Yeasayer: “Ambling Alp”
With its mystical lyrics and psychedelic flourishes, Yeasayer’s debut record, All Hour Cymbals, was the feel-good indie rock record of ’07. However, “Ambling Alp,” the first track from the group’s sophomore record to see the light of day, finds the Brooklyn band getting more direct with its positive vibes. Chris Keating drops more motivational couplets here than a Deepak Chopra press release. “The world can be an unfair place at times/But your lows will have a compliment of highs,” he sings. The song bears a marked resemblance to Rusted Root, but that’s a good thing. No, really. “Ambling Alp” suggests that Yeasayer’s next record is going to single-handedly revive the djembe economy in 2010.

Four Tet: “Love Cry”
Rhythm has always been integral to the schtick of Four Tet (AKA electronic musician Kieran Hebden), but “Love Cry,” from a new limited edition 12″ is the best he’s ever done at making straight-up dance music. On last year’s Ringer EP, Hebden shed his busy post-rock roots with four stripped-down and hypnotic tracks that borrowed equally from Villalobos-style minimal techno and afrobeat. “Love Cry” goes even further, ditching chords, melodies, and dramatic gestures for a killer pulse and a single note bass line.

Javelin: “Twyce”
Javelin may have a few rough edges—hiss-heavy production and high-frequency synth squeals—but the Brooklyn duo’s music is mostly just smooth sailing. Listening to “Twyce,” from Javelin’s debut Thrill Jockey 12″, is sort of like stepping through a Sandals advertisement and onto an actual Caribbean beach. Mostly because there’s a ton of cowbell. The funky vintage keyboard parts, which suggest a sizable amount of time spent listening to Wally Badarou’s Kraftwerk-in-the-Bahamas-album Echoes, doesn’t hurt either.

Woodsman: “Dikembe Mutombo”
The American West is a fertile habitat for head-music. For instance, LaMonte Young, the Grandmaster Flash of heavy drone, found his original inspiration in the incessant winds of his native Idaho. But most people out there just seem content to tool around on a mandolin. What a drag. Denver Colorado’s Woodsman, at least, are making good on all of that wide open space. “Dikembe Mutombo,” has is thoroughly stocked with rippling guitar figures and post-Hawkwind trance rhythms.

Tomorrow night Gestures–D.C.’s second-best-use-of-air-pressure and only punk-rock brass band–will celebrate the completion of its debut EP, Nice, in a time-honored fashion beloved by any musician who has just spent tall paper recording and pressing a record.

In other words, they’ll go busking.

The sextet–which features drums, tuba, saxophone, clarinet and two drummers–will perform live tomorrow night on or near Dupont Circle. There’s a chance that this action will trigger a turf war with the Circle’s traditional occupants, the United House of Prayer’s shout bands. Probably not, as those guys generally play in the summer. Also, UHOP shout bands are all about fire, brimstone, and Dixieland. Gestures, on the other hand, sounds a little more like a herd of elephants sinking into an ocean abyss.

Read the band’s official statement after the jump:

Read More “Gestures Release EP/Perform at Dupont Circle Tomorrow” »

Raheem DeVaughn:

-For those that don’t read credit I wrote”Gently” on Usher’s last album most of my other stuff has been in the HIp hop World UGK ,Game & ect

-so bilal oliver just arrived to my studio in NJ to lay his parts for the last song that needs to be completed on my album!

KingPen Slim:

-to everybody asking me what kinda coat I had on yesterday it’s a Rocksmith joint, that joint is so alias that I didn’t even know lol

-Just had to have that “you’ve-really-been-inconviencing-me-since-you’ve-been-in-town-as-much-as-I-love-you” talk with my mom had to do it

Tabi Bonney

-Sooo…people are leaving demo’s under my windshield wiper. I dunno why.

-IDEA! I should do a short film where cartons of milk are like black peoples kryptonite or sumthn. Like bamas run from the cartons like noooo

-So…how do we eat ice cream? Do we have to take a lactaid pill everytime or something? Cuz I haven’t had ice cream in 10yrs either!

Travis Morrison:

-involuntarily tears up at “Amazing Grace” by Aretha Franklin and “New Grass” by Talk Talk and can’t listen to them at work.

-slow grocery stores. A DC institution.

Field Music: “Measure”
After a two-year hiatus spent toiling at solo efforts—School of Language and The Week That Was—brothers David and Peter Brewis have reunited Field Music and promptly cranked out a 20 song double record. And while that smacks of indulgence, “Measure,” the album’s title track, finds the band as reserved ever—pairing austere string loops with exacting percussion and rivaling the George Formby Jr. songbook for the title of most English-sounding music ever.

Surf City: “Autumn”
The Kiwi quartet plays New Zealand’s version of classic rock—that is to say trippy indie-rock rife with slacker ebullience and backwards guitar riffs.

Frankie Rose: “Thee Only One”
Former Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls drummer Frankie Rose has gone solo, but her debut single doesn’t fall too far from the reverb-soaked, Phil Spector-loving vine. “Thee Only One,” is so hazy sounding that one must assume the song was recorded at the bottom of a cistern next to a fire fueled by old copies of Chickfactor.

Weezer (ft. Lil Wayne): “Can’t Stop Partying”
For years now, old time Weezer fans have been down on their knees praying that Rivers Cuomo will finally get back to writing guitar rock and stop rapping/rap-rocking/repping Timbaland. “Can’t Stop Partying,” probably isn’t what they had in mind, though. “Gotta have Patron, gotta have the beat/I gotta have a lot of pretty girls around me,” sings Cuomo. Those wounded-but-nerdy words wouldn’t have been a bad fit on Pinkerton, but the big synth splashes and the guest verse by Weezy, not so much. “The unusual is the fucking usual/Man my life is beautiful,” raps Lil Wayne, who is at this point, may be the only person on the radio making weirder choices than Cuomo.

This Sunday Wooden Shjips will perform their first ever D.C. gig at the Red and the Black. And I’m at a loss for words–mostly because I’ve typed them all already. Well, all of the hippy-dippy ones, at least. Looking back at these two reviews (1,2), I realize that I’ve pretty much burned through my repertoire of stoner-jokes, psychedelic adjectives, and then some (a Harry Dean Stanton reference?) in trying to convey the reasons why I like this San Francisco-based space-rock quartet. Hey, at least I never trotted out “face-melting.”

So let’s maybe ditch the lysergic cliches for a minute and get down to the facts about Wooden Shjips:

Read More “Sunday: Wooden Shjips @ The Red and the Black” »

Tabi Bonney:

-My fathers advice to me before I head out to Cali in the morn = “talk alot” Thanks dad, where would I be without you. LOL

-Got alot done so far & now I’m about to take a nap and dream about my pop life in 2010.

KingPen Slim

-DMV popping so hard these next two weeks, hu homecoming, Monday night football, bp3 tour and Halloween get sleep now

-Chris samuels set to retire due to his recent neck injury? Damn

Carol Bui:

-at inner year last night til 1am knocking out flute overdubs and my mouth feels just fine! we begin MIXING THIS WEEK…it’s about damn time

Beauty Pill (Chad Clark)

-Doctor says BP can tour next Spring if I keep with the same regimen. Death 0, Chad 1. Hoping to defer the rematch.

LCD Soundsystem: “Bye Bye Bayou” (Alan Vega cover)
LCD Soundsystem has made many homages to Suicide (the musical act, not the Swedish pastime), frequently appropriating the New York  duo’s spooky sense of pulse. So, it’s nice to hear James Murphy cover a tune from Suicide singer Alan Vega’s 1980 solo debut. Murphy flattens out the original’s bluesy shuffle but does a pretty impressive job of capturing Vega’s beatnik-Elvis-impersonator singing style.

Julian Casablancas: “River of Brakelights”
Remember how the Strokes were going to save classic rock? That was a misinterpretation. On “River of Brakelights,” the second song to leak from his forthcoming solo debut Phrazes for the Young, Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas reveals that he actually wanted to save classical rock. Powdered wigs and fugal pretensions aside, baroque counterpoint hasn’t had such a solid chance of cracking the Top 10 since Falco walked the Earth.

Slava: “Dreaming Tiger”
The Chicago/Brooklyn-based production team honors the glory days of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s creative union by pairing lush synths and house percussion with mantra-like vocal samples. “Dreaming Tiger” could have fit nicely on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and not just because the title sounds like it was lifted from postcolonial literature.

Big Boi featuring Gucci Mane: “Shine Blockas”
If Big Boi’s endlessly delayed Sir Luscious Left Foot ever lands in stores, there won’t be any surprises left (maybe a few skits?). But if it’s any consolation to Def Jam, “Shine Blockas,” the umpteenth awesome track to leak from the Outkast rapper’s solo record, should garner multiplatinum YouTube views.

Over the last 15 years, Kansas House, a tiny four-bedroom home in Arlington, has seen members of bands that recorded for almost every D.C. record label—Dischord, Teenbeat, Slowdime, Simple Machines—crash on its floors, perform in its living room, or be thoroughly revolted by its rat-infested basement.

Kansas House is not a club. Shows happen there once or twice a month. But the experience of seeing a show at Kansas House is different. At the Black Cat, for instance, you buy a ticket and see a band. But anyone who’s crammed into Kansas House’s tiny living room to watch Black Eyes, Q and Not U, or Trans Am could be forgiven for feeling  like they were part of a movement.

You can still feel that way, at least for a few more months. On Dec. 1, Kansas House’s epic run will finally come to an end. The building is in the process of being sold to an Arlington development firm. Eventually, the house will be demolished to make way for mixed-use development.

Read More “I Think We’re Not in Kansas House Anymore” »

Pressing a record is a pain in the ass. Really, it is. You have to record the music, get the tracks mastered, press the records themselves, have them shipped from the pressing plant and so on and so forth.

So after taking the better part of a year just to get the music part right, it’s understandable that True Womanhood might want to forgo the pains of creating a physical product. Especially when there are quicker, more efficient ways to get the music out there. The moody D.C.-based band leaked two new studio tracks around the internet yesterday–posting a yousendit link on facebook and passing the songs around to interested parties via e-mail.

The two songs–”Magic Child” and “Dignitas”–were recorded by the band in three studios over the course of seven months. “Most of it was recorded [in Brooklyn] at Death By Audio, some of it was recorded in D.C. at our houses, and the vocals were recorded in Baltimore, with J Robbins,” explains guitarist/vocalist Thomas Redmond. “The last time we recorded [for a demo CD, sold at shows throughout '08] we did it in my living room. We used really shitty equipment. We bought the cheapest–literally the cheapest– mics we could get on Musician’s Friend, set them up haphazardly, and made due. So this time it took a while to figure out what was the right sound.”

Download link after the jump:
Read More “True Womanhood Leak Digital 7″” »

Sometimes, when you’re bogged down in the day-to-day grind of terrestrial life, sipping a Starbucks coffee and idling in traffic, it’s easy to forget that we’re all just standing on a tiny fleck of rock floating aimlessly through an incomprehensibly vast cosmic void.

Which is why it’s good to keep a few Om records around. When it comes to invoking thoughts of the infinite, the California-based bass-and-drums duo is second only to Carl Sagan.

In part, this is because Om’s songs are really long. At 19-minutes, “Thebes,” which opens the band’s just released third LP, God is Good, is so epic that it to puts most takes of “Dark Star” to shame. But some credit should also be given to bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros—stoner-rock’s answer to Alice Coltrane. His devotional chanting and endlessly unspooling low-end elevate Om’s music beyond the realm of mere fuzzy-headed riffage and into the realm of sensual, spiritual thinking.

Om w/ Six Organs of Admittance, Lichens
@ DC9
1940 9th Street, NW
9 p.m. $14