Sunglasses from Savannah, Georgia will be an exciting contribution to the music scene this year. Interestingly, this collaboration between Samuel Cooper and Brady Keehn started through a film production. Their sound is fresh and a good example of “out of this world” music, but is incredibly difficult to describe. The crossovers and style are not something I have heard much before but are something to appreciate as music should keep expanding and explore new areas.
While everything else, including girls, have come and gone, Yo La Tengo has stayed. Since I started listening to them in the end of eighth grade, Yo La Tengo has always been there for me. They have always been my reliable source of good music, never ever disappointing me. I can with proud heart say that I’ve never heard a Yo La Tengo-song I really dislike.
Throughout your life there are certain albums and musicians that really strike you as different, special, otherworldly even. They mold and shape you and at the most extreme they might make you reconsider your whole way of life. The albums I’m featuring in this series of articles are the ones that did something like that to me, or at least the most prominent ones.
Being a non-religious person, these albums are probably the closest thing to a religion in my life. Some believe in God, some believe in Buddha, some even believe L. Ron Hubbard. I Believe in Magnus Moriarty™.
Now We’ve Got Members, concidered to be the flagship of the small Oslo-based CD/CD-R label, Metronomicon Audio, are celebrating ten years as a band by playing through big parts of their catalogue, starting at the beginning, before they’ll release a new album titled Repulsive Force sometime this fall.
In the beginning, the band didn’t have any members at all. Today, the band has ten members, and in some live situations they’re augmented by additional musicians, forming an ensemble of as many as fifteen members. They describe their music as a mixture of musical styles from near and distant hemispheres, all relative to which hemisphere the listener might be situated. The sound has elements of both balkan folk music and arabian funk, as well as progressive rock (without the rock), disco (without the mirrorballs) and free jazz (without the jazz) and it’s all neatly merged together in their complex yet hummable pop tunes.
Klak Tik comes from the Faroe Islands, which is quite a unique place. For those who don’t know, it’s an island group located between Scotland and Iceland. Even to this day it’s still part of the kingdom of Denmark. People might be familiar with the folk artist Teitur who is also native to the islands.
Candy Claws is a duo from Fort Collins, Colorado. They spent their first two years as a band writing and recording their first album. Which in their words was their “musical companion” to Rachel Carson’s book called “The Sea Around Us”. They describe Carson’s book as a non-fiction scientific book “imbued with beauty and mystery, written in such elegant prose it feels more like poetry, a “hymn to the sea”. A hymn to the sea is quite a fitting expression to use here too since the album contains recorded sounds from different shores around in the world. From the seas of Italy to the Philippines. The band have acknowledged how this might sound like a gimmick but they feel it added a personal quality since it was recorded at places that were dear to them. It is hard to dismiss the creativity from these two.