February 2012
24 posts
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Andrew Bird
Chicago’s multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird graces our pages today in anticipation of his new album, Break It Yourself, out on Mom+Pop Records in the US and Bella Union in the UK.
Bird was destined for an illustrious musical career having been trained in the Suzuki method from the age of four, with violin as his primary instrument, and initially sought to showcase his considerable skills...
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Patten
London-based producer Patten (another enigmatic figure whose real name is apparently so well-guarded that even his emails are signed off with the single letter ‘D’) released his stunning debut album GLAQJO XAACSSO on the quickly-maturing No Pain In Pop label at the end of last year. A disorientating update on the classic sound design of late 80’s / early 90’s Detroit and...
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Naked On The Vague
Where previous material from Sydney’s Naked On The Vague put them in the same raucous, post-Stooges garage camp occupied by the Von Bondies or The Icarus Line (albeit with a idiosyncratic laid-back coolness in a Velvet Underground vein), their new material, going by the stunning leaked track ‘High Noon’ (listen below) sees their sonic palette expand into noisy, drifting...
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Power Animal
Squealer will never complain of being sick again. Philadelphia’s Keith Hampson, the driving force behind Power Animal, spent ten months in and out of hospital and, although too fatigued to play his instruments, he still managed to piece together the songs for his latest EP, Exorcism, which came out on Tuesday.
In spring 2009 Hampson re-worked years of bedroom recordings with the help of...
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Dustin Wong
In recent weeks the blogosphere has been lit by fireworks of praise for Dustin Wong’s second album on Thrill Jockey, Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads, so we thought we’d throw our hat into the ring and add a bit of news which should negate the occasional “one trick pony” tags that have been unfairly slung his way.
Formerly of Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine,...
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Bass Drum of Death
Last year’s Fat Possum signings Bass Drum of Death released their storming, fuzzy debut LP GB City late last year - a tremolo’d, distorted exploration through the imagination and talents of Oxford, MS-based band leader (and former Fat Possum employee) John Barrett.
Now a two-piece, with Barrett freed from the drumkit, the chords can be dirtier and messier, the vocals can be wrought...
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Bill Orcutt
Though presenting new music by new artists generally requires a relative inclination to the young, it is just as important for us at Squealer to include experienced, weathered musicians who contribute to the “new music” landscape in (necessarily) different ways, but with just as much vigour, just as much excitement and just as much exploration.
Flying a particularly greying,...
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Louis Weeks
The emerging talent that is Baltimore’s Louis Weeks catches our ear today as he steps above the crowd of folk-tinged singer/songwriters by combining his skills of traditional melodic songcraft and electronic composition.
Prior to 2011, much of his work seems to have been fairly standard acoustic fare, not bad, but not too remarkable either. Last year, however, things began to pick up:...
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Dead Fader
Brighton / Berlin’s Dead Fader seem so intent on destroying speakers that the black-line waveforms SoundCloud feeds out to visually accompany their tracks resemble rolling pins, or sausages, or whatever antisocially-obese object you could care to name, representing a mix so loud that it only just matches the limitations of the software. Even to the point at which their label specifically...
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Perfume Genius
Back in 2010 Mike Hadreas, also known as Perfume Genius, delivered a debut album of lo-fi, intensely intimate songs based mainly around voice, pads and piano that, although the lyrics were occasionally hidden behind the production, garnered comparisons with Sufjan Stevens in its tenderness and evidence of undeniable talent. Not bad for a first record.
Now, less than a week away from his...
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Andrea Belfi
Milan’s Andrea Belfi - an accomplished electro-acoustic composer and percussionist - has already made a mark on the ‘indie’ world with his collaborations with David Grubbs, but with Wege, his debut LP for the solid Melbourne-based ROOM40 label, the crossover seems incontestably achieved. This is also aided by the inclusion of Machinefabrik and Greg Haines on his new record.
...
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To What Strange Place
An unusual update today. Not a band or an artist as such - except for his creative mastery and careful selection of sounds - but a musical curator. A narrator, rather than a director, but just as valuable and just as accomplished.
Currently visiting the UK (from Baltimore) on a listening/lecture tour, ethnomusicologist and serial uncoverist Ian Nagoski is commonly regarded as the foremost...
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Here We Go Magic
Brooklyn’s Here We Go Magic are back with a third album, A Different Ship, due to be released later in the year through Secretly Canadian, from which today’s featured track is taken.
Starting as the solo project of artist-turned-musician Luke Temple, Here We Go Magic’s first, self-titled LP was recorded on a 4-track with little more than a tom, synth, mic and guitar to create...
Watchgalapagospresents:
Frightened Rabbit - My Backwards Walk
Scott from Frightened Rabbit came along to the Lick frozen yogurt shop to play some songs, and we came along to record them! This track is from the excellent album ‘Midnight Organ Fight’.
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Young Heel
“Young Heel makes experimental madrugada pop music. Brooklyn, NY.” When that’s all you’ve got to go on when researching a band it’s fairly obvious which word is going to stick out. Thankfully, Young Heel haven’t taken any left-field inspiration from Norwegian rock band Madrugada, or even Portugal’s moustachioed 1975 Eurovision Song Contest entry of the...
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Doldrums
Canadian Eric Woodhead might be seen - if a little unimaginatively - as a descendent of Australia’s legendary re-splicers The Avalanches. A haywire but detailed joyride through Bollywood scores, funk, electro-beat, R&B and Casio-chic, Woodhead’s Doldrums project first reached the outside world’s ears on a split 7” with Squealer-favourites DD/MM/YYYY. Now the proud...
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Slugabed
Effortlessly capturing Ninja Tune’s spirit and personality in one driving, beaty, energetic, articulate and stirring swoop, Greg Feldwick and his Slugabed project always seemed destined to land with that label.
Feldwick - a 20-something producer from Brighton, UK - released his Sun Too Loud, Turn It Off EP through Ninja Tune in October 2011. A vibrant menage of throbbing basslines and...
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Sealings
Brighton’s Sealings write dark, brooding, black-as-black pop songs drowning in distortion, played at an almost antisocial volume and seemingly written for no one but themselves. Antisocial may in fact be the perfect word to describe the band as, when Squealer saw them as a two piece, front men Liam and Michael were as interesting and engaging to watch as the drum machine that accompanied...
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Creepoid
A fitting name for a musical entity that creeps between dark, acoustic folk and Velvet Underground-style fuzz-jams, Philadelphia’s Creepoid released their debut full-length online a whole year ago. Slowly-surfacing new music, however, reveals a re-emergence of a band who appeared to only narrowly miss their chance at huge recognition with their stunning Horse Heaven LP.
Horse...
January 2012
19 posts
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Sisterland
Coming to our attention via FatCat’s top-drawer demo collection, London’s (or maybe Leicester’s, or maybe Oxford’s, depending on the source) Sisterland revel in a gloriously messy, big-hearted noise, covered in fuzz but allowing an underlying sincerity and expressiveness. Taking Joy Division’s taught desperation and uprightness, combined with the tightness of Fire...
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Yppah
Another offering from the Ninja Tune offices today as we bring you D.Song, the pre-release track from Eighty One of Long Beach resident Yppah, aka Joe Corrales Jr.
With a history playing guitar and bass in high school rock bands before turning to mashups and being part of turntablist group The Truth, this is Yppah’s third studio album and features a number of collaborations with Seattle...
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The Men
Today marks the first time we’ve (knowingly) featured the same artist in two individual daily updates. This is partly testament to The Men’s astonishingly quick songwriting turnaround, partly because Squealer is - surprisingly - now old enough to be able to span multiple stations of a single band’s back catalogue, and partly because The Men are firm favourites of ours who fully...
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Blacklisters
Leeds’ Blacklisters popped up on our radar again last week with the preview of forthcoming single ‘Trickfuck’ but, for this writer, Dirty Three’s announcement and witnessing the blistering Shield Your Eyes live show took precedence.
Blacklisters don’t bring anything blindingly original to the UK hardcore scene but everything they do is pitched perfectly between...
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Raffertie
Never straying too far from our daily artist updates, Ninja Tune again demonstrate their quality-assured and highly selective A&R policy with new signing Raffertie.
Producer / sound designer Raffertie (aka 24-year old, London-based Benjamin Stefanski) will shortly release his thumping, mesmerising EP Mass Appeal on Ninja Tune, following a set of remixes for Domino, Moshi Moshi and One...
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Hotel Mexico
Geographically inaccurate, difficult to Google, Kyoto’s Hotel Mexico offer as their mission statement “pop music to make girl happy in the world”, which elucidates just as much as their cryptic and / or Japanese language promo literature. Hence, somewhat frustratingly, the lack of biographical and background information in our write-up.
Luckily, there is a lot to like about...
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Shield Your Eyes
Shield Your Eyes are one of those bands that work unenviably hard at everything they do and one of these days, one of these albums, the wider music audience will wake up and take notice of what has been right under their noses all this time. Back on tour and with new album Volume 4 available now on Function Records, we feel guilty for enjoying them for so long without singing their praises...
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Evian Christ
Evidently revelling in his anonymity, the bizarre-hop / space-beat producer Evian Christ’s musical output is traceable exclusively by his infrequent, irregular uploads to his youtube channel. There is some speculation that Evian Christ is a “known” producer, leaking out hobbyist productions under a pseudonym for interest’s sake; further sources still suggest that Evian...
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Dirty Three
A first record in seven years can be a tentative step for many bands, for some it can be a delicate retreading of recently healed wounds, for others a desire to reignite a dwindling creative flame. Thankfully, every member of Dirty Three has been more than busy since 2005’s Cinder, guitarist Mick Turner has built a reputation as a Melbourne-based artist while running Anchor & Hope and...
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Dead Gaze
Sitting somewhere neatly between Cure-ist synth-goth-pop-noir and a dark Bauhaus / Big Black-esque punk vitriol, Mississippi’s R. Cole Furlow and his Dead Gaze project pack a heavy, concise punch of hooks and garage vigour under a facade of swampy fuzz. Somewhere hidden amongst the swathes of noise and the laconic and Southern drawl is a real conviction; something that tellingly confesses...
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Mike Wexler
In his various jobs as a security guard, art handler and second-hand bookstore clerk (amongst others) Brooklyn’s Mike Wexler has had the time to think long and hard about exactly what he does and how to accomplish it. Back with a second LP almost two years in the making, what we’ve heard of Dispossession bears all the hallmarks of a true auteur, a singular vision planned...
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G. Green
Borne of the same twisted, fertile West Coast scene that produced Sic Alps, The Hospitals, Eat Skull, Burning Yellows and Tyvek among countless others, Sacramento’s G. Green operate on a simultaneously unusual and community-spirited plane. The band - a core boy/girl duo with a rotating cast of helpers - have already released a handful of limited EP’s and singles on several labels,...
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Laura Gibson
Amidst the hubub of excitement surrounding the official confirmation that two seminal bands will be reforming and performing this year, we could be forgiven for overlooking the rising tide of press supporting release of Laura Gibson’s second album, La Grande, the follow up to 2009’s Beast of Seasons. Thankfully we didn’t.
A comforting and comfortable work of Appalachian...
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David Bowie
In honour of his 65th birthday (but primarily of his incredible, consistent and invaluable contribution to music), today we happily bend Squealer’s “new band” ethos to feature David Bowie as our artist of the day.
Music would doubtlessly be a very different place without Bowie’s complex marrying of articulacy and pop music, of melody and sound-experimentation, of...
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Damned Dogs
Despite releasing a super-limited cassette on City Centre member Fred Thomas’ wonderful Life Like label - generally a sign of a band on the move - Ypsilanti, Michigan’s Damned Dogs and their brand of soporifically harsh, glittering noise-scapes have retained the enigmatic elusiveness that their music would probably suggest. A Google search reveals next to nothing, except that Damned...
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Kerouac
Ah that beautiful moment between when a band get a few good releases out in to the world and when they get written about and analysed and interviewed and chewed up. When all there is to know is the music. The rest is just window dressing.
So all we know about Kerouac, all we need to know, is that their three releases (EP, split with The Long Haul, split with Pariso) exhibit a furious, anarchic...
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Clams Casino
New Jersey’s Mike Volpe and his musical project Clams Casino present something of an enigma. Though Squealer is unlikely to be the place to find favourable references to Lil B and Soulja Boy, Clams Casino - with his quite stunning Instrumentals LP (released by Type Records last year) - gives us a reason to mention both in a slightly giddy, gushing light.
Volpe became a genuinely hot topic...
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Thao and Mirah/Evening Hymns
A happy new year to all! The date has changed but we’re still the same; appreciative of what the past has given us/grateful to see the back of it, apprehensive of what the future holds/greedy to embrace it. So as a product of and homage to the Janusian thinking this time of year brings, today’s article is a double header: one past, one future; one happy, one sad; one track, one video;...
December 2011
14 posts
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Squealer top ten of 2011 (part 2)
2011 hasn’t been the greatest year all round; economic meltdown, riots on the streets, ecological disasters and the travesty that is the Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration have all been billed as signs of the impending apocalypse but today we bring you ten records that have made this particular Squealer writer’s year that bit brighter through the fog of doom and gloom.
Without...
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Little Girls
Toronto’s Josh McIntyre, a.k.a Little Girls, has been making his own brand of scuzzed-out electro-pop since 2009, fusing elements of 80s post-punk with the new wave pop aesthetic under delicately placed yet suffocatingly thick layers of fuzz and reverb.
So far, so familiar. Yet what sets McIntyre apart from his peers, of which there are increasing numbers, is the inherent darkness and...
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Maria Minerva
London-based Estonian Maria Juur has the slightly unenviable honour of taking the penultimate “featured artist” slot of 2011. This is not to say, though, that the music she makes should suffer any similar such near-overlooking. A hazy, trippy, skewed, near-unhinged variation of MTV-pop, Maria Minerva has all the faded-memory qualities of a forgotten, warped, foreign-language hits...
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Soccer96
In lieu of writing about our almost uncontainable glee in hearing Bella Union’s news that Dirty Three will be releasing a new album in March, due to the lack of any pre-release material, we bring you the math/glitch/synth-pop/electro wizardry that is Soccer96.
Armed solely with a couple of Roland keyboards and a basic drum set-up, the Brighton/London-based duo create dizzyingly...
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Squealer top ten of 2011 (part 1)
2011 has been a good year for music. It was a good year to launch our Squealing endeavour, and December has been a good month for starting plans for bigger, bolder and brighter projects for 2012. So good, in fact, that we neglected this important rite of passage for music journalism until a relatively late point in the month.
So, part 1 of our staff end of year lists (stay tuned for the rest of...
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Keep Shelley in Athens
We intended to feature the newest addition to the ever-tasteful and ever-expanding Planet Mu roster last week, to coincide with the release of EP Campus Martius, but somehow Greek synth-pop duo Keep Shelley in Athens got bumped/mislaid/forgotten about. The record itself maintains an icy yet blissful tone throughout while still managing to flit between dark and light; from the dancefloor filling...
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Shigeto
High school-ditching, jazz-studying woodshedder Zach Saginaw picked the pseudonym ‘Shigeto’ in reference to his grandfather and the Japanese line in his heritage - an affectionate and genuine tribute to a culture and background that has informed and fed his music.
New album Lineage (released by Michigan’s fiercely original, trendsetting Ghostly International label) is a heady...