Holy Family is a band originally from Gothenburg, Sweden that hopped over the Atlantic and now resides in Montreal, making strange, experimental post-RnB or something. Whatever it is, it was interesting enough for me to blog about…so there…
Oh, J. Mascis, bless you and your love of album covers that look like Yellow Submarine meets Princess Mononoke.
So, the words and visuals on this YouTube clip are totally insane, but please don’t think I am, I just feel like they’re so crazy that they’re actually really interesting.
So what’s the deal with this song? It’s supposedly some sort of ‘Kabala song’ or something, but here’s the weird thing, this summer I was sitting around the pool on my Kibbutz with a bunch of other people around my age. The radio is on the pool PA, playing whatever radio stations play (pop music bullshit mostly), and suddenly this song – which I’d heard before – comes on the station (nobody switched it over to a Hareidi station while we weren’t looking) and not only do the other twenty-somethings not get weirded out by it, but they’re singing along with it! Apparently it’s a somewhat well-known song here, though I’d never heard it in any Jewish institution in Canada before, nor even when I was here last year actually learning about Kabala at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In any case – it’s a beautiful, beautiful song, both melodically and lyrically. One thing I like about a lot of the religious music here that’s in Hebrew is that it’s really honest-sounding, it doesn’t sound like bullshit or ‘sing for Jesus’ or some shit, it’s like legit, you know? Not to say I’m always the biggest fan of the religious people here, but no matter what a song is about, legitimacy is legit, so I will give them that.
Electro-pop from London duo Affair – most diggable.
Pang Attack, the electro-ish/shoegaze project of Montreal’s Alex Hackett released a solid EP last year around the time we wrote about his performance at NXNE ’11, but his latest Phantom Forest EP builds upon that one in a big way, with all kinds of new elements tossed (succesfully) into the mix – we are most impressed.
These guys Desert from Barcelona, Spain describe themselves as Cocteau Twins meet Laurel Halo, but I’d say they’re more kind of like a band doing stuff in, let’s say, King Felix EP Laurel Halo‘s ballpark – but really, really ridiculously well.
Hoooold me clooser tiny…uh…burka ninja?
I don’t really know anything about this guy Benny Bashan – nor will I bother looking anything up for this – but this song is interesting. The guy sounds like the Israeli version of Jonathan Richman, and the song fits that: it’s like this dude saying how great this girl but it’s kind of done in a funny, idiotic way, almost sarcastically, and there also seems to be kind of an absurdist bent to the song. Like, for instance, here are the first couple lines in translation:
“You’re great
And you’re cute
You’re great-cute
Clap
Insanity
‘Cheers’ (?)
I see you dance great
I see you standing cute
I see you sitting, thinking upright
And beneath it all in order to also be cute”
That’s the vibe of the song. Enjoy (?)
The name of Stockholm’s Dream Curtain is practically lazy considering they make this kind of chillz, dreamy shoegazey stuff that you would expect of a band with that name. But whatever – sounds good.
