angels twenty - return home

Archive for February, 2007

Halfby
Screw the Plan
Screw the Plan (2006, single)

Halfby is a Kyoto-based DJ with a bunch of releases on the Second Royal label (though I think he’s moved on now to a much larger label, Toy Factory). Astute readers will note that Second Royal is also the home of Handsomeboy Technique, which should give you a pretty good idea of what Halfby’s all about: upbeat, sample-heavy breaks and hip-hop. Halfby’s approach is less pop, more groove; it’s basically Handsomeboy Technique on permanent “party” mode, which may appeal to you if you lean more towards the Avalanches than the Go! Team.

That’s a lot of names to throw at you, and if you don’t know who any of those bands are you might still be a bit confused. So let me put it to you straight: this is infectious breakbeat music, peppered liberally with lounge influences and coated with a sugary pop sheen. It’s like a party in your ears and everyone’s invited. Apparently the kids in Japan actually dance to this stuff in clubs; if that’s the case, then we all need to move to Japan right the hell now, because the kids in Japan are clearly way cooler and way more fun than we are. Halfby’s been around for a while, with a radio hit and praise from the likes of Pizzicato Five under his belt, but has only released on album to date. Recently, however, he’s been putting out a series of singles through Toy Factory, which is where “Screw The Plan” comes from. It’s insanely catchy, and there’s a bizarre music video to boot (also including “Rodeo Machine,” off the album Green Hours):

February 25, 2007
filed under Electronic
1 comment | permalink

All My Friends
Theme From All My Friends Get Hung Up
All My Friends Get Hung Up (2007)

Say hello to All My Friends, a UK band with a penchant for quietly charming, jangly guitar pop with a 60s touch. All Music Guide named the band one of their post-Valentine’s Day crushes, and “crush” is exactly the sort of word you want to use with a band like this. “People Like This,” from the band’s MySpace site, has the all-important boy-girl vocals that make twee pop fans swoon, with a bit of swirly organ thrown in to make things interesting. “Theme From All My Friends Get Hung Up,” an instrumental that wouldn’t sound too out of place on an Essex Green record, refers to the band’s as-yet-unreleased album. Actually, the band haven’t released much of anything just yet, though they’ve been putting out cover tracks for a while now under a project they call Pop Explosion. For a while it looked like an EP release via Spanish label Tragadisco Records was in the works, but now it looks like the EP might be shelved in favour of just releasing All My Friends Get Hung Up instead, which already includes all the tracks that were going to be on the EP. Unfortunately this means a bit of a delay, and as a result we’re stuck with MySpace posts for a while yet.

Whatever they decide to put out in the next couple of months, though, it’s worth keeping an eye out for new All My Friends material. The world can never have enough gentle indie pop.

February 22, 2007
filed under Soft
Comments Off | permalink

Fantastic Plastic Machine
Paragon
Beautiful (2001)

“Paragon” is a cut off the last Fantastic Plastic Machine album to be released in North America, Beautiful. Tomoyuki Tanaka, the man behind FPM, is still making records, but the Shibuya-kei movement with which he is associated has retreated from Western shores. The breezily optimistic, retro-influenced pop sound doesn’t seem to play so well in a world filled with terrorists imaginary and real, climate change and environmental destruction, and the general sense of pre-apocalyptic ennui that has settled over everything in the past couple of years. Originally intended in some part to pay homage to the relentlessly forward-looking retro-futurism of the 60s, the sounds of Fantastic Plastic Machine, Pizzicato Five and Towa Tei now seem almost as out of touch as the original recipes.

Fantastic Plastic Machine took a more club-friendly approach to Shibuya-kei, especially on Beautiful. With more insistent four-on-the-floor beats on many tracks (including the single “Take Me To The Disco,” which strangely only appears on the album in remixed form as a bonus track), Beautiful is less lounge and more dance. Maybe that’s why it found a home on American label Emperor Norton Records, also past home to Japanese exports like Takako Minekawa and electro artists like Miss Kittin and Ladytron. Around the time electroclash became really popular, Emperor Norton was doing quite well; well enough that Rykodisc took notice and entered some sort of business arrangement with the label in late 2004. At that point Emperor Norton sat somewhere between “partner” and “victim of label merger,” and with the market falling out of both electroclash and Japanophilia, the name seems to have been quietly dropped, and label signees like Ladytron have gone on to release albums through Rykodisc. Does this explain why we haven’t seen a Fantastic Plastic Machine album in the States recently? Or maybe the scene has just petered out considerably, with most of the major players on hiatus or broken up.

Well, whatever. Even if Beautiful now sounds more like a turn-of-the-millennium cultural artifact, it’s still just as fun and crammed full of lounge-club goodness.

February 18, 2007
filed under Electronic
Comments Off | permalink

Go! Team
Junior Kickstart
Thunder, Lightning, Strike (2004)

A couple of video treats for Go! Team fans recently. First, Honda’s been screwing around with Go! Team-esque music for their recent Fit campaign, but have finally gone and snagged the real thing for a new Civic ad. The big surprise, of course, is that Thunder, Lightning, Strike has been out since 2004 and seems to be a prime opportunity for cool-seeking advertising creatives everywhere. So why have there been no Go! Team songs soundtracking ads until recently? It all comes down to money.

certainly no change of heart – I hate bands who do adverts. I’ve turned down lots in the past – forgoing potentially lots of money. It got to the point where the people who publish go team songs were getting so fucked off that being dropped was looking very likely – they weren’t making any money. theres a limit to how many times people will take a No.

I’m not worried about fucking people off but the trouble is that for the second album we need a publishing company to clear the samples (which is what a publishing company does) before it gets released to avoid the mistake of the first album. It would be a serious handicap to have an album full of uncleared samples.

basically this ad was a concession so that there would be someone to clear the samples. Hypocritical i know but its a tricky thing to navigate through when you make sample based music. it’s a minefield.

If you’re like the Go! Team and not so much a fan of ads, maybe you’ll prefer this apparently unofficial music video for “Junior Kickstart”:

This is exactly the sort of ludicrous chase scene I imagined when I first heard “Junior Kickstart.” Though my chase didn’t involve arcade game characters.

February 14, 2007
filed under Hard
2 comments | permalink

Brittle Stars
So Unfair
Brittle Stars (1999)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Brittle Stars, a late-90s indie pop band from Gainesville, Florida that broke up far too soon. With just one album and one jumbo-sized EP (twice as long as the album!) under their belts, Brittle Stars don’t have a lot of material out there, and their former label, Shelflife, is going through a reogranization that may have thrown both those releases out of print. But should you manage to track them down, you’ll find some classic indie pop tracks, well before indie meant Bloc Party and Interpol. For starters, the name Brittle Stars perfectly describes the delicate, spacey, synthesizer-driven sound (though in fact it’s a reference to a type of marine life resembling a starfish). On some of the louder tracks there’s a distinct lo-fi shoegazer vibe, though the wall of sound appears to be more like one overdriven, fuzzed-out guitar. But when the band tosses out the guitars altogether, something special happens—they give us a glimpse into a spaced-out kind of indie pop that comes pretty darn close to pure euphoria. “So Unfair” is a case in point: riding on waves of soft keyboard notes and Estelle’s hushed vocals, “So Unfair” is two minutes and twenty-one seconds of bliss—the sort of bliss that conjures up in my mind the feeling of floating in outer space.

Estelle left Florida in 2000 for greener pastures, and by that point another member, Josh, had already filed his two weeks notice. After a couple of farewell shows the band drifted apart. Dan Sostrom (finally a last name for someone!) is still in Gainesville, running the dream-pop label Clairecords with his wife Heather; Estelle, meanwhile, has ended up in New York City playing in a new band called Elephant Parade.

February 11, 2007
filed under Soft
6 comments | permalink

HammerFall
Hearts On Fire
Crimson Thunder (2002)

It’s February, and curling fans know that February and March are the best months of the year—it’s prime curling season, both for playing and for watching. The Brier starts at the beginning of March (and I’ll be in Hamilton to see the opening!), and the national women’s championship starts in mid-February—always a fantastic way to spend lazy reading week afternoons. This year, the Scott Tournament of Hearts is changing its name to the rather unfortunate Scotties Tournament of Hearts (Scotties? Really?), but it’ll still provide all the fantastic women’s curling action we’ve come to expect from Canada’s best, and it’s still got “Hearts” in the name. That means “Hearts On Fire” will still work as the unofficial theme song for the best thing to ever hit Lethbridge, Alberta.

What does a heavy metal song that has “Hearts” in the name have to do with curling, you ask? Oh, nothing at all. Except this.

Yes, that’s the Swedish women’s curling team, aka the gold medal winners at the 2006 Turin Olympics. The band re-released the song before the Olympics to provide support for the team, and obviously it was the power of rock that put Anette Norberg and crew over the top. This isn’t the original video, of course; the video released in 2002 has CG fire and a scorched earth and a flaming book and stuff, but clearly this video is way more hardcore.

February 8, 2007
filed under Hard
Comments Off | permalink

Steve Grimmett
Grab Your Garmin

For a while there, it looked like the art of jingle writing was dead and gone. Commercials these days steal their soundtracks straight from the albums of up and coming artists more often than not, and while that means smaller artists get a nice little cash boost, it also means less retrokitsch for future generations to enjoy. But every so often someone remembers how to write a catchy tune with on-the-nose lyrics about particular products. Enter Steve Grimmett, who apparently has enough of a sense of humour to pen a ludicrous song about GPS navigators. The result is “Grab Your Garmin,” the soundtrack to a typically over-the-top Super Bowl ad involving giant monsters and an Ultraman-esque superhero in a tight silver bodysuit powered by the awesomeness of a GPS navigation system. Even better is that in addition to the original commercial, there’s also a full-length music video version. But the best part? You don’t need to wait twenty years for the retrokitsch effect, because “Grab Your Garmin” comes with the cheesy goodness baked in. Well played, advertising creatives, well played.

February 5, 2007
filed under Hard
2 comments | permalink

Sophie Ellis-Bextor
Catch You
Trip the Light Fantastic (2007)

Anyone who knows anything already knows the best pop stars come from the British music scene. Why settle for Jessica Simpson and Christina Aguilera when you could have Kylie Minogue and Girls Aloud? And look who else is back—performing during the BBC’s coverage of New Year’s 2007 was none other than Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the woman who gave you “Murder on the Dancefloor.” And though Shoot From The Hip wasn’t quite as well received as debut Read My Lips, “Catch You” sounds like an altogether different beast. Whereas Ellis-Bextor’s 2004 album suffered from an overload of cheesy pop production that sounded several years out of date, the first single from Trip The Light Fantastic keeps its eye on the prize. This sort of million-miles-an-hour, electro-influenced dance pop suits Ellis-Bextor far better than the slightly hammy disco flourishes of yesteryear and arrangements that often left her alone to struggle with the lyics—not exactly her strong suit. “I Am Not Good At Not Getting What I Want” this ain’t.

By contrast, “Catch You” feels like 80% chorus, meaning Ellis-Bextor doesn’t have to worry so much about those pesky verses. And in place of the bit-too-loud synth hits and slightly-too-slick guitar riffs, we get a streamlined electro-rock track worlds away from anything from her last two albums. In the past, if we were lucky we’d maybe catch Ellis-Bextor in a bemused mood, or maybe with a slight snarl (after all, she did play the bad girl in the video for “Murder on the Dancefloor”). But “Catch You” is Sophie Ellis-Bextor with all engines on full throttle, and it turns out she’s still got plenty of tricks up her sleeve. Though a Stateside release is about as likely as the British invading Greenland, import hunters can pick up Trip the Light Fantastic in May.

February 2, 2007
filed under Pop
7 comments | permalink