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Two Weeks

This is an outstanding fan made video for Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear. It's made by Gabe Askew. Very impressive.

And here's the official version but I think I know which one you will prefer.

Paperback Mitre

Over the last few weeks, Pete and I have been busying ourselves with a new football super blog called Paperback Mitre. Please check it out if you're interested following our highs and lows through this new season. There is also small music section that will feature some songs that we enjoy. Football and music- it'll never work. I've posted three songs already, so for the sake of completeness, I will repeat myself here for ALE readers.

Memory Cassette are a mystery. They are either a collection of musicians from New Jersey or just one guy. We don’t know. What we do know is that their chilled-out shoegaze and lo-fi electronica create beautiful summer dreams.

Memory Cassette - Asleep At A Party

I Come To Shanghai take their best indie pop and neo-psych sounds and their favourite records by The Shins and Vampire Weekend and then create their own synth filled sunshine pop.

I Come To Shanghai - Your Lazy Eye

This Windmill song is featured on a new ESPN advert and has inspired me to go back and listen to the 2007 album it come from, a record about embracing the perfect moments in life and recognising the sadness of everything passing in the moment of our death. His new album is out next month.

Windmill - Fluorescent Lights

Why British Sea Power are probably the finest band in the land...

Two incidents this week have proven to me just how vital a band British Sea Power are. Firstly it was last Saturday. As usual we were in the Star and Garter and they played 'No Lucifer'. Listening to that song, it feels like something massive that should be all over the radio. There's big moments for festival crowds to shout out and a clear chorus but then you listen to the lyrics ("the boys from the Hitler youth...a little lost roe dear") and watch the video and it's still 100% the same eccentric brilliant British Sea Power. I hate the idea of a band being eccentric so let's just say it's a band being exactly as they want to be. It's a band totally at ease with themselves and totally focused on making music. Yet the song and the album, Do You Like Rock Music, are wonderful things with massive tunes. It fully deserved all the press and awards it received.



The second incident was tonight. I had got the Man Of Aran DVD a while ago but I've only just had a free flat and an evening to sit down and watch it. Here's how to follow up your most successful album: release a soundtrack to a long forgotten 1934 film about a remote Irish island and a battle with a shark. I love the fact their record label let them do it and I love the fact BSP chose to do it. Post Rock is a genre I enjoy but at the same time I cannot stand a lot of the dull single chord stuff that gets mixed in with it. It's a tricky art form but one, that if you do great right, can be truly mind blowing. Fortunately Man Of Aran falls into the breath taking, life enhancing bracket of the genre.
Here's the trailer for Man Of Aran:



As James and I have forged our friendship, British Sea Power have always been involved. Brilliant nights watching the band at Grasmere Village Hall and Kendal Brewery were stupidly fun and again reminded me of why BSP are so vital. A band who are breaking the mainstream but doing it in their own style. Everything White Lies et al will never be.

It's James' birthday on Sunday so I shall be raising a toast to him on Saturday night and requesting a whole heap of British Sea Power at the Star and Garter.

You Let Me Down/I Let You Down

The Rural Alberta Advantage have filtered into my life like a lot of new bands do and that's through the wonderful guys at WOXY. I noticed a friend with great taste and a DJ from WOXY discussing this band on Twitter, I knew I needed to give it a listen and I'm really glad I did. Their debut album 'Hometowns' is out now on the always amazing, Saddle Creek records and from a few listens on train journeys it's really great. The RAA mix the best bits of Ra Ra Riot, The Dutchess and The Duke combined with hints of Kings Of Leon before they wanted to be U2.

The track you can check out here is called "The Dethbridge in Lethbridge" and is a noisy racket which mixes howling lyrics with sweet backing oohs and aahs. The vocals are sometimes stretched with emotion like Jeff Mangum on all those awesome Neutral Milk Hotel songs we all know and love.

The Rural Alberta Advantage - The Dethbridge In Lethbridge

When pay day hits I'm going to get this album right away. You should join me. It has the potential to become a firm favourite of twenty oh nine.

Not content with just one awesome band in this post, let's meet another. Say hi to The Drums. They are making the most enjoyable summery pop tunes I have heard in a while. Even as Manchester pours with rain I am bopping around my flat to these tunes that will be in your head for days.

The Drums - Let's Go Surfing

Check out Let's Go Surfing. It's like a less 'prepy fuck' version of Vampire Weekend. With a bass line that bounces along like an endless game of Peggle. (I'm stupidly addicted to this game on my iPhone) and the best use of whistling since the delightful Noah and the Whale hit us with 5 Years Time.

It doesn't stop there though as their MySpace proves. I Felt Stupid is all 80s drum machines and synths. The chorus sounds so familiar you're sure someone's done it before. Where as 'Down By Water' slows everything down but with the same lovingly layered vocals we have found in the other tracks. Lead singer Johnathon reassures the subject that 'If they stop loving you, I won't stop loving you." Its blend of 50s and 80s music means it sounds like Marty McFly's parents should be dancing to it at the Enchantment Under The Sea ball. Pop perfection.

A Sacred Night Where We'll Watch The Fireworks

I’m very glad that Animal Collective’s new album was a big success. Well, when I say big success, I mean that more of my friends took notice of them and agreed that yes, they are a wonderful strange bunch. Now I feel it is my job to get them to go back and purchase the preceding albums, many of which are, in my humble opinion, better than Merriweather Post Pavilion. My favourite if you want to know is currently Sung Tongs, which is more or less just an acoustic guitar, tribal like drums and layers and layers of vocals throughout the whole album. Quite different to the sound you’ll hear from the Baltimore/NY/Now all over the place group these days. When I was pre-ordering what will be next week’s “record of the week” (oh the excitement is killing everyone, but its obvious if you’ve read closely enough, save yourself!), I had a look through what else I could grab from Domino. Seeing as they only released the last two AC records, my mind was made up. I’ll buy Strawberry Jam.

Just going back one album is actually a great start for everyone who’s only just got into them. Even though MPP was considered their “pop” album, I find SJ much more accessible and, well, basically more upbeat becuase it has a much better beat to it throughout. I feel much safer and comfortable listening to it than I do with any of the other albums. I enjoy the fact that nearly every album they’ve done has enjoyed different levels of input from all members. SJ is mainly a Avey Tare effort, so you will find less of Panda Bear’s dreamy expansion and contraction found on Person Pitch and MPP and more of a peculiar vocal style matching complex, experimental pop.

Animal Collective - Fireworks

Animal Collective really are an amazing band with an amazing back catalogue, which I really hope people explore. No doubt I will be talking about Feels in a few months as I myself purchase my way back through them. I should also point out, I'm a big fan of strawberry jam.

Baby, I've Been, Breaking Glass In Your Room Again

I bought this record a couple of weeks ago but I've only got round to blogging about it now for my ongoing series of weekly bought records. I will update again with this week's purchase soon. I was going to put in a bit of research before commenting about it and I quickly found out that Pitchfork had rated it the greatest album of the 1970s. I don't necessary agree with that, but it is certainly one of my favourites of that decade. And so, through laziness and admiration for great writing, I present to you Pitchfork's very own Chris Ott and his opinion on David Bowie's eleventh album Low. I hope they don't mind/ever find out.

Released in January 1977, Low was the most potent and encompassing hybridization of pop music's many modes to that point, an album that continues to resonate as a syncretic masterpiece three decades later.

Still fascinated with the urban funk rhythms he'd employed less subtly for Young Americans and Station to Station , Bowie was increasingly drawn to the synthetic novelties Can, Neu!, and Eno were positing, particularly Eno's Discreet Music , which informs most of Low 's second side. This gorgeous quartet of dramatic instrumental pieces started out as the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth , an 1975 film by Nicholas Roeg starring Bowie, at the apex of his cocaine addiction, as an extraterrestrial Übermensch. Unbelievably, Bowie's compositions were rejected; brought through to Low , they provide a grave emotional counterpoint to the record's self-exploratory A-side, proof positive that Bowie really was out to wipe the mirror clean in Berlin.

David Bowie - Sound And Vision

The kaleidoscopic opening salvo "Speed of Life" tests our willingness to come along, staring out like Johnny Rotten, but-- crucially-- not caring if anyone follows. "Sound + Vision" and "Breaking Glass" are our most immediate rewards, more familiar in their funk stutter-steps and sultry crooning. The latter owes everything to guitarist Carlos Alomar in the left channel, who delivers the lead with a swagger to rival Mick Ronson and T.Rex. Obstinate, rueful and reckless, the album's first side is a collection of seven short "fragments," whose brevity is at once a knee-jerk reaction to the meandering Station to Station and the end result of a bad case of writer's block.

To correct an injurious and carelessly repeated claim, Brian Eno did not produce Low (or "Heroes" or Lodger ). While his presence and influence are uncontestable-- especially in the aching instrumental "A New Career in a New Town"-- producer Tony Visconti and Bowie shaped the analog onslaught heard here. For their fine ears, there's also a principal debt to the Eventide H910 Harmonizer, the first commercially available pitch-shifter, which through doubling lends Low its signature distorted snare drum, one of the most ingenious production advances you can point to in the 1970s, and a sound producers still reach for today.

Politically, Low is a singular and brutal indictment of the only thing Bowie's native England cared about in January 1977: punk rock. To a man who lived through Iggy and-- let's be honest-- designed Johnny Rotten, punk's brief lifespan and predominantly societal (rather than musical) impact were foregone conclusions. That Bowie could see past the flames to paint this horizon is irrefutable evidence of his solipsistic genius. Balancing process art, experimentalism and rock 'n' roll tradition, Low is Bowie unrefined, the most captivating effort from the decade's most-watched man. --Chris Ott