About the music we post:
The songs we feature on Tandem Magazine are only for the purpose of sampling. If you like what you hear, please support the artist by purchasing their music, preferably at your local independent record store.
The Grey Area are Jason Steinhauer and Timothy Jones from Washington D.C. Together, the music they create is fun and extremely full bodied, especially coming from a two-piece. Laced in reverb and distorted guitar, the tunes come off as almost freshly classic rock sounding.
Already, the songwriting is diverse but points towards something of a greater whole. Clever little bits such as the busy yet smooth saxophone part in “It’s Only Monday”, a part reminiscent of McCartney’s “Listen To What The Man Said”, work their way in. “You”, with it’s theatrical vocals and heavy guitar, recall Queen. However, the band’s best moment is the song “Ourselves”. A ridiculously catchy melody sits over warm guitar before a moment of tricky guitar soloing, all culminating with some always-appreciated na-na-na’s. It’s simply a great pop song.
Chicago-based five-piece A Lull are making quite the splash in the indie blogosphere. Their music is pop through and through, irksome perhaps to those less embracing of that genre. But it’s also heavily indie rock, with percussive elements that imply electronica in rhythm and speed. The band released their first full-length Confetti this past April to much praise on indie label Mush, also home to Daedelus and Blue Sky Black Death. Now they’re releasing a follow-up EP that consists of songs they cut from Confetti, called Confetti Reprise. The album art plays up the first album too.
When talking with Matt Hourigan, the man behind the rap outfit Lifestyles, he admitted to me: “I wasn’t really used to the hip hop music here [in Minneapolis] at first. It just seemed so cold and gritty.” It’s true. Whether it’s the long cold Minnesota winters or the industrial-meets-urban elements, music from the Minneapolis hip hop scene tends to have dark and dirty production, one of the reasons why it has gained so much popularity outside of the state. In contrast, Lifestyle’s mix of surf, hip-hop, reggae and acoustic elements sounds isolated from everything else within the Minneapolis scene. But then again, maybe it’s almost perfect here: In such an enthusiastic place for music, the blur between underground hip hop and spoken-word acoustic could land Hourigan a gig playing almost any club or venue in town.
L.A. band Warm Weather is made up of three Bates and Dartmouth grads that moved out to Hollywood this past fall and started writing music together on the drive. They’ve since settled down and are gearing up to release a five-song EP, not yet snatched up by a label, in the near future. The band’s lyrics are old-fashioned and their vocal harmonies have a barbershop quartet feel to them. They get a lot of Fleet Foxes and Beach Boys comparisons, definitely not without reason, and the track “Coney Island” sounds uncannily like last year’s L.A. buzz band Local Natives. Other tracks are less imitative though and the band’s musical skill clearly communicates itself in listening to their recordings and watching their live videos. Definitely focused on recording to this point, they don’t have many upcoming shows on their calendar but keep your eyes and ears open.
Thus, for your listening pleasure, here’s “Coney Island”:
For more information on Warm Weather and to hear other songs from them, visit here or here.
Next Tuesday, local trio Zoo Animal will take the stage at Saint Paul’s Turf Club with Wye Oak and Callers. Their mesmerizing live shows, minimalist aesthetic, and the unflinching examination of faith in vocalist Holly Newsom’s lyrics have won more than a few converts in the Twin Cities. Zoo Animal strive to make their music accessible to everyone, religious and secular alike. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Newsom said she relied on Christianity during her parents’ traumatic divorce when she was young. Since then, God has become the focus of astute and thought-provoking songs. In “Black and Gold,” off of their 2008 album Young Blood, Newsom sings, “I was working at my night job / Thinking about when women started working / All the stores had to stay open late / ’Cause there was no one to shop during the day / So I’m a working woman, I have no choice.” Paradoxes and self-examinations like these appeal to listeners on a universal level. Newsom says, “A lot of the Christian life is a struggle, and I think everybody can relate to struggle. And so even if I’m talking about my relationship with God maybe someone’s relating it to their relationship with their boyfriend or whatever, you know?” In Zoo Animal, the band’s latest release, that relationship with God grows increasingly more complicated. After moving from a conservative small town to a much bigger city, Newsom struggles to remain faithful while being constantly exposed to drugs and alcohol (which she abstains from). You can hear pain in Newsom’s ragged gulps before each verse on “Dollar Signs,” and in the distant, desperate wails on “A Hatred.” It’s a darker album than Zoo Animal’s debut, but definitely worth digging into.
Gene Lee, a full-time University of Chicago student, is churning out feel-good electro-pop music. Inspired originally by Sufjan Stevens and later by Spanish electronic rock band Delorean and the Las Vegas-local group Kid Versus Cougar, Lee began writing music in high school but really pulled out the stops when he got to college. Over the past two years, he wrote and recorded a five-song EP in his dorm room and performed his first live show for a group of students living around him. Each song on Lee’s debut “Suncentered” is about space because he was interested in astronomy and religion and their interplay, but the music doesn’t have a spacey or ambient feel. Lee’s saturated vocals are reminiscent of harmonizers Fleet Foxes and Local Natives, but they lie on top of perfect club beats that seem better set outside on a sunny day than in dark strobelighted spaces. Even the guitar parts are poppy to an extreme.
Last year I promised I would give a rundown of the music that most impacted me while I was living in Spain. Now, a year has passed since I spent three months in Barcelona and traveling throughout the country and I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the experience. Lately I have found myself coming back to a lot of the music I was listening to over there and figured this might be a good time to share it. One song in particular continues to grab me.
The Chicago-based band California Wives will be featured live from the studio on 89.5 FM Vocalo tonight (January 5) at 8 pm. Leaning heavily in the electro-pop direction, the band will also play the Tomorrow Never Knows festival at Lincoln Hall January 12 with Houses, Sun Airway and The Helio Sequence.
This past September, California Wives put out an EP called Affair. Recorded at the ever lovely Engine Studios in Chicago, the album screams high-production value but the band certainly doesn’t hide behind that, playing to their strong suits. Vocalist Jayson Kramer has a voice that’s both thin and robust and barely there reverb makes it work in the barren (and the XX-sounding) landscape of songs like the EP’s opener Blood Red Youth. On lyrics like “Looking through the looking glass / in the hand of a liar / you well-read sycophant / political man of iron,” Kramer’s phrasing makes lines interesting that in other contexts would seem overdone.
Who or, more precisely, what is Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr?
Well, I guess the easy answer is they’re a band. But why name a band after a famous NASCAR driver? Will they get sued? Are they trying to be cool by association? Is it ironic? And, most importantly, why are they making such a big splash in the music world with only a four song EP to their name (and one of the songs a cover at that) from a record label that doesn’t carry many other bands of note?
Listening to the EP (called Horse Power - fitting, right?) itself raises similar questions. From the first five seconds of “Vocal Chords,” the listener expects a-capella-heavy tune a la Fleet Foxes, but it turns shoegaze-y, seconds later it’s Hawaiian and the changes keep coming, making it hard to pin the song down into any sort of traditional genre and hard to determine its overall emotional effect. Is the song light and fun or heavy and complex? It’s guitar-rock music but layered under electronic beats that make you feel like you’re in a club. Or is it surf-singer-songwriter music over sweet and sad group harmonies? The rest of the EP doesn’t help us define it much more, twisting lyrics from “what I have is nothing that you want” to “all we have is nothing but our love” in the progress of the EP’s opener “Nothing But Our Love.” In the same vein, putting together close opposites “I just want you to stay” and “I just don’t want to stay” on “Vocal Chords” doesn’t exactly make things easier either.
But the complexity is what makes the songs interesting and through it all the music is accessible and light-hearted. “Simple Girl” simplifies things a little bit with Jeremy Messersmith-like vocal lines and more straightforward lyrics. The Beach Boys cover “God Only Knows” is true to the original song’s simple idea throughout but both it and “Simple Girl” still have their fair share of eccentricities, which is what makes them great. Taken as a whole the EP is a good one for the summer and it will be interesting to see what the band comes up with on a full-length. They’ve got one scheduled for late 2010 or early 2011, so keep your ears open.
I leave most of my questions open for debate, so decide for yourself. Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr will be playing TOMORROW September 2 at Subterranean in Chicago and on Friday, September 3 at 400 Bar in Minneapolis.
You can listen to ¾ of the EP on the band’s myspace. Here’s a pretty interesting video for the EP’s first song “Nothing But Our Love”:
At Lincoln Hall last night I got a nice surprise. The night’s first opening band, River City Extension, knocked my socks off. The group is an Edward Sharpe-like eight-person collective with a frontman who looks strikingly like Conor Oberst and their songs ranged from introspective and soft acoustic guitar tunes to rollicking punk- and ska-inspired sing-a-longs that had the audience smiling and dancing. Their set-up includes two trumpets, a cello, a djembe, a keyboard, in addition to all the traditional makings of a rock band. They’ve also got a set of three phenomenal vocalists, two males and one female who build some awesome three-part harmonies and each stand beautifully alone. In addition to their talent, they all brought energy and excitement to the stage, and it rubbed off on everyone else in the room.
The band has a record out now that they released this past May, but physical copies are elusive – most available at live shows and near their home town in New Jersey. You can, however, purchase the digital version at iTunes or Amazon. But the band is encouraging people to ask their local record stores to order it to demonstrate demand for the album, so that’s an option too.
More than anything, though, you should see them live. Minneapolis, if you’re reading this in time, you can catch them tonight at the Triple Rock Social Club at 5 pm. If you just missed them in Chicago or Minneapolis, keep checking this website and we’ll post the next time they come through town.
