My friend Tim Ortopan, who offered the tip for Earlimart, describes their music as “intelligent pop that’s true to an indie-rock spirit.” I’ll add four more words — brooding, ethereal, fuzzy, complex — and suggest a peek at The Ship, the multi-purpose LA music collective of which Earlimart is a part.
Treeball
I have a soft spot for subversive pop music. The kind that’s equally cynical and sentimental. The kind where you’ll be driving your mom somewhere and she’ll say, “Well, this sure is a nice song.” The kind where you say, “Yeah, it’s about scoring blow in Bolivia.” The kind with monkey love metaphors (or maybe they’re not metaphors, either way…). The kind that stays with you long after you stop thinking about the lyrics. The kind with beautiful boy/girl vocals and a Finnish mailing address.
Hello Goodbye
Two Racing Junior bands within the same week? Just shows that good 3hivers think alike. When a Swede was named coach of the English national soccer team, an angry British tabloid columnist wrote: “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer-throwers who spend half their lives in darkness.” If that’s what it takes to make music like the Scandanavians, i.e., Norway’s Hello Goodbye and Kawaii and Sweden’s The Radio Dept, who exactly do I need to sell my birthright to?
Barcelona
In honor of the Red Rovers Football Club winning the Fall 2004 Coed Division One Championship of the Greater Memphis Soccer Association, I’m sharing the official MP3 of the Red Rovers, Barcelona’s “Kasey Keller,” even though my favorite American goalkeeper is Brad Friedel since he plays for my beloved Blackburn Rovers. I liked Kasey when he played for Leicester City, and I can understand why he went to Rayo Vallecano in Spain, but I mean, come on, Tottenham Hotspur? Yes, I’m a geek, which goes right along with Barcelona’s lovely geekpop. Be sure to check out the Sprites if you haven’t already. Barcelona R.I.P.
Preston School of Industry
The two or three songs that appeared on each Pavement album by full-time guitarist and occasional singer/songwriter Spiral Stairs always seemed to be these little secret pleasures, three-and-a-half-minute chunks of rocking-out energy blended beautifully with randomized weirdness. His hard work continues (and his creativity grows) on two Preston School of Industry albums, full of rootsy, poppy, noisy, sloppy tunes, all of which Spiral Stairs got to write and sing.
Tegan and Sara
So, like, Tegan and Sara are these mildly punky twin sisters from Vancouver (I even read somewhere that theyÃre lesbians!) drinking, cursing, and bickering their way through their mid-20s, or something like that. Whatever. Like most Canadians, Tegan and Sara rock out when they need to, slow it down the same way, and have entire albums filled with songs reflecting the requisite angst and confusion brought on by being or doing some or all of those things listed in the first sentence.
From Bubblegum to Sky
You’d think Memphis, with its extensive musical history, would get some decent bands coming through on tour. Nope. From Bubblegum to Sky, aka Mario Hernandez, is not coming anywhere near Memphis, as they’re playing Athens, GA tonight. They play a bouncing, harmonizing, and energizing pop, proof that good pop is not limited to the influences of the ’60s and ’80s — there’s a whole decade in between! Somebody in Athens, please go see From Bubblegum to Sky tonight. Let me know how it goes.
Love of Everything
Here’s some off-the-cuff, discordant pop, indebted to the likes of Daniel Johnston. Bobby Burg, recording as Love of Everything, writes and records music with the same healthy disrespect for the songwriting and recording process. Instead of striving for perfection, getting lost in the details, he seemingly gets his ideas and emotions out quick, without much thought. You may be tempted to write Burg off with just an obligatory listen, but with time you discover this boy’s got soul.
Kawaii
So while I’m listening to Kawaii, my better half asked (or rather accused), “Are you listening to ’80s music?” I could only reply, “No, it’s Kawaii.” Sure Kawaii may take their name too seriously — “kawaii” is Japanese for “cute” — but don’t confuse them with the other ’80s electronic imitators (good and bad) out there. The keyboards, the boy/girl vocals…it’s all tinged with the influence of Esquivel, the master pop hipster, as heard in the fluttering electronic samba of “Friends Make You Lonely.”
Red Eyed Legends
Here’s a sure-fire invitation to hatemail: My world would be just fine without the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and other New York scenesters that would do your biology homework for you if you paid them enough but couldn’t share an unironic moment if the presidency of these United States depended on it. That’s why it’s entirely illogical for me to like this faux-Brit pinball dance of a song from Red Eyed Legends as much as I do. Maybe it’s their Midwestern roots that make their post-no wave head-jerking sound so free of pretense even though they’re trying so damned hard to be pretentious. If there’s any musical lesson to be learned from the recent election it’s that we New Yorkers are way out of touch — it’s the middle of America that shapes our collective conscious, so listen up.