Music Recommendation #5

3/6/11-3/12/11

First things first.  This week is Radio 1190's Spring Pledge Drive.  We're an independent radio station and in order to keep it that way, we need our listener's to support us.  All we ask is the bare minimum which helps us keep the promotions going, the lights on, and the music playing.  If you have a minute, go to Radio 1190's website, check it out, and if you can spare a few dollars, donate what you can.  Also, check out this awesome shirt design you could get!

Onto the blog.  I know it isn't Sunday yet, but I have a busy weekend and I've been productive, so I thought I would drop next week's new music on you now.  Sound good?  I thought so.  This week I'm bring you two new albums, Brown Recluse's "Evening Tapestry" and Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx's "We're New Here."

“Evening Tapestry” is the debut LP from Brown Recluse out of Slumberland Records.  The band formed in the early 2000s and self-released their first EP, “Black Sunday,” in 2007.  Their second EP, “The Soft Skin,” was released in 2009, shortly after they released a cassette-only release on Dead Format called “Selected Hymns (Of the Evening Tapestry).”  They combine narrative lyrics with a psychadelia-tinged indie pop creating lighthearted, flowing tunes.  Brown Recluse does a good job of making their music seemingly innocent on the surface.  At first I thought it was really fluffy and light, and nothing at first glance really gave me the impression to believe otherwise.  However, when I went through it again I noticed some of the lyrics are deep, profound, and some times disturbing.  "March to Your Tomb," the closing track of the album (contrasting the opening song, "Hobble to Your Tomb"), has an upbeat, light guitar melody, but the opening lyrics are as followed: "Smeared my blood on the neighbor's fencepost/ Dragged my arm like a limp fraying paintbrush/ Trimming hedges by her briars/ They gashed my pale flesh like barbed wire," after which a twangy guitar solo follows.  Brown Recluse's lyrical content is without doubt the best feature of this album and each and every song has interesting insights not only vocally, but instrumentally as well, a plethora of sounds strung out across the album.  Brown Recluse has a number of interesting stories to tell and "Evening Tapestry" is a strong debut LP for the band.

“We’re New Here” is a collaborative effort between Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx from The xx.  What the duo did was take Scott-Heron’s “I’m New Here” (released in 2010) and remixed it by putting a thick, electronic, bass filled sound behind Scott-Heron’s raspy, hip-hop inspiring spoken word vocals.  This is without doubt the epitome of combining old and new to make something both versatile in sound, yet somehow familiar.  While seemingly far apart, Scott-Heron and Jamie xx are connected through XL Recordings and owner Richard Russell who connected the two.  This album blew.my.mind.  It seems like an odd combination especially because Scott-Heron and Jamie xx are so different: one is black, one is white; one is young, one is old; one is British, one is American; one is a vocalist, one is a instrumentalist.  However, surprisingly, when the two of them come together they create a wonderful fix of old fashioned singing and new age electronic instrumentals.  If "I'm New Here" wasn't already incredible enough, Jamie xx puts a wonderfully innovative twist on the entire album.  The sounds across the CD have a wide variety, each of which has it's own unique feeling.  The trance like, bass flooded, standout favorite of the album, "NY Is Killing Me," alters some of Scott-Heron's vocals with strong reverberation and compliments them later in the song with a high-pitched, repetitive shrieking.  Put that together with the thumping bass, synthesizing, and bells and you get a sound that engulfs you and throws you into a musical chemistry experiment gone horribly right.  "My Cloud," in contrast, shifts both instrumentally and vocally.  In this song, Jamie xx slows it down and has longer drawn out chords with a softer back beat that compliments Scott-Heron's decision to sing instead of use spoken word.  "We're New Here" is an incredible mix of new and old and Scott-Heron puts it best in "I've Been Me" when he says, "If I hadn't been as eccentric, as obnoxious, as arrogant, as aggressive, as introspective, as selfish... I wouldn't be me, I wouldn't be who I am."

So, there's next weeks new music and hopefully I'll be able to bring some of the other music I've been listening to on here in the next week or so.  Look out for a DeVotchKa review in the next week or so along with maybe some other stuff if I decide not to be a lazy college student.  Keep listening and thanks for reading!