Mount Kimbie: “Ruby” — Crooks and Lovers (Hotflush Recordings, 2010)
Reblogged from leisureleisure-deactivated20110 with 7 notes
Hot Glögg…and Other Delights (Christmas Mix 2010)
1. Devo - Merry Something To You (01:18)
2. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects (02:17)
3. The Free Design - Close Your Mouth (It’s Christmas) (02:03)
4. Paul Simon - Getting Ready For Christmas Day (04:13)
5. Dora Bryan - All I Want For Christmas Is A Beatle (02:31)
6. Girl in a Coma - Blue Christmas (02:27)
7. Mojochronic - Rudolph (You Don’t Have To Put On The Red Light) (02:49)
8. Mariah Carey - Oh Santa! (03:56)
9. DJ Schmolli - Christmas (Pumping Up Christmas) (04:07)
10. Nancy Wilson - Christmas Waltz (Awayteam Remix) (04:09)
11. Root Boy Slim & the Sex Change Band - Christmas at K-Mart (02:54)
12. Holly Golightly - Christmas Tree’s On Fire (02:55)
13. St. Etienne - 21st Century Christmas (03:50)
14. Tegan and Sara - The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) (02:23)
15. Area 25 - Here Come the Christmas Zombies (02:16)
16. Crocodiles & Dum Dum Girls - Merry Christmas Baby Please Don’t Die (03:18)
17. The Elves of Heaven - This Christmas (04:30)
18. The Magnetic Fields - Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree (02:24)
19. Brenda Kutz White - Christmas in the Northwest (05:33)
20. Bananarama - Baby It’s Christmas (05:00)
Created by OrangeTV - Compilation by Orange TV, December 2010
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Depeche Mode: “Black Celebration” — Black Celebration (Mute, 1985)
Reblogged from leatherforleisure-deactivated20 with 4 notes
DAVID BOWIE: RARE. UNRELEASED. OUTTAKES. (01:04:36)
1. David Bowie - Right On Mother (02:39)
2. David Bowie - Life After Marriage (04:42)
3. David Bowie - The Enemy Is Fragile (Something Really Fishy) (04:11)
4. David Bowie - Penny Lane (02:56)
5. David Bowie - Footstompin/ I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (04:03)
6. David Bowie - April’s Tooth of Gold (02:24)
7. David Bowie - She Should Be There (06:21)
8. David Bowie - Rupert the Riley (Unreleased) (03:02)
9. David Bowie - It’s Tough (03:56)
10. David Bowie - How Lucky You Are (03:30)
11. David Bowie - Shadowman (03:43)
12. David Bowie & Lulu - Dodo (04:31)
13. David Bowie - Columbine (04:07)
14. David Bowie & Marianne Faithful I Got You Babe (03:28)
15. David Bowie - Creep/Baby Fingers/The First Time/The Motel (Demo) (07:25)
Jay Carkhuff: Just Jay EP
01 Tiffany
02 Since Summer
03 Perforated Soul
04 Drift Away
05 Creepy
Composed/Produced/Performed
by Jay Carkhuff
1999-2000
4AD Label: 1980
01 Fast Set: Junction One
02 Bearz: She’s My Girl
03 Bauhaus: Dark Entries
04 Shox: No Turning Back
05 Rema Rema: Rema Rema
06 Modern English: Swans On Glass
07 Bauhaus: Terror Couple Kill Colonel
08 Cupol: Like This For Ages
09 The The: Black and White
10 Birthday Party: Friend Catcher
11 Mass: Labour of Love
12 Modern English: Gathering Dust
13 Bauhaus: Telegram Sam
14 Dance Chapter: Anonymity
15 In Camera: The Conversation
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Geisha Boys and Temple Girls – Heaven 17 (1981)
This is my favorite Heaven 17 song. Back in the ‘80s, when I found out Heaven 17 was formed by members who split from The Human League, it blew my mind. From that point onwards, I was always sure to learn what bands people had been in before or after whatever I listening to. In other words, I spent a lot of time with The Trouser Press Record Guide.
There’s so much to love about this song: The solo synth at the beginning that goes on longer than you expect, and then the payoff after that when the track explodes; the headlong pitter-patter chug of the drum machine; and the way the opening synth line organizes itself and returns, twisting and cascading around the vocals . It all reminds me of a time when the technology was fresh and exciting and musicians were inspired to make crazy joyous noises.
Reblogged from thepleasuresofelectricity with Notes
Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas
Last week, the no.7 album in the UK was Paolo Nutini’s Sunny Side Up, which doesn’t really sound like a young man playing folk-pop so much as a very boring old man singing for preschoolers. Twenty years ago, it was this album. Oh how the times have a-changed, right? And yet, why shouldn’t Heaven or Las Vegas have been a commercial success? It marks the height of the Twins’ openness and pop accessibility. While guitarist and usual sound architect Robin Guthrie was battling heavy drug addiction, bassist Simon Raymonde took more of a musical front seat and singer Elizabeth Fraser wrote and performed more candidly, especially about the recent birth of her daughter Lucy Belle. The album was released by the hippest UK label ever, 4AD, whose president Ivo Watts-Russell called it one of the best things the label ever put out, even as his relationship with the band was crumbling—he would release Cocteau Twins from their contract at the end of 1990, mere months after Heaven came out. Quite a complement to get from someone who was about to fire you. Not that they hadn’t earned it, of course.
The album opens with skeletal drums and Guthrie’s unbelievably smooth, soaring guitar. In fact, aside from some softer synthesizers filling out the arrangement, “Cherry-Coloured Funk” doesn’t develop much beyond those textures. And yet, like the rest of Heaven, it feels unwaveringly lush and ornate. The secret weapon, of course, is Fraser’s confident, flexible voice. Listen to how natural she sounds sliding between low notes on the verses and how she doesn’t lose an ounce of power when she jumps into falsetto on the chorus. The band also wisely left the vocals fairly dry and up front in the mix, dodging the typical shoegazer’s mistake of burying their most beguiling element for the sake of atmosphere. “Pitch the Baby” has a lot of the same sounds, but foreground’s Raymonde’s lite-funk bass line, while “Fifty-Fifty Clown” is more grounded and beat-driven, evoking Fleetwood Mac at their druggiest. “Fotzepolitic” is a jangly, Slowdive-esque rocker, “Wolf in the Breast” is an alternate-universe high school slow dance, and “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” finishes the record on a note of semi-epic wistfulness, its spitfire syllables slowly disappearing over the horizon.
But the most essential song here—and my personal favorite—has to be the title track. One of two songs from the album released as singles (the other being “Iceblink Luck”), “Heaven or Las Vegas” is pure perfect dream pop. It is by far the lushest and most finished-sounding song on the album, its heavy 80s drums supplemented with processed bongos, its synths and guitars playing twin leads, and Fraser’s voice doubled and tripled into a harmonic force to be reckoned with. Notice how the descending three-note synth hook in the verses gets resolved by the strums of the rhythm guitar, and how Fraser’s voice intensifies to a near-scream on the chorus (“Must be why I’m thinking of Las VegaaaaAAAAS”) without ever sounding less than totally controlled. Every verse, bridge, and chorus feels ideally placed and every melody is compelling and evenly paced. It’s an absolute triumph of a song and I have no clue at all what it might be about.
Listening through it today, Heaven or Las Vegas sounds inextricably linked to time and place. Its tinny drum machines, sterile synthesizers, and thin digital reverb are textbook late-80s, so much so that the record’s most direct contemporary offspring, M83’s Saturdays=Youth, is a work of explicit nostalgia. While it’s important to remember that, at the time, the technology was cutting edge (and the amount of cocaine consumed was copious), it’s also important not to make excuses for the past. Cocteau Twins’ mysterious, icy aloofness is largely generated by these dated textures. They wouldn’t be the same band without them, and Heaven would not be the self-contained masterpiece that it is were it not bound to its historical moment. Anyone even remotely interested in first wave shoegaze and dream pop should consider this required listening. Period.
Indeed…
Well Said…who wrote that?
Reblogged from thelostcool with Notes
