Monday, December 20, 2010

FOAVOD: Sam Prekop - The Silhouettes

Today's FOA Video of the Day comes from Thrill Jockey artist Sam Prekop. This killer video (cute anthropomorphized blobs having adventures to celestial electro music) was directed by Jordan Kim of Yo Gabba Gabba fame. Tearfully adorable and annoyingly uplifting:

Sam Prekop - The Silhouettes from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Bazookaluca Podcast: Best of 2010


Want to hear two people chatter excitedly (jadedly, ruefully, hopefully, gloriously) about the year in music? FOR AN HOUR?! That's what I thought you said!

My dear friend Luca invited me to be his guest for the second installment of the Bazookaluca Podcast! We discuss our respective best-of-the-year recommendations in music and go on plenty of tangents. He even did a great job cutting in the tracks we talked about! It's amazing.

CLICK HERE to listen to it streaming on the website.
CLICK HERE to listen to it free via iTunes. (Subscribe...you know you want to.)

Also, see Luca's staggering Best of 2010 Megalist for GIFs of Christina Hendricks' boobies and corgis. Oh! And a TON of music, film, TV, etc. He's the hardest-working man in showbiz, folks.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Metal/Flute!

So my dear boys in Lazer/Wulf asked me to recreate the brief guest spot I did with them on the song "Who Were The Mound Builders?" when they recorded their spectacular The Void That Isn't a couple years back. For their great return-to-playing-live-in-Athens show at Caledonia December 4, I brought my flute and waited beside the stage until the last song. I wondered why my mouth had gone so dry and I wished my beer wasn't gone. Then it was time. And I played. And then it was over.

The thing about the internet, though, is that even the most fleeting, out-of-body-type experiences don't necessarily have to stay that way. Someone could very likely be there to capture the moment and preserve it for all eternity. Someone like Sloan Simpson and Mike White, of Southern Shelter and Deadly Designs, respectively.

At Southern Shelter, you can listen to (and download for free) an MP3 of my flirtation with metal glory (It's track 4). You can also watch a video/audio synch of the Wulves' newest performable creation, "There Was A Hole Here (It's Gone Now)," which has been stuck in my head for three days. Matter of fact, here that is:



As always, I've written about L/W here on FOA before. Here it go.

But I'm not the only one. Flagpole's done a great job of plugging the deserving, and they ran a feature the week before the show, for which I had the honor of taking this picture, as well as several others (which I hope will soon, ridiculously, see the light of day):



Now, that was fun. I do worry about the poor recycling worker who had to clean raw ground beef off of all those cardboard boxes...sorry man, my mistake...

Of course, Flagpole's talked about Lazer/Wulf plenty of times, as well. How could you not?


Lazer/Wulf on the Facebook!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Flagpole Calendar Pick: Bridges and Powerlines


This is a little out of date, but here's the mini-feature I wrote on Bridges and Powerlines for Flagpole Magazine:

Bridges and Powerlines

New York’s Bridges and Powerlines share more aesthetically with composer John Philip Sousa than anyone would have expected—especially them. After producing a debut LP driven by shiny keyboard melodies, the quartet has blossomed into a band that makes near-marches. The tunes feature sweeping arrangements that, though still pop-driven and lyrically balladeering, explore frontlines unlike any the band has approached before...[Read more]

Record Review: Wolf People - Steeple

One of the now-rare pieces I've written for TMT of late. Hopefully more will follow.

I wrote about Wolf People's singles compilation release Tidings earlier release this year here.)

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Wolf People
Steeple

Jagjaguwar

...Completely devoid of the ADHD that made Tidings so charming, Steeple instead errs on the side of monotony, the whole thing sticking firmly to its take on authentic psychedelia. Without declaring the record totally unvarying, though, I’d instead assert that it feels more complete but less passionately (naïvely?) hopeful than Tidings did. Like a bright-eyed recent graduate, Tidings went in every direction at once, envisioning endless possibilities. Wolf People, as the freshly diploma'd will do, picked a direction and went with it. They selected an eventuality from the infinite potentials they hinted at on Tidings and worked on it, honed it into a whole, fully-realized work of art. Steeple is competent and very obviously displays hard-earned skill, but it’s a little sad to think about all the directions they didn’t go, all the roads they didn’t take....[Read more]