Big Scary Monsters

heilewelt:

Minus The Bear - Listing

This is from the vault of unanswered press mails I got and which wanted to put out there - it just took a bit. It’s a very good animated video for “Listing” - a song taken from Minus The Bear’s latest release “Infinity Overheard”. The single will be released on the 15th of April, the album was released on Big Scary Monsters a little while ago (like September 2012). Jesse LeDoux (who worked for artists like Yo Gabba Gabba) directed the video and Six Point Harness produced it.

I like its playfulness and how it keeps me wondering what will happen next. It certainly fits the light hearted, poppy sound of the song (we are not talking about the lyrics here…well, at least I am not). Maybe it’s about this aftermath of a relationship where you go through everything and sometimes even a song in a grocery store just brings you right back into this feeling* - I may be wrong through. Anyway, I very much love the song and how the melody keeps staying in my head for a bit. 

They will be on tour soon, not in Berlin but maybe you are located in a town near by a place they play and then you should go for me. 

Have a good week,

Dörte

 

Tour dates for Europe (please look for US dates on their website):

20/04/13 Luxembourg - Out of the Crowd Festival @ Kulturfabrik
21/04/13 Amsterdam - Melkweg
22/04/13 Cologne - Luxor

UK

24/04/13 Cardiff - Clwb Ifor Bach
25/04/13 Kingston - New Slang @ McClusky’s
26/04/13 Birmingham - Academy 2
27/04/13 Glasgow - King Tuts
28/04/13 Liverpool - The Kazimier
29/04/13 Manchester - Academy 3
30/04/13 Leeds - Cockpit
01/05/13 Portsmouth - Wedgewood Rooms
02/05/13 London - Garage

*Probably I just think that because that happened to me today. It was a tad emotional in my head.

bay-radio:

If it’s got their name on it, you pretty much can’t go wrong with Big Scary Monsters. If you’re into your left-field rock, you probably already own a couple of their CDs. They’ve done it again with this one too, the compilation titled Family Friends really is a cracker. Basically it’s got 14 tracks from bands that are really getting exciting in 2013, and they’ve put it up for free download, which is always nice.

Thanks BSM!

decemberembers:

Song of the Day #41

Hop Along - “Get Disowned” (Get Disowned, 2012)

I’ve gotten more people into Hop Along than any other band ever. This album is brilliant but it barely got any reviews or attention… I can’t remember where I heard about this album, even. But it’s honestly one of the best indie-rock/emo records of the last few years.

This is the album closer, and perhaps the album’s most instantly-enjoyable track (it’s rare in that it feels back-loaded rather than front-loaded). I listen to this walking around campus a lot, and it gives me this weirdly frustrated form of catharsis - I want to just scream and throw myself around at the end - “Meteor make me young”.

I love the way Frances Quinlan writes lyrics; it’s quite stream-of-consciousness, free-associative, often surreal - somewhere between Dave Berman and Tim Kinsella (more towards the latter), but certainly very distinctive. She has a knack for writing not so much choruses but distinctive lines sticking out across the record, which might even not mean that much or seem too striking but she makes them resonate so much. So when she yells “Meteor make me young”, you may not have any idea what she means at first but she puts everything into belting those words out. There is something in that image though, some feeling it’s difficult to put into words - wanting to be overwhelmed by nostalgia, suddenly wanting something impossible to happen and for aging and responsibility to suddenly vanish. But that’s the reason for the abstraction of her approach; she’s saying things that can’t be fitted neatly into logical structures.

The free-association here is knotty & almost impenetrable, weaving between first and third-person. It’s just a weird collection of stories that seem to mean something important, that the narrator is turning over. I wrote about how well Cat Power does that on “Colors and the Kids” (Song of the Day #10) and while it’s much more difficult to thread “Get Disowned” together, it’s a similar approach, one which I wish more songwriters would employ. Quinlan does a similar thing to “Colours and the Kids” in that her melodic structures are as stream-of-consciousness as the lyrics, there are fragments of catchiness and the odd mental link-up between points, but across the record her instrumentation is even more adventurous, complemented by her astonishing vocal range. Listen to how gorgeous the harmony is on the line “Greater than my love gone out the door / [Is] the love that I’ve ignored”, a second vocal part which only comes into the song for that line, and I like that because it’s like she’s trying to directly write about love, (like most boring songwriters) which she doesn’t really do elsewhere, it’s almost as if she’s ironising that line, and I’m still not sure what exactly she means by it.

I used to mishear “Pocono Mountains in the ’60s as “polka-dot mountains in the ’60s” which I thought was a wonderful image, it made me think of old photographs where that’s how the colour pigment works, and that aesthetic forming a lasting memory of those mountains; it added to that sense of unachievable nostalgia for me. But that’s not the lyric. I just wanted to mention it.

Hop Along are coming to Nottingham soon, I’ve already booked my ticket, but they’re third on the bill?? And I’m more excited about this gig than anything I can remember.

(Source: Spotify)

weareshitpretty:

well, this lot have just made my day.