Undoubtedly, two of the biggest names of the last decade's indie rock and electronica were Spoon and Four Tet. In this week's City Paper, our critics take a look at their new records and how each act is faring at the dawn of the 2010s.
Spoon's Transference leaves Marc Hirsh underwhelmed:
Transference is larded with bits and [...]
It's hard to deny that Sean Gray and Christopher Berry have some bragging rights. In the last year their label, Fan Death, has put out a number of noisy 7-inches, 12-inches, and cassettes, including music by Drunkdriver, FNU Ronnies, and Ringo Deathstarr. In terms of productivity, they've outpaced just about every other D.C.-based label. More [...]
A round-up of recently released vinyl records by D.C.-based labels and bands
Mingering Mike & The Big D: "There's Nothing Wrong With You Baby Pts. 1&2"
The first ever vinyl release from enigmatic D.C. soul musician/artist Mingering Mike. Originally put to tape by Mike and his cousin, Big D, in a bedroom, "There's Nothing Wrong With You [...]
Tomorrow, D.C.'s True Womanhood will finally release its debut EP, Basement Membranes, on the Baltimore-based label Environmental Aesthetics. Recorded in at least three different studios—Brooklyn's Death By Audio, Magpie Cage, and at home in D.C.—over the course of a year, the EP's six songs are caked with haunting sonic gloop. Guitars drone, drums pound, and [...]
Bloc Festival 2010: Your pals at Festival Watch like to keep you informed about things that don’t happen in this country. Maybe it’s 'cause we’re jealous that we can’t really afford to go to them—and are hoping that we can live vicariously through those of you who can.
Anyway. If there’s ever been a festival that [...]
If you couldn't tell already, we're extremely pumped for tonight's Sockets Records showcase at the Black Cat. In this week's One Track Mind, Leor Galil talks to one of the groups playing tonight, Imperial China, about "Corrupting the Integrity of the Grid," his favorite song on the trio's upcoming album Phosphenes. He writes:
... the track [...]
In honor of tonight's Sockets Records showcase, All Our Noise recently hosted a live session for space-punk trio Buildings. The band performed two songs, "Tesselations" (see above) and "Tiny Mountains," which you can find at the AON site.
People spend a lot of time and money trying to get happy, but Des Ark's Aimee Argote is not among them. A year's worth of feeling good has, apparently, really messed with her creative mojo. On her blog she writes:
for a while there i fell into an uncomfortable downward spiral of writing well-adjusted easy going [...]
When Space Tigers spoke with Washington City Paper in July, the band was all giggles—understandable, really, given that its music spills over with childish glee. The group makes stripped-down art folk that could come from another dimension, the sort of playful, repetitive songs that Animal Collective wrote before its ambitions ballooned to underwater-amphitheater scale. At times, [...]
The French experimental rock group Magma wrote so much material during its 1970s heyday that it's still recording some of it—take, for example, its most recent album, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré, which measures up to some of the group's classic works. Reviewing the album in this week's City Paper, Brandon Wu writes:
Magma created an in-depth mythology that forms [...]
