Do as I did and cue up The Soft Pack in your car, on cruise control, at a comfortable speed just above the posted Speed Limit (9/mph in my case). It doesn’t feel like you’re racing, but, with no one ahead of you or in the rearview mirror, the world still goes by at a blistering pace. As albums go, The Soft Pack truly felt like it was meant for that ride. Thirty-two plus minutes of sheer will-power, chugging along, on all cylinders but never struggling to keep up. When the last song finished, three minutes from my destination, I couldn’t bring myself to select a specific track to repeat and finish the ride—I wanted the entire experience again.

The Soft Pack, even in their previous incarnation as the Muslims, never seemed quite at home with their Los Angeles (by way of San Diego) brethren. The energy always felt different, as is the case here. As albums go, this is one of force – and not force in the form of a push, but as in nudging you along for it’s entire half-hour, gently prodding at your back. An invitation to keep on driving. Highly recommended.

The Soft Pack’s self-titled LP is out new via Kemado Records. Video after the jump. words/ b. kramer

MP3: The Soft Pack :: C’Mon
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Here we go, the first installment of an irregular series in which I plan on highlighting some of my favorite voices online (and beyond). We’re kicking off with Raven Sings The Blues. Based in NYC, since 2006, Raven has been a go-to source dealing in garage, psych, lo-fi and other related curiosities—both new and old. I asked RavenAndy to curate the following mixtape summing up RSTB’s aesthetic. At 20+ tracks, it does just that. Andy is my guest this Friday during the second hour of my SIRIUS XMU show. Grab this mix and be sure to bookmark his site.

I wrote about the b-side to this track last year (the accompanying video is ace). As previously mentioned, Kindness are from the UK and have thus far released one seven inch. Other than that I know very little. I’m bringing this back up as, due to a recent Talking Heads binge, I’ve been spinning the record’s A-side a lot; Kindness’s cover of the Replacements “Swinging Party.” Completely reinvented, the track ditches its original lounge vibe and comes off like a lost David Byrne cover. Very curious to see what Kindness is up to next.

MP3: Kindness :: Swinging Party
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 26 (SIRIUS), and channel 43 (XM), can now be heard twice, every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. Below is this week’s playlist.

SIRIUS 127: Jean Michel Bernard – Generique Stephane ++ The B-52’s – 52 Girls ++ Pylon – Stop It ++ The Raincoats – No Side To Fall In ++ The Vaselines – Slushy ++ My Bloody Valentine – Loomer ++ The Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey ++ Surfer Blood – Catholic Pagans ++ Yo La Tengo – Decora ++ The Besnard Lakes – Albatross ++ Best Coast – This Is Real ++ The Drums – Let’s Go Surfing (Knight School Version) ++ The Magic Kids – Hey Boy ++ Beach Fossils – Daydream ++ Knight School – Pregnant Again ++ Local Natives – Sun Hands (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Local Natives – Stranger Things (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Local Natives – Warning Sign (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Local Natives – World News (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ The Bicycles – B-B-Bicycles ++ Dum Dum Girls – Jail La La ++ The Sandwitches – Back To The Sea ++ Atlas Sound – Doctor ++ The Soft Pack – Fences ++ White Denim – All Consolation ++ No Age – Sleeper Hold ++ Japandroids – The Boys Are Leaving Town ++ Charlotte Gainsbourg – IRM ++ The Kindness – Swinging Party (Replacements cover) ++ The Fiery Furnaces – The End Is Near ++ Talking Heads – Sugar On My Tongue ++ Richard Hell & The Voidoids – Blank Generation ++ The Modern Lovers – She Cracked ++ Devo – Gut Feeling ++ Iggy Pop – Sister Midnight ++ The Tallest Man On Earth – King of Spain ++ Jordan Mason & The Horse Museum – Avalanches ++ Horse Feathers – Finch On Sunday ++ Sgt Dunbar – Everything Is Pt. III ++ Blair – Candy In The Kitchen

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.
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When someone mentions there’s a new Gil Scott-Heron album coming out, you sit up and take notice. On February 9th, XL Records will release I’m New Here, Scott-Heron’s first new album in over 14 years. Produced by XL’s owner, Richard Russell, the album finds the poet moving through a dense urban soundscape reflective of the inspiration his 70s work has had on hip-hop for the past thirty years while still paying tribute to his career-long influences of the blues and jazz.

I’m New Here opens and closes with the tracks “On Coming From a Broken Home” parts one and two, respectively. At the album’s beginning, this leads into lead single “Me and the Devil,” a claustrophobic interpretation of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues.” Its twitches of electronics and machine-heavy percussion underlines an obsession with burial and afterlife destinations. The title track follows this, a cover of Smog’s “I’m New Here” that takes the playful, matter-of-factness of the original and turns it on its head, using the themes of the Johnson song to play the lyrics like the meanderings of someone newly arrived to hell. “Turnaround and you may come full circle and be new here again,” as if cleansed in the fire of all the old mistakes and grievances.

There is a focus on the relationship of parents and children – obviously in the opening and closing tracks, but also in originals like “Your Soul and Mine” and a dark and desperate take on Bobby Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You.” The theme of burial and death resurfaces, too, in “New York Is Killing Me,” a rattling cacophony of handclaps and cymbals that sounds like a lost Waitsian composition. There is a sense of people fleeing responsibilities and fleeing themselves (“Running“) and of people analyzing their own support structures (“The Crutch“).

I’m New Here is an album that seems uncertain, grateful for the lessons learned, even if the results have been chaotic and hazy. The anger of youth has mellowed to reflective, surgical analysis about the road traveled and what few places there are left to go. words/ j neas

MP3: Gil Scott-Heron :: Me And The Devil
MP3: Gil Scott-Heron :: Where Did The Night Go
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Ojai, CA sits at an elevation of 745 feet above sea level.  Seated in the Ojai Valley, the town is an easy hour and a half drive from Los Angeles; the majority of which is spent on the 101 freeway. Heading north, it is only the last fifteen miles or so, when you veer off onto HWY 33, that it’s clear you’re a long way from the never-ending suburban sprawl that is southern California. Suddenly it’s rural—the McDonalds and  Starbucks replaced with produce stands, old barns and mom & pop small businesses. Teetering the line between bohemian village and vacation resort enclave, it is here, in this town of roughly 8,000 residents, that Lissie calls home. Originally from the Midwest, it is here that Lissie found sanctuary following a brief stint living in L.A.

It’s Lissie’s vocals that first grab your attention. She’s blessed with one of those voices that seems as if it should belong to someone twice here age. Her voice is both rough and pretty; a combination which, when it works, is something to behold. Hers very much works. It’s her instrument, she commands it.

Lissie’s debut, the 5 song Why You Runnin’ EP, sounds like a road trip through the deep South. A road trip where you’re riding shotgun, not driving, with the windows rolled down. At your feet is a paper bag full of old cassettes; Bonnie Raitt’s Give It Up, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Dylan’s Desire, Lucinda William’s Car Wheels. Traveling music. Lissie’s debut was made for such a road trip. It was made to be dubbed onto a cassette and tucked into that old paper bag along with the beer and cigarettes. So, really, it makes sense that Lissie left the congestion of the city for Ojai, a place where her music, with the windows rolled down, feels right at home.

Elsewhere: Our friends at Your Truly caught up with Lissie a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco

MP3: Lissie :: Little Lovin’
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Hailing from the Niassa province of Mozambique, singer-songwriter Feliciano dos Santos is little-known outside of his native country, despite receiving praise from the likes of the New York Times, PBS, the Guardian and the BBC. His band, Massuko, generally sings in three regional dialects, Yao, Nyanga and Makua, and occasionally in Portuguese, the country’s official language. The music drifts through rhumba, reggae and various provincial folk elements. One of Massuko’s biggest successes is a subtle but powerful acoustic folk tune called “Tissambe Manja,” where an easy, sun-setting intonation conceals something decidedly heavier. Its emotional strength is exerted by its simplicity, a characteristic readily felt even without the benefit of translation or meaning. But when meaning is applied, our perception of it might change.

“Tissambe Manja” actually means “Wash Your Hands.” It’s a song about cleaning up after using the bathroom, with lyrics as simple and straightforward as the title suggests. Taken literally, the song has power for the occidental listener only in context. In English–”We wash our hands / For the children to stay healthy“–it wouldn’t necessarily resonate with our life experiences. It wouldn’t touch on our insecurities or emotions. We would also recognize it for what it is: primarily, a children’s song. Within the context of Africa’s severe hygiene and sanitation deficiencies, its initial, untranslated strength might be replaced by something more defeatist, something like empathy. This belies our pursuit for meaning: that somehow “Tissambe Manja” has greater potential to move us when we can’t understand a word of it. Because “understanding” can sometimes get in the way of “listening.” That’s true of any music, but it’s a particularly cumbersome proposition with something like African music, when our primary interpretation is devoid of the explicit lyrical intent proffered by our native tongue. The meaning of the thing has to then come from a different place, a place other than our heads.

This brings us to Fela Kuti, the de facto face of African music. Since a few years after his death, his immense catalogue has seen a renaissance in the western music collective, probably making him more popular than ever. This Fela glut is evidenced nearly everywhere. Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have produced the Broadway production Fela!--it alone a vibrantly loud glorification of the man. Knitting Factory Records is in stage one of an expansive remaster/reissue of his life’s work, recently releasing the palette-whetter Fela: The Best of the Black President (a two-disc repackaging of a former hits record). In the coverage of nearly *any* music from Africa, Fela for some reason bears at least brief mention most of the time (even when his only association with other forms is an incredibly massive and intricately diverse continent of origin). We intently monitor each new Fela-related endeavor and even retrieve his old documents for reinterpretation in an exhaustive reprise of the man’s remastered life. The catch then is that critics and listeners of all stripes will believe they’re forced to make new discoveries in his music, uncover previously overlooked nuances, knowing what we know about him. We will try to once more understand his music within the context of his life. But again, trying too hard to understand something can encumber our ability to listen to it.

+ continue reading after the jump…

This Spring Aquarium Drunkard is releasing the follow-up to last year’s RAM On L.A. compilation. Details per album choice and artists to follow. Stay tuned. In the meantime I’m re-posting the 2009 Los Angeles sampler with new cover art (front/back) by our good friend Bobby over at Kitsune Noir. Original compilation notes and 132 MB download after the jump.

Over the course of eight years and three albums Dengue Fever have neatly made a career out of mining the sounds of Cambodian rock & pop prior to the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Being so it’s only fitting they were chosen to curate Electric Cambodia – a fourteen track compilation LP to benefit the Cambodian Living Arts.

Billed as “14 Rare Gems From Cambodia’s Past” the set acts as a primer for those who have yet to stick their big toe into the waters of the Cambodian Cassette Archives or other similar sets. With Dengue Fever’s popularity having grown outside the NPR set the past few years, the group is in a unique position to shed light on the artists/movement that spawned their sound.

These tracks were recorded in the 1960s and early ’70s soon after Cambodia became an independent nation. “A period of rapid modernization that not only influenced music, but also architecture, sculpture, painting, and cinema. Cambodia’s own artistic renaissance, this era came to a sudden end when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975 and brutally attempted to destroy any trace of modern society.” That is the 10,000 foot view of the political situation surrounding the music, a story Dengue Fever expand on in their 2008 documentary Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. Both Electric Cambodia and Sleeping Through the Mekong are out now. If you’re here in Los Angeles, Dengue Fever are set to perform Saturday night at the KCRW Haiti Relief Concert at the El Rey Theatre.

After the jump: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock & Roll – A Documentary

MP3: Pan Ron :: I Will Marry You
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I came across Payom Moogda’s “Tamai Dern Sae” while down driving a desolate strip of the Pacific Coast HWY—somewhere between Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo. California’s coastline, especially north of Santa Barbara, is both extreme and beautiful. This particular trip favored the former as it was well after dark and, except for the scattered hamlets that dot the central coast, was lit only by the moon.  It’s nights like these that induce a powerful feeling of magic. Those rare instances where everything comes together cinematic in scope; the music, the stretch of road, the shadows, the salty air. Thinking back, it’s almost as if the memory were shot in black and white. Perhaps it was.

Driving down the PCH, approaching midnight on that Autumn night, I heard the first static-y strains of a sixties Thai rock ‘n roll band covering Ray Charles and other American/British rock and pop. The windows were cracked, and coupled with the wind, the tunes coming out of the Ford’s speakers sounded like an otherworldly alien transmission.

That night was a few years ago now. I’ve since tracked down the compilation (the first volume in a highly recommended series) that I assume the Ray Charles track was culled from, Thai Beat A Go-Go Vol. 1. The reason I say assumed is that the majority of the tracks the series rounds up are (reportedly) regional one-off seven inches and rarities. Like the Cambodian rock compilations I’ve written about here in the past, the Thai Beat series goes a long way to unearth a parallel world of pop and rock, from the sixties and seventies, that was both influenced by the West yet remained inherently its own. Fascinating stuff…and a hell of a lot of fun.

MP3: Payom Moogda :: Tamai Dern Sae (Why Do You Walk Like A Drunkard)
MP3: Vichan Maneechot :: Dance, Dance, Dance
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Former Frente! vocalist, Angie Hart, duets with Bonnie “Prince” Billy on “Little Bridges” off her 2009 disc Eat My Shadow. The Juxtaposition between Hart and Oldham’s off-kilter vocals works perfectly here.

MP3: Angie Hart & Bonnie “Prince” Billy :: Little Bridges
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About a year ago I caught the reunited Clem Snide at a club show here in L.A. The band was touring behind the release of Hungry Bird, which while recorded in 2006, prior to the band’s split, was not released until 2009. Eef Barzelay has always had a way with a cover. Oddly distinctive and immediately identifiable, Barzelay’s voice that night lit into a languid rendition of Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets To Paradise.” This FM radio staple staple, left over from the mid-80s, was transformed in a haunted plea; all before the majority of the audience caught on to what they were hearing. Below is an acoustic, solo, rendering of the tune.

Clem Snide’s new LP, The Meat of Life, is out later this month (February 23rd) via 429 Records.

MP3: Eef Barzelay :: Two Tickets To Paradise (Eddie Money)
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