Resourcefulness

O'Spada - Time

Our first track comes from Swedish group O'Spada, dubbed due to lead vocalist Julia Spada. 'Time' sounds like classic disco house except without the cheese. It's probably redundant for me to claim this to be a great track when it's me that posting this on my blog called my picks. This is a great track. However, when I first heard it, it was a lo-fi, live version and I just imagined being in this dark and sweaty VFW hall that we broke into for one night to throw this jam of a party... rebroadcast on AM radio.

Speaking of lo-fi, what are your thoughts on it? Annoying? Classic? Hearing 'Time' again makes me almost prefer the grimey version because of the image it provokes. I liken it to reading a book versus watching a movie; you are casting your own perceptions of what a given moment is like and how the sound really would sound if the production was glossy format. With old jazz/blues recordings, I feel like that is the sound that is proper for the time, almost a part of the tune's credibility. Naturally, the other side of this is that if I heard a song before and are hearing it again on a shitty 32kpbs MP3, I'd throw a fit.

Back to the tune, I feel like it has too many stop/starts in it. Luckily for me (and you) they put out a remix comp so you can sleight your own hand at it.

O'Spada - Time (producer remix pack)

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The Radio Dept. - David

Track 2 comes from these guys. This should be on your personal picnic mix to play after you've eaten too many PB&J's and you stare at the sky in your poodle skirt or high pants, whichever you prefer. The strings, high-pitched synth vamps, and bells give it just the right amount of sugar especially when coupled with the dreamily distorted vocals. >>This is a great track.

P.S. I didn't plan for this, but these guys are Swedish too.

New resource

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So I was checking out my analytics one day and I saw that I got a hit from wearehunted.com. What is it? Basically whereas traditionally charts rank their music according to record/mp3 sales, these guys blogcrawl and try and figure out what people have been talking about and they base their rankings on that. Interesting concept: instead of looking at the economic side of music, it takes into account what all the fanboys are saying. Anyway, it turns out that La Roux is up there and I'm part of the cause. She's great!

I've come to appreciate good vocals in music now. Not so much the content, but the delivery. This is in contrast to opera or other classical music where the goal is to achieve a sort of perfection therebywhich everyone starts sounding the same. Elly Jackson (La Roux), Hope Sandoval (of course), Stephen Merritt (The Magnetic Fields), Alison Moyet (Yazoo), Morrissey, and Laura Marling specifically on young love. There are more, but let's not advertise everybody just yet. You know if a voice is good when you can close your eyes, nod your head, and feel enchanted with goosebumps and want to go to their next book reading written in Italian or Portuguese with lots of vowels.

P.S. Just found a new blog whose last like 10 posts align perfectly with my tastes. Winner: offtheradarmusic.com

Like Sita Sings The Blues, that's all.

expansion of new Desires (part 1)

My musical tastes are expanding. More specifically, I am utterly tired of bangers. I think I've mentioned it before that I've been getting more and more into is chiller downtempo (but not necessarily electronic) tracks. Specifically it has lately been The Magnetic Fields.


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The Magnetic Fields - All The Umbrellas in London

The Magnetic Fields - Underwear

I actually was first introduced to Underwear via Dedric, alongwith he added

The White Stripes - Handsprings

Not exactly within the scope of this post however it is a fantastic song.

Anyway, I'm not saying that I no longer appreciate the hard hits... hardly. I think that as of late I'm more attracted to the slower grooves especially by Fred Falke, Hope Sandoval, Badly Drawn Boy, Chad Van Gaalen. It's probably a reaction to the popularity of the harder stuff. Now, a more important question to myself is why am I repelled by the popular? I'm not actively trying to put my nose in the air (most of the time), it just turns out that it's part of my personality. I guess if it is an innate quality, I'm not going to start going to delve into my childhood to figure out why I became me (my grandma custom-made my clothes, my ma made my lunches from polish ingredients, I was in the IB program, my dad knew the answers to all my questions, all my friends were all different races...). Ok diary, that's enough of that.

I think I said it before when speaking of this that this is my prediction for the next trend in electro-indie-pop. It's true; the saw wave with distortion has its limits. Hell, distortion itself has its limits before the stuff all starts to sound the same and starts to border with just looping a sound bite to a 64th- or 128th-note (yes, that effect transition is used a lot). What about that transition in other instruments? Done that. That hard/forceful stroke with the bow on the violin, that hard growl vocals you hear in blues, same with saxophone. I wonder how one would take those transitions and put them into electro? DEF the saxophone. There needs to be more of the soulful jazzy sax tracks in electro (case in point 'Hearts on Fire'). But in terms of a loop -> distortion there would need to be some analysis done of the sax growl. For one, it is a singular note, but how do you analyze the timbre? Man, I've always wanted to make my own synthesizer.................. dedric?