Well here we are, sadly, at the final “Summertime” jam of the season. This song from Death Cab for Cutie, from the Plans record, isn’t technically titled “Summertime,” but the lyrics and music really capture the sense of loss that comes with the realization that summer has ended. This version of “Summer Skin” is from a Death Cab performance up in Toronto.
Enjoy one last weekend before you have to put those summer whites back in the closet until next year! Peace out, kids.
Brooklyn’s own indie-pop trio Elizabeth & the Catapult are performing tonight at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and we’re stoked to finally check them out. Musicians Elizabeth Ziman, Dan Molad, and Pete Lalish formed the band back in 2004 and just released their first full length, Taller Children, in June of this year on Verve Forecast. The album as a whole is an exceptional mix of intimate, effortlessly soulful vocals, pop melodies, jazz twists, and textured acoustics.
Ziman has a voice, with hints on Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald, that sounds like she has been singing for much longer than her 27 years would suggest. She was trained as a classical pianist and started to focus on vocal training as a teenager. She went to the Berklee School of Music on a scholarship to study classical composition. There, she met drummer and fellow Berklee student Dan Molad at a party during their final semester, and they began performing together soon after. Guitarist Pete Lalish, another Berklee student, later joined the band and they moved to Brooklyn in 2005. Using Molad’s home studio, the band financed, recorded, and produced their first EP, Elizabeth & The Catapult back in 2006.
There are a lot of great tracks on Taller Children including “Race You Home,” “Right Next to You,” “Apathy” and the albums namesake, “Taller Children.” I also found a really great video of them covering “Coconut” by Harry Nillson at their last show in NYC, the CD Release party for Taller Children at Joe’s pub back in June. In the video they are joined onstage by the Muppet costume-wearing, subway-performing-sensation Xylopholks.
Today’s Jam is not on Taller Children, it is called simply “New Song” for now, but it will hopefully be on their next release and we’ll be sure to ask them about it tonight.
There have been a myriad of iPhone applications released recently, the most interesting (and creepiest) of which use GPS technology to locate where your friends (or strangers) are in relation to you. Some of the intended uses of these apps are more tame than others. A brand new app still in development by iPhone game publisher Chillingo, called “Crystal“, is rumored to combine this type of technology with social gaming (a la Sim City). So even as people are walking around with their iPhones, they won’t have to actually interact with other people in the “real world”. As Chillingo’s Chris Byatte told Pocket Gamer.biz “We want to create the slickest, smoothest and fastest experience so the user isn’t really aware they’re even using a social gaming network.”
Maybe The xx, who are all rumored to be quite shy, were ruminating on this concept when they wrote the first single “Crystalised” off of their self-produced debut album, xx. The band members met at the Elliott School, which also claims Hot Chip among their alumni, and they recently made NME Magazine’s The Future 50 list. xx was released on Young Turks Records on August 17th and “Crystalised” was the single of the week on iTunes that week. Just a few days ago, the band appeared at the 2009 Reading and Leeds Festivals, and are currently touring with another EV2BK favorite, Florence & the Machine. This song is catchy and is sure to be huge this fall, when we’ll all hopefully be listening to it live and in person, with some real human friends!
Not to sweat Jay-Z too hard after yesterday’s post, but ever since the entirety of The Blueprint 3 (the much-hyped and anticipated eleventh studio album from Jiggaman) leaked online yesterday, it’s pretty much the only thing that music bloggers and Twitter users want to write about.
But in characteristic fashion for the de facto King of the Rap Game, Jay-Z kept his cool and has now offerred up a free stream of the record for all to enjoy through MTV’s The Leak. This seems like a pretty smart business plan to me, since he’s diverting attention away from the fact that it’s available for free download, and turning everyone’s attention to the MTV stream instead.
So in a show of support, today’s “jam” is a link to the streaming version of the whole record. I’m only one spin deep so I’m not trying to talk high points or low points, but I think I heard a line in there about “Obama on the text”… haha, Jay-Z is running this rap shit.
Yesterday, at the final JellyNYC pool party of the summer, featuring performances by Grizzly Bear, Beach House, and Vega, Jay Z and Beyoncé were in attendance. This has been all over the news today for some reason, mostly for Jay Z’s praise for Grizzly Bear and indie rock in general, for pushing the envelope in music and giving Hip Hop a reason to go further. As he told MTV, “They’re an incredible band … The thing I want to say to everyone — I hope this happens because it will push rap, it will push hip-hop to go even further — what the indie-rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring … I hope that they have a run where they push hip-hop back a little bit, so it will force hip-hop to fight to make better music, because it can happen, because that’s what rap did to rock.” Not everyone will agree with Jay’s comments but it can’t be denied that there are some really ground-breaking acts out there these days.
Another Brooklyn band who has been getting a lot of notice lately for their music and innovation, and happen to be great friends of and collaborators with Grizzly Bear, are the Dirty Projectors. Their latest album Bitte Orcha, released in June, has recieved some rave reviews. With Beyoncé on their list of top friends on myspace, they could be next in line to get pulled into the hip hop game. They make their national television debut tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman, so they seem to be on the move.
East Village to Brooklyn 