The "You Should Listen To..." Thread

[Beautiful Tragedy]

wait for love - matt white
honorary title - stay away


good songs.

[rockpit]

I listened to Dear & The Headlights, and I liked Sweet Talk that I didn't really listened to the other songs.



Artist: Los Campesinos!
Album: Hold On Now, Youngster...
Release Year: 2008

Album Review:
ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

Every musician is also an audience, and if the ever-growing pile of new music my exhausted mailman brings me every day is any indication, more and more audience members are becoming musicians, too. Since long before "indie" was a buzzword, the loosely defined scene has celebrated participatory self-expression-- whether in the first independently released punk records ("It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it," sang the Desperate Bicycles in 1977, on one of the first ever), the hand-assembled 7" singles of 1980s indie pop, the four-track cassettes of 1990s lo-fi, or even the revival-meeting catharsis of the Arcade Fire and "Form a Band" exhortations of Art Brut. Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be you.

(WITH MY WALKMAN TUCKED UNDER MY FOREARM)

Few bands have made as much out of this ideal of enthusiast-as-artist as Los Campesinos!. Formed two years ago at Cardiff University in Wales, the indie-pop septet first grabbed attention on MySpace, but their music embodies some the best elements of the past 30 years of indie music. It's not just the superficial connections, like their Ramones- or Pastels-style surnames, band-made zine, or the cover of Pavement B-side "Frontwards" on last year's slept-on Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP. With boy/girl exclamations (!) befitting a punkier Heavenly/Calvin Johnson collaboration (!!), the lavish instrumentation of Broken Social Scene (whose Dave Newfeld produces), childish glockenspiels, and exuberantly buzzing guitars, debut album Hold on Now, Youngster... is a giddy, tuneful love note to individuality, pathos, smarts, silliness, and everything else indie pop built its name on. There's even the requisite ironic self-mockery-- nobody actually thought this stuff was cool, did they?

FOUR SWEATY BOYS WITH GUITARS TELL ME NOTHING ABOUT MY LIFE!

Like indie bands from the Smiths to Vampire Weekend, Los Campesinos! pack their songs with lyrical specificity, only their lives are apparently full of internet surfing, indie fandom, and absurd humor. "Stick with the imprints/ With the hieroglyphics that the fan club sent us," Gareth Campesinos! hollers with every exclamation point in his young being on "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats", which claps into an Aleksandra Campesinos!-sung chorus about Spiderman. This bunch are as apt to sing about CTRL-ALT-DEL, LiveJournal entries, and that old blogger standby "throwing up in my mouth" as they are about B-sides, K Records T-shirts, or C-90 cassettes. Hey, this is what they know, and they document it with an emotional vividness that should have Pete Wentz friending them in no time. (Even though he probably won't get most of their jokes.)

THE OPPOSITE OF TRUE LOVE IS AS FOLLOWS: REALITY!

Depressive gloominess is, of course, another indie hallmark, perhaps put most succinctly by a certain former K Records affiliate in the Nirvana title "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die". Hold on Now, Youngster... takes on the topic with wit, sure, but also an ache that suggests that such feelings are still all too real to them. Asked what character from The Breakfast Club he would be, Gareth proclaims, "I'd be the one that dies." Told by Aleksandra that "no one dies," he retorts, "Well, then what's the point?" Then again, "...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison" flirts with sex-- starting with the coy opening line, "It's bad enough you ever use the word as an adjective"-- so Los Campesinos! have also shed some of indie-pop's stereotypical puritanism.

AND EVERY SENTENCE THAT I SPOKE BEGAN AND ENDED IN ELLIP...SES!

In contrast with the often exclusively macho male archetypes typically offered by mainstream rock and hip-hop, indie-oriented bands since the Modern Lovers have offered new visions of masculinity. And Hold on Now, Youngster...'s masterful update of indie tropes goes as far as embracing indie pop's bookish wimpiness for both boys and girls, from the Jane Eyre disses of the colorfully chiming "Don't Tell Me to Do the Math(s)" to the "damn extended metaphors" of "My Year in Lists" to, well, there's a song called "We Are All Accelerated Readers". The best holdover from the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP, "You! Me! Dancing!", is a shy acknowledgment that as much as indie audiences may have come to love dance music, not everyone can do the Dude 'N Nem.

I SPENT THE LAST SEVEN YEARS PERCHED ON THE EDGE OF MY BED SCRATCHING "I AM INCREDIBLY SINCERE" INTO MY FOREARM!

Wry self-criticism has been arguably another of the most integral aspects of indie fandom for decades. If you're going to be a lonely obsessive carting around boatloads of worthless records and even more useless knowledge, you'd better at least have a sense of humor about it. And Los Campesinos! do: "Well, I need new hobbies, that's one thing for certain," they shout on "Knee Deep at ATP" after overturning High Fidelity's hypothesis that "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like." The aforementioned "My Year in Lists" starts to apply the music fanatic's favorite pastime, list-making, to New Year's resolutions, then thinks better of it. You won't admit to reading about it in Pitchfork. Whatever.

I GET CARRIED AWAY...

For all its unabashed indie fandom, Hold on Now, Youngster... varies from the music it worships in a very fundamental way. No one will ever call Los Campesinos! "shambling", as John Peel termed the twee-pop set, nor will they be called slackers, like their heroes Pavement, because this debut is unusually taut and polished, with hooks, crescendos, and clever turns of phrase nearly always in the right place. Yeah, they've started recycling a couple of their tricks, like Ballboy-esque spoken-word outros, and their youthful, shouty vocals won't be for everyone. But in the album's highlight, "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks", the guitars jangle in one speaker and squawk in the other, building up to a gleeful chant-- "One blink for yes, two blinks for no!"-- that caps one of the most triumphant indie-pop songs you're likely to hear in 2008. Cynics will no doubt tar the band's admirers as undeveloped, ignorant, or stupid. But we're happy.

-Marc Hogan, February 21, 2008



The whole album's really a good ride. There's probably one song that doesn't convince me much, [don't remember the title, can't care figuring it out] the one in which the vocals don't match the timing of the music - if it's intentional, which I think it is, it's not convincing. Other than that, this one's a great indie-pop debut.

[AvrilRocksMyWorld]

Artist: Sons and Daughters
Album: This Gift
Release Year: 2008

It's easy to look at the Sons and Daughters as a vehicle for Adele Bethel's vocals, easy to overlook the rest of the band because she is so arresting. Her voice has star quality, big and powerful but subtle and rich. She never over-sings and at times she can send shivers down your spine. You could see her singing power ballads and making tons of money. That she chooses to sing with the band she does is pretty amazing; that the band she sings for knows how to use her vocals to their fullest potential is also pretty amazing. This Gift is truly a team effort and a triumph for the band. Their previous records have been good — The Repulsion Box contained some memorable songs ("Dance Me In" being particularly ace), but it was lacking something. Possibly what was lacking was Bernard Butler. His production here is much fuller than Victor Van Vugt's on The Repulsion Box; it's also more immediate and punchier. His use of buckets of reverb, differing guitar tones, and glittering arrangements gives the record a more three-dimensional feel. It gives the band a sheen of glamour and drama that was lurking below the surface waiting to burst out in a shower of mascara and the fire of love. The musicians in the band all raise the stakes with their performances, too. Scott Paterson's guitar cuts and shreds with abandon, dropping memorable riffs into almost every song. The rhythm section of David Gow on drums and Ailidh Lennon on bass is rock-solid and tighter than spandex. Most of all, what has changed for the band is the quality of the songs. Instead of a decent record with a few gems, This Gift is so full of intensity, drama, and memorable songs that it's hard to isolate any as the highlights. If pressed, though, you could go for "Darling," a dramatic and menacing rocker with a brilliantly bright chorus filled with angelically harmonizing Bethels; or "This Gift," which evokes X with the desperate vocal interplay between Bethel and Paterson and the ragged beauty of the melody; or maybe the raging "House in My Head," which gives Bethel a chance to really let loose; or "Gilt Complex," a tough song with some of Paterson's rawest playing. Really though, just about any song could be singled out for praise. It's that strong of an album, strong enough to satisfy a desire for tattered glamour, for dramatic, inspired, and powerful guitar rock of the kind that maybe only the Bad Seeds at their best could once conjure up. Sons and Daughters are that good.

by Tim Sendra


YouTube - Sons & Daughters - Gilt Complex

I really like them (and the female vocalist)
anyway, i haven't listened to this album much. but in my opinion it's really good.
i like expecially 'Iodine' and 'Gilt Complex'
it's definitly worth a listen.

__________________________________________________ _______________________________

oh yeah, i like Tegan and Sara A LOT too.
me and my dad call it 'our new favourite band' when we talk about it.
and me and my dad basicly decide what's been played in our house.
and that means a lot of tegan and sara

and about los campesinos!
i like those guys too.
i only have one song on my ipod, but i hear the album's worth a listen
i should do that sometime
because they're coming to a festival i'm probably going to this summer.

[rockpit]

^ Sounds worth listening, from the review.

Everyone loves Tegan and Sara .

I don't know how Los Campesinos! sounds live, but their record is gooooood .

[Av-Lav]

Boomtown Rats - The Fine Art of Surfacing
I personally recommend, the classic "I Don't Like Mondays," and "Someone's Looking at You."
I love Bob Geldof

[AvrilRocksMyWorld]

Artist: MGMT
Album: Oracular Spectacular
Release Year: 2008

Album Review:

This dazzling electro-psych band is two arty Brooklyn dudes who derive keyboard lines from the jumpy gait of a praying mantis and dress up in matching capes. Their buzz single "Time to Pretend" — a booming, tongue-in-bong sendup of the rock biz — sounds like a Flaming Lips outtake, with good reason: Lips producer Dave Fridmann helmed MGMT's debut disc, fluffing their glitchy daydream rock into an intergalactic odyssey. There are hints of Joy Division and Sixties nostalgia both acid-tinged and bluesy, but Oracular Spectacular's playfulness and remarkable density are best displayed on "Electric Feel," a surprising bit of funk featuring the original come-on "Ooh, girl, shock me like an electric eel."

• by CARYN GANZ

It is suprisingly well actually
i recommend 'The Youth' and 'Electric Feel' as well as the single 'Time To Pretend'
yeah, i like them.

[rockpit]

I've read about them and have probably seen their video. Hope they're music is not like Klaxon's, not because I don't like them, because I tend to not listen to that kind of music after a while . I'll check out Boomtown Rats too .