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“We wanted to begin a band that sounded gigantic”, We the Living say on their website, but oddly enough, this 3-member indie rock/pop band from Tennessee mostly crafts songs that are beautifully contained and tender, even wistful. Their website is a little too wordy and cerebral (probably an influence of Ayn Rand, from whose book of the same name I assume they got their name) – their first album apparently is split into “heaven” and “earth” sections and their Myspace page lays forth a manifesto about “spread [ing] the idea that everyone needs a personal philosophy”. Since their music is lucid and unpretentious however I won’t hold it against them. Download their newest EP, “Boom Forest”, by signing up for the mailing list. I just did and the EP consists of 5 exquisite songs. Check out “Left and Leaving” and “Re: Stacks” below.
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Odds of Being Alone, Trent Dabbs and Amy Stroup(from the Life Unexpected soundtrack)
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In the Sun, She & Him – She & Him is the insanely cool collaboration of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, and this is the single off their second album, set to be released in March
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Blow Me Away, Breaking Benjamin- first single from the rock band’s new album Dear Agony
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Pick Up the Phone, Dragonette – insanely addicting pop hit from the Canadian electropop group’s second album Fixin’ to Thrill
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Scars, Allison Iraheta- marvelous second single from the American Idol contestant’s first album Just Like You
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The “Play On” round-ups are where I highlight a random assortment of amazing songs I’ve discovered in the past few weeks/months.
1. “Meme Si (What You’re Made Of)”, Lucie Silvas & Gregory Lemarchal. I must’ve listened to this 30 times in the first week of discovering it, and a week later I’m still listening around twice a day. Obsession doesn’t even begin to cut it. “You’re not in love this time – but it’s all right”.
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2. “Dear You”, Josh Aeur. Oddly, this reminds me of “Hey There Delilah”. As classic as the Plain White T’s song? Probably not, but it’s held good for me through months of re-listens and I firmly believe it will become a classic.
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3. “Hazy”, Rosi Golan feat. William Fitzsimmons. A stellar little gem resonant with tenderness. “Without you, things go hazy”
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4. “From Sarah with Love”, Sarah Connor. One of those iconic love songs that comes along every once in a while and perfectly captures a certain mood/situation. Helped Canadian songstress Sarah Connor on her road to stardom.
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5. “Poison & Wine”, The Civil Wars. Wait for the chorus, and fall with the same mad crash that I did. Then listen every day for at least two weeks. “I don’t love you, but I always will”.
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“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” – Ernest Hemingway
Song of the Day:
“Say It’s All Over”, Paper Moon
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Art Brut is an English and German indie rock band which I discovered via a side project of one of their members, Eddie Argos, who formed a band with Dyan Valdés from The Blood Arm called Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW. He and Valdes just put out an album called Fixin’ the Charts (Volume 1), which is apparently a collection of responses to particular pop songs, and from the moment I heard “G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N (You Know I’ve Got A)”, a single from it, I was hooked with a capital H.”“G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N (You Know I’ve Got A)” is a response to, you guessed it, Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”.
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I haven’t listened to the rest of the album as yet, but you can check out the Stereogum Fixin’ the Charts premiere article and a (negative) review from LineofBestFit (like I said, I haven’t listened to the album yet, but I’m interested to see if I agree with his criticisms), and you can also can buy it from Amazon or Itunes. The Amazon description goes as such: “2010 debut from the British outfit featuring Eddie Argos from Art Brut and Dyan Valdes from The Blood Arm. Everybody Was In The French Resistance…Now are correcting the mistakes of Pop songs past. So far, they have defended the belittled blue-collar worker from Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger,’ told Gerry And The Pacemakers that, in fact, it is okay to walk alone, dumped the manipulative Martha Reeves on behalf of poor Jimmy Mack and have taken the misguided instructions of a 17th century ballad to its logical conclusion. They are ‘fixing the charts’!”
This led me in turn to check out Art Brut itself, and while I think overall I prefer Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW(and yes, every one of those words should be capitalized, and yes, that last “now” should be in caps, before you ask), Art Brut itself is also quite interesting. Their debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, was released on 30 May 2005, with its follow up, It’s a Bit Complicated, released on 25 June 2007. Their name comes from a kind of outsider art, “art brut”, defined by French painter Jean Dubuffet’s as art by prisoners, loners, the mentally ill, and other marginalized people, and made without thought to imitation or presentation.
I hate their music videos but it can’t be helped so here goes-
Review: (most of which can also be applied to Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW) The good first – they’re funky and funny, aggressively cheeky and offbeat, a bit in-your-face and always tongue-in-cheek. What they have essentially done is taken an original concept(I’ve never quite heard their brand of screamo-tinged angst, conversational-rock-not-quite-rap-rhythms, and sarcastic societal commentary before) and having found what they with some reason consider to be a good thing, run with it quite consistently. The bad – I would categorize the band overall as a an excellent mix-seasoner(ie one or two Art Brut tracks per playlist) rather than a consistently pleasing artistic effort, because once the novelty wears off their songs all sound pretty much the same. There’s only so much clever-but-angry almost-screamo I can take at one time, and while I am very much a lyrics-focused person, when I’m forced to fall back on lyrics alone to differentiate between songs which all have essentially the same rhythm and beat, I begin to think that perhaps the songs are too intensely lyrics-driven. Despite my appreciation of their musical playfulness and innovation, it feels as if Art Brut got lazy once they’d invented their own particular musical style, applied it haphazardly and without restraint to all their songs, and then settled down to write clever lyrics (hint: the “without thought to presentation” aspect of art brut only works if you’re making music for purely self-indulgent purposes). The result is that more often than not the lyrics get lost in the dominant choruses. Also, Art Brut faces the danger of any band with anger as a part of its repertoire – that the line between angry and whiny is very, very, very thin. It has been the undoing of many a more brilliant group than this one. If they can learn to tone down and focus their admittedly exciting brand of energetic sarcasm, they could become something great (or at least good).
Having said all that, Art Brut is delightfully offbeat group and I will certainly keep an eagle eye on them in future (they remind me, inexplicably, of Flight of the Conchords, a group whose brand of cheery-instead-of-angry societal mockery and constantly-morphing playfulness Art Brut could do well to take a page from).
