Video Vacuum - Angel Olsen, Tropical Strength, Gentlemen, The Entrance Band

Final week of work for the year; Australia wins the first Ashes Test - it's a pretty good place to be for me right now. I still have a mountain of work to get through though, and hence the procrastination. So - let's have at the vids!



Angel Olsen is a beguiling chanteuse. Firstly due to her musical endeavours up til now have involved skeletal, atmospheric, cavernous folk, all shadows, smoke and mirrors. Secondly because the first cut from her upcoming album is the complete opposite of that. 'Forgiven/Forgotten' is two minutes of chugging rock, Olsen's vocals strong and bold, the video a frenetic edit of car window views. It's not a total backflip - the 'Sweet Dreams' single from earlier this year was a haunting number with a more prevalent guitar, but Olsen is more operatic there - it feels particular and staged. It's light years away. It's bizarre, because I love Olsen's old stuff (especially her album on Bathetic Records, Half Way Home) - and yet I love this track. Guess I just love Angel Olsen. The new album Burn Your Fire For No Witness will be out early next year on Jagjaguwar and Dead Oceans - can't wait.



Here's some Aussie dudes making a lysergic number with birds chirping in the background, a mega-slowed down video of a guy falling into a wake pool by the sea and ink dispelling into water. It reminds me a bit of Snowman at their lightest at the beginning, then becomes spun out wasteland of nude swimming and barbecues. Tropical Strength is their name (you know, after the insect repellent?) and 'Wake In Fright' is the song's name (you know, like the gritty outback existential nightmare novel written by Kenneth Cook, or the film directed by a young Bruce Beresford?). It's all weird - and fucking amazing. I really need to see this band, stat.



London band Gentlemen aren't usually my kind of band. 'Late Nacht' is an OK song too, don't get me wrong. But it's this film clip that gets me listening to the song over and over. The screaming and feverish drumming? Then the slip into a hypercoloured set of landscapes? It's pretty genius in my opinion. Bashing skin as catharsis. True that.


Spider from Paz Lenchantin on Vimeo.

Now I'm probably being blasphemous here, but I knew very little about Los Angeles' The Entrance Band before I saw this clip for 'Spider' - and I still know very little. All I know is that this song is a pretty good slice spaced-out and decadent garage pop, and the film clip - all arthouse surrealist noir, arachnid nightmares, Bunuel masturbation - is even better. I'm keen to check out their new album Face The Sun, if that's any consolation.

NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

Burying Strangers, Claiming Victory

Exciting news week, methinks! First up today is the news that A Place To Bury Strangers are set to release their new LP, Victory, June 11 through Dead Oceans. It will be their first album with new bassist Dion (last seen in The D4), and shows a shift in sonic dexterity that will surely divide fans, but I think it opens up a plethora of opportunities The new single is 'You Are The One', and it starts off moody and jangling, down a sleek monochrome hallway before exploding in your face, the closest you can get to a 4D aural experience. Seriously, get some wicked headphones and plug into this, see if it doesn't forge itself onto your eardrums.



A Place To Bury Strangers - You Are The One

I mentioned a while back that APTBS phoenixed out of the death of a band called Skywave, and the other band to do the same was Ceremony (not Rohnert Park and Zoo Ceremony - these guys have nary a hardcore bone in their bods). The similarities are rife. Well, there is obviously no bad blood between them, as they have this ltd edition 7" split with each other! Out on Famous Class Records, expect this to fly out the window, so buy it here.

Gauntlet Hair Go Chillwave On The Top Bunk

You've gotta give it to Gauntlet Hair - despite their constant pigeonholing, the Denver duo refuse to be taken seriously. Latest track 'Top Bunk' is impressive in its innate ability to capture the shimmering insularity of the "chillwave" movement (I shall refrain from this abhorrent name from here on out) whilst remaining solely live instrument based, and wearing their Animal Collective thinking caps for all to see. The skewering of the coastal sounds is of particular note. Now, I haven't heard their self titled debut (on Dead Oceans) yet - I know, I'm a bad person - but with this twist in the tale track, I'm sure their noisy pop has many other trajectories on which to travel. I think I will try to find this record today...

Gauntlet Hair - Top Bunk

Burying Strangers Beyond The Wall

We, along with just about everybody, loves A Place To Bury Strangers' 2009 LP Exploding Head. Hell, I played the Dinosaur Hunt light gun arcade game with former bassplayer Jono at ATP the very night this blog came to be! But since then it has been kinda quiet. Now they have announced February's launch of EP Onwards to the Wall, their first release since leaving Mute Records for Dead Oceans. The incredible noisy shoegazers (complete with new bassist Dion, formerly of cool Ramones-obsessed Kiwi band The D4)have done everything behind the scenes in order to bring these new tracks to light, which pretty much ensures it will be loud as fuck and just as exhilarating.

A Place To Bury Strangers - So Far Away

What's In The Box, Akron/Family?

Portland, Oregon’s favourite psychedelic freak-folk noiseniks Akron/Family have carved out a very unconventional musical path since their self-titled debut. My first introduction to them was the track 'Running, Returning', which was on a Spunk Records EP sampler. Then when I went to purchase Akron/Family, I was perplexed by the plaintive ambiance that was spat back out at me. It wouldnt be until I heard 'The Rider (Dolphin Song)' from 2006's Meek Warrior, before I would quickly revisit the band and henceforth become a fan.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of frustration with Akron/Family, not half because they can be incredibly unconventional and obtuse. Still, their creative output is impressive, and some 6 years later, with segues into folk strumming, experimental glitches and sprawling bursts of guitar abandon, they have provided the world with their second self-titled release, with the ambiguous subheading The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Their record label, Dead Oceans, put out in their press release a bizarre notice that the first copies of this album arrived at their offices in a brown cardboard box with SHINJU TNT and AK DETROIT scrawled on it. From a short note and a video that arrived days later, it becomes "apparent" that the album was written in a cabin built on the side of Mt Meakan, an active volcano in Akan National Park on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. It was then recorded in an abandoned train station in Detroit, after a year out studying Bent Acid Punk Diamond fuzz and Underground Japanese noise cassettes, then chopped up their results into thousands of minute imperceptible samples interlaid with fuzzed-out rerecordings...

Whether you believe the elongated, secretive and surreal genesis of this album or not (also including leaking the album themselves in a looped, sampled and slowed down fashion so as to seriously confuse file-sharers worldwide), the end result is something that has managed to bridge all of the more out-there components of the Akron/Family aesthetic whilst making their best effort yet to bridge the mainstream with the obscure - and its this eclecticism that makes S/T II very nearly a resounding success.

Starting with ‘Silly Bears’, we are thrown into a joyous musical rocket ship that hurtles towards an ever-expanding sun – it is jubilant, infectious, and teetering on wanton self-destruction with its distorted effects, guitars and strange vocal harmonies (alongside lyrics about fun-loving bears). This is the best introduction to Akron/Family in general and S/T II in particular – there is verve, quirks, space and a pervading sense of silliness throughout. We have emotive atmospherics (‘Island’), Devendra Banhart via The Black Keys (‘So It Goes’), shoegaze via Vampire Weekend (‘Another Sky’), bizarre vowel harmonizing (‘A AAA O A WAY’) – and that’s only the first half of the record! You name it, its here – garage hoedowns, 60s elegiac pop, dream pop, blues rock… However, there are no pretensions here – Akron/Family are just ambitious and fit to bursting with musical ideas that they attempt to shoehorn into any given musical mould. It shouldn’t work, yet this menagerie does work in myriad ways. A flawed, yet fundamentally fun, release.

Akron/Family II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT is out now.

Akron/Family - Silly Bears

Akron/Family - Island

To Akron Family Or Not To Akron Family?

Wow. My first listen to this had me scratching my freshly shaven face in bemusement (which is a bemusing gesture in and of itself). My second listen had me scratching my newly hewn (and instantly disliked) military-styled noggin. Ive always thought that Akron/Family were a group that have not garnered the recognition they have rightly deserved. Managing to swing from Animal Collective sonic pop abuse to pure psychedelic guitar sprawl, with various folky philanderings in between, it may be their strength (colouring various genres with a trademark zeal) that has kept them in the darkened corners. And their newie, S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT, is NOT going to be the album that shoots them into the stratosphere. Unless by stratosphere I mean the outer reaches of human drone consciousness – then, they may have marked themselves new uncharted terrain. For Shinju (as the album will be referred to for the rest of this, and any subsequent, posts) is a slowed down methadone nightmare of a dreamstate...

Or is it? It seems that the initial version of Shinju that came out on the eve of 2011's inception was a warped remix loop of the album, leaked by the band themselves. Which makes sense in retrospect (and also proves my friend Dan cannot be trusted with his 'here's some albums that are awesome and are soooooooooooooo legit!' schtick...). Then the news that Akron/Family are having a listening party for the album in Northern Ohio this saturday - if you're nearby and are keen to get first dibs way earlier than the rest (Shinju aint released in the UK until March), check out deets here.

So maybe they will get the recognition they deserve? Its hard to say. But if you so feel, hunt the internet for the alternate version (if thats what it actually is - the guys have done enough subterfuge to have me still quite confused). Here is 'Silly Bearz' from the album, in the remix mode and as a live offering - can you spot the difference?

Shinju is out on Dead Oceans Records March 14 in the UK, February 8th elsewhere...

NB - if this isnt the true album, I still think its a good drone piece - so win win!

Akron/Family - Silly Bearz

Akron/Family - Silly Bears (live)

PS Since writing this Akron/Family have dropped the first single from the 'real' album - so here is 'So It Goes', followed by its droned counterpart.

Akron/Family - So It Goes

Akron/Family - So Tis Goes ('fake' version)