It’s been a busy month in Ypsi-music-making, listeners, thus that this is less a blog post and really a rehash of recently streamable songs from your neighbors.
The passing of children’s author (a misleading genre-designation) and illustrator Maurice Sendak hit me like a tome’s 6-ft drop from the shelf of the headlines to the resonant marble floor of my heart. It hit me because we’d lost something so real; he had remarkable frankness and was seemed so uncommonly in-touch with the human experience, a crazy-eyed, wholly sensitive seer into our collective souls.
It his local singer/songwriter Misty Lyn Bergeron too; inspired by a quote of his (and many are archived throughout the halls of the Internet), she wrote a and recorded this song the day he died. It invites clichés like breathtaking, but maybe it’s that slight breath you hear her take, right before she starts cooing into her phone’s mic. A lovely lullaby – it’s probably the happiest, at least most comforting, sad song you’ll hear all month (or maybe any month, this year).
Saturday Looks Good To Me are currently winding their way back home – the resurged roster led by Ypsi’s song sparkplug Fred Thomas got things going about three months ago, more a finding-your-bookmark and opening-the-page back up then some typically perceived reunion stunt, they used Jim Roll’s Backseat Studios sessions as a launch-pad, heading out around the east and Midwest to play some oldies (like the poignant, string-sawed dulcet love dirge below) and, likely, some newbies (that Thomas never ceases to write feeds this writer’s own motivation…) The breathy/breathless shuffler, those drums that sort of trip the numb narrator forward in his introspective as the sweet strings assure goosebump-percolation, comes from SLGTM’s Polyvinyl-Records debut. The new album, coming this summer, will also be on said-label.
http://www.polyvinylrecords.com/store/index.php?id=67
~5.20.12 – Woodruff’s – Ypsilanti – with Body Holographic and Santa Monica Swim & Dive Club~
Oh-kay…let’s click over to a more anthemic setting, warming/brightening/amplifying things up a bit with Team Ethic’s riff-showered indie-rock ballad “Skin” from an EP they put up approximately-one-month-ago-today. It’s got a nice groove to it, a striding beat, a bob-n-weave bassline and guitars going crazy like it’s 1996 while those melodious mid-range vocals belt out above it all. Kinda has a closing-credits type vibe to it – like you’re watching yourself walk off down some city street towards subtle mysteries beyond otherwise blasé horizons while the gaffers, caterers and best boy names scroll over your back.
Spanish Radio’s new single makes me want to go outside, be outside, makes me feel the warm air of these young summer nights; those resonant guitars buzzing like cicadas, organs croaking out his meditative drone, the drums kicking up detritus and tapping down some tribal trance-like plod. This is part of a full length titled Silverado that came out a couple weeks ago, it sounds like an apt soundtrack to any Beat-romanticizing road-tripper ready to left some musing minimalist music currents take him where they will… (It helps certain evocations of wanderlust and morning-meditations that their song-titles are mostly destinations). There are faint wisps of folk-pop grimed gloriously into by an experimental stirring not seen properly since the likes of Brightblack Morning Light, but still – they’ve added an unfounded grooviness to the otherwise aloofness of most experimental rock.
Err…are back in action and not holding back on flicking on the bleary-fuzz black-lights for this post-grunge grinder. Sparse guitars take their time, stabbing away like sharp paint peelers on the outer walls of a house that the rock-duo sounds just itching to tear-down. Phlegm-clearing choruses buzz with comparable catharsis over the space-rock-twisted guitar pours while the drums go from their sparse marches to fuller, fiercer fills. Glad to see they’d gotten a follow-up to their ’10 debut up and out last month.
Let’s soften it up a bit with Nathan K.’s latest indie-folk jam “Leave Them.” K.(lages) has fostered a hazy, harmonious aesthetic, often that of a pensive, post-everything-philosopher searching for stars to gaze upon through the blankets of light pollution above Ann Arbor’s main drags and instead finding refuge in the coffee houses, chill house parties and forgotten parks scattered out towards the city limits where he comes to terms with mortality through his musical muses. Not a ballad, not a closing-credit cut, but something quietly rousing, pedaled forth by those quirky percussive elements, from the strum of the acoustic guitar, to the modest clap of their hands.
More sounds coming – every month.
Other shows? Recent U-M graduate Mick Bassett continues his post-Marthas odyssey, spurred on by the physical release of his first proper solo LP Here Lies the Lion that Lied in Your Bed 5.18.12 – Woodruff’s – Ypsilanti – Mick Bassett – with Small Houses / Match By Match / Anna Vogelzang
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mick-Bassett/10409326371
http://www.facebook.com/matchbymatch
http://www.smallhousessing.com/
