Happy new release day, everybody! Today is a big day for us. Not only did I get a free coffee today at the local coffee shop (which is a long, elaborate story I will discuss in the comments) but today we are giving away our newest release: Spanish American by The Seams! Included in the download are 9 tracks, liner notes, lyrics and hi-res album art.
If you would be so kind as to use the following link to share this album across the World Wide Web, we would be forever grateful: http://bit.ly/spanishamerican – let us know your thoughts in the replies and please Tweet, Facebook, share this thing until your ears bleed.
I don’t have a television, because, as I told Bassey, that’s something the employed have. Normally, this is not a problem. And my feelings on the Oscars I have already made plain. I still thinkinviting diehard Eurotrip fans would fix everything.
And yet. We still wish it could be something, the small, very small part of us that lingers on a Baldwin making a joke about the Baldwins, as the channels go by. Okay, maybe we just love a guaranteed trainwreck, if famous people are going to be in it, even if it happens at approximately three miles an hour.
So, it was in this milieu that I decided, as penance for my recent blogging absence, I would seek out the true spirit of Award Season, wherever it may hide. The results show the darker side of life through Oscar’s eyes.
It might have been a good idea to plan this more than an hour in advance. Needless to say, the two sure-fire TV owners were not home. The Wilson Ave laundromat, my usual TV source, was stuck on Spanish soaps. No matter, the Internet led me to Williamsburg, which you might think would be the place least likely to care about the Oscars. True, it was a lederhosen-only affair, but that only increased my foolish yearning to find entertainment value in this somehow.
Skipping down Lorimer Street to a band that was really cool three years ago in a clearance Gap coat, I brought shame upon the hallowed night I sought, even ten contiguous states of irony away. I ignored the glances from all around that seemed to say, “We have far more important places to skulk to than a Oscar party, but if we were going to one, we would not even slow down going by if we saw you through the window.”
More determined than ever, I tried to remember if I had seen any of these movies besides Up and the 45 minutes of Avatar I saw before, delirious with Sigorney Weaver and 3-D aggravated flu, I sat somewhere quiet and had an acute episode of not vomiting.
Sighing a little in contentment at not needing to even make an effort not to vomit at the moment, I reached Pete’s Candy Store. Yes, that’s a bar.
So we just couldn’t wait until March 9th when we release the new record by The Seams, Spanish American, for free on our site. This track is just too good, was caught in my head for 3 days and just needed to be heard by more than 5 people (that’s me, the band and maybe some girlfriends). Listen to the track “Stay” below and check out a little info about the track by the band’s singer/songwriter Jon Lullo.
“Stay” is the first song I wrote after DTEA broke up. I did a little writing with a friend in Los Angeles (Kevin Ridel) while writing for DTEA’s second record, and it completely changed the way I approached songwriting. I kept the different tricks he had taught me in mind while writing this track, and I feel like it helped set the tone for the kind of songs I wanted to do with The Seams. Also, while it’s a fleeting moment, it’s the first track where I got to bust out my remedial slide guitar skills.
DON’T FORGET:Spanish American will be available FOR FREE right here on Air & Sea Battle on March 9th!
After 12 years of playing together, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is a California band that has tried it all and still hasn’t found what it wants. After releasing the maligned “The Effects of 333,” BRMC returns to its roots with Beat the Devil’s Tattoo. However, like a cultural mutt, it can’t quite figure out what style to call home. And unfortunately, on this record, BMRC refuses to do the hard work of creating a coherent, consistent identity.
The record starts out promisingly, with the title track, “Beat the Devil’s Tattoo”, a chant-filled hillbilly stomper, where the vocals follow the minor-tinged guitars and the percussion is provided primarily by the boots of the band. The song iterates between verse lyrics and and “AH-ah-AH-ah” choruses, with more guitars added as the song reaches its climax, a hypnotizing recitation of the song title. A promising start.
The next tune, “Conscience Killer”, is a faux-Stooges rocker that tips its hat to the band’s Wild One motorcycle roots. Unfortunately, for all its “rock”, it gives me a greasy garage-rock-revival feeling that I thought was left back at the beginning of last decade. A brief detour for the brit-pop “Bad Blood” (and more guitar pedals), and the band returns with more stomp. The molasses-paced “War Machine” would be punishing, but for the deep-on-drugs vocals, which seem to have forgotten that the band was supposed to be gritty again on this jam.
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Cedar Avenue’s Someday Soon is a pop rock confection with fresh programming and keys – turning what should sound monotonous into engaging experimentation. But the album could certainly use more of it.
Above all else, the Minnesota-based four piece offers smooth radio-friendly vocals and harmonies that the younger lady set will love. And its no wonder, Cedar Avenue is an immensely talented ensemble that seems to have ironed out any wrinkles in days long past.
But in music, you can oftentimes be too perfect — the primary weakness of Someday Soon is that the singing and melodies don’t sound much different across tracks, and the album needed far more experimentation with tempo and digital programming to distract from that.
Give Up The Ghost by Good Kids Sprouting Horns was recorded in a bedroom, and it sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom. Not to mention a thin bed of static. But that’s the thing – It’s real.
But sometimes real just means that you’ve heard this stuff before. The instrumentation is hardly ground-breaking — it is layered well enough, but sloppily. And much of the production doesn’t credibly offer the live feeling it seeks to create or stumble into much else.
The album begins with Popcorn Ceiling, the track posted below. It’s an ode to the thought of ever having to leave that place — that bedroom and the mental state it governs. The lyrics and arrangement recall countless conversations had in small rooms littered with out-of-date recording equipment and wires shaped like the red lines on your feet. Conversations that always seem to conclude, “what do we know?”
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“Popcorn Ceiling” has the kind of sonic repetition that seems like the perfect kind of cynical in that bedroom, but hurts an album’s replay value in the real world.
For every time the purposefully off-kilter keyboarding produces a lively result, such as the second track, Double Digits, A Life Achievement there is a track like the appropriately named Effigy, that just seems out of place.
Still, it takes a certain amount of bravery to leave tracks like, “Headache” so sparce, with faint rolling percussion that lives outside a simple keyed melody on the choruses and vocals during verses.
“The sidewalks are cracking/ there’s no place left to step/ my god isn’t listening and he will not save our mothers” vocalist and lead guitarist Anthony Bitetti sings on the fourth track, “but if I had just a little more time/ I would tell you all the reasons I love to hide — tonight is the night we die.”
A bit over the top, yes. But if that’s the kind of thing that scares you away, you won’t like this album anyway. (The track concludes with about a minute of static-y chatter.)
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Below is a list of new releases that we either listened to and love, or expect you to care about. Let us know if we forgot anything in the replies.
