Neon Indian is doing to New Romantic Synth pop what Wavves did to garage rock and Blank Dogs did to Gothic music, stripping it down to its clockwork essentials and dirtying up the gleaming cocktail hour jetstreams with grit and echo and lo-fi effects pedals. And yet, despite the messy spontaneity of the execution, the [...]
01.08The xx
Is young British trio The xx band of the year? Hmmm, maybe…. Rolling Stone named their debut album, xx (Young Turks), one of the 25 Best Albums of 2009, while the Guardian music blog crowned it Album of the Year, and who am I to disagree? The xx’s sound is a slinky and mysterious recasting [...]
Space-rock doyenne Orenda Fink (love any name that sounds like a character in an Edward Gorey comic), one-half of Azure Ray, explores an earthier sound, all red-clay and green hills, women in long black veils wandering through Appalachian cemeteries late at night, on Ask the Night. Determined to create an album without computers or any other [...]
Thomas himself admits that he’s as surprised as anyone that this one-off project became a mammoth quadrilogy in its own right. The editorial selections for this compendium also have the distinct feel of comic fans kicking up their heels. Thomas reprints Jim Harmon’s earnestly-titled paean to the Justice Society, “A Bunch of Swell Guys” from [...]
It is a hazy smell of sweet grass in the afternoon kinda album, an album-length collaboration with Tokyo’s Tenniscoats. Born out of mutual admiration and excited promises to work together, the Tenniscoats and the core Pastels duo of Pastel and Katrina Mitchell met up at a Glasgow studio for several sessions of spontaneous recording augmented [...]