Dammit, these eMusic cats have to to be some of the coolest people on the planet. Not only is their taste damn near impeccable (see their eMusic selects program….I feel like I owe them my first born for turning me onto the Rural Alberta Advantage) but they also put out amazing content themselves. I’d totally be jealous of them if I didn’t love them so much.

Up today is an interview with the uber influential but reclusive Black Tambourine, where they talk about fun stuff like, you know, potential reunions. It’s worth a read. Trust me. If you don’t trust me, trust eMusic.

Haven’t heard of them before? Have you heard The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart? Crystal Stilts? Pretty much every single band in Brooklyn and San Francisco today? Then you’ve seen people who likely pray to their worn Black Tambourine vinyl every single morning.

A link to the interview, some excepts, and an mp3, after the jump…

Every single band seems to reunite; what about Black Tambourine?

Pam: A reunion show would be fun for me, because I miss the guys and it would ensure we were all in the same room again. I’d love to play the songs again, too! But it would be kinder to think of the audience in this instance. And realistically, we live too far away from each other for a reunion to happen easily. We all have really young kids that aren’t yet strong enough to come along as our roadies, and I’m still a nervous wreck when it comes to performing in front of people. If it didn’t go well, it would be such a bring-down! So I feel A-OK about not having a reunion show planned. A reunion BBQ would probably be better for all involved.

Mike: Yeah, I’m with Pam here. I think it would be super fun but it would be a huge bummer if we weren’t really great, which is more than a possibility. I do think one of the things that attracts people to the band is the mystery of not knowing what we might be like live. I’d hate to spoil that by getting our balding, paunchy selves (the guys that is, Pam is still her lovely self!) on stage and making a sub-standard racket.

Read the entire interview here.

[mp3] Black Tambourine – For Ex-Lovers Only

So imagine my surprise and interest when, upon stumbling into work this morning (I’m sick…boo!) and booting up my computer, I saw that one of the Holy Trinity of music blogs (Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, and Sterogum) had undergone a major redesign. Like, drastically major. This, ladies and gentleman, is news of the highest order. But what does it mean?

Okay, so I’m going to be reaching into my training as a music blogtologist (it’s sort of like proctology, only you study a lot more asses) for some analysis here. Bear with me. Pretension will be abound below.

In my mind, there have always been THE BIG THREE (Pfork, Gum, and BV). I say this with apologies to PopMatters, Gorilla v Bear, Tiny Mix Tapes, and any number of large and/or worthwhile blogs. You are important, I love you, but you’re not the big three. Had Stylus Magazine not gone under three years ago, I might be talking about the big four. Alas, no.

Pfork was always the biggest and it was always the most magazine orientated, with separate sections for news, reviews, and columns/articles. Originally updated once a day, the site has moved in a slightly more blog orientated direction with continual updates. Even so, Pfork holds much more in common with a magazine such as Spin than with a music blog.

BrooklynVegan was always the most blog formatted of the three. While technically a regional site, they cover so many national bands that a reader from any where in the nation could read it with interest. Its format has changed little to none since its inception.

Finally, Stereogum has tended to occupy a ground between the magazine format of Pfork and the blog format of BV. It has no reviews but it does have columns/articles. It is continually updated throughout the day. Stereogum was redesigned three years or so ago when Buzznet bought it and the reviews were, at least among those I’ve talked to, relatively negative. Which is why this redesign is interesting.

This new Stereogum design is a distinct move towards a more Pfork magazine format. But what I worry about is, Stereogum doesn’t do any one thing better than anybody else. They were good as a blog but now they’re moving away from that towards a magazine format and Stereogum’s content is not particularly magazine orientated. It’s mostly news. There are columns and articles but they appear infrequently nowadays. From a personal point of view, I read Stereogum to scan it. They used to post a headline and the first paragraph of a story. Often times I’d be drawn into a story I would normally not read. With their new format, they have eliminated this; now you only see the headlines. I wonder if this will allow me to spend less time on their site. After all, what does Stereogum do at this point that Pfork or BV doesn’t do? And both of those sites update far more frequently. Again, personal experience here, but I think Pfork and BV have eclipsed ‘Gum and will continue to keep doing so. When was, after all, the last time ‘Gum broke a band? I can’t remember. Now when was the last time Pfork did (at some point this week, probably…) or BV (sometime this month, probably…).

Finally, here is the way things used to look…

BrooklynVegan in February of 2005
Stereogum in Jan 2005
Pitchfork in 2003

This great news comes to us from our friends at 17dots (the links contains an interview w/ the band and them performing the new track) :

“An exciting announcement today from our good friends and eMusic Selects alumni the Rural Alberta Advantage. They’ve partnered with the fantastic T-Shirt company Threadless (who I was spending large chunks of my paycheck supporting for a while there!) to give fans the opportunity to name a heretofore untitled song.”

Evidently, the band has partnered with the t-shirt company Threadless, and are asking the Threadless users to suggest a title for the tune which they’ve been referring to as ‘New Song’. Check out the comment on Threadless Tee-V to see what song titles have been suggested so far and check out the song “after the jump”

[mp3] The Rural Alberta Advantage – “Edmonton”
[mp3] The Rural Alberta Advantage – “In The Summertime”

http://radioexile.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Help_Name_a_Rural_Alberta_Advantage_Song-500×248.jpg
http://radioexile.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Help_Name_a_Rural_Alberta_Advantage_Song-120×120.jpg?rand=355877

There, deep in the nether regions of space, a small crack forms in the absolute blackness of nothing, before quickly bursting into a circular tear that burns through space like film celluloid. This tear is quickly followed by a glass-like shattering of the cosmos and the space-time continuum itself rips apart.

A gaping hole is formed.

Through this hole, in rhythmic time, come a thousand billion footsteps as the armies of Satan march in formation. Horrible terrible beasts of nightmarish origin and with foul weapons lumber through towards earth, every footstep in perfect synchronization with its neighbor. Every star, quark, and celestial body shakes from the deafening din of these marching beasts.

Out of the hole they continue to stream in a never-ending torrent of terror. They begin to chant. Their static filled words are completely fuzzed out by the time they reach earth but their meaning is clear.

The camera then zooms back to a sleeping earth and the song ends.

The work of the Olivia Tremor Control and its successor/evolutionary heir Circulatory System has always been cinematic in scope and intent. The first Olivia Tremor Control album was a soundtrack for a never filmed movie and the second OTC and first Circulatory System albums were among the most “visual” albums released in recent decades. Perhaps because of their close association with psychedelics and the dream world, the music made by the OTC/Circulatory System always seems to invoke visions, like my interpretation above of Signal Morning’s first track, “Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant”. The genius of these tracks was that, because they were “soundtracks” for films that never existed, the listener was able to create their own mental film to match with the provided soundtrack. The result was a richness and depth of listening experience that few bands have ever matched.

I hated Signal Morning, the second Circulatory System album, for a long time. One of my most anticipated albums for almost five years now, I hated these songs from when I first heard the them in a small college basement three years ago. Despite massively lowered expectations, I was still disappointed when I first heard the recorded Signal Morning in its entirety a month ago.

I now think this album is completely brilliant and possibly the best and fullest realization of what the Olivia Tremor Control first set out to do well over a decade ago.

The Olivia Tremor Control is one of the best and most underrated bands of the 1990s. Formed as one of the pillars of the Elephant 6 Collective (which also spawned the Apples In Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Of Montreal), they released two truly incredible double albums of sprawling, densely layered, massively catchy 60’s influenced pop rock that more or less was of a higher quality than the material that influenced it. Upon the band’s late ‘90’s break-up, almost the entirely of the band reformed as Circulatory System (the main loss being OTC co-founder Bill Doss) and released an equally trippy but much darker album that was as good as the earlier OTC releases but without its predecessor’s sometimes overindulgent electronic noodling.

Which brings us to Signal Morning. By far the most original and least backwards looking of the previous three albums, Signal Morning is the first OTC/CS album which feels like a completely modern album of their own creation, untethered to past notions or sounds. The production is much finer than that of the original OTC albums, which strongly benefits recordings as intricate and dense as these. Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of this album is that, unlike almost any other recording I’ve ever heard, these songs sound sculpted out of solid blocks of sound. Only the bare minimum of superfluous sound is removed, leaving thick and heavy blocks of fuzzy noise. This explains my three years of disappointment with these songs; the melodies are there and the songs are incredibly catchy, but one must first rub ones hands over and over the monolithic outside of these songs in order to pick up the faint lines. In that respect think of Signal Morning as the anti-Grizzly Bear. Instead of finely woven and intricate songs you get dense carved blocks of sounds.

This is one of my top albums of the year. I’m approaching my tenth listen and each time this album improves. Knowing the depth of the Olivia Tremor Control albums, I would be shocked if I were still not uncovering new lines and carvings in these songs 50 listens from now. Highly recommended. There is nothing else out there that sounds like this.

[mp3] Circulatory System – “Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant”

http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/radioexile/uploads/2009/07/381-500×500.jpg
http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/radioexile/uploads/2009/07/381-120×120.jpg?rand=576548

Throughout my weeks and months I collect songs by relatively unknown bands that are deserving of hype. I try to post a collection of these songs every week but some times life gets crazy and I don’t get around to it for a couple weeks. The common theme of this week’s Hype Device is that Pitchfork has stolen my thunder on 4 out of 5 of these songs. I made this Hype Device a couple of weeks ago and in the interim, P4K reviewed 4 of these songs. Damn them to hell, I say.

Oh well, at least they have good taste.

On with the show…

[mp3] Frat Dad – “Brosef” [MySpace]

I found this song about a month ago on the (completely awesome) Underwater People‘s Summertime Showcase compilation. Upon first listen, Brosef by the New Jersey two-piece Frat Dad immediately stood out as being completely brilliant. In a year when no-fi seems to be all the rage (see: Wavves, Mazes, Pens, Vivian Girls, Times New Viking) and yet so frequently is unsatisfying (see, yet again: Wavves, Mazes, Pens, Vivian Girls, Times New Viking), it’s great to see a band step up to the plate and deliver the sort of lo-fi masterpiece Guided By Voices used to deliver yearly or that a hundred forgotten Nuggets or Pebbles bands cranked out weekly. Brosef is a perfectly fuzzed out garage rock nugget that sounds like laying on your back in a warm ocean somewhere, slowly dying. Not to compare everything to Neutral Milk Hotel but if NMH had existed in the 1960′s as a melancholic garage band, this is perhaps what they would have sounded like. God, I love this song.

So I was pretty excited that I’d both found this song that was completely brilliant and that nobody else had written about it yet. I search of Hype Machine turned up zero results for Frat Dad or Brosef. I was going to post this song last week and expose the world to it’s glories. I would become the famous blogger who first posted about Brosef! It would be I who was featured in the BBC documentary 20 years on down the road, right after an aged Bono explains that Frat Dad was U2′s primary influence through the years. That would be me!

But I was tired. So I went to bed with this piece half written and then proceeded to procrastinate for the next week or so and then…..THIS.

FUCKERS!!

That was MINE!!! WHY couldn’t you have let me just have just this one! You’re Pitchfork! You get to break EVERYTHING. ME, I’m some bored kid with a laptop posting in his boxers in my Crown Heights apartment with the rent lower than many bar tabs.

It’s okay, I’m over it. So long as the world gets to hear this totally kick ass song.

Assholes.

[mp3] The Color Wheels – “Green Means Go”

I feel live I’ve had this song on my iPod for years. Maybe I have. Honestly, I cannot remember. It’s not a song that you can date to a specific time or place, like so much other indie music (“oh, that is so post-clap your hands say yeah but pre-wolf parade”). I do know why I had the song – The Color Wheels are from Poughkeepsie, as am I, and being as fiercely nationalistic about my hometown as I am (never mind that I moved away as soon as I could….), I was eager to listen to the one area band that did not list The Used as a influence on MySpace. That was a run-on sentence. I apologize to my English teachers of past.

No, The Color Wheels are a power pop band, thank you very much. And you know what? They’re pretty damn good at it. Maybe even really good. Possibly even really fucking good. Best moment in this song is when lead singer Jon sings “Andrew DUBYOU Kay” and he just nails it with authentic enthusiasm, much like Lou Reed’s laugh in “Heroin”. If you, like I, grew up on Weezer in the ’90′s, then you basically need to put this song on your iPod post-haste.

[mp3] Circulatory System – “Overjoyed”

I fucking love the first Olivia Tremor Control album. I love the second Olivia Tremor Control album. I like the first Circulatory System (OTC’s successor) album. The long awaiting second Circulatory System album? Um…..was not impressed at all first listen. Or second. Or third, for that matter. It seemed like an unfocused mess. But then I focused on this song alone and then I realized, this song is pretty good. Does it rank with OTC’s best? No. Well, maybe. It’s hard to describe, but there is this intangible to Overjoyed that makes it sound like nothing else being released today. Maybe that’s worth something. Put on your good headphones (this is OTC/CS after all!) and listen for yourself.

[mp3] The Clean – “In The Dreamlife You Need A Rubber Soul”
Fuck.

Sorry, I’ve dropped the f-bomb in every other song review this post so I figure I should keep up my streak. Somewhere my parents weep.

But you know what? This song deserves strong language. The Clean are a legendary and influential band out of New Zealand. They’re primarily known for their work in the 1980′s. I personally love their song “Point That Thing Somewhere Else”. They just reunited recently and are now on Merge. That’s about all you need you need to know. Pitchfork, those thunder stealing bastards, only gave this song a 7. I think it’s a 9. How can you get any better than this? This is as good as anything The Clean have ever released. Not only that, but here they sound vaguely mid-1960′s Rolling Stones-ish. You can’t lose with The Clean.

[mp3] Dinosaur Jr – “Over It”

Everything that can be said about this song is better said by the video. Bonus points if you can figure you which indie rock legend makes a cameo.

http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/radioexile/uploads/2009/06/remixtapeimage-300x109jpg-120×109.jpg?rand=772275
http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/radioexile/uploads/2009/06/cassette-tape-iii-500×437.jpg