Tag: The Mattoid

Beak> welcome you into their world of strangely organic robots.

Every so often, I’ll gather up some of my favorite tracks from the last sixty minutes of my three-hour radio show and create an entire episode of The Final Hour, this one being the third such installment. This is the music that is played between 11pm and midnight, and it’s generally darker, more instrumental, sometimes even experimental, and this is an opportunity for the chronologically challenged to experience some of that closer to their regular waking hours.

Every six years or so, Valentine’s Day lands on a Tuesday, and it’s a grand excuse to update and refine the Fight Night playlist, featuring two hours of music about verbal, physical, and emotional aggression. Why go the opposite way? I’m sure those with dates have better things to do than listen to the radio, and those without might appreciate the theme. Tonight’s Final Hour is a replay of tracks from another Final Hour from about a year ago, with all-new live commentary from yours truly.

Mimi Parker, vocalist and drummer and half of the Minnesota band Low, passed away a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. It’s a shocking loss and an abrupt end to a musical career that was still unfolding; the band’s last two albums, coming at the tail end of a discography that spans decades, showed a blossoming new direction for an act that was famed for their quiet and glacial approach. We open the show with Low’s rendition of a Bee Gees classic in tribute.

The world that deliberately-lowercased beabadoobee presents in her new album Beatopia is pastel neon colors, soothing howls, bright shadows, and all manner of psychedelic oxymorons. Tonight’s show features its introduction of sorts, and closes with the unexpected krautrock drone of my current favorite discovery, Japan’s deliberately-uppercased MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, whose all-over-the-placeness manages to live up to its intriguing name.

Coming straight outta Dublin, Fontaines DC have an insistent and incisive sound that carves anthems out of marble using only guitar strings and a chiseling voice. No particular theme seems to emerge tonight, although we will be closing with Angel Olsen’s “Go Home.” Go home, it’s midnight.

The landtrain rumbled over something bumpy. Probably a hill, thought the conductor, as they made their way down the gently swaying aisle, digital holepuncher out, ready to process the ticket. The passenger, sole occupant of the car, sat oblivious, staring out the window at the landscape rushing twenty feet below, the faint sounds of some Slovakian cumbia leaking out of the expensive earbuds. “Ticket please?” The passenger startled, and reached for the sleek titanium briefcase, its embedded digital timer declaring to everyone that it held no ordinary cargo.