August 2008 Archives

There's a distinct difference in loving music and loving playing music.

Bands love music which is why they play their hearts out, but that's not the only thing that they love about it. A huge part is the exhilaration of striking that chord perfectly on your guitar or acing that unevenly measured syncopated beat on your drum kit. It's not just making the music, it's the act of playing music itself. What you get out from it isn't just great sounds, but wonderful music that fellow musicians can identify with as well.

Broken Social Scene is just that. If there's such a thing as a musician's musician, this group is a band's band. Known for taking the stage with a lineup of 17 or more band members - their live shows are a surefire burst of musical energy.

If you're new to listening to Broken Social Scene,  'Almost Crimes' is one great song you can start with. What I love about this band that they go all out with the instrument playing. Here's an instrument tally with just the album version of 'Almost Crimes' (the running tally is in parenthesis):

Intro                                 :         keyboard/keyboard programming (1), guitars (2)
20 seconds into the song   :         drums (3)
25 seconds into the song   :         another guitar (4), yet another guitar (5) and a bass guitar (6)
35 seconds into the song   :         a squeak of the saxophone (7) then... a male vocal (8) and a female vocal (9) - yes, that's Feist there, long  before she hit mainstream.

That's 9 musical instruments including lead vocals.

'Almost Crimes' live is another matter - just double everything up (even the drums - they perform this song with 2 drum kits on stage!) and that's the song fleshed out in live form. An extra treat is having musicians from other bands jamming along, with Leslie Feist, Amy Millan (Stars) and Emily Haines (Metric) alternating on the female vocals.

The video below features Kevin Drew and Feist's silhouettes rocking out to the song. If you like the quirky way Leslie Feist dances (which I definitely do), you'll probably want to add this to your favorite video list.

Email actually. Imagine my surprise to get a nice treat in my inbox - fresh new songs! Sometimes you half expect to get some crappy samples from somebody, but this was anything but.

I know, I said I rounded up my Swedish indie themed posts with Hello Saferide... but then Friska Viljor's "Monday" kept popping into my head, so I wrote about that, and then I get this email from Staphan O' Bell....

Ok, so what if a large chunk of my entries are from Swedish artists - with Swedish music, what's not to like? Sweden is after all, the land where Abba came from. ;)

"I'm Ok" is a sweet sweet song about...you guessed it - being ok. Actually, 'ok' isn't the right word - more like 'alright' (you'll get it once you listen to it).  The song begins as an easy listening acoustic guitar love song about a boy who gets silly nervous when he's in front of the object of his affections, that he needs to tell her that - yeah, he's alright - he's just crazy in love (which explains why he's acting weird most of the time).

The best thing about this song is that it swells into a beautiful finale of guitars and drums, which sort of reminds me of Glen Hansard's songs from the movie "Once". And of course, how could I not mention that it's another perfect use of my favorite percussion instrument - the glockenspiel...or probably something that sounds like it. Didn't the song just sound so nice with it?

  Listen to I'm Ok

For more of Staphan O' Bell's songs, check out his MySpace page.

Thanks for sharing Staphan!

This song just slays me. Whenever I hear it, I can't help but imagine a sleazy European guy hitting on some girl at a bar after geekily dancing to Numa-Numa.

Don't let the visual image ruin this song for you though.  It's just my personal take on it - which really has nothing to do with the song. Most won't even find it extremely amusing, well no, the song IS quite amusing, though not in the funny laugh out loud kind of way.

Friska Viljor's 'Monday' is a tap-your-feet, bop-your-head, electro-pop kind of song. It'll feel quite at home in the 80's with the likes of Human League's 'Don't You Want Me'. If you listen to it carefully, it's like a friend telling you how his day went after a night out in the town...with a dash of electro beats added to accent the narration.

It's pretty angsty and ridden with depressing feelings of alienation. In fact, one of its repeating lyrics is "I have to cancel all my dreams" - quite far from the visual representation that my brain cooks up whenever I hear that song.I guess it's just the weird mix of it being so Human League-ish, and the lyrics so detailed, narrative and wreaking with pathetic insecurity that make it so amusing for me. It's quite endearing, really.

  Listen to Monday

The Boy Least Likely To is a great example of  a band that you've actually heard of that you didn't know you did. Their song 'Be Gentle With Me' has done it's rounds on different commercials, TV spots, TV shows and who knows where. Believe me, once you've checked out the song below, your first reaction would be: I've heard this song before!

It's actually one of my personal faves when it comes to driving on the road with my son, since: a) he likes it, and b) it reminds him to be gentle - as he sometimes forgets. Surprisingly, reminding him a couple of times through song form is effective.

It's also one of those great sounding songs that make good use of the glockenspiel without overusing it. Yes, there is such a thing as overusing the glockenspiel. I've heard it before. You won't realize it at first when you're listening to it, but towards the end of the song, if you think you're suffering from a splitting headache and a semi-permanent ringing sound in your ear, you know there was glockenspiel overload.

Aside from its responsible use of the glockenspiel, the song, which is uber-cute, also has the cutesy mascots from the band's album cover (a fleshed out version of the singer Peter Hobb's brother's drawings) starring in the music video. It also features Rashida Jones (The Office) as the Boy Least Likely To's  love interest.
 

Stars, I've mentioned them here before and I'll mention them here again. Stars is a kick-ass band. Not only do they make the best not-so-much-about-love love songs, they also make great soundtracks for independent short films.

'Tonight' is a 6 minute film about the travails of a former cosmonaut who's also on the verge of a marital breakdown. With Stars in you're soundtrack, you'll never go wrong.

I'd actually like to think that this is an extended music video for Stars' 'Tonight' - since everything about the film is practically driven by the song..

If you've never thought a film about a cosmonaut would ever be so heartbreaking - this one's for you.


Tonight

  There must be something in the water at the Latchmere Leisure Centre for this band to be passionate enough to write a song about it. And passionate it is - from it's intro of rolling beats , to it's rhythmic opening lyrics (yes, 'Swimming swimming, swimming, swimming' is quite rhythmic) - you can actually feel your heart pounding along.

The Maccabees' song Latchmere is a mini masterpiece in a sense that it makes you giddy with excitement when you hear it...and think: 'What's that song all about?' And you'd be curious to find out that, no it's not love, nor fighting a revolution...it's just all about a leisure centre - where speedos speed by and people are asked to stay in their own lanes when swimming.

Now I find myself loving Latchmere, a place that I've never gone to, and I'm interestingly looking forward to seeing their wave machine.

I've posted the song below. The band's got a neat stop motion video, but as most music videos have nothing to do with the song, you guys can check it out some other time - Latchmere is best experienced by first timers aurally. Enjoy ;)

 

  Listen to Latchmere

I'm going to round up my Swedish indie music themed blog posts with a solo artist from Stockholm, Sweden called Hello Saferide (real name: Annika Norlin).

This pretty young gal broke into the internet music scene with a song called "High School Stalker"- a cute pop tune that relays a day in the life of a girl who's in love with a guy, whom she, as the title of the song goes, stalks. She goes through all the basic stalking elements: rummaging through his school records, breaking into his dentist's office and even befriending the stalkee's  (I just invented a term there) mom. Lest not we forget, she begins with the most classic and easiest way of stalking - through the internet. As evidenced by one line of her song -"I've been on the Altavista, I went one twice on the Yahoo!" - she checks out internet data to get any sort of information about the object of her desire. Thinking about it, this line is actually lost to the people of the Internet Generation (or even general internet users nowadays). Who goes on Altavista and uses Yahoo! as a search engine anymore? Probably if you were living in the 90's, which might be when this song was made. But of course there were other better alternative methods back then, like Switchboard or checking out their ICQ profile or if they have a page on Angelfire or Geocities...

Okay, before I reveal how ancient I am and what my internet activities were in the the mid to late 1990s, here's Annika's catchy-fun, tug-at-your-heartstrings pop song about unrequited love:

  Listen to High School Stalker