September 2008 Archives

What better way to celebrate the first few weeks of fall than to introduce you guys with a summer song. It's not just any summer song. Peculiar as it is, it's a summer song that actually feels like fall - perhaps, almost wintry.

When Michael Leviton strums his ukelele and sings songs about the beach and summer - it's not all pearly shells or tiny bubbles. They're heart-wrenching ballads that will make you say (in a dramatic soap opera-ish kind of way): 'I'll never love again!'.

Aptly titled 'Summer's the Worst', he dishes out about the dangers of summer love. Summer days and summer nights will eventually lead to heartbreak - but the pathetic beings that we are, we're still drawn to it. As his lonely boy musings jab at the human weakness for summer romance, the song ends with a nice duet that seems hopeful - maybe we can give summer just one more chance?

The song has an interesting music video . Interesting, as in, not bad, not good,but interesting. I'd highly recommend hearing the song first.

  Listen to Summer's The Worst *

*'Summer's The Worst' is also available for download at Michael Leviton's official site.

Johnny Foreigner is noisy rock and roll, with whiny boy vocals, and a pinch of angry grrl power thrown in for good measure. 'Salt, Pepa and Spinderella' is not their noisiest offering, but it's a great introduction to a band that you could definitely get hooked on.

The visual treat below is them doing everything but sing their single 'Salt, Pepa and Spinderella' - represented in a collection of nicely arranged stills that serve as their music video. Great stuff Johnny, great stuff.

If you haven't guessed it yet, I am a big fan of 80's music. None was more delighted than me when the 80's revival came to the mainstream in the form of The Cure-like tunes from the Killers, Gwen Stefani's New Order inspired songs or just seeing the keytar played in Cobra Starship shows.

I still remember skipping school just to play records at home. My eclectic collection ranged from  Tears for Fears and A-ha,  to the age-appropriate best selling record of that time - Sesame Street Live. Yes, believe it or not, I was a really young kid in the 80's. And yes, I started playing hooky while in primary school - either my parents were too gullible or I was really great at feigning a killer headache. I'd stay home with my turntable and play DJ, scouring through my record collection to fill up my playlist, which interestingly included Songs from the Big Chair and Cookie Starts With 'C' played back to back. Those were the good old days. 

As I'm all in 80's mode right now, here's a song that'll take you back. It's not this band's usual fare, but excellent nonetheless.

Belle and Sebastian's "Electronic Renaissance" was actually released right at the time when Oasis became big, which didn't help much in this little band's attempt at an electronic renaissance. It makes for a great non-80's eighties song though, full of all the electropop components essential for a renaissance of your own.

  Listen to Electronic Renaissance

Forget about holding up your boom box to a girl's window with Peter Gabriel's 'In Your Eyes' blaring out the speakers, or getting the school marching band to play 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You' while you sing through the PA system from the football field bleachers. This Loveninjas song, is the perfect song to serenade a girl by.

It builds up from its keyboard intro, to a nice feel good rhythm. It also has that 80's new wave love song kind of feel along the lines of Aztec Camera and The Lotus Eaters (if I lost you there, don't worry - it just means that it's good). And of course, what's a love song without heartwrenching lyrics? The singer asks..no...he pleads, You can take what you want from me, do what you want - I just want to go out with you.

At the end of the song, a girl just can't help but fall in love. She'll run up to you, throw her arms around you and kiss you. But here's the clincher. The moment she says: 'That is so wonderful! I never knew you were such a romantic. It's such a beautiful song. What's it called?' - when you've finally got the girl who turned you down so many times, wrapped around your arms, will you dare say what the name of the song is?

  Listen to Do Me

To kick off my being active again in the Indie Music DB blogosphere - here I present a song I came across recently by a band in Liverpool called Hot Club de Paris. I'm not sure what it is with bands that have names of countries or places they don't come from - like Architecture in Helsinki (Australia), I'm from Barcelona (Sweden) or Of Montreal (US) but so far, most that I've encountered, have pretty sweet songs.

Sometimesitsbetternottostickbitsofeachotherineachotherforeachother is one of the longest song titles that I've ever come across. It's also one of most amusing songs I've heard recently - considering the nature of the title, which makes my perverse mind think is about sex. Well actually, thinking about it as being plain old sex is quite a conservative take on it, since you can intrepret it in other ways...

Listen to the song and judge for yourself -

  Listen to Sometimesitsbetternottostickbitsofeachotherineachotherforeachother

Well, it's THE submission form...so you know, it'll be easier for me to update the DB when you submit your information in. I know, I know - it looks a bit crappy if you look at it web-design wise (much like the whole site) - but it's a whole three days worth of hard work (stretched over a one month period, since LIFE got in the way) - to give you guys a great working submission form.  Actually, it works better for me since it cuts my work to edit all the information submitted to the DB down to half.

Ok, so now that that's done, time to populate the Indie Music Database...and pronto! I've gotten 26 so far, only nine hundred thousand more to go. And this, is my cue to ask you guys for help. Click here to go to our Contribute page. Help in the form of Indie Music information is greatly appreciated.