SEPTEMBER DISKULL PARTY
Saturday September 22nd start from 10pm
DJs: D-Marco, Mrs Moustache, Shantastic, Maria del Carmen del Mar
Band: Dead Animal Marathon
at Rose Live Music
345 Grand St
Williamsburg, NY
1 comment September 8th, 2007 marco
The go! Team - Proof of Youth
England’s Go! Team play a fast and furious mix of 60s girl groups, 70s car chase TV themes, 80s lady MCs, and 90s guitar squalor. Their 2005 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike was critically lauded for its cheerleader anthems, syrupy string samples, and mad-as-a-hatter horn arrangements. This release bombs melodies into the stone age with its needle-in-the-red anti-production approach. It lurches from bubblegum pop to white noise in a heartbeat. Contributors include Chuck D, the original Double Dutch Divas, Rapper’s Delight Club, Marina from Bonde Do Role, Solex, and Washington, DC’s Frederick Douglas All Star Cheer Team.
Taken from: insound.com
Web: thegoteam.co.uk
The album will be released September 11
Add comment September 7th, 2007 marco
Architecture in Helsinki
Architecture in Helsinki make boisterous, Technicolor-toned indie pop, and they do it with a verve that is alternately thrilling and exhausting to listen to. This quality seemed to be the main focus of all the hyperbolic praise prompted by the band’s 2005 release, In Case We Die, and rightfully so. It’s hard to deny the infectious charm of “Neverevereverdid” or the sugar rush of “Frenchy, I’m Faking,” but once you get past the candy-coated shell, Architecture in Helsinki don’t provide a lot to chew on. Much of this can be attributed to the band’s self-consciously awful lyrics, which range from 10-year-old-doing-a-Madlib juvenile to stream-of-consciousness bizarre. On Places Like This, however, songwriter/vocalist Cameron Bird and company seem to acknowledge their lyrical deficiencies by taking them to the logical extreme of self-parody, while keeping all their kitchen-sink instrumental layers intact. They know it’s silly, but they don’t give a shit, and neither should you.
That’s not to say that some curiously dark edges don’t exist on Places, as when Bird bittersweetly sings about “Leaping off the edge of this world” on album opener “Red Turned White.” But from there, things get loopy. “Heart It Races” is a dreamy love song with ethereal steel drums, and it’s followed by the prototypical Architecture in Helsinki party-jam “Hold Music,” complete with left-field tempo shifts, bells, and whistles. That song, along with “Like It Or Not,” provides a great example of the band’s refreshing self-awareness, replacing attempts at sing-along choruses with shout-along, onomatopoeic revelry. But if you’re still waffling about joining in on the monkeyshines, “Debbie” will settle you on one side of the love-it-or-hate-it line in the sand. The track steps along as a cheeky bit of disco-funk until a gloriously pretentious and out-of-place horn solo climaxes with Bird bleating in falsetto. You might cringe, you might smile, but you won’t not react. Just know that Architecture in Helsinki have enough energy to continue cranking out these adrenaline and saccharine cocktails until you do.
Taken from: tinymixtapes.com
Web: architectureinhelsinki.com
Add comment September 5th, 2007 marco
The New Pornographers - Challengers
Don’t look at pictures of The New Pornographers. If you do, you’ll think, “These guys look more likely to teach me about sedimentary limestone than write good songs.” But it would be your loss not to listen to them, as their fourth album is a staggering masterclass in indie-pop songwriting that will make your brain melt and send firecrackers around your heart. Like Arcade Fire, The Shins and The Decemberists, they’re a band that American rock blogs go loopy for, and not without reason. From the Raspberries-esque power-pop of ‘All The Old Showstoppers’ to acoustic gems like ‘Adventures In Solitude’, these are tunes Brian Wilson would have cleared room on ‘Pet Sounds’ for, each boasting spellbinding melodies and a harmonic complexity to die for. Did you really just read “a harmonic complexity to die for” in NME? Well, we did warn you they’d melt your brain.
Tim Jonze
Taken from: NME
Web: Thenewpornographers.com
Add comment September 2nd, 2007 marco
M.I.A. - Kala
The Central St Martins graduate with the Tamil Tiger parentage is poised to raise temperatures - and eyebrows - all over again. Maya Arulpragasam’s second is a head-spinning equatorial dash so completely cuckoo it makes any accusations of cultural tourism seem mightily churlish. She’s in Trinidad one minute, India via Angola the next, but always anchored by choleric basslines that are 100% London.
Rhythms are constructed from gunshots, dog barks and swarms of rattling snares, with producer Dave ‘Switch’ Taylor at his most fidgety behind the desk. New Order and Pixies are plundered for apocalyptic oomph on the stupefying “$20″ while “Mango Pickle Down River” brilliantly finds M.I.A. trading rhymes with aboriginal kids. She twangs the boundaries of taste both lyrically (”Take me on a genocide tour/Take me on a trip to Darfur”) and musically. But a knockout’s a knockout, however messy the bout.
Sam Richards
Taken from: uncut.co.uk
Myspace: M.I.A.
1 comment September 1st, 2007 marco
Chromeo - Fancy Footwork
Chromeo’s Dave 1 keeps his cool, even in the middle of a domestic scrap. “Let’s keep the screaming and the fighting and the crying to a minimum,” he says on “My Girl is Calling Me (A Liar)”, “and if the kitchen don’t work we can fight in the living room,” biting off that last syllable sharply enough to force the rhyme. Before the household battles, presumably, comes the pick-up, and he’s good at that too: “Let me tell you that I saw your boyfriend, walking down the street,” goes “Bonafied Lovin’ (Tough Guys)”. “He was standing all shaky, hands all sweaty, and he could hardly speak/ I might as well take a minute or two to put you on to some game: You got a boy like him, a man like me, and that’s just not the same.”
Best friends Dave 1 (aka David Macklovitch, A-Trak’s older brother) and P-Thugg, who give one another common sense advice as part of their tracks, don’t self-edit much. “Just take her to movies and you’re bound to work it out,” interjects P-Thugg, via telephone, on “My Girl Is Calling Me”. The band’s self-consciously limited palette– an electrofunk-by-numbers mélange of talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics– is just another manifestation of their inability to tell a lie. If a song’s called “Fancy Footwork”, it’s going to be about fancy footwork.
Cocksmen they may be, but it’s a thing they’ve got to talk themselves into. Faux-ballad “Momma’s Boy” is a mashed-out keyboard confessional about a romance between a girl in love with her dad and a boy equally in love with his mom. A novelty song with a happy ending, the two of them figure something out: The girl looks like his mom, and he looks like her dad, so they’re all set. On the 1980s throwback “Opening Up (Ce Soir On Danse)”, Macklovitch is in the middle of baring his soul to a new girlfriend when he loses her number. He’s got to ask her, “Tell me what numbers to dial, ’cause I’ve been strung out for a while.”
Going over the top here is just part of the package. The skin flick sax on “100%”, the ripping, non sequitur guitar solo on “Momma’s Boy”, the straight “1999″-rip that is “Outta Sight”: These are the consequences of getting in the mood. Better that than the cynical grab at pop star detachment that is “Tenderoni”, Fancy Footwork’s first single and far and away worst song. Built around a bad bit of slang that fell out of favor years ago, Macklovitch utters platitudes like “You and I/ Baby we go side by side” before rapping about getting in those pants over some slap bass. All you need to save songs like these is to not blink in the face of the irony, the shtick, whatever– just don’t break the frame, right?
More lovable is their “Intro”, where over some tinnily epic synths the two Chromeos get a girl to chant their name, over and over, the three syllables ascending like stadium entrance music. This is surely what they come out to when they play live. And though it may hype a crowd it’s obvious it’s there for them too. Nerdy guys in sunglasses, they’ve got to convince themselves of their cool before they go to work on us.
-Zach Baron
Taken from: Pitchforkmedia.com
MySace: myspace.com/chromeo
Add comment August 11th, 2007 marco
SPOON - GA GA GA GA GA
Six albums into a career typically summed up by those not paying attention as “college rock,” continues to make dazzling pop music for the rest of us. It will get a lot of attention for its weird title, but listeners engaging “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” will be rewarded for seeing the book through the cover. From the sly, sinuous–even cocky–leadoff track, “Don’t Make Me a Target,” to the album’s stunningly evolved closer, “Black Like Me,” Spoon has produced its most complete record yet, an assured and confident document that trades on classic grooves, hooks and familiarity, but still feels like something entirely new. Leader Britt Daniels has taken the band through enough stylistic shifts over the years to build a reputation as a college radio Bowie, but “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” does the surprising thing and uses the basic framework from the group’s previous album, 2005’s “Gimme Fiction,” this time applying a slightly more consistent shade of paint; Daniels’ showman tendencies on that album’s thematically wandering tracklist have been reined in somewhat here, trading expansion for consolidation of gains. “The Ghost of You Lingers” uses an echo chamber effect and a simple repeated keyboard riff to achieve an inescapable haunted-house chill, but the following, Motown-influenced, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” doesn’t erase the feeling of the previous song; it builds on it. Daniels is no longer getting caught up in the trap of having to write the perfect song every time out. Shades of colors and mood are allowed to emerge and retreat, so when the band switches from groove mode into something approaching outright weird on “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case,” it feels more like sliding into wistful memory than a stylistic stop sign, with the track’s quiet-loud-quiet dynamics recalling the group’s early days as would-be Pixies, except with a decade’s worth of context behind the borrowed riff. The album closes with two of Spoon’s finest songs ever: the almost Beatle-like “Finer Feelings,” all throbbing bass and churning drums and nakedly honest vocals, and the previously mentioned “Black Like Me,” which builds like a classic rocker, with Daniels admitting “I’m in need of someone to take care of me tonight,” and later urging “all the weird kids in front/tell me what you know you want” as the song builds to an aching crescendo. Like the band itself, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” peaks late and satisfying.
Add comment July 22nd, 2007 marco
WHITEY
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.
MySpace: myspace.com/hellowhitey
VIDEO:
1 comment June 30th, 2007 marco
Digitalism - “Idealism”
VIDEO: by Digitalism - Zdarlight
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.
-Jamie Fullerton
Taken from: nme.com
Add comment June 30th, 2007 marco
JUNE 28TH DISKULL PARTY
DISKULL PARTY AT SLIPPER ROOM THURSDAY JUNE 28th 10PM
-BRULESQUE SHOW
-FEATURING MANASE LA TU’
-DJ D-MARCO
-DJ LESTER
-DJ JENNY CURIOUS
-DJ MRS MOUSTACHE
SLIPPER ROOM
167 ORCHARD ST
NEW YORK, NY
Add comment June 22nd, 2007 marco
