Monthly Archives: May 2012

Cornershop’s new LP Urban Turban, out on their own Ample Play label, hits store shelves today, 5/15, and we’ve cornered the duo’s Ben Ayres to answer the question all this week—what are Cornershop’s Favourite Record Shops? 

Grimey’s, Nashville | “An amazing store which has stacks of records secondhand as well as any new ones you might want. It’s central to the burgeoning Nashville scene of exciting new bands, of which we’re releasing two; The Paperhead and The Sufis on Ample Play.

They also have regular instores by local bands at Grimey’s. And its run by lovely helpful music freaks. Last time I was in there, asking for the cassette only (at the time …..we released a vinyl version shortly after) release of The Paperhead’s debut album, someone shouted across the shop to one of the band who just happened to be there at the same time and said ‘Hey Ryan, this guy from England wants a copy of your cassette!’

It’s that kind of place. Special.”

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While by no means an unknown work, it also seems fair to say that Daryl Hall’s first solo LP Sacred Songs gets nowhere near enough retrospective attention. This is mainly due to the inclusion of what many might consider to be an odd associate (at best) or an irreconcilable collaborator (at worst) in art-rock maestro Robert Fripp. Blue-eyed soul meets Frippertronics? Yes, indeed.

If the team-up of Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp remains an unlikely pairing from seemingly disparate areas of the ‘70s rock landscape, after some consideration their creative union shouldn’t really be designated as a case of strange bedfellows. The key to understanding how these two ended up in the same studio lies in getting beyond the surface perception of Fripp as a prog-rock outlier and Hall & Oates as simply a hit machine.

But folks who know Fripp’s contributions to Blondie’s Parallel Lines and especially Bowie’s “Heroes” have surely already comprehended that there’s more to the guy’s output than just King Crimson and (No Pussyfooting). And any fan of Hall & Oates that’s travelled back in their discography to their Atlantic Records period has been greeted with the unusual doozy that is Abandoned Luncheonette.

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As we noted yesterday in our full review, “With Urban Turban, Cornershop continue with their welcome and unexpectedly prolific return to the record racks. Collecting the fruitful results of a batch of collaborative singles, this album should easily satisfy old fans, while its playfulness, intelligence, and range will help recruit new ones.”

“…Urban Turban’s best moments present a further deepening of Singh’s and Ayers’ pop ingenuity. If they’ve always successfully avoided the shallowness of pastiche, they also seem to have found a way to increase the frequency of their output without putting any strain on the level of quality.”

“Urban Turban…still shines as another exceptional collection of tunes from a consistently rewarding group of pop scientists. And it’s an album certain to only improve with increased familiarity.”

It’s true. We like it quite a bit and in tandem with the band and their label Ample Play, we’ve assembled one heck of a giveaway for two winners.

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You’ll be hard-pressed to find another producer today who’s risen to such prolific heights as fast as Danger Mouse. Arguably the best thing to emerge from the mid-00s “mashup” fad, producer Brian Burton hit it big on The Grey Album, his deft fusion of the Beatles and Jay-Z, and has since become one of indie rock’s most sought-after producers.

Since 2005, Burton has been the yin to Cee-Lo Green’s yang in the psych-soul duo Gnarls Barkley, paved the way for the Black Keys’ rock superstardom with his production on their 2008 album Attack and Release, made sharply nuanced indie pop with the Shins’ James Mercer as Broken Bells, and gave Norah Jones a sexed-up makeover on her newest release Little Broken Hearts.

Most recently, Burton has bestowed his magic touch on LA indie poppers Electric Guest, whose Danger Mouse-produced debut album Mondo was released on April 24 on Downtown Records. Mondo fuses the group’s MGMT-esque indie pop with a healthy dose of R&B – to speak in Danger Mouse terms, imagine a Beck-helmed Broken Bells with some borrowed Gnarls Barkely soul. Frontman Asa Taccone‘s infectious falsetto is put to good use, coupling with enormous hooks and hip-swinging funk to create a retro-tinged sound that’s entirely listenable.

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The first full-length LP from hardcore punk survival unit OFF! delivers more of the brief, scorching sound initiated on their four highly-regarded EPs. It’s a dandy listen, and it places Keith Morris and cohorts at an interesting place. Just where will they go from here?

When it first came to my attention that Keith Morris was going to be fronting a new band, my immediate impression was a mixture of sincere happiness for the guy and a complete disinterest in actually hearing the music. We’ll get to the happy part a few paragraphs down, but the apathetic aspect has been hashed out by quite a few others already; it has to do with both the age of Morris and his band members and the actual contemporary relevance of the whole hardcore punk shebang.

Methinks that hardcore is a perfectly fine genre to tackle in the here and now, but it is a form best served up by a band of fresh-faced upstarts like Trash Talk rather than promulgated by a bunch of certified oldsters. Unlike blues, jazz, and country & western, punk rock and hardcore in particular doesn’t ripen with age; it’s very much a young person’s game. Of course, plenty of old punks are still making high quality music. It’s just that very few are still working from within the confines of the style that originally spawned them.

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