Hi Old Blog

I find myself wanting to write on here sometimes, but I can’t seem to find the time.  I think when I get back from Germany in December I’ll fire up the ol’ p&p+s post-writing robot and spit out some words that I may or may not put on here.  Until then you can find me over at http://ericmgreene.com .  It has absolutely nothing to do with music, and the writing is significantly drier and more boring, but 4 out of 5 grandmas agree, it’s better than doing nothing.

bis später

Hiatus Time!

I find myself too busy to update regularly, so I think it’s time to go on p&p+s Indefinite Hiatus™ !!  Maybe at some point in the future I’ll return, maybe not, maybe, maybe.  If you miss me too much you can always go back into the post archives and read super old posts as you cry yourself to sleep.

It’s been real, blogosphere.

Not Your Typical Music Video

HAHA GET IT?

Sometimes I Post What I Say I Will

So here it is, seemingly six months in the making, pots&pans+spoon’s homage to the late, great Voxtrot.  I have somehow found time in between March Madness games to find writing motivation, so here I am.

Frontman Ramesh Srivastava. So precious.

First, a little history.  Voxtrot came into being and was awesome from the start.  Some of their early stuff sounded a lot like Belle & Sebastian, which isn’t a bad thing.  Here’s an early demo of “The Start of Something“:

They quickly added a little edge to their sound and created the most perfect blend of indie pop and rock this world has ever known.  To this day there remains nothing as perfect as Ramesh’s blending of poignant coming-of-age lyrics and jangly pop hooks.

The band released 3 EP’s, all adored by critics and music listeners everywhere.  Here’s “Wrecking Force” from the Raised By Wolves EP:

Due to the hype surrounding the three EPs, Voxtrot’s first full length album was hotly anticipated by music fans everywhere.  As happens sometimes in this situation, the self-titled album wasn’t everything it was hyped up to be.  Reception was lukewarm at best, the album failing to live up to the extremely high standards set by the EPs.

I actually quite like the album, though I don’t love it as much as Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives or Raised By Wolves.  Most people don’t seem to agree with me though.  Here’s “Ghost” off the full-length:

Everyone’s slight disappointment turned to horror as 2 years after the albums release, Voxtrot released a new single, “Trepanation Party.”  I’m not going to post that here.  Not that it’s the worst song in the world, it’s just very far from the Voxtrot I know and love.

Another new single was soon released, thankfully sounding something more like the old Voxtrot.  This would be the last thing released from the band, as exactly one year after announcing the band was working on material for a second album, Ramesh posted on his blog that the band was breaking up after a short tour, citing extreme pressure and a songwriting rut.

Hearts were broken, tears were shed.  Fortunately the band left behind two of my favorite EPs ever, and some other freaking awesome stuff.  Ramesh manages to pack a novel’s worth of words into each song and deliver them with a poise and sweetness I’ll never get tired of.

The best ever

Ramesh’s blog is also a great read.  It’s always interesting to gain insight into artists’ thought processes, especially when they write as eloquently and interestingly as Ramesh does.  His post about the bands break up is especially interesting/sad.

Today is a landmark here at potspansspoon, as we are offering our first p&p+s Download Value Pack!  For the price of one download you will receive all 3 incredible EPs from Voxtrot (Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives, Raised By Wolves, and Your Biggest Fan), as well as their self-titled album and the L’Adieu a l’Été demo.  That’s an incredible download value if I ever did see one.

Download the p&p+s Voxtrot Download Value Pack

What a great value!  I have even more good news too!!  As I was gathering the link to Ramesh’s blog I noticed that he posted about a month ago linking to his new site and talking about some kind of new musical venture.  To say I’m excited would be an understatement, as I have struggled to finish writing this post without venturing over to the new site to check out the new stuff.

I’m glad I finally got around to writing this post, as Voxtrot is one of my favorites, plus I found that link to Ramesh’s new stuff, so that rules too.  Next time maybe I’ll have the new Strokes album , which I still haven’t gotten around to listening to.  Or maybe I’ll have some Youth On Fire stuff!  Or Maybe both!  It’s a mystery!  Pots!  Pans!  Spoon!

Randomly Selected Songs

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, but I finally put together some dance shit.  I say dance shit because I don’t know what to call it.  There’s some house, some electronic stuff, maybe some trip-hop, as well as some funky bits.  Funky Bits would make a good band name.

Mostly I was going for songs that are danceable, but there are definitely some songs on here that aren’t really.  So it’s pretty much all the songs that I felt like piking whenever I put this together.  It’s a mystery to everyone!  Even me!

Download Dance Shit

The first Google Image result for "dance shit". Note: the filename is "laserbeast_teeth.jpeg"

Tracklist:

1) The Twelves – Works for Me

2) Tinie Tempah & Swedish House Mafia – Miami 2 Ibiza

3) Pendulum – Plasticworld

4) Monarchy – Maybe I’m Crazy

5) Steve Angello & An21 – Valodja

6) Steve Angello & Sebastien Ingrosso – Partouze

7) Miami Horror – Sometimes (G.L.O.V.E.S. Remix)

8 ) Black Kids – I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You (The Twelves Remix)

9) Axwell – Nothing But Love (Remode)

10) Cassette Kids – Lying Around (Diamond Cut Radio Edit)

11) Neelix – Disco Decay (Felguk Remix)

12) 80kidz – Reflex

13) Magic Machines – Sicky

14) Classixx – Cold Act Ill (Radio Mix)

15) Erlend Oye – Sudden Rush (The Twelves Remix)

16) Classixx – I’ll Get You (Treasure Fingers Remix)

If you couldn’t tell , I like The Twelves.

Bell-Play

Skins has some awesome music (Yes I watch Skins, deal with it).  They’ve used way too many good songs to list on here, so I’ll just say that they had “live” performances from Crystal Castles and Born Ruffians on the show in past seasons.  An interesting mix for sure, but awesome nonetheless.

A reason to watch Skins. One negative: she's an Arsenal fan.

The finale of the fifth series (in the UK they are too cool to say “season”) was this past thursday , and in a now nearly weekly ritual, I run to google to check the name of a song that was used in the episode.  This week it was Dog is Dead’s “Glockenspiel Song.”  Hooray for original titles!

This is certainly much closer to Born Ruffians than Crystal Castles.  With lyrics like “We are a mess/We are failures/And we love it” it’s certainly a perfect match for the show.  It’s also perfect in other ways, such as the killer sax solo at the end.

The Coolest Ukulele Video You Will Ever See

This is Taimane Gardner.  She’s 22, from Hawaii, and has stripey pants and a small hat.  She kind of reminds me of Diane Kruger if Diane Kruger was Hawaiian and shredded mad ukulele.  Why yes, we are going to get married, thanks for asking.

Do You Like Bass?

Classixx – I’ll Get You (Treasure Fingers Remix)

Real post this week!  Maybe!

A Title With Meaning

If you’re an avid reader of p&p+s (as I’m sure you are) you’ll remember that I was quite excited for Bibio’s upcoming album Mind Bokeh due to this tantilizing album sampler that was released in January:

More labels/artists should make these little youtube videos, because this moved Mind Bokeh from “Mild Excitment” to “Insomnia-Inducing Fervor” on the p&p+s Album Anticipation Scale (PPSAAS) (haha pee pee ass).  The video definitely put this album on a lot of people’s radar, including mine.  Thankfully, Mind Bokeh leaked today, and I have been genuinely enjoying it from the first listen.

Even the album cover is awesome.

When asked about the album title, Stephen Wilkinson, the lone man behind the sound, had this to say:

Bokeh is the out of focus region of a photograph. It’s not a quantifiable thing, but photographers and lens manufacturers are obsessed with it. In Japanese it means “haze,” “blur” or even “dementia.” I called the album Mind Bokeh because I’m interested in the effect of defocussing your mind, whether through meditation, chemicals or whatever — it’s a state of mind quite alien to Westerners.

It’s always cool to hear artists’ reasons for titles and lyrics for things, even if you don’t like being categorized as a high-strung Westerner.

This is the 7th Google Images result for Stephen Wilkinson. I can only assume that Bibio drives this car.

Bibio’s last album Ambivalence Avenue was hailed as a great album by pretty much everyone, so as with any follow-up to a great album fans were wary of disappointment (The King of Limbs anyone?).  Mind Bokeh is better than Ambivalence Avenue.  I can’t say there’s a song that I don’t enjoy.  Maybe this is a side effect of the album sampler, as I find that I tend to like things that sound a little familiar.

That being said, if you think this album is going to sound like the album sampler repeated 10 times, you’d be extremely wrong.  Wilkinson always manages to blend electronic and folk and I don’t even know what else to make his extremely unique sound.  Listen to “Saint Christopher“:

This was the song from the sampler that I was most eager to hear.  Since the sampler only contained a few seconds of each song, it made me really excited to hear the rest of the ones I liked.  So, pretty much all of them.  If you can’t tell already, I kind of loved this sampler thing.  I probably listened to it 50 times or so.

I think the sampler really worked for this album because it’s a very cohesive piece of music.  I don’t think it would work for an album comprised of a few good songs and a bunch of filler tracks, because inevitably you’d be left with a large percentage of shitty song clips.

So, yes, I love this a lot already.  And gauging from other reactions I’ve read around the interwebs it’s going to be on a lot of Best of 2011 lists.  So listen, love, buy, and let your mind defocus.

Download Mind Bokeh

Also, a bonus music video:

Thom Yorke Dances to ‘Single Ladies’

Hello Mr. Blog, it’s been a while. While I was gone, Radiohead decided they would announce the release of their new record The King of Limbs much in the same vein of their In Rainbows release.  Again they’re releasing independently, but without the pay-what-you-want scheme of In Rainbows. Digital downloads are priced at $9 for MP3 and $14 for lossless WAV files.  There is also the fancy vinyl package for $48.

The price point is very interesting to me, as retail CD’s don’t go for much more than the $9 or even $14 they want for the download.  Especially since they are releasing this independently as a download and distribution costs are virtually zero, they stand to make lots and lots of money.

Well enough about that.  After In Rainbows seemed to be a combination of their previous records, I was interested to see where Radiohead would go with this one.  They had released a couple of singular songs in the past year or so, none of which I was really a fan of.

Terrifying

The King of Limbs is short.  8 songs, 37.5 minutes.  Radiohead had previously said that they would like to move away from full-length albums and more toward an EP-based approach, so maybe that’s why TKOL is at a kind of in-between length.  So for a minimum of $9 you get 8 songs.  I think that’s roughly what an album costs on iTunes, though I haven’t bought music from there in a long time.  Apple takes something like 30% of all sales on iTunes, which means Radiohead is making more per-sale than they would on iTunes.  Which is a long cry from the pay-what-you-want model of In Rainbows.  HAHA OKAY REALLY DONE TALKING ABOUT MONEY NOW.

As for the music, the album is a lot more stripped-down than anything else from Radiohead.  Stylistically I’d say it’s somewhere in between Amnesiac and In Rainbows.  It’s more percussive and a lot less melody-centric than I’m used to from them.  It’s certainly a long way away from the triple-guitar driven days of the late nineties.

I guess everyone should stop being surprised when new Radiohead sounds completely different than old Radiohead, seeing as this is the band that has released Pablo Honey and Amnesiac without skipping a beat.

There were too many words in a row so I put this here.

Here’s “Codex“:

I’ve been discussing this with one Rajib K. Mitra, and we both agree that if you’re looking for serious catchy guitar riffs, you’re going to be disappointed.  Fortunately, Radiohead does downtempo sad songs as well as anybody.  The King of Limbs is not something you’re going to want to listen to when you want to rock out and pep up your day.

There are some rumors going around that the band is going to release more songs at some point, as the album currently is quite short, and there are many other songs known to be recorded that are not present in the track listing.  There’s also something in the lyrics for “Separator” (the last song) about ‘If you think this is over/Then you’re wrong.’  Radiohead have been known to put little hidden things (the presence of the number 10 in In Rainbows, Kid 17) within their albums, so I guess nothing’s out of the question.  I would think this would be the last release for at least 6 months though.

So, watch this:

The jury is out on whether this is a legitimate artistic dance interpretation of “Lotus Flower” or whether Thom is snickering at everyone taking this seriously.  It’s certainly a change of image for a man seemingly irked by the spotlight throughout his career.  As happens with an video of something dancing goofily on the internet, people have taken Thom’s dance and set it to a variety of hilarious soundtracks, this being the best I’ve seen so far:

via Dumb-Bee Elkins

Regardless of your enjoyment of the album, I hope you can agree that Thom dancing to Beyoncé is hilariously awesome.

Download The King Of Limbs