past articles

30 April 07

April 23, 2006: Erin McKeown

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29 April 07

Grizzly Bear: Beware, The Haunting Will Become A Friend

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Taken by a merry ol’ land of woebegone and some desperate, desolate conditions, Grizzly Bear would build their dens and call the place home sweet home for lack of sudor in attempting to get anywhere different. Some just know when they’re home, when a relaxing familiarity is aromatic upon its detection in the breezes. There needn’t be anything more than some heart-rending and tearing for Edward Droste, Daniel Rossen, Chris Taylor and Christopher Bear to identify with their surroundings. Those instances and their details are the draperies, the rods and the brackets. The Brooklyn foursome will build around it all – to suit, giving it the walls and roof and blanketing color to provide the essence of a love all loved out, but still remembered as it was, before it was dry as a drought of all its nourishing elixir. Grizzly Bear, through beauteous harmonies and textures meant for the hides of sleek race horses, gives over a kind of paralyzing manna that has a glow, a shadow and an echo to it. Watch yourself around their music, as it takes you and everyone you’re touching at the time captive. It’s in watching how these four men man their individual wheels while walking down the streets of Paris, singing their song “Knife” a cappella for our good chaps at La Blogotheque, that you witness all that’s sublime in the simple world of things that make us happy.more...

27 April 07

The Comas: A Body Can't Sleep Through This One

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) What’s the landscape like during a coma? What does the air feel and taste like? How’s the light in there? What comes out of that state of relative inactivity? What are the dreams like? Here you are unresponsive, no one can wake your ass up, you can’t hear anything, you don’t know what pain is and things couldn’t be set up any better as an incubator for the sickest, mind-bending hallucinations. The first words out of your mouth, if you ever came to again, should be, “You’ll never guess where I was,” in between the greatest, extended yawn of your life. Back you were from a dawn, a dusk and all the in between at a cubist castle, getting looks at everything in disjointed parsings – wished the best of luck putting them all together and deciphering the creatures and the aftertaste. Andy Herod and his Comas have assembled a sampling of where a head might be floating inside this state of being out to lunch for an indeterminable amount of time with new album Spells, whose name isn’t at all fraudulent or misleading (a lyric from album opener “Red Microphones” goes, “Call down the knights from ghostly towers/Puff on the yore of dragonfire.”).more...

26 April 07

Rock Plaza Central: Establishing What Heretofore Has Never Been Called Canadicana

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) One distinction needs to be made early in this report on Toronto’s Rock Plaza Central – the pioneers of Canadicana. Lead singer Chris Eaton is attempting to sound like Johnny Cash when he sings, not Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, you jackals. Oh, the wavy, fly where it may stamp of Mangum’s soft impression of a voice may be there in familiar parts, but that’s not the intention of a novelist who’s been blurbed about by the acclaimed Jonathan Lethem and has written a book that’s been deemed required reading in course study at two different colleges. He’s got that black, that tarry, inky black in his soul, the kind Cash had. And while we’re at it, wasn’t Cash the first to really define Americana music? It says America more than Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo ever have or will (no offense Son and Tup). We just didn’t label Johnny Cash back then. He did write about coal-burning trains and the kinds of people who take their lumps and then strike back like venomous snakes. That’s America – it’s heart and soul is in taking lumps and then getting even.more...