3hive

Fruit Bats are releasing their fifth album, Tripper, on August 2, 2011. The song included below is a great indicator of another solid release. Please enjoy.

Fruit Bats – Tangle and Ray from Tripper (2011)

Shan’s original post from 01.27.2006

I’ve been meaning to post the Fruit Bats for a while now because, well, because they’re as reassuring as a warm cup of tea. The acoustic guitar has a lovely lilt to it. The slight, overdubbed vocals don’t demand attention but get it anyway. And the alternately peppy and melancholy rhythms float on and on and on. All in all, you get the sense that the Fruit Bats respect their mothers, and a little motherly love in our indie pop could do us all some good.

Thurston Moore needs no introduction, being the lead singer for Sonic Youth and releasing solo albums for the past 20+ years. However, in his long musical career, this is the first time that he has collaborated with Beck and the results are quite spectacular. Both songs below (and the entire album) are full of depth, and quite different from his last, more straight-forward indie rock effort. Thanks in part to Beck’s production skills, great use of strings, and of course Thurston’s incredible talent at songwriting and guitar playing. Enjoy.

Thurston Moore – Benediction

Thurston Moore – Circulation

On paper, Socalled’s bio reads like an elaborate art hoax: he’s a producer/ composer/ arranger/ rapper/ singer/ journalist/ photographer/ filmmaker/ magician/ cartoonist/ puppet maker – oh, and Yiddish music enthusiast! – who, for his fourth album, invited 34 collaborators from all ends of the musical spectrum into the studio. As a whole, Sleepover is disjointed – sounding like “Prairie Home Companion” one minute and “106 and Park” the next. There’s a recurring thread of humor and pastiche on many of the tracks, but others stick out as being quite earnest. So it’s difficult to nail a unifying theme. However, taken individually, each song holds its own, and some even stand out. Take these two examples, where the eclectic ingredients come together nicely into a singular concept. The title track is a send-up of ghetto-tech anthems, with none other than Detroit’s own King of Booty, DJ Assault, serving up hypnotic refrains over a frenetic klezmer loop. (The joke wouldn’t be complete without puppets freaking in Socalled’s apartment – so be sure to watch the video.) By contrast, “Work With What You Got” is a positive vibration calypso-hop jam featuring Roxanne Shante and The Mighty Sparrow on vocals that would feel at home on the soundtrack to a feelgood children’s movie.

Socalled || Teaser Sleepover #2 from Dare To Care Records on Vimeo.

Sleepover (featuring DJ Assault) from Sleepover (2011)
Work With What You Got (featuring Roxanne Shante and The Mighty Sparrow) from Sleepover (2011)

The Devil Whale is a great band out of Salt Lake City. The music they play is a blend of 60′s and 70′s era folk, garage, and pop. They self-released their new full length Teeth at the end of May. It’s an excellent album as you can hear from the taste provided below, it has been on constant rotation since I got it. After enjoying the song we have shared, head on over to their bandcamp page and give the entire album a try, you will not be disappointed.

The Devil Whale – Standing Stones

http://www.thedevilwhale.com/

http://thedevilwhale.bandcamp.com/

Spring showed up and left in a matter of a few days. Anyone who lives or has lived in Utah knows that the weather here changes at a moments notice, and as we had a beautiful clear day yesterday, today is gray and wet. This change in the weather will not get me down though, I have found Pearly Gate Music.

The band is Zach Tillman and, according to Barsuk, “he records and usually plays live with a stylistic variety of full-band options”. The folk music he creates is warm and sunny, just like the weather we had in Utah yesterday. The song “Bad Nostalgia” sounds like it could have been recorded at a religious revival. The songs below are perfect for any summer mixtape, but also excellent for the rainy days when there is nothing better to do than lay around the house and listen to music. Enjoy.

Pearly Gate Music – Big Escape

Pearly Gate Music – Bad Nostalgia

The Cave Singers is a three-piece folk band from Seattle, Washington. The band consists of guitarist Derek Fudesco (former Pretty Girls Make Graves bassist), along with drummer Marty Lund (formerly of Cobra High), and vocalist Pete Quirk (formerly of Hint Hint). They formed in 2007 just after the demise of PGMG. They have released three outstanding albums to date. No Witch, their third release and first on Jagjaguwar, is a departure from their two previous releases in that most of the songs are now electric.

The two songs below are a great illustration of the transition they have made from their past acoustic sound to their new electric sound. “Swim Club”, with it’s sweet and warm acoustic roll, conjures the feelings of working out in the yard on a nice summer day while the kids ride their bikes up and down the street. While “Black Leaf” brings the rock, and brings it good. The hand claps, tambourine and chunky guitar really make this song move. These songs are so good, when you have finished listening to them, you will immediately go out and buy this album. It may even become THE soundtrack to your upcoming summer. Enjoy.

The Cave Singers – Swim Club

The Cave Singers – Black Leaf

Two days ago I had no knowledge of Tune-Yards. I stumbled upon them while searching through the webs looking for something new. I came across a description on Pitchfork.com of their music, calling it a mixture of folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock. That combination of genre’s peaked my musical curiosity. I had to check them out.

Tune-Yards newest album, W H O K I L L, is even cooler than I imagined, and the song, “Bizness” is a great example of the album as a whole. The song is full of layers, like a musical trifle if you will. Layers of saxaphone, drums, background vocals, and what I think is a keyboard, but can’t tell for sure. All those components are held together by a driving bass line, from new member, Nate Brenner, that really moves the song along. Singer (and sole member before the addition of Brenner) Merrill Garbus seems to strain as she sings/yells/almost raps at times the lyrics. This is a great song to put on repeat while in the car and blast it for all the passers-by to enjoy with you.

Tune-Yards – Bizness

I’ve been captivated by Bill Callahan ever since I discovered him at my favorite record store. Callahan has been recording music for sometime now, since 1992 as Smog, a moniker he shed with his first self-titled album in 2007. His new album, Apocalypse, is his fifteenth. His voice is dark and smooth like a tub of margarine with bits of toast residue in it. It reminds me a bit of Chris Goss from Masters of Reality. Some musical parts in his newest album remind me of a few Mike Watt songs.

With only seven songs, the album appears to be short, but there are 40 minutes of tremendous song structures mixed with one of more original voices I have heard in a long time. This track, “Baby’s Breath”, starts out slowly, builds to a nice pace, then settles down into its original tempo. It repeats this pattern throughout. The emotional crux of the song hits as he exclaims, “Oh I’m a helpless man, so help me”, while his guitar cries out in pain. As of right now Apocalypse is the best album I have heard this year. I highly recommended it.

- By Todd S

Baby’s Breath [MP3, 10.1MB, 255kbps]

dragcity.com

Inlets’ first full-length album has been over three years in the making, and now fans can finally hear why it took so long. Sebastian Krueger is back with a lush slice of pastoral pop called “Bright Orange Air”, a teaser from the forthcoming Inter Arbiter LP. Equally gorgeous is the accompanying video, directed by Benjamin and Stefan Ramirez Perez. For those who geek out on this sort of thing: it was filmed, rotoscoped, separated into layers, and then run through AfterEffects to create seven different color textures from which they created a rich range of color. Yummy.

Lisa’s original post from 01/31/07:
Sebastian Krueger is the man behind what he calls “the bedroom fidelity project” Inlets. This perhaps makes him both faithful and musical? Ladies? He is also a generous man, and we here at the ‘hive appreciate good music even more when the artists who make said music decide to make their EP’s available for NO dollars to music lovers of the world. Krueger gets “sharing the sharing.” He just gets it. Back when I was a 3hive fan and not a participant, I used to be totally charmed by all this “this is totally a Clay band”, “oh such and such is Shan music for sure” business. Since I’m still pretty new, I’ll just say that Inlets is Lisa music–moody, instrumental, a touch earnest, but musical in a way that avoids sappy sweet sentimentality. And who doesn’t like a man who cut his teeth with My Brightest Diamond? So snatch up the Vestibules EP at luvsound while the gettin’ is still good.

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Sebastian Fors, Sweden’s answer to Jeff Tweedy, used to roll with a revolving cast of characters called The Ones That Got Away. He now leads a group called Let’s Say We Did. Fors’ groggy vocals and lovelorn lyrics cast a nice shadow against the band’s bright Americana pop. Frayed edges in the production make it feel old and familiar, like flannel on a cold day. Cozy up.

Buy the EP here.

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