Monday Music Roundup

Spurred by an article I read on the Wall Street Journal site this morning about the movement to ban Comic Sans (and other “fonts of ill will”), I’ve been thinking about typefaces today. One of the hardest things about this new site was the damn typeface. Are you aware, dear reader, of the boggling array of choices one has when selecting the visual representation of their words? And that everyone’s computers may see it differently anyway?

Talking with the guys who laid out my new site often boggles my mind. They send me links to whole sites discussing typefaces, almost as if it were a fetish (is it? It is, isn’t it). They compose sentences like, “I find something pleasingly humanizing about slab-serifs.” It is a whole other world that makes my head spin. A pleasing distraction. As I threatened to them over email a few minutes ago, I am going to start dropping serious typeface knowledge at bars, and then run off with a rich font heir.

When I’m not geeking out over the appearance of my written words in this digital age, I am listening to some new tunes. Of course.

Angela
Jarvis Cocker
The first single from his second solo album, Jarvis Cocker himself (of Pulp fame, and one of my favorite smarmy smarm voices) took time to answer a few preemptive questions about the release. My favorite is: “#3 – HAS JARVIS GONE ROCK? No – but during the course of touring his last record he discovered that, with this band, he COULD rock & so he’d be a fool not to. (When the situation demanded it).” Clearly.  Further Complications was recorded in Chicago with Steve Albini while the band was in town for the Pitchfork Music Festival, and is due 5/19 on Rough Trade.

First Person
Jenny Owen Youngs
This slip of a track (it’s all of forty seconds) starts of Jenny Owen Youngs‘ sophomore album in completely irresistible fashion. All handclaps and ukuleles, this seems like a tune Feist could choreograph something for. Following the success of her ferociously honest Batten The Hatches, her new album Transmitter Failure (May 26, Nettwerk) is richly orchestrated, backed at times with the string section from the Spring Awakening musical (oh, I liked that post).

Magic Show
Electric Owls
After years fronting The Comas, Andy Herod decided (in his words) to “stop playing music for a while because being in a band was ruining my life.” He tells the story of leaving New York City, sitting late at night as a house party wound down to the strains of Neutral Milk Hotel, and how he “just started pulling out all of this old stuff and listening and remembering and learning all over again what used to really electrify my heart.” Recording with local Asheville, North Carolina musician friends under the name Electric Owls, the shimmering and authentic result is an album called Ain’t Too Bright, out on Vagrant Records on May 5. This is just what I needed today.

The Boy From Lawrence County
Felice Brothers
Does anyone else think that this dude should get together with the girl from North Country? Seems obvious to me. Last year The Felice Brothers knocked me flat when they came in all whirling dervishes of accordions, wonderfully wordy lyrics, and pure undiluted joy in concert. The sophomore album Yonder Is The Clock (out now on Conor Oberst’s Team Love label) is largely a pensive, gorgeous, twilight album. This song grabbed me on the long drive home Sunday night — so resigned and wistful. It sounds like it already happened a long time ago, the quietly plucking banjo plunking like rain on a cabin’s tin roof, just starting to fall or right after the storm has passed overhead. “Roll on old silver river through the Iron Range, past the sleeping trains that wait. Gold and amber petals in your water wade.”

Born A Man
Clem Snide
I found myself in a conversation at the Clem Snide show on Tuesday night with my friend Luke (the wonderful illustrator responsible for that Fuel/Friends header logo above!) and we had to keep straightening out in our minds how Clem Snide is the band and Eef Barzelay is the frontman. However you say his first name, Eef is a songwriter that impresses me in the league of John Darnielle and the Decemberists — you know, the kids who could have soundtracked an SAT study party. I cleaned out the merch booth after his incisively impressive set, picking up more discs to get acquainted with his extensive catalog. Their newest album Hungry Bird (429 Records) is represented well by this vivid song that hit me the hardest during his set, with its bluesy melody that somehow manages to feel effervescent. When Eef repeated the line over and over again – “We are just bracing for the impact by loosening our limbs…”  something in my chest tightened. “Every single one of us has a kitten up a tree.”

Monday Music Roundup

“Won’t you wear . . . a sweater?”

We are requested by Mister McFeely to don a sweater of some sort this Thursday, in honor of what would have been Mister Rogers‘ 80th birthday. I think I’ll wear my green hoodie that I can zip up all the way, pause, and then zip it halfway back down. Man, I loved that (American kids) show when I was a tot. To this day, whenever I catch a rerun and he tells me that I am special, I believe him.

But seriously. Why was the postman on a childrens’ show named Mister McFeely?!

Tunes for the weekly grind:

Girls Like It Too
(new, live in Buenos Aires)
Jarvis Cocker
Jarv says that girls like it too, I only wish the audio here was a bit better so I could vouch for the girls in this equation. We’ll just have to take his word for it; he sounds like he would know. I like Jarvis because he always sounds a little smarmy, dramatic, and very Euro-metropolitan. This song also revives that fantastic stage whisper way he has of singing that makes you feel like he’s letting you in on a secret. Huge potential in this brand new song — it’s melodic with an arching, anthemic chorus — and the live rip isn’t half bad.

Snow in Berlin
Zookeeper
“Okay here we go,” warns the opening voice on this bright and effervescent tune from Austin, TX five-piece Zookeeper. The song melds horns with retro pop sensibilities, and feels like the anticipation in the sky the moment before the sun bursts out from behind the horizon. Another album art selection that falls under the conspiratorial hushed-whisper “I think they have problems” header, Becoming All Things is out now on Belle City Pop!. These guys played something like a dozen shows in Austin this last week, and hey! My beloved Dodge had them on his serious SIRIUS show back in December.

What She Turned Into
Retribution Gospel Choir
The purest, most enthusiastic music-blog stop in my regular rounds easily falls to the guys at Said The Gramophone (for example, on Sam Cooke). They recently posted up this track that I’d never heard a thing about, featuring Red House Painter/Sun Kil Mooner Mark Kozelek producing music by Alan Sparhawk of Low, Matt Livingston and Eric Pollard. According to StG, “That means that [Kozelek] strode into the recording booth and turned the amps up. He turned them right up. He slapped Sparhawk across the face, tore Livingston’s shirt and punched a hole in Pollard’s tom. He glowered at them. Then he went back to the mixing desk and set the thing on fire. “Play,” he said over the crackles. “Play me a pop song.” It was going to rain that night, hard.” I mean COME ON. Yes. Listen, and it is exactly so. Retribution Gospel Choir has a full-length album out tomorrow on Kozelek’s Caldo Verde label.

Silence
Portishead
And so the first new Portishead album in 11 years begins with a crackly, mysterious transmission in what I think might be urgent Portguese, kind of like the french woman in Lost. The song crests, thrumming and unrelenting, mysterious and sexy. In short, all the things you’d hope for from these Bristol trip-hop pioneers. But what you didn’t expect was that they’d make you feel like a spy in the cold sleek streets of Berlin, rather than a beautiful blissed-out clubgoer. Third is out April 28, and Portishead is another fine band that’s gonna be at Coachella.

Young Folks (Peter, Bjorn and John cover)
The Kooks & Simon Wilcox
Resist it as you might (and I did try to resist initially), the whistling from the original version of this song was the catchiest thing on the radio in 2007. Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street on an especially sunny day and I want to whistle something; this does nicely (that or the Andy Griffith theme). Therefore when The Kooks covered this song with lovely Canadian gal Simon Wilcox and cut the pursed-lip magic, something else got lost in the transaction. It is still catchy and adds that cute brogue. From a recent free NME disc, the Kooks say “We tried to make it more of a rock’n'roll song, throwing a bit of Motown and doo-wop into the mix.” See what you think.

And hey, happy St. Paddy’s! Me and Sir Jameson plan to do a wee bit o’ celebrating.