MP3: Faunts - “Feel.Love.Thinking.Of”

Write what you know. It is the most common advice offered to young songwriters, and it’s probably the best. But in the case of Faunts’ approach to songwriting, such advice would be misguided and reductive at best. This is a group of musicians who write what they can imagine. At once symphonic and sprawling; ambient, yet driving, Faunts’ latest articulation, the full-length Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. (out February 17th, 2009 on Friendly Fire Recordings) is the culmination of a year of touring, recording, and meticulous exploration of this transcendent imagination. With its effervescent guitars, mathematic loops and synthesizers, surging drums, and seemingly nomadic bass lines, Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. is a fluid expression of Faunts’ painstaking attention to instrumentation and arrangement which allows the buoyantly defiant mood of the record to transverse any one song in particular. This is a band of perfectionists - every movement agonized over, every melody deconstructed and explored - whose labors have resulted in an expansive, layered, textured, and sublime collaboration. Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. perfectly encompasses the band’s ambitious, imaginative devotion to sculpting not only a musical moment, but an entire atmosphere which accompanies that moment.

Born out of the dark autumn months that settled over Edmonton, Alberta (in western Canada, six hours north of Montana) in late 2000, Faunts’ original lineup consisted of brothers Tim and Steven Batke and Paul Arnusch. After turning an old office space into a studio, the three spent a full year creating their magically haunting debut album, High Expectations/Low Results, which immediately established the band as an up-and-coming presence in the Canadian music scene.

Following the success of Results, Faunts evolved into a five-piece ensemble with the addition of Joel Hitchcock, and turned their attention to their second release, M4. Composed of scores initially created to accompany three independent short films, M4 (which also had its title track featured-to critical acclaim-in Bioware’s multimillion-selling Xbox 360 video game, Mass Effect) is a quintessential demonstration of Faunts’ ongoing love affair with complexly layered melodies and soaring refrains. It also yielded the extraordinary animated video for the song “M4 (Part II)”, which appeared multiple times on MTV2’s “Subterranean” and brought the band a slew of new fans from the animation and gaming communities.

Fall of 2008 saw the release of Faunts Remixed, which built on the success of Faunts’ first two efforts. The album features reworked tracks from both Results and M4 with contributions from artists working at the forefront of the North American electronic music scene: Cadence Weapon, Mark Templeton, Brightest Feathers (aka Saxon Shore), San Serac, and the Paronomasiac (aka Nik Kozub from Shout Out Out Out Out).

Now with the addition of Scott Gallant a third Batke brother, Rob, Faunts have given us Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., an album that is both more ambitious and sprawling in its conception and tighter and more focused in its execution than anything the band has done before. A more vocal, song-oriented album than its predecessors, Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. contains some truly sublime moments: the electronic pulse of the eponymous title track, the bending synths on “It Hurts Me all the Time” that almost evoke the singing saw, the krautrock-y slow burn of “Alarmed/Lights”, the emotive refrain of album closer “Explain”. With Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., Faunts have outgrown any old comparisons and developed into their own entity, and the results couldn’t be better.

Faunts
Feel.Love.Thinking.Of.
(Friendly Fire)
Street date: Feb. 17, 2009

1. Feel.Love.Thinking.Of.
2. Input
3. It Hurts Me all the Time
4. Out on a Limb
5. Lights are Always On
6. Das Malefitz
7. I Think I’ll Start a Fire
8. Alarmed/Lights
9. So Far Away
10. Explain

FAUNTS LINKS:
MySpace - www.myspace.com/faunts

Band Page - www.faunts.com

Label Page - friendlyfirerecordings.com

MP3:Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele - “Meet Me In The Garden”

Jackson, Mississippi native Dent May grew up singing in local church groups, acting in school plays, and performing at nursing home gigs with a recorder choir. In high school, he wrote synthy power-pop with his band The Rockwells while recording erotically charged novelty tracks with friends on the side. After three unsuccessful semesters at NYU’s film school, May moved to North Mississippi where he helped found the Cats Purring arts collective and formed a country-rock band called Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City. In late 2007, inspired by Serge Gainsbourg and Lee Hazlewood, he began performing as Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele and released a digital EP of cheeky lo-fi tunes, A Brush With Velvet. The title is a reference to The Partridge Family, episodes of which May obsessively collected and organized on VHS tapes as a teen. His debut album, The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, was recorded with Rusty Santos in May’s home, a double-wide trailer in Taylor, Mississippi (population: 300). He continues to perform with Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, and recently began recording dance music under the moniker Dent Sweat.

DENT MAY & HIS MAGNIFICENT UKULELE

2/20 Vancouver, BC The Biltmore Cabaret *
2/21 Seattle, WA Neumos *
2/22 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge *
2/24 Sacramento, CA Harlow’s *
2/25 San Diego, CA Casbah *
2/26 Los Angeles, CA Troubadour *
2/27 Santa Barbara, CA SOho Restaurant and Music Club *
2/28 San Francisco, CA The Independent *
3/01 Eugene, OR John Henry’s *
3/02 Boise, ID Neurolux
3/05 Minneapolis, MN 400 Bar
3/06 Chicago, IL Schubas
3/07 Pontiac, MI The Pike Room at The Crofoot
3/08 Cleveland, OH Beachland Ballroom
3/10 Ithaca, NY Castaways *
3/11 Toronto, ONT Lee’s Palace *
3/12 Montreal, QC Il Motore *
3/13 Providence, RI Club Hell *
3/14 Boston, MA Paradise *
3/15 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom *

* = w/ A.C. Newman

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
(Paw Tracks)
Street date: Feb. 03, 2009

1. Welcome
2. Meet Me In The Garden
3. College Town Boy
4. Oh, Paris!
5. Howard
6. Girls On The Square
7. You Can’t Force a Dance Party
8. God Loves You, Michael Chang
9. At The Academic Conference
10. 26 Miles
11. I’m an Alcoholic
12. Love Song 2009

DENT MAY LINKS:

MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/dentmay

Press Materials - http://www.paw-tracks.com/dentmaypresspage.html

MP3: WAVVES - “So Bored”

To avoid any potential confusion (and there is a lot of potential for confusion here) we’ll break this down for you nice and slow:

* WAVVES has a self-titled debut album out now on the Woodsit label
* WAVVES’ second album is called WAVVVES (notice the extra “V”)
* Both albums have very very similar covers
* WAVVVES by WAVVES is on the De Stijl label and is out on Feb. 03, 2009

Bio:

When not watching Cops or drinking 40s in the park, Nathan Daniel William blogs on classic rap and records waves and waves of effortlessly great slack / crust / beach / punk compressed onto 4 track cassette in his San Diego bedroom. It’s a room that most of us will only imagine. Thanks to the eager bloggers, you may have already heard WAVVES. if you have not, we can say that few things are more annoying than reading a string of sound references. So how ’bout this : WAVVES are exemplifying every pastiche of what anyone in their mid 20’s has been through musically and somehow, some that they have not. How a tune written by a 22 yr old can evoke this boyish reverie and reverence of thoughtful nostalgia is beyond me, but listen between the grooves and yr gonna hear it too. WAVVES is the sound of today’s american youth! It’s a new day rising and as the wavves get higher, they gotta converge. You can choose to stay down in the curl, but if you follow the winner, we can meet up on the crest..

WAVVES
WAVVVES
(De Stijl)
Street date: Feb. 03, 2009

1. rainbow everywhere
2. sun opens my eyes
3. get in the sun
4. jetplane (staying on a )
5. no hope kids
6. more fur
7. so bored
8. summer goth
9. surf goth
10. goth girls
11. ghost ramp
12. killr punx
13. scary demons

WAVVES LINKS:

MySpace - www.myspace.com/wavves

Band Page - ghostramp.blogspot.com

Press Materials - destijlrecs.com/WAVVESpress.html

Kiss/Kick is the latest album from Broken Spindles, and the second release from The Faint’s blank.wav record label. Although Broken Spindles’ sole member Joel Petersen has done remixes for Of Montreal and AFI and is also a member of The Faint, Kiss/Kick is a strictly “No Eyeliner” record. It is more No Wave than New Wave.

The new album was made in Omaha’s Enamel, the studio owned by The Faint. With the entire studio at his disposal, Petersen used a live drummer more than on his previous Spindles records. Petersen says, “I knew that finding the balance of opposites was key to making sense of it all, to get the right mix of human and machine, acoustic and electronic, analog and digital, spontaneous and premeditated.” This combination is heard clearly on the song “Introvert” which features programmed live drums, keyboards that hold down the rhythmic center and a guitar sound that careens out of control.

Lyrically, the album explores human fragility, both in body and mind. Songs like “I’ve Never Been This Afraid” and “We All Want to Fit in” show Petersen observing others and himself — a constant theme in all of the Spindles records. Kiss/Kick is a record that takes the place of that late night journal writing session where the writer reveals more than what he knew was inside. As Petersen says, “For me, there has always been truth somewhere in the midst of extremes, and lyrically, this is where I wanted to be — open, honest, and truthful. ”

Kiss/Kick is Petersen’s strongest work to date. With four Broken Spindles albums and five Faint albums under his belt, he has found his voice, as well as comfort in being the observer of our inherent discomfort with ourselves and our relationships. He has learned how to reduce songs to their basic parts without losing the power and excitement of great production.

Broken Spindles
Kiss/Kick
(blank.wav)
Street date: Feb. 17, 2009

1. I’ve Never Been This Afraid
2. Introvert
3. No Mind Knows Mine
4. The Moist Red Mess
5. Beat Down Break Up
6. We All Want To Fit In
7. In The Dark
8. Figure Face Pretty Boy
9. You’re Happy But Not For Long
10. The Talk

BROKEN SPINDLES LINKS:

MySpace - www.myspace.com/brokenspindles

Band Page - www.brokenspindles.com

Label Page - www.blankwav.com