RPM is somewhat like a musician equivalent of the International Novel Writing Month. Each year in February musicians are invited to record and release a 35-minute, 10-song album during the 28 days of the year’s shortest month. All the other criteria are entirely up to the musicians. Read more about it here, if you’re so inclined.

Kurrel is an Australian musician who has become one of my favourite internet-based musicians in the past few years. He’s had many names throughout his adventures and dabbled in many styles, mainly frolicing somewhere amidsts dance tracks, quirky pop music and sound experiments. In the recent years he’s become obsessed with ukuleles and has bent the little instrument to suit his any will, most of his current work being based on acoustic recordings that are heavily filtered through either various pedals or after-processing. You can check his web portal here.

Kurrel loves participating in the RPM things, February’s pretty much over, 10 tracks and 35 minutes of electronic shoegaze-inspired atmospheric ambient ukulele-driven pop await us. The bulk of his RPM 2010 offering consists of atmospheric instrumentals where a dreamy haze drowns the listener in layers of thick sound, ready to be swept away via daydreams and evoked settings: the bird calls of “Hello”, the enchanting fairytale clockwork of “Clock”, “Afterglow”’s shoegaze thunder and the dreamy strums and high-pitched melodies of “Gone Flying”, et cetera. It’s a short atmosphere journey, nowhere near ambient but equally evocative and sonically brilliant to explore. But Kurrel’s always been best when he’s let his own voice join in and thus the blissed, chilled melodies and the man’s relaxing vocals of “The Longest Trip” and “Every Sunset Brings a Sunrise” are the highlights of the new one. Overall, it’s Very Good – and in fact, the only criticism I’ve got is the format itself, 35 mins and 10 songs is quite restricting.

You can grab Kurrel’s RPM 2010 here, for a radiohead price of whatever you desire. There’s also free full samples of each song in case you don’t want to trust my words blindly, and those who do end up downloading it also get a few bonus tracks in the forms of a few outtakes. The removed ukulele solo that makes up for one of the bonus tracks is actually quite brilliant and I wouldn’t have minded to have seen it as a part of the actual thing.

Jason Lytle, he of previously Grandaddy and now of a brand new solo career, wants to wish each and every one of you (even you grumpy cynical sods) a merry Christmas through the medium of a 7-track instrumental piano EP full of songs with nothing to do with Christmas.

You can download it here and it is indeed very lovely, very beautiful and very wonderful.

In other news, Lytle is also in the process of writing material for his next solo album and he guarantees that “[it] will be the weirdest, most wonderful mayhem” he has made. Should be worth a gander.

Why do we resist that which we suspect we’ll like?

Certain new releases get so much buzz on the social-networkosphere that they can start to feel a little overexposed before they’re even out. Such was the case with Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse”. Still, it’d be a shame to miss out on something good simply because it’s saturating the Twitternets and Facebookitron, so after several weeks of trying to look the other way, at last I succumbed.

My pyrrhic defeat already assured, little more was to be lost in springing for the deluxe version, which included instrumental versions of all 13 songs. Getting the additional material seemed somewhat superfluous, as I so rarely watch bonus-disc videos and whatnot, but since this one was all commute-compatible audio, and a mere $3 extra, I decided to go for it. This turned out to be a Very Good Idea indeed.

Initial fears that the instrumental tracks would wind up as a musical Garfield Minus Garfield proved unfounded. The vocals are so striking in the main album that they mask the incredible richness of the underlying arrangements. This isn’t a bad thing — every song on the album is strong in its own right, overflowing with sounds, while not overwhelming the whole. It speaks to the album’s amazing production that removing Imogen’s distinctive croon from the mix could still yield such lush tapestries, eminently listenable on their own.

If I’d only known of the instrumental album, it would still have been well worth the full price by itself. It’s not every day that two different sides of the same oeuvre could yield such compelling results when put together.

So yeah, I’ve just fed the hype saturation a bit more. Sorry about that. But don’t let that stop you from giving it a whirl.

Imogen Heap on MySpace

Profile and sample tracks on NPR

Lawsuit was perhaps the biggest 90s band you’ve never heard of. Hailing from the cow-infested university town of Davis, California, the ten piece self-styled ska-jazz-punk-bubblegum band was perhaps too revolutionary for their time.

Third-wave ska washed over the indie scene in the early 1990s, spilling over occasionally into more commercially successful music: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish came in with this tide, among others. Lawsuit was certainly buoyed by ska’s semi-underground popularity at this time, yet they never could be cleanly pigeonholed as ska, nor any of the other genres they borrowed from. Their genre-bending sound was purely their own: bouncy and brassy, spicy power-pop so salsa you’d dip chips into it if you could possibly find a way to stop dancing. Perfectly suited for any combination of skanking, waltzing, tangoing, moshing, and/or white-boy head-bobbing.

While the recordings never fully captured the magic of their live shows, they remain as precious relics of a band that deserved far more exposure than they got. For years they consistently packed venues across California, but their unclassifiable nature made record labels shrink in fear. Perhaps if their album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip had been released in today’s climate of nichier tastes and fewer gatekeepers, Lawsuit could have wound up bigger than Coldplay. We’ll never know what might have been, but we can still enjoy the gifts they did leave us.

Their dense and quirky lyrics are a perfect match for the nasally tenor of their front man, the late Paul Sykes — sounding equal parts David Byrne and Fred Schneider — winding punful swifties into the DNA of peculiar characters and situations, familiar and stylized tidbits of everyday life.

This doctor has me on hold
His hypocritical oath, his hippopotamus house
He’s at the petting zoo tomorrow with a hyperactive child

Their craftiest and most ambitious work of wordplay comes in the album opener, “North Dakotachrome”, which embeds the names of numerous U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and other North American place names, such as how Washington, Yukon, Kansas, and Oregon find their way into

I go washing tons of clothing
And you contact me there
Can this be the ending
Or a gone berserk affair?

Merry angst infuses “The Complaint Song”, with each of the four verses lamenting a different irritant that has timelessly tormented humanity. It could easily be a dirge if it lacked the horns, bouncy rhythm, bubblegum vocals, or melody; fortunately, we are instead left with a chipper quartet of mini-rants that turns out to be far more listenable. A similar collision of perky ennui permeates “Useless Flowers”, “Stoplite”, and “Entropy”, the latter of which practically begs to be a choreographed dance number in a 1920s speakeasy.

So get somewhere that you can safely tap your toes without too much social awkwardness, give Lawsuit a good cross-examination, and judge for yourself. Most of their discography, along with some of their alumni’s various side projects, are available for free or cheap download.

MP3: Thank God You’re Doing Fine
MP3: North Dakotachrome
MP3: The Complaint Song

Download album: Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1993)

It’s great when old friends come to visit. Times change, everyone evolves, but the same commonality that bound you in the first place holds firm, and your divergent paths feel intertwined.

Such is the case with bands too. Old friends, companions in your life, come back with different names, new faces, new hairstyles, but the good artists still know how to make your toes tap and your head bob.

The new Wonderlick album feels like a long overdue visit from an old friend.

Once upon a time, the ’90s microphenomenon Too Much Joy brought eponymous excesses of euphoria to the handfuls of They Might Be Giants, Barenaked Ladies, and Rancid fans who found them. While TMJ eventually ceased to exist except as a mandibular condition, two of its key minds continued in their spare time as WL. These guys don’t have a lot of spare time — during the day Tim Quirk is Rhapsody’s VP of Programming, and Jay Blumenfield is a TV producer and director.

“Topless at the Arco Arena” marks their first full-length release in eight years. It continues TMJ’s and WL’s flavor of ponderous pop, introspective and snarky, dripping with cynical optimism.

The liner notes are dominated by Quirk’s essay that gave the album its name, which reflects on the power an AC/DC concert had to incite young women to bare their chests for the entire crowd. The album, like the essay, riffs on that dynamic of empowerment versus exploitation, the uncomfortable mingling of individuality with commercialism that so saturates rock music as well as the Wikipedia-Twitter-Google-powered world that gives so many part-time musicians and fans their livelihood, and made so many would-be rockers trade their guitars for dayjobs.

But that sounds awfully heady for such a fun album.

“Topless” tells tales of arena concerts and board rooms, of crass wealth and amateur passions, and of the power and vulnerability that comes with both. From the stripped-down bubblegum pop of “A Different Kind of Love”, and the more sinister jauntiness of “This Song is a Commercial”, to the sweeping landscapes of “You First” and “Your Majesty”, Wonderlick celebrates the humble majesty of its diverse cast of characters — the ones you’d have a beer with, and the ones you’d likely never see outside their limos.

While the messages are sometimes subtle (“The Case Against Tattoos”), sometimes blatant (“This Song is a Commercial”, “The C.E.O. Considers His Holdings”), even their heavy moments keep a light-hearted touch.

“Devil Horns” brings the album to an anthemic close, poking fun at the idolatry of so many rock fans, but with a certain reverence. Like old friends who know you well enough to be aware of all your foibles, but who love you anyway.

Perhaps that’s the sort of perspective that comes from a couple of regular guys who just happen to have been intermittent rock stars for the last two decades.

Order the album and download free MP3s on the band’s site.

1) Introducing Palace Players continues to be awesome

2) Repeaterbeater continues to be very cool, even if it’s way too short (it just breezes by so annoyingly fast!)

3) Owl is a short electronic instrumental. It might work as an intro if it had a song it would be an intro for or as an interlude if it was included on an album rather than a 12-minute EP. As of now, it’s nifty but forgettable.

4) Start is a pretty two-minute piano ballad. It’s pretty. That’s about it.

5) Swimmer’s Chant is a nifty, drum-heavy song that drums its way into something of a grand, big song but doesn’t really quite make it there.

What a terribly disappointing bunch of terribly obvious leftover scraps. Plus two awesome album tracks.

I am not much of a rap expert. This is not because I dislike the genre (in fact it’s quite a cool one) but because I’m a right picky bastard. This exceeds to other genres too, mind you, but rap to my ears seems to have the quality to offer stonkingly great tunes but not so often excellent albums. But every once in a blue moon when I actually grab myself and lift my arse off the chair I actually do some adventurous research into the genre I’m not that deep in with, and sometimes during those adventures there’s a full album that destroys my Forcefield of Pickiness.

Today, we are talking about Curse ov Dialect’s Wooden Tongues and quite frankly, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to describe it. Curse ov Dialect themselves hail from Australia, Wooden Tongues is their third album and Rate Your Music defines its genre as ‘abstract hip hop’. I prefer the genre tag ‘batshit insane’ or ‘Mighty Boosh in hip-hop form’. The most random plethora of samples pop up at the most random times and are rapped over by the most random voices. Each song has at least one part that sounds like it belongs to a completely different song. It’s absolutely daft. And it’s in fact pretty good.

(more…)

Tis the year of dark night collectives, it seems.

The Sparklehorse/Danger Mouse collaboration Dark Night of the Soul, featuring e.g. Nina Persson, Jason Lytle, David Mercer, Suzanne Vega, The Flaming Lips, Black Francis, David Lynch and many more, is getting an official release someday during this year, but those who are curious about it can now check it via Chrysalismusic (just hit the box.net player on the left side).

Based on one listen, it’s some seriously intriguing stuff. It gets a bit naff around the middle but man, the first three tracks are awesome and the general quality’s really swell. Definitely deserves yet more listens. Also loving the cohesive sound despite the ragtag team.

Plus, you know, the general joy of having some new Sparklehorse material again. Make a new proper album soon please, Mr Linkous!