Besides being super sexy, Owen Pallett is a classically trained musician who formed the band Final Fantasy. We’ve been listening to his album, He Poos Clouds, and “The Lamb Sells Condos” caught our ear. The title made no sense to us until we did a little research. Besides the beauty of the song, we were kind of struck by the thematic parallels to Joni Mitchell’s “Harry’s House, Centerpiece.” Both describe the domestic consequences of the rampant pursuit of business. Without trying to be too heavy handed, businessmen in the pursuit of money sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their families, ultimately leaving everyone feeling unhappy and hollow. We wonder if Owen was/is aware of the similarities. Or maybe it’s a Canadian thing.
Bill Wasik wrote a great essay, “Hype Machine,” on indie rock as a web extra for Oxford American’s 2007 music issue. Wasik dissects the culture of indie rock and the power of the blogosphere to turn an unknown band of yesterday into the It band of today, and ultimately, the passé band of last year. Wasik illustrates his point with The Annuals, a band touted in 2006:
As promised, half past ten on the morning of July 18 saw Ryan Schreiber, the founder and editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, place his imprimatur upon the new band, which he likened to “some fantasy hybrid of Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.
We’ve provided a few references to some of the songs and bands mentioned in the article for the uninitiated.
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (Merge) Band Of Horses - Cease To Begin (Sub Pop)
Battles - Mirrored (Warp) Beirut - The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing)
El-P - I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (Definitive Jux)
Justice - † (Downtown / Vice / Ed Banger)
Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)
Panda Bear - Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
Radiohead - In Rainbows (self-released) Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone)
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)
The National - Boxer (Beggars Banquet)
You should vote. The great thing about the PLUG voting process is you can listen to a complete song from each album right on their website before you make your decision. The songs stream into each other so you can start it up and do something else while you listen. Furthermore, we’ve written about some of these albums on Brontosaur.us if you would like to reference some of the music we are streaming here.
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.
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.
