We took a break over the past few months. We’ll be back soon. In the meantime, check out my favorite song of the summer–Lil Wayne’s “Dear Summer.” It’s from a few years back, but it’s still dope as hell. Stay tuned!

Wow, it’s been a while. I got back from 5 weeks singing opera in Italy last week, with a layover in London. On my flight home from London, I sat next to a philosophy professor from UMass Boston. We spent quite a few of our 9 hours on the plane (lots of delays) trading music, and she showed me a bunch of really wonderful singer-songwriters.

The first one who really peaked my interest was a girl named Vienna Teng. I seem to have a predilection for female singer-songwriters. Her voice is beautiful, without the cutesy-ness of Regina Spektor (and all her sound-alikes). Her songs make me want to take a bubble bath with scented candles and let the sound wash over me. At the same time, they make me want to drive with all the windows down on Martha’s Vineyard at the end of summer when the leaves are starting to not be so green anymore.

My plane buddy recommended Teng’s album Inland Territory. It’s a perfectly crafted album about so many things that form a totally coherent whole. There’s “Grandmother Song,” a song from her judgmental grandmother’s point of view sung without any instruments behind her, “No Gringo,” a song about if the racism issues in Arizona were the other way around, and white Americans were the targeted group, and countless other excellent tracks (actually only 12).

My favorite of the moment is called Antebellum. I hope you like it. If you do, support her and get one of her many albums on Amazon, or iTunes, or from her website. She has to pay for grad school somehow. Her grandmother will be very happy.

Vienna Teng - Antebellum

Love,

Lucas

A long while back in middle school, as I was discovering my first taste of independent music in the heyday of Drive-Thru records, I listened briefly to a group on their roster called Steel Train.  For eighth grade me, they were nothing that really stood out compared to the other Drive-Thru bands that had captured my attention, and I went back to listening to The Early November and The Starting Line (nothing wrong with that!).

A few years later Lucas tried to tell me how good they were by sending me their cover of the Jackson 5′s “I Want You Back.”  I became a little more interested and checked out “Better Love,” a song that details the lead singer, Jack Antonoff’s, high school relationship with…Scarlett Johansson.  Yep.  That would be a tough one to get over.  Anyway, their music for some reason still didn’t hook me and thought that I would never really enjoy the band that much.

Cut to last week when I saw the cover of their new independently released self-titled album.  I loved the album art immediately, and the image of the punk girl particularly struck me because I’ve been reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series recently.

Their most recent Self-Titled album plays out like a retrospective study on the last half decade of indie rock, which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing!  There are Animal Collective-like whoops and hollers, chiming guitars that evoke Vampire Weekend, and a general epic feel that echos the recent Springsteen obsession of punk bands like the Gaslight Anthem

The standout track for me, however, is the pop abandon of “You Are Dangerous.” Piano and palm muted guitars periodically rise and fall over a stop-and-start rhythm section, which gradually builds to a catchy-as-hell post chorus guitar riff that makes me want to dance around forever.  Add in some obligatory vocal “oohs” and you’ve got a great mid-summer jam.

With specific online purchases of the album the band is also giving away an alternate version with every track covered by a different female artist!  This is a pretty sweet idea, and is made only better by the fact that Lexington native Amanda Palmer lays down her own version of Steel Train’s “Behavior.”  Awesome!

Kinda last minute, seeing as it starts in like 3 hours, but looks like it will be a cool show! Magic Man, jamesDUNK, Michael Parallax tonight at 346 Putnam ave, Cambridge. 8:00 on tha dot. and it’s free! Check it out! byob, son. free shows in the summmmmmmmmer

Facebook event page!

Hi,

I work with the L Magazine and we are currently gearing up to put on another Northside Festival here in NYC at the end of the month. This year they have some pretty great bands, but they are also sweetening the pot by giving out a bunch of free passes, and a brand new iPad to a lucky winner. It’s a pretty cool prize and I was thinking that maybe some of The Illin’ Music Thread readers might be interested in checking out the competition and the festival. It would be great if you can give it a shout on the blog, it’s a cool festival for NY and we are really excited about getting the word out about it this year.

You can check out all the info on the festival and the giveaways at this link.

All the best,

Sam

Got this email yesterday. I don’t know what I think of the iPad, but the band line-up looks wicked sweet–Gracious Calamity is playing!! Wavves is also super sweet! To my New York friends–I’d check this out, even if it is in Williamsburg. June 24th-27th.

From Paramore to lesser known groups like Versaemerge a lot has been made recently of the proliferation of female-fronted emo/pop-punk acts.  As in any genre, some bands are very good while others should have never left the garage.  One of the bands that falls into the former category is Heartsounds.  Fronted by singer/guitarist Laura Nichol and backed up by ferocious drummer Ben Murray, Heartsounds arose from the ashes of Nichol and Murray’s previous melodic metal act Light This City (whose name sounds more like mediocre emo band than a pissed off metal act).  Light This City was notable not only because of their awesome dual-guitar harmonies, but also because Nichol was actually the vocalist!  Female screamers in metal are few and far between, but she held her own and even convinced a lot of listeners that she was one of the boys.

After the demise of Light This City, she and Murray decided to indulge their secret devotion to punk and created a great album of blazing fast pop punk tunes.  Take a listen to Slave to a Heart That Strays from their debut full length Until We Surrender. Check out that chorus!! Awesome.

A band I’ve been listening to a bunch recently is Boston’s own BIRTHDAYS. And really, what better music matches a cool, cloudy June day in Massachusetts? Non-traditional percussion, guitar drones, analog synths and yelpy vocals all blend together in a raw, lofi melange, courtesy of messrs. Sammy and Kevin. Listening to BIRTHDAYS reminds me of the feeling of excitement I’d get while falling asleep the night before my own birthday when I was a young’un. THEY’RE SO NOISY AND COOL I wanna be their friends

There’s also something about BIRTHDAYS that is entirely danceable. I can’t help but bob along to songs like “Biggie Shorty” or “part that grows,” even though there is no drum beat that makes your chest reverberate. While listening to BIRTHDAYS,  I get the feeling that their band rehearsals are lots of FUN. Where they could be serious, they instead get silly. It’s happy music!!

Fans of BAIXA, Hear Hums, Here We Go Magic, MANNERS, or Truman Peyote may like BIRTHDAYS. It’s good music to listen to during a thunderstorm, or when trying to fall asleep on long car rides. I highly recommend these dudes!

To download “Biggie Shorty,” “body bust,” “mating falls,” “part that grows,” and “Procreating Flower Bug,” click here!

Click here to download a brand-new song entitled “Every Time I Swim (Ariel)”! It’s apparently about “seeing The Little Mermaid when I was five years old and falling in love.. realizing for the first time that I dig girls and that they aren’t yucky.”

Grant, OUT!

The band builds a powerful machine that sends Andy to another dimension and Ben must travel through and save him.

Shot in 1 day in -15 degree weather, with a borrowed camera and $0.

BOSS

follow-up to my post on FARMS

pretty self-explanatory

In my ongoing quest to discover the zeitgeist of the times, I present to you: VACATION DAD.

My friend Mark brought this dude (the drummer of FARMS) to my attention a month or two ago after discovering “ihopeyrfavoritecoloriseverywhere” on some music blog. I’ve been listening to him basically non-stop since then… I’m not really sure why I haven’t posted him on here yet. Better late than never, I suppose.

His EP is more atonal and drone-y than his newer stuff. You can definitely hear FARMS all over this EP–giant swells of sound, blissed-out sonic soundscapes, but a noticeable lack of drums. In the back story to this EP, you can see why Vacation Dad is an artist of the times:

i started flirting with this girl
she was married
then we sex in a tent one thing led to the other
we dated for a while
then we broke up cause i suck
then i got laid off cause the economy is bad
i had a real job one with
concrete
and wood
and hammers
and nails
and forklifts
and racism
i recorded this to make myself feel good

Anyways, I’m not posting the EP for download, so whatever. Download it off his myspace if you’re interested. However, the melancholy sentiment of his explanation for recording his EP carries on to his newer songs.

Since he’s a drummer, his tracks have kick-ass percussion. The drums sound HUGE (especially on “Hemp Scented Body Lotion”), like strange futuristic machines making music because there’s no need to make anything else anymore because IT’S THE FUTURE and the humans are gone. And also these machines have found out how to love. Like Wall-E except less heartwarming and family-friendly.

The synths are also boss. Fuzzed-out to the max, thundering, with gigantic amounts of reverb. The 8-bit tones almost sound like they’re lifted from Super Mario World or something. Mix in some crazy, ecstatic yelps delayed-the-fuck-out with a massive, bleating dance beat (I’m talking about “Dream Boat,” here) and you’ve got a recipe for some nice risotto/balls-to-the-wall awesome song of the summer. Some people are talking about a “chill-wave” “movement” thing, and maybe this “qualifies”, but I don’t really know because I don’t read pitchfork. “whatever” “man”

I like his newer stuff a bit better than his EP. He’s releasing a split with Truman Peyote later this year (“Dream Boat” is a sneak preview from the split), and the songs are amazing. Don’t miss out on this dude–you’ll be hearing about Vacation Dad in the future.

Click here to download “ihopeyrfavoritecoloriseverywhere”!

Click here to download “Hemp Scented Body Lotion”!

Click here to download “Dream Boat”!

Grant, OUT!

I recently had a dinner conversation with some friends about music. I talked with them about what I mentioned in my post on Totally Nebular–that is, I’m trying to find music that speaks to me, as a 90s baby growing up in the shadow of the 80s, that 80s that defined the sound of music in the last decade. As I said before, how can I relate to music that was created when I wasn’t alive for the creation of it? Obviously, you can have appreciation for music no matter when it was created, but I feel that those who created 80s-derivative music created it out of an ironic appreciation for the shitty music of their childhood. I didn’t grow up with Scorpion and Flock of Seagulls, though…! So that’s where I’m at currently; I’m looking for music that has the mood of my growing up, that reflects conditions I can relate to.

So where does this long diatribe lead us? To FARMS of course! I’ve been meaning to post them on here forever seeing as I’ve been listening to them for a month or so. They’re fucking awesome, and totally have that feeling I’ve been looking for. They do a better job of describing themselves than I could:

One member of FARMS has a fully functional synthesizer in his head and holds his mouth a little open like a third ear. One member of FARMS is a fucking ‘showboat’ who works drums like a middle schooler trying to show an older girl his ‘passion’ or how good he is at making out. One is a pleasant, video game psychic and one applies corporeal metaphors to like everything, and then smiles. FARMS is a Wisconsin band, because sometimes there is nothing else to do here/there than take drugs and go into woods or drive on interstates. They play in a basement with a coal chute and a bat.

Their music is absolutely wonderful. Whooshing synthesizers, delayed-the-fuck-out guitars and intricate, pulsing drums seem to define their sound a bit. Most of their songs are instrumental, but who needs lyrics anyways? They’re also really good at writing subtly catchy hooks. I’ve been whistling along to “We’ll All Be, On The Home Team” and “we got a box of white tape snakes” for weeks now. It’s all pretty lofi and grimy. Their drummer also makes music under the name “Vacation Dad“. Check him out–I’ll be posting him on here later.

When I listen to FARMS, I feel like they’re affirming life for every animal on our planet, like they’re celebrating going outside, like they’ve got nothing to hide from anyone. “All the lies you’ve ever told don’t really mean a thing, the ocean seems to say,” says Machi Tawara (and FARMS duh lol but with music instead of haikus lol  lol)

If I were you, I’d download their EP1 and their song “we got a box of white tape snakes” immediately. It’s great summertime porch-sitting music. Put on FARMS and watch the red sun set, and pretend it’s never going to come back

Click here to download FARMS’ “EP1″!

Click here to download “we got a box of white tape snakes”!

Grant, OUT!