July 2011
23 posts
4 tags
Brown Recluse - Evening Tapestry →
When I first put Evening Tapestry on, it had a warm, almost familiar feel to it. I couldn’t place it at the time (chalking it up to the fact that the sound is familiar in the way soft sand at a beach on your current holiday feels exactly like the one on your last holiday). But it turns out I knew more about Brown Recluse than I thought, having featured their 2009 EP, The Soft Skin, way...
4 tags
Handsome Furs - Sound Kapital →
On his third album, Wolfman (well, Wolf Parade man) Dan Boeckner drops the guitar and strips things down (maybe inspiration for the artwork?!) to just the machine elements. This puts the keyboards of his wife and band member, Alexei Perry, to the fore and in doing so creates a warmer, dancier album than their previous spaced-out records. Inspired by travels to Eastern Europe and Asia it is in...
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Woods - Sun and Shade →
Woods’ previous album, 2010’s At Echo Lake, was the first album on my long, long backlog playlist for about a year before I called bankruptcy on that list earlier this year. As such, it got quite a lot of listens without ever quite making it into review phase. Which is a shame because not only was it a good album, it makes quite a nice benchmark for their new album Sun and Shade,...
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They Might Be Giants - Join Us →
When They Might Be Giants say Join Us, you say How? Masters of the novelty, Join Us is actually a pretty straightforward set of power pop songs - gone are the tunes for children or TV shows as John Flansburgh and John Linnell focus on making an album for those kids’ parents, the people who probably were tuning into TMBG the first time around. Overall, It’s characteristic old ground...
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Washed Out - Within and Without →
Washed Out (aka, the very un-indie name of, Ernest Greene) finally gets around to releasing a full length album even though it seems like he’s been around for eons in today’s music world after essentially creating the chillwave genre alongside Toro y Moi, Neon Indian and Memory Tapes. Whilst chillwave has, for the most part, faded into a relic of hipsterrunoff’s archives,...
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Radiohead - The King of Limbs →
Aaaand this is the one we’ve been saving up for all week. Good Morning Mr Magpie! Mysteriously appearing like a ghost we’d given up on little by little, The King of Limbs came into full bloom like a lotus flower on Spotify recently. You’ve probably heard this feral beast already but don’t let this review separate you from another listen or eight. Hidden codex? Maybe.
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6 tags
Vieux Farka Toure - The Secret →
Something different for your Friday, The Secret is the latest album from Vieux Farka Toure, prodigious guitar maestro and son of African music legend Ali Farka Toure (who you may know from Talking Timbuktu, Ry Cooder’s follow-up to Buena Vista Social Club). On his third album Vieux stretches his arms and lets his axe skills show - it’s a thoroughly modern take on African music or a...
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King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine →
I’m embarrassed to say that I had to wait for the Mercury Award nominees to be reminded to post about this one. Having first listened to this album whilst in the trance of an existential gaze through a window with rain beating down upon the streets, it felt like the perfect accompaniment. Appropriating a sound that takes one far away - to a lonely fishing island in the North of Scotland...
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NEW! The Indie Animals Collection
It’s a jungle out there. Yes, record store buyers beware: the reason CD sales have been gradually decreasing for the last decade has nothing to do with the advent of the internet and piracy (oh no) but with the marauding creatures lurking in every aisle. Just take a closer look next time and you’ll see animals prowling the racks.
Well it’s time to stop the bloodshed and...
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The Head And The Heart - The Head And The Heart →
Slip in the CD, (or just click on the link above) and a warm blanket of indie folk seems to grow around you. The first few songs are warm and thoughtful, yet awakening. Cats And Dogs, particularly, starts the record with a clean bang. However, in this writer’s opinion, the latter songs start to drift from the mark slightly and the energy seems to dull throughout the record. It’s...
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Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz →
This is a courtesy post for Mr Stevens whose fine, fine 2010 album has just been made available on Spotify (alongside the surprise EP All Delighted People which preceded it). Proclaimed by HotSpotMusic writers as the #3 album of last year, “Sufjan’s signature sound innovated = absolutely incredible” with “a surprise album that keeps unfurling it’s epicness with every...
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Liam Finn - FOMO →
As the bio reads, Liam describes this record as, “Nothing over-intellectualized or technically flashy. Songs that connected with everyday listeners who simply appreciate tunes that trigger tapping feet or a lump in the throat.” … which is an admirably self-aware description. These are some solid, mainstream indie rock tunes. They sound almost familiar in the way that seeing a...
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Nightlands - Forget The Mantra →
It’s a bright, warm day out on the West Coast. You’re up for adventure. You throw off the tie and grab your surfboard. Running out towards the sparkling blue ocean like a wandering plant in the throngs of photosynthesis. You dive in. It’s warm and cathartic. Spotting a big wave in the distance you mount your board, ready to go wherever it takes you. Waiting. Stillness....
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White Denim - D →
I must say that I was pleasantly surprised when D rolled in on the HotSpotMusic backlog playlist. It’s a tight mixture of rock patching in blues, psychedelia and alt.country wherever they see fit. At times it’s My Morning Jacket, at others it’s Grizzly Bear and there’s even places where it sounds like rocky moments of Radiohead. It’s not as good as any of those...
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Various Artists - Rave On Buddy Holly →
Who couldn’t enjoy a tribute album of the great bespectacled one by some of the finest names in rock today. Buddy Holly’s songs remain as important as they ever were and it’s always fun to see other people tackling the classics, even if some are better than others. Finest cuts on here include Julian Casablancas’s boombastic, synthetic version of Rave On, Karen...
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Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Unknown Mortal... →
Taken from New Zealand and imported to Portland, Ruban Nielson (of former punk rockers, the Mint Chicks) and his band of merry men decided to create something he describes as “alien beatnik pop music that echoed 60s psychedelia and krautrock minimalism with just a hint of gentle weirdness”. Equally eerie and lo-fi, it’s Nielson’s uncanny ability to write hooks into that...
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J Mascis - Several Shades Of Grey →
J Mascis is a distinctive looking chap. He’s also a distinctive sounding chap with an earnest voice that shines through on this record, even without the layers of fuzzy harmonics that his work is traditionally shrouded within. Said to have been wary at releasing an album of such sparseness and, in places, youthfulness, those fears can be discarded by any listener as Several Shades of...
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The Bewitched Hands - Birds & Drums →
The band formerly known as The Bewitched Hands On The Top Of Our Heads has decided to take the ethos of the music - short, catchy and memorable - and apply it to the group’s name. Now simply The Bewitched Hands, this French ensemble’s first full album (and what a full album it is at 25 songs!) is packed full of power pop gems - as if The New Pornographers allowed Phoenix into the...
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Ezra Furman & The Harpoons - Mysterious Power →
Some reviewers compare Ezra Furman favourably to the slew of Dylan impersonators. But this is not the whimsy of Conor Oberst or similar folk-ish pretenders, this is the considered folk-rock that imagines what would’ve happened if the Newport incident had been but one step in Dylan’s electric re-awakening. Anyone who’s been following Furman’s career to date will already...
6 tags
Emmy The Great - Virtue →
Chilling, sweet, real and poetic as always, Emmy the Great’s second full length album, Virtue, brings the indie folk heat. Building on First Love, this is broader, more constructed. I once read Emma say that if everything that she wrote about in her songs happened to her, she’d be pretty screwed up, but that the emotions are real. That represents her songs fairly well - real...
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June Playlist
Something of a renaissance for HotSpotMusic in June - the most posts in the month for a long while (and yet not nearly enough to keep up). Maybe that has something to do with the peer pressure induced by all you lovely new followers. With great power etc…
So, last week Spotify and HotSpotMusic both mined the recent archives with the eventual addition of Smith Westerns’ great...
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The Kinks - Face To Face →
Sunday Sermons
There’s perhaps no finer sound of Englishness than the Kinks who, between Ray Davies pen and the music hall rhythms, have inspired today’s breed of social-commentators with an independent voice and an ear for melody. It’s undoubtedly my favourite Kinks record (just pipping Village Green Preservation Society) and is one of the best of the 1960s, skewering the...
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HotSpotMusic. Half Year Roundup
Not content to let list making wait until its traditional annual festive occasion, most blogs and magazines appear to be doing half year roundups. Well, we’re no different. In fact, we started it (if one year ago counts, which it doesn’t). I refuse to rank just yet because albums need a little time on the hob until they come to the boil but there’s certainly a few there...