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Featured Artist: NRBQ

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

371284 722 Featured Artist: NRBQArtist: NRBQ
Title: Keep This Love Goin’
Label: Clang! Records
Genre: Rock : Alternative
UPC: 614511778428
Territory: World ex- JP, KZ
Release Date: 5.17.11

While bands like Sonic Youth are just reaching their 25th year, NRBQ is getting close to its 45th. After plenty of lineup changes, Terry Adams is the only original member remaining. But since forming a new band in 2007, originally known as The Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet, the group has produced an album that’s worthy of the legendary NRBQ name.

Adams explained his decision to release the album under NRBQ’s name in an open letter to his fans, stating that he never personally left the band, and was determined to keep the spirit of the band alive. After being diagnosed with a serious case of throat cancer in 2004, he attributes much of his recovery to the music and the fans that supported them.

With Adams, and Scott Ligon on guitar & vocals, Pete Donnelly on bass & vocals, and Conrad Choucroun on drums, Keep This Love Goin’ offers twelve unforgettable and unmistakably-NRBQ tunes. The band explores sounds in pop, rock, jazz, swing, and more, and continues to demonstrate the great musicianship, emotion, fearlessness and fun they’ve been known for throughout their career.

Featured Artist: Spindrift

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

370075 72 Featured Artist: SpindriftArtist: Spindrift
Title: Classic Soundtracks, Vol. 1
Label: Xemu Records
Genre: Alternative Rock : Psychedelic Rock
UPC: 782861102023
Territory: World
Release Date: 5.10.11

Mixing the dusty, cinematic soundscapes of old spaghetti-western film with mind-expanding Psych Rock, L.A.’s Spindrift makes music that sounds like what one would hear while tripping in the desert on a vision quest.

Front-man Kirpatrick Thomas self-released several psyche albums before joining the Brian Jonestown Massacre to play guitar and relocating to Los Angeles, where the seeds were sewn for a new West Coast version of his vision. Thomas’s lifelong fascination with the “west” and western films were the inspiration for his psyche-west music style, redefining a new direction in indie music that imitators are still trying to fully understand.

Spindrift’s new full-length, Classic Soundtracks, Vol 1, is a soon-to-be classic concept album, capturing what the band has always done best in rich, vibrant recording sonics. Produced by Ethan Allen (Better Than Ezra, Throwing Muses) and mastered by the legendary Howie Weinberg (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins), each track is uniquely accompanied by a music video or vignette that bring back the lights and magic of a Hollywood once thought to be forgotten, and pushes further the band’s visual experimentation that began with the release of their 2005 feature full-length film, “The Legend of God’s Gun.” Each of those films will be featured on ifc.com, so be sure to check them out!

,368915 72 Featured Artist: SpindriftArtist: Colt Ford
Title: Every Chance I Get
Label: Average Joes Entertainment Group, Inc.
Genre: Country : Country
UPC: 661869002262
Territory: World
Release Date: 5.03.11

Featured Artist: In Flagranti

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

358731 72 Featured Artist: In FlagrantiIn Flagranti
download icon Featured Artist: In Flagranti “Worse For Wear” (mp3)
from “Worse For Wear”
(Codek Records)

icon landing page Featured Artist: In Flagranti More On This Album

Predictably jacked to the brim with their signature no-gristle, no-glory aesthetic, In Flagranti introduces their new album, Worse for Wear. Succeeding 2006’s Wronger Than Anyone Else and 2009’s Brash & Vulgar, In Flagranti’s Sasa Crnobrnja and Alex Gloor have left behind their vintage porn-chic sensibilities and instead turn to yesterday’s trashed goods for inspiration. “Flea markets and recycling parts of our production are really at the center of this album,” said the now London-based Crnobrnja. “I like things to be old and run-down,” added Alex Gloor, who still resides in Basel. “So I let myself be inspired by one of my favorite places to spend time: 1970s-80s New York City.”

Using experiences from Gloor’s past trips to the Forty Deuce, Worse For Wear conjures up ghosts from the finest of adult playgrounds past. “Hollow Discourses” swaggers in on a gritty bass line, revealing excess in its degenerative electro finest, and “Prelude to Chaos” reminisces the days where the finest of 69-cent wines glistened in the gutters outside the arcade. But standing at a right angle from In Flagranti’s better-known, dirty disco sound are tracks with a peculiar sense of calm. Tracks like “The End of the Road” and “On the Fringe” leave a bit of the sleaze at the massage parlor door, opening up a new chapter of sound for the band. More outer space dump diving than straight-up vulgar, Crnobrnja also added that the album “Works with old recordings that we have not used yet, such as vocals recorded years ago that I didn’t like at the time.” Bringing back the past has meant a softer edge for the duo, who still work from different countries. The only time they come together is for music.

Hit the jump to watch a video teaser of the album.

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Featured Artist: Son Lux

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

367163 72 Featured Artist: Son LuxSon Lux
download icon Featured Artist: Son Lux “Rising” (mp3)
from “We Are Rising”
(anticon)

icon landing page Featured Artist: Son LuxMore On This Album

Featured Artist: Son LuxMeet a man driven wildly by music.  A man classically trained, but rewired with his own two hands. A frequent collaborator, occasional curator and consummate “man behind the curtain” now emerging at the front of something yet unnamed.  Somewhere between the concert hall and the club you’ll find his haunting liquid soundscapes, born of hip-hop composition, o’er-strung with chant, hinting at some divine unreachable.  Meet Son Lux.

For his first album Son Lux spent three years compulsively collecting sounds—thousands of them—one and two-note fragments sampled from his personal collection and the local library’s. He turned his trained ear to recognizing consistent aural hues, built a palette, then began arranging not by melody—as a composer would—but by rhythm, as a beatmaker.  For the first time, Ryan Lott (Son Lux) set out to make the music inside of him. It’d be a sort of pop, but divorced from verse-chorus form—memorable music without a hook. And he’d sing (also a first), but not traditional lyrics. His words would be small snippets—things read or overheard—open-ended and repeated like chants. Single notes became pulsing electronic orchestras; simple words became transcendent, and his first album, At War With Walls And Mazes was born.  Read on to find out more about Son Lux’s latest release and watch the video about the creation of the cover art, fascinating!

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Featured Artist: The Heavenly States – “Oui Camera Oui”

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

360606 72 Featured Artist: The Heavenly States Oui Camera OuiThe Heavenly States
download icon Featured Artist: The Heavenly States Oui Camera Oui “Model Son” (mp3)
from “Oui Camera Oui”
(Hippies Are Dead Records)

icon landing page Featured Artist: The Heavenly States Oui Camera Oui More On This Album

The Heavenly States’ new album, entitled Oui Camera Oui, is a 7-track album presenting photographs from a PTSD decade. A collection of intense fragments of experience from a dystopian America, Oui Camera Oui offers images culled from American trauma, overheard business disputes, misremembered events, moments captured in medias res, and an overarching moral ambiguity. There is a sense of displacement and unattainable homecoming, yet without a hint of sentimentality. Together, the songs see now what will have happened two futures from now.

With a sound, attitude, and point of view previously likened by reviewers and critics to Dinosaur, Jr., Pavement, The Clash, Talking Heads and The Replacements, Oui features all of the States’ musical traits: hooks, sing-a-longs, the lush string and keyboard arrangements of Genevieve Gagon, ample melodies, the huge drumming of Jeremy Gagon, and the raucous guitar playing of lead singer Ted Nesseth. Guests on the album include Britt Daniel of Spoon and special guest Eugene Mirman (Flight of the Conchords).

True to its punk nature, the band continues to ingeniously use a simple everyday vocabulary to paint complex sonic and conceptual landscapes. Telescoped into an EP, these qualities have an amped intensity.  True to form, the arrangements are tremendous, the melodies are killer, and the rock and roll is solidly intact.  It is an album that you play once, then twice, then a hundred more times.  And then you play it again.

Featured Artist: The Heavenly States Oui Camera Oui

Featured Artist: The Bell

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

360118 721 Featured Artist: The BellArtist: The Bell
Title: Great Heat
Label: Badman Recording Co
Genre: Indie : Alternative
UPC: 655037092629
Territory: World
Release Date: 4.12.11

Hailing from Malmo and Stockholm Sweden, The Bell are a three
piece with a penchant for memorable melodies and drum machine
driven, classic, alternative songs. Vocals and instruments are
shared by the trio of Nicklas Nilsson, Mathias Stromberg and Jan Petterson. Though they live many miles apart, they co-wrote and recorded Great Heat together through e-mail, electronic file exchanges and Skype. Great Heat is the follow-up to their strikingly good 2007 release Make Some Quiet.

Recording an album is a challenging process in itself, but recording Great Heat from multiple locations got downright ugly at some points. According to the band, the conflicts really started when it came time to sequence the album. There were threats from each of the members to quit the band and quotes flying around like “You can redo the vocals yourselves. I am not going to give in to just anything. Fuck this! It’s really not worth it.” But now that all has been said and done, the band looks back on those days and laughs. It’s hard to stay mad when a killer, 80s post-punk daydream of an album emerges from all the violence.

Great Heat delivers an immediate impact of songs that stick in your head after just one listen. Stromberg’s has been compared to Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, and Nilsson and Petterson do a great job of supporting the vocals with tense and propulsive synths, drums and strings. The sound is a bit more developed than their previous efforts, and leads like a trip through computerized sounds and a balanced choir of voices to support the nostalgic glam-rock style.

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