Again with the voices. While driving around this summer, I found myself listening to this new release by Brooklyn trio, The Antlers, quite a bit. The vinyl edition of the album came with a complimentary CD, so seeing as how inexplicably behind I am on the times as far as Bluetooth baloney, auxiliary mp3 inputs, shortwave shenanigans, blah blah, etc. go, I decided to repeat Familiars pretty excessively over a multiple-week period. At one point, when the record had most likely worn out its welcome, my wife commented on the music (suffice it to say, not exactly to her taste, but no disdain did she intimate) by pointing out how much it reminded her of growing up in a household that mainly played The Eagles and The Beach Boys. However, she also said it reminded her of Twin Peaks and she understood why I liked it so much, she being a fan of the show and its slow, dreamy music just as much as I. With those two passing assessments, she had pretty much summed up the album's raison d'être. Thematically, Familiars is obsessed with the idea of the doppelgänger and the wondrous ability for multiple, occasionally opposing selves to be present at any point in the life of an individual, the darker shades of being and the lighter ones all rolled into some fantastic Daniel Day-Lewis performance of a lifetime that we all have the ability to create, direct and star in all by our little lonesomes. (Kind of like being able to show appreciation for both David Lynch and Don Henley in the same breath.) Familiars is definitely a smooth operator, protracted and elegiac at times, cool to the touch at others, but overall a smoky, passionate, foamy funhouse of ethereal sounds. The songs here are actually quite spare, consisting of nothing more than voice, guitar, drums, piano, and (wait for it) trumpet. Yes, there are lots of towering but tasteful, hall reverb-soaked horn leads, fills, and solos, which makes sense considering the way the plaintive trumpet seamlessly interweaves with and provides counterpoint to Peter Silberman's kindly but soulful falsetto further underpins the album's overall fascination with double lives. The past becomes the present, and the present becomes a mirror for self-reflection, and sometimes that reflection turns monstrous, as on the dusky, fluttering, sinister second track entitled (you guessed it) “Doppelgänger”. Most of these songs aren't so despairing, however, and, to me, that is what makes the album so accessible. Unlike earlier sadder, concept-driven work by the band, most notably the 2009 cancer ward set Hospice, Familiars relies less extensively on heavy overarching narrative constructs, instead preferring to burrow into a dreamier state of consciousness where it can speak more suggestively via cinematic, chiaroscuro vignettes. Ultimately, the looser spirit of the album hits the listener harder because it doesn't feel the need to grieve or heal or forget, having already left its body a thousand times before and since, simply happy to return when the moment is right and then move on again, endlessly inhabiting itself and coming into its own, fading into the night and fulminating at dawn. Play and repeat.

Music video for “Hotel”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynkp1VHwbHg

12/10/2014

Added a few more here...