too much typing—since 2003

10.23.2007

new music: delicious hot, disgusting cold

It's been a while since I've featured actual new music here, as opposed to stuff from deep in past tenses of my musical grammar, but here are a few intriguing tracks that have come my way courtesy the diligent efforts of the musicians themselves and/or their slavering publicists.

Plushgun "Just Impolite": I like the blend of straight-up pop songwriting and semi-nostalgic synth wrangling here. It's a solid and catchy little number. Also, I've never met a metatext I haven't liked liking. The band's put up more tracks you can stream through one of those trendy players at the myspace website internet thingy.

Destroy Cowboy "1000 Candles": A fairly ambitious, complexly structured number - as that might lead you to expect, there's a tinge of ye olde progge here, with that smoky, murky synthetic chorale in the opening, a change of time signature midtune, and a general air of large intensity. But the band keeps the energy high, and I like the way the various melodic components come back in different textural guises.

Super Volcano "Instant Attraction": Recording's a bit murky, but actually that serves the song, in that the grunting bass and overdriven electric piano sound work well with the singer's sort of snide tone. Not so audible on this track, but this band also exudes a whiff or two of progness, particularly on a longer track downloadable at Super Volcano's myspace (where you can also hear another couple of tracks). I'm not fully persuaded by that aspect of this band yet - but in general I like it when bands are unafraid to mess with structure and sound, so better to fall slightly short in doing so than play it safe and bore everyone with the old same place.

(None of this music is actually disgusting. But just as James Joyce could never resist a pun, and thus put a picture of his father in a cork frame - because he was from Cork - I can never resist a semi-obscure musical reference, in this case to a Bonzo Dog Band song.)

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