Godspeed You! Black Emperor Reunites

Pardon my giddiness as I blast this info to all media but I’m very psyched to hear, (via Pitchfork) that the media-eschewing, politically charged, Canadian, post-rock collective will be touring in the Winter.

They will first curate and headline All Tomorrow’s Party’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” in Minehead, UK. Then, according to the announcement on their website, they will play a “handful” of UK and EU dates followed by exactly nine US dates.

Here’s a little taste of what they do:

[youtube width=”480″ height=”385″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsf2LoLk3SA[/youtube]

2010-03-31 Megafaun with Sharon Van Etten

The Stage Awaits

Last night, in Washington, DC, The Black Cat Backstage (the downstairs, more intimate room at the Black Cat) played host to a great night of music. Sharon Van Etten, who got such great press from NPRMusic during SXSW, opened for the North Carolina based freak folk band, Megafaun and those of us in attendance were definitely given a treat.

Sharon Van etten

From the beginning of Van Etten’s set the crowd stood or sat attentively but with the standard opening-act-respectful-distance-from-stage buffer in place. That, until after the first song, Sharon cut to the chase and encouraged folks to gather close. Buffer broken, so began a well received set of original material (and one cover- see the clip below.) Van Etten’s voice shimmers in the room as she accompanies herself on a striking, red Gibson electric guitar. These, along with her strong lyrics and enchanting sense of humor as she chatted from the stage made it definitely worth arriving early to see and hear her perform.

Check out this brief clip that I shot of her covering Blaze Foley’s “Oooh Love”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UzO01vruXU[/youtube]

Megafaun came to the stage with no announcement or fanfare and proceeded to gush about being such fans of Sharon Van Etten and how they were thrilled to have finally seen her perform. (in fact, the moment she hit the stage, the trio bounded from the backstage door and into the crowd to watch.) My setlist notes are a jumble but they leaned heavily on the most recent release, “Gather Form & Fly”. I think the opener was “Kaufman’s Ballad” which, with it’s eerie harmonies set a great tone for the night. Continue reading →

New Pornographers “Together” Pre-Sale & Tourdates

As mentioned previously, The New Pornographers will be releasing their new album, Together on May 4. You can pre-order it today from Matador Records. Preorders come with a poster and a 7″ of the band covering three songs from the Detroit psych-pop band Outrageous Cherry. The first single, “The Crash Years” is available today via iTunes.

Before we get to that epic list of tourdates, here’s one of the tracks Outrageous Cherry tracks that will be on the 7″ for all pre-orders:

Continue reading →

R.I.P. Mark Linkous

Mark Linkous, the man behind Sparklehorse and one of the men behind the Dark Night Of The Soul record that this blog loves so much took his own life, Saturday, at the age of 47.  The New York Times has an informative obit here.

He will be missed.

In a bitter twist, we have also learned from this BBC article that the Dark Night Of The Soul album may finally be headed for record store shelves in June of this year. The unspecified problems with EMI have apparently been resolved. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUvuXXbMwq8[/youtube]

Update:

Great piece from Robin Hilton at NPR Music.

Rediscovering Oar

Chatting with a friend the other day, we stumbled onto the topic of ‘legendary’ or ‘landmark’ records. We made little distinction between those two labels and that of ‘infamous’ but a few titles tumbled out onto the table. “Pet Sounds” was one of the first and, when my friend noted that he hadn’t dug it for years after first listening until he learned more about its genesis, I expressed a bit of shock and countered with a confession of my own.

“A classic album stands up on its own whether you know its history or even like the music. Hell, you couldn’t have gotten me to like My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” back in the 90’s but I could tell that they were doing something powerful on there.”

(That’s true. In the mid-nineties, while I was expanding my musical vocabulary with older music across the boards of rock, pop, jazz, and folk, I neglected much of the contemporary material. I’ve been working to rectify this over the past ten years.)

As our discussion progressed, he asked me about Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence’s acclaimed solo record, “Oar”. Was it really a masterpiece as he’d often heard? Who was Skip Spence, anyway? Continue reading →