The Darcys // Peg

As bad a wrap as the jazz-influenced smooth rockers get from the hipster generation, as witnessed by the portrayal of Donald Fagen as a mush-mouthed buffoon on the popular Yacht Rock shorts. Under the high-gloss sheen of studio innovator Roger "The Immortal" Nichols, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker assembled intricate progressions interlaced with brilliant lyrical moments of dark witticism, in the process achieving a level of perfectionism that may never again be matched.

That being said, the task of covering one of their tunes is in itself one of the most daunting undertakings a band can attempt, and the reworking of an entire album a la the Bird and the Bee's nod to Hall and Oates is akin to an indie band death wish. Nonetheless, last week Toronto's The Darcy's released their free reinterpretation of Steely Dan's seminal effort Aja, which features one of top 3 Dan tunes "Peg".

As well-executed as these tracks are, especially in their effort to re-imagine the tunes as sinister prog numbers, it's hard to listen to such well-known tunes objectively with fresh ears. So are the pitfalls of most covers, I suppose. But it's a fresh take that I can see myself really liking had I never heard of Steely Dan before, which should serve some black-hearted hipsters rather well me thinks.

MP3: The Darcy's - Peg
Full Aja Downlad: here

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Liz Green // Hey Joe

Why does everything sound so much more charming when filtered through the magic known as the female British accent? For instance why was it so adorable last weekend when The Staves were wandering around my flat asking who had just shat? In the same way why are semi-standard folk tunes with smatterings of Tom Waits-inspired horns somehow so much more enchanting when UK songstress Liz Green sings them? Her album O, Devotion is out now via Piccadilly Records.

MP3: Liz Green - Hey Joe

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Hormones // f-zero

Last week I was able to catch local punk trio Hormones (no 'the') playing an in-store at Good Records celebrating their latest EP To The 9s. Their set began with the band powering through their previous effort, an erratic and heavier spin on sounds pioneered by bands like The Minutemen -- complete with singer/drummer Jordan Williams' D. Boone-esque vocals -- before moving on to their newer, markedly more melodic release. When it works it really works but other times it makes one appreciate the way the sporadic playing of their three distinctive parts would meld together in a collective chaos would create something bigger than the group's individual members on their older works. Catch enough of their shows and you just might get lucky enough to witness a special guest spot from the lovely Taylor Rea, whose Yeah Yeah Yeah's cover might even intimidate Karen O just a touch.

Hormones headline a sweet all-local lineup at Dada Feb. 11.

MP3: Hormones - f-zero

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The Staves // Icarus

If you haven't already done so sign up for the mailing list over at sofarsounds.com. Those folks put on super exclusive and hyper-intimate house shows (you know the kind where people sit Indian-style on the floor and you can hear even the faintest breaths of the person watching beside you) where the locations and acts are disseminated at the last minute. Had you been on it before you might have experienced the otherworldly charm and radiance of The Staves, a trio of English birds who were kind enough to hang around after the show to sip whiskey and teach us dirty British slang terms.


(The Staves on iTunes)

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Juliette // My First Hardcore Song

To further drive home yesterday's point concerning Ben Kweller's life-long struggle to experience hardship and career-long failure at genuine angst I give you the raddest 8-year-old Aussie lass who has more pure soul/animosity in the nail of her pinky finger than Kweller ever will. When she screams out the bit about her pet fish smelling foul you better bet they must really fucking stink. And just for the record I would gladly shell out the cash if Juliette ever releases My First Hadrcore Album. Not even joking.

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Ben Kweller // Mean To Me

A decade ago Ben Kweller was undoubtedly one of my favorite things going. But then a funny thing happened; I grew up. Like Wooderson might say, I get older and BK's music stays the same. When I was last able to speak with Ben about his upcoming album Go Fly A Kite! I let myself be suckered into the belief that this time would be different. Finally he had written his bigger, louder 'Fuck Off and Die' album. Finally he'd learn to be mean --or at least learned to be real. But alas as Spin magazine's first preview of the album reveals he's back to his old tricks, relying on stale, lifeless guitars and backup vocals so precise they're unsettlingly robotic.

The sad thing is, however, with '09s country effort Changing Horses and this new supposedly angstier Ben, the singer actually thinks he is evolving. But here we are, three years after following in the career footsteps of such luminaries as Darius Rucker and Jessica Simpson Kweller is still writing songs about a girl he met in a hotel that was mean to him. That being said, his latest just might be the worst Radish record yet.

In his defense, though, I can imagine it would be extremely difficult to write a record a record about your 'hard times' that contained at least a shred of soul when you haven't faced a single hardship or difficulty your whole life. Other than, you know, that one time when his mom was sick and he couldn't afford to buy his girlfriend a plane ticket to accompany him on the visit back home and so they had to be apart for a week.

MP3: Ben Kweller - Mean To Me

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Kontaktor // Back To School (LehtMoJoe Remix feat. GalleryCat & Jaeson Green)

Local boys LehtMoJoe, GalleryCat, and Jaeson Green appear on this track by Norwegian electro duo Kontaktor, you know, for all you suckers who just couldn't wait to get back to your classes today.

Also worth noting is a nice little electro-blues EP Leht just put out featuring a trio of original tracks composed as the score to this short little motorcycle advert/film that's approaching 5 million hits on the YouTubes, and (humble brag alert) features yours truly murdering some mouth organ in there somewhere too.



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Luiz Rocha - Espiga // Controle Remoto

A large percentage of times I shop for records I like to look for those things that didn't make the cut when labels were deciding which albums they were going to reprint their catalog on cassettes and then again on compact discs. As a result I've ended up discovering a lot of jazz, world music, and novelty records that time has otherwise forgotten, and in turn some of my current musical tastes have been swayed as well.

No I did not discover Luiz Rocha - Espiga in a dusty record bin -- it was actually through a few errant internet clicks in an attempt to close out a spam/virus assault -- but it does mesh quite well with these newly-cultivated preferences.

All of the info I could find on the Brazilian Barcelona-based clarinetist were either in Spanish so, just for funsies, I used BabelFish's translation services to translate his official bio to English, then back to Spanish, then back to English to see if it made any more sense.

"of Luiz Rocha; Espiga"…The musician, the clown and the professor, have begun with music to the 11 years that touched the guitar, but the definitive enthusiasm by the sounds went when discovering clarinet and the winds. It touches clarinet, the point under clarinet and the guitar. It has made trips by Brazil and Spain, has directed to music and the subjects composed for the glasses and the cinema of the theater, taught to music to the agents and to the children and has worked like clown in hospitals and streets. At the moment that touches inside. Qbamba. and it takes to his music the pairs, the trio and the quartet by the world.

All giggles aside, though, the song "Controle Remoto," in particular, is a slightly creepy dance number with a slightly Latin groove and it has been rocking my world as of late.



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Mason Jennings // Dr. King

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JR & Friends // YeSirE Bob

Ever hear a song so bad that it's kinda good? As much as you claim to detest Rebecca Black's "Friday" I'd be willing to bet my badly-abused liver that you have more of the lyrics engrained in your skull than you'd ever admit publicly. But the phenomenon can't really be blamed on how easily the internets and the YouTubes have made it for the ARK music factories of the world (or even the bedroom Bo Burnham's for that matter) to quickly and effortlessly disseminate their underlying genius to the masses, I mean, just look at people like Wesley Willis or Tiny Tim who have seemingly existed as far back as Edison's wax cylinders. The line between quirkiness and genuine mental illness is apparently very small, and made all the thinner since the coining of the term 'novelty music'.

As I was playing BandCamp roulette this morning I came across the music of JR Claiborn which I am positive is terrible and yet I have listened to several times so far today. Do bad artists know that they are bad? Do ugly people know that they are ugly? Does a bad song become a good song if it was made that way on purpose as some sort of elaborate put-on? Does the fact that BandCamp thinks this is one of the best songs tagged 'Dallas' mean absolutely anything? How many consecutive questions is too many consecutive questions to end a post with? How far back did you stop reading?



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Warm Weather // A Promise

Back in the fall I got to temporarily transcend the confines of the written word with my 60-minute jaunt into the medium of radio when local station IndieVerse was gracious enough to allow me to take part in their Guest DJ Hour series. In between my bouts of verbal diarrhea I also got to play some of my favorite jams of 2011, including the creamy smooth harmonies of "I Only Know" by Los Angeles band Warm Weather, which I am admittedly a sucker for.

Later this month the band is set to release another EP titled Looking Through, which they've been kind enough to share a track from. Check out "A Promise" below or see the dudes live this spring at SXSW. Here's hoping they opt to add a pre or post SXSW stop here in town on their way to and/or from Austin.

MP3: Warm Weather - A Promise

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O.V. Wright // Ace of Spades

Despite some semi-racist undertones, and the overtly misogynistic line "I use ace of club to keep my babe in place," this old school soul number by O.V. Wright has still been our jam as of late. Sure this level of overused extended metaphor generally has an easier time inducing rimshots than pelvic thrusts but at just over two minutes in length it is also easy to overlook. Wu-Tangers like Ghostface Killah have sampled Wright's tracks before, but we still think it is fair to say his catalog has been severely overlooked by the hip-hop community in that regard.

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It's A Corporate World Indeed

After seeing those annoying freecreditscorereport.com commercials for the zillionth time it occurred to me the lead singer looked an awful lot like Daniel Zott from Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. (whom I also had the pleasure of interviewing not all that long ago). A quick perusal of the freecreditscorereport.com website reveals the fake band from the spots is actually anything but. Detroit band The American Secrets apparently won some sort of contest to become the company's official spokesband. According to the band's site their frontman is indeed one Mr. Daniel Zott also of Dale Jr. Jr.

[Insert pause while minds are blown]

And contrary to their uber cringe-worthy ads their original tunes prove the band to be quite competent in the arena of super bright indie pop, as evidenced by their performance on the now defunct George Lopez shit storm. Also it is worth noting that the band formerly (and ironically?) went by the much more clever name The Victorious Secrets.

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Tennis Bafra // Knox Harrington

A couple weeks back a batch of no-frills Swedes put out their Nomethod debut, Knox Harrington, a '90s indie-rock throwback that benefits from heady arrangement; mediocre Sonic Youthian melodies are alternated with tension building ascents that grow more head-rattling as the song progresses, and benefiting both portions of the song with the juxtaposition.

MP3: Tennis Bafra - Knox Harrington

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Pepper Rabbit Calls It Quits

It always comes as a shock when a band calls it quits. The latest announcement came from Los Angeles indie outfit Pepper Rabbit, a band we covered at SubEx excited about their potential success. Pepper Rabbit's frontman Xander Singh made the announcement via Facebook:

"In summation, it doesn't matter why Pepper Rabbit had to end, that will stay within the people involved. But I have to say that everyone who ever bought a record, illegally downloaded a record, came to or snuck in to one of our shows, I thank you dearly from the bottom of my heart. And to everyone professionally involved with Pepper Rabbit, and to all the bloggers and publications that supported the band, I can't thank you enough for your support. Not many people take chances on other people, let alone themselves. I never took a chance on myself until Pepper Rabbit. And I am thankful everyday that I've learned to take a chance on myself. Speaking for myself, I'll of course be writing music and making many more records in the future, and I will keep you all updated on the goings about in my musical life. Though I will be exploring many other opportunities in the music world, nothing will ever keep me from making records. And the encouragement that all of you have given me, keeps me driven to make more and more and more music, and I hope you will enjoy whatever I come up with. And if not, thats okay too :-)"

-Laura Sliva