Unpiano | Music Blog

Dear Mr. Kanye West,

You are the only rapper/producer that can get away with sampling brand new songs, so you really need to get on the ball and give this girl a million dollars so you can sample it for your next massive hit.  The song sounds like Philip Glass was hired to arrange at Motown, I promise there’s nothing out there that sounds like this!  Seriously, just give her a single milli, you will easily make back 14 million, which leaves you 13 million to spend on solid gold suits of armor to surround your pewter toilet.  Just listen to it a couple times; you can easily make at least 3 hot beats with this (intro, verse, chorus, you know how to do), you can use the chorus as your own (just repeat her lines in a gruff rap accent!) and if you get nominated for some bogus award you even can hire Ms. Andersson to sing with you at your live performance.  Don’t be a fool, sample this song before it fades into obscurity and everyone else has to wait 15 years.

Love,
Johnny

Theresa Andersson – Hold On To Me

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Oh man.. this new Grimes video makes me so happy for any number of reasons. Kind of gives you hope for the future you know? Some people give her a hard time for using such a baby voice, but I have always thought it complemented her lisp and music perfectly. Not going to do a huge post about her since her album Visions is pretty well known by now and she is now signed on 4AD, however I will say that this video made my day when everything is gloomy as hell.

Grimes – Oblivion
Grimes – Genesis
Grimes – Crystal Ball

Bonus:
Grimes – Crystal Ball (Young Galaxy Remix)

I like when I hear something that I don’t have a name for, where I can hear the influences but I have no idea what to call it.  British/Italian solo artist Porcelain Raft is somewhere between electronic indie pop and shoegaze guitar rock.  It’s not quite sad enough to be depressing, and it’s not uptempo enough to dance to, so you really need to channel 9th grade and listen with the lights off in your bedroom, staring up at the christmas lights strung on your wall.  Alternatively, invite your long-time crush over to drink cheap wine out of coffee mugs and make your move for a first kiss like 3 songs deep.  If it works, you got like 35 minutes of great makeout music ahead.  If not, you can start the grieving process without changing the record.

Porcelain Raft – Is It Too Deep For You?
Porcelain Raft – The End Of Silence
Porcelain Raft – Drifting In And Out

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A week ago, after spending an afternoon looking like an idiot in an old wood-floor rollerskating rink in Glendale, I Netflix’d (that’s a verb now) this awesomely bad roller disco movie, set in Venice during the supposed late 70′s rollerskating craze and featuring a tarted up Linda Blair with some castaway cast of soon-to-be-in-porn actors and actresses that can’t act or act-ress. Its a typical teenage fad movie, like Breakin’ or Thrashin’, with some good-hearted rich girl trying to be down and a struggling out-of-her-league underdog trying to get famous for something you can’t make money at, and his cheeky friends and her shitty parents who don’t understand and all the usual shit. Needless to say, it was awesome, and I sat through the whole thing with my jaw in my lap. My wife said I shook my head through the whole movie, probably at the completely improbable situations, characters and dialogue that danced before me (on skates, and in slutty 70s/80s fashion, of course). It was like an American Apparel boner-fest with badly delivered laugh-out-loud lines and a disco soundtrack. Well, except with this track, which opens the film and totally rips the rest of the original soundtrack double-LP a new asshole. Powerpop by numbers about some supposed “Good Girls” who are clearly sluts, sung by this one-hit L.A. wonder with a rapper’s name.

Hey look, its little Inga Humpe from the German art-punk outfit Neonbabies from a few posts back, all grown up and off to covering British dance hits. Sometimes, when I re-read the things I write, I hate that I always say things like “it sounds like ‘x’ mixed with ‘x’”, but I’m a really lazy writer, especially after a few beers, so I’m going to say “it sounds like the Chromatics mixed with early OMD, covering the Pet Shop Boys”. But this time I’ll have to add “except it sounds about ten times cooler than anything those two stone-faced twinks ever did”.

Skronky post-punk from Germany’s Neue Deutsche Welle period (New German Wave, duh). I was about to do the requisite “they really stood back and threw darts at the band names of the last five years for this one” when I realized this debut LP came from ’81. Sorry to all of the “Neon” and “Babies” named bands, they beat you to the punch by three decades. Fans of LiLiPUT and Kleenex take note, jagged party-time art-punk with hints of reggae, punk, new wave and lots of pop sensibility. Vocalists Anete and Inga Humpe went on to long, fairly successful careers in pop and later new age, which sort of makes this the German version of Yanni’s first band. Check out the no-wave version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.

Neonbabies – Spass Muss Sein
Neonbabies – Ich Will Dich Nicht
Neonbabies – Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Neonbabies – Blaue Augen

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

//photo by ajani charles

Ahhh… the sound of crossing the finish line. The sound of being up for a week straight and not giving a fuck anymore. It’s a hard feeling to capture in a song, but with a rapid fire verse and a dragging, syrup-drop beat that sounds like a stagger Drizzy and Wayne cut through the bravado and nail the best cut off the new album. It’s the sound of being really really tired, but knowing that you killed it. Which is why they can listen to all your questions and they answer them all at once with a big “hell ya, fucking right”. You can even hear the grin on Weezy’s face as he spits one of the best hooks in a minute. The feel good jam of the week. If you did anything you are proud of lately, you can go ahead sit back in your chair and relate to this like a motherfucker..

Drizzy – HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)

I know I’m probably a little late on this, I’m not the most current dude, but a really great way to get introduced to new music is by drinking beer and smoking pot. Blah blah blah “liver disease”, blah blah blah “low sperm count”. How about, “awesome amounts of patience to sift through hours of YouTube threads, blogs and message boards chasing forgotten treasures”? Or “tireless yapping with other record nerds about shit you don’t know about yet”? Just be sure to take notes, because there’s a good chance you’re going to forget a whole lot about what you learned before the morning. Case in point, this 7 inches of reissued wax only found its way into my collection because of a crumpled, beer soaked note I found in a pant pocket after a late nighter, in which the phrase “awesome Sing Sing reissues” was chicken scratched onto a torn chunk of grocery bag. Lo-fi power poppish punk with a hint of TV Personalities, recorded in ’79 and reissued this year. Grab one before they’re gone.

Voice Of The Puppets – I Don’t Want To Know

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m not really that familiar with Grizzly Bear, and what I have heard I wasn’t impressed with. However, their bass player (and sometimes producer) Chris Taylor has this side-project CANT that kills pretty much everything right now. It’s definitely not a dance record, but the sound set is closer to Neon Indian or LCD Soundsystem than it is to Radiohead. It reminds me of Matthew Dear, a techno producer who started making electronic pop/rock. Similarly, Chris Taylor isn’t a virtuosic singer, but his earnest delivery shines through and carries the songs. The heavy drums and synth patterns are definitely groove-oriented, but the quick builds give the songs more of a pop feel than you might expect from the intro.

This is the perfect come-down album for pretty much any drug or bar-hopping session, but it could be used really well as a pre-game for mellow nights out too. Best listened to with 2 or 3 close friends in a small apartment, loud enough so that it’s difficult to make small talk over the songs; all listeners should be inebriated to the point of being amazed by something small like a flute lick but too fucked up to verbalize what it was. Teenagers or adults with a lot of free time should feel free to obsess over the lyrics.

CANT – Too Late, Too Far
CANT – Answer
CANT – The Edge

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This track has been in heavy mix rotation since I stole it off the awesome Mod Punk Archives site years ago. A perfect 60′s revival pop hit (tipping the hat to the Byrds, the Zombies and other post-mod British Invasion rockers), but recorded on the other side of the pond in the mid 80′s by San Diego garage-heads. Comprised of members of better known SoCal garage scene favorites like the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Crawdaddys, the Nashville Ramblers had a short run with little to show for it, but what they did manage to record was so timeless its been a staple of power-pop comps (like Bomp’s “The Roots Of Power Pop” or Rhino’s “Children of Nuggets”) for the last 20 years. Mike Stax’s Ugly Things Records recently reissued a limited edition of the original 7″, snatch one up before they’re gone.

Nashville Ramblers – The Trains

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bonus:
Nashville Ramblers – The Trains live on “Its Happening”, 1987