Watch I Used to be a Sparrow, the duo of Dick Pettersson (In These Woods) and Italian expat Andrea Caccese (Songs For The Sleepwalkers), cover an old tune by Appleseed Cast. Look for the band's debut album "Luke" to be released in April via .
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Sonic Router is streaming the new album "paper boat" from Swedish skweee duo Markis Sage, aka Rigas den Andre + Mesak: http://www.sonicrouter.com/2012/01/first-listen-markis-sage-paper-boat-losonofono/
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Jenny Hval - Viscera The poststructural feminists are going to have field day with this one. There's already been so much said on Jenny Hval, former alias Rockettothesky, that it requires some self-reflection of adding more unnecessary internet debris. I'll try to make this short and sweet. First off, "Viscera" -- the first effort released under her own name -- scares the shit outta me. Kicking off with a quirky avant-garde-like recitation, it dropkicks you like a welterweight champion of morbid genius. Heavyweights I'm referring to of course of dark siren goddesses and radical poets: Kate Bush, Siouxsie Sioux, Elisabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Patti Smith, Laura Nyro, etc. It's no wonder Ms. Hval wrote a Masters' thesis on Kate Bush, probably something as bad-ass as Lacanian readings on voice (think: Mladan Dolar's, "A Voice and Nothing More", MIT Press) or phonocentrism. Just as Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" was inspired by an Emily Brontë novel, Jenny Hval draws on strong literary influences. It takes special brains to not only extrapolate necessary understanding of one's music on paper, but be a decisive act/performance as well. And she certainly is.
An old music critic once told me you can tell everything about a band by reading their lyrics. Most of the time you do it reluctantly, with one-eye squeezed shut -- especially bands where English isn't their first language. It's painful to ingest the gaping vulnerability of text, so it's often treated it as a discardable or excess entity, sidelined by the "real" stuff. But here the music follows the imagery of the words, pieced together like limbs conjoined and changing; developing within itself, evolving, caving in, and even exploding ("Portrait of the young girl as an artist"). Jenny Hval exhibits beautiful harmonic development ("How gentle") but her songs never get so lost to return to a theme ("Blood flight"). It never so alienates it's listener should you understand it, and patience is rewarded abundantly.
- Ann Sung-an Lee
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has posted a great new track from Finnish noisepoppers Black Twig for preview on SoundCloud. Look for their debut album "paper trees" to be released on January 11.
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Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet polled 100 musicians for their favorite Norwegian albums of all time and has compiled the results into a list 100 long and here's the top 10:
10. De Press - Block to block
09. Röyksopp - Melody AM
08. Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett, Palle Danielsson, Jon Christensen - Belonging
07. deLillos - Suser avgårde
06. The Aller Værste - Materialtretthet
05. Knutsen & Ludvigsen - Juba Juba
04. Kjøtt - 12"
03. A-ha - Hunting high and low
02. A-ha - Scoundrel days
01. Radka Toneff/Steve Dobrogosz - Fairytales
For the full list, including various individual contributors' selections, go here: http://mbtopp100.no/category/listen/
If you have Spotify, listen to album #1 right here.
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A preview of that upcoming Markis Sage album "paper boat" that I told you about yesterday.
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Markis Sage, aka the skweee duo of Rigas/Henrik von Euler and Mesak, are working on a new album to be called "paper boat" which will be released later this fall via on both cassette and vinyl. More details to come?
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harold | Mon, Feb 6th, 2012 22:42:51