Your attention please. WHITEY is a sort-of solo project by N.J WHITEY. He is a misanthrope that spends most of his time skulking in dark corners. When he plays live he is accompanied by the following friends and associates- Wildcat (drums/sequencers), Scott X. Fairbrother (guitar/bass) and Shah (guitar/keys). For the first year guitar was also Patrick Walden (Babyshambles)… however the bright lights/hot pipes enticed him away. The fifth secret member is Robert Harder, a mysterious Bavarian who operates the mixing desk. Over the past two years WHITEY and his live sidekicks have played over 200 shows alongside (amongst others) Undertones, Buzzcocks, LCD soundsystem, New Order and Iggy Pop. There have been sessions for XFM and Radio 1. It was a lot of fun, but now they are having a lie-down. They will be back with a live XFM broadcast in late May. WHITEY is currently finishing his second album, GREAT SHAKES. It draws on a delirious range of influences, and features the live act as guest musicians. Its very good. You should hear it, really. This album is a follow up to the 2005 album THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL IS A TRAIN (1234 Records). This made many critical ‘Best Of Year’ lists. You should listen to this too, if you can find it.
After remixing the likes of Tom Vek and those neon, new rave tykes Klaxons for the past few years, Jens Moelle and Ismail Tuefekci, aka Digitalism, are aiming their own robotic house-rock at the dancefloors of the world. The perfect move, considering cats such as Simian Mobile Disco and LCD Soundsystem thrive as healthily as any sub-Libertines trilby-rockers. Indeed, ‘Idealism’ is dusted with the kind of metallic house glitter caking LCD’s ‘Sound Of Silver’, and, just as promisingly, the title track could have been carved from Daft Punk before they decided they were human after all. Elsewhere, synth-punch ‘Pogo’ thwacks like a double uppercut from The Chemical Brothers - just one of the block rockin’ feats here.
When Diplo happened across Bonde Do Role they were marrying a kind of carioca or baile funk to samples of brash hair metal and party-hearty hip hop. They’ve moved on for their first album proper on Domino (whether for copyright clearance or aesthetic reasons) and decided to recreate most of the music in the studio first before scrappily sampling themselves. The effect at times is incredibly daft - but at the same time it’s incredibly exciting. The opening track ‘Danca Do Zumbi’ sounds like a crazed punk band covering Daft Punk with a baile funk DJ on beats. So while DJ Gorky taps out a blaze of hair metal on a flying V, a Satanic voice guffaws: “This is the most evil thing you will ever hear… Death to your speakers!” Frequent flyer clubbers will probably have already heard the their tribute to the most referenced spy in popular culture ‘James Bonde’. Gigantic echoing electro-funk breaks match a heavy ‘Eliminator’ guitar riff which cheekily morphs momentarily into the quasi-raga of the Bond theme itself. Of course like on all of their songs, front woman Marina Ribatski is singing/rapping in Brazillian but it’s pretty much easy to pick up on the fact that Bonde Do Role think JB is “super-cool”. Word. Their current single ‘Office Boy’ is a salacious tale of young horny guys in shit jobs who just want to get down the beach and ogle women. It’s more pure pop than the rest of the album and sounds slightly out of place. There’s some Bambaataa referencing electro on ‘Marina Do Barrio’ that’ll have you burning holes in the knees of your Tachini tracksuit bottoms. Track after track here pops up rants in your face, slaps you a few times, then kisses you before departing after three minutes. Like the crazed teens BDR pretend to be, this record is restless, maverick and inventive, coming up with riffs and themes and dropping them immediately for something even newer and perverse just seconds later. And if there’s any justice ‘Bondillica’ will become the song of the summer.
“People finally seem to be realising how good this band are. This fourth single from their amazing debut album carries on the slightly unbalanced sounding three-piece’s rise to power. Order your tweed suits now.” - new-noise.net
Sonic Youth are excited to announce a NYC performance of the Daydream Nation album: July 28 at the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tickets on sale. Additional Daydream Nation performances in the USA include July 13 at the Pitchfork Music Festival, on July 19 at the Berkeley Community Theater in Berkeley, CA and July 20 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.
Becky Stark, lead singer of Los Angeles-based folk-pop quartet Lavender Diamond, speaks in a shy whisper, loves English tea and genuinely hopes to save the world through music. As a teenager growing up outside Washington D.C., classical singing was Stark’s preferred emotional outlet. So it’s strange and fateful that a hardcore-punk concert (Fugazi) was what led her to realize she could tell her own stories. Stark studied comp lit and art semiotics at Brown University and became involved with the Fort Thunder scene of Providence, Rhode Island (the breeding ground for Black Dice and Lightning Bolt), which helped inspire her to start writing her own music. Upon graduation, she and a friend wrote a punk operetta called Birdsongs of the Bauharoque, in which Lavender Diamond, the character and the band, first took shape.
The character is based on a long and windy creation myth that Stark tells with the out-of-breath intonation of a child, involving a man who discovers a cave of diamonds after being drawn there by its otherworldly hum. “It’s a metaphor to me for a certain sound,” Stark explains. “That sound in that story has become very real to me.” After self-releasing a CD of her own songs in 2003, she moved from Providence to L.A., transformed the character into a band (Steve Gregoropoulos, piano; Ron Regé Jr., drums; Jeffrey Rosenberg, guitar), released the Cavalry of Light EP in 2005 and was picked up by Matador in 2006. Lavender Diamond’s full-length Imagine Our Love, released this month, is a joyous collection of upbeat, operatic folk songs delivered by Stark in an angelic coo. During her live shows, Stark often sings with her hands outstretched to the audience. “I have this idea of sharing love with people,” she says. “I think a lot about the possibility that someone would sing these songs, sing them to themselves, and what that would mean.” Coming from anyone else, these words would sound trite — but from Stark, we feel the love.
The duo of Handsome Furs began as an idea in the winter of 2005, comprised of Vancouver residents Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade) and his fiancée, Alexei Perry. Dark and minimal while noisy and earnest, the point was to be as sparse and repetitive as possible with the help of little more than vocals, guitars, and a new drum machine. Through this, songs of earthbound captains, eggs made of gold and iron, and sleepless bodies were born. Boeckner’s disenchanted vocals thinly resonate while cloaked in a frenzied undertone of fear and uncertainty, all punctuated by bare drum machine beats. Through the course of each track, a deep-seated sense of longing struggles with staunch realism as a restless disdain for both urban life and smaller towns collide. Handsome Furs toured Europe before writing any songs. They have since opened for the likes of David Cross and Modest Mouse before releasing a proper record. Recorded at Wolf Parade’s studio, Mount Zoomer, in the heart of December, Plague Park is their debut. It is a record of melancholic tendency and heartfelt desire; a stripped-down symphony roaming between city and country, and made for ears of either side.
