DoublePlusGood is a drums/keys duo from Portland, Oregon that makes some cool, aery tunes. Supposedly they recorded in an old factory and the reverb was so awesome they didn’t need to add any to the drums or vocals in the production process.
This is a cool shoegaze band. Some of the girls in the band are pretty sexy. Or at least the sexy hair obscuring their faces makes me imagine that their faces are correspondingly sexy. Their music is pretty sexy. The band of the week is…
NO JOY!!!
Sooo, I don’t know what the deal was, but somebody or other in the band was from Montreal and someother person or persons was/were from L.A. or they were separated for a while or something. I don’t really know. Anyways. They made some cool videos and songs and put out a solid album on Mexican Summer (solid label) and now they’re hot shit.
As a self-professed shoegaze-nut, I was intrigued by the band at first but thought that they were a little too pedal-heavy and melody-lite, as I’ve often complained of the first wave of post-Loveless shoegaze bands of being. However, they were really fucking cool, both in sound and in visual style. So I watched the new videos when they came out and downloaded the album. Because it’s so murky and the melodies aren’t uber strong it was at least good for when I read on the treadmill, it kind of just blurs and such.
Then I saw the band @ the Silver Dollar during NXNE a couple months ago and thought they were really cool live, so I went back to the album, looking for a little more. And amazingly I found it. And now I think the band actually has some pretty cool melodies and that they’re one of the best shoegaze bands around today. And that’s a pretty decent compliment cuz there are a lot of killer shoegaze bands around right now (Memoryhouse, Deerhunter, School Of Seven Bells, Wild Nothing, etc.).
Anyways, this will be my last Band of the Week ever unless there’s some kind of protest to let me know people are reading these, cuz I monitor what gets hits and what doesn’t and though I always hoped that these kind of personal-style band of the week entries would be something to make the blog stand out a bit, but these days I find it just a kind of chore that rarely gets much attention, so maybe it’s time to make a change…If you’ve enjoyed them and would like to see more, let me know. If not, I suppose no one will miss them.
Belfast band Sea Pinks makes lo-fi psych pop. There’s a whole story behind it. Whatever. Music.
In Toronto, when you hear about all-ages rock shows you usually imagine awful screamo-fests populated by punked up youngsters being ripped off by some large, soulless organization mining the bands’ friends and family for a bit of disposable income. It’s pretty unfortunate, considering there are no shortage of great young bands in this city making awesome indie rock: that much I’ve learned since we started our (sort of) monthly Soundz of the Youth all-ages indie rock series.
One of my favourite bands (that I found over Craigslist!) we’ve had is The Grapefruit Colour – a guitar-drums duo that plays smart, sharp melodic indie rock/pop. I insisted that they get a bandcamp up pronto and thankfully they’ve heeded my advice. Below is one of the songs off their excellent demos EP.
Our good friend Liam Sanagan (best known as a member of Toronto indie-poppers First Rate People, who operates solo as LUM) has released a new version of the song “I Am Alone” (previously released as a demo on the Boys Choir Demo) along with a video to accompany it. It’s pretty cool, got a bit of a bounce to it now.
I’m a pretty big Deerhunter/Atlas Sound fan so I was psyched to find out that Bradford Cox will be releasing a new album called Parallax (sounds like a Pokemon, right? It’s actually: “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g., through the viewfinder andthe lens of a camera.” -Dictionary on my Mac) on November 8th. Has it leaked yet? Anyone? Oh, well. It will. Soon. In the meantime, here are thoughts on the first track, “Terra Igcognita” (ooooh, Latin…).
Marc: Truth is the song’s a little boring. Just a little. At least as a single. I mean, sure, it’s cool, Cox is always pretty cool and interesting, but last time around we got “Walkabout”, which was more like a fucking knockabout, and then he followed that with “Shelia” a bit later, which was also really cool. Sure, in between were those tracks on the album there were all kinds of chillz little acoustic creepers that tied everything together nicely, but that’s not what gets people (like me, at least) psyched for an album.
Also, it sounds very, very clean. Cleaner than what’s come before, for sure. Not necessarily a bad thing. It’s cool.
The album? How bad could it be? Cox and crew have pretty much been pumping out awesome release after awesome release for the last couple years, I see no reason to think that they’d stop now. Even if this first track is a little boring, maybe when it’s grouped up with a bunch of other cool tracks and given some context it’ll work better. I’m sure it probably will.
Also, the little “bum bum bum” part at the end is kind of neat.
Photo: Mick Rock
No, the cult of the same name has not risen up from the grave and, undead, began making indie rock music…though it would be interesting to hear the kind of sounds they might make. Instead, Heaven’s Gate is a new shoegaze band arising out of the ashes of solid Brooklyn band Sweet Bulbs. (Via Pitchfork)
Photo: Cory Smith
It seems as though I’ll never discover all the talent contained in this crazy city, Toronto. Someone just passed the word on to me about a cool shoegaze band called Beliefs that’s doing their shtick here. And you know (if you read this blog) I’m a sucker for the ‘gaze…
Another word that a lot of bands use in their names these days: sun. As in Sun Araw, Sun Airway, Sun O))), Sun Kil Moon, Empire of the Sun, etc. and that’s not even taking into account those bands like Treefight for Sunlight, Sunny Day Real Estate, A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Sunset Rubdown, Sunset and such who have some kind of variation on the word sun in their name.
Then again, the sun is a pretty deal. It does allow for life to exist on this planet. It’s not too surprising that some bands might want to pay tribute to it by tossing it in their name.
So yeah…now we’ve got New Orleans indie-rockers Sun Hotel…who we’ve actually posted about before…but they got better. Here’s a new song off their next EP Gifts, which is coming out October 11th.
It’s ironic that there are black people on the cover of the album because Malkmus’ music may be the whitest rock in existence
