Summer | girlpants
Tag: summer

Links of Interest (not lynx of interest; this is not a bobcat watching club, THIS IS GIRLPANTS)

News­flash: Unless you live in Port­land or some other pos­sibly myth­ical “cool” and “rainy” place, right now it’s hot and summer. So let’s listen to music and also read about it instead of going to Coney Island and staring at weir­does (or busting open a fire hydrant and dousing our body parts in it/making our chil­dren run through it/giving our gypsy cabs a free car­wash with it, as denizens of Bush­wick, Brooklyn are wont to do. Believe me, I’ve called 311 more than once already to come shut down aban­doned, gushing hydrants. Old Man Niina isn’t a water waster). (That’s not me in the pic­ture, either.)

But I digress. Below are some links that effec­tively update us on a por­tion of the fas­ci­nating matter that is music in the summer. 

  • John Darnielle per­forms 2009’s The Life of the World to Come in its entirety, and you can view the video at Pitch­fork if you act quick-like etc.
  • If you live in New York, you should plan to attend North­side Fes­tival. This year’s tremen­dous lineup includes Wavves, Au Revoir Simone, Titus Andron­icus, Liars, and about 928347 times more.
  • Everyone ever has already done an “antic­i­pated summer releases” list, so I’m not gonna rehash. But heyo, Arcade Fire! They’ve put up the track listing for their highly antic­i­pated new album Sub­urbs, and with this track listing have sur­faced also some tracks for lis­tening. Below is a radio rip of “Ready to Start,” gor­geous and slow-building. You can also listen to “Month of May” here.
    Arcade Fire — “Ready to Start” 
     
  • Indie Rock Café has a good post on recent summer releases that are easy to miss in the uproar over heavy hit­ters. Per­sonal high­light for me is the Lou Barlow song “Loser­core,” but the post also covers Cary Ann Hearst, Apollo, the Vita Ruins, and Com­mu­nist Daughter.
  • Also, you should know that you can stream the Lou Barlow EP = Sen­tridoh III at Merge’s web­site. “Gravitate/One Machine” is so good. It’s hot out­side plus a thou­sand humidity today and this song is making me want to box someone.
  • And finally. Does anyone inspire as much crit lately as Lady Gaga? I know this might be old news (and the pub­li­ca­tion title may be a tad hyper­bolic) but I follow this all-Gaga journal with fas­ci­na­tion; some recent pieces posted dis­cuss hys­teria, com­modity fem­i­nism, the Gaga/Illuminati con­nec­tion, and Gaga as Kate Bush response. (Another topic of note might be Gaga as George Bush response, but that’s not an article I’m going to write this summer.)

1 Comment by Niina on June 20, 2010
filed in Listmakery, Music, Off-site mp3, mp3
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Emo in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

At 19 I had an Adven­ture­land–style summer, working at a Barnie’s Coffee in the local mall—remember Barnie’s Coffee? The place charmed, in a free­wheeling, no-one-gives a shit kind of way. One co-worker was loud, hot, and reg­u­larly stole from the till so she could buy Oxys; another sold them to her. Not nearly as depraved, I mostly con­cerned myself with how loudly I could play the stereo. But I always enjoyed watching them tear through, seri­ously, cases of whip­pits in the back. Yea, the store folded a few months later.

One day another co-worker, and a 2001 emo-redux trans­plant from out of state, plugged her shitty Dell laptop into the stereo. Hmm. Wistful pop, jangly guitar and girl-next-door vocals utterly free of impu­ri­ties. “Hey can I burn this?” Over the ensuing years I’ve lis­tened to the EP count­less times, con­sci­en­tiously trans­fer­ring the songs from disc to desktop to Nomad Jukebox mp3 player to Mac­book. No tag infor­ma­tion on the files—I only remem­bered her saying that they were a local band called… the Maccabees?

Some­times you don’t do things until some invis­ible switch is flicked on inside you. I sup­pose I could’ve looked them up at any point, but I liked how the mys­tery gave them a cer­tain aura—that and I’m kind of lazy. But the other night, after nine years plus another half hour of Googling, I dis­cov­ered that there was, indeed, a local Florida band by that name [ed. note: not to be con­fused with the scruffily hoodied Brits of the same name].

So the Mac­cabees, as it turns out, were a sequel to the mar­gin­ally better-known band Pohgoh, who ran from ’94-’98 and were fea­tured on the sem­inal Emo Diaries Volume I com­pi­la­tion. After the they broke up, singer Susie Ulrey wrote a bunch of tunes, and along with hus­band Keith she formed the Mac­cabees to play them out. This, as I under­stand it, went on until about 2001 or so. Part of the long-running Tampa scene, most recently this crew has released a one-off recording under the name Pre­fontaine.

The Mac­cabees — “Abingdon”

I would highly rec­om­mend you pur­chase what I now know to be their beau­tiful Songs from the Weakest Link EP. Even though some of the mys­tery is gone, I’m glad to learn that these guys man­aged to carve out a DIY career, that they were able to make music a part of their lives and locale in a way that, for better or worse, I don’t think can be quite repli­cated anymore.

2 Comments by Mike on April 15, 2010
filed in Music, mp3
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