Monthly Archives: August 2012

Last month, King of Spain snagged our Single of the Week position with the hypnotic, driving, and ultra-literate track “Motions.” We’re delighted to debut the new track, “Basement Fires” from the Tampa, FL twosome today at TVD.

“I was 15 years old at the time and just discovered punk and post-punk music—due in large part to the local community radio station. They had a Saturday “alternative music” show that was sponsored by the only independent record store in town. I remember skipping school and traveling close to 10 miles by bus to get that shop. No small feat in a town known for its lack of mass transit.

On entering that store I can absolutely remember the sights, sounds and smells of tens of thousands of vinyl albums. Over the next several years I scraped, scrounged, and saved to buy any album that caught my fancy. Eventually I amassed quite a collection of records, but more importantly a collection of memories.

That experience still sticks with me today. The music on those albums helped instill an independent spirit inside of me. It is that spirit that still helps define the person I am today.”
—Daniel Wainright, King of Spain

King of Spain’s All I Did Was Tell Them The Truth And They Thought It Was Hell is out today (8/28) via New Granada records.

King of Spain Official | Facebook

“Vinyl is so dear to our hearts—every tour is one big shopping spree, from Tokyo to Cologne, Austin to Adelaide. There’s nothing like hiding all day in record stores, finding gems to bring back home and listen to, the way it should be heard.”
—Amy Millan

As if to hammer that point home, Stars has given us, …no wait—one of you—a limited edition gift. The band release their brand new LP, The North on September 4th, but in advance of that street date, they’ve pressed a tiny run of just 500 gold vinyl copies of the new record, and they’re turning two over to us to turn over to two of you.

Each golden vinyl copy of The North is hand numbered and stamped, which must be the most personal release from the band to date. The balance of this limited run release will be heading direct to the local indie, mom and pop shops in the US and Canada.

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“I was considered a wild child by my parents who didn’t really know what to do with me, so they packed me off to a kibbutz at the age of 11.”

“If Tel Aviv was pretty remote from any kind of International youth culture in those days then the kibbutz was even further. Any kind of non-local music was impossibly exotic! Yet somehow the Beatles were so big that they actually got to the local electrical shop in the small town 3 miles walk from the kibbutz that sold a few records.

I bought the original double EP of Magical Mystery Tour there, complete with booklet. It would be really hard for anyone in this connected age to really understand, at the tender age of 14, what this magical link with an incredible culture, so alien to my surroundings but so exciting, meant to me.

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A Thing Called Divine Fits is the solid, at times even quite good debut album from a trio composed of some true indie heavyweights. However, in this case the collective past success of its membership results in “solid and at times even quite good” not being good enough to satisfy the inevitability of mounting expectations.

By now anybody that’s read a shred of promotional material about Divine Fits has gleaned that it’s a project/band featuring the talents of one Britt Daniel (he of the contempo rock giants Spoon), Dan Boeckner (former member of defunct big-deal Wolf Parade and half of the more recent duo Handsome Furs), and the sorta odd duck in this equation, drummer Sam Brown (of ‘90s punkers New Bomb Turks).

So yeah, Divine Fits are accurately described as an indie supergroup. There are those that will bristle against applying that tag to an amalgamation of indie musicians no matter how noteworthy, and only for the reason that the membership of Divine Fits are less widely celebrated in the here and now than the folks in Blind Faith were in the there and then, i.e. “indie” is by its nature different (read: inferior) from the late-‘60’s/early ‘70s rock that’s now designated as “classic” (read: superior). That’s preposterous, I say.

And there will inevitably be those that will get all huffy over the unmitigated gall of comparing the supposed self-contained indie purity of Divine Fits to an overblown concept that should evermore remain with the egocentric aged rockers of dinosaur days gone by; the one thing (the new thing) can’t possibly be anything like the other thing (the old thing). And that’s ridiculous, too.

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Actually, there are very few “ah ha” moments in this racket—lots of “oh…no” and “heard that before”—and rarely arrives something of uncompromising quality, substance, nuance, and inventiveness—until I was sent Johanna and the Dusty Floor’s “Witch Shoes” almost a year ago. 

The band, the vehicle for Aussie-born songstress Johanna Cranitch, returned last week with the video for the new track, “Fishbones,” which was directed by Jeaneen Lund and shot by Jessie Sara English and filmed “…in Iceland over two days, seasons apart—first working with three hours of sunlight on a winter’s day, when the moon was full and bright at 4PM, and then working with 23 hours of daylight in summer, when the sun was shining at 2AM.” 

Prepare for the aforementioned “ah ha” moment.

From our First Date with Ms. Cranitch almost a year ago to the day, “…when I lived in London …someone gave me a Joni Mitchell record. I looked at it and thought “Gee, I better get a record player so I can listen to it.” I bought a cheap one in Kings Cross and then that was the full circle for me. I have listened to records ever since. I mean, MP3’s are great, the convenience of an i-pod is amazing—but nothing beats that crackle and depth you feel and hear from a record. I think the crackles give the music character.

When I started working in a recording studio in 2004 I had one and only one opportunity to use the tape machines. I spliced that tape and edited like a champion. I am surprisingly good at tape edits. Then, that job was finished—out of my hands until the client came back a few months later with the final product . . . a lovely shiny brand new pressed vinyl record. I was so proud that something I did in 2004 ended up on an actual record. I will never forget that…”

Johanna embarks on dates with the Cranberries as backing vocalist this Fall, and headlines Brooklyn’s Glasslands Gallery on Saturday, 9/1 with I am Lightyear and Sveta Bout. Tickets here.
Photo: Brad Trent/Damn Ugly Photography

“When I got the test pressing for my new record Spilling A Rainbow, I unwrapped it like a Wonkabar with a golden ticket inside, or like the birthday gift from my favorite person.”

“To get my ear acclimated, I put on one of my favorite albums, Gabor Szabo’s Bachanal, hoping that my record would sound as clear and full. This record was originally released on Gary Mcfarland’s label, Skye, and was pressed on standard vinyl (nothing too heavy).

As I listened, I took the 180gm Spilling A Rainbow vinyl in my hands and held it to the light to make sure there was no residual dust. When I had gotten enough of the Gabor to know where I stood with my record, I plopped the platter and dropped the needle.

The gleaming pie of vinyl was about half the volume of Bachanal—no exaggeration. I thought, “Well let’s just turn it up and see how we are fairing,” but basically no dimension came through and none of the details were there. The overdubs, the sizzles, and the throbs were gone; It was a pale emaciated hostage. Now I am thinking, “I’m going to miss my release date… I don’t want to be a pain in the ass, but this sucks.” I didn’t want to have a vinyl release just so to be able to say, “Hey my records on vinyl.” So… Fuck it! I called off the pressing and called my friend for some inside advice. How could my album sound smaller and flatter than a record from 1968?

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“The thing with vinyl is that it looks pretty as well as sounds great. And although sales of physical copies have taken a huge dip recently it’s actually vinyl that’s on the up. My experience of being in a band and running an indie label is that your average music collector would rather buy a 7” single than a CD single. So why is this? I think clearly, it’s often as much an aesthetic decision as it is a choice about preferred sound quality.”

“Vinyl is more expensive to make and so arguably more care tends to go into, not only it’s manufacturing, but also its design. Hells, if we’re gonna spend all his money on a lump of plastic why not make it look cool too?! The packaging can be so beautiful and inspired, the record can be any colour of the rainbow, it can be etched and it can have any image you might desire atop its grooves.

You can do this with CDs as well I know, but’s not all about the records themselves. There’s something magical about the mechanics through which they’re played too. I personally have heard very few people gush about much they love their CD player, but I’ve heard plenty of people (myself included) bang on about how they adore their record player.

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It’s our weekly Twitter #MusicMonday recap of the brand new tracks from last week that the folks in the press offices want you to be hearing. We post, you download.

Police Teeth – Bellingham Media Blackout
Kjartan Bue – Man Riding Backwards
Blessed Feathers + Peter Wolf Crier – Porcelain (RHCP Cover)
Tes Elations – May She
Dan Friel – Valedictorian
Mike Dillon – Leather On
Michna – Wanted Exotic
Nervous Curtains – Wired To Make Waves
Social Studies – Terracur
Max Turnbull – Gun Shy

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Pussy Riot – Putin Lights Up the Fires

The Sweet Serenades – Can’t Get Enough
Bambi Lee Savage – Oh Loneliness
Chris McFarland – Simple Selfish Plan
The Men – Candy
Carolyn Mark – Not Like The Movies
Gregory Pepper and His Problems – Another Stitch
Alameda – Oaxaca
Albert Swarm – Things Fold Into Themselves
Trash Aesthetics – Black Domino Box
Chomp – Fresh Wounds

28 more FREE TRACKS after the jump!

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Jon Sidel is on vacation and will return with all new episodes of the Idelic Hour next Friday. This episode was originally broadcast on 6/22/12. —Ed.

Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

An astrologer once told me upon reading my “chart,” I would spend much of my life roaming alone at night. For me it was never a secret, the night has always been a friend.

These past months, on many a night, I have driven LA boulevards listening to the making of a record—an extraordinary album by Sean Rowe, an artist I work with. Last week Sean debuted a single from this very special release. The song “Bring Back The Night” is a calling, and the muse for this week’s Idelic Hour.

It’s a fact that all the great songwriters have at least one “cut” about the night. Thank you Sean for bringing back these “nights” for me. I’m not sure what your song title means but when I was checking up on some of the songs for this week’s playlist, I stumbled on this quote for the song “Nightfall” by The Incredible String Band:

“The hangman is death and the beautiful daughter is what comes after. Or you might say that the hangman is the past twenty years of our life and the beautiful daughter is now, what we are able to do after all these years. Or you can make up your own meaning – your interpretation is probably just as good as ours.”

I love this.

By the way, Sean Rowe’s album is called The Salesman and The Shark. I wonder what that means?

The Idelic Hit of the Week:
Sean Rowe – Bring Back The Night