Clay and I had this ritual in college where we’d turn down the lights, lay flat on our backs, and play certain songs over and over again. It served as a catharsis for us, often following a botched exam or “I like you…as a friend.” Our playlist included a variety of music, though most of it fell under the so-called “slowcore” and “shoegazer” categories. But not just any band with bad posture, pale skin, and walls of distorted guitars or mumbled vocals would do… You gotta have dynamics to pull me out of a funk. Build, crash, rebuild. Like waves, like Legos. The Very Hush Hush seem to have that dynamics thing figured out (could be their classical music training). Each of these tracks, if taken in one- or two-minute intervals, may seem shy or sullen, but taken as a whole will lift you up to where you can see more than just your shoes.
Wolf Parade
If you haven’t been already, brace yourself to get slammed with all things Wolf Parade at least through the end of the year. It’s all the rage with the cool kids, and they’re wrapping up a tour with The Arcade Fire this week, so their hip factor’s inching way up. Don’t believe a word of it until you hear it for yourself, at which point you very well may find yourself high-stepping proudly, baton in hand, leading Wolf Parade down your street. Hit the comments and let your fellow 3hive readers know where you stand…
Valley Lodge
You heard it here first: The next old-ass band to be hailed better-late-than-never as influential pop geniuses is Electric Light Orchestra — good ol’ ELO. I’ve heard them so many times in commercials and elsewhere lately that I’m convinced an unseen cosmic force is watching me and that the next time I order Chinese food it’ll be Jeff Lynne holding the bag and telling me to read my fortune cookie very carefully. Perhaps it’s even Lynne who subliminally led me to Valley Lodge (well, Lynne and the 3hive suggestion box), who, despite not sounding much like ELO at all, share the infectious habit of overdubbed high-tenor harmonies with the erstwhile prog-pop gods. There are also guitar hooks, a bass of a thousand rhythms, and mixed acoustic and electric melodies to keep you right in time. These are men who know how to craft a slightly emo, slightly retro pop song – and why shouldn’t they when their members’ list of former and current projects include Walt Mink, Sense Field, Satanicide, and Uptown Sinclair? “All of My Lovin” is one of those tracks that instantly sounds like you’ve been bouncing to it all of your life. And there are a dozen more little beauties on the album. Even the bios on their website are more fun than a barrel of domesticated monkeys. But, if Valley Lodge ever hope to be as mega-influential as ELO, they really need to work on their album covers. The birds are nice, guys, but the Technicolor ELO spaceship kicks ass. You know it’s true.
Silversun Pickups
I was lucky enough to come across Silversun Pickups’ self-released EP last year and was immediately smitten with the band’s relaxed take on rock ‘n’ roll’s melancholic side, and how, as they put it “get loud, get quiet, get ugly, get pretty.” I’m also lucky Joe didn’t beat me to this band, like he did with fellow shipmates, Earlimart.
Explosions in the Sky
We were watching Friday Night Lights and digging on the soundtrack. I was all, “This sounds like Mogwai” and Heather was all “Yeah” and I’m all “But Mogwai in a football movie?” and Heather’s all “Yeah.” Then we froze the credits and had to pick up our jaws from the floor. It wasn’t Mogwai. It was Explosions in the Sky, from Austin, Texas. These two tracks pack a big wallop. Kind of like Texas. Almost sweet at first, once the build hits you, it’s like senior year all over again.
The Morning After Girls
When I lived in San Francisco, I worked for a company whose founders were from Melbourne, a city they often called “Australia’s San Francisco†for its artistic community and hipster quotient. It makes sense, then, that the Morning After Girls, whose delicious guitar psychedelia sounds perfect on a podcast next to San Fran’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, would hail from Melbourne. They are too cool for school, no doubt, but with the Cobain-esque wail of “High Skies†and the Ride-esque riffs of “Straight Thru You,†they make school seem way less than cool anyway.
Brendan Benson
If Brendan Benson’s indie cred translated into cash money, he could probably find what he’s looking for, instead of still looking for it. All the hip Detroit bands link to his website; he runs a ghetto recording studio and hangs out with Jack White; he got screwed by Virgin Records in a ’90s album deal but is back with V2 anyway — what more could you ask for? Benson’s got a little twang, some ’60s sensibilities, and a whole lot of talent. If he could only get Jack to punch him out in front of some photographers…
Matisyahu
A Hasidic reggae sensation. It sounds like a sitcom setup that inevitably ends in “Now I’ve really seen it all!” And I’ll admit that when I saw Matisyahu for the first time, the gangly visage in a black suit and hat and traditional beard, combined with a voice perfectly trained for staccato wordplay, was as disorienting as Michael Bolton bustin’ out with a rhyme that would make Jay-Z blush. Yet despite being the last guy you’d expect to find himself in a waka-waka rhythm, Matisyahu comes legit with lyrics often steeped in religious imagery which, like Bob Marley’s Rastafarianism or even Bono’s Catholicism, never cross over into dogma. It’s in those lyrics that Matisyahu’s conceit comes into focus: Zion, Babylon, salvation, temples, princes and kings — whether Jamaica or Jerusalem, reggae at its core is rebel music for true believers. Matisyahu is true, and he’s bound to make some new believers of his own.
Truckstop Honeymoon
It seems like an appropriate time to post some New Orleans levee-billy — courtesy of Mike West and Katie Euliss of Arabi, LA — with sincere hopes that Truckstop Honeymoon will still be making these wonderful sounds. Bluegrass, southern rock, country, Anglo-folk all contribute the background to the wonderful narratives presented by this husband and wife crew. Check out “Capitol Hill” and “Walk of Shame” to get a sense of the political and cultural landscape, then hit their website to buy the two Truckstop Honeymoon albums.
The Red Thread
There’s a yearning for something else in The Red Thread’s pretty, simple chords that give you a wistful sense that something is ending and another thing is beginning. Not anything serious, just something that was bound to change, like the heat of summer into the crisp melancholy of fall. Maybe it’s more ideal for the Tuesday coming up than for right now with the last long weekend of summer in front of you, but maybe you can give autumn a little peek and realize that you’ve been looking forward to it for a while.