Mixtape 250 • Poppies
Like light glinting off a distant wave, La Luz bring you a realm of possibilities.
Like light glinting off a distant wave, La Luz bring you a realm of possibilities.
We’re starting out with new music from Beatsteaks, who are taking on the Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)” for our opener. Tonight’s show featured both Molecular Steve and Delicate Steve, both of whom have new albums out, so I expect another couple of Steve-heavy shows in the future.
After a dormancy of a few years, The Dodos have re-emerged and proven to be anything but extinct. This duo makes a sound that is easy to recognize but hard to describe, a sort of acoustic progressive metal filled with droning rhythms and cascading guitars that you can clearly hear on the appropriately-titled “Unicorn”.
The story of Nell Smith & The Flaming Lips is as improbable and unexpected as their album full of Nick Cave covers. Existing in a triangular universe of mutual admiration, Where the Viaduct Looms gave us the opening track tonight, the menacing “Red Right Hand”.
If The Wedding Present were the traditional sort, they would be bringing coral to the festivities. This one is from earlier in their career, closer to the wood years, but the Velvet Underground never goes out of style. This is from another good VU tribute album, Heaven and Hell from 1991 or so.
The name would lead you to expect old-school riff-heavy fuzzed-out psychedelia with a strong southeast Asian accent, and it would lead you true.
The Texas trio returns with their very specific blend of surf, psychedelia, and exotic spice, but this time around they’ve dropped the “instrumental” part by adding gloriously subdued vocalizations to some of the tracks.
The girl group aesthetic survives, drenched in spring reverb and distant crooning, and it’s not just unscathed, it’s very agitated and ready to rip throats.
Heavily influenced by surf music and pre-psychedelic jangle, this collection of songs show a lot of energy and musicality, with Jean’s nicely hyper-reverberated guitar sharing the spotlight with her hypnotic vocals.
Well, that was an interesting show. Not much listener activity tonight, though that's OK since I had my hands full with SSL certificate madness in order to finish the Secret Project that is this site itself. Perseverance at the command line won the day (and the small green lock on your browser bar), even if it was interrupted every minute or few with ongoing radio show requirements.
Side note: It is impossible to purchase or renew a certificate without at least two password resets. I'm not sure which of the thermodynamics laws governs this, but it seems to be fairly immut