Hot Damn Jamz IV: Ten Bands We Are Crazy for This Week
January 29th, 2009 | 3:30 pm est |
It’s really amazing, thrilling and shocking (or something) that each week we run across all these new bands that we think are worth a listen or two. If you do the math on that, by the end of the year we will have featured around 3,500 bands, projects and artists. (Good golly, that’s a lot of linkage.) Hopefully this week’s selection of weird, wild and wonderful bands will give you a thrill or at least something to think about, maybe even learn from. If not, let us know who we should have featured. Links away!
Animal Hospital
Boston’s Kevin Micka is the brains behind Animal Hospital’s emotive post-rock, which starts out subtly but builds to dramatic heights on tracks like “His Belly Burst (Edit).”
Dum Dum Girls
Like the Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls worship the Shop Assistants and Black Tambourine, but there’s a breezy sweetness and pep to their sound that the sludgy VGs can’t quite deliver.
Eternal Summers
Despite their name, this Virginia male/female duo have a lot of autumnal melancholy in their sweetly chiming, gently rocking indie pop sound.
Exebelle & the Rusted Cavalcade
Fans of the Damnwells and Ryan Adam’s twangy efforts will find something familiar about Exebelle’s rustic racket, which alternates between alt.country rock and weep-into-your-whiskey ballads.
Math the Band
Silly, shouty party songs played on cheap keyboards with loud guitars is a formula that works more often than not, and Math the Band would make Andrew W.K. proud.
Real Estate
Real Estate’s chiming indie-rock has a tropical, sunny wildness lurking around its heavily reverbed edges that channels instant summer. Let’s rock the beach indeed!
Screaming Females
With a name that suits them particularly well, this Jersey three-piece rocks out like an angry riot grrrl version of the White Stripes.
Talk Normal
Talk Normal’s abrasive beats, keyboards and vocals are heavily No Wave-influenced and strangely hypnotic, suggesting what Liars might sound like if they were a female duo from Brooklyn.
Weird Owl
Equal parts reverb and crunch, these Brooklyn-based owls sound like they’re howling from the porch of Syd Barrett’s cabin on Black Mountain.
What’s Up
Did you ever wonder what an 8-bit 5ive Style would sound like?
The work I did in the early part of the 80’s trumps all of this! Even my last album Love Kingdom can take on any of these groups albums
Great. Thanks guys! Loved Math the Band; great find. Keep it coming with the free, hott, MySpace .zip albums. Thanks again.
i like this band: myspace.com/raaskalbomfukkerz
“What’s Up” has an interesting multiplayer communal practice scale, which they have called a “song”. At least it’s kinda unfamiliar sounding when taken to be a “song”, …and… if odd=good,… is at least partially worth a (free) listen.
The other people have to be kidding us.
I have some really dynamite freak-out tapes from my 17th birthday drunk-out that easily top all of these offerings. I guess “Allmusic” is shooting for 3500 releases, come hell or high water.
I would like to pose a question to the new music community……
If a series of new musical works was offered up by an auteur (or auteurs) who refused to categorize or identify themselves beyond “Unknown Auteur(s)” would such a lack of social appendage be seen as fatal, sabotaging our ability to judge the intent of the offering,……. or would it be liberating to expose ourselves to a 100% “no prior expectations” sonic experience, free of all political or seductive kant?
Consider this: “MySpace” is a social network. On Myspace “person” stands equal, or more-than-equal with any recorded media, thus biasing potential audience reactions. In such a situation, “personhood” could absolutely subsume musicality, originality, coherence, inherent value, and technical worth, rendering all offered works into a sort of dating advertisement, and nothing more.
In point of fact, a really amusing freak-out tape could easily be a more attractive advertisement than some hard-to-judge musical (or quasi musical) sonic work, of higher technical merit.
Yet, this website is not called “AllFreakOut”. In fact, it terms itself “AllMusic”, and thus a set of preconditions is implied. (Of course, this may be an erroneous assumption on my part.)
Perhaps a division of the offerings into “Musical” and “Sonic” genres could save afficianadoes of one or the other genre the disgusting downer of reaching out for structured art, and filling one’s ears with merest camp sonic trivia.
I really don’t know.
What do YOU think?
H. Springer
harrydog1b@hotmail.com
I did the math.
10 bands x 52 weeks = 520 bands, not 3500.
That is all.
oh, wait - you’re doing the old fashioned “numbers” based math. we here at HDJ headquarters deal in the math of ideas and feelings, none of that bothersome accuracy or precision for us. i admit you may be right but by the time the end of the year creeps up it will have felt like 3500 bands.
Yeah, these week’s offerings are pretty bad. Dig deeper, or maybe less deep, my friends. There is a lot better stuff out there than this.
Ahh, I misunderstood then. Continue with the feelings math.
i listened to all of these and they are all wonderful. Screaming Females of NB is cool