Still in love with Bat For Lashes.
--- Dan Deacon plays Ireland in june - I wanted to post some photos of a recent gig to get across to some people what they should expect from a Deacon show.
http://www.culturebully.com/dan-deacon-triple-rock-social-club-05-02-2009
The review given of Bromst over at P4K was surprisingly good. It picked up on a strand thats been running throughout Deacon's discography - the idea of community. I think that its really strange that a more 'band' album, like Bromst, sounds far more insular than any of the predecessors. I was talking with Stephan from Halfset, in a failed interview, last year about this progression from introspective to more extrospective (??) music, and its a really strange subject. Halfset did it a more haphazard way by inviting in more collaborators and I spose in a much more overt wayby inviting a/v artists to interpret songs. But Deacon's sense of community extends from a showmanship, and a particular philosophy - yet with Bromst there was a tendency to put the music too firmly set in a reactive mood, by which i mean reactive to this central idea of what Deacon is, as laid out by blogs and critics and the like. Bromst is great but it's too similar in styles to Superman of the Rings for it not to make me wonder about the validity of this 'new' approach.
--- From the funnier side of indie - http://pitchfork.com/news/35244-wayne-coyne-apologizes-to-arcade-fire/
--- Todays work time playlist has involved alot of those fourtet/burial tunes. As I watch You From Afar, The Juan Maclean and some good ole The National. ohh and a lot of burial.
--- The Juan Maclean were a band that I've been seeing in a lot of 'what I'm Listening to now' posts/enbeds but not a lot has been written about them- apart from a pretty good lil review over at the Quietus. The music, and I hate having to boil down a band into cliche's but this one works - is what would come of LCD Soundsystem and The Human League having a love child. Comparisons being made to Hercules and Love Affair are purile. HLA got the DFA sound and went for a look at disco, and pulled it off in a really good way - mainly because you an't exactly claim that there was anything particularly time-specific or culturally neccesary about disco, it can be transposed into any time period - it might sound naff it might not depending on the level of cool that the band trying to pull it off have. The Juan MacLean's game plan is similar but its basing itself firmly in the same period as disco, just on a different continent - Europe. So expect Human League sounding trade offs between the male and female lead singers with familiar enough electronics going off underneath. Its good, its not ground-breaking and if you give them a chance the music does grow on you. But here's the deal, disco was fun. The Human League were far too po-faced for their own good. And the same can be said on the HLA vs Juan Maclean front.
--- And the end here's a pretty cool song from the XX, via Nialler 9;
The xx - Crystalised from Young Turks on Vimeo.
--- Jeremy Barnes from A Hawk and Hacksaw discussing modern city-planning. The Quietus do have a lot interesting wank. http://thequietus.com/articles/01602-a-hawk-and-a-hacksaw-on-the-potential-pitfalls-of-natural-building
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