Video: Gus Gus – Add This Song

The video for the first single of Gusgus sixth studio album. Directors: Heimir Sverrisson and Jon Atli Helgason Assistant director: Raffaella Brizuela Editor: Steffi Thors Cinema Photographer: Tomas Tomasson

Review: Senser – Resistance Now

Cosmopolitan Breed 77, The Prodigy and System Of A Down mingling metal and synth rock parading is topped off with a quirky, Amy Lee rehearsing with Queen Adreena flavoured backing kick. It renders ‘Resistance Now’, a mood and tempo flitting saunter. Heitham Al-Sayed’s philistine vocals awaken any nihilistic demon within you. Then it’s slowly nursed back into a dormant state, through the soothing sway of co-vocalist Kerstin Haigh.

Multi-genre mixing has become a bit of a theme for Senser over the past 14 plus years, yet each time they add a different slant, more instrumental robustness or cosmopolitan vocal spice, ensuring that each album keeps the air of mystery that they have circulating. This single from new album, ‘ How To Do Battle’ encapsulates all of the adventurousness, alternative craft and canny arrangements to maintain Senser’s status as a true alternative act.

Live Review: Counting Crows – The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show

Counting Crows – The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show Sat Aug 29th Mohegan Sun Arena
Many times the opening acts of a concert can be a struggle to get through in order to see the main attraction. Maybe you know one or two hits by the openers, but can do without the other songs that you don’t know. The Traveling Circus and Medicine show takes a different approach. The show is headlined by the Counting Crows and features Michael Franti and Spearhead, as well as, Augustana. What makes the show different is that right out of the gate the bands are all united on the stage at the same time. This creates some unique versions of the bands songs. During the show the bands alternate between playing together in various lineups, and playing individually. This keeps the show very exciting and the energy never gets too low during its 3 hours. Expect to hear hits from all three band’s hits and also cover songs. One omission that upset some fans was the lack of a “Mr. Jones” performance by the counting crows. However, fans listening carefully would have heard elements of the song “Mr. Jones” during songs. Local community organizations are giving the opportunity to raise their awareness with booths outside the shows. The Counting Crows are known for their string of 90’s hits and continued success in the pop rock charts and soundtracks. Michael Franti and Spearhead is better known for current hit single “Say Hey (I Love You)”, while fans may remember Augustana for their single “Boston”. This was a very fun show to see. There are still dates through the beginning of September. For more info visit http://www.travelingcircusshow.com/ .

By Jonathan Cohen

The Man and His Mistress

Above my desk hangs a poster of Ella Fitzgerald singing at the Downbeat Café in 1949. Sitting at the table closest to the stage is Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Benny seems mildly entertained (does he know who he’s listening to?) but the Duke’s smile says it all. His eyes are joyful, his energy real, and the pleasure he takes from listening to a fellow musician is obvious. Ella quite possibly was at that moment singing one of his songs.
Perhaps there is no composer in the history of American music who has earned greater notoriety and worldwide respect than Edward Kennedy Ellington. His musical career spanned almost six decades and produced a plethora of astounding compositions ranging from the plunger mute “jungle sound” of the early years to the Sacred Concerts performed in cathedrals around the world in the 1960’s. One cannot touch upon the compositions of Ellington without also considering the collaboration between himself and Billy Strayhorn, whose partnership proved to be one of the most artistically productive of all time. The resulting sound of the Ellington band was one that cannot be easily categorized or described; it changed with the times and forever remained an entity to be shaped and stretched by the limitless boundaries of a creative mind.
Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington D.C. in 1899. Musically he was brought up on church services and piano lessons, but his real fascination with music began as a teenager when he started sneaking into a local pool hall with friends and first heard stride pianists at work. While vacationing in Philadelphia one summer, he heard a pianist named Harvey Brooks who inspired him to start taking his piano playing more seriously. It was during this time that a friend nicknamed Edward “Duke,” for no reason really except to give him a classier social image. At home he soon befriended local musicians and became well-known around town for sitting in for them on occasion; occasions which led to the meeting of famous stride pianist James P. Johnson and the formation of a friendship that led Duke to move forward in his career.
By 1923 Duke’s band was playing regularly at the classy Kentucky club in New York City and had developed a sound that set them apart from other bands of the day. The sound produced by horns “growling” in a wah-wah style with plunger mutes came to be known as “jungle” music. The group gained reputation by playing with visiting musicians such as Sidney Bechet and after forming a managing partnership with Irving Mills, the band soon secured a spot at the prestigious Cotton Club in Harlem. It was from this nightclub that America first heard the band over the radio. Mills saw to it that Duke only recorded his own music and hassled white-only record companies to include him in their catalogue. The band began appearing in Hollywood movies and set off to travel abroad. Gaining fans among the likes of the Prince of Wales, Prince George, and the Duke of Kent, Duke Ellington and his musicians were becoming one of the most sought-after bands in the world.
Seeing as how the band’s first European tour was received so enthusiastically by jazz fans, Ellington reasoned that he might be able to experiment with his music more upon returning to America. His piece entitled “Rude Interlude” was a composition nearly without a melody that relied on a solemn chord progression. The piece also contained a wordless vocal by Louis Bacon. Amongst critics comparisons began to arise between the work of Duke Ellington and that of British-born composer Frederick Delius, who was known for his rich and sensual harmonic sequences. Soon Duke Ellington’s pieces and general style of writing inspired further comparisons to classical composers. In the New Statesman there appeared an article written by Constant Lambert declaring, “I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient ‘Hot and Bothered’ and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section. He gives the same distinction to his genre as Strauss gave to the waltz or Sousa to the march.” A friend of Duke’s, Edmund Anderson, recalled playing for Duke the music of the classical composers and marveling at Duke’s astonishment upon hearing it. He had never listened to Ravel or Debussy before, but expressed extreme appreciation for the utter beauty of their work. Said Ellington of his personal musical taste, “I like 100 percent of Tatum, 100 percent of Bechet, about 100 percent of Oscar Peterson, 100 percent of Delius, Stravinsky, Debussy. If I don’t like 100 percent of Ravel, I guess it’s because I haven’t listened too well to some things.”
The camaraderie among the instrumentalists in the Duke Ellington band was strong. They felt that they were a part of a family and were well paid and taken care of by Duke. Ellington, in fact, wrote pieces with specific players in mind. He would study how they played and write the music around them, such as trumpeter Cootie William’s feature, “Concerto for Cootie.” The compositions made most famous by Duke Ellington, however, were songs such as “Satin Doll,” “Mood Indigo,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and “Sophisticated Lady.” Most of this music was written while on the road, on the back of napkins at dinner, or at the last minute in the studio. If he didn’t like how a piece was coming together, he was known to rip it up and flush it down the toilet, claiming that if it was any good then he would remember it later.
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn became a collaborative force in the 1940’s. The two were so compatible artistically that upon considering one of their pieces it is hard to say exactly which part of the contribution belongs to Strayhorn and which to Ellington. In New York in 1963 a hospitalized Strayhorn was telephoned by Duke with an idea for a project. Duke gave him the title of the song and a few verbal instructions from which to work from and when Strayhorn sent the finished product back to Duke, who had also completed it at the same time, the two discovered that they had started and finished the piece on the same two notes. They had also both made use of the same six note melodic theme, of which only two notes differed. Ellington described their remarkable relationship as “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.”
The future world-wide travels of the Duke Ellington band provided great inspiration to the composer, who was known to write suites unique to the country he had visited, such as the Far East Suite, the Virgin Islands Suite, and the Queen’s Suite. Another interesting genre of composition that Ellington explored later in life was his sacred music. Upon being invited by the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to play a concert of sacred music, Ellington took to writing what he would describe as the most important thing he ever did or would do. The music was not traditional church music or a blending of secular and sacred, but pure Ellingtonian. “Now I can say out loud to all the world what I’ve been saying to myself for years on my knees,” he noted. It seems that the sacred concerts are representative of the depths of the reaches of Ellington’s music; not constrained to any one genre, powerful and far-reaching.
Among other honors, Duke Ellington was awarded the Emperor’s Star of Ethiopian, the Legion of Honor, the President’s Gold Medal, and the presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also considered for a Pulitzer Prize and won 13 Grammy awards.
At his funeral service in 1974 more than 12,000 people attended. One of his musicians gave the address, stating that “he was loved throughout the whole world, at all levels of society, by Frenchmen and Germans, by English and Irish, by Arabs and Jews, by Indians and Pakistanis, by atheists and devout Catholics, and by Communists and Fascists alike.” Ella Fitzgerald noted, “It’s a very sad day… A genius has passed.”

He left the world with approximately 3,000 compositions that covered almost as many moods, genres, tonalities and movements. His love of the music is laid out clearly for the listener to enjoy and today its influence is heard everywhere. Duke Ellington himself said it most eloquently: “Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays…she is ten thousand years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand-new woman every day, and as endless as time mathematics… Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”
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Download: Pelican – Strung Up From The Sky

Chicago instrumental art metal outfit “Pelican” — first track released off of their new record, which is being released on Southern Lord this fall.

Download: Pelican – Strung Up From The Sky

News: Rubies Announce Fall Tour!

Rubies will be hitting the road this fall for 5 appearances along the East Coast and in Canada. The band will also be filming with Daytrotter for those not lucky enough to catch them in-person on 10/5.

TOUR DATES
9/30 – Brooklyn – Union Hall
10/1 – New York – Piano’s
10/2 – Montreal – Pop Montreal
10/3 – Toronto – The Drake Hotel
10/4 – Chicago – TBC
10/5 – Daytrotter session

Video: Sweethead – The Great Disruptors

Sweethead (Troy Van Leeuwen – Queens of the Stone Age) have a new video for “The Great Disruptors”

News: Sargent House label offers FREE sampler courtesy of AmazonMP3

Sargent House is offering a free sampler of its diverse roster of bands beginning this week via AmazonMP3. The 12-song compilation features tracks by RX Bandits, Bygones (Zach Hill & Nick Reinhart), Good Old War, Maps & Atlases, Tera Melos and Red Sparowes. The label sampler includes two singles currently at radio, “My Lonesome Only Friend” (MP3) by RX Bandits and “Looking For Shelter” (MP3) by Good Old War. See full track listing below.

Sargent House FREE sampler track listing:

01. Good Old War “Looking For Shelter”

02. RX Bandits “My Lonesome Only Friend”

03. Maps & Atlases “Ted Zancha”

04. Bygones “Click On That (Smash the Plastic Death)”

05. This Town Needs Guns “Chinchilla”

06. Tera Melos “A Spoonful of Slurry”

07. Fang Island “Vlad”

08. Native “Ride The Tide”

09. Red Fang “Sharks”

10. Love You Moon “David’s Birthday”

11. Cast Spells “Glamorous Glowing”

12. Red Sparowes “The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer”

Interview: Mew

This is the first album without your original bassist. How much did that equate into the recording process and overall sound of the album?

That it a tough question to answer because Johan’s musical direction has changed a lot since he left Mew. Undoubtedly it would have been different. But I am not sure exactly how it would have been different.

This album sounds a lot warmer and there is more light on it than there was on Kites, and so I suppose from the outside it is tempting to believe Johan was responsible for all the darkness, but that is not the case. On Kites the general feeling and idea was to make a dark and hard-handed record, but we don’t ever want to make the same album twice, so in many ways No More Stories is a counter-reaction to Kites. We would never have made No More Stories if we had not made Kites. That’s how it works, we move ahead in zig-zags and in shifting formation.

This album seems to have a miscellaneous feel, like each song is very different from the next, which was the first thing I noticed when I heard the record. It has a very different feel than your previous album. Was this something that was preconceived or did it just happen as you started to record?

We had a very strict or at least thought-out schematic approach to the last record, we wanted it to be dark and cold, more so than our prior records, and we wanted each song to progress into the next, as seamlessly as possible. On this album we wanted to create something warmer and more colorful and to some extent for each song to be its own story so to speak. We also applied different methods of writing, and often put ourselves in a new place and with new tools to make sure the end result was dynamic and pulsating and never felt stagnated. So I suppose in a way this album is as thought-out as the last one. We certainly spent as much time and more on it!

I read that you recorded this record in Brooklyn, Copenhagen, and France. How do you choose where to record?

That’s not exactly true. We did some of the initial writing in the south of France, it was a break between touring the Kites album in the states. It was just a way for us to focus on new songs and putting all our energy into it, as we felt we were in dire need to start writing again.
The recording started in Brooklyn, there is a studio there which our producer Rich Costey had worked in before and really liked. That place has a great sound and a lot of strange old instruments which makes it sort of a playground for musicians who want to expand beyond the “normal” rock music ensemble. We did a lot of tracking there. Then we went back to Copenhagen and recorded some stuff at our own studio / rehearsal space, such as mallet instruments and synths and other bits and bobs. And then we returned to New York, this time recording at Electric Lady in Manhattan which is a great place that has a very pleasant atmosphere. We also mixed the album there.

Choosing where to record.. it’s a long list of variables that need considering. Sometimes it can be a logistic nightmare. We really like New York a lot, and our producer lived there at the time and knew those studios, so it made sense for us to go.

You have been playing some intimate shows with Nine Inch Nails. How did the tour with NIN come to life?

Trent Reznor appreciates what we do and asked us to go on the tours. We did some big shows with them in Europe and now are doing an intimate tour here in the states. It’s been really great so far, and we are very happy to have been invited and it feels extra special because it’s their farewell tour. Trent Reznor has had a huge impact on music and is just an extremely talented and creative guy!

I’m also a big fan of Kashmir. Do you guys have any type of musical relationship with them? Any chance of a Mew / Kashmir US tour in the not-so-distant future?

That’s cool. I think they are recording in New York right now actually. We have done a short tour with them in Denmark and know them well and they are super talented and great guys and fun to hang out with! But no, there hasn’t been talk of doing tours with them just now.

What music are you guys currently listening to, and do you have any music suggestions?

I am looking forward to hearing the new Mt. Eerie album which I have not yet gotten my hands on. These last three days I have listened to the following albums

Symptoms “Calm”
Oh No Ono “Eggs”
Plaid “Tekkon Kinkreet soundtrack”
Genesis “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”
Yellow Magic Orchestra “Naughty Boys”

Did you have any specific albums or artists that you were influenced by while recording this album?

Hmm… not sure. We talked about Beatles Magical Mystery Tour, how that album sounded, with warmth and its compelling stereo image.
But I don’t think we are very conscious about what inspires us. It’s more like a few extra spices that go into the veggie- and fruit juice blender
and then when we stop grinding all the juice out we stop and see what it tastes like.

News: My Tiger My Timing second single due 19th October

My Tiger My Timing are Anna Vincent, James Vincent, Jamie Harrison, Gary Drain and Seb Underhill, and formed in 2008 in south east London. After the release of their first single earlier this year – ‘This Is Not The Fire’ – they return with second single ‘I Am The Sound’ out October 19th through Silver Music Machine. The single will also feature ‘The Distance’, a dark and a remix by Hook & The Twin and May68.

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