Tampa Calling

VINYL:

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO – Dark Side Of The Black Moon: What Planet Are We On?
More proggy psych from Acid Mothers Temple — mixes Pink Floyd with fuzzy wah guitars and cosmic sounds. Double LP includes an exclusive bonus D-side track.

Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Double LP comes in beautiful litho-wrapped gatefold jackets and includes MP3 download.

Earth - Radio Live
Vinyl only release. Radio Live is comprised of two tracks from a live radio broadcast on KFJC (12/31/07) and two tracks from a live performance in Vienna on their 2008 European tour.

God Help The Girl - God Help The Girl
After the success of Belle And Sebastian’s most recent album, The Life Pursuit, band leader/singer/songwriter Stuart Murdoch decided to pursue the writing of a rock musical scored for female singers. After auditioning vocalists via Internet contests, he made his choices and, with all members of Belle And Sebastian backing him up, recorded this record. It combines the strengths of early Belle And Sebastian records in a broader musical palette, drawing equally on musicals, ‘60s girl groups, ‘80s indie, and classic pop. LP includes MP3 download.

Green Day - Know Your Enemy 7”
Ultra-limited edition 7” single features the non-album B-side “Hearts Collide”. We have a limited few remaining after Vinyl Saturday! Read the rest of this entry »

A blog I periodically visit, Music for Kids Who Can’t Read Too Good, recently posted a pretty good list, “T.A.I.S.T.M. (The Acronym In Song Titles Mix),” a series of songs with acronyms in their titles paired with MP3s of said songs. A pretty nice little collection, with songs like of Montreal’s “Requiem For O.M.M.2,” Broken Social Scene’s “TBTF,” “DLZ” by TV on the Radio, and Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” Check out the rest and listen to the songs by clicking here.

Pitchfork recently ran a comprehensive guide to releases coming up in 2009. I’ve scaled it down to the highlights (no box sets, re-issues, vinyl, 7″ or overseas releases) and added a few as well. Click here to see Pitchfork’s complete guide.

JANUARY

06
*The Brighton Port Authority, I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat (Southern Fried)
Glasvegas, Glasvegas (Columbia)
The Gourds, Haymaker! (Yep Roc)

13
Late of the Pier, Fantasy Black Channel (Astralwerks)
Lymbyc System, Carved by Glaciers (Magic Bullet)
My Dear Disco, Dancethink (Dancethink)
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Greatest Hits (Columbia Wal-Mart exclusive)
This Will Destroy You & Lymbyc System, Field Studies (Magic Bullet)
*Derek Trucks Band, Already Free (Sony Legacy)

20
*Andrew Bird, Noble Beast (Fat Possum)
*Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino)
Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light (Secretly Canadian)
*Bon Iver, Blood Bank EP (Jagjaguwar)
Calexico, Live From Austin, TX (New West DVD)
John Frusciante, The Empyrean (Adrenaline Music)
Ice-T, Live in Montreux 1995 (MVD DVD)
Matt and Kim, Grand (FADER)
*The Modern Skirts, All of Us in Our Night (Modern Skirts Recordings)
A.C. Newman, Get Guilty (Matador)
Ben Nichols, The Last Pale Light in the West (The Rebel Group)
Or, The Whale, Light Poles and Pines (Seany)
Public Enemy, Revolverlution Tour 2003 (MVD DVD)
*Squarepusher, Numbers Lucent EP (Warp)
*Umphrey’s McGee, Mantis (Sci Fidelity)

27
*The Bird and the Bee, Ray Guns Are Not the Future (Blue Note)
Brian Wilson, That Lucky Old Sun (Capitol DVD)
Circlesquare, Songs About Dancing and Drugs (!K7)
*Cotton Jones, Paranoid Cocoon (Suicide Squeeze)
*Dan Deacon/Adventure, Split 12″ (Carpark)
*Franz Ferdinand, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (Domino/Epic)
Hot Chip With Robert Wyatt and Geese EP (Astralwerks)
Kylie Minogue, Boombox: The Remix Album (Parlophone)
of Montreal, Jon Brion Remix EP (Polyvinyl)
Owen, (the ep) (Polyvinyl)
Rush, Retrospective 3 (Atlantic CD/DVD)
*RZA, Afro Samurai: The Resurrection (Wu Music Group)
Duncan Sheik, Whisper House (Victor)
Bruce Springsteen, Working on a Dream (Columbia)
*The Sway Machinery, Hidden Melodies Revealed (JDub) Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of great music this year; here’s my subjective list of the best. Snider’s will be posted later.

1. of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl)
I’ve lauded this album to the moon and back, and I love it for the very reason it turns other people off – the quick and abrupt rhythm changes within the songs, the clever and suggestive lyrics, and the layers upon layers of rainbow-hued sonics. Kevin Barnes’ refusal to dumb down his music for mainstream audiences is commendable and refreshing, especially since the result is a virtual masterpiece. I’ve listened to it at least 100 times over the past three months and I’m still not sick of it, which, in my book, makes it the best album of ’08.

2. Bon Iver: For Emma… Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)
Bon Iver is Wisconsin singer/songwriter Justin Vernon. His rootsy debut album under this moniker is the sort that takes your breathe away with its stunning, austere beauty — light drums, acoustic guitar, the occasional wash of background sonics. But the sole element that makes For Emma’s subtleties and well-crafted songs of longing and loss work so well is Vernon’s delicate, soulful falsetto, sometimes multi-tracked to elegant effect and so magnificently expressive it brings a tear to the eye.

3. TV on the Radio: Dear Science (Interscope)
Bumpin’ disco-funk dance music marked by out-of-the-box beats and brimming with sexiness and soul, Dear Science found a rather serious Brooklyn art rock band building upon their dark meditative style by letting loose and having fun with it.

4. MGMT: Oracular Spectacular (Columbia)
People use the word “derivative” a lot when discussing this band. But MGMT does ’70s-style psychedelic glam rock right, throws in some funky electro-pop for kicks, and presents it with the sort of cock-strutting confidence you’d expect from a band on its fifth record, not its first (or second, depending on who you’re asking). What really makes this album a top 10, however, is the production quality; I’ve heard demos and the songs wouldn’t be nearly so good if they hadn’t been jazzed up in the studio.

5. Icy Demons: Miami Ice (Obey Your Brain)
The experimental Chicago/Philadelphia ensemble departed from their distinctly Zappa-esque-jazzified-prog-rock-meets-New-Wave-pop sound to an album so out there that even I couldn’t wrap my mind around it at first – off-kilter melodies, shifting time-signatures colliding with warm and mellow samba beats, menacing cello and buzzing synthesizers broken up by a xylophone-infused vocal interlude. In the end, the novelty spoke to me.

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To wrap up our Of Montreal coverage, they closed this glorious show with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Enjoy!

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An otherwise ordinary Monday evening was transformed into a fantastic inferno of colors, costumes and characters at The Ritz featuring Of Montreal, Fiery Furnaces, and Fire Zuave. It was impressive how many people were in attendance given the competition with the Bucs game and it being a Monday.  Proof positive that the Tampa area has a plethora of indie music fans.

See photos after the break. Click here for Leilani’s in-depth review and killer video.
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Photo of Kevin Barnes by Phil Bardi; to see a bunch more pics by freelance photographer elawgrrl, click here.

Of Montreal’s stage show is an aural and visual hallucination brought to dazzling life. I could spend a few thousand words describing it in colorful detail and still manage to leave out plenty.

The six-member band played against a huge backdrop of vivid, psychedelic animations and under washes of saturated lights. Two sets of drums were mounted on risers on either side of the stage and a revolving screen set up between them hid-or-revealed a motley cast of performers, who acted out all manner of scenes and scenarios with and without frontman Kevin Barnes, and in costumes and masks that ranged from cute to freakish. Barnes himself disappeared behind the screen to change outfits a dozen or more times, from fur to sequins to spandex to centaur, a performer serving as his second set of legs for that last ensemble. He covered himself in red paint, in shaving cream, in glitter. He sang and played guitar, pranced from one side of the stage to the other in nothing but a pair of sassy gold trunks, climbed up a riser to sing from its heights or play drums a few minutes, climbed back down to be executed in a faux-gallows, and appeared to have a grand old time all throughout.

The 90-minute show included most of the songs from Of Montreal’s latest, Skeletal Lamping, as well as several crowd pleasers from the three albums — “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” and “She’s a Rejector” from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, “Eros’ Entropic Tundra” off Satanic Panic in the Attic, and from The Sunlandic Twins, “So Begins Our Alabee” and “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games,” the latter the song so infamously changed into the Outback jingle and only recently brought back into rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

We interrupt your normally scheduled programming for a brief message from Creative Loafing’s Promotions Department.

Don’t forget to visit CL’s Fun and Free Stuff page. This (and next) week, we’re giving away tickets to see Of Montreal, Les Savy Fav, Wanted DVDs and more!

You can also join our music text message group “The Mixtape” for concert updates and other exclusive chances to win tickets, CDs, downloads and more – all you have to do is send the word MIXTAPE to 50618.

You may now resume reading, commenting, blogging, flickring or twittering.

In 2007’s masterful Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, of Montreal frontman/visionary/songwriter Kevin Barnes got up close and personal, expressing his fears, frustrations and failures against rainbow-hued synth-pop with a funky, disco-fied swagger.

Skeletal Lamping finds Barnes in much better spirits and back to mining his psyche for material, the album playing much like you’d imagine his psyche actually works — jumping from one memory to another, lingering on sexual fantasies and depravities, stopping to muse and ruminate on this incident or that person, mood-shifting from confident to downtrodden, from high and happy to contemplative to spazzed-out, thoughts and ideas spurting forth lucid and witty, or as disorienting streams-of-consciousness. Soulful ditties and synth-pop dance numbers mingle amid songs-within-songs that are made up of a few or more wildly divergent electro-symphonic movements, each with its own rhythm and sound and feel that either fits comfortably or crashes inelegantly into the movement before or after it to create an interesting and truly exceptional, if sometimes chaotic and sonically challenging, whole.

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