Below is the the video for what is presumably the first single from the upcoming debut album from The Black Tape from Chicago.  They released an EP in July 2010 which continues to satisfy, so please check out the video and let’s all hope we see the album sooner in the year rather than later (release date still unknown).  Enjoy.

In the past I’ve been known to speak disparagingly about the internet, what with the kitten videos and the general promotion of a solitary, sedentary existence.  Indeed, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing for someone writing a blog to complain about the internet, but my comeuppance is only stings that much more acutely with the discovery of voxengo.com.  I’ve been working on some music of my own over the past few months, and as is a common problem in New York, I don’t have access to a drummer.  Yes, of course there are drummers in New York, but considering the constraints on space and the patience of neighbors it seems like drummers are a rare commodity, especially those who have access to an affordable space in which they can be decently recorded.  Voxengo’s core business is plug-ins and samples, but also offer a custom drum service; for $59.95 I was able to get a totally awesome, professionally recorded drum part for a track I’m working on.  I filled out a short questionnaire and uploaded mp3s for the track minus drums, the scratch drum track and the click track and he was good to go.  And fast- I had some issues with the file sizes I had bounced out; he had to wait longer for me to get him the corrected versions than I had to wait for him to send me a preview of what he had done.  You have the option of sending him back to try again if you don’t like the preview, but I thought he nailed it.  Granted, I wasn’t asking him to do any crazy Tony Williams stuff on it, but that’s no aspersion on him; I gave him my silly little indie-sounding track and he came back with a drum part I thought was really great.  Here’s the unmixed, unedited track with his drums:

Why the Cable Guy reference?  ’Cause the dude’s in the Belarus!  Thanks to the information superhighway I’m now an active participant in the global village!  And I don’t even feel like an asshole about it!  I know I’m about fifteen years late in admitting this, but yes, you can find actually cool and useful stuff on the internet.  Above was a link to the voxengo site, here’s the link for custom drums.

Merry Christmas everybody.  Here’s a playlist I put together; hope you enjoy.

Leiber died today at the age of 78 (he's the one with the second most amount of hair).

Today Jerry Leiber, half of the Leiber and Stoller songwriting team, died in Los Angeles. Which is to say, today one of the most important voices in America in the 20th Century died. With Mr. Stoller, Jerry Leiber wrote a list of songs that are foundational to rock and roll.  This body of work not only harnessed the raw, hellion energy of early artists coming out of the R&B and Rockabilly worlds, but also were amongst the first to see in rock and roll the potential for real poetry, real art. Here’s a brief list of songs they wrote:

Hound Dog
Jailhouse Rock
Searchin’
Three Cool Cats
Kansas City
(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care
Charlie Brown
Yakety Yak
Poison Ivy
On Broadway
Spanish Harlem
Stand By Me

Leiber and Stoller were the Gilbert and Sullivan of there time; not only zeroing in on the public’s taste and possessing a sense for what they wanted next, Leiber and Stoller said something about what it meant to be alive in America between 1954 and the arrival of the Beatles (whose early repertoire was filled with their songs, a few showing up on record). Cars, girls, freedom, longing, innocent love, love that has tarnished- they wrote for a generation rapidly becoming self-aware. Leiber and Stoller worked with the idiom of Black American music to express something White American teenagers were beginning to feel- angst. They saw in Black culture the frustration, the yearning, the enduring that comes from being an outsider always forced to look in on a culture whose obsession with your subjugation is borderline freudian and were able to translate it into terms teenagers could understand: that the best way to get by is to get on in a way they just can’t understand (luckily empathy ran both ways; the road from “Three Cool Cats” to “Stand By Me” to getting on a bus to Birmingham was probably not very long).

Even if we judge him solely by the attributes of his musical contributions Jerry Leiber is a giant. For what he helped turn us into we should always be thankful. Besides, if he had followed in his father’s footsteps and become a Baltimore grocer, we’d never have this:

Blueblood by The Croup

At long last The Croup have released a follow up to 2004 self-titled debut. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait for fear that we won’t see a third album until 2018. Jason Gambrell and Casey Brandt, the only permanent members of what would best be described as a studio project, have departed from what some might consider the enjoyable anti-folk simplicity of their debut for I would describe as a lo-fi Brian Wilson-esque suite (Gambrell and Brandt are joined brilliantly by Jason Holt on bass and Dave Van Epp on guitar). I will say that this album is excellent; certainly the best album I’ve heard this year and probably my favorite release since the xx debut in 2009. In some ways this is an apt comparison- both are sparse synth-based pop, however where the xx write lyrics steeped in adolescent desire hinting at obsession The Croup can’t help but write wry lyrics more akin to Rollins than Soft Cell.

Split into 3 parts, each part of the album can be broken down further:
Part I – Intro / Move On / Puppet Train / Happy Guy / Nothing
Part II – Parenthesis / Black Box / Hate You More / Shoot it Over
Part III – What I Believe / The Sun / Growing Old / Brown / Together in the End

While some might chafe at the notion of not being able to scan directly to a specific track, the album is short enough to enjoy straight through. So get to it; there is no weak part throughout the entire album. If I have any complaint it is that I wish they would have utilized Dave Van Epp’s guitar more; the two solos he does lay down shred and are really fun to listen to- why hold back on rippin’ solos? Listen and enjoy. Here’s “Together in the End”, the closing piece from the album:

We were all very sad to hear of the passing of Randy Savage on Friday.  Glad to see that the Macho Man took the opportunity to do all of us here on planet earth one last solid.  Here’s the title track from his 2003 album Be A Man:

Today marks the long-awaited release for Fleet Foxes second album Helplessness Blues, as well as the beginning of a tour that will last almost uninterrupted through August and take them across North America and Europe.  Although I’m not generally a huge fan of their sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm there is certainly something catchy about their melodies, and only a fool would deny the care they put into crafting their harmonies.  While Brian Wilson and Crosby, Stills and Nash are often invoked when describing, I find their sound akin to Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree (in that I think their music can sound like it was written in cult compound), not to mention My Morning Jacket:

I also find something Prog-y in their harmony constructions, similar to what we hear in the Your Move section of “I See All Good People”:

That one might be a stretch, but regardless of their cult sound tendencies or perhaps sounding (and even looking) like MMJ’s little brother, the songs on Helplessness Blues are essentially sentimental.  The obvious care taken in arranging, as well as the vaguely stilted language in which the lyrics are written only lend more value to the Simon-&-Garfunkel-esque earnestness and sincerity of the songs and general likability of the effort (it also makes them sound alittle like they were written by an adolescent trying really hard to impress a girl he likes, which is also very sweet).  For all the press they’ve gotten regarding their mature sound, Fleet Foxes are really writing love hymns for young people who may or may not have ever lived with their significant other; indeed I imagine this album will become the soundtrack to the coital rustlings of many a summer tryst, of love’s first bloom.  And they said they weren’t hippies…

Of course, I’m already sick of the song “Helplessness Blues” and dread the long future I foresee in which I encounter this song on countless movie soundtracks and Volkswagen commercials.

Here’s a performance of “The Last Living Rose” off of Let England Shake.  It’s nice to know that there’s someone in England who isn’t a-twitter at the notion of Prince William getting married before he loses any more hair.  From guardian.co.uk, live in their studio.

While we’re on the subject of the Queen’s female subjects who may be less than impressed by the meaningless show of it all, I’d be remiss to not mention the passing of Poly Styrene, front woman of the early punk band X-Ray Spex and solo artist who died this past monday.  While it is personally a tragedy for her family to have lost her to cancer on the eve of her tour to promote her first album in seven years, it seems especially poignant to lose a British voice, however marginalized for most of her career, that always spoke out against the crass and corosive nature of our raw consumerism at a moment when her home nation is not only celebrating one of its most regressive, albeit harmless, institutions, but chooses to do so with the buying and selling of countless items of absolute crap.  Here’s a remembrance of Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex from the film The Punk Years:

Runner-up prize goes to Best Coast, who went from obscure stoner, fuzz, lo-fi wannabe band to buzz band du jour, counting Jerry Seinfeld and Thurston Moore among their accolytes (who rocks more than Jerry?).  I heard they’re on/going on tour with The Waves, which not only will offer them increased exposure after playing Jimmy Fallon in early January, but the chance for an outshining of the headliner we’ve not seen since Prince opened for the Stones (the crowds may have booed, but in retrospect I think we all know who probably was more on top of their game in 1981).

BAND TO WATCH IN 2011:

SCREAMING FEMALES: They’re not exactly a new band, but they work hard as hell and they’re still pretty much under the radar, and singer/lead guitarist Marisa Paternoster really shreds on guitar (as if J Mascis were female and raised in New Jersey in the nineties).  Here’s one I like:

Only time will tell. Here’s hoping for a new year that doesn’t totally suck!

China Pig

Friday Don Van Vliet, better known to the music world as Captain Beefheart, died after years of living with Multiple Sclerosis.  Although the obits that have been written reduce his importance to the album he was best known for, 1969′s  Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart was to me the Sunny Rollins of Rock & Roll- Trout Mask only really touches the surface for what his output has meant to two generations of musicians.  Here’s a track off the 1980 album Doc at the Radar Station which, like a low-grade fever, seems to addle my brain every day of my life.

SITE NOTE:  I apologize for the lack of postings in the last few months.  Boogmusic will make every possible effort to make sure such a lack of productivity never happens again.  Thank you for your continued support…