The Motion Sick Shows Magnet's Film at 11

Ok, so maybe Aquaman isn't the hippest superhero out there. It didn't stop The Motion Sick from writing a song about him anyway.
Magnet says of the video, "A bouncy, lighthearted take on everyone’s least favorite superhero, 'Aquaman’s Lament' is just the kind of quirky observation you’d expect from the Motion Sick: “Superman can fly and can stop a speeding bullet/I can talk to some fish.” Well, you don’t become a superhero just to get the glory. Featuring video clips from classic cartoons such as Super Friends, 'Aquaman’s Lament' is bound to make you nostalgic for the days before Christian Bale." Check out the video at http://ping.fm/qgW8T Click Here to Read More..

Hyperstory Makes Magnet a Mixtape

Magnet recently asked hyperstory's C Scott Blevins to make a mix tape and he didn't disappoint.
Magnet says:

Hyperstory’s self-titled debut album, featuring musicians who have played with the likes of Miles Davis, Beck and Jane’s Addiction, will be released November 10 on the Pureland label. The album is a mixture of live instrumentation and programming, and it seamlessly blends genres as diverse as funk, post-rock and jazz. Blevins made MAGNET a mix tape, and you can definitely hear the influence these artists have had on Hyperstory’s music.

Check out his personal mixtape here.Check out his personal mixtape at http://ping.fm/tWEPI Click Here to Read More..

Susurrus Station Featured on Magnet's MP3 at 3PM

"J. Breeden and Sara Dyberg of Susurrus Station have found a way of harmoniously combining the experimental vibe of the Mars Volta with the retro-rock sound of the Raconteurs. But wait, up pops urban Greek folk music and moody vocals you’d expect from Nick Cave. Breeden and Dyberg bring to the table a phenomenal display of culture and expansive instrumental talent that makes Susurrus Station and its songs almost mind-boggling."--Magnet Magazine
http://ping.fm/23HUF Click Here to Read More..

The Old Believers Offer mp3 in support of upcoming tour

The Old Believers premiere track off their upcoming 7 inch on Undertheradar.com http://ping.fm/k4MNa
West Coast Tour Dates

08-26 High Dive, Seattle, WA
08-31 Hemlock Tavern - San Francisco, CA
09-03 Silverlake Lounge - Los Angeles, CA
09-06 Trunk Space - Phoenix, AR
09-10 Meadowlark - Denver, CO

09-12 Neurolux - Boise, ID Click Here to Read More..

Eat Sugar gets 5 out of 5 stars in City Beat

"If you were to place a bet as to what local band will be the next to follow the likes of Bad Veins, Pomegranates and Daniel Martin Moore into the ranks of 'nationally acclaimed'." Love it.
http://ping.fm/wrLeF Click Here to Read More..

Week 6 of Golden Bloom exclusive

The time has come for Ryan's Smashing Life to offer their exclusive track, “Dead Petals”, from Golden Bloom’s forthcoming album, Fan the Flames and with it they’ve included an interview with the man behind the music, Shawn Fogel.

Ryan’s Smashing Life says of the new record, “We are already convinced that this album will prove to be one of the year's best new releases. (It's late July and I saw this with confidence.) Yes, Fan the Flames is that good.”

During the interview Fogel touches on the recording process and how certain instruments and even an accident played a key role in the overall sound of the album. Fogel recalls, “I fell in love with the glockenspiel while making this record, and you can hear it on more than half of the songs. "More glock in the rock!" became my mantra in the studio.”

He then touches on the exclusive track "Dead Petals" and admits, "If you listen carefully you can hear Roger's cat Chatterbox walking across the piano at the very end of the second verse. You'd think that when a cat mashes some dissident notes while you're rolling tape you'd scratch the track and go for another take, but Roger and I looked at each other and said 'that's a keeper'."

http://ping.fm/5Edum Click Here to Read More..

Sunday Music Spotlight-Golden Bloom

Pop Culture Will Eat Itself asks the question, "How can one guy do all this, and do it so well? I don’t have an answer to that question, but I can tell you this: whatever he decides to do in the future, I’m in."
http://ping.fm/S5RYk Click Here to Read More..

Alan Cohen Experience Video Creates Match Made in Heaven

Magnet says in their Film At 11 feature: "In January, producers Roger Greenawalt and David Barratt set out to record every Beatles song: on ukulele. The video for the Alan Cohen Experience’s "Your Mother Should Know" mixes Oedipus with Sarah Silverman, which to us seems like a match made in heaven.(But Silverman should know: She slept with God.)
http://ping.fm/kjwsO Click Here to Read More..

The New Up Announces Tour

The New Up announce national tour dates in support of the national release of Better Off on August 18th. Wrapped in effusive female fronted melodies, darkened by whirling guitars while juxtaposing hard-hitting 00s alternative with psychedelic overtones, The New Up awaken lusty social revelations that call upon hope with their new EP Better Off, the second EP of a three-part series.
8/21/2009-Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco
8/22/2009-Cellar Door, Visalia, CA
8/23/2009-Viper Room, Los Angeles
8/24/2009-Soda Bar, San Diego, CA
8/28/2009-Vinos, Little Rock
8/31/2009-Caledonia Lounge, Athens, GA
9/2/2009-Alley Katz , Richmond, VA
9/3/2009-Outback Lodge, Charlottesville, VA
9/4/2009-The Red and the Black, Washington DC
9/6/2009-Cedar's Lounge, Youngstown, OH
9/9/2009-The Robin Hood, Kent, OH
9/11/2009-The Dark Room, Chicago
9/12/2009-Cactus Club, Milwaukee
9/17/2009-Zebra Lounge, Bozeman, MT Click Here to Read More..

Week 3 of Golden Bloom Exclusive mp3s

The world exclusive review of Golden Bloom's 'Fan The Flames' is now available at http://bit.ly/mtdNJ Click Here to Read More..

Under the Radar Detects Golden Bloom

Today, we've got an exclusive download remix of runaway single "Doomsday Devices." This retooling, by the Athens, Georgia electro-rock threesome Ruby Isle is an auto-Tuned freak show. The remix could easily slot in well with the rest of Kindercore's stable of dance-pop bands.
http://www.undertheradarmag.com/media/wolrd_premiere_doomsday_devices_ruby_isle_remix_mp3/ Click Here to Read More..

Pitchfork states Speck Mountain "aims towards the sky"

This subtle ascension seems to come from an injection of soul. As Some Sweet Relief progresses, song structures lean toward the realm of spirituals and blues, and Balabanian's supine purr begins to feel more classic. You won't mistake Speck Mountain for a gospel group, but it's fair to say that, at least during the album's second half, they sound more like Spiritualized than Mazzy Star. Take the phasey organ of the aching "Backslider", which seems ghostwritten by Sonic Boom, or the slow croon of its partner track "Backsliding", whose staircase-climb has a distinct Jason Pierce tint circa "Shine a Light". It all leads to another sharp peak, "Twinlines", whose simple chorus-- "Oh, how long," delivered in a pretty Balabanian moan-- belongs distinctly to this band...there's no law that says mellowness can't reach as high as energy-- especially when, as with Speck Mountain, it's permanently aimed towards the sky.--Marc Masters, Pitchfork Click Here to Read More..

Magnet Magazine is Drawn to Golden Bloom

Magnet Magazine launches the first week of one week exclusive mp3s given to nine music sites leading up to the release of Golden Bloom’s album, Fan the Flames, due out August 18th.
http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2009/06/19/world-premiere-mp3-golden-bloom/

"MAGNET is proud to kick off the Summer of Golden Bloom, mainly because this album is redolent of mid-period Wilco; lead track "E.H.M." sounds like an imaginary b-side to "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" featuring Scott McCaughey and appearing circa Summerteeth instead of Being There." Click Here to Read More..

Golden Bloom offers free exclusive mp3s to Nine Music Sites

Recently named one of Spin Magazine’s "8 Undiscovered Bands Worth a Listen,: Golden Bloom offers free exclusive mp3s to nine music web sites in support of his upcoming release, Fan the Flames, due out August 18th. Leading the charge, Magnet Magazine (www.magnetmagazine.com) will offer the first track off the record, "E.H.M" as an exclusive on their site beginning Friday, June 19th. Under the Radar Magazine (www.undertheradarmag.com) will follow with "Doomsday Devices (Ruby Isle Remix)" on Friday, June 26th.

Golden Bloom Album Promotion - ‘Fan The Flames’ Song By Song
19th June "E.H.M" @ magnetmagazine.com
26th June "Doomsday Devices (Ruby Isle Remix)" @ undertheradarmag.com
3rd July "Fan the Flames" @ tuneraker.com
10th July "She Leaves Me Poetry" @ bagofsongs.com
17th July "The Fight at the End of the Tunnel" @ consequenceofsound.com
24th July "Dead Petals" @ ryanssmashinglife.blogspot.com
31st July "If You Believe" @ spin.com
7th August "The Mountainside Says" @ popwreckoning.com
14th August "Theme For an Adventure at Sea" @ fensepost.com Click Here to Read More..

The Waltons they ain't

They met over a tambourine and a bottle of tequila ... now Brett and Rennie Sparks have made an album celebrating 20 years of marriage. They talk music and married life to Amy Fleming of The Guardian.

Who would you rather work with than someone you love?" asks Rennie Sparks, plainly. When she puts it like that, placing all your eggs - creative, professional and personal - in one basket sounds like a no-brainer. "Maybe," adds her husband Brett, smirking, "before everyone gets married, they should be forced to write a song together, to make a record and go on tour together." If you can do all that without falling out, you can safely assume that you are a highly compatible couple.

To read more about The Handsome Family and their life together as a couple and as bandmates, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/23/handsome-family-interivew-folk-music Click Here to Read More..

"Shame On The Soul" is one of Q's 50 Essential Trackes

Speck Mounatin--Chicagoan's second helping of superior dream-pop.
If, as some reckon, a full-blown shoegazing revival is imminent, Speck Mountain have plenty going for them. In fact, Marie-Claire Balabanian's lonesome vocals, the languid pacing and fuzzy, opiated atmosphere their songs generate make them the closest thing there’s been to Mazzy Star for a long time. Though Balabanian and partner Karl Briedrick prefer to call what they do "ambient soul", what really matters is that they do it beautifully. Curtain-raiser "Shame On The Soul's" lightly-fingered tambourine, churchy organ swells and shards of acid-etched guitar instantly set the dreamy mood. Never straying far thereafter, it all makes for a heavily addictive, comfortably numbing kind of experience.—Peter Kane Click Here to Read More..

MOJO--LA meets Detroit, they record in Chicago and sound like the Delta.

Speck Mountain core members Karl Briedrick (guitar) and Marie-Claire Balabanian (vocals) call their sound "ambient soul." The "soul" bit is no empty boast; their echoey shimmer has the ghostly quality of mist on the bayou...Balabanian intones fetchingly, like Patti Smith in slowmo.--Phil Sutcliffe Click Here to Read More..

KEXP names "Some Sweet Relief" the Song of the Day

Today’s featured selection, chosen by Morning Show host John Richards, is “Some Sweet Relief” by Speck Mountain from the 2009 album Some Sweet Relief on Carrot Top Records. Speck Mountain consciously avoids the extremes of shoegaze and folk, instead cherry-picking each school’s finest qualities and bolting them together with the sincerity and richness of Motor City soul, creating oscillating texture grounded in human truths and softening reality’s sharp corners with warmth and sonic space...they will send you searching for your headphones, closing your eyes and sinking into the floor. Some sweet relief indeed. Click Here to Read More..

Speck Mountain is the Word

Word Magazine
Speck Mountain-Wherein alt.country square dances with psychedelic gospel
Musical collision could just be the last refuge of the indolent scoundrel, yet occasionally something genuinely thrilling can squeeze out between the cracks of genre paving stones so willfully tossed around. Speck Mountain’s Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian achieve an absorbing alchemy on their second album, compiling country, gospel, shoegazing, ambient and psychedelic sounds into what we could foolishly call a sonic Battenberg. In spirit and mood, these nine careful, sighing, unfolding tracks may on the surface call to mind Cat Power (Backsliding), Throwing Muses (the title track), Dusty In Memphis (I Feel Eternal) or mid-period Lambchop (Twinlines); but it’s the repetition of lethargic chords, beaten out over sleepy and minimal percussion, that delivers the music into a more spectral plane. Balabanian’s tired and pained voice is their trump card and sparse, whispered musical arrangement allows her the space to glide, a torch singer in an emotional power cut. —Eamonn Forde Click Here to Read More..

The Handsome Family Announces West Coast Tour in July

7/14 Seattle at Tractor Tavern
7/15 Vancouver at the Biltmore
7/16-7/19 Dawson City Music Festival
7/21 Portland at Doug Fir
7/23 San Francisco at Bottom of the Hill
7/24 Santa Cruz at the Crepe Place
7/25 Los Angeles at Spaceland
7/26 Los Angeles at McCabe's
7/27 San Diego at Casbah
7/29 Tucson at the Congress Click Here to Read More..

Ten Tips to Increase Media Exposure

Look we get it. It's tough out there. So we thought it was time we lent a little insight on how to increase exposure in the media world. Check out the article written for Musician's Atlas April Newsletter, Atlas Plugged at http://www.musiciansatlas.com/newsletter/apr09/mediaexposure.asp Click Here to Read More..

Speck Mountain Takes the Stage with NPR's Second Stage

While the duo's debut release, Summer Above, has more of an innocent vibe, their newest album, Some Sweet Relief is more textured and mysterious than its predecessor and begs to be unpacked...The resulting album is dreamy, impressionistic, and ambient. Like sunlight shining through a gauzy curtain, Balabanian's rich vocals are simultaneously hazy, distant and piercing.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103215670 Click Here to Read More..

Pitchfork Digs The Handsome Family

Stephen Deusner of Pitchfork says the Handsome Family's "new songs are so full of woodsy imagery that they make Neko Case seem urbane...a testament both to Rennie's skillful threading of words into images and Brett's sensitive translation of words on a page into vocals."
Rather than dwell on country gothic doom and despair, they've recorded all manner of love songs-- odes to sex, devotion, redemption, sacrifice, New Mexico, and more sex-- that are only slightly sunnier than their usual fare. But don't expect corny sentiments even from a song called "Love Is Like".
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12878-honey-moon/ Click Here to Read More..

Tim Hinely BLURTS About Honey Moon

Since the release of their debut record in 1995 (Odessa) the Handsome Family (married couple Brett and Rennie Sparks) have explored the depths of the human soul with songs about drifters, murderers, and even Aunt Barbara "who went crazy in the 70's, wrote poems to Jimmy Carter but forgot to feed her kids" (from "Lake Geneva on 1996's Milk and Scissors) and on this, record #8, they do not disappoint. This record was written to celebrate their 20 years of marriage and as someone who has been married for not even half that long I toast them for their longevity - and the music, too. The band's music has been called Gothic Americana and that seems as good a place to start as any, Brett writes the music and sings most of the sings while Rennie writes the lyrics (she doesn't forget the dark humor) and they have rounded up a batch of terrific musicians in their adopted hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico (where they moved to several years ago after many years in Chicago).

The songs on Honey Moon are just a gorgeously haunting as anything they have done previously. The opener "Linger, Let Me Linger" adds some lovely cello to the proceedings (which already include Brett's rich baritone) while "Little Sparrows' adds some zippy pedal steel which gives it a completely different feel. "When You Whispered" is pure Carter Family country and the nearly perfect, "A Thousand Diamond Rings" is the record's best song (that has a murky, Calexico-ish feel to it but these guys were doing this stuff long before Calexico). Yet another terrific chapter in a book that I hope these guys never finish.

Click Here to Read More..

Billboard Endorses Honey Moon

Is there an act more inscrutable than Albuquerque's Handsome Family, alt-country's equivalent of the famous Grant Wood painting "American Gothic"? Husband-and-wife team Brett and Rennie Sparks hole up in their garage studio for long stretches, surfacing publicly every few years with their latest recording to accept the kudos of Americana aficionados everywhere, then retreat once more to their solitude. The music on their eighth studio album since forming in '93—a mélange of classic-era Nashville ("Wild Wood"), '50s Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop ("Linger, Let Me Linger"), and Memphis soul balladry ("My Friend")—is equally veiled, Brett warbling Rennie's pastoral lyrics about lingering kisses, lonely songbirds and reverse-anthropomorphism in an expressive baritone equal parts George Jones and Bing Crosby. Who are these people, you wonder? Though answers don't come easily, the process of getting to know them is fascinating nonetheless.—Fred Mills Click Here to Read More..

The Handsome Family Teaches Word Magazine About Romance...Handsome Style

There's a good lesson to be learned about romance from the Handsome Family's husband-and-wife team of Brett and Rennie Sparks. Take My Friend, a brilliantly low-key lament that swings slowly across the front third of the reord. If you tilt your head back and close your eyes you'll believe you've sat on a bench outside a white wooden church somewhere in Macon County. Inside, just through that crack in the door, Brett's stood in the pulpit dressed in robes that have seen many, many better days, he's got three days' growth and the smell of raw gin on his breath. Rennie's sat at the organ, looking at her husband, wondering why no one else can see the good in him.

I know, it's ludicrous. For a start, Rennie writes the words and plays no instruments, but that's the sort of dramatic power that they bring to their songs. Lots of people swear that they live inside their material, but The Handsome Family can feel like they've actually been cast in the movie of their songs and have been method acting like their lives depended on it ever since... Click Here to Read More..

The Handsome Family Makes The Cut With Uncut

It's safe to say that Albuquerque's Brett and Rennie Sparks, aka The Handsome Family, have never really embraced the love song. Death, disease, madness? Sure. But the idea of country's darkest duo falling into the tender trap seems way outside their remit. Yet that's exactly what they've now done, partly to mark their 20th anniversary and partly due to a particular luminous epiphany that Rennie had while listening to The Platters on a mountain range in New Zealand. That said, there may be no corpses or fathomless wells on Honey Moon, but this is hardly, lyrically at least, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton... Click Here to Read More..

Oprah Takes Honey Moon with The Handsome Family

Featured in the May issue of O (Oprah) Magazine, Richard Gehr says this of The Handsome Family's upcoming album, "Though the Handsomes draw on Depression-era strains of folk music, Honey Moon is sensual and celebratory...May their musical honeymoon never end." Amen to that. Click Here to Read More..