Last year, some friends of mine were playing through town with a solo post rock musician I hadn’t heard of. After his set, we got to talking.
“I didn’t get your name,” I said.
“Billy Mays III.”
“Descended from the original Billy Mays, of course?” I joked.
He smiled. “Yeah, that’s my dad.”
And that’s the story of how I met Infinite Third.
At this point in time, the biggest question I ask about anything the Antlers could release is “will it get me to stop listen to Undersea?” And four tracks though it was, that extended play was one of the most beautiful records released in 2012, and it remains a fixture on my turntable. So when the mood strikes for the Antlers, will anything replace its sublime wonder, or should I just play the disc I have?
Every once in a while I’ll hear a song by a band I know nothing about that will absolutely capture me. Earlier this year, that song was Murmurs by Hundred Waters, a long-burn, glistening, hypnotic piece of electronic atmospheres meticulously crafted by aural architects.
For years, Daft Punk has shown the world glimpses of pop music’s future. Tracks like “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” or “Human After All” broke through the surface of pop consciousness like an elusive White Whale before diving back down into the depths.
Continue reading
You could pretty much guess what this album would sound like from the narrative of its making of: an Arcade Fire album produced by James Murphy with a lead single that David Bowie threatened to steal if they didn’t release it in a timely manner.
There’s always been a weird sort of relationship between the independent music scene and Top 40 pop. Often, indie often derides pop for lack of artistic integrity, separating itself from the cheap tricks of pop to make serious music. But there are other times where indie tries to beat pop at its own game, shoving even more hooks and dance hooks into three minutes, which always ends up dripping with irony.
Then, there’s CHVRCHES.
2011’s Native Speaker was one of those albums that snuck up on me without much fuss, but it crashed onto my year end list like a whirlwind. It was a bipolar affair, slipping from vulgar to tender within the same verse as the tracks jumped from manic exuberance to serene atmospherics as the record progressed. And with the announcement that their keyboardist had stepped down, it seemed like Flourish // Perish would spend most of its time in the chirpy, bouncing art pop portion of Braids’ repertoire.
But that’s not the case at all. Rather, Braids merged their two extremes into one beat-ridden, ethereal whole.
It is my understanding that the term “dubstep” means different things depending on what side of the Atlantic you’re on. Stateside, it means the sort of bro-friendly, attention deficient, robot-sex music that’s made its way into car commercials and cheap summer movie soundtracks. In Britian, however, dubstep is a little more subtle–shifting textures over time, setting grooves and resting in them, forming a subset of electronic music much more suited for a late night drive than a trailer for the new Transformers movie.