In honor of Halloween, we tried to dig up some spooky stuff.
This video by Bat For Lashes is pretty creepy. It has that Donny Darko thing going on.
This American Life has a great podcast about how everyday things can quickly become scary given the right circumstances. Check it out.
First, Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark wants to bring love and peace to the world. Yeah, our cynical Brooklyn hearts didn’t buy that hippie-dippie LA peace, love and harmony crap either until we saw this video.
Lavender Diamond’s music is often simple, beautiful, and very repetitous. The verse might be one sentence, the chorus another, but damn Becky sells it. We do not know anyone else that can sing the same thing over and over and not make us nauseous. Also they freaking dance in the street in that video. Tell us that didn’t make you smile!
Second, we’d like to direct you to one of our favorite This American Life episodes. It is one of the strongest and funniest we’ve listened to. This episode is centered around the theme of music lessons. David Sedaris talks about when his father forces him to take guitar lessons, but David dreams of singing jingles as he imitates Billy Holiday’s voice. And Sarah Vowell talks about her passion for music and, specifically, the recorder. It’s a great episode from beginning to end. We laughed and cried. Good stuff.
We can’t link directly to the full episode unfortunately, but you will find it on this page. The second “full episode” is the link.
La Blogotheque produces this great weekly video podcast called The Take-Away Shows. Basically, each week they film a band performing outside. The backlog of The Take-Away Shows is very impressive. They’ve filmed a lot of great bands. And the movies are enthralling.
Here are some of our favorites:
And that’s just a small sampling. All these movies are available for free to download to your video iPod through an iTunes podcast.
Beirut’s The Flying Club Cup is achingly beautiful. If you aren’t familiar with Beirut, their sound is heavily influenced by Balkan folk music (think Gypsy). Many of their songs sound as if they are from another world and another time, especially the first album Gulag Orkestra. But others such as “After the Curtain” are as accessible as any song by The Postal Service. Zack Condon and his mighty band expand and build upon the sound of Gulag Orkestra on The Flying Club Cup. The music is less heavily influenced by the Balkans, but the same richness and texture is still there: strings, horns, percussion. We really appreciate Beirut, much like Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire, for pushing indie rock music beyond the four/four-guitar-bass-drum-kit formula, however tried and true it may be.
From Gulag Orkestra
“After the Curtain”
From The Flying Club Cup
“The Sunday Smile”
“The Penalty”
We saw Architecture in Helsinki a few months ago at The Fillmore with a few friends. We had never seen Architecture in Helsinki. AiH was a tiny blip on our radar. We paid them no mind and vice versa. But then we saw their show. Their music is completely infectious, fun, and capricious. They are an incredible band to see live. Their fans were rabid and we were swept up in it all.
We just noticed that AiH’s new album, Places Like This, was released last week and that they are starting a tour next week. Guys, if you get a chance to see this band, do it.
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Does Kellie have a bloody nose in this video? Do they all have blood on their faces? We can’t tell because of the poor video quality.
Heart It Races
