Author Archives: Joel Oliphint

Watch/listen: New Sigur Ros music, “Ekki Múkk”

Sigur Ros is releasing a new album, Valtari, on May 28. The album will have eight tracks, and premiering today on the Icelandic band’s website is the nearly eight-minute track “Ekki Múkk,” with a minimalist but pretty video to accompany. Expect the swells you’ve come to know and love from Sigur Ros.

Details on the website are few, but it does have a quote from Georg: “i really can’t remember why we started this record, i no longer know what we were trying to do back then. i do know session after session went pear-shaped, we lost focus and almost gave up…did give up for a while. but then something happened and form started to emerge, and now i can honestly say that it’s the only sigur rós record i have listened to for pleasure in my own house after we’ve finished it.”

With all that shimmery, greenish water and ship in the distance, I keep expecting the potato-faced (or drum-faced?) woman from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea to emerge from the water in this video.

Valtari tracklist:
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Sunday in Columbus: Spanish Prisoners, Time & Temperature, Saturday Giant

MP3: Spanish Prisoners – Rich Blood

Spanish Prisoners return to Columbus for the first time in many years Sunday night at Kafe Kerouac:

Spanish Prisoners at Kafe Kerouac
with Time & Temperature, Saturday Giant
SUNDAY, MARCH 25
ALL AGES SHOW
2250 N. HIGH COLS., OH
DOORS at 9, $5
Fbook RSVP

Neil Young & Crazy Horse to release ‘Americana’ June 5

Neil Young releases his first album with Crazy Horse in nine years, all old folk songs, protest songs and murder ballads. From the press release:

Some of these compositions which, like “Tom Dooley” and “Oh Susannah,” were written in the 1800s, while others, like “This Land Is Your Land” (utilizing the original, widely misinterpreted “deleted verses”) and “Get A Job,” are mid-20th-century folk classics. It’s also interesting to note that “God Save The Queen,” Britain’s national anthem, also became the de facto national anthem of sorts before the establishment of The Union as we know it until we came to adopt our very own “The Star Spangled Banner,” which has been recognized for use as early as 1889 and made our official national anthem in 1931. Each of these compositions is very much part of the fabric of our American heritage; the roots of what we think of as “Americana” in cultural terms, using songs as a way of passing along information and documenting our past.

Tracklist:
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Lydia Loveless: SXSW accolades, Rhapsody video

It seems hometown girl Lydia Loveless turned even more heads this year at SXSW. SPIN named her one of its “Best of SXSW,” saying she’s “one of the most badass country or Americana or rootsy-fartsy songwriters working today. Her Red Eyed Fly set at the Bloodshot Records showcase was a revelation…. Loveless may not even be a household murmur right now, but she’ll get hers soon enough, and the old alt-country guard better look out.” Greg Kot at the Chicago Tribune was similarly complimentary, and the LA Times called her Saturday night set a “high-energy, don’t-mess-with-me take from a rising young should-be-star with an outlaw bent…. [“More Like Them”] is equally relentless and stubborn, indicative of an artist who isn’t interested in hearing your advice. With songs like these, she doesn’t need it.”

Sounds like the Donewaiting fave did all right for herself. Check out the above video of Loveless and Ben Lamb doing an acoustic version of “Back on the Bottle” at SXSW for the Rhapsody “Stripped Down by the River” series.

Update (more press):
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Video: Lambchop – “Gone Tomorrow”

…because there’s never a bad time to post a Lambchop song, especially when the video involves semi-pro wrestling.

Lambchop’s Mr. M is out now on Merge.

Thursday: Jay Reatard doc @ Wex

On Thursday in Columbus, the Wexner Center will screen the new documentary Better Than Something: Jay Reatard, a film about prolific Memphis punk-rocker Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. aka Jay Reatard, who died in 2010 at the age of 29. What began as a series of 2009 interviews with Lindsey for a promotional documentary called Waiting for Something became a larger project after his death, as the filmmakers sought out Lindsey’s friends, family members and former bandmates to fill out the picture of a controversial figure, known for his on-stage vitriol as much as his hooks. (I remember him hurling at least two insults at crowd members during his show at the Summit just a couple months before he died.)

The A.V. Club describes the doc this way: “Better Than Something doesn’t really try to resolve the mystery of how someone could be simultaneously so productive and destructive. But given how briefly Jay Reatard was in the public eye, it’s a thrill to see so much performance footage in Better Than Something, as well as to hear multiple perspectives on some of the most legendary Reatard antics.”

The Wexner Center is also bringing in Eric Davidson, singer for the legendary Columbus band New Bomb Turks, to introduce the screening. Davidson wrote about Jay Reatard in his book We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988–2001. Davidson will also DJ and sign books from 5:30-7 in the Wex store.

Ace of Cups hosts the post-screening party with Angry Cougars, Slave Labia and Nervosas.

Stream Lost in the Trees’ new album

A Church That Fits Our Needs is featured as a “First Listen” over at NPR. It’s out March 20 on Anti-, and I highly recommend it.

Lost in the Trees return to the Wexner Center April 5 with Poor Moon (Christian Wargo and Casey Wescott of Fleet Foxes).

MP3: Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s – “Shannon”

MP3: Shannon

Here’s another track (via RCRD LBL) from Margot’s forthcoming Rot Gut, Domestic, out 3/20.The band will hit the road at the end of the month, starting with the sold-out CD101 Day (Side A) at the LC on March 31. Full tour schedule:
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MP3: Indians – “Magic Kids”

MP3: Indians – Magic kids

Check out this track from a guy in Copenhagen named Soren who goes by the Google-unfriendly moniker Indians. It’s a bedroom project all recorded by Indians, who will self-release the “Magic Kids” 7-inch to the world in less than a month. Along with Sinkane’s funktastic “Runnin,'” this single is one of the most memorable I’ve heard this year, a song of loss awash in tributaries of synth that gradually become an ocean, then just as gradually drift away.

Indians’ first show was just a few weeks ago, and Soren likes to make videos for his songs, such as the affecting video for “New,” the B-side to “Magic Kids”:
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Listen to Sufjan Stevens’s new hip-hop project

As you may have heard last week, Sufjan Stevens teamed up with Son Lux and Serengeti to form a new hip-hop(ish) group called s / s / s. You can now hear the Auto-tuned first track, “Museum Day,” from the forthcoming EP.

Anticon will release the Beak & Claw EP March 20. It’ll also feature contributions from My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden.