Saturday, July 31, 2010

Sigur Rós - Takk...


"Takk..." is an album by the icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós that was released in 2005.
"Takk..." incorporates a lot of ambience and a signing technique called "vonlenska". I was recently introduced to the album by a good friend whole is the guitarist for my brother's band, and I fell in love with it as soon as I started listening to it. The music is very ambient and makes you feel as if you were exploring some kind of cave. I would recommend this album to anyone, even if they think they don't really like post-rock.

Monday, July 26, 2010

-[The Construct]-





















Hai guise, it's me again for the first time in a while. I know you missed me and all my sexiness, but the time for gawking is over. It's time to get to the metalz.

-[The Construct]- is a band I heard about from a thread that the guitarist posted on a metal forum I go to (http://www.metalguitarist.org). A lot of the people on that site are actually in bands, so I may very well post more stuff from guys over there sometime. But for now, let's focus on -[TC]-.

There's not a lot of material of there's available for listening to yet, really just the two songs on their Myspace unless I'm missing something. But give them a listen. They create a pretty huge ambient atmosphere with their usage of reverb and their nice dark down-tempo sound.


Rory (their guitarist) made another post thanking me for the blog post and letting me know that they actually have a Facebook too, with the two songs from their Myspace as well as two more songs up, all of which are available to download for free (and are actually the only songs they have recorded as of now. Can't wait to here more from them). Thanks a ton Rory!

Menomena - Friend And Foe


This is Menomena's 3rd release, and 2nd album-album. This is quite different from Fun Blame Monster, actually. Where Fun Blame Monster was minimalistic, Friend and Foe is quite full of wonderful sounds. The loops method used in Fun Blame Monster are still used here, but you can barely tell - like I said the album sounds very full, as if it were made by more than three multi-instrumentalist dudes. This album focuses much more on vocals and vocal harmonies, most obvious in the greatest song ever written by man, Rotten Hell.

The package itself is pretty sweet too - the insert has a plethera of doodles and some holes, where, using the CD (also filled with doodles) can be filled to make various matches with the disc and insert. It's fun to play with.

Check it out, yo

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Menomena - Under An Hour

This is Menomena's 2nd release, and it's more of a soundtrack than an album. Well, it IS a soundtrack. An instrumental soundtrack, in fact, to a dance troupe performance from back in 2004 or so. There's three long tracks on here - Water, Flour, Light. Honestly they don't sound like anything on Fun Blame Monster - really it doesn't sound like anything on later releases either. It does sound like a soundtrack, which might be bad for some, and good for others. Personally I really dig the stuff on here, and suggest you check it out.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Menomena - I Am The Fun Blame Monster!





This is my favorite album ever. It literally completely changed how I think about music. I really have no words strong enough for my love of this album. It's epic. It's rushing. It's soaring. It's haunting. It's beautiful. It's beauty comes from it's simplicity: Three guys, guitar drums bass and sax every now and again. The songs are built on loops that are constructed into masterpieces.

Seriously. Go get this album. It comes with a flippin' flipbook too, how much better can you get?

Folk Fridays


Welcome to Folk Fridays, the day of the week where I introduce you to a folk artist/band/project that you should know about. The band of this Friday is Bon Iver, a folk project started by artist Justin Vernon during a time in his life in which things weren't going so great. He ended a relationship with Emma, the girl he writes about in the album, his band broke up, and he had a bad case of mononucleosis(not fun, I actually just suffered from that last February). What does one do when something as bad as this happens? Move to a remote cabin in the woods of Wisconsin and record an amazing album, that's what! The whole record is an amazing emotional journey through love, success, and his failed relationship. Justin takes us into the deepest part of his heart, and through his beautiful falsetto voice and heartbreaking lyrics he draws us in, not letting us leave until the last note is played. One of the best albums I've ever listened to, check this out as soon as you can.

Monday, July 19, 2010

I suck

Sorry, I got busy this weekend and couldn't do those ELHR posts. Plus I haven't really listened to the other two enough to make a great review or whatever. Sorry

Anyway I have another theme week this week, to coincide with a certain release this Tuesday...

That'll start on Friday and last up until Tuesday where I'll post about the new one. I'm probably gonna do this with other artists too in the future

Forever,

-Fritz

Friday, July 16, 2010

ELHCW: Have A Nice Life - Deathconsciousness



This right here is Enemies List's most famed recording. Have A Nice Life is the band of the two founding members of ELHC, and it's an INCREDIBLE album. It's about 1.5 hours in length, and as of now it's only available in digital format from the ELHC main site. They did a limited vinyl run of this album (only 500 made), and that up above is one of 'em. It came with a book-type-thing about the philosophy and historical background of the album (deep stuff, I know). It really doesn't add much to it, but it's cool to have.

The music will blow the shit outta yer ears in an instant. It kinda tricks you with a nice acoustic ballad of sorts to start it off, before shoving your face to the wall with DAT BASS all over the god damn place. The rest of the album ranges from shoegaze, sludge, folk-ey stuff, even a bit of the ol' 'lectranica. Definitely a mixed bag, and everything in it is amazing.

You can buy the digital version here. I suggest you do - it's not like it's going to a big ol' evil corporation or nothin'.


Enemies List Home Recordings Weekend Extravaganza!

This weekend I'm gonna make a few posts highlighting artists and albums released by a marvelous home recording label, Enemies List. This label, made by two bros, has released around 6 or 7 albums so far by various artists, and their mission is to, pretty much, kill the music industry. They do limited physical releases, their artists are only liable for one release (and more if they want it) and it's a generally cool little label. They like to interact with their listeners as well - earlier this year they held a scavenger hunt to find a "long lost tape" of one of the bands on their label, Nahvalr. They posted various clues and images, and a group of people on Last.FM went into the woods and found this tape. It was pretty cool. You can read about it on the labels Last.FM page, posted below.

Anyway, the label focuses on shoegaze, metal, post rock, post metal, and other such genres of music. This weekend I'll showcase three releases. Are all 3 mind-blowingly amazing? Nah. Is one incredibly mind-blowingly amazing and the other two extremely good? Very much so. Stay tuned.



Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Man Parts





















Hello everyone, welcome to my very manly post for today. Today the band I'm featuring is Man Parts, a joke band (by which I mean stuff like Psychostick, Dethklok, Spinal Tap, etc.) made up of of two strapping young lads who hail from Twin Cities Minnesota. If you have Rock Band 2 for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, you can find a couple of their songs in the Rock Band Network store, which is how I found them. Here's their Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Man-Parts/191762942581?ref=search

According to the Facebook page, Mike Plante's role in the band is "Lead Guitar Shredification", as well as being the "Lead Vocal Noise-Maker." With him is Nathan Gerdes, whose roles are "Drumset Thrash-o-phizer, remedial bassist, backup vocal noise-maker." And apparently their genre of music is classified as "Tofu-thrash." I take it that means they make fun of every couple of kids who ever tried to be brutal by tuning their guitars to drop d and playing some overly simplistic riffs with horrible tone, by doing just that.

They completely nail what they're going after. After a few seconds of listening, thoughts come rushing to your head of a couple of teenagers on a Youtube video with no talent trying to be the next big thing, and it's genuinely funny. Their song Motorcide has become a big hit amongst my friends and coworkers at parties (we often have to shout the chorus whenever the mood strikes us). You obviously can't take it too seriously musically, but if you're in the mood for some sheer ridiculousness take a listen.

As I said, Motorcide is available for purchase in the Rock Band Network store on Xbox 360, as well as Molten Death. Both songs are 80 Microsoft Points each (the equivalent of $1).

Last but not least, here's videos of both of the songs in action on Rock Band in audition mode (I'm not sure if these were the final versions of the charts or not though).



Sunday, July 11, 2010

Sleep Party People - S/T

Sleep Party People is a band/solo project (I really have no idea which, I think solo project though) from Denmark. They make nice dreamy ambient post-pop type stuff, in the same vein as Sigur Ros and Jonsi. The only problem is the weird vocal effect the guy uses. It's a bit irritating at times, but it usually fits the music.

This is only avalible on a foreign iTunes (no CD) so here is a link to download it

Saturday, July 10, 2010

LSD Soundtrack

Greetings once again anuswaffles.

So there's this old PS1 game that was only released in Japan called LSD. No, it's not about drugs. It's kind of a "dream simulator." See, a staff member at Asmik Ace Entertainment (the company who developed and published the game) had been keeping a dream journal for about a decade, and the idea was that they would take things from her dream journal and put them into the game. More of an art project than a game really, as your only objective is to walk around various areas and watch what happens, hoping to see something new. There are only a handful of areas in the game, but sometimes they'll render with different textures, or there will be new objects, or some new people/animals/creatures will be roaming around, etc.

You may be wondering what all this stuff has to do with music. Well, this game is weird. Weird as shit. With a game like this, you need a soundtrack that's weird as shit too. I wasn't able to find what I would actually call a soundtrack of music from the game, but there IS a soundtrack of remixed tracks from the game called Lucy in the Sky with Dynamites. You can find the songs on Youtube, but I highly suggest you download the album if you want to give it a listen, as it's one of those albums where every song flows with the next one really well so the whole album is more like one really long song. Speaking of which, apparently all of the "songs" from the game aren't really individual songs, but all part of the same musical score, played in different tones.

So anyway, check it out. There's 20 tracks, many of which are really short, but there are a few 3-4 minute songs in there, and a couple that are over 7 minutes. Here's a download link.


As strange as the music (and the game for that matter) is, I really kinda like it, in a weird way. The game itself is really hard to find too, but you can find ISOs of it pretty easily to run on a PS1 emulator. Of course, as a wise man once said, "This is illegal you know."

Rotovox
































Hey guys, it's KEWB again. I figured as long as I'm writing on a blog about obscure music, I'd help support some of my areas local talent. So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Rotovox.

Rotovox isn't quite as weird and trippy as most of the stuff that's been posted on this blog so far; rather you're going to find a great radio-worthy hard rock group.


They aren't that obscure where I'm from, but they're far from mainstream and certainly deserve more recognition than they have right now. I actually know the band's frontman personally. Cool guy.

Seith

I wasn't planning on making another post today, and in fact there's other stuff I planned on posting before this, but I just found out about this sort of progressive melodic death metal band from Finland called Seith and really dig what I've heard so far, so I figured I'd share with you guys.

They aren't the most technical band out there. Really simple playing mostly, but great song composition. They have sort of an ambient sound that reminds me a little bit of Opeth (sans the clean vocals; none of that to be found here, though that's really not a bad thing in this case as I really don't think they would fit this band's sound). They also have some sweet clean guitar mixed in with the heaviness, and I'm not just talking about straight up going from a clean intro to heavily distorted main riffs to clean interlude type stuff, though there is plenty of that type of thing, but I mean they actually take some heavily distorted rhythm guitar and play some great clean lead lines over it, and frankly, they pull it off really fucking well.

I actually found out about these guys searching Youtube to see if I could find any Bird From the Abyss videos (ironic, I know, because these guys sound absolutely NOTHING like them). I ended up finding the video below, which is a compilation of 20 brief clips of songs from various obscure bands (BFTA included, at the very end, along with Seith, which has the 4th clip in the video).


I'm sorry to say that I actually haven't even watched the video past the Seith clip, as it was enough for me to leave the video to look for a video of the full song. I found it. :D


Did some more searching around and found the following two songs.



If you dig them as much as I do, check out their myspace at http://www.myspace.com/seithofficial for more of their tunes, as well as free downloads for their first two albums. Don't you just love discovering new music?

I've got at least 2 new posts planned for tomorrow. Til then, later.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Swans - Beautiful Child



Enjoy your beautiful nightmares.

Bird From The Abyss - II




This is Bird From The Abyss' second release (entitled, what else? II) and his only full length album. To me, this one has a bit of a, lets say, fuller sound than III. Instead of feeling like you're walking through a forest, II makes you feel like you're in a desert. Very cool sounds.

The package itself comes in an envelope with a poster, a booklet and a gold CD. Nice stuff.

Go buy this one here or listen to it there

Sweet Billy Pilgrim. Also Hi Guys.

Since this is my first post on the blog, I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm KEWB. Pretty much everybody who is a part of writing this blog knows me, but in case anyone actually follows this blog, I figured I should tell you a little about myself. I love music of just about all types, though mostly metal. I played trombone in my school's band through grades 6-11 and Graduated from high school in 2008. I also started playing electric guitar a couple years ago (I think it was the summer of 08, yeah, that sounds right so that's what I'm saying ok). I really never had any interest in playing guitar though until I started playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which I'm still addicted to (well, still addicted to Rock Band anyway). Horribly. I'm currently sucking at college and looking for full-time work while working a shitty job at Burger King in the meantime.

Now that introductions are over, time to get to the myoozaks. Remember how I said I was addicted to Rock Band? Well it was announced today that a song by Sweet Billy Pilgrim is going to be coming to Rock Band as DLC next Tuesday (along with a 5-pack of songs by The Vines, whose song Get Free will be on RB3).

If you're like me, the first thing you thought when you saw the title of this post was "Who the fuck is Sweet Billy Pilgrim?" But I kinda liked the Crown of Thorns track that was released on RB a few weeks ago, along with many of the songs by the countless no-name bands in the RBN, so Harmonix is no stranger to introducing me to cool new music by bands I've never heard of. So I hit Youtube to give the announced song a listen, and I found this video.


Kinda neat, no? I don't know if I'm gonna get it, as it doesn't sound like something that would be very fun to play on RB. Kinda baffled as to why this song was released before RB3 since they could have licensed it for RB3 features since it's kinda keyboard heavy (for those of you out of the whole Rock Band news loop, RB3 is going to have keyboard, along with vocal harmonies and "pro mode", which is essentially playing real instruments), but whatever. Still a good example of Harmonix introducing me to some new music. Maybe one day when I'm bored and just want something new to play I'll pick it up. There are definitely worse songs in the RB library.

That's all for now. Later cockbiscuits.

Mail...

Post in a while


Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt






This band is incredible. I defy you to listen to this and not enjoy yourself. TPDR is a collective of sorts who make very happy music about love, life, loss, and snowdays. Their debut album, entitled I Love You. I Love You. I Love You And I'm In Love With You. Have An Awesome Day! Have The Greatest Day Of Your Life! (the first two pics up above) came out this year, and their EP, We're Humans: Be Awesome! came out in 2008 or something. The EP has three songs on it, Fast Forward Regrets, Snowday, and In Your Face Suckiness, which are all on the debut. But, look at that EP: It's got a see-through disc with a dinosaur on it. Why WOULDN'T you want it?

As for the debut, it's definitely one of the best releases of the year. It takes the main idea of the EP's songs (happiness and fun and stuff) and expands on it to make some of the catchiest tunes out there. Plus, the lyrics are surprisingly great - even beautiful at times. (YOU MAKE MY HEART EXPLODE! WE'RE ALIVE, WE'RE IN LOVE, WE'VE GOT HOPE JUST BECAUSE!) Unfortunately there aren't many songs of theirs on YouTube, aside from live stuff (their live shows are apparently like one giant dance party. I seriously need to get to one), but look around to find samples and stuff. Or, y'know, buy the album itself. Trust me, you won't regret it

Math the Band - What the hell is this music video?

I recently came across a band that I have no understanding of at all: Math the Band. Math the Band, from what I can tell, is a duo that plays bizarre nonsensical electronic music. When I first found them the first song I listened to was "Why Didn't You Get A Haircut?".



... I just want to know what the hell was going on in that music video.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Sunlight Ascending - New song released!

Pretty much the most promising young post-rock band out there right now, Sunlight Ascending, have released a new song from their upcoming EP. Unfortunately they ran into problems in the studio, so this is a rough mix, and the new album cover will come soon.

The song they posted is really good, you should check it out!

You can listen to it here.

Give them your respect, and if you like it, be sure to pre-order the EP when it comes out! It will be out on vinyl and in digipack form.

Maps and Atlases - Perch Patchwork




This is the debut album by Maps and Atlases, a cool band from Chicago, who makes very cool music. They're kinda math rock, but their math is at an Algebra 1 level, meaning they have some technical guitars and drums and such, but nothing that will leave the listener confused and/or bewildered. This is nice, easily digestible indie pop/rock. Of course, easily digestible doesn't make it simple. There are some really awesome melodies and licks in here, as well as some awesome segues and such. Definitely one of the best of 2010 so far.


Key Tracks: Pigeon, The Charm

Bird From The Abyss - III






Bird From The Abyss is a music project from a guy from Finland. He's released 2 EP's and 1 album (entitled I, II, III of course). This EP is his most recent. The music is kinda like droney folkey ambeintey stuff, with the main instrument being an acoustic guitar. It almost makes you feel like you're walking through a forest or something. It's pretty darn cool.

Here is his website. You can get almost all of his music for free, and stream the stuff you can't get for free otherwise. This EP is only like $7 or $8, so buy it if you like his tunes.



Suddenly more people

Alright folks, we've got two more posters on board.

Greg (joysubtraction) and Joe (Noctus) will be contributing their own findings of their side of the music spectrum, which will often overlap with others.

-Fritz

Post Number 1

Hullo everyone

This is a blog of sorts dealing in music of all sorts, obscure or otherwise (hence the title). Whenever I get a new CD or record, or if I find some cool album/song/band/whatever, I'll post it here.

Enjoy,

-Fritz