Austin Town Hall

When you get a press release that mentions Belle and Sebastian, The Flaming Lips and Pavement all at once, you’ve either got to be excited or scared.  After listening to this single from The Color Bars, I will definitely say I’m leaning towards excitement, and clamoring to get my hands on their recently released record, Prosopopoeia.  Really, it’s just great pop music, and with the electronic influence on this track, I’m getting more of an Of Montreal feeling here, giving a bit of classic quirkiness, though it’s a bit more in the nerdy vein as opposed to Kevin Barnes hyper sexuality.  Just let the hooks sweep you through the day.

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Download: The Color Bars – Structupoppie Rally [MP3]

In a conversation with one of our local blogger friend’s, Sonic Itch Mike, I decided that I really needed to take a close look at which spots on any given album are the killer spots to put your hits.  Some people think that the immediacy really makes Track 1 the best, but I’m going to look a little closer at this idea.  I mean, there are hundreds of classic albums out there, and surely they ascribe to this great song placement formula.

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With only about a week and a half remaining until the huge ACL festival starts on the 8th of this month, it’s time that you really start thinking about that plan of action for who you want to see over the weekend.  Sometimes your choice will be easy with only one decent band playing at a certain time, but then you’ll have a choice like this one that will make you want to pull your hair out.  So on the one hand you have The Flaming Lips who formed over 25 years ago and have been doing their psych rock thing for longer than most of us can remember.  But then we have a more recent favorite in Band of Horses who can still hold their own despite their relatively short career together.  Both bands are playing on Sunday late in the day at 6pm on opposite sides of the festival, so you have little hope of catching a bit of both sets.  My initial feeling was to go with Band of Horses based on my just having seen Flaming Lips at Free Press Summer Fest earlier this summer.  Plus, I feel like The Lips are still using the same damn live gimmicks that they’ve been hitting us with for the last 5-6 years… I mean cool, but I’ve seen it more than once.  Then again, Flaming Lips play right before The National on back to back stages so it would be nice to just post up and avoid fighting the crowds.  I also fear that the Band of Horses crowd could be old hippie city since The Eagles play on the same stage shortly after BOH. My indifference towards the recent material from both of these bands may cause me to just go with a majority vote amongst my friends.  Care to share your thoughts?

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One of our favorite local acts, The Octopus Project are gearing up to release a new collection of songs, titled Hexadecagon.  The project began, as the band is like to do, with a bit of an artistic inspiration, writing the songs to video clips, and recording in the manner of the Flaming Lips on Zaireeka.  This collection hits the streets on October 26th, and just you wait for the band to rock it out, just like they do near the end of this track.

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Downlaod: The Octopus Project – Fuguefat [MP3]

So this past weekend I made the short trek over to H-Town for the Free Press Summer Fest put on in Eleanor Tinsley Park.  It was a hot weekend with a little bit of unwanted rain thrown in to make it even more humid than usual in the metro area.  The weather unfortunately caused me to miss some major acts during the weekend, but nonetheless I still had a decent time.  Follow the jump for more and a few photos.

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I’ll be the first to admit that after listening to At War with the Mystics a few years back, I fully expected Embryonic, the new album from The Flaming Lips to be one of the worst albums I would come across this year.  Yea, I lost the faith, and like others, I was pleasantly suprised when I got my hands on the album.  A few spins in, and I dug it.

For the first few moments, you can tell that the shift of the group has gone towards a less pop-centric approach to writing.  Gone from the opening moments are the anthemic pop songs one would expect to hear coming from Wayne’s mouth as he walked across a crowd in a bubble.  Still, the one thing that makes me reluctant to go full on into this conglomerate of sounds, which is really what the first few tracks are, is that I heard this all before.  Sure, the Lips can pull it off, but it reminds me an awful lot like that Battles album from a few years back.

Then comes “Evil,” which starts out as mere noise samples, then goes into traditional song structure, and then fades back into the samples once again. Unfortunately, it’s not really a classic song approach for the band, and you won’t get a chance to really hear them pull off in that direction again until “I Can Be a Frog,” but you really don’t get too far into the song itself, due to the fact that you’re spending most of your time trying to catch the noises that correlate to Wayne’s lyrics.  Even “Silver Trembling Hands” isn’t a straight-forward song, and it was the single.  Take out the vocals, and you have the rest of the album in your hands.  No lie.

So what makes up the majority of this album you might ask?  Well, if I were The Flaming Lips, and I were constructing this album, or explaining away its secret recipe, I would do it as such:  2 Parts Flaming Lips, 1 Parts M83, 1 Parts Battles, 1 Part Liars/Deerhunter, 2 Pandering to Noise Fans, 1 Part Throwaways.  You probably bake it in the studio for several years just to make it come out the way you want.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the lack of originality on this album, as far as where my ears hear the sounds coming from, is that very few people could execute an album precisely the way this group did.  Their fusion of sampling, pop, psychedelia, jazz, noise, etc comes off successfully, without really exhibiting  a lull in the album.  If anyone could construct such a concept in their mind, and then pull if off, it had to be the guys that put together Zaireeka.

Sure, there aren’t any classic gems, like most of us really wanted to get the band to toss our way, but there is no denying that beneath the sinister construction of this noise, something beautiful will come to fruition.  Will I be the one to see that beauty?  Maybe so.  As of now, I’m still trying to figure out who on Warner Brothers tried to explain Embryonic to the bosses on behalf of The Flaming Lips because I’m having trouble enough explaing it to myself, let alone anyone who reads this.

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Download: Flaming Lips – Silver Trembling Hands [MP3]

What?   You still listen to THAT album?  That record is so 2004!  Well, that’s okay, because we really like that one too, which is why we decided to come up with a list of our favorite albums of the last decade (2000-2009).  Sure, these might not be YOUR favorite records, or the most critically acclaimed, but we sat down and really thought out every record from the past ten years that we keep coming back to in our collections.  You’re likely to disagree with some of these, and we won’t tell you we’re absolutely right we just know that these happen to be OUR favorites.  If you think we totally blew it here, feel free to tell us so, but be nice, as our egos are kind of fragile.  Follow the jump for more.

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It’s hard not to be a fan of really good pop music, especially with the output of independent artists bringing great pop to our ear; Pop Levi is just another such character in a long line of pop musicians leaving good bands (Ladytron) to go it their own in the pop world.

Now on his second album, I’ve come to expect great things from this character, despite his tendency to look like a side-show Shakespearean actor.  However, the output here is too similar to the debut album to substantially increase his value in the pop lexicon of the music industry.

His voice is quite unique, which makes it hard to distinguish changes in pitch from song to song, as his falsetto reverberates in the caverns of my mind. Even here, it seems like more effects are being used to help shape is voice, although more of that is owed to the various samples and instrumentation that weighs this album down.

There are some exceptional tracks present throughout this record, and the spacing is appropriate so as to keep our interest from start to finish.  ”Semi-babe” slows it down just enough to mimic an Albert Hammond Jr. ballad.  It’s a different spin on his tried and true formula, immediately creating one of the more memorable moments on Never Never Love. “Mai Space” also has a similar magic to it, even though I feel as if the samples here were directly rooted in Flaming Lips Yoshimi nostalgia.

There are some missteps here too, which keeps this album from rising to the surface of a pleasant breakthrough album in 2008. Pop Levi‘s desire to imitate such greats as Prince tend to show him at his weakest moments, and frankly, his most unoriginal.  Similarly, “Calling Me Down” represents a change in direction from traditional stylings, for this artist at least.  When he slows it down this slow, he loses ground with his audience, which is fair enough considering the album should probably stop before the closing song, “Fountain Of Lies;” the greatest mistake I noticed.

Throughout the record, I hoped and prayed, that he could hold onto the strength of the opening bit of this album.  I admire his efforts to go beyond his comfort level into new areas of pop where he was yet to traverse, but in doing so, he loses what grabbed me during his debut.  What I expected to be extremely experimental in the pop vein of things, ended up retracing the steps of his past glories; when he steps off this path, he falls too far off, leaving us waiting for him back on the trail to pop glory.