[Photos] – Owen Pallet Performs At Union Chapel In London
Owen Pallet, formerly known as Final Fantasy and maybe also known for his collaborations/contributions with The Last Shadow Puppets, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear and others, released his first album as Owen Pallet (Heartland) on January 11th, and since then he’s taken off. With album reviews that are almost all in the very positives, his brand of Violin-infused Indie Pop is sure to garner him a huge number of new followers and garner a wider audience. That’s a lot of garnerin’.
His Twitter account is often littered with strange and nonsensical tweets, but sometimes there are little nuggets of goodness, like the one where he said “Can’t contain it. I just completed 10 days on the best album I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on.” which is allegedly in regards to him working with Arcade Fire on their new album.
Owen played the London Union Chapel on January 25th and DrownedInSound have some awesome pictures from the gig, check them out at that link you just read past.
[Review] [Listen] – Operator Please – Yes Yes Vindictive (2007)
Hold your breath. Ready?
I first heard of Operator Please when I was watching an episode of Jools Holland that I had tuned in to to see Liam Finn (which turned out to be the best performance of the night). Stuck between Melody Gardot and The Pentangle were Operator Please. A young, energetic five-piece with a violinist, a 12 year-old drummer (not really, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him) and a guitar-playing female singer dressed like you’d expect a female member of The Hives to dress.
Their sound and energy was enough to persuade me to download their debut album “Yes Yes Vindictive”, released at the tail end of 2007 in their native Australia. Upon hearing the first few bars of opener “Zero! Zero!” you wouldn’t be wrong to think it was a cover of the Knightrider theme song (or a muscially inclined Bee trapped in an amp). The pace is frantic and sets the mood for the rest of the album with singer Amandah Wilkinson singing with a fervor about an apparently ungratful, arguementative and ever-present boyfriend on most of the songs. On songs like “Get What You Want” she rather matter-of-factly states “I wish I could feed you some Ritalin/So maybe I could get a reaction or/Maybe even some facial expression/ But it’s not your fault if you really don’t wanna.”
Curiously the violin works. “Curiously” because it’s not often that a guitar-based band without the backing of more than one stringed instrument can pull off the pairing, but Operator Please pull it off effortlessly. On “Just A Song About Ping Pong” (which is, believe it or not, a song about ping pong) the violin cuts in and out, slowing down the furious pace at which the guitars and drums have been racing along behind handclaps and screams of “GO!”, only to pick right back up where it left off and ending leaving you wanting more than the 2:18 of it. “Two For My Seconds” is the opposite, a pop lament led by a piano and with lyrics about blame and holding a grudge, sung with a smile. It’s a nice change of pace from the energy of the previous tracks, but not for long as the song quickly ups tempo and catches you off guard.
Though Operator Please offer nothing new in terms of musical progression or unbridled talent, they definitely have what it takes to get you up on the Ian Curtis-inspired indie dance floor (you know, the one where you flail your arms and half-Ska), especially with songs like “Yes Yes” and “Terminal Disease”, the latter clocking in at a blistering 1:56. Album closer “Pantomime” begins with a hardly-present guitar and Amandah singing softly “I’m on strings/So move me/March, march, march/ To the beat of no drums”. Building up into a crescendo of guitars, bassy drums, piano and strings, it’s not how you’d expect the album to end upon listening to the first track.
They’ll likely draw comparisons to The Gossip and The D4, even CSS and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but if they’re to shake those comparisons they’ll need to come up with something different, something magnetic to pull you in like “Get What You Want” and “Just A Song About Ping Pong”, especially when some of the songs on “Yes Yes Vindictive”seem to be recycled from the song before, or even from the b-sides of The Gossip.
With a yet to be announced album due out this year, here’s hoping they stick around long enough to prove me right, and wrong.
Oh, and you can breathe now.
6/10
Worth checking out: The D4, The Gossip
Buy “Yes Yes Vindictive”
Listen Before You Buy – “Yes Yes Vindictive”:
Frightened Rabbit Announce Tour, Contest, And More
Frightened Rabbit have announced a North American tour (which does include Canada), a contest to win tickets to not only see them live in either the U.K. or U.S. with an opportunity to meet them after the gig, but also a new video for “Nothing Like You” from their upcoming and highly anticipated 3rd album “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks”, due out on March 9th via FatCat.
Their tour dates have them starting off in Australia (last night), in the U.K. for the first two weeks of March (and curiously not even playing in Scotland), then over to the U.S. for SXSW and then back again for an entire month, starting at Coachella and finishing in San Diego, with shows in Canada in between.
01-29 Melbourne, Australia - Laneway Festival
01-31 Sydney, Australia - Laneway Festival
02-02 Sydney, Australia – Metro Theatre *
02-03 Sydney, Australia – The Filth at Beach Road Hotel
02-04 Melbourne, Australia – The Palais *
03-04 York, England – Duchess of York
03-05 Manchester, England – Club Academy
03-06 Aldershot, England – West End Centre
03-08 Bristol, England – Thekla
03-09 Oxford, England – Academy 2
03-10 London, England - Koko
03-12 Birmingham, England – Academy 2
03-13 Sheffield, England - Leadmill 2
03-14 Norwich, England – Arts Centre
03-17 Austin, TX - SXSW
03-18 Austin, TX - SXSW
03-19 Austin, TX - SXSW
03-20 Austin, TX - SXSW
04-17 Indio, CA - Coachella
04-19 Tempe, AZ – The Clubhouse
04-21 Houston, TX – Walter’s
04-22 Dallas, TX – Loft at Palladium Ballroom
04-23 Little Rock, AR – Revolution
04-24 Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade
04-25 Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle
04-27 Washington, DC – Black Cat
04-28 New York, NY – Webster Hall
04-29 Boston, MA – Paradise
04-30 Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church
05-03 Montreal, Quebec - Petit Campus
05-04 Toronto, Ontario – Opera House
05-06 Newport, KY - Southgate House
05-07 St. Louis, MO – The Old Rock House
05-08 Chicago, IL – Metro
05-09 Milwaukee, WI – Pabst Theatre
05-10 Minneapolis, MN – Varsity Theater
05-12 Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre
05-13 Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge
05-15 Vancouver, British Columbia - Biltmore Cabaret
05-16 Seattle, WA - Neumo’s Crystal Ball Reading Room
05-17 Portland, OR - Berbati’s Pan
05-19 San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
05-22 San Diego, CA - Casbah* with Echo and the Bunnymen
The details of the contest are as follows:
To celebrate the impending release of our third studio album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, we’ve decided to run a competition! In keeping with the theme of mixed drinks, all you have to do to enter is post a video response or leave a comment in the Shout Box on the channel of you making your favourite cocktail, or a cocktail of your own making, and we’ll pick our favourite as our winner. The closing date is the 15th of February, so get creative and get filming! The winner will get two tickets to an upcoming gig in the UK or US and the opportunity to enjoy the winning drink with the band after the show.
Heres how to submit your ‘Winter of Mixed Drinks’ cocktail recipe
1. Register on MUZU.TV and become a friend of Frightened Rabbit
2. Submit your recipe by uploading your video on the fan uploads page here
Or writing it in the shoutbox below
Last but certainly not least, their new video for “Nothing Like You”, the second single from “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks”. I posted a video a few days back of singer Scott Hutchison playing “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” in a garden, giving a excellent acoustic rendition of the song. Check out “Nothing Like You” below.
[Review] [Listen] – The Maldives – Listen To The Thunder (2009)
There are bands that have a name which fits their sound before you even hear their music; The Strokes, Animal Collective, De La Soul, The Hives, Kriss Kross. There are bands whose name invokes a particular sound in your head before you hear their music, but upon actually listening to them they sound nothing like you expected (whether it be good or bad). Upon hearing of the band The Maldives I had pictured in my head some sunny rock, born on the coast of an island in the Indian Ocean.
Something fresh. Something vibrant.
Thirty seconds into “Goodbye”, the first song from their label debut album “Listen to the Thunder
As the album progresses you can hear Band Of Horses (both bands are from Seattle and even have similar bearded band members, they probably hold beard-wearing competitions too), Neil Young, Nicklecreek….even My Morning Jacket, as well as Bluegrass, straight up “twang” country, steel guitars, and harmonicas. With thoughts of old men playing the harmonica on a dusty front porch, the album flits between sounds of Country, Alt-country, tolerable Country (which some might say IS alt-country) and Rock. Yeah, Rock.
On songs like “Time Is Right Now” you can really hear the comparison to the afore-mentioned Band Of Horses, and even though it begins with good old-fashioned barn-dance music and lines like “Wanna live and let it all be/I wanna lose this darkness inside of me” it ends with a resounding guitar-driven outro, something Neil Young would be proud of. “Say Nothing” is a slow, pianio-laden ballad in which singer Jason Dodson cries “There’s a knocking on my window/There’s a frost in the air/Manhattan’s on my mind/Got no reasons, got no cares/I could have loved you if I tried/ But the night was way too young/”. “Whidbey Island Blues” follows in the footsteps of “Say Nothing”, almost too closely, and “The New One” is a short and sweet pining for a love lost, bringing back the organs you hear briefly in the opener but filling out with more guitars over shouder, as opposed to sat on the knee. “Do You Still” begins as a standard country song, voice-twang in full effect and slide guitars a-plenty, but then jumps into what at first reminded me of a Benny Hill sketch, with guitars chasing fiddles, fiddles chasing harmonicas, harmonicas chasing the drums and then it all ends with exposed breasts and someone falling over.
If this album is trying to cross over from country to something else, it doesn’t. If it’s trying to sound like most other alt-country albums of the past couple of years then it’s doing a pretty good job. If you like your music with slide guitars, knees up, and a splattering of country-twang then you’ll probably really enjoy this. One thing you can be sure of is that it’ll get your feet tappin’.
For anyone who can appreciate some good rock but can’t get past the country twang, stick with Band Of Horses.
5/10
Worth checking out: Band Of Horses, Neil Young
Buy Listen to the Thunder from Amazon
Listen Before You Buy – “Listen To The Thunder”:
