Spring has sprung and just like an ice cream truck theme song, there are some great new bits of songsmithing that have captured my imagination.
First off, I have Andrew Bird’s new Armchair Apocrypha (listen to the complete disc here) running on repeat most nights. As we have seen of late, there are plenty of rockers dipping into the chamber sound and some fantastic string players playing with and within the genre. But perhaps because I was once a rather serious violinist myself, I can be pretty harsh in my personal assessments of these projects. Appreciate yes, but praise–um, not so much. Bird has always stood way out in front of the crowd in this area for me, exhibiting a deep mastery yet measured control of his instrument’s capabilities and working intriguing ideas into the texture of the music he creates without letting any sound in too far center stage. Mixed with lyrics that can still surprise your ear even after quite a few passes and the whistling–oh, the most excellent whistling–it’s a dreamy package. If you like what you hear, do dig backwards into his catalog to sample some rawer yet delicious tracks.
Also on the spring fantasy playlist are all that bands I discovered while editing an article about music in New Orleans by Aurora Nealand. Seriously, the woman should get a cut from the NOLA tourism association. The best part of working on this piece was getting to the middle of the article before realizing that all of the many projects mentioned up to that point played outside. In the street. Parades! My northern city girl blindness had me laughing out loud, and 15 minutes and some concentrated Googling had me clicking through tons of new music. Come on, would you have been able to resist tracking down a band with a name like Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? That’s got to be a hindrance when it comes to snagging marquee space, I would assume, but I like their moxie.
‘Tis the season, I guess, for spring sprucing and the gathering of new music to fill the newly reclaimed clean spaces. Now that it’s warm enough to leave the windows open at night, I wonder what the neighbors are into…
Very glad you’re blogging more regularly now–I’ve always been amazed at how well you’re able to crawl around the web on Friday mornings.
I think a good current example of crossover is the Radiohead remix project – I posted one recently and was both happy and disappointed to find out how many great mixes are up on the site (only about 1700 to sort through) – many of which are really interesting cross-genre experiments. I guess more edgy and probably even more exciting is remixin.org
Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? and the outdoor music thing reminded me of one of my BFF’s on myspace, Scene of the Crime Rovers. My friend who’s in it calls it an ‘experimental/community marching band’ – they only play outside and do some whacky stuff.
In reference to your subtitle and blog description: I’ve always appreciated the myspace artists whose defined genres are ‘Other / Other / Other.’ It’s tempting, but risks turning people away if they’re searching for particular genres.
I also love the Andrew Bird album. His live performances are great–here he is followed around Paris. What a treat it would have been to be there: http://www.blogotheque.net/Andrew-Bird,2976
I’ve been an Andrew Bird fan ever since his 1998 CD, Thrills, with his band, Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. One song from the album,”Pathetique,” uses translated Heine text from Schumann’s Dichterliebe. So, back in 1998 he was actually the indie rock neighbor next door who went over to the prestigious University students composing two houses down. Or rather, he IS the musician from the prestigious university AND the indie rocker. In any case, great pick for a blog about music and syncretism.
Dave had been telling me how great Andrew Bird was forever, and so I finally bought the album after seeing your post. It is wonderful. Thanks so much for writing about it.
Real New Orleans:
http://noladiy.org