Happenstance Is A Dinosaur!

Hey there everyone! Sorry for the delay.You can now follow my musical thought balloons on Ghost FM! All you have to do is push that play. Thank you for your patience.

...

Folks!
I think I need a break.
It may pass. I may come back.
Focus is absent. Brain cells go arbitrary paths.

And if you want to find me, I have my Milk Parade journal where I'm free to freelance.
I also created this Formspring.me thing so you can ask anything. Be gentle though!

Take good care,

xoxo
Pedram

Indie People You Should Follow on Twitter (a.k.a. Why the Cuss Am I Doing This?)

First I need to nota bene that don't expect these guys to follow you back unless you're Jeff Mangum or his agent. But if they somehow did, smile! The following is a compact list of indie music bloggers/sites you can safely start following on twitter. These are the huge names, not just any sort of blogger is listed here. If you need a more comprehensive list you can always click on this google spreadsheet, though I doubt if you want to go through that.

So if you tend to stay current with what goes on in this confusing universe of indie, these guys (in no particular order) can show you the way:

• @DrownedinSound: Drowned In Sound
• @pmablog: Pretty Much Amazing
• @fyan: Chrome Waves
• @SongbyToad: Matthew Young on Song By Toad (not that major but cool)
  
• @weeklytapedeck: Weekly Tape Deck
• @largeheartedboy: David Gutowski of Largehearted Boy
• @aquadrunkard: Aquarium Drunkard
• @realdaytrotter: Sean Moeller of DayTrotter
• @muzzleofbees: Ryan Matteson of Muzzle of Bees
• @earfarm: Matt Tyson of Ear Farm
• @stereogum: Stereogum
• @amritsingh: Executive Editor of Stereogum & Videogum
• @scottgum: Scott Lapatine of Stereogum
• @pitchforkmedia: Pitchfork
  
• @ryanpitchfork: Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork
• @DodgeMOKB: My Old Kentucky Blog
• @knoxroad: Knox Road
• @brooklynvegan: Brooklyn Vegan
• @stgramophone: Sean of Said the Gramophone
• @mattpicasso: Matt Jordan of You Ain't No Picasso
• @igifconnor: Connor McGlynn of I Guess I'm Floating
• @gorillavsbear: Chris Cantalini of Gorilla vs. Bear
• @BowlingStone: Chris Hunt of Bowling Stone (again! nice guy though)
  
• @MusicSF: Aidin Vaziri, a pop journalist but sometimes firmly indie
  
• @tmtzine: Tiny Mix Tapes
• @tuneage: Tuneage
• @perpetua: Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog; This one is protected. I assume he tweets about waiting long by the river and watching the bodies of his enemies float by!
  

BTW if I'm missing something major, let me know and I'll update the list. You know where I tweet, right?

Our Orthodox

My lava lamp died! Didn’t last long. Only a week; the lava bubbles don’t float around anymore. Well, I can’t say it’s completely dead yet. Let’s just say it’s vegetable now, in a coma. I used to stare at my lava lamp for 20 minutes and listen to psychedelic stuff or sometimes dubstep. Now that it’s not operating enough to make me hallucinate and make something out of the vibes coming out of my speakers, I need a music that not only enthralls me instantly, but it should do even more good. It should be picturesque. For the record, my mind is too occupied to decipher likes of Neutral Milk Hotel. I can’t go back to Okkervil River (at least not for now), and so I find comfort in Our Orthodox: A DIY indie folk act led by Neal Harris, a 26 year-old Pacific Northwestern songwriter and 3 year resident of Los Angeles.

Our Orthodox not only fills up Okkervil’s gap (and by gap I mean what they haven’t achieve, in fact the band appears on a new record backing the psychedelic deity Rocky Erickson up and it’s called True Love Cast Out All Evil) but it has its own aesthetics you just couldn’t find anywhere in midst of all that “rock”. And believe me when I say Neal Harris can sing much more stable, at ease and confident than Okkervil’s Will Sheff. The self-titled debut contains 7 immediately affiliating songs all failing to distract us. Harris uses the very instruments they use in every country and folk record but it’s the overall consistency of the record that goes jackpot.

Beyond that we have the guy’s lyric-writing talents that tide the room together. I can do a comparison with Conor Oberst for Harris goes just as in-between and thoughtful as some stand-out Bright Eyes moments only less dismal and monochromatic. It’s safe to say Harris has made the best out of his main inspiration’s folklore moments.

Our Orthodox also shares another entity with Okkervil and it’s the presence of William Schaff behind the enchanting cover art. This is just where you can realize where Harris' poems go, so allow me to delve into it: You see Nietzsche and Jesus Christ riding on the same merry-go-round and a contradiction pops up: religion vs. the rational. There’s also a duet performing violin and guitar with heads as a trumpet and an accordion (probably the same accordion with which the first track begins) and so these instrument-heads may also give you tidings of a superb album (last time you saw such a thing goes back to 13 years ago with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Our philosopher and out prophet are both partly-mesmerized by the music or at least that’s how it looks like, they have one thing in common thank God. I’m not sure if Jesus listened to anything but Friedrich was a big time fan of the classical. Here though, through music, is just where their thoughts overlap, or probably we should get ready for a fist fight! A natural-born atheist vs. spirituality monster a.k.a son of God! And I think Harris confirms that the story behind the album “takes the perspective of a young man whose own distaste for religion conflicts with his love for a genuinely spiritual girl. Pitting cynicism, romanticism and hope against each other; over the course of the album his state of mind gradually becomes transformed by loneliness, and he begins to suspect that he would rather just remain indifferent and in love than defiant and alone.”

“My Records” is a favorite of mine and it also gives me a John Denver convenience. The other tunes are not this country and the song also has its own lo-fi charm relatively. The whole 7-track album is streamable on Bandcamp which has been made the official place for this one man band. Or if you look confused...


* Artwork: "Here They Come" by Reza Riahi
* Our Orthodox official / Facebook

Twin Sister

Lord! They’re in the act of keeping on giving away and therefore we can (just for the sake of argument) conclude NY is not the best city to sign a record contract and then you can laugh at my superficiality. Yes my dear nieces and nephews, free music is always a delight and there’s always a heavy cloud of negativity upon it. “You don’t share a masterpiece!” Probably, but probably you’re being cruel. Twin Sister from Long Island, NY are giving away their 2nd EP called Color Your Life from their apartment absolutely for free. Then if you were gracious enough, it’s highly recommended that you buy the disk either digitally or physically. All they ask in return is not to link to their MySpace page and link to their own website and that’s what I’m doing.

Twin Sister is Eric, Gabel, Andrea, Udbhav, Bryan. They are not really descriptive by nature and leave the category judgment to us. Though the 6-track EP is a kaleidoscope of diverse indie-pop tunes: the ascending slow-burner of the opener “The Other Side of Your Face”, the hit potentials of “Lady Daydream” (my pick so far) and even the ambient grounds of “Galaxy Plateau” that lead to the dreamy breeze of “Phenomenons”.

Here’s all the tracks hosted by the band website. Nonetheless if you like to have the whole package you should click here. I guess that’s how they prefer. So the least you can do is get the album and leave a warm feedback.








p.s. The Band's previous EP Vampires and Dreaming Kids is also free.

* Twin Sister official
* Buy Color Your Life via BandCamp / Infinite Best Recordings

Every Mess Invested Was A WHORE

Dee Dee, the main girl behind the new “blissed-out buzz saw” garage-rock medium-fi act Dum Dum Girls is in company with an ex-member of a very similar band: Vivian Girl’s Frankie Rose on drums. But they have elevated from a Dee Dee solo noise-punk to a full band now. There’s however distinctions between Dum Dums and the Vivians despite their numerous similarities. The least important nuance is where Dee Dee can sing in German, too! Keeping on…The Dum Dums can remind you of The Vaselines so much and then they refuse to simply burst out each single 90-second lo-fi rehearsal they recklessly perform on a CD. I was not really happy with the Vivians back then but Dum Dums have served me well so far. There are easily recognizable guitar lines. Most preciously is the work of guest guitarist Brandon Welchez (from the Crocodiles) on the short-lived but Pixies-style notes of “Blank Girl”. The band’s debut album is I Will Be and so fleeting it plays that you can try the 11 tunes twice each comprehensive try you give and it’s all due to the overall 60s pop culture of the work. “Jail La La” was the first single out of the disk earlier on.



All songs on the album is written and recorded by Dee Dee herself during an 8-month period in 2009 though there are also aids from Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner and Andrew Miller. The album ends with a noisy cover of Sonny & Cher’s “Baby Don’t Go”. Not to mention the German song “Oh Mein Me” is not considered a favorite! Yuck!

*****

Speaking of yuck, did you also get the hype for the last three months? Why has it become exceedingly noteworthy everywhere (including here) that Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden do not like the new MGMT album to be solely a collection of hits the way their previous success story Oracular Spectacular was. Well, seemingly this is not their only request. They also want you to forget about what innate electro-youth-pop talents they once were and how bohemian and liberated they made you feel: “The youth’s starting to change, are you starting to change? Together?” or “Every mess invested was a score, we couldn’t use computers anymore”! Didn’t these enchanting lines bundled with a heavy sensation of modern freedom bring you comfort? Or was it hall just happenstance?

I was already horrified to see the cover art to MGMT’s Congratulations. Subsequently when I gave the first leaked tune “Flash Delirium” a listen, you may not believe me, but I knew something terrible is going to happen sometime soon. Congratulations is downright inaccessible and don’t yell at me when I say it also reminds me of Mars Volta’s The Bedlam In Goliath. In fact, it IS just as helter-skelter and bad.

Well then you didn’t want to make hits! That was fine with everyone. But providing our eardrums with some space to reflect, and our minds an opportunity to calculate wouldn’t have been so unwise. There’s nothing on Congratulations you can count on since they have all overlapped untidily on each other. An unstable stream of confusing clamor reigns over the songs. You can almost hear everything when you’re desperate to dismantle any of those bombs throwing at you, everything that fails to make sense. If it was pure noise art, it could be well understood. There’s nothing wrong with No Age when you know this is what they do. But when all the elements stack up on you, the overall sound is nothing but a noise that is misinterpreted. I can no longer play these back to back failures on my player. Hope you can achieve something out of it. Maybe there’s a link I’m missing here. Maybe aesthetics in this chaos are what I like to ignore. But simply put, I have not heard anything as un-fun this year.

This one is akin to the other disasters, a lukewarm song to look up to.



* Buy Dum Dum Girls I Will Be
* Dum Dum Girls on Sub Pop Records / MySpace
* Preorder MGMT's Congratulations
* MGMT official / MySpace
* Photo: Craig Robinson on FlipFlopFlying

My First Review Ever: The Dissociatives

(September 2005)

I'm making an awards show for myself at home by Powerpoint, and I'm gonna take my Best Alternative Album award to The Dissociatives, where real talent of 2k5 is given away!! I don't know who Paul Mac is but i know Daniel Johns from Silverchair and i wasn't a big fan (although i knew they were a considerable band), but this collaboration has worked out big time. There have been many great collaborations since the start of the new millennium, also known as Superbands (In order of album release dates: A Perfect Circle, Gorillaz, Audioslave and Velvet Revolver), this one is a bit like Gorillaz in genre, but far less commercial which I think is the reason of being critically acclaimed. Alternative I mentioned, but you can say Dreamy-Electronic Pop or sometimes I wanna call it agriculture-space-rock, cuz this one explains it much better, just take a look at these fascinating inventive lyrics:

"All of the time at my hands, so far has gone, to feeding my animals" or "It's raining concrete a tunnel wind blows, Stones on my column the path that I chose" There are lots of new great electronic sound effects you can't find nowhere else, but there are many chorus repeats sometimes which may not make sense after hearing the album for the 10th or 11th time. Two songs on the album are lyricless and are my favorites, the theme of the first track We're Much Preferred Customers is a bit different from the others, still kicking ass! I actually were not aware of these high potentials lying in Daniel Johns' mind,and there goes my big Well-done! Great job guys, but don't go pop like some bands losing themselves!!

Oprah! God Wants You To Have A Private Jet

Courtenay Green is the vocalist, guitarist, percussionist and the girl behind synthesizer in See Green: The L.A. resident indie pop outfit. She’s the sunny L.A. girl, blond hair spilling over a form fitting retro dress. She’s not really into borders of any kind but in the end she would like to entertain us with positive vibes. Cause maybe that’s why pop music was invented. “Goldmine” is a joyous pop fertilizer that borrows inspirations with more major indie acts with likes of The New Pornographers, Tegan and Sara and David Byrne and then turns them into a Shania Twain kind of mainstream pop. So next thing you know, See Green might be on VH1 in a real short notice. Courtenay, unlike Avril Lavigne would like to achieve something with her songwritings: “I want people to know that I’m putting 100% of myself into every song I create. Each rhythm, bass line, guitar part, synth riff or whatever else is the result of hours and hours of meticulous arranging, writing, re-writing and tweaking, which I think gives each track a deeply personal and authentic quality”. Well, let’s just wish them luck in whatever she and her band-mates do. See Green’s Violet EP will be digitally available on May 4th.

[mp3] See Green "Goldmine"

*****

Naked riffs, 4-track nature and all that bedroom folk side stories and in the end of the day, maybe that’s what makes sense. You’re bored to death with all that prog-rock over-productions, with all that “I Kissed A Girl” bumpy pop beats looping around all over the country clubs stealing your peace of mind. Here’s a lo-fi chance to claim it back. From Farmington Hills, Michigan, comes Devin Hollows (aka Devin Madgy) with a bagful of short, though thoughtful arrangements. His gentle folk rock can even have road music tendencies, but it’s all in your head when it’s settled. “Thought Song” might only be 2 minutes long, but it provides you with all the structures and melodies you might expect from a non-acoustic tune; Minimal but also repeatable on different occasions.

[mp3] Devin Hollows "Thought Song"

*****

…which of course brings us to our final free songs by Scott Lanaway. And one of them is a genuine electro-folk grower the way you never thought. Maybe if you’re into Sade, you may realize what I’m uttering out. Currently all the tracks out of his new album Mergers & Acquisitions is streamable on his official webplace. He’s from Toronto, Canada and is ostensibly pro at bringing lifeless easy-listening melodies into life and then spicing it upwards to artifice by singing a lavish and funny chorus line like “Oprah, God Wants You To Have A Private Jet”. There’s nothing puzzling about anything related to Oprah Winfrey, is it? Though it was after like 3 tries that the song could unlock the door to my listless veins and maybe that’s what you must do. Just follow my pattern to discover Scott’s bona fide.

[mp3] Scott Lanaway "Oprah, God Wants You To Have A Private Jet"
[mp3] Scott Lanaway "1333"

NB: Oh God I don’t really want to go through that again but man! When you see a song that is solely streamable on the blog that means you cannot have it on your iPod. But if you see a [mp3] thing on the left corner, feel free to steal the track. That’s how they differ. Now I’m loud and clear. Bless you!

* See Green on MySpace
* Devin Hollows on PureVolume / MySpace
* Scott Lanaway official

Everybody's Fine

Some 9 months ago, you couldn’t imagine the world around you without Michael Jackson. Well, we lost him a little early. He couldn’t write another song like “Thriller” or “Smooth Criminal” I know, but he was still MJ and he was around to inspire almost the entirety of pop culture. When Michael passed, it was rather difficult going to bed thinking he’s no longer among us. Now for everyone - except for their parents - there are people who have the same conditions. To me personally, I may not still be able to walk under the same sun knowing Robert De Niro or Paul McCartney are no longer here. I guess it’s just a matter of time until you replace such role models with other stuff. And some people just don’t care but most people do. Anyhow hope these 2 good ol’ school fellas hang there for a long time to come.

And where did I suddenly go this emotional and sympathetic out of the blues? It was when just a while ago I watched the new De Niro film called Everybody’s Fine. A family movie about an old father who decides to keep the family together after his wife passes away. He invites his now-grown-up children to his home only to figure out they are too busy spending time with him. Though, he doesn’t give up. He packs his bags and hits the road to visit them one by one.

It’s a decent sympathetic movie that despite having a melancholic weather all throughout does not bore you or make you do something else while watching. To cut a long story short, the film ends with a brand new tune by Sir Paul called “(I Want To) Come Home”. I’ll take it as an auspicious harmony. I mean look who’s writing a song for a film led by who? To me, this minimal Paul McCartney song was the thing that shaped up the whole film, colored its fate and well-intently emotionalized it. There are probably no better way tickling people’s nostalgia than writing a song about longing for home.



But this is not the only reason I’m sharing this Paul McCartney song. Now this news is probably 7 years old though it’s still newsworthy for a Beatles fan. You DO remember “Back In the U.S.S.R”, don’t you? Yeah The White Album no doubt has a top place in your music lists. I once asked a web robot about his favorite album of all time and it was The White Album. Never mind, in the Soviet Union regime, these four guys from Liverpool were banned from performing anything musical in U.S.S.R. And by their globetrotting fame across the universe, Russian people were bound to find a brick in the wall to get to know/hear them. So Beatles music in the biggest country in the world was nothing but contraband. This is exactly how The Beatles were injected into every cold Russian vain. By the fall of communism in Russia, the wait was finally over but it took some other 14 years for Paul McCartney to arrange some stuff. In 2003 his Live In Red Square (St. Petersburg) was on DVD. A Live documentary film by Mark Haefeli in which everyone from an avid elderly Beatles fan kissing Paul’s hand to Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin shared their own Beatles stories. Wearing a red shirt himself on the stage it was time to shed light upon some memories that led to brighter days. Watching a Russian cry with Beatles songs was so impressing and delicate.

* Photo Source: Today and Tomorrow
* Buy Everybody's Fine Soundtrack
* Buy Paul McCartney's Live in Red Square DVD
* Paul McCartney official / MySpace

Nothing Is Wasted

Whatever Cut Copy’s “Hearts On Fire” did to the dark discos with black lights in 2008, Hot Chip’s “I Feel Better” does in 2010. Although it takes almost two minutes to construct and settle as a danceable thing, the song has almost all the elements a year-end best list demands. There are Latin melodies, stainless vocals and bright optimistic lyrics about values of living. Together you get your favorite pop song of the month and of course you feel relieved. Amidst all that beauty, our folk songsmith Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has (out of the blues) done the honor of duplicating the track, adding his own folk poetry to the song and what you get is a new version called “I Feel Bonnie”! Surprising it may sound but when it comes to Will Oldham, anything is possible. He hasn’t stayed idle remixing dance material though; his new work with Cairo Gang is called The Wonder Show of the World and is out now.



Speaking of poetry and how a band can extract music out of wise thoughtful lines, from Cincinnati Ohio, The National is up to release their next full-length High Violet on May 10 in Europe and May 11 in North America. Your first taste out of the disk is “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and it doesn’t take a sharpened up ear to realize it sounds like the band’s critically acclaimed previous album Boxer only more instrumented and layered. Even if this is how it’s meant to be, there’s still hope for an equivalent neat indie rock record coming up. Matt Berninger sings with deliberation and just how you wanted him, he’s still the very post-punk revival existentialist. Apparently he's decided to bottle it up all inside and never show a rage symptom.


* Buy Hot Chip's One Life Stand
* Hot Chip official / MySpace
* Pre-order The National's High Violet
* The National official / MySpace
* Photo Source is unknown but thanks to Alireza Efatian for posting them over