4AD

The Big Pink is love obsessed. The duo’s debut album, A Brief History Of Love, features three songs with “love” in the title. Whether spelled out or not, however, the sentiment appears on all the tracks. But the sonics behind the Big Pink’s love obsession are all harsh noise and fuzzy aggression. A bit Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a bit Jesus and Mary Chain, a bit Atari Teenage Riot (with whom vocalist Robbie Furze played for a while), The Big Pink has a way with writing songs that are instantly familiar. You might think you have heard it before, but it just sounds like something you heard before. At the same time, A Brief History Of Love is all new, original post-shoegazing. “Dominos” has a strident pace that demands a sing-along. In contrast, Furze’s drones on “Frisk” are of a driving nature that pull up rather than drag down.

A Brief History Of Love will be released in the United States on September 22.

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The Big Pink – Frisk

Friendly Fire Recordings

The Phenomenal Handclap Band is a collective out of NYC that specializes in combining elements of every major musical genre of the last forty years — rock, soul, psychedelia, disco, prog-rock, funk, new wave, and probably a few others I’ve missed. It seems like an unruly soup, but somehow they make it work in a mostly seamless rollick through the decades. And not only that, they get you dancing. Members have been involved in numerous notable projects, from TV on the Radio to Calla to Mooney Suzuki and others. They also happen to be friends, so over the last few months I’ve sat by as everyone from Rolling Stone to NPR, Spin to Pitchfork have gushed over this band. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a way to get into the game — but haven’t been sure what other superlatives I could add. Alas, their first video provides an opportunity. All this time I’ve suspected they’ve been up to no good; now it’s confirmed.

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Stones Throw

For the last few years, artists like Jamie Lidell, Amy Winehouse, and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings hinted at a true throwback to the classic soul sounds of Motown, Atlantic, and Stax. Seemingly coming out of nowhere (Ann Arbor, Michigan to be exact), Mayer Hawthorne is another advancement of this sound and, quite simply, the real deal. You might be taken aback by how un-modern this debut album sounds. Down to the instrumentation and arrangements, Hawthorne does his best to pay homage to this timeless era albeit with new original compositions, both sung and played by him. Replete with backing vocals reminiscent of the Four Tops and the Spinners, songs like “Maybe So, Maybe No” and “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out” are immediate classics, even if they are seemingly time warped to a new era. Ballads, almost a lost art in current music, are right at home alongside this mid-tempo soul. Barry Gordy would be proud, if not a little surprised, that there’s still a market for these sounds, and the fact that Stones Throw (venerable indie home to Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf) discovered and released this album is a testament to how things go beyond full circle. A strange arrangement indeed, and a promising one.

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Mayer Hawthorne – Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin’

Photography courtesy of Verve Forecast

Having recently topped iTunes’ singer-songwriter chart with their debut Taller Children, pianist Elizabeth Ziman and fellow Berklee alums drummer Danny Molad and guitarist Peter Lalish launched a nationwide tour last Thursday with a headlining set at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. The set’s highlights included “Race You”, “Momma’s Boy”, and “Taller Children” (streamed below), all propelled by frenzied rhythms and jaunty pianos. At times, the trio was accompanied by accordion, violins, and synchronized handclaps (courtesy of an uproarious Brooklyn crowd). Released this summer, Taller Children was produced by Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis, who has also worked with Rilo Kiley. That’s a salient touchstone for the Catapult, as Ziman’s singing and songwriting often evoke the sweet swoon of Jenny Lewis — not to mention the jazzy warble of Feist and the caustic lyricism of Regina Spektor. On that account, it seems the aforementioned triumvirate of indie-pop chanteuses may soon have to make room for a new member to the club.

Elizabeth & the Catapult will be hitting a city near you through September and October.

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Photography by Franco Musso

Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel have been making music together since they were in grade school. They meet everyday to play, whether they have specific ideas in mind or not. Eventually, out of these daily improvisations, an album is born. Maintaining this sort of routine for over a decade takes an incredible amount of commitment. Asked if their relationship resembled a marriage, Godin responds, “For me, the idea of a marriage is someone who doesn’t piss you off. The world is cruel enough. When you come home, you need some support. Our producers tell us these stories about bands that hate each other and I say, ‘Why do you do this?’ You have to want to be together.”
     So Godin and Dunckel’s marriage may solely be a musical one, but it’s an incredibly successful partnership. Love 2, the most recent fruit of their labor, sounds like a record from two musicians who have hit their stride — they know what works, and this go-round they’ve found inspiration in the sense of security that love and acceptance can provide. “Love shouldn’t be a problem,” Godin says. “Yes, but lack of love is always a problem,” Dunckel continues. “The songs on this record are about aching for love. We just want to say, ‘Love me.’” And that’s not an impossible request.

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Air – Do the Joy
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Photography by Alex Marvar

Last Friday, we went to the sweltering, bricked confines of New York’s Mercury Lounge to check out the Antlers perform their recently released album Hospice. And while we cannot emphasize enough how magnetic and magnificent the trio’s headlining set sounded, we’ve already amply pronounced our affections here. On that account, we also wanted to pay our respects to the band playing right before the Antlers: Murder Mystery. The Brooklyn quartet infuses a bit of Americana into their catchy and carefree songs, which call to mind the old indie guard of Luna and Pavement. On tracks like “Lost” (streamed below), Jeremy Coleman’s baritone, the intricate interplay of keyboard and guitar, and the buoyant bass and drums rise and converge in a beguiling tension whose sunny disposition nevertheless serves the spirit of summer romance well in these waning days of the season.

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Murder Mystery – Lost

XL Recordings

Jack Peñate is desperate for you to forget his first album, Matinee, and focus on his new one. In case the message wasn’t clear enough, it is right there in the title, Everything Is New. Peñate has reinvented himself as a brand new entity. Gone is the self-indulgent, snobbish, and superior attitude of the debut. In its place is carefully crafted modern-day soul — not in the conventional sense, however, but the British interpretation of it. This means emotive vocals that aren’t overwrought with vibrato. Rather, Peñate showcases his vocal abilities with empathy and genuineness of emotion that have no choice but to ring true. Afrobeats, handclaps, and scatterings of a gospel choir charge these tastefully melodic songs. Driving world rhythms are the identifiers of “Let’s All Die” and “Give Yourself Away”. But it is the heralding horns and tough dance pace of “Be The One” and the bold statements of “Tonight’s Today”, balanced against island-tinged percussion, that give the album its bite. With Everything Is New, Peñate has redeemed himself enough to inspire us to hit “reset” where he’s concerned.
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IAMSOUND Records

With just an EP to her name, Anita Blay has immediately garnered comparisons to Santigold for both her work with Santi producer Radioclit and, moreover, a comparable skill for churning out eclectic and electric party starters set to buoyant synths, grinding bass, and penetrating hooks. Pulsing at the heart of these four songs, of course, is the 23-year-old’s sinister siren’s call of a voice. “Clean Apart” (streamed below) serves up Prince-esque flourishes of intergalactic funk while Blay subverts the usual narrative of adultery/break-up tracks with a snarling, empowered reprimand to her ex-to-be. Meanwhile the hypnotic beats and digitized chimes on “I’m Not Sorry” recall Madonna’s forays in Euro-dance, tinged with a barbed ferocity that seems certain to become thecocknbullkid’s hallmark.

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thecocknbullkid – Clean Apart

There are some inspirational, off-beat composers out there. Namely the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra — playing on carrot-flutes and radish-marimbas — and Joseph Bertolozzi, who turned the entire Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge into a gigantic percussion instrument. And then there was David Byrne’s installation last year, Playing the Building. Most recently, composer and sound designer Diego Stocco appeared on our radar. With an eminently creative mind, Stocco builds music out of ingenious objects like sand and burning pianos. For his latest project he turned to a sprawling old tree in his own backyard.
     “In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs,” he writes on his website. “It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.”
     It turns out he could, so he did, and with no other means than a pencil sharpener, two microphones, and a customized stethoscope he made a track simply by thumbing and shaking the tree. The pencil sharpener was used to trim the twigs so that Stocco could tune them. Connected to a plastic pipe on one end and a microphone on the other, the stethoscope then transmitted the sounds Stocco created. The final version of the track has not been processed or digitally edited in any way. “All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on,” Stocco explains.
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Frenchkiss Records

Peter Silberman possesses a voice that is all at once haunting, weary, and undeniably beautiful. At times, his singing evokes the fraught croon of Win Butler while at others he soars to the angelic heights of Antony Hegarty. Given the title of Silberman and company’s debut, Hospice indeed casts a shadow of death and doom over its ghostly refrains. But this is not to say the album is wholly bleak and hopeless; rather the effect manifests itself more organically. Through ten songs, we progress from twinkling lullabies of innocent youth to the aching grace of life’s final days. The album’s closer, “Epilogue”, fittingly strips away the dreamy instrumentals of an earlier track, “Bear”, to reveal a singular balladeer with a starkness that might just herald this year’s Bon Iver and Arcade Fire — all rolled into one.

The Antlers will celebrate the release of Hospice with an August 21 show at New York’s Mercury Lounge featuring fellow Brooklyn upstarts Murder Mystery in support.

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The Antlers – Bear