Oh My Goodness So Much Rock

This stuff came out on Tuesday, and it's the best I've heard all week:

• Flight - The Lead Riders EP (Zoo Music) [Twitter]
• Noisy guitars, creepy keyboards and crazy vocal distortion from Mississippi. Quite good!



The Lead Riders -
Click to order

• Released digitally; available as a free stream on many sites including this one. There are 500 12" vinyl EPs available, too (click here and scroll down to buy one).

• Sisters - Ghost Fits (Narnack) [sisterssound.com]

• I heard this one yesterday (found it here). It's noisy, fun rock-'n'-roll with lots of really fast drumming, and I like it a lot.  
• I especially liked track 3, "Sky". Track 7, "Courthouse", is pretty amazing, too. The album gets better as it goes along. Five of the tracks can be heard on their MySpace. 
• They're starting a tour here in Ohio on October 15th. As far as I can tell, this duo from Brooklyn just became a band this past summer, and they're already making quite a name for themselves.



Ghost Fits - Click to order

• These guys have made an album to be proud of. I like this as much as No Age. Recommended listening.

Here's one of this album's fantastic tracks that's not on MySpace (track 5):

Sisters - "Wake Me Up" (Ghost Fits, 9/28/2010)

Femo?

• Football, etc. - Self-titled 7" (Keep It Together/Count Your Lucky Stars/strictly no capital letters) [MySpace]
• 
  
  
  

  
  

  Football, etc. - Click to order

  This one snuck up on me—didn't expect it until October, but apparently it came out last week. Sorry, not so fresh, but definitely not a stinker. 
  
  
  Somehow when "emo" rock is sung by a lady, it can sound so right. Houston's Football, etc., for example, don't sound so different from Letters to Cleo or even Be Your Own Pet. A great voice and a great band. In a couple of weeks, they'll be recording their full-length on the Count Your Lucky Stars label in Norman, Oklahoma (Boomer Sooner). In the meantime, we have this 7" to enjoy. Hear both tracks, "Away Game" and "XXL" (yes, most if not all of their song titles have something to do with football), here.
  
  
  I was amazed, with their name and song titles, that I was able to find a video so easily. They uploaded this to YouTube themselves around this time last year, and they were sounding very quality back then, too. That shows you how long it can take to get a song from rehearsal to release, even on a tiny record label!
  
  Football, etc. - "Away Game" (rehearsal; 9/21/2009)

Women's Second Album Out Today

Can't believe I missed this one. I'm gonna have to work harder at this.

• Women - Public Strain (Flemish Eye/Jagjaguwar) [MySpace]
• Listening now (found it here—so wrong, I know, but I didn't put it there). Most of the album is kind of slow but interesting. It certainly has its moments. Track 3, "Narrow With the Hall", is on their MySpace and is a fantastic bit of noise pop. The closer, "Eyesore", is on MySpace, too. You can download those two tracks legally here.

Public Strain - Click to order

They're on tour now; see the schedule on MySpace. Detroit tonight, Toronto tomorrow, here in Columbus October 12th.










Here are the four boys from Calgary playing the opening track, "Can't You See", two weeks ago in the Netherlands:


Women - "Can't You See" (9/14/2010; Incubate, Tilburg, The Netherlands)

Stuff I Missed Yesterday

"Party Talk" - Order here

Fine pop singles being released this week:

• Craft Spells - Party Talk/Ramona 7" (Captured Tracks) [Blogspot]
• Distant but very listenable pop music from California. There's a definite disco feel here. You can hear both tracks on their MySpace. Download here. There's an interesting remix of "Party Talk" on YouTube, too.

• Further Reductions - Decidedly So/Not Unknown 7" (Captured Tracks)


"Decidedly So" - Order here

• Recommended if Depeche Mode with female vocals sounds like your thing. Dark new-wave pop from Brooklyn. See them play the A-side here, and hear the B-side on MySpace. Download here.

• Liquid Days - "Spelunkhead" single (beko) [Tumblr]



"Spelunkhead" - Download here

• Sounds like Suicide gone pop. Also from Brooklyn. These guys should really play with Further Reductions. I probably wouldn't attend the gig, but I think they would do well together. Download here.

And the winner is? I'll have to go with the B-side to Liquid Days' "Spelunkhead" single— "Out of the Mist". There's some interesting stuff happening on this track. I made a little stream for ya with the closest thing I could find to a picture of this mysterious duo who has even fewer listeners on Last.fm than my own band:

Liquid Days - "Out of the Mist" (9/26/2010)

Color-Free Record Week

Halcyon Digest - Click to order

A few interesting things coming out this week. There seems to be a black-and-white theme—coincidence? Yeah, probably.

• Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (4AD) [halcyondigest.com] [Blogspot] 
• Some call it "shoegaze punk", but that doesn't quite capture it. They're kind of hippie-ish in my opinion. Hear the first single, "Revival", and see the video for the second single, "Helicopter".

Mixed Race - Click to order

• Tricky - Mixed Race (Domino) [trickysite.com] 
• Eccentric British trip hop from a master of the genre. Stream it free on NME.

• No Age - Everything In Between (see previous post) 

• Greatest Hits - Danse Pop 7" (Olde English Spelling Bee) [MySpace] 
• They're giving this thing away for free on SoundCloud. You can also order it on white vinyl. It's titled well—this is fun indie dance pop with a disco vibe. See here:
GREATEST HITS "DANSE POP" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Danse Pop 7" - Order here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Anything I missed?

Welcome / No Age's Latest

Hello.
Welcome to the 8-Tracks Fierce Blog. 8-Tracks Fierce is a monthly music podcast I started in 2009 featuring new tracks by underground rock artists. It's an atypical show because I almost never play a full track, and I talk about the song and the artist while it's playing (not the whole time—just part of it). That way I can get eight tracks into a half-hour show and just give the listener a taste of what that artist is doing. 


The show went on a long hiatus last October, and I've finally decided to bring it back in January 2011. I would do it sooner, but my wife and I just moved from New York to Ohio and we're about to move into our first house and have not one, but two babies. So I need some time for things to settle down. Even though there have only been five episodes and there hasn't been a new one for nearly a year, 8-Tracks Fierce is somehow ranked #23 in the alternative music category on PodOmatic, a leading podcast distributor on the Web. I hope to move it up in the ranks quickly next year.


The show will have mostly the same format when it returns, but the content will be a little tighter. For previous episodes I would desperately look for albums that had come out in the past year, and I wasn't that smart about it. I've now found ways to get newer content so I can bring you the freshest music, and I'm going to narrow the genres down to a certain...aesthetic. No more mellow or folky music just to get more listeners. Just the most interesting and exciting noisy, punky, psychy indie and alternative rock I can find.


Another thing that will change, as you can see, is that there will be an associated blog. This is just to give the show more of a "home" on the Web and to share a little more content here and there. In today's case, I wanted to talk about No Age's new album, which is slated to be released next week. Thanks to some really awful people in Internet land, I've had it for weeks already. Thanks, awful people!


No Age - Everything In Between (9/28/2010; Sub Pop Records)

I saw No Age, a duo who plays noisy, creative punk rock, here in Columbus last week, opening for Pavement. They made Pavement look like wussies. Their new album, the third of their full-length efforts, continues their vibe but in a slightly new direction that's difficult to describe. I'm sure many reviewers have done a good job of writing about it already, and there will be much more next week. Suffice it to say that I recommend this album if you like noise and creativity. No Age abounds with both. Even though they're communist hippies.


The first single from the album is track 2, "Glitter", but if I were doing an episode of 8-Tracks Fierce this month, I would definitely play track 12, "Shred and Transcend". I like to find those little nuggets of goodness for you. Here they are playing it last May at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona. Oh yeah, they've added a keyboard/sampler/noisemaker guy to their live act, and I definitely approve. Not sure if he's an official member of the band, but he looks it if you see them live and don't know anything about them.

No Age - "Shred and Transcend" (May 2010; Primavera Sound Festival; Barcelona)

Download (not my link)

No Age on Blogspot