Mixtape 199 • Kenneth
Little Dragon guards a treasure hoard of beats and drama, but they are quite willing to share.
Little Dragon guards a treasure hoard of beats and drama, but they are quite willing to share.
Always a special treat to be back on the air after missing a show. This is the third show in a year that I’ve started with a Fugazi cover, in this case Failure taking on “Waiting Room” with their trademark grinding, implacable approach. The power of these songs, its distinctive musicality and lyrical content, is undiminished in the hands of any band bold enough to take on the material. Tonight also featured the confluence of several loyal listeners, including James in California, Underdog in Georgia, and Charley who is on South Korea time and got to take benefit from the time zone.
Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
There are several sounds that are most definitely British, and with their clear soaring female vocals and intimate indie pop sensibility, The Catenary Wires are a textbook example of one of them.
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.
Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.
As individuals, Jay Som and Palehound each have their musical quirks and unique style. Together as Bachelor they plot a strange new course through the realm of dream pop.
If you are of a certain age and exposure to the MTV, you would think that people in Tijuana eat barbecued iguana, but that was just Stan Ridgway and Wall of Voodoo reaching for a cheap rhyme. Polvo takes the song's nervous energy and turns it up a few notches.
Tonight, we have Fruit Salsa! A fresh variety of fruits, from the ordinary to the exotic, is selected and cut up into an hour's worth of delectable desert. Somewhere in there, The Soft Boys give us a live version of a Tin Pan Alley classic.
Sneaks uses electronic layers and a disaffected delivery to create something that lives in the past and in the future and only circumstantially in the present.