Today's Swell Tune: Creep Me Out

• Band: Ruby Coast
• Album: Whatever This Is (download it free from their website)
• From: Aurora, Ontario, Canada
• Sound: Like Vampire Weekend has been listening to a lot of The Jam; rock
• Website: rubycoast.bandcamp.com
• Social: facebook, twitter

Today's Swell Tune: Old Flames

Jeremy Lee Given - Old Flames by Jeremy Lee Given

• Artist: Jeremy Lee Given
• Album: Old Flames (available free on bandcamp)
• From: Knoxville, Tennessee United States
• Sound: A lo-fi Band of Horses that doesn't annoy me; indie pop/rock
• Website: http://jeremyleegiven.tumblr.com/
• Social: facebook

Today's Swell Tune: Top of the Morning

Top Of The Morning (D. E. Healey) by MrShuffleupagus

• Artist: D.E. Healey (by way of The Wiggly Tendrils)
• Album: Tendrils in Space
• From: Philadelphia, United States
• Sound: If this doesn't make you smile as your alarm, good luck with your soullessness; micro pop
• Website: http://thewigglytendrils.blogspot.com/
• Social: facebook
• Download Free: from bandcamp

A Complete King of Limbs Cover Already Happened, and I'm Even a Little Late With It.

Apparently there's already a cover of Radiohead's less than week-old King of Limbs album. It's the work of Robotanists who challenged themselves to put together the entire eight-song effort within 24 hours of the album release. It's a fun project, if a clear publicity stunt. But consider this: I am in Moscow, you are wherever you are, and suddenly we're both listening to this band from LA.  So points for efficiency. And I have to say it's not half bad, given the timeframe.  



You can download the whole thing free from bandcamp.

ROBOTANISTS does The King of Limbs -In 24 Hours- LOTUS FLOWER by Mr. Shuffleupagus

Today's Swell Tune: Staring at the Ceiling

Staring at the Ceiling (arrange) by MrShuffleupagus

• Artist: arrange
• Album: Quiet State
• From: Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States
• Sound: You are obliged to stare pensively out the window of a moving vehicle; ambient indie shoegaze
• Website: http://malcomlacey.com/
• Contact: facebook
• Download Free: on bandcamp (whole album)

New Russian Apartments EP: Share It or Die in a Week. My Logic is Flawless.

The Russian Apartments have been featured on this blog twice before: once as a mysterious single, and again in an interview.  So I wasn't about to let the release of the new EP, The Last Last You, go without mention. 


Once again, New-Hampshire-based Mike Caulfield brings synthy, subtle bedroom pop that somehow manages ethereal without sounding cold and retro without sounding "done." It's haunting, quirky and as good under the microscope as it is for ambient listening. If introspective ghosts could play synthesizers, it would sound like this.


So here's my theory: maybe they do.  Because Mike is still a pretty mysterious character, if you think about it (who actually lives in Keene, New Hampshire?)  Oh, and he specifically requests sharing over payment on bandcamp and everyone knows ghosts don't need money. Yet he really wants you to share the album.  


Huh. Well I get what's going on here. I've seen The Ring.  So share it, or in exactly one week you will die of... being scared? (Is that what that was? Can that even happen?) Whatever--even if you don't, it would totally be worth it. This album is boss.


The Last Last You is 100% free on bandcamp, and you can keep up with The Russian Apartments via the website and facebook. You've already heard Gods and Miss McGinty's Ghost (coughspookynamescough). I also highly recommend the title track:

The Last Last You by The Russian Apartments

The Black Keys vs. Big Boi: Wick-It the Instigator Can Probably Cook Better than I Can, Too

For the record, I am a good cook. Thing is, I rarely remember food until I'm already starving, so by then it's more of a laboratory situation. Crackers with salad dressing? Done it.  Mustard on toast? Sadly, yes. Popcorn with liquorice?
Yeah... I may or may not actually buy the ingredients for that one, now. Awhile back I got it in my head that savoury yogurt should exist, but as it turns out, the fact that it doesn't has nothing to do with a lack of ingenuity in the yogurt industry and everything to do with the reality that yogurt and condiments should never, ever meet. 


So while mixing two good things together might seem logical, it doesn't always make for a gorgeous lovechild. Sometimes you just get relish curdling tomorrow's breakfast.


Luckily some people know better when it comes to experimentation and you can count Memphis-based Wick-It the Instigator among them. He took two of last year's favourite albums-- Big Boi's Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, and The Black Key's Brothers--and mashed them into The Brothers of Chico Dusty: Big Boi vs. The Black Keys. And it's hard to imagine fans of Big Boi, The Keys, or both not digging it.


It's not unlike The Black Key's Blackrok project, so the idea isn't totally out of left field, but let's give credit where credit is due.--the thing is pretty damn tight. Impressive enough in fact, to have gotten the attention of Big Boi who has plans to work with Wick-It in 2011. So what we have here is less horseradish yogurt and more popquorice/lickorn. Or something you like. Whatever. It's always about you.


The entire album is available for free from bandcamp. Nice.

The Brothers of Chico Dusty (Big Boi vs. The Black Keys) by wick-it

In Case You Don't Get to Eastern Europe Too Often: Some Polish Indie

A few weeks ago I posted one track--one--from Polish band The Car is On Fire. Then I went to work. 


I came back after three hours (yes, I work three hours at a time; no, I'm not a hooker) to find that my daily number of hits had doubled compared to the average. Actually, it showed that I had received 300 times more visitors from Poland on that day than I'd had since this site began. This led me to believe that either The Car is on Fire has ridiculously large, supportive families, or the Polish music community is very tight. Factoring in the added e-mail influx, I had to presume the latter, which was confirmed by Lora Lie's Mateusz Romanowski's admission that "(The) Polish alternative scene (is) rather small...Most of these bands are... friends."


Small, yes, and not very international. When a foreigner thinks of Poland, they probably think of polka bands or death metal--indie music doesn't really spring to mind first. Certainly didn't for me. So it was great to be sent so many links to so much music I never would have found on my own. 


After dozens of Polish bands, I may not be an expert but I've got a few things figured out. First, the Polish sound tends toward the dark and moody--and this is from someone in Russia, remember. But then the same mood also allows for an intensity and grit that western indie can be a little shy of these days. 

Pictured: brooding, gritty intensity..

This post is a scrapbook of my first musical trip to the Poland scene. Obviously not everything sent to me could make it, but then no one sent me cash bribes, either (this is from someone living in Russia, remember). 


Some things I dug:

• Crab Invasion was introduced to me as a band for Modest Mouse/The Wrens fans. I'm adding a dash of new wave to that description and a bit of grime. Personally, I just love how every raucous noise has its place. It'll makes you want to dance down in front of the stage. (myspace):

 Crab Invasion (W STUDIO), на Myspace Music

• When We Were Very Young, took their band name from the A.A. Milne collection of the same name, and their songs from the poems. They're Floydish psychadelic/experimental but bill themselves as "children's music", which is either tongue in cheek or proof that Polish kids are way, way fucking cooler than kids everywhere else.  I couldn't find a way to embed, but their playlist can be found here and it's worth listening to even if you don't have any offspring. Or, if you want, you can just play it at random neighbourhood children.  (myspace)

• On the folksier side, check out Jacek Kulesza Trio; Suitcase and Tambourine. The name is equal parts non-sequitor and very sensible in that there is no trio (just Jacek) but he does indeed play a suitcase and tambourine. Yep--plays the suitcase. (website)

Jacek KULESZA trio "Friend" from t.s. on Vimeo.

• Lora Lie is an uncompromisingly depressed garage band. Their own myspace page describes their music as "melodramatic (pop) songs" and that right there is bloody fantastic. And right on-trend with hints of grunge. Update: download Lora Lie's Rewind EP here.

Another Way (Lora Lie) by MrShuffleupagus

• Finally, I'll direct you to Karate Free Stylers whose neo-shoegaze-new-wave-noise EP At Least We Are Able to Breathe is so completely entrancing, it's a sin that seemingly no one outside Poland has heard it before. Go download it from their bandcamp now, before it stops being free. Go.

At Least We Are Able To Breathe (Karate Free Stylers) by MrShuffleupagus

Today's Swell Tune: Up and Down

Up and Down (The Conduits) by MrShuffleupagus

• Artist: The Conduits
• Album: The Conduits (EP)
• From:  Toronto, Canada/ San Francisco, United States (they've never met in person)
• Sound: Like a number from "Regina Spektor and the Magical Music Box"; experimental pop
• Website: http://theconduits.bandcamp.com/album/the-conduits-ep
• Download: from bandcamp (name your price)

Musicians are People Too: Interview with The Russian Apartments' Mike Caulfield (Exclusive)

If you're a regular here, you know that most mornings I post "Today's Swell Tune," some track in heavy rotation on my current personal playlist. What you don't know is that the entire feature came about so I could put up songs with no accompanying article. Sure, it's convenient in cases of all night masked crime fighting  drug-and-hooker binges laziness, but initially it was devised as a means to feature The Queen of America despite having zero information about The Russian Apartments. 

Then lo and behold (what?) I was contacted by Mike Caulfield who is, for all intents and purposes, The Russian Apartments.  Our mystery man informed me that he was neither running from the law nor in the witness relocation program--he just had no idea so many people had been listening. 

How is that possible? Well, Mike sat down with me to talk about it. Just kidding. We emailed across 7,000 km, eight time zones, and one and a half holidays to discuss trends in music, his new single, and why people scattered across the globe suddenly want to know who he is.

Mr.Shuffleupagus:

You've been a bit of a mystery since the summer--there was nothing about you other than a download for quite awhile. What's the story there?  

Mike Caulfield:
Since about 2008 I've been putting up music I make on the Internet as part of one project or another, and I've just gotten used to the idea that I was releasing to a very small set of friends and fans and fellow artists.

So Joe Andreoli (of I Am This Big Black Cloud) and I put the Double Phantasm split up on Bandcamp, I think in August, and we kept saying crap, we should send this out to the music blogs, and shop it around to labels. But we kept putting it off because a) we work day jobs, b) we also have personal lives, and c) given a choice between marketing our music and making more music, we generally end up making more music. 

How did you end up with listeners all over the world? Would you call this an accidental sort of success?

Right, I really have no idea. Sometime in early December I'm sitting in a bar with friends, and someone says -- "hey I have a story for you". He says, "I'm over my girlfriend's house and we're listening to a playlist someone forwarded her, and your song came up." And he starts telling me that he likes that video I made with the monkey. And I say -- "Um, what video with the monkey?" I didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about. But I went home and found the music was up on last.fm, on BIRP, in these various mixtapes and blogs, and that someone had made a video for it.

So yeah, accidental sounds right... I'm absolutely shocked. It's bizarre to see people in Italy and Serbia adding you to their favorites list.

This is never easy: How would you describe your sound?

Dyschronic, I suppose. There's some other labels that for what one song or another sounds like: retrofuturism, glo-fi, hypnagogia/hypnogogic pop, hauntology, bedroom psych... But if you look for something that holds (everything) together, I think it's a fascination with time out of joint. I'm really interested in how we live in a post-historical world. If you fell asleep in 1973 and woke up to the radio in 1983, you'd be like, holy shit, the future. If you fell asleep in 1993 and woke up to the radio in 2003 or 2010 how would you know?

It''s tempting to just blame that on the radio and the record companies, but I'm not entirely sure there's a future left to go to - at least in a modern sense. All our possible futures turn out to be alternate histories, and we're endlessly looping back into the past to find small spaces that weren't fully fleshed out when we rushed past them. I wish there was a term for people that deal with that in an intentional way -- how to mine the past without turning everything into one big hunk of present. But I don't have a term for that yet. It's very close to retrofuturism, I think, the music of the future that never came to be... music of the past that never happened.

What do you think the most exciting trend in music is? And the worst? What trends do you predict?

Well, this will seem really biased, but I think the most interesting things are all these things around dyschronia, time out of joint. And there's this other set of related things that revolve around presence and the lack of patina in modern life.


The patina thing is interesting.Technology makes presence of the past as real as the now. Maybe more real. That Beatles song that used to have that peculiar 60s mix, that record with the scratches that reminded you John Lennon had been gunned down and Harrison had been taken by cancer -- that's been replaced by an immortal remastered digital file that sounds perfectly at home next to the latest Katy Perry tune. There's no evidence of time passing, of distance, of the fact this was recorded on a particular day with particular equipment, we're given this as if it was released yesterday.

So there's this feeling of living in the infinitely reproducible and eternal digital present. Which seems like it should be an awesome thing, but it kind of sucks. A lot of these things around now are coping mechanisms -- cassette culture, lo-fi music, steampunk, maker fairs, various forms of retro-ism -- a lot of it is to escape from this eternal unbroken now. We want our transience back. 

Kids being born now, maybe they won't miss that sense of receding history, they'll just be born into this world where everything is now all at once. Me, I need my coping mechanisms. I need history, loss, absence. So I don't know what the trends will be, but I think they are going to continue to deal with this issue for at least a little bit. As for me, I'll be just taking whatever others come up with and trying to do it with a better hook.

With all the new attention are there any plans for a full-length album?

I actually have a dozen or so songs in the can, but I'm not happy with them. I haven't explored some of the style on More Than Passion enough yet, and I want to go back to that... I feel if I hit my groove I'll be releasing three or four EPs this year. We'll be releasing Double Phantasm on a limited run of 100 through Gnar Tapes in late winter/early Spring. If those clear fast there's probably more physical media in our future. 

Who are you listening to right now? 

Blank Dogs right now. A lot. Coma Cinema**--Mat has such a great sense of lyric and rhythm, he's like a young Ben Gibbard. It's songwriting as craft & architecture, which I'm always a sucker for. Dead Gaze and Nice Face. Bedroom electro-psych. That Nicole Kidman & Greenspon collab, Already Dead. 

I also go through phases where I listen to the Rubble Box Set incessantly, and I'm in one of those now. If you don't have this, you need to get it -- all these obscure lost singles from the late sixties, pop-psych, freakbeat, stuff released on limited pressings of 45s, financed by the bassist selling his Vespa or someone's Mom putting up the money. And early stuff from people you didn't know went back that far. 

What advice do you have for other DIY artists?

I'd say do it because you love to do it, not because you want to make it. Do it in a way that if you never find success you'll have no regrets. If you manage that, success is just an excellent day you have, and failure is impossible. If you're doing it staked out on some future massive win where you're making a living doing it, you're an idiot. 

And the Lightning Round:

Quick and honest--what's the last song you listened to?

Cloud Nothings, "Cool Kid"


What is the first album you ever owned? And the last album you got?

I bought the Kinks "One For The Road" at a yard sale. And immediately after answering these questions I'm going to order a 5 CD sampler pack from Bridgetown Records, which at $22 is unbeatable. 

Who is your favourite artist of all time?

Oh, geez. I used to say Dylan. I think that's still true, though maybe less so. I've got pretty traditional heroes -- Lennon, McCartney, Dylan, Bowie, Ray Davies. I think the main thing is I have to connect really deeply to the lyrics. 

I think the other thing I like about older heroes is when you pick one you are picking such a broad variety of music. I mean, Stuart Murdoch is probably a hero to me, but there's less variation in a decade of Belle and Sebastian than in a year of John Lennon. My modern heroes tend to be people that embrace a variety of styles, people who give you a bit of whiplash album to album, where you wonder what they are coming up with next.

Oh crap, this is lightning round, right?

Do you have a musical pet peeve? Something when you hear it, you turn off the music immediately?

You'd need days for me to catalog that. I have a lot. I suppose the big one is that fake gritty vocal style you'll hear in Nickleback, truck commercials, and various indie singer/songwriters. Gravel voice. If you sing like that I'm going to do more than turn off your song, I'm basically going to lose respect for you as a person. 

You are stranded during the zombie apocalypse with only three albums to listen to until the end of the earth. What are they?

If I had to survive with only three albums I'd do myself in. My weakness and my strength in music is I get bored really, really easy with stuff. 

MP3s: Death of the music industry or music industry wild west?

Hopefully both. 

Would you like to say hi to your mum/primary caregiver?

I'll say hi to my wife, who puts up with me moping when I can't find time to do music.  Or when I'm answering interview questions at breakfast.

----

A very big thanks to Mike for answering the questions, waxing awesome on the subject of musical patinas, and insulting Nickelback. And while this interview was the bees knees, I do have to admit I'm a little sad to let go of my visions of him as crazed brilliant recluse/serial killer/Batman. 

To contact Mike Caulfield/The Russian Apartments:
website
facebook
twitter
bandcamp

And here are the two latest releases, available from that bandcamp page:

Gods (The Russian Apartments) (Radio Edit) by MrShuffleupagus

Miss McGinty's Ghost by The Russian Apartments

**Mr Shuffleupagus notes that she was listening to Coma Cinema at the moment she read this sentence for the first time and was promptly freaked the fuck out.

Hi... They're In... Delaware: Mean Lady

R&B. Radio scans. Music boxes. Clapping. Tambourines. Beats. Ukelele. Samba. Psychedelia. Banjo. Birds. Bells. Rain. Shrieking children. Old-time piano. Sleigh bells. A choir. Electric guitar. Vintage strings. Laughter. Sweet, soulful female vocals. And something that sounds like hooves. 

In five songs.

If you assume it would be noisy and disorienting, you're obviously not Mean Lady. On their debut EP Kid Friendly, Katie Dill and Sam Nobles effortlessly mix all of it into an undeniably beautiful 23 minute span. 

I can't even mix a martini that doesn't taste like olive water.  

The duo from Newark, Delaware claim it all started as a hip-hop project. But experimentation and curiosity have clearly taken them far beyond that territory and into a world they've made up for themselves. The final result is a surprisingly listenable, dreamy work that unfolds like a sunny-day acid trip.

Take a hit below and then download free from bandcamp. 

**Note for those with musical ADD: Be sure to get past at least the one-minute mark for the full effect**

Lonely (Mean Lady) by Mr.Shuffleupagus

Indian Sun (Mean Lady) by Mr.Shuffleupagus

Mod is the New Lo-Fi: Introducing Chalk and Numbers

For the past couple of years, indie pop has been all but dominated by a Beach Boysish retro sound, almost as though everyone stumbled across their dad's copy of Pet Sounds at the same time. And as much as I love The Drums, The Morning Benders, et cetera et cetera and so forth, I think I've had enough.  Time to move past the sunny, ultra low-fi bubblegum.  Trends, by their very nature, have to evolve.

Enter Brooklyn-based twosome Chalk and Numbers.  Their more sophisticated pop rides in on the same wave of heavy 60's nostalgia but moves the inspiration from west coast to east, swapping laid-back vibes for something more swinging. Think less LA and more NYC, when hep cats were hipsters and Greenwich was Williamsburg. Think pop art. Think turtlenecks. Think Beatle boots. Skinny suits. Mary Quant. Edie Sedgwick. Artists' lofts. Motown. Mod.

Yes. 

It's time to take production back up a notch.  This is shinier, sexier, and proves that pretending you don't care means you're trying way too hard.

They're giving it away, so get the entire EP for free here

He Knew (Chalk and Numbers) by Mr.Shuffleupagus

I Hope You Do (Chalk And Numbers) by Mr.Shuffleupagus

Formula of a Mashup: Girl Talk's All Day

Remember the movie Pretty in Pink? In case you don't care for John Hughes/were born in the 90's/have a penis, I'll run it down as painlessly as possible:

Andie (free spirit) + wrong side of the tracks + 1 alcoholic dad - 1 living mother + (2 boys' love ÷ 1 rich boy, 1 poor boy) + dramatic arguments x emotional climax ± rain = She finally gets to go to prom!

But poverty + quirkiness = homemade prom dress. Thus: mother's gown + conveniently like-coloured dress from boss ÷  tragic use of scissors = dress like a hobo drag queen's bindle if said drag queen were sponsored by the Pepto Bismol company.  Really, this dress may have singlehandedly ruined the film. It's lazy, ugly, confusing. It is the very definition of a bad, bad mashup.

And with that bizarre segue, I can say that Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) has developed a system far better than Andie's.  Relying on his tried and true "1 part hip hop +1part rock/pop ÷ instrumental track = album" formula, Gillis has just put out his fifth mashup, making him veritable master of genre.

But what was once formula might be getting formulaic.  Even Gillis shows signs of tiring; Feed the Animals and Night Ripper both felt tighter than All Day which starts strong but slowly loses steam after the halfway mark, finally winding down into an inexplicably slow, unmixed heap of John Lennon. It's sagging like Andie' dress around this point.

If All Day has something over the albums before it's the material it samples.  In addition to the expected base of Ludacris, Run DMC, 2Live Crew, Notorious BIG, 50 Cent, Ice Cube, JayZ, NWA, etc  Gillis throws in everything but the musical kitchen sink including Iggy Pop, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Lady Gaga, Blue Oyster Cult, Kylie Minogue, The Rolling Stones, U2, Simon and Garfunkel, Rage Against the Machine, The Talking Heads, Beck, Cream...I've not even come close to naming half of them. Some will argue that it's unfocused but you can't deny that it's more fun, relying less on beats and allowing melodies to win out occasionally. For someone like me, who's less about the hip-hop, it's a nice switch.  And at the end of the day, there is really nothing to argue over, here. These are mashups. It's musical candy. It would take a special kind of buzzkill to get too stressed about it. It's supposed to be fun and fun it is.

As per usual, Girl Talk is making the entire thing available at Illegal Art, meaning even if you're poor like Andie you can still get it because it's completely and totally free.

(Some samples of the entire 58 minute block:)

Let It Out (Girl Talk) by Mr. Shuffleupagus

Steady Shock (Girl Talk) by Mr. Shuffleupagus

Expand Your Music Library Without Money, Theft or Effort: Woozy Viper

The morning after a party is predictable. Your head is splitting and your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth. Your clothes and dignity are places unknown. There is at least one thing on your sheets that does not belong there and you wonder if detergent/cab fare would get it out with minimal effort.
Stumbling into the living room you find the stragglers either too drunk or too hardcore to have left and you rattle empties until these debauched leftovers blindly grope their way out of the flat trailing shame and alcoholic vapour behind them.

But then there's that one guy. You know him but not all that well. Maybe you worked together three jobs ago or he knows your brother, something like that. But however he got there, two things are sure to be true about him: he lives way the fuck across town and he has no ride back.

This guy is spending the afternoon with you.

In an attempt to shake him you meet friends for brunch. He tags along. At the restaurant someone mentions something everyone should check out back at the apartment, and somehow he's right there with you. But now you're enjoying him. He's harmless. He's funny. He's slightly mental. But he's charming in his own "maybe-he doesn't even-have-a-home" way. Yeah he can hang out with your crew. Why not?

And then before you know it, there's a keg and a whole new party at your house. You weren't planning on it but the idea somehow rose organically out of drunken conversations at the midget strip club, and now the police are knocking because neighbours have complained and there's apparently some kind of law about farm animals in apartment buildings. How any of this came about is now something of a blur, but one thing is for sure: it never could have happened without that guy. You don't do stuff like this, but that guy does.

Woozy Viper's first album is the musical version of that guy.

At some point Luke and Mitch Meseke of NYC decided to stop fussing around, stop trying to reinvent the record, and start making rock and roll of the classic 60's variety.  It doesn't sound brand new, but that's a good thing. It's not mixed quite right, but that's a good thing too. This is an album for the purists. You can almost smell the dust and beer of dingy roadhouses in every riff. It's a gritty, boozy and refreshingly uncomplicated rock n' roll album made by and for people who yearn for the days when rock was about cigarettes, bottles of whisky and dirty stories about groupies, not neuroses and antidepressants.  It's two parts Lou Reed, one part young Stones, one part The Kinks, and a dash of Jim Morrison served over a Hunter S. Thompson road trip. 


And the best part is that you can get the whole album for free here. So you should go do that now.


WV01 LookOut by Mr. Shuffleupagus

WV06 DirtyRat by Mr. Shuffleupagus