This Parisian act may only have one EP to their name, but when a link to their new video recently dropped into our inbox, we knew we had to share it. Making what they call “Polyphonic Pop”, this seven-piece’s bombastic baroque sound evokes the Arcade Fire, but with a happier, more playful tenor. And while this song alone is certainly worth a mention, what really struck us is the amazing new clip accompanying “70 Million”. Produced by L’Ogre Productions, the video seems to take off from that pioneering feat in music-filmmaking “Losing My Religion”, in which R.E.M. brought the work of Caravaggio to life. For “70 Million”, Hold Your Horses! add a bit of Monty-Pythonesque panache to acting out paintings, like da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Magritte’s The Son of Man, Munch’s The Scream, Chagall’s La Mariée, and basically every other work one would need to study for an introductory art history survey. So count us among the many excitedly awaiting what this band produces next. But for now, we just wanted to thank them for, well, reminding us all that learning can still be fun.

Buy this at iTunes.

The world lost a singular artist on March 6, as Mark Linkous passed away from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 47 years old. The singer-songwriter had produced six albums with his band Sparklehorse, and over the past fifteen years played and worked with an amazing array of icons, such as Radiohead, Tom Waits, the Flaming Lips, Cracker, PJ Harvey, Vic Chesnutt, Daniel Johnston, Julian Casablancas, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, the Brothers Quay, and Guy Maddin — and no doubt, Linkous stood deservedly tall among these fellow talents. More recently, he collaborated with David Lynch and Danger Mouse on the Dark Night of the Soul project, which we profiled previously and will be released this summer.
(more…)

Last month, we were lucky enough to catch these Scottish upstarts at one of their sold-out New York shows at the new Knitting Factory Brooklyn. Outside, snow may have been falling in large soggy clumps, but the dismal freeze could not stand up to the buzz burning inside. Taking the Williamsburg stage, these four Edinburgh natives looked relatively out of place, more resembling brawny hooligans than the hypersensitive hipsters that constituted their audience. As the band briskly moved through highlights from last year’s debut, These Four Walls, such as “Moving Clocks Run Slow” and “Roll Up Your Sleeves”, thoughts of compatriots and FatCat label-mates the Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit were inescapable. But the band’s penchant for angular guitars also evokes comparisons to Bloc Party, while their urgent melodies at times inch toward the terrain of U2’s earliest anthems. This last reference point seems even more suitable with We Were Promised Jetpacks’ new EP, The Last Place You’ll Look, which will hit stores on March 9.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
(more…)

Mythical, mystical-sounding albums always seem to demand larger-than-life tales of their own. So we were hardly surprised to encounter the provocative back-story to Holly Miranda’s spellbinding new record. According to the accompanying promotional literature, Miranda grew up in Tennessee and Michigan, where she attended church five times per week and was not allowed to indulge in “secular music”. She escaped to New York at the age of sixteen in pursuit of singing stardom and was soon offered a record deal, only it was with a label linked to the mafia. Miranda quickly sought refuge with family in Detroit before eventually returning to New York and succeeding (relatively) with the Jealous Girlfriends, a band that happened to rehearse next to the studio space of one Dave Sitek, a veritable deity in the Brooklyn music scene. Five years later, the now 27-year-old Miranda is releasing her solo debut, an album produced by Sitek and reportedly recorded over a three-week span between the ungodly hours of 7 p.m. and 9 a.m.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
(more…)

We came across this on photographer and PLANET contributor James Chiang’s blog for his Ideation & Presentation course at the Academy of Art. And as great fans of both Björk and Arvo Pärt, we just had to share with you this clip from the BBC program Modern Minimalists, in which the Icelandic chanteuse interviews the Estonian classical composer.
     A pioneering force within the mystical school of minimalism, the septuagenarian Pärt experienced a slight renaissance in the past decade with last year’s premiere of Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as with the inclusion of his work on the soundtracks to Fahrenheit 9/11 and There Will Be Blood. But his influence (and particularly his stark yet beautiful style, known as tintinnabulation) can also be felt on records by more mainstream, modern artists like Max Richter, Radiohead, and, indeed, Björk.
     Set to the lush and lamenting strings of Pärt’s 1977 composition, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten”, Björk begins the interview by declaring that his oeuvre “in a very sensitive way has got the whole battle of this century inside him.” Speaking in her signature sprite-like patter and sporting intergalactic chignons, the singer-turned-temporary-journalist also suggests a somewhat strange dialectic shaping Pärt’s aesthetic — that of “Pinocchio and the little cricket,” in which a postlapsarian human capable of so much pain confronts and consorts with another being bursting with compassion and the will to comfort.
(more…)

Having received an endless stream of hype for their self-titled debut, this quartet will finally release their much anticipated sophomore set next week, and we couldn’t wait to share our impressions. If the debut was chiefly defined by Ezra Koenig’s lilting voice and soukous-style of guitar, the power of this second record very much resides in the hands (and dials) of Rostam Batmanglij’s arsenal of instruments and skilled studio work. In fact, Contra’s ten tracks ostensibly diverge on two paths: One (anchored by songs such as “Cousins” and “Holiday”) continues the jubilant pop that turned the debut into a surprise hit; the other boasts a more baroque strain of synths and samples — first demonstrated in October’s release of “Horchata” as well as on the reggae-tinged “Diplomat’s Son”, which appropriates vocals from M.I.A.’s “Hussel”. These distinct paths collide and culminate in standouts “Run” and “Giving Up the Gun”, in which carefree harmonies crash into digitized blips and beats. As Koenig sings on “Giving Up the Gun”: “Your sword’s grown old and rusty/Underneath the rising sun”, it almost seems the band is consciously trying to overcome the sophomore slump of sameness that doomed so many upstarts before. For that matter, even “Cousins” subverts the formula of earlier hit “A-Punk” by adding an aggressiveness we didn’t realize the band possessed. Thus, on this second album Vampire Weekend achieves the rare feat of honoring what earned them initial acclaim, while still evolving their style with an ambition that promises even more excitement in releases to come.

Watch “Cousins” after the jump. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.
(more…)

Having already released twenty or so records the past decade, the four prolific members of Animal Collective have put out a new EP just as January’s Merriweather Post Pavilion seems to be topping every critic’s year-end list. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Baltimore band’s five new tracks maintain Animal Collective’s unique flair for progressive music that precariously straddles the line between innovative and inaccessible. Eschewing the latter entirely, however, “What Would I Want? Sky” (which samples the Grateful Dead’s “Unbroken Chain”) mixes carefree harmonies over trippy, carnivalesque noises and eerie atmospherics that, decades from now, could still stand comfortably among the Beach Boys’ and Radiohead’s dreamy classics.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

This week we sat down with Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle of Hot Chip to talk about their new record, One Life Stand, which hits stores in February. While our full feature is still forthcoming, we wanted to recognize a project the band says they’ve been especially loving recently: Mark McGuire. Best known for his work with the Cleveland band Emeralds, McGuire recently released an ambient acoustic record for Vin Du Select Qualitite, which calls to mind Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. “I would normally really hate solo guitar with a loop pedal,” says Doyle, “but there is something about the way he does it that is really amazing. I’ve been listening to his music a lot this year.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“This is the last song that I write while still in love with you,” Charlie Fink sings on “Blue Skies”, one of many tracks that narrates the end of love from his band’s The First Days of Spring, a concept album of sorts for the brokenhearted. Named after Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, this London quartet mixed Fink’s downtrodden voice, which recalls Will Oldham, with delicate plucks and pianos throughout their headlining set, exuding a rustic aura of Americana that belies their British background. Much like the band’s cinematic namesake transformed from a quiet melodrama to a modest epic, the album’s title track (streamed below) morphs spare guitars into a climactic swell of violins and distortion.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at iTunes.

Fresh from headlining a show at the Guggenheim last week, this experimental outfit from Brooklyn (by way of Baltimore) has just released the first single from their highly anticipated second record, Odd Blood, due out February 2010 on Secretly Canadian. “Ambling Alp” kicks off with strange sounds reminiscent of gurgling water that soon give way to the kind of tribal-electro rhythms that have fast become the trio’s hallmark. That said, with moments that recall the snarling gospel of TV on the Radio and the dreamy delirium of Animal Collective, this new track boasts a more accessible, uplifting shift from the sometimes esoteric athmospherics coloring their 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals. Suffice it to say, we can’t wait to hear the rest.

Download the track at www.yeasayer.net. Also available on the site is a digital bundle featuring remixes by Memory Tapes and DJ /rupture, as well as instrumentals.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.