Listen to new music and watch new music videos from this week, from Death Grips, Alasdair Roberts, Ume, Toro y Moi and more.
In case you missed out on one of my favorite records from 2012, Death Grips‘ “No Love Deep Web,” check out these weirdos’ 13-MINUTE short film subconscious spelunking. Don’t adjust your monitors: there really is not much to hear for the first nine minutes or so. Good luck.
It’s Free Week here in Austin right now and one of my favorite Austin-based band Ume play tonight at Emo’s East. Ingest all of their dream-rock starting here at their Facebook page.
STRFKR may have a name that annoys me to no end, but their new “Say to You” warms my cold dead heart. This is the third song to arrive from the quartet in advance of their fresh Feb. 19 album “Miracle Mile.” It’s smooth and blippy, with a keyboard lead any mother could love.
Somebody has to release music in early January, bless their hearts, and Last Royals are among the brave during this generally dead time for new material. They’ve decided to stream their album in whole this week before the Jan. 8 drop, via Spotift. Start the stream below. I especially like the knots of nerves and acoustic sad bastardness in aptly named “I Hate California.”
I go to the bathroom, and Toro y Moi has new music. I make a sandwich, there’s more Toro y Moi. This is good. Toro y Moi is really good, pop-favoriting, groovy dance compositions. I like that Chazwick Bundick works and is willing to evolve on a micro scale, single to single, instead of only waiting for sea change albums like his own “Underneath the Pine” to put a new bruiser out there. “Say That” (with video) arrived this week, it’s got soul. It’s on “Anything in Return,” due Feb. 10.
American country and Scottish folk music have a fine history of tension and release, of the desire to murder or to take or to sleep and then just doing it. There was a winter a couple years ago that I kept Alasdair Roberts‘ “No Earthly Man” on repeat and I came into spring exhausted and ready to do anything, in such a manner. The Scottish folk writer, steeped in elements of rock ‘n’ roll and and open, poetic palate for collaborators, has a new one on Drag City coming out on Jan. 22: “A Wonder Working Stone.” You can sample all of its tunes here, but in the meantime, watch this naively entertaining promotional video involving a puppet and the hearty brogues that could tell you what time it is any day.
I think it was SXSW three years ago that I sat on the ground in Austin during SXSW and had my ass blasted/grafted/melted into the dry soil by The Bronx, and subsequently by the alt-metal/hardcore band’s latin hard rock incarnation Mariachi El Bronx. This is the former’s year for a new effort, their first in five years. “The Bronx (IV)” will drop on Feb. 5, and their single “Youth Wasted” premieres on Monday via MTV.com because why the hell not MTV. Here is the promo for its arrival.
“‘Lives Inside the Lines’ is an upbeat antidote to the pessimistic shift in the collective consciousness. It’s an ode to the bittersweet reality that we are human, we are finite, and we are flawed. Matt [Pond] gets to the core of his own humanity, and we can’t help but listen intently to see what he finds.” Sh*t, let me get out of the way. First track is killer, scratches my Rogue Wave itch. Out Feb. 5
Tim Kile was in the earliest incarnation of Arcade Fire, and has long played under the name Wild Light. They used to be on Columbia, now they’re on Kickstarter, to make something delicious.