Our Staff Pick of the Week comes from barista Estera Stanciu, who has been digging Black Moth Super Rainbow‘s Dandelion Gum.
Black Moth Super Rainbow is an enigmatic band sitting on the edge of post-industrial Pittsburgh. Their musical body is composed of electronic feet, psychedelic arms, warped/dreamy vocals, hazy-Technicolor eyes and lips made of mutable butterflies.
Dandelion Gum is a perfect backdrop to a lazy sunny afternoon — an essential summer album!
VIEW PHOTOS FROM JOSH RITTER’S RECORD EXCHANGE RECORD STORE DAY IN-STORE HERE!
Purchase Josh Ritter‘s new CD So Runs the World Away at The Record Exchange and we’ll give you a free signed CD booklet!
Our friend Josh has signed a limited quantity of booklets from the new CD, and they’re available exclusively to Record Exchange customers who buy the CD this week for a special sale price of $12.99. If you live out of town and want to get your hands on a signed booklet, order online HERE, call us (208.344.8010) or email us and we will facilitate the order for you.
So Runs the World Away is being hailed as another step forward in Ritter’s artistic evolution. NPR says So Runs the World Away “doesn’t defy categorization so much as it creates its own. Ritter’s category lacks a name, but it has a sound, a vision and a sense of poetic determination that puts So Runs the World Away on a level reserved for records such as Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. … With startling detail, distinctive storytelling, compelling subject matter and astonishing musicianship, Ritter’s new album has reset the singer-songwriter bar.”
Paste magazine says “Josh Ritter hits a beautiful stride on his sixth album, a soulful combination of conversational folk ballads and powerful gut punches. He’s not the only one channeling the greats, but he does it better than almost anyone else today.”
Phantogram‘s Eyelid Movies has been getting a lot of spins around the store, and Mary McNeel is just one of the many RX staffers digging this new record, which masterfully blends electronic loops, hip-hop beats, shoegaze, soul and pop. Here’s what Mary had to say about her Staff Pick of the Week:
If you like electronic music in a gentle hip-hop way, you will enjoy this new release by Phantogram. This duo from a small town in New York brings such beauty to the new world of electronic music. Experience the different styles and harmonies that Josh Carter and Sarah Barthel introduce into their music.
In “Turn it Off” and “Futuristic,” the electronic soundscapes and Barthel’s voice surround you with a beauty that causes you to fall right into their music. Another great song is “Running from the Cops,” which allows you to feel yourself running with them in the comfortable instrumental sounds. Then notice how the music changes to rougher sounds in several of the songs.
The seller song on this CD to me is “All Dried Up.” Listen to her voice moving with the music as it soaks you up. Here they introduce you to the strong electronic sounds, suggesting the sound of various samplers, tapes, records, synths, drums, percussive and stringed instruments.
Xiu Xiu just came through town, and RX staffer Ryan Harper was among the fans who caught the band’s show at Neurolux March 25. Here’s what Ryan has to say about Xiu Xiu’s latest, Dear God, I Hate Myself:
In an often overlooked interview, Jamie Stewart settles the longstanding indie-rock-nerd debate on the pronunciation of his band’s name (it’s Shoo-Shoo), but then goes on to recount a favorite moment in Xiu Xiu’s evolution. Relaxing between gigs in an out of the way cafe, Stewart and his bandmates overheard the groans of a fellow customer into his phone: “Aww, man, I can’t. I have to take my stupid sister and her stupid friends to see some stupid emo band called Schwee-Schway.”
Of course, Stewart says, he introduced his band as “Schwee-Schway” that night and as “Jzoo-Jzoo” or “Kcsoo-Kcsoo” on as many other nights since, happily wallowing in that ambiguity, in the secret, acrid humor of the inside joke that is or isn’t the band’s name. “Who cares?” he seems to be saying, like the smirking, overly self-aware nihilist in the corner.
This, then, is Xiu Xiu through the lens of its only constant member, Stewart: tortured tales of disillusionment and dismemberment and all the tongue-in-cheekiness that comes with the territory.
And this, also, is Dear God, I Hate Myself, a return to the eclectic, openly-electronic art-pop of his third album, Fabulous Muscles (2004). This is another album that revels in absurdity, misery, and mixed-up, awkwardly muttered love, all while barely keeping a straight face. It’s another carefully constructed vision of life filled with characters as harrowing and hilarious as the cross-dressing, gun-toting “Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl” from A Promise (2003), characters as imaginary and real and myriad as all the beloved perversions of the band’s name.
It isn’t that Stewart’s hushed confessional vocals aren’t serious. Delivered over a wash of glitchy, minimal darkwave, owing equal debts to Deerhoof and early post-punk pop, to New York No-Wave and Cal-Berkeley-back-alley gender politics, Stewart’s narratives of over-the-top self-hatred and under-the-table strokes of faith are entirely earnest, and, really, that’s the joke: that these desperate, pathetic characters might not be the same people singing to you from the stage, from the studio, but they’re completely real. They’re the people you meet right before last call, the people who buy insurance from you, the people who sell you refrigerators. They’re us.
Love it or leave it. And, like Stewart, I can’t help but love it — from both sides of the stage.