musings

The UberDork Cafe kickstarter project reached its funding goal this past weekend! Congratulations, Natali!

A fairly varied set of tracks for the month:

• A Place To Bury Strangers by A Place To Bury Strangers
  This album is a revelation! Seriously, it blew my mind – it’s so many 80s-and-90s-alternative music styles. Some songs are The Jesus and Mary Chain, some songs are The Cure, some are Fields of the Nephilim and Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry goth-flavoured. There’s not a single weak moment on the album. Certainly the best download of the month, maybe the best download so far this year.

• Evolution by Android Lust
  I’ve always loved industrial music, but let’s face it, it’s pretty much music made (mostly) by European white men, and that gives it a kind of sameness. So I was really thrilled when I discovered Android Lust a couple of years ago. Bangladeshi-born, NYC based Shikhee is Android Lust. Women in Industrial are a minority. Asians in Industrial even more so, particularly South Asians. As you might imagine, a South Asian woman in industrial is almost impossibly rare. But I’m not gushing about Android Lust because she’s a South Asian woman – that’s just icing. Android Lust is excellent. This is the remix album of her debut, and it’s just fantastic. In places quietly menacing, in other places super aggressive, but almost always unsettling and creepy (the way early Velvet Acid Christ albums were unsettling and creepy).

• Cantoma by Cantoma
  Really mellow, latin-jazz-influenced down tempo. At times riding the edge of too jazzy for me, but really excellent over all. Perfect “chillout” music, as the raver kids say.

• Way Their Crept by Grouper
  Ambient, creepy, haunting and beautiful. Grouper’s debut is wonderful, but only hints at the magnificence that is yet to come. (Yes, I’m talking about Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill.)

• Scheissmessiah by Hanzel und Gretyl
  Not quite as good as Uber Alles but still tons of ridiculous over-the-top fun. Choice song titles include Kaiser von Shizer, Disko Fire Scheiss Messiah, and Scheissway to Hell.

• At The Soundless Dawn by The Red Sparowes
  Red Sparowes’ debut album. Epic instrumental rock with a metal edge – imagine Mogwai, Isis and Pelican had some kind of mutant gene-spliced child and you get some inkling of Red Sparowes.

• Every Red Heart Shines Towards The Red Sun by The Red Sparowes
• The Fear Is Excruciating But Therein Lies The Answer by The Red Sparowes
  Red Sparowes’ second and third albums respectively, I listened to these two back-to-back so they kind of blur together for me. Somewhere along the ride, that hard Isis-style edge rounded off a bit, much to the music’s benefit. Still heavy, but not quite as bombastic.

• [Everywhere] [And Right Here] by The Six Parts Seven
  Yet another so-called post-rock band (have I mentioned how much I hate the term post-rock?), but different. Where Yume Bitsu did psychedelic, where Mogwai does epic, where Mono does introspective, The Six Parts Seven does pretty. And it really is very pretty music.

• You Never Did Anything Wrong To Me by Team Ghost
  M83 co-founder Nicholas Fromageau left after their second album, Before the Dawn Heals Us, and has stayed under the radar for the past seven-or-so years. Team Ghost is his return to making music, and his M83 roots are clearly apparent. But where M83 progressed, Team Ghost is mostly the same. This EP sounds a lot like it picks up right where Before the Dawn Heals Us left off. Musically the EP is terrific, but the vocals are rather weak. It’s a shame, because they hurt an otherwise enjoyable EP.

I’ve recently been made aware of a really great kickstarter project – The UberDork Cafe. A safe and friendly community centre for the geeks and dorks amongst us – a group of which I’m a proud member – is terrific. I’m getting close to forty now, and I’m pretty comfortable with who I am, but for the younger set I think this is really important. As a teen, I knew I didn’t really fit in with anyone. My high school had a strong athletic focus, and the outsider groups were mostly metal-heads and goths. Though I identified with the goths, I didn’t adopt the look. Worse, I was one of the “smart kids”. Now, I was always a loner, so it didn’t really bother me too much that I didn’t fit in, but it would’ve been nice to have a place to go. (All that cliquish BS evaporated in university – between the amazing community at the school and access to the goth and industrial clubs of the city, I was in heaven.)

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I understand the need for a place like UberDork Cafe. I wish there were one near where I lived when I was in high school. If there were one here I’d go now.

The project founder, Natali, isn’t looking for a ton of money (how she’s going to swing this with such little investment is a mystery to me) and she’s well on her way to her goal, but she’s not there yet. (If, by the time you read this, the project goal has been met please donate anyway – every bit helps.)

I actually managed to get my downloads within the calendar month this time!

• Akumu by Akumu
  Ambient, teetering on the precipice of minimal. Akumu is the post-Thrive project of Deane Hughes.  While it hasn’t captured my attention the way Thrive had, it’s very very good.

• I Will Be by Dum Dum Girls
  I downloaded this after listening to the 30s samples.  Imagine a low-fi Ladytron and you’re most of the way towards understanding the sound of this album. Excellent.

• Improvised Electron Device by Front Line Assembly
  Once again, Rhys Fulber has left the fold and the FLA sound changes. It doesn’t change all that much, though.  Like KMFDM, I keep buying FLA’s stuff because of its consistency – it might all sound similar, enough so that I can’t always tell which album any given song is from, but it’s all good.

• Pearl Diver by Malory
  The first Malory album, the magnificent “Not Here Not Now”, was an unabashed Slowdive worship session.  Since then, Malory have worked hard to define themselves as their own band, and not merely an exceptionally good knock-off band.  Pearl Diver, their fourth effort, still wears the Slowdive influence proudly, but by now it’s just that – an influence.  The songcraft is more varied with this album, with songs that wander into the atmospheric and spooky.  This album’s the highlight of the month.

• Chase the Tear by Portishead
  A one-off track that Portishead released in support of Amnesty International. This could be the song that defines Portishead for me.

• Sister Kinderhook by Rasputina

• Parallelism by The Science Teacher
  Gentle, yet haunting, ambient music from Stripmall Architecture (ex-Halou)’s Ryan Coseboom. Not what I was expecting from him at all, but well pleased. It’s lovely.  My only complaint is that at 3 tracks across 18 minutes, it’s just way too short.

• Small Black EP by Small Black

• The Five Ghosts by Stars
  Perhaps not Stars’ best album, but a worthy followup to the brilliant Sad Robots EP. To be fair, I think anything would be hard-pressed to top “A Thread Cut WIth A Carving Knife”.

• YG No Art EP by Young Galaxy