Talk about timing. Brooklyn-based Twin Sister released their second EP Color Your Life on Tuesday. The same day they get a respectable 7.5 from Pitchfork. On Wednesday they are named one of The L Magazine’s 8 Bands You Need to Hear. And today just started, so who knows. Maybe they are taping for Letterman this afternoon.
Twin Sister is offering a free download of the album for two weeks. So if you haven’t heard about it and downloaded it by then, then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s apparently everywhere. You can sample the album with the song Lady Daydream above. This is the one song I clearly remember when I saw them at the Creekside Lounge during my hazy SXSW, and after a few listens through this EP I can see why, it’s a standout track for sure.
You can find the band in New York a few times this month. Tonight they play Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn with Holiday Shores. On April 9th they are opening up for Xiu Xiu at Bowery Ballroom. And finally on April 11th they are at Silent Barn in Queens with Alex Bleeker & the Freaks.
The boys from Ireland have released yet another great video to go along with their great album, Tourist History, which was released at the beginning of the month. Something Good Can Work will be the third single off the album and will be out on May 3rd with remixes by The Twelves and Crookers, among others.
The band is currently on tour with Phoenix, a band that first comes to mind when searching for comparisons even though Two Door Cinema Club doesn’t have a human drummer. A more apt association may be a mix of more typical UK indie rock, like early Bloc Party, and putting them on a label like Kitsuné, which they just so happen to be on. The French label is more known for its electronic acts like Simian Mobile Disco, Yelle and Classixx, but the mix of electropop from the band helps them fit in nicely.
Two Door Cinema Club will be headlining the Bowery Ballroom on May 12th, but be sure to check their dates with Phoenix in April and their headlining dates in May to see if they are coming to a town near you.
K, so there was some music fest or something. There was music, blogging, beer-sweat T-shirts, but mostly blogging.
It was beautiful, probably.
But that was last week! This week, what we care about is stodgy guys discovering Youtube. I just won’t let my developing classical music-blogging obsession die.
Here’s a composer who pieced together Youtube auditions for his piece into a Powerpoint-ish purple-gradient-tastic 250-person choir. What poor grad student edited this into semi-coherence? We will never know, but his windows on our walls of many lanlord-friendly colors, windows into our souls, we will never forget.
This guy has friends! Friends, named Steven Bryant, who tell us the Composing Secrets “They” Don’t Want You To Know! But seriously, this guy deserves some Internet fame, because it’s clear from his blog that composition is the dismal science.
And by science, I mean, art. And by dismal, I mean, no money.
SXSW finally came to a close in Austin, TX on Sunday. Two days later, I finally made it home and had a chance to piece together the week (thanks Twitter!). Here’s this year’s recap of a badgeless show-goer.
Hit – Longbranch Inn
Impose Magazine owned the Inn for three nights. In a mostly Brooklyn band showcase on Wednesday, Nashvillians JEFF the Brotherhood stood above the rest very literally, as they brought their set to a climax with Jake on top of the bar and Jamin holding down the drums as usual.
Miss – Longbrach Inn’s bathroom
Watch out for the dark, sewage-filled hole as you enter. Not the kind of liquids you want your socks soaked in for sure. I somehow managed to pirouette around it each time, but there were a couple close calls especially as the Lone Stars added up.
Hit – Scotland
Mainly, We Were Promised Jetpacks and Frightened Rabbit. The AV Club probably put on one of the better start to finish showcases of the entire week, which included the two bands mentioned as well as Tobacco, Wooden Birds (who played “Aaron & Maria” and made my day), and The Rural Alberta Advantage. And free Brooklyn Lager! As awesome as all that is, I don’t think anything touched the performance put on by We Were Promised Jetpacks, but Frightened Rabbit came damn close. The Winter of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit was released at the beginning of the month, and is a great record.
Disco Ensemble’s new video for the first single “White Flag For Peace” from their upcoming album is now online. The video is directed by Sami Sänpäkkilä who is also known for running a pretty sweet Finnish label called Fonal Records.
No information has been released yet on the title of the new record or its exact release date, but make sure to watch the video above as many times as possible to hold you over. You can also pick up the band’s latest EP, Back on The MF Street, on iTunes.
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With the music portion of SXSW kicking off a week from today, it’s time to start scanning the various free shows Austin has to offer and picking out some must-see bands. If you can’t catch one of the five shows they will be playing then, check out The Sandwitches Myspace page for more tour listings.
The San Francisco-based band released one of the most criminally overlooked albums of 2009. The Sandwitches’ How To Make Ambient Sadcake is a true throwback to girl groups from the 1960s. And with so many bands as of late borrowing the sounds and style of garage rock from that decade, this just seems like the next logical step. I would be selling these three ladies short, however, if I were to just leave it at that. The album is much more than an ode to a decade.
On “The Revisionist”, the band taps into their inner Stevie Nicks. The blues of a band like Fleetwood Mac mixed with gritty southern folk is the bedrock of the album. It’s something the Watson Twins have been trying to pull off for a number of years now and just haven’t been able to do over the course of a full album. I listen to the next track, “Strangers Shadow”, and think “I bet the Twins wish they wrote this”.
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!
A&SB is a music & media blog (and sometimes record label) run by some fine writers as well as the folks over at Paper Tiger. Sometimes we review records, sometimes we just post articles about new music we love, and sometimes we post about new happenings surrounding Paper Tiger artists.
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