As we dive into the weekend, we've got bedroom pop.
Alden Ginger - "Refinance Your Mortgage". Lofi fun from Alden Ginger, one half of The Unicorns. It's like a kid playing in his basement, drums rattling while the organ swings. Imagine a Teddy-Bear Picnic where one of the bears is wearing a vintage T and Buddy Holly glasses. This is his band. And while it's messy and hissy, the whimsy in it is what makes the Unicorns so appealing - the play amidst musical hooks and fumbles. Dan ripped this mp3 from the stream that used to exist on a New Music Canada page [google cache]. Alden cites his influences as "Baudelaire, David Bowie, Caprice, the wurlitzer, [and] The Beatles".
Both of these songs can be grabbed from The Robot Ate Me homepage, but that's a coincidence:
The Robot Ate Me - "The Genocide Ball". On Vacation is a two CD set. The first half is the weaker record, strange scratchy jazz recordings and Ryland Bouchard making awkward comments against Hitler, Jesus, and the world's evil greedy governments. That said, "The Genocide Ball" is unoppressive wonderful, like Ben Gibbard singing along with Kid Koala. It's a breezy wheeling tune - a clarinet leading the way, Bouchard wielding a cane. Better still, the political barbs are subservient to the melody, sideshows for the main, toe-tapping attraction. [buy]
The Robot Ate Me - "On Vacation". The title track somersaults away from jazzbacked ditties and towards crumpled indiepop fun. CD 2 is full of peculiar, good-natured tunes - like The Unicorns without the sex, The Microphones with a marching band. A suntanned melodica wheezes between stamps of drum and cymbal, Bouchard singing out a hopeful yellow vacation day. "I can buy almost anything that I'll ever need!" It's a song for the first or last day of school, for long strides out of a building and into the grass, dandelions puffing into bloom. [buy]
Keith posted an absolutely amazing track from the upcoming William Shatner record. It's "the Shat" accompanied by Joe Jackson (and produced by Ben Folds), covering Pulp's "Common People." Shatner's speaking it all so honestly, with such a Cocker glint. The instrumental build is a cleaner, simpler version of the Pulp original, the tune reimagined for a 21st Century marketplace, M83 and Sum41. (I've put a low-fidelity mp3 rip of Keith's .mov here.)
See you Monday!