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New Music This Week on the Current!

Posted at 10:58 AM on February 9, 2010 by Jim McGuinn (1 Comments)

Wintertime - sure, it's cold out, but it's also a great time for new music to be unleashed on the world. Another batch this week at the Current:

Peter Gabriel - Flume - Real World - The idea behind Peter Gabriel's new Scratch My Back project is an exchange where each artist would cover one of Gabriel's songs in return for his covering one of theirs; the other artists' renditions of Gabriel's songs will appear on a later album entitled I'll Scratch Yours. Most of the covers are by fellow boomer rockers like David Bowie, Neil Young, Paul Simon, and David Byrne, but Gabriel also tips his hat towards the New Indie with covers of songs by Elbow, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, and our favorite Wisconsin cabin-recorder, Bon Iver.

Johnny Cash - Ain't No Grave - American/Lost Highway - American VI: Ain't No Grave is a posthumous album by Johnny Cash. It is set to be released on February 23, 2010, three days before what would have been Cash's 78th birthday. The music on this album comes from the same sessions as American V: A Hundred Highways. Is it possible that Johnny Cash died of exhaustion, locked in the studio with Rick Rubin for days nonstop, backlogging so many songs that here we are 7 years after his death with yet another new album? Including members of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, Beck's band, and the Avett Brothers, it's another slice of gorgeous haunted music from The Man In Black.

Everybody Was In The French Resistance ... Now! - G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N. (You Know I've Got A) - Cooking Vinyl Eddie Argos, eloquent and witty front man and lyricist of lo-fi heroes Art Brut gets together with girlfriend Dyan Valdes of L.A. rockers the Blood Arm to produce an album's worth of "answer songs": responses or rebukes to famous songs already made by other artists. This one takes Avril Lavigne to task. Other songs de ridicule include classics from Bob Dylan ("Think Twice, It's Not Alright") and Michael Jackson ("Billie's Genes"). Here's the vid -

Album Leaf - Falling From The Sun - Sub Pop - Jimmy LaValle is essentially The Album Leaf. Now over the course of five albums, he/they have been creating moody, atmospheric ambient indie pop, with the help of various pals, sometimes including Sigor Ros' Jón "Biggi" Birgisson, who mixed this record at the Icelandic band's studio. Like the beautiful and sometimes austere geography of Iceland, Album Leaf's music can be both majestic and delicate, sometimes in the same song.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat The Devil's Tattoo - Vagrant - Taking their name from Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang in the Wild One (quick - what was the name of the other gang? "The Beetles"), this is the title track to album #7 from the California rockers. Fuzzy guitars, menacing vocals, druggy Stonesy blues riffs? All the trademarks of classic BRMC are here. Welcome back boys!

Toro Y Moi Minors - Carpark Records - Spanish? Japanese? How about one guy in a bedroom in South Carolina? Chaz Bundick --the 23-year-old, half-Filipino/half-African-American artist who records as Toro y Moi has put together a fascinating debut album - one of those records that's hard to describe yet easy to like. We'll see how he pulls off his menagerie of sounds when he comes to the Turf Club on April 2.

You Say Party! We Say Die! - Laura Palmer's Prom - Paper Bag - You Say Party! We Say Die! (often abbreviated to YSP! WSD!) is a Canadian five piece dance-punk band from Abbotsford, British Columbia. Their third album XXXX was released to critical acclaim and the band was featured on the front cover of four Canadian regional papers and one national paper (do they have more than one in Canada?). YSP!WSD! are scheduled to play two shows for the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver, BC. Twin Peaks fans unite!

Corinne Bailey Rae Paris Nights/New York Mornings Capitol - Four tumultuous years after the release of her debut album, Corinne Bailey Rae returns with The Sea. After multi-platinum, award winning success on her first release, Rae suffered tremendous loss when her husband, Scottish soul trumpeter James Rae, died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol in 2008. The Sea contains songs written before and after Jason Rae's death, and critics have gone so far as to describe it as "an album that suggests Nina Simone singing a modern version of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.

Charlotte Gainsbourg - Dandelion - Because/Elektra and
Charlotte Gainsbourg - Time Of The Assassins - Because/Elektra
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Capitol and
OK Go - White Knuckles - Capitol -
Spoon - I Saw The Light - Merge
Devendra Banhart - Can't Help - Reprise -More tracks from the latest efforts by some of our faves.

Lissie - Wedding Bells - Fat Possum - We've been lovin' the 5-song debut EP from Lissie for a while now, and here's another track from it. But what's her deal? From her bio - Lissie is from along the banks of the Mississippi, in Rock Island, Illinois. Why You Runnin', her Bill Reynolds (Band Of Horses) produced - EP, has earned the young singer high praise, as "an incredibly soulful Americana artist who finds the sepia-toned sweet spot between Neko Case, Laura Marling, and the Shangri-Las." Lissie lives by herself, with her dog, in a farmhouse in Ojai, California. There are many things from her life & history that make these songs and her spirit possible, some of it in deference to that spirit: having a grandfather who was an international barbershop quartet champion, having a great-grandfather who was a train-jumping hobo on this famous Rock Island Line (the Cash song of the same name Lissie has played in hometown gigs), a father who delivered her at her birth, getting kicked out of high school, selling honey for living money upon coming to LA and an inability to separate herself from this Midwestern city where many just raise their families, get fat and die satisfied. Wow. Can't wait for the full length this summer.

Comments (1)

Just reading this post got that Eddie Argos song stuck in my head again. He (and Art Brut) seem to be one of the most despised artists on the Current, but I think he's great. I feel like he's an artist who cares about what he does, yet doesn't take himself all that seriously. It's a contradiction, but it works.

Posted by Mac Wilson | February 9, 2010 2:08 PM

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