Tag: Yo La Tengo

Raw as a blister and smooth as obsidian, Okay Kaya is a spinner of tales and shifter of moods.

There’s a lot of great new music out there right now, and near the top of the heap is The Bug Club, whose most recent release is filled to the brim with joyful nuggets of everyday life. The school year has started and the coffers are overflowing with a lot of great new music.

A third installment of Version Control, our semi-regular exploration of tribute and imitation.

Enter Tommy Guerrero’s world of light breeze and perfect t-shirt weather.

All hail the mighty kraken — it’s about time some brave band took up the Squid name for themselves.

It’s been a while since something has made me sit down and listen like the North Americans’ steel-string ambient flow.

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.

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.

The new album from Jen Cloher is magnificent, and when her Twitter account favorited the playlist entry for the lead track tonight, I near swooned. I recommend you listen to I Am The River, The River Is Me from start to finish, and enjoy something you’ll be doing for years to come for the first time. In other news, our recently adopted cat Princess Otoboke Beaver (aka Pris) gave birth to four healthy kittens on St. Patrick’s day — Ziggy, Stardust, Spider, and Mars.

As it happens, if yours truly has a Valentine’s gig, it’ll be followed by one on Pi Day. Except on leap years. But the point here is that I thought about doing a show themed on circles, spheres, and other such expressions of the number and decided against it, but keep your ears peeled for some future incarnation of a “Round and Round” playlist. Instead, tonight we kick things off with the sort-of eponymous track from The Nude Party’s latest release, and wrap things up with about 30 seconds of Railroad Jerk, because technical difficulties.