Our old pals in Murder Mystery have kicked off the summer season with a couple of one-off releases. These new tracks offer an insight into a slightly new direction for this Brooklyn four-piece. The sprawling guitars that dominated 2007’s Are You Ready for the Heartache Cause Here it Comes and evoked comparisons to Pavement have been superceded by an easygoing electro-pop aesthetic. Over a buoyant set of synths and beats, siblings Jeremy and Laura Coleman take turns on the microphone for melodies that recall Stars and Belle & Sebastian. “I Am (If You Are)” and “Change My Mind” show a band brandishing its verstaility and, we hope, revealing a promising new sound for their next full-length.

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Both tracks are downloadable at murdermysterymusic.com. Buy Are You Ready for the Heartache… at iTunes. Murder Mystery will be playing with Food Will Win the War at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory on July 18.

There’s something comforting yet mystifying about Laurie Anderson. In a single breath, Anderson can wax provocative about economic apocalypse before discussing an upcoming Christmas record by her piano-playing dog, Lola Belle. Yet, no matter how hyper-intellectual or flat-out absurd her words and works might seem, in conversation she somehow straddles the line between pretentiousness and preposterousness without ever succumbing to either. Since her breakthrough work from forty years ago, Duets on Ice, in which she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice and played violin until the ice melted away, through her ten-plus albums featuring collaborations with William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Antony Hegarty, and husband Lou Reed, Anderson has mastered the far-flung worlds of avant-garde art, literature, film, experimental music, and even technology, inventing instruments such as tape-bow violins and voice filters. Using the voice filters in much of her spoken word and musical works, Anderson cultivated a male alter-ego (in an act she calls “audio drag”) named Fenway Bergamot, whose visage and voice take center-stage on Anderson’s latest album, Homeland, which continues her critique of American identity and injustice.

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Buy Homeland at iTunes. Visit Nonesuch Records to hear song samples. And for more remixes of “Only An Expert”, visit Indaba Music.
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Mixing dense feedback and ghostly noises with jangly hooks and three-part harmonies, this quartet reveals the more joyous sides of shoegazing and psychedelia. A cycle of circusy synths whirl throughout the opening track, “Good Feelings”, for an effect that recalls Philip Glass by way of Animal Collective. Meanwhile, “Drunk Kids” and “All Night Outside” combine the drone of Deerhunter with the layered pop of the Beach Boys. Such influences notwithstanding, perhaps, a better way to consider Light Pollution is by looking at the name of the band itself. Aside from its most immediate connotations, the conjunction of “light” and “pollution” and, for that matter, the title of the record, Apparitions, point to the proliferation of something scary, deadening, and dark — all of which has been paradoxically paired with the image of a bright, white, warm glow. The publicity notes accompanying the album report that it was produced “over the course of a long, stoned, agoraphobic winter spent isolated in a heatless warehouse west of Chicago”, which indubitably sounds bleak. Listening to the finished product, however, we can plainly see that “Good Feelings” have prevailed — the dreary and upsetting turn dreamy and uplifting on this debut.

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After the jump, check out the video for “Drunk Kids”. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

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Playing a bizarre mish-mash of ’70s-era soft rock and Syd Barrett-inflected psychedelia, this British band was co-founded by Blaine Harrison and his guitarist/father Henry. The elder Harrison encouraged his son, at the age of twelve, to form a band as an activity to partly deal with his confinement to crutches due to spina bifida. Following 21 from 2008, Serotonin is still quite informed by a love of 10cc and ELO, but the new tracks shift away from the sometimes exuberantly chaotic sound of their first albums for a more ’80s-inspired set of carefree pop songs. “Dreaming Of Another World” and the title track feature bouncy hooks driven by glam-rock guitars and New Wave synths reminiscent of Pulp (likely influenced by producer Chris Thomas, the man behind Different Class and Roxy Music’s modern classics). Meanwhile, jubilant whistles and kazoos somehow work well amid the odd romanticism of “Flash a Hungry Smile”, as Blaine sings about “birds and bees” and STDs. After three albums of scattered availability stateside, this five-piece from Eel Pie Island (a whimsically sounding place that complements the whimsical sound) are releasing what promises to be their inevitable breakout.

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Watch the video for “Dreaming Of Another World” after the jump. Serotonin hits stores on July 13. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
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A blonde woman struggles to keep an oily black liquid from oozing through flowery wallpaper. A mumbling man washes what seem to be giant eggs in a stream. A family camping out and roasting marshmallows on an open fire somehow segues into a moment of demonic possession and an orgiastic food fight. And alien beings perform some mysterious fire ceremony, amid tribal drums and other rhythmic weirdness, before flashing to audio/visual noise that certainly could induce seizures in the more epileptically vulnerable.
     Animal Collective, the ever prolific group hailing from Baltimore, have followed up last year’s acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion and Fall Be Kind with this “visual album”, a collaboration with Philadelphia filmmaker Danny Perez that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has been touring the world in one-off screenings. The 54-minute film marks the culmination of four years of “an open-ended operation of audio-video synthesis”, said Perez, who previously helmed concert films for Black Dice and Panda Bear, “the passing back and forth of visuals and sound so that each would inform the other and create an organic structure.”
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With a supremely simple sub-thirty-minute, thirteen-track debut, this British trio calls to mind the brisk noise-pop of Sub Pop label-mates No Age (not to mention early Seattle grunge). Perhaps, a description of their first show says it all: the band played a party titled “RAGE” in their native London which purportedly involved a lot of beer and one giant trampoline, evoking an image of disgruntled, drunken, and high-flying youth that is only too apt given the sounds unleashed on Nothing Hurts. While “Worse to Come”, which features guests Vivian Girls, recalls a grimier version of the male-female vocal interplay of the Vaselines, much of this record revolves around hazy feedback giving way to the rapid-fire play of singer/guitarist John Arthur Webb. Chunky, distorted riffs spike through “Weird Feelings” only to be followed (if not soothed) by a lush, almost shoe-gazer-like, drone on the ethereal “Franklin”, during which Webb contemplates the band’s ostensible infatuation with ephemerality, crooning, “All this won’t last forever”. Combining both of these currents is “Years Not Long”. The grizzled sweep of guitars on the album’s opener deftly straddles the line between cockeyed exuberance and infecting heaviness for an effect that all but boils down Male Bonding’s unique allure in two-and-a-half glorious minutes.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, watch a live session the band did for BBC. (more…)

In one of the unquestionably oddest releases of the year, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim memorialize the notorious First Lady of the Philippines and shoe connoisseur Imelda Marcos (as well as her nanny Estrella Cumpas) with this 22-track concept album. In exploring the life of one of the last century’s most infamous female figures, Byrne and Fatboy Slim have enlisted quite an array of strong women behind the mic, including Sharon Jones, Santigold, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Nellie McKay, Natalie Merchant, as well as lone male guest, Steve Earle. In largely writing all lyrics in the first person, Byrne casts his subject as a wannabe disco diva reflecting upon her innocent teen-beauty-queen hopes and doomed dreams for fame, fortune, and power. Throughout the two discs (which also come in a deluxe edition with a DVD of music videos and a 100-page book), it is hard not to think of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita — both in concept and aesthetics. The title track, with Welch (of Florence and the Machine), starts the album with soft-rock flourishes, kitchy cabaret, and Seventies-era strings and horns befitting this twisted take on the Broadway biography.

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Buy this at iTunes.
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The world lost an icon like no other yesterday when Malcolm McLaren passed away from mesothelioma in Switzerland. He was 64 years old. Of course, he was best known for forming and managing the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, but through the ’70s and ’80s McLaren wielded influence in realms well beyond punk rock, bringing hip hop and world music to greater notoriety in Great Britain with his own solo work and radicalizing the realm of fashion alongside longtime partner Vivienne Westwood.
     McLaren and Westwood ushered in a renaissance of Edwardian fashions with their clothing shop Let It Rock, which opened in 1971. Traveling to New York the next year on business, McLaren met the New York Dolls whom he would soon manage. That partnership lasted just a few years, culminating in McLaren’s controversial decison to drape the Dolls in Soviet-themed leather regalia for a concert — the backlash of which contributed to the band’s breakup. In the meantime, McLaren reinvented his fashion business under the monicker SEX, which sold S&M styles and certainly influenced Agent Provocateur, the lingerie retailer co-founded by McLaren and Westwood’s son Joseph Corré.
     McLaren’s management roles came to involve the band the Neon Boys (which included future Television founders Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell) and the Strand, who would soon be renamed the Sex Pistols, after a green-haired chap named John Lydon was discovered while wearing a shirt on which “I hate Pink Floyd” was scrawled.
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Written and recorded in the far-flung locales of Brooklyn, Sydney, and a botanical garden in the Bay of Naples, this four-piece ensemble offers up its first set of actual songs, following four records of largely instrumental work. Calling to mind fellow practitioners in chamber-pop, like Rachel’s, Joanna Newsom, and Sufjan Stevens, this song-cycle composed by leader Padma Newsome, alongside Bryce Dessner (who also plays in the National), brings together an assortment of guests, such as Stevens, Matt Berninger (also of the National), and Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), whose angelic soprano anchors “On the Edge” and “Cocodrillo”, which begins the album with a hypnotic round of monastic chants and peculiar voicings. “We Were Here” matches tranquil guitar and banjo plucks with glockenspiels befitting a soothing lullaby, while Stevens and Worden’s harmonies suggest something more sinister underneath, as they sing, “You are there, and then you’re not”. Such precarious pairing appears throughout these ten tracks and is accentuated in the album’s very title, which wavers between a children’s fable and medieval monster tale for a hauntingly romantic effect.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

After releasing a slew of one-off tracks (including the amazing “New Flowers” and “Bejan”) and remixes for the likes of Au Revoir Simone and Telepathe in the past year, Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm have finally put out their first EP. Standouts such as “Real Life” and “Policy Of Trust” bring more than just a nominal nod to Depeche Mode, as the Brooklyn duo pairs simple electro hooks with the jubilant global appropriations heard in the recent work of Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, and Yeasayer. But that’s not to say Tanlines is riding piggyback on the latest trends of indie rock. Throughout Settings, tropical rhythms and synths swell with layers of finger snaps, airy vocals, and intricate guitar riffs reminiscent of Emm’s stint in Don Caballero to build a wall of sound that is wholly at home yet entirely unique to the realms of pop, dance, and world music.

Tanlines will be playing at Le Poisson Rouge with Micachu and the Shapes on March 30.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.