Tag: black midi

It's an all-new rehash, with the fifth edition of Version Control!

Nothing can foil the pigeonholing into a genre like a clarinet. The band uses this and other analog sounds to weave minimalism and maximalism, presenting recognizable indie or songwriter tropes before smashing them in their musical supercollider.

Geordie makes good use of a voice that's as smooth as silk and a delivery that promises the utmost reliability, but it's not making a discernible effort to distract from the wonderful glitchiness and complication that hides in the background.

The carefully curated collection of artists performing tracks made famous by other artists continues, in the third annual Version Control. Some of these could be so obscure as to ask “is it a cover if I never heard the original” but we can leave the answering of that to the armchair philosophers. I’ll go on the record saying a good song is a good song no matter who performs it. Also, to the listener and fellow cassette afficionado that complained about Maxell and Memorex being mentioned in the same breath: my point is that neither one of them is TDK.

Sure, we’ve all heard of the Eiffel Tower, but what do we know about the architect whose name it bears? April March breaks it all down on this version of the Pixies’ song. Also in this show, a special-delivery track from Planets in the Ocean, a new project from one of my favorite vocalists, Robb Benson.

I always thought Kurt Vile was a play on the name of the German composer that gave us “Mack The Knife,” but that seems to be his given name (bonus: middle name is Samuel). Sonically, he’s more in line with Lou Reed than Weill, topping his awkward nouveau folk with a voice that may not be the most musical but is actually the perfect medium to express this particular malarkey.

It takes a certain mindset to take on a King Crimson song, and clearly black midi is of that mindset. Is it a bugle call for all prog rockers everywhere to take up their Moogs and sparkly jumpsuits and join the New Prog Revolution? I can support that.

I’ve done a couple dozen all-covers shows already, usually during fundraising, but for some reason have never come up with a name for them. It must have been because the painfully obvious Version Control hadn’t occurred to me yet, a real embarrassing confession given my day job in the realm of code. At any rate, it is here, and we are going to be versioning them semantically starting now.

For quite some time, Mommyheads have delivered the sort of complex pop and lyrical insight that fills in the cracks and gaps in your musical thinking with new ideas and sounds.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.