Slow Animal - Demo (2010)

Artist: Slow Animal
Album: Demo (2010)
Label: Self-Released

Current price:
Bandcamp.com - FREE

Hoo ooo OOOO hoooo ....

Thrash happy drums.

Vocal harmonies that are so persistent they take on an ambient quality.

Reverb, reverb, reverb.

Best Coast comes to mind. Early Girls. It's not like they invented a genre here.

But to be fair, I am pretty late to the game—this demo is just shy of 2-years old at this point—and even without that apology, this E.P. ranks up there with the best indie pop to come out in the past couple years.

They also pulled a Mamas & The Papas by recording quintessentially west coast music despite living on the complete opposite side of the continent. But if the music is anything to go by, they have the only real suntans in New Jersey.

Stream or download the album from Bandcamp.

My sister gets credit for the tip.

A Fistful Of Dollars: Dec. 31, 2011

Went by Amoeba Music in S.F. today and dug the following out their clearance bins:

7 Year Rabbit Cycle - Animal People (2003)
Feathers - Feathers (2006)
Darker My Love - Alive As You Are (2010) [Spotify]
Seal - Self-Titled (1991) [Spotify]
Rings - Black Habit (2008) [Spotify]
God Lives Underwater - Self-Titled (1995) [Spotify]
Happy Jawbone Family Band - O.K. Midnight, You Win! (2011)
Seal - Human Being (1998) [Spotify]

They have the same deal as Streetlight Records—buy 3 get, 1 free—so the total was around $8.65. (Also picked up a DVD, so that total is approximate... pardon my math.)

Was especially pleased to come across that Happy Jawbone Family Band album. They put out the soundtrack to my Xmas 2011, "A HAPPY JAWBONE FAMILY X​-​MAS GIFT TO YOU, 2011. VOL. 1: OPEREATION HO! HO! HO!" (Bandcamp, $0/name your price)—which I never quite got around to writing about last week... sorry about that. It's worth checking out, even if we are 359 days away from the next socially acceptable time to listen to it.

The rest of the picks are not-all-that-guilty-pleasures from my younger days and satellite projects to other bands I dig: Rings features Abby Portner from Drawlings, sister to Avey Tare (Animal Collective), and was produced by Kría Brekkan; Feathers includes Meara O'Reilly, who put out a fantastic solo E.P. under the name Avocet a few years back that I picked up at a live show; 7 Year Rabbit Cycle is one of Rob Fisk's post-Deerhoof projects; and Darker My Love is I guess Tim Presley's main band, though I mainly know him for his project White Fence—who, it happens, will be ringing in the new year tonight at the Brick and Mortar Music Hall along with The Fresh & Onlys and Thee Oh-Sees.

Happy New Years everyone.

Diamonds In The Rough: Dredg - The Orph E.P. (1997)

Diamonds In The Rough is the third recurring feature currently planned for The Two Dollar Revue. If the album blurbs are all about accessibility—good, cheap music that anyone reading this blog should be able to get their hands on—and Fistful Of Dollars is about finding that same music in quantity, then this feature is about quality finds that go above and beyond what you might normally come across: the sorts of things you would have a hard time finding at any price, bought at a fraction of their reasonable value.

In Berkeley there's a massive salvage warehouse called Urban Ore where you can find just about any odd or end you might imagine. Want a cool old door? They have hundreds of them. Shoelaces, old video game systems or drill bits? Those too. A large portion of what they have is clearly on its last legs of use, but if you put a little backbone into it there are for sure treasures to be found at always reasonable prices.

They sell CDs as well, and while their selection amounts to little more than a bin of mismatched cases and discs that have apparently all had run-ins with steel wool pads, it's only $0.25 a disc and sometimes you get lucky. Knowing this, I braced myself, dove in... and found two CDs I was perfectly happy to own, including one real doozy of a find:

In 1997, the Los Gatos band Dredg independently released the above E.P., commonly called the Orph E.P. for one of the tracks on it, though by all appearances it's untitled. This was before they recorded Leitmotif and well before they signed to Interscope. The music on the E.P. is heavier than their later material, baring obvious affinity to some of the big California nu-metal bands of the time: the first minute of "Kayasuma" could easily be the Deftones, while the first track, "Is Not Everything," falls somewhere between Korn and Incubus with its tribal drums and its rapped vocals. Both tracks shift halfway through to a sound that is more typical of their later work, helping the E.P. not be completely defined by that awkwardness of influence that plagues most recordings by young bands, but the best track is still easily the instrumental title track. "Orph" is the only track on the E.P. that really screws with your expectations, sounding more like Penguin Cafe Orchestra than anything that was happening in California in the nineties, completely abandoning standard rock instrumentation for, as best I can tell, a xylophone, a mandolin, an accordion and a tambourine—and sounding wholly formed as a result. It perfectly exemplifies the eclecticism that set Dredg apart from their peers as they matured as a band, and it's a strong enough track that it makes the other two songs better for their proximity.

I have no idea what the CD is worth. I can't find any copies that are up for sale or have been sold recently on eBay. It's a definite rarity, though, and something I'd given up on ever owning years ago, so finding it for a quarter made my day.

Naturetone - Nihon (2010)

Artist: Naturetone
Album: Nihon (2010)
Label: World Around Records

Current price:
Bandcamp.com - free/optional donation to the Red Cross

Awhile back it started to bother me that I didn't own or know a lot about hip-hop music. I had Wu-Tang Clan's first album and probably a Public Enemy album or two. I had some rap-metal leftover from my youth (no comment)—but it all seemed too token.

One of the first things I did when trying to remedy this was to Google "psychedelic hip-hop," hoping there was a such thing for really no deeper reason than I liked the way it sounded. Surely there was a hippie or two out there making beats, yeh? Well, as with most things one can imagine under the sun, it does exist and there's a blog dedicated to it—and on that blog they mention one label over and over again: World Around Records. I guess this is my way of saying kudos to the guys or gals who run the Psychedelic Hip Hop blog for turning me onto what remains the best single roster of beat makers I've come across: guys like Man Mantis, S. Maharba... and Naturetone.

Naturetone is one of the artists on the label I know the least about, and his music doesn't contain the sort of pathos that leaves me needing to know more about him. What I do know is that he makes enigmatic beats that stand on their own two feet. The kind of beats that an average rapper would ruin with inappropriate swagger. The kind of beats, for example, that Tricky makes (when he's not in too defeated a mind)—but without the claustrophobia his vocals tend to lend to a mix. Naturetone does employ vocal samples here and there to close the gap between instrumental and non-instrumental music, but the way he uses thoses samples has more in common with 90s electronica than anything more recent—neither pitched up like early Kanye West, or down like current dubstep artists—leaving them as is and mixing them in as just another sound at his disposal.

It's worth mentioning, Naturetone might be the least "hip-hop" artist on the label. While he incorporates hip-hop drum and bass sounds as he likes, songs like "Japan Blues" sound more like The Knife than J. Dilla, and his beats are only ever as syncopated as they need to be. If anything, he is to hip-hop what Sigur Ros is to rock, or Isis is to metal... the lineage and influence is apparent, but it's hard to say they actually belong to those genres. Like those artists, Naturetone strips the more divisive aspects of his genre out—the machismo and the noisiness, in the case of hip-hop—and leaves you instead with music that is somewhat introverted and basically... pleasant. This can be good or bad, depending on your particular philosophy of music and/or mood, but for my money Naturetone's "Nihon" is an exceptional soundtrack to a mug of coffee and a rainy day.

Stream or download the album on Bandcamp

A Fistful Of Dollars: Dec. 03, 2011

Sometimes you find a lot of really great music at once for dirt cheap—A Fistful Of Dollars will be a recurring feature focusing on exactly that: hauls of three or more CDs bought at once and averaging a dollar or less per disc in price. It's a good way for me to quickly pimp a lot of albums without writing blurbs for each one, but also I hope it'll give you ideas on where to look in your own backyard for the kinds of music deals this blog is all about.

First up, yesterday I spent an hour or so at Streetlight Records here in Santa Cruz and, after struggling to find anything I wanted, I set to work on their dollar bins:

O.C.S. (Thee Oh Sees) - 2 (2004) [Spotify]
De Facto - Megaton Shotblast (2001)
Fucked Up - David Comes to Life (2011) [Spotify]
Damsel - Distressed (2006)
Corrina Repp - It's Only The Future (2004) [Spotify]

One dollar each, plus Streetlight's buy 3 get 1 free on used CDs under $5 deal in effect. Total Spent: $4.34. Really happy with that haul, and I could go on at length about all five albums, but I'll save that for in case I decide to write up blurbs on them down the road.

On a related note, a few weeks back KZSC held their annual 25 cent CD sale, which is always a lot of fun. Admittedly you have to be dedicated to get much out of these sales: my friend and I spent, no joke, 3 hours digging through bins that began the day only loosely organized by genre (and even that modicum of order was gone long before we left). There's throngs of people you have to squeeze between to get within arm's reach of the bins, and even then the chances of finding something you want within the first 100 CDs are slim. But everyone is there for the same reason so people are totally respectful of each other, and your perseverance gets rewarded in the end with hauls like this:

Wooden Wand - Death Seat (2010) [Spotify]
Tim Kasher - The Game Of Monogamy (2010) [Spotify]
Junip - Fields (2010) [Spotify]
Marnie Stern - On A Tightrope (a/k/a/ Self-Titled) (2010) [Spotify]
Nellie McKay - Home Sweet Mobile Home (2010) [Spotify]
Brad Laner - Natural Selections (2010) [Spotify]
El Ten Eleven - It's Still Like A Secret (2010) [Spotify]
Alec Empire - The Destroyer (1995) [Spotify]
James Blake - Self-Titled (2011) [Spotify]
Tricky - Mixed Race (2010) [Spotify]
Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (2010) [Spotify]

Plus Dusty Springfield - Dusty In Memphis (1969) [Spotify] for a dollar from one of the other vendors there. Total Spent: $3.75.

The Cranberries - Everybody Else Is Doing It... (1993)

Artist: The Cranberries

Album: Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)

Label: Island

Current price:

Amazon - $0.48

Half.com - $0.75

I first fell in love with the Cranberries while watching Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express for a class during my freshman year of college. (My love of the Mamas & the Papas dates to the same period of time. Ditto my love of Hong Kong. That movie taught me how to love.)

Later, when I worked at a record store for awhile, I played the second-hand cassette copies of their second and third albums we had for sale a bit, but to be honest those two left me cold. Too... over the top? The great thing about the Cranberries' first album is how tasteful everything is. Sure, Dolores O'Riordan wails up a storm at times—but at other times she's all coos and subtlety. It's a difficult balance for any singer to achieve, and her success on Everybody Else Is Doing It results in an album that is emotionally distraught, girlishly naïve or distant and reserved precisely when it needs to be.

Then there's the production. I suppose you could compare the reverb drenched sound to some of the Edge's work from around the same period of time, or even the Cocteau Twins, but a lot of it reminds me in equal measure of the strange little atmospheric effects producers in the 50s and 60s loved so much. Guitar stabs that reverberate to the end of time and an overall aesthetic that isn't unconducive, for example, to an accordion buried in the mix of the last track, “Put Me Down,” give the album an aspect of the timeless. No, no one would mistake the drum sound for anything that vintage, but the flip side of that coin is that someone unfamiliar with the band might mistake the album for a more recent production.

Listen to the album on Spotify.

Note: Still messing around with format for these blurbs. Anything you'd like to see done differently in the future? Want longer reviews? Shorter? Let me know what you think.