Canadians vs. Canadians, + Spleen U. rebooting.

Caribou

Junior Boys' new album, It's All True has been one of my very best electronic purchases this year. Caribou's Swim was one of my best electronic purchases last year. What happens when the two team up?


Well, listen for yourself - Caribou has remixed 'You'll Improve Me' off It's All True for the forthcoming single release, and it's a fucking treeeeat! It's one of those long, meandering remixes that isn't so much about the dancefloor, it's just more of a purely eargasmic refix. Yeah, Canada's really got it going.


Spleen United were talk of the town a few years back here in DK, and they're finally back with their third full length in January. Things have been really quiet around the band, and they've seen outfits like Turboweekend somewhat conquer their niche of indie electro to bop your head to.


Their new single is on the loose now, it's called 'Days of Thunder', and you can jump on it over at P3! It sounds pretty sweet, and very familiar, probably due to Bjarke Niemann's signature voice - definitely related to their sophomore album, Neanderthal, but even more upbeat perhaps. I can't really make out whether or not Spleen United will win back the prominence they had back around 2008. Funny thing is, since then, I've really jumped aboard their debut album, Godspeed Into The Mainstream, which is decidedly more slow moving than its successor. They probably won't go in that direction though.


We're listening to Sufjan Stevens right now - the only guy who can make an EP with a runtime of almost an hour. Crazy lad. The EP is All Delighted People, which was sort of a preliminary maneuver leading up to last year's The Age of Adz. Check out 'Djohariah' for good measure.

Remix Saturday!

Jamie xx.

Oi! I'm in remix-mode these days - there are really so many gems to find out there, if you know where to look!


A good place to look is with Jamie xx, who hits the nail insanely on the head sometimes, as with this new rework of Radiohead's 'Bloom'. Jamie's original rework for the TKOL RMX 1234567 series wasn't very exciting, but this one is really massive! There isn't much left of the original tune though, but who cares. The link also contains a pair of seriously hard ass remixes by Anstam and Nathan Fake.


Another good place to look is at Belgian masters Soulwax, whom I dug up slightly for a party recently. They did a sweet mix of 'DARE', off Gorillaz' second album, Demon Days. 


A third good place to look is with French producer and remix wizz Yuksek, from whom I found this lovely remix of Mali duo Amadou & Mariam's 'La Realité'. It's off the 2010 Amadou & Mariam Remixes album, which really contains some nice mixes!


I guess everyone noticed James Blake dropped a new tune today, 'Curbside'. Perhaps not everyone noticed that it's actually pretty sweet. I've never been fond of Blake, and usually ignore whenever he plagues the blogosphere with his minimalist wank. But this is good enough.


Finally, Real Estate did a Take Away Show performance of 'Green Aisles' while they were in Paris for the P4K get-together recently, which I think you all should check out. I'll give word on their new album, Days, soon btw. Peace out.

Exciting collabs and side projects!

Nicolas Jaar.

I'm so epic shit at digging up new stuff these days, it really bugs me! I've got all other kinds of things in the air, which is really nice, but it sorta makes being on the fore of new exciting music difficult.


Anyway, Nicolas Jaar wagged his always cool little tail today, with a new EP called Darkside, a collab with Dave Harrington. Jaar does very little wrong, and this is pretty cool, with a wee guitarre... Sounds very much like something Trentemøller could have made, which, remember, isn't the worst thing in the world. Listen to it over here at Gorilla vs. Bear!


In the non-collab zone, can't help thinking how Heavenly Beats remind me of Jens Lekman. Just check out 'Faithless'. In case it reminds you of Beach Fossils too, don't wonder - it is one of the dudes from Beach Fossils...


Oh, and how about this for a potentially mind-blowing, trans-atlantic collab? Hot Chip haven't exactly been buzz band of the year for some time, but here, a few of the Chips team up with Pat Mahoney, drummer of now-defunct kings of NY, LCD Soundsystem, on their new project New Build. On 'Misery Loves Company', both the Chip and the LCD influence are very obvious, and if they cut it right, their debut EP, due 2012, could be a real slam dunk.


Mahoney isn't the only one of the LCD posse on the radar right now. Nancy Whang, along with The Juan MacLean is featuring on this epic Holy Ghost! cover of Ministry's 'I Wanted To Tell Her', themselves part of the DFA crew. Jus' one big, happy family...


Also, I bought tix for darling Leslie Feist's show in Copenhagen in March, which is gonna be epic! Also, new Sigur Rós album coming up, what an effing treat, especially if that means they're coming our way soon too (Roskilde, perhaps!).

Why "Mylo Xyloto" rhymes with "No no, no no no."

Mylo Xyloto. What the fuck does that mean, you might ask? Well, I guess only Chris Martin knows, like only he and his posse know, just why we needed this fall from grace from an otherwise pretty stable pop-rock outfit.


I know it's tough burger to compare Coldplay to general tendencies in indie, as they have always had sort of an askew relationship with all the cool shit. Even so, one could say that pathos has had some sort of a revival as of late. Like chillwave, and the fact that everybody are falling on their bums over M83's new album.


I have always had a troubled relationship with unsubstantiated pathos, which easily becomes empty calories. My profound hate for Band of Horses is a good example of that, and look what Muse did to themselves on The Resistance!


Mylo Xyloto seems to be another case of bona fide band gone mainstream, the bad way. Mainstream the good way was what they did on A Rush of Blood To The Head. Mainstream the bad way, meanwhile, is when it constantly hits you like a jackhammer, how much this album smells of commercialism and an absolute void of new creative ideas. Just listen to the four-on-the-floor beats that are nauseatingly present on this record, as foreboded by the ominous lead single 'Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall' (oh, dear, how touching!), and, to draw the parallel backwards, by the hideous title track off 2008's Viva La Vida.


Mylo Xyloto is a daunting affair to look at, with carnevalesque artwork and a 14 tune strong tracklist, but three of these tracks are less than a minute long, and none clock in at above 5 minutes. All right, track length isn't necessarily a indicator of quality, but this sure suggests the aforementioned creative void.


I can live with 'Hurts Like Heaven' as a nice, feel-good opener, even if it's as musically nutritious as the portion of mac and cheese I just ate. But 'Paradise'? Holy fucking Christ, what is this?! The melody is as bad as anything, the lyrics are complete nonsense, and the music is utterly boring.


I guess melody is the main theme on this record, or rather, lack of melody is. There's nothing that really sticks with you after listening to it, perhaps except for 'Major Minus', which is one of the few strong tracks, along with 'Us Against The World' (again, oh dear!) and 'Up With The Birds', which are pretty, sound a bit like something off X&Y or A Rush of Blood..., but still utterly forgettable. Then there's the Rihanna collab 'Princess of China', which, sorry, wasn't a good idea. It's not a question of bridging rock music and mainstream pop, it is a perennial pseudo rock band becoming mainstream, again, the bad way. It's not two talented musicians joining forces, it's not art. It's a money machine, and it's no advantage that the song sucks for real either.


I know it's nice with all the $$$, but really, if there's so little creative juice left in the tank, guys, it's OK to call it quits. LCD Soundsystem did so, and so did The White Stripes. Parachutes and A Rush of Blood... speak for themselves, many were hard on X&Y, but it wasn't as bad as people make it, and Viva La Vida actually was a pretty decent try in the direction of inventing a bit of a wheel. Mylo Xyloto is as bullshit as the title suggests. Coldplay have gone from being a humble middle-of-the-road band with stellar melodies and lyrics, to being a middle-of-the-road band trying to sound grand, but they fail, and fall hard on their little asses with this record. Back to the drawing board.

With the wild wolves around you...

Bon Iver.
((c) Martin Rosenauer - rosenauer.dk)

Justin Vernon has come a long way since back then, in ye olde hunting cabin, of which the indiesphere has now spun many a tale of a love lost. Even so, 'The Wolves', in all its simple majesty, was the highlight of a generally spotless Bon Iver concert in Copenhagen yesterday.


Vernon, now the leader of a nine-man army of multi-instrumentalists, now has to exist somewhat on a middle ground. He has rapidly outgrown the intimate surroundings, in which For Emma, Forever Ago fit so perfectly, and so has his music outgrown the man-with-guitar simplicity, in stead becoming an ornately orchestrated affair of man and machine.


I read a critical review today, which seemed to revolve around the melodies drowning in the arrangement and heavy instrumentalisation at the concert yesterday. I do not agree. If you had heard For Emma, Forever Ago and nothing else, yes, you would have been shocked and disappointed, but you've got to allow a talented musician to evolve. Right from the get-go, 'Perth' opened the set ever so powerfully, and all through the concert, on tunes like 'Blood Bank', 'Minnesota, WI', 'Holocene' and 'For Emma', the brass and percussion really got aired out. 


I am a big admirer of, when very many people on a stage each play very little, making every little timbre of every little instrument important, and Bon Iver had a massive tour de force of just exactly that yesterday. From 'Beach Baby', which was a surprising, but very welcome, addition to the set, through 'Hinnom, TX' to 'Wash.', where the band seemed to be balancing almost soundlessly on the knife's edge, before tripping slowly into the next tune. 'Wash.' especially stands out on Bon Iver as the simplest, but one of the prettiest tunes.


Speaking of the two albums opposed to each other, I could have wished for more of For Emma, Forever Ago, and I've been thinking all day that yesterday really confirmed the notion that Bon Iver just isn't quite as good. It's more flourishing musically, but For Emma, Forever Ago is just pure magic, and as such, even though Vernon let himself take center stage on 're: Stacks' and the aforementioned 'The Wolves', I missed tunes like 'Flume' (WTF?!), 'Lump Sum' and 'Blindsided'.


Even so, this was really a concert of the ages, one that left me empty, speechless and slightly dumbfounded.

Stellar shows and sublime sound.

Kashmir.
((c) Christian Hjorth - hjorth-photo.dk)

About a week ago, I was lucky to be at two stellar concerts, both of which are sure to be defining musical moments of this year for me.

When Kashmir announced a month and a bit ago, that they were gonna perform their iconic and defining 1999 album The Good Life in its entirety, I just had to go, and me and a few of my mates were lucky to grab tickets within the four-and-a-half minute span they were on sale. The Good Life hasn't been as instrumental to me personally as its successor Zitilites has, but as I often make clear, I am a huge fan of the album format, and The Good Life is more of a concept and more of a whole than Zitilites is.

Another treat was the fact that many of the tunes on The Good Life haven't been performed live for ages, if ever. That made it quite an easy task for Kashmir to satisfy the rapturous crowd, in concentrated delivery of gems like 'It's OK Now', 'New Year's Eve', 'Mudbath' and 'Gorgeous', tunes, which have been iconized by an entire generation of Danish music enthusiasts. The truest highlight however was the emotional/uplifting pair of 'Lampshade' and 'Graceland', each in their own way core tracks on The Good Life. The former is probably one of the most laconically well-written songs I know of, while the latter really sparked the band's fame.

If I were to point out one bad thing, it was the encore. I had really anticipated something special here, but what we got was in effect tunes that we've all heard live a hundred times before. Sure, 'The Aftermath' and 'Surfing The Warm Industry' are both among my favorite tunes, but really, in a crowd of dedicated fans (remember the sellout time of less than five minutes), who hasn't heard those tunes at least a handful of times live? Kashmir could have done anything, played anything from their catalogue - OK, we've all heard 'Vote 4 Dick Taid' and 'Leather Crane' live by now, but this could have been a massive chance for them to play rarer tunes like 'Rose' or 'Cellophane', or even just 'Melpomene' or 'Petite Machine'... They should have done so, in my opinion.

Coincidentally, I went back to Koncerthuset only three days later, for the Jens Lekman concert orignially scheduled at  Jazzhouse. Now, Koncerthuset isn't exactly the most street and urbanely chic place on earth, but, being a multi-million dollar building, it does have some of the best acoustics around.


Lekman, to be honest, is also one of the best performers around. He started off slowly, but what an amiable and gracefully humble artist. Lekman balanced perfectly between humorous yet deep little stories, his fabulous material, which worked fine with just him, his big, fat, ginger drummer and, later in the set, his sampler. Finishing off with a powerful, unplugged version of 'Shirin', Lekman made his way through old and new material, with a good distribution from both Oh You're So Silent Jens, including a Swedish version of the beautiful 'Julie', Night Falls Over Kortedala and the new EP, An Argument With Myself. One could have wished for tunes like 'Maple Leaves', 'A Postcard To Nina' or 'Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo', but the set was way sweet, and Lekman was too!