What The Hell Am I Listening to?!?
With the holiday season lull in new releases I had gotten really burnt out on just about everything I had been listening to and was worried it would be a while before I’d hear some great new albums. Then all of a sudden in the last two weeks I’ve discovered all sorts of cool stuff. Here’s two of my favourites from January:
The Magnetic Fields (New York, NY)
The Magnetic Field’s newest album, Distortion, is their attempt to be more The Jesus And Mary Chain than The Jesus And Mary Chain. If that reference point doesn’t mean much to you, let me describe what this album sounds like to me: Imagine you are an astronaut alone on a spaceship that has malfunctioned and is spinning out of control into deep space for a long time. You are in the thralls of despair and going crazy being trapped alone. Then, suddenly your FM radio transmitter catches a signal of some ’60s oldies radio station from Earth. But between the distorted interference of the weak signal and your warped brain, the music sounds dark and evil. If that sounds interesting to you, check this one out:
Dengue Fever (Los Angeles, Ca)
With Dengue Fever, not only have I discovered a great band, but I’ve also learned some history lessons I didn’t really know. During the Vietnam War, native Cambodia ’60s pop music was heavily influenced by US Forces radio broadcasts of surf rock and soul music. When the Khmer Rouge came to power in the ’70s, they banned pop music and many of the artists making this sort of stuff mysteriously disappeared. Dengue Fever came about after LA native Ethan Holtzman traveled to Cambodia and discovered this music. He and his brother teamed up with lead-singer Chhom Nimol who sang in the Khmer language to form a nu-Cambodia pop band and thus Dengue Fever was born. Their third full-length, Venus On Earth, is a fun and psychedelic trip through some great world music:
- Posted by Davy Minor on February 3, 2008 at 2:24 pm
