November 2011
14 posts
4 tags
Korallreven – An Album by Korallreven →
An Album by Korallreven is an album by Korallreven. Their first in fact. Korallreven are a duo from Sweden (including one former member of the Radio Dept.) focused on making blissful electronica, something you could probably deduce by the titles of their preceding mixtapes: A Dream by Korallreven, Another Dream and A Dream Within a Dream. It holds within it a powerfully hypnotic set of tunes...
5 tags
Blouse - Blouse →
When the good people of Summer Camp go to sleep at an angle, this is what you get. Beautiful, dreamy synth-pop that’s slightly too off-kilter to call pop and slightly to charming to call shoegaze. The twisted dream state extends beyond the rather ethereal ephemera that is each song but into the content too, covering everything from the complications of time travel to the distorted...
2 tags
Indie Animals Collection: The Big Cats
Roaring into this week’s edition of the Indie Animals Collection are the large, prowling beasts we pretend to call cats. Only they’re far more dangerous. Just look at those teeth.
And that’s why all indie music names after such feral beasts is bold, fearless and toothy of course. Watch out for the delicious red herring in this one.
Click here: Indie Animals: The Big Cats
6 tags
Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler - This Is Christmas →
I hate Christmas records so much. But this is a Christmas record with Emmy The Great and Northern Ireland’s Ash’s Tim Wheeler. I am feeling so conflicted right now. And that is why I will leave it up to you, dear reader, and your impeccable taste to make the judgement on this one. I do urge you to at least listen to Christmas Day (I Wish I Was Surfing), an inspired Wheeler take...
6 tags
Gospel Music - How To Get To Heaven From... →
Imagine the Moldy Peaches on their most introspective days. The days when the wacked-out, crack-finding urges were gone. Now imagine a pineapple. Forget the pineapple. What you’re left with is Gospel Music. Anyone who listened to the EP Duettes will know how How To Get To Heaven From Jacksonville, FL is going to sound. Charming little pop ditties with witty lines such as “I...
5 tags
Summer Camp - Welcome To Condale →
It’d be easy to dismiss Summer Camp as lazy 80s revivalists but beneath that veneer of sneer is a heart of gold. Sounding like the soundtrack to the John Hughes movie that was never made in, let’s say Condale, this album is a pop masterpiece of sun-reflecting-off-the-newly-polished-surface-of-that-sailboat-you-took-out-once-as-a-kid-style-glistening quality. This is an album about...
5 tags
Atlas Sound - Parallax →
Parallax is probably Bradford Cox’s 1,057th album in the last three days, such is the man’s impressive output. And it’s good. It’s like a collection of postcards from a constantly shifting destination, a time and space undefinable but defiantly refined. But not only does Parallax contain a misty mystery but it is also contains some great songs - from a conceptual and a...
6 tags
The Decemberists - Long Live The King →
The King Is Dead… Long Live The King! A fitting companion piece to the Decemberists fine album from all the way back in January. ’twas so long ago this record almost sounds vintage now. So old that it’s cool again. Well okay, it’s actually one of the few records of 2011 that’s stuck all the way through the year so having a little fill-up on that is more than...
1 tag
WatchHolding Pattern - a HotSpotMixtape
Every so often I put together a mixtape of new and not-so-new tracks. I used to put them up on a second blog, cleverly entitled HotSpotMixtapes but I’ve decided to just add them onto here for now so y’all can find and enjoy them. So here’s the latest one, Holding Pattern. If you like it, check out some of the older ones over on 8tracks.
5 tags
Still Corners - Creatures of an Hour →
Still Corners have taken the concept of pillow talk to another level - listening to Creatures of an Hour (and we can only assume that that hour is the Twilight Hour) is like being transported to the top of a mountain, shrouded in the clouds with lead singer Tessa Murray whispering delicately in your ear. The atmospheric paradox the band creates from behind the covers is a simultaneous equation...
5 tags
Active Child - You Are All I See →
You Are All I See. It taps into everything that’s cool about 2011. Heavenly yet ghostly vocals (like a zombie archangel doing celestial karaoke) mixed with ethereal, spacious sounding electronica, slightly off-tempo beats, R&B undertones and even the knowing lyrics. It has something fairly unique in its use of the harp to decorate the album in a way that is a more refined, shiny...
5 tags
The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions →
The world has only waited around 44 years to hear these recordings. It’s like the Kennedy files of pop music. The secret stash of unfinished but certainly not unfurnished studio takes of this infamous album have finally surfaced and now you can experience the maddening frustration of Brian Wilson’s attempts at perfection which ultimately drove him slightly mad. Each track on here...
2 tags
Indie Animals Collection: The Wolf
The idea of a lone beast, howling into the midnight sky with only the extraterrestrial objects for company is something of a fitting metaphor for most indie-based warblers. Although I’ve never seen a wolf playing electric guitar that doesn’t mean they can’t.
And yet there are no actual wolves on this playlist… simply your run of the mill Wolfmother, Wolf People, Peter and...
1 tag
October Playlist
Welcome returns from Ryan Adams, Jens Lekman and the absolutely stellar Wilco album lit up October. And the super effort from super-group Wild Flag wasn’t bad too even if Radiohead’s remix album didn’t quite match up to expectations.
Click here: HotSpotMusic. - October 2011
October 2011
13 posts
5 tags
Youth Lagoon - The Year Of Hibernation →
This disappeared just before I had a chance to blog it but it has just returned. Not really with a bang of course because this album is entirely about the slow burn, the subtlety with which things creep up on you in life is reflected delicately in the songs of Trevor Powers. Each song is a carefully considered meditation, drenched in so much reverb and echo that you feel like you’re...