someone's killing celebrities, i thought you should know

gotta do my shoutouts now.
peace to:

david carradine

farrah fawcett

michael jackson

billy mays

my name is mister cappy-tan
this is the producer, sparky

GOODNIGHT SWEET PRINCE

I WILL FONDLY MISS YOU, OH KING OF POP!

IWRESTLEDABEARONCE - It's All Happening

My current candidate for album art of the year:


I don't think I could think of a more appropriate name for this release. Genre-hopping, Ritalin-addicted heavy fucking metal that sounds alternately like a less serious Between the Buried and Me and a far more clever Between the Buried and Me. The songs are short, brutal, and unique. Shades of HORSE the Band and Meshuggah... but also pop-song interludes, bluegrass breakdowns, and animal sounds mixed in for god knows what reason: let me warn you, if this sort of irony pisses you off, then this album will piss you off more than anything else. But if you can appreciate the band's sense of humor alongside their seriously heavy "chuggachuggachuggachugga RAAAAWRRRRRRRRRRRR hnggggggggggg-----untz untz untz untz untz untz untz ::::: bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzst" type stuff, then you might just come away from this album with a whole new point of view. And, to boot, it's just great for throwing on at full volume and getting all your frustrations out with. Highly recommended.

Try it here.

So Many Dymanos - The Loud Wars

So like a million bajillion years ago the song "Heat/Humidity" by these guys snuck onto my iPod somehow. Keep in mind, a million bajillion years ago, there was a lot less music piracy, and I was unfamiliar with torrenting and blogsearch.google.com, so the most likely way this thing crept into my collection was via download from their MySpace page. Remember those days? Me too. I was getting really into the Blood Brothers and Cursive and generally was on the prowl for crazy-sounding emo. So Many Dynamos filled that gap pretty well, at least as far as that one song went, and they won some bonus points having a palindrome for a name. I specifically remember listening to "Heat/Humidity" about a dozen times on one skiing trip. FAST FORWARD TO LAST NIGHT:So a few nights before last, a friend of mine invited me to go see Maps & Atlases. I was like "Whatever, no one good plays around here, but they sound pretty bad ass." Therefore, as per my new can-do attitude, I agreed to go simply based on nothing. Me and a few friends met up at my other friend's apartment before the show. The friend who invited me proceeded to show me a video of Maps & Atlases' "Everyplace Is A House" being played behind footage of Beeker from the Muppets freaking out (you know, the one where he's got steam coming out of his ears and shit?). Well that video pretty much summed up my evening. We did some stuff and then walked back to the venue through the rain. We got there, I had to pay for my friend, and there was no re-entry. Welcome to my hometown. Anyway we got there as this band called Fang Island were playing - and let me say something about them: they are loud as FUCK. After they were done rocking the fuck out, I was all like "Hey, who's gonna play next?" and my friend goes, "I dunno, some band called 'So Many Dynamos.'" And that's when shit got real. I was all jumping up and down and freaking out: "Oh man! They're fucking awesome!" and started getting generally amped. And then they played. And then Maps & Atlases played. And it was good.

But this post isn't about some dumb show I went to (probably the last dumb show I'll be to all summer). It's about So Many Dynamo's new album, "The Loud Wars." I bought a copy at the show because I was totally hood rich and messed up, and thank God I bought this particular CD because I had already torrented their previous two albums (a fact that I had forgotten in between some royal ass-pains involving getting my laptop fixed). So I ripped it into my computer and left it there and tried to listen to some other stuff, namely the most recent Maps & Atlases EP that I also purchased at the show. But I started leafing through the booklet for "The Loud Wars," and these dudes have footnotes to their lyrics. FUCKING FOOTNOTES*. As if they couldn't hammer the nerd thing home any harder - but it's whatever because they're so cute. Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that this record is hard NOT to listen to once you have it. From the first off-kilter bars of "Artifacts of Sound" through the dance party riffage of "Oh, the Devastation!" and on into the end of "The Formula," the thing sounds like if armies enjoyed drinking PBR and dancing to math rock rather than killing each other. Like, if there was an army of people wearing glasses and plaid button-up shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and then that army met up with a bunch of stoned Yale students; like, if we were at Bonaroo right now instead of wherever we are. ("We don't make friends/we build armies").

Part of the reason this album sounds so freakin good is definitely due to the production work of the one and only Chris Walla, guitarist with Death Cab 4 Cutie and indie-uber-producer, whose previous work with the Thermals (specifically on "Fuckin A," the best album ever [sometimes] and official home of my theme song, "How We Know") I admired very much. Walla applies his patented "taking a weird scrappy band and turning them into U2" formula to the Dynamos' sound without losing that sense that they could play your basement party tomorrow. There's also a few bells and noises that I assume he had something to do with (there's a footnote about it but I'm too lazy to look it up - I guess this proves once and for all who's nerdier: SMD). Overall, the "huge but intimate" sound is really what makes the record: there's not too much reverb, but when it's there it creates a warming blanket; there's not too much bass keyboard, but when it's there it's doin' work; there's not too much distortion on the snare, but God that little bit makes such a difference. You see what I mean? Walla took these weirdos, who were guilty on all counts of no-bass-player in the first degree and tinny sounding angular guitars and turned them into a big warming sun on sound - albeit a slightly drunk, too-skinny sun with hair in his face who listens to Nintendocore but doesn't tell anybody. This is a very fun album too, and that's its biggest strength: "seriousing up" the Dynamos didn't destroy their sense of scrappy danceability, and the band was able to retain its "not nerdy, just interesting" vibe. Making them biggest was a good move, Walla. Enjoy your footnote.


*try it. (rapidshare - password: www.mp3tera.org)

Julianna Barwick - Florine

This album contains some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard. Not much needs to be said beyond that, but I'll wax poetic anyway. If you want to skip over the boring part, just get the album, lay down somewhere in the middle of a field in the sun, and let it take you on a trip.

Julianna Barwick is a leading example of what I consider to be the New Wave of Young American Composers: independent, inspired, and unique voices from various cities in the U.S. who write gorgeous music under the guise of pop or rock. Barwick's music would not only have been considered avant-guarde 40 years ago, but it also would have been incredibly hard to produce. Barwick's compositions and performances are based on layers and layers of her own voice, looped and manipulated with the help of live electronics, spliced and edited over each other to create an intricate tapestry of sound. Barwick claims to take inspiration from the congregation at her childhood church, which did not have any isntruments, who created an ethereal environment of a capella voices. Barwick aims for and often approaches the same kind of transcendence that church composers - from Tallis to Bach to Part - have always grasped at. Her voice warbles, strides, spreads like light through stained glass, blanketing the listener in what is more of an epiphany than a piece of music. Through electronic manipulation, Barwick not only creates a whole choir of airy sopranos but is able to create an entire four-part choir by pitch-shifting her voice lower or higher. However, the truest beauty to be found in a Barwick piece is from listening to non-album cuts, preferably live versions. Here, we can see the piece unfold from a single, swaying vocal line into a fully-fleshed force of nature, building to crescendo, reaching apex, and then dying away into beatitude.

Try it here. Just fucking do it.

Colin Munroe - Is the Unsung Hero

In keeping with my promise to start reviewing records, I'll start with this little gem of a mixtape from a fellow named Colin Munroe.

I've been partying pretty hard lately, mainly crashing at my friend's apartment and staring at the ceiling while my friends play beer pong for hours on end. Over the past few weeks, there have been few jams coming out of the stereo system that I didn't recognize: songs like Fabolous' "Throw it in the Bag (ft. The-Dream)," Swizz Beat's "When I Step In the Club," MSTRKRFT's "Bounce (ft. N.O.R.E.), Drake's "Still Fly," and especially Sean Kingston's new, indelible pop smash "Replay" have kept me company through many a ceiling-staring session and have helped set the perfect early-summer, haven't-a-care-in-the-world party atmosphere.

But there were a few tracks I didn't recognize: poppier than the electronics-soaked hip-hop around them, with delicacy and intricate arrangements, tight lilting harmonies surrounding the lead vocals - what or who was this? It turned out to be Colin Munroe.
Munroe's music is pretty unique. He creates bouncy, upbeat pop music akin in production sparkle to Maroon 5 or Passion Pit, but his forte is adding in a flavorful twist of hip-hop. His mixtape "Is the Unsung Hero" features spots from some of the best underground rappers of the now, including Mickey Factz, Drake, and Wale. The track that first really got my attention, though, was a re-working (or as Munroe calls it, a REVOX) of Bob Dylan's ballad "Who Killed Davey Moore?" Munroe takes a live version of the track and, as if dusting off an old '78 and transfering it into his computer, makes it shine and sparkle with 21st century intensity. He essentially only adds multiple harmony tracks to the chorus ("Who killed Davey Moore?/Why and what's the reason for?), allowing Dylan's storytelling to shine through with its necessary directness and indignation. But the harmonies that Munroe adds are astounding; they surround and compliment Dylan as if they were spotlights shining down on him from above.

The standout single, "Piano Lessons," is just as captivating. The song uses a pop bounce to tell the story, through pitch-shifted vocals, of a young man forced to take piano lessons against his will. The lessons, though a bore and a task, do of course contribute to the boy's later blossoming interest in music; and we can safely assume that the boy in question is Munroe himself. But the music he makes here would not have come about through any conventional career in classical piano. The track features gorgeous pop-bounce production from Black Milk (sounding something like his track "Without U" from his last mix, "Tronic") and a guest rap from Joell Ortiz (because who else could name drop Mozart and Beethoven in the same line?), but the star here is clearly Munroe's voice. He plays two parts: the storyteller, who shares his natural singing voice, and the young man who is the subject of the song, a persona created through some nifty pitch-shifting. The end result is indistinguishable from either hip-hop or conventional pop, but can also sound a hell of a lot better than popular examples from both genres. The music shows what can be done when creative artists meld genres together to create new experiences for the listener, and this mixtape is perfect for any occasion, beit picnics, parties, barbeques, road trips, or whenever you want to take a break from the radio.

Other standouts include "Will I Stay" (the track featuring Wale), "Cannon Ball" (featuring Drake), and "One More Chance" (featuring Mickey Factz). If this guy could get a spot on the charts, I guarentee that the Jonas Brothers would disappear into obscurity. God, please make this the sound of pop in the future.

The mixtape is available on Munroe's MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/colinmunroe