“Pop music shouldn’t always get a bad rap,” says Top Pops!, a recurring selection of pop music highlights across a selection of styles. Brooklyn sister duo Prince Rama return with one of their boldest and most well-formulated conceptual spins on their own music yet with their latest record, Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World. This post samples some tracks and goes into details about the bands and backstories they’ve invented, their Kickstarter-funded DIY film, their “So Destroyed” dance contest, and a shared recording with Sun Araw.
Top Ten Hits For The End Of The World Tracks & Backstories
Prince Rama have long been about chasing the conceptual with their multimedia-encompassing theatrics, but their latest idea, Top Ten Hits For The End Of The World, takes our collective 2012 fascination with the apocalypse and turns it into a most playful collection of pop hits. In my opinion, this record, which is comprised of ten tracks from ten fictional bands — all of which have extensive back stories crafted by the girls themselves — is the duo’s strongest to date. With Ariel Pink lo-fi vibes but with collation of genres both fictional and invented (“cosmic disco”, “motorcycle rock”, and “ghost-modern glam”, to name a few), the model of Top Ten Hits… frees the girls from the binds of expectation and allows the to run free on all fronts.
Rage Peace – “So Destroyed” (as channeled by Prince Rama)
For the album’s first single, Prince Rama took on the nihilistic protest band Rage Peace’s violent-turned-pop songs. According to the press release, “Rage Peace formed as a small protest band in the early 90s and before they knew it they were the Bob Dylans of a whole generation of angry youth. They became founding members of the Rage Peace movement, based on the principle of nihilism as the only true order, and wrote songs with violent messages placed in seemingly saccharine pop structures. The band was notorious for staging organized acts of violence and destruction, burning cars and sometimes buildings in the name of chaos. When the end came, their bodies were found locked inside a limousine they had set on fire. The license plate read ‘HEY U’.”
Bleep is a column focusing on varying degrees of electronic music news, videos and MP3s. In this post, ’80s sci-fi influences electronics are given their due as Majeure and Chrome Canyon churn out analog synth-layered landscapes like nobody’s business.
We begin with the well-reputed New York-based musician Chrome Canyon, whose latest record, Elemental Themes, will come out on Stones Throw on October 9th. This music video for “Branches”, directed by the solo artist Morgan Z himself, was inspired by the visually-stunning Koyaanisqatsi, for which you can view a trailer below. Unlike Majeure, to follow, the sounds of Chrome Canyon occasionally has more terrestrial grounding to tie it back to earth as we know it. This comes in the form of chopped vocal samples, straight-forward drums, live bass and guitar, and occasional Bach-like compositions of madness. Not to mention the elusive sounds of the Theremin.
Elemental Themes tracklisting to follow after the jump.
“Pop music shouldn’t always get a bad rap,” says Top Pops!, a recurring selection of pop music highlights across a selection of styles. Two female-fronted records from Taken By Trees and Southern Shores offer their unique spins on tropical-influenced experimental pop and release their records on the same day (October 2) via Secretly Canadian and Cascine, respectively.
Victoria Bergsman, former frontwoman of The Concretes and the female voice on Peter Bjorn And John’s “Young Folks”, is now stepping into a new light with her newest project, Taken By Trees. Her debut record, Other Worlds, will be released on Secretly Canadian on October 2nd and highlights a sunshine-filled period in Bergsman’s life, when the Hawaiian Islands and falling in love played a crucial role in changing her artistic trajectory. Two singles have been thus far released for the album — the stereotypically dream pop “Dreams”, with a music video you can see HERE, and the dubbed out dance jam, “Large”, which you can hear below. On Other Worlds, Taken By Trees is innovative at times and derivative at times, but “Large” is a hint of Bergsman’s better tendencies. Simply drawing from tropical influences is often not quite enough — especially in this current tropical pop-saturated atmosphere — but when tropicalia is slathered in manipulations and unexpected tendencies, that’s when it really shines, and Bergsman does so well here.
Taken By Trees will soon be on tour with Jens Lekman, whose latest you can hear HERE. See full tour dates at the bottom of this post, and expect our full review of the record soon.
Michna’s 4-track Moving Mountains EP comes out early next week on Ghostly International, and has remixed a track from labelmate Matthew Dear. “Earthforms” upholds Matthew Dear’s dubbed-out vocal treatments while entering frequently into drum n’ bass territory. Moving Mountains EP is the first release fom the New York producer in nearly four years, since 2008′s debut record, Magic Monday. His single “Through The City On The Edge Of Forever” can be heard on Ghostly International’s Soundcloud.
Pacific Northwest folks can see him live tonight at Barboza in Sattle or tomorrow at Rotture in Portland. Both dates are with Breton. Full tour dates below, along with the original of “Earthforms”.
Matthew Dear – “Earthforms” (Michna Remix)
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SPECTRAL HYPNOSIS
A recurring series, featuring mesmerizing songs for one to lose sense of time and space, mind and body. This installment is a particularly intense one, reserved for those who understand that noise can be a hypnotic mechanism. Here are intensely aggressive sounds from The Silent Moon, minimal techno from Silent Servant, and offerings and remixes from ERAAS.
Somehow, Luis Vasquez of The Soft Moon (and Lumerians) can release tracks like “Die Life” and embrace gothic dance vibes without coming off as annoyingly trite. Zeroes, his latest album to be released via Captured Tracks, doesn’t seem like the cheeriest of records, as it seems to not only wallow but actively embrace all things doom and apocalypse.
The press release gives a summary of the album’s tracks as follows:
Zeros opens with “It Ends,” a rumbling eerie epic that explodes and then fades. The slowing breath and pulse at the finish signify our break with reality as consciousness drifts deeper into Vasquez’ world. Welcoming us into “Machines,” a demon utters unclear incantations over snapping drums and flange-warped tones, while the titular song gives us a beat to dance to as a strange voice gushes lascivious “aahhhs” from a cloud of swirling synths. Songs like “Insides” and “Crush” feel utterly inward-looking-a loner’s cry buried in soil and metal shavings-but “Remember the Future” bounces like a twisted John Carpenter score, and “Die Life” lashes out at everything within reach. Listen closely and you’ll hear the sounds of the creatures and people that survived whatever catastrophe created this space: chirping insects, bawling whales, strained howls, jungle percussion, tribal chanting.
I’ve not heard the album in its entirety yet, but it comes out the day before Halloween, and if “Die Life” is any indicator, it will serve as the perfect soundtrack to that pagan holiday. Tracklisting and tour dates in the full post.
MusicfestNW does one of the better jobs in the festival circuit of scheduling the heavy bands. Reason being that MusicfestNW, unlike most festivals, doesn’t take place in one central location. Rather, it is scattered amongst the various venues throughout Portland, Oregon. And although normally walls might seem like a constricting measure in life, the walls of the venue provide a safe haven for the volume to hit extreme levels, the vocals to shriek instead of harmonize, the double bass to reach red-lining beats per minute and the guitar distortion to be devastatingly heavy. Aural Devastation is a recurring column about heavy music.
Swans
Seeing Swans is an emotional experience and a tough one to make it through, at that. Charging off the brilliance of Michael Gira and company’s epic new release, The Seer, Portland was laid to waste by the heaviness that is Gira’s project. Gira is well-known throughout the live circuit for his intensity, and although he is no longer as confrontational as he was in the early days, his intensity on stage translates immediately and effortlessly to Swans live show. It is a slog that is based on repetitive, almost locomotive-like mashes of noise and distortion. Over it all, Gira can be seen yelling at his band, demanding more energy and channeling some sort of weird musical rage. With every heavy stomp and grimace, one felt Gira’s pain as if it were one’s own. There were a few souls in the Hawthorne Theatre without earplugs. They must have ignored the decibel warning on the front door. Not a smart idea.
The Seer is a 2-CD record that saw an August 28th release. It is the result of the band’s getting back together in 2010, after a 14-year hiatus.
Prince Rama have long been about chasing the conceptual with their multimedia-encompassing theatrics, but their latest idea, Top Ten Hits For The End Of The World, takes our collective 2012 fascination with the apocalypse and turns it into a most playful collection of pop hits. In my opinion, this record, which is comprised of ten tracks from ten fictional bands — all of which have extensive back stories crafted by the girls themselves — is the duo’s strongest to date. With Ariel Pink lo-fi vibes but with collation of genres both fictional and invented (“cosmic disco”, “motorcycle rock”, and “ghost-modern glam”, to name a few), the model of Top Ten Hits… frees the girls from the binds of expectation and allows the to run free on all fronts.
