Albert Einstein “Imagination is more important that knowledge”
Constantine Papadakis “For the sake of peace and prosperity, we must respect individualism yet unite under common goals.”
Yesterday evening, Brooklyn indie break-out band MGMT released their first single from their upcoming Congratulations full length. The song is entitled “Flash Delirium” and although we are unable to offer Drexel students direct download of the song, it can be streamed or downloaded at the bottom of the post here.
The first single of Dr. Dog’s sixth studio album to be released April 6th, “Shadow People”, was also played, setting the crowd absolutely on fire. “Shadow People” is somewhat like “The Breeze” from the album Fate in that it begins quietly and solely by Scott McMicken, and then grows increasingly louder and more complex with accompaniment of instruments with Toby Leaman and Frank McElroy doing secondary vocals. These ballads sound like the Beatle’s in their psychedelic stage and were absolutely adored by the fans present.
Honus pounded on his keyboard and the band ripped into the beginning of their crazed series of songs. At one point, Honus came out with a megaphone and a trenchcoat like he had just escaped from a mental institution while at another point he changed into a sequenced green shirt to express his feminine side. Meanwhile, the crowd danced and moshed like they were at some sort of psychotic religious service and there is no doubt in my mind that a majority of the crowd were under the influence of at least one variety of pharmaceuticals.
Yesterday’s This Addiction, the seventh studio album from the trio, finds the band longing to recreate the appealing, straightforward punk rock songs that earned them their fan base in the beginning. The album is following their last two releases, Crimson and Agony & Irony, which were less punk rock sounding and more pop. Although This Addiction is a step forward from the, in my opinion, dull Agony & Irony, it still lacks the magic that the earlier records possessed.
These bands together comprise the new indie genre phenomenon know as Chillwave. For those of you not familiar with the genre asking “WTF is Chillwave?” – Wikipedia describes it as being “characterized by heavy use of synthesizers, downtempo disco beats, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.” Honestly, I couldn’t give a much better description myself – the genre uses mainly synthetic instruments and stresses melody and complex arrangements. However, the overall vibe is one of relaxation. Essentially, Chillwave feels like one is sunbathing in the hallucinogenic sun-rays of a star in some distant and deranged galaxy.
For me The Catcher in the Rye is a piece of literature that is both comforting and unsettling. It feels to the reader as though they are not by themselves – Holden represents the countless people in the world who feel as though they are held down or alone. On the other hand, “The Catcher” pinpointed the word I had been looking for at that time in my adolescence to describe the people with which I had made contact. Holden taught me they were phonies. He taught me never to be a phony, but he also taught me that there was nothing I could do about it. No one could ever catch all those kids running through the rye, and so all I could hope to do was to never get too close to that cliff that Holden talked about.
Aside from being full of me acting like this snow storm is the apocalypse (I insisted on going to North and spending $20 to “make it through the weekend”), today was full of some really cool music news. On my old blog, which can be found at www.nclrmusic.blogspot.com, when I had days where there was just a lot of this really cool music news, I used to post it in bullet-point form for my readers to get through quickly. I think that’s the easiest way to share these things. So here it is, you’re music headlines for 2/5/10:
Because of this change in music and the way listeners consume music, the music industry is now at a crossroads. They are now forced into deciding whether it should give up on trying to make any money off of recorded music, or crusade against illegal downloads and fight a war that is seemingly as endless and useless as the war on drugs or the War on Terror. I believe that if illegal downloading isn’t stopped soon, music will become entirely free, and bands will become a thing of the past, replaced by machines reproducing sampled sounds.
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