Posts By Melissa Tan

MAP June 2013

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We can all admit to getting too attached to the music scene where we live. It’s way too easy to forget what the rest of the world is doing – especially the hundreds of artists and lesser-knowns producing incredible music within their small towns and beyond. Your monthly wake-the-heck-up call/ roundup of the best tunes from around the globe is back for June.

Representing Aus this month are brilliant Sydney band Gang of Youths. We also farewell German blog Coltran, who are sadly leaving MAP for other commitments. The team at Coltran have been sharing a new music submission every month since MAP began in 2008, so big kudos to these guys. On a good note though, there are plenty of tracks here to keep you in the loop with what’s happening around the traps. SALUD.

Click the play button icon to listen to individual songs, right-click on the song title to download an mp3, or grab a zip file of the full 34-track compilation through Ge.tt here.

ARGENTINA: Zonaindie
Excursiones Polares – La Guerra Psicológica

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Concepto Cero, one of La Plata’s finest record labels, just turned four, and they decided to celebrate by releasing a free compilation with songs from all of their artists. La Guerra Psicológica is an original track by El Perrodiablo, but in this case played in a blues fashion by Excursiones Polares. Both bands are from the Concepto Cero family, so we recommend you to download the whole album and check for their latest releases.

AUSTRALIA: Who The Bloody Hell Are They?
Gang Of Youths – A Sudden Light

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Harmonies and punch-the-air victory songs are generally always in high demand. Sydney’s Gang Of Youths are next. This sounds like Win Butler singing at your birthday and Julian Casablancas singing at your funeral at the same time. A Sudden Light is a loose, belter of an anthem with a modulating chorus, overbearing references to children, drugs and enough harmonic “WHOAHS” to easily make them your new favourite band.

AUSTRIA: Walzerkönig
The Unused Word – Heaven (Testa Remix)

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Much like the recent 4AD signing SOHN, Anna aka The Unused Word is not only working and living in Vienna, but also has her finger on the pulse with her soulful mixture of hip hop and new school electronica. Heaven is taken from her debut EP ∞ (Infinity). The version here is a remix by her labelmate DJ Testa.

BRAZIL: Meio Desligado
Rua – Às Bolas De Gude

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Rua, also known as Rua Do Absurdo, is an experimental quintet. Às Bolas De Gude shows their minimalism with beautiful vocal melodies and a marimba guiding us through the song.

CANADA: Quick Before It Melts
Ketch Harbour Wolves – The Good Blood

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Weaving together history, mythology and their own personal experiences, Ketch Harbour Wolves’ new album, Queen City: Volume One, is their first of what is expected to be a multiple disc project that aims to create a sonic map of their home, Toronto. The Good Blood is an excellent gateway into this sprawling, ambitious project, and to Ketch Harbour Wolves’ majestic, cinematic back catalogue.

CHILE: Super 45
Alex y Daniel – Cada Vez Que Invento Algo Sobre Ti

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After reaching recognition and fame through their solo projects, Alex Andwandter and Daniel Riveros (Gepe) – two of the most iconic faces of Chilean pop – got together in a joint project that, under the suggestive name Alex y Daniel, combines their musical curiosity. Their new single Cada Vez Que Invento Algo Sobre Ti (“Every time I make up a story about you”) mixes Andwandter’s penchant for dance music and Riveros’ melodic instinct perfectly, leaving no room to doubt that, together, they’re dynamite.

COLOMBIA: El Parlante Amarillo
La Etnnia feat. Doctor Krápula – La Gran Epidemia

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It is our pleasure to introduce you to perhaps Colombia’s biggest hip hop project, La Etnnia, who formed more than 25 years ago in the Las Cruces neighborhood of Bogotá. La Gran Epidemia, a preview of their eighth album Universal, features the stellar appearance of Doctor Krápula, a rock band with long renown in Colombia. You can watch the video for the song here.

DENMARK: All Scandinavian
Scarlet Chives – In A Ground Floor Apartment

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Scarlet Chives is something as rare as a Danish band signed to a Norwegian label and, in a not so distant future, that label, Riot Factory, will release the alternative rock quintet’s second full-length album. In A Ground Floor Apartment, a MAP exclusive download, is the B-side to first single The Timber Will Fall.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: La Casetera
Hache ST – Sebastian Lemba

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Culture and rebellion are at the center of this experimental piece, which revolves around the figure of the black anti-slavery advocate Sebastian Lemba Calembo. This track is a portal to that struggle and it’s an essential component of the journey outlined by Hache ST in his new album, Zafra, which portrays the main ideas of life in a shared Caribbean island, and its intricate, passionate toils for freedom.

ECUADOR: Plan Arteria
El Extraño Comportamiento De Un Torso Animado – ¿Dónde Están Tus Amigos?

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El Extraño Comportamiento De Un Torso Animado is an indie band with a lot of attitude. Formed by Ernesto Torres and twins Nicolás and Felipe Meneses, the trio have a punk-rock spirit with a guitar sound that invites you to dance. From their first EP, Mujer Pulpo, we present the single ¿Dónde Están Tus Amigos?

ENGLAND: Drowned In Sound
BODYWORK – Tame

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English avant-pop or alt-rock or whatever the kids on the cobbled streets are calling it these days hasn’t had the respect it deserves for quite some time. Percolating beneath the Mumford mirth and Adele success, there’s a throbbing underbelly of eccentricity and experimentation that flirts with radio-friendly melody. Leeds’ BODYWORK are one such act, muddling Roxy Music’s odd shuffle with Wild Beasts and Heaven 17’s falsetto into a sublime cocktail of alien grooves. Download their LP for free from their website.

ESTONIA: Rada7.ee
Forgotten Sunrise – Sisters, Brothers & Other Hellborn Creatures

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Forgotten Sunrise is a cult band who are pleasing the ears of the world with negative music for positive results. They have just released their seventh album, Cretinism.

FINLAND: Glue
Constables – Ludovico

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With all its members born in the early 90s, Constables is a very young band and is simply inspired by the three most important things when you are 20: sex, girls and alcohol. Musically, Constables offers melodic guitars and fast rhythms with a post-punk approach. The band has just released its debut Bedroom Culture EP, which is available on SoundCloud.

GERMANY: Coltran
Poétique Électronique – Irregular Heartbeat (Video Edit)

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Poétique Électronique is a clever group: they have a good band name, they know what they want to do and they know how to do it. Their musical approach stands out from the crowd as they realise when to pause and when to push. Irregular Heartbeat is a fine example of the current penchant in electronic music for soft vocals and punchy bass. As this is my final MAP submission due to time contraints, I want to say goodbye to you folks and many thanks for the great time!

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INTRODUCING: Gang of Youths

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Gang of Youths

 

Gang of Youths aren’t confused, just curious. People who write about music love it when a band releases two tracks that sound completely disparate from each other. We thrive on that shit. It lets us make stupid comparisons, gives us an excuse to abuse the right to use adjectives like ‘juxtaposing’ and ‘brooding’, and makes the lesser of the two feel reasonably insecure.

‘A Sudden Light’ and ‘Riverland’ sound like they’ve been penned by two different artists. For anyone who wanted an example of what Wim Butler at your birthday or Julian Casablancas singing at your funeral would sound like; here’s your smorgasboard. As soon as that major-minor piano refrain treads in at the start of ‘Riverland’, you get the feeling this is gonna be something special. Actually, anyone who can sit down at a piano and sing in-tune is pretty special (and sadly, too rare these days). It’s definitely a mood setter; a track for closing time, quiet train rides home. I can picture this track sitting nicely in the background of some Sophia Coppola film, the one where the characters are probably dressed in ornate clothing and doing something suitably ironic.

On that note – for the small lapse of stillness that ‘Riverland’ brings, ‘A Sudden Light’ is the punchline here. It’s a loose, belter of an anthem with modulating chorus, overbearing references to children and drugs and enough swarming around harmonic ‘WHOAAAHS” to put the whole Brisbane league of bands out of business. This is a killer track –  and even for GOY’s indecisiveness, you should probably claim this tune early. You know where good pop songs go to die? Derpy Australian dramas, like Offspring more often than not. So while their music programmers go hunting for matching cobalt outfits (see above) and the strange form of ‘censorship’ the band have employed on all their press shots (see above), definitely recommend you cart along to their next show. Nothing wrong with committing to a good hook, right?

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LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR – Surf City

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 Surf City have been one of my favourite NZ bands since Matt posted their track ‘Icy Lakes’ back in 2010.  UTR’s Courtney Sanders takes us for a rehash of the NZ fuzzrats for this week’s LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR with their punchy new track ‘It’s a Common Life’. This tune is blowing up on the interwebs at the moment, so get on this quick.

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Surf City

You’ve probably heard of Surf City before. Hell, you may have even seen them live circa 2008 when they released their critically-acclaimed self-titled debut EP, which contained the jangly, Dunedin-Sound-evoking classics ‘Mount Kill’, ‘Records of a Flagpole Skater’ and ‘Dickshaker’s Union’. Sure, they’ve received their share of criticism for sounding a little too much like their major influence New Zealand lo-fi outfit The Clean, but they have channelled that band’s sound and nonchalant ‘tude better than anyone else in the business. The guys are a household name in this country (relatively speaking) and have earnt spots on line-ups at overseas festivals (I saw them at both SxSW and headlining a solo show in Los Angeles #sosuccessful).

However, they took the laissez-faire approach to their craft a little far when, on the back of all this hype, they didn’t do very much at all for quite some time. They then released a really-quite-good album called Kudos in 2011 which for the most part went under the radar. We have heard little from them since until this week when – totally out of the blue – they announced that they will release a new full-length album in August and provided us with a taste of it, in single ‘It’s a Common Life’.

New Zealand may have a lot of alternative guitar bands who reference our most famous era of music, but I’m sure a lot of them also look toward Surf City’s earlier work for a riff or two. Have a listen to ‘It’s a Common Life’ and please get as excited as me – and more excited than Surf City themselves – about a new era for this significant band.

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MAP May 2013

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Click the play button icon to listen to individual songs, right-click on the song title to download an mp3, or grab a zip file of the full 36-track compilation through Ge.tt here.

ARGENTINA: Zonaindie
Paula y Los Besos – Bailar

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Paula y Los Besos is the new musical adventure of singer, songwriter and poet Paula Trama. The band just released eight songs in the form of two EPs that range from acoustic-punk upbeat tunes to tender folk ballads. Bailar is a cover of T. Rex’s Cosmic Dancer, with Spanish lyrics adapted by Paula herself. You can hear and download both EPs from their Bandcamp page.

AUSTRALIA: Who The Bloody Hell Are They?
Swimming – Triplebrie

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Adelaide’s Swimming are sisters Katie and Angie Schilling and friend Sam Reynolds. Triplebrie is the first single from their new record Yes, Tonight. There are plenty of layered vocals and looped sounds on the album, but Swimming’s simple outlook on acapella really does its best in an acoustic setting. The trio also sell tea towels as merchandise, so we can’t really say anything bad about this band right now.

AUSTRIA: Walzerkönig
Fijuka – Behave (From Now On)

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First a drum machine, then a Billie Jean-style bassline and finally synthscapes that embed the voice of Fijuka’s Ankathie singing one of the weirdest declarations of love we have ever heard. Fijuka stands for DIY pop with an art school touch. Watch the music video for some Rhönrad wheel action.

BRAZIL: Meio Desligado
FAROFF – Brazilian Star Wars

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Can you imagine the Star Wars troopers having fun in a slum in Rio de Janeiro, listening to funk carioca in the summer and surrounded by girls? This is not a new track, but Brazilian Star Wars shows one of the best moments of DJ FAROFF, the name used by Leo Bursztyn, PHD in economics and former guitarist of Brazilian band Móveis Coloniais de Acaju.

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PREMIERE: Seja – ‘Like Fireflies’

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Seja 2

Australia needs a new pop chanteuse. Preferably one who’s not going to splay jazz hands or bore us with sad folk music. We think Seja is probably a good fit for the title. She’s interesting, mysterious and isn’t really Aussie at all (Seja was born in Germany). After spending years playing synths for Regurgitator and Sekiden, Seja’s been a solo venture and is releasing her second record soon.

‘Like Fireflies’ is the brand new track from Seja’s upcoming record All Our Wires. The track is a burst of sonic-pop, fused with Seja’s trademark breathy vocalesque and heavy synth work. It’s a little bit St Vincent – and dare I say, even Dido in parts. Either way, Seja’s not shy about space oddities or that Korg, and all that makes us think that this is the kind of brassy, dreamy pop we need more of around here.

Some words from Seja about ‘Like Fireflies’:

“I wanted this song musically to have a continuous groove in the drums and bass ala Stereolab and Can. Ben Ely (Regurgitator) leant a hand playing bass and contributed a great running, bouncy bass line that fits in with the upbeat, ‘squelchy’ synth sounds I picked. When we demo-ed this song it had a really bizarre drum loop that really syncopated, so when we were tracking the album it was important for me to have some of this rhythmical strangeness, without alienating the listener too much. Mirko Vogel and I had lots of fun taking turns at making the craziest noises we could on the Korg MS-20 for the intro.

The song is about being madly in love with someone and going through the motions of wooing them, being shy in the courting processes, shouting it off the rooftops, to togetherness, to compromise, to supporting one another in crisis and all the other great things that happen in a relationship with a solid foundation. It is also about the process when you fall in ‘friend-love’ with someone new, then see how your friendship develops with that person in a platonic way…”

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Catch Seja on these dates:

June 23rd – Blackbear Lodge, Qld.

July 5th – Brighton Up Bar, Syd.

July 6th – Grace Darling, Melb.

 

All Our Wires is out in June.

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EXCLUSIVE: Greyjoy – ‘Greyjoy’ EP

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greyjoy

In case the obvious wasn’t apparent enough – yes, Greyjoy is a Game of Thrones reference. These Perth guys aren’t just a bunch of tv-gruffs though. Their sound is a lot more interesting than horsemeat consumption, the plague or the gratuitous bad sex offered by said reference, so you should probably listen up.

A project between Karlin Courtney and Matt Crocket, Greyjoy came around somewhere in between meeting through friends and purchasing a Juno 6 two years ago.

Greyjoy definitely have a ‘Sydney’ sound going on. The interwebs makes the state by state divide a little less divisive these days, but it’s not to say that bands still don’t hop onto scenes and sub-scenes in their own pockets of town. While some people are still set in tunnel vision that everyone from Perth is either pedal-heavy or still frothing over Xavier Rudd, “garden shed” producers making sunny-synth pop like these guys prove otherwise.

Greyjoy’s debut EP is one for late nights and early mornings. Marked by equal parts sunny-side-up pop gems (‘Strangers’, ‘Distance’) and others which live on the slow burning descend (‘Emerald’) this is a great effort for a first release. I find it difficult to digest synths with the same seriousness that I once did in 2007, but for every pastiche going in their description (including the Thrones reference), these guys make it work.

Greyjoy are releasing their self-titled EP on Wednesday, but for now you can stream an exclusive listen below.

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1. Strangers

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2. Idle Thoughts

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3. Distance

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4. Amygdala

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5. Emerald

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