Braids

Braids at 529, October 2015

Montreal's Braids is one of my favorite bands.  After seeing them open for Purity Ring at the Buckhead Theater in May 2015, I wrote, "We weren't prepared for how great Braids were.  Front-woman Raphaelle Standell-Preston's vocals soared at times, startled at others, and had my complete attention throughout.   They have a new album, Deep In The Iris. out but even the outstanding cuts from the record don't match the immediacy and range of Raphaelle's live vocals.  By all means, if you have a chance to catch this band, do."

High praise indeed.  I was similarly impressed when they opened for Wye Oak at Terminal West in May 2014, the very first time I had either heard or seen them, and when they headlined at 529 in October 2015.  The show at the tiny 529 club was particularly memorable, as I was standing barely ten feet from Standell-Preston and her personality really lit up and filled the room.

After a 5-year gap, Braids are finally back with a new album, Shadow Offering, to be released April 24 and produced by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie.  The band has released a new single, Young Buck, as well as an accompanying video.

In a statement, Standell-Preston spoke about the intention behind the track:

“We wrote this song to capture the nervous anticipation of desire, the delicate chase of seduction, the highs and lows of obsession, and the humor in between. To want to possess someone, make them desire you, fall for you, only to learn that to lust is not to love.”

The accompanying music video contains choreographed dances moves like so many pop music videos, as well as imaginative sequences and suggestive writhing, and many male and female bodies. At first, this felt like a departure for Braids, especially with Standell-Preston's new look.  But then we remembered the NSFW video they released for Deep In the Iris cut Taste, which featured naked bodies of all shapes, sizes, and ages, and the confrontational lyrics of their song Miniskirt.

Young Buck explores desire from the feminine viewpoint ("Young buck, 22 year old who treats me badly, The blaring example of what I am drawn towards and should strongly move away from") and the video inverts convention by objectifying male instead of female bodies.  This band has long explored the intersections of desire, feminism and sensuality - that's their turf - and Young Buck and its video are merely the latest expression of that exploration.

Wolf Parade Cancel Tour Due to Coronavirus Pandemic

In addition to punk-pop band Green Day, K-pop superstars BTS, and pop princess Avril Lavigne, the Canadian indie rock band Wolf Parade have cancelled their planned tour due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.  

Berniepalooza II

We can add another band to our Berniepalooza playlist of those who've played at Bernie Sanders' rallies - Soccer Mommy played today at a rally at the University of Houston.

Also, today I learned that at the Las Vegas rally where The Strokes played for Bernie supporters, the opening band was Sunflower Bean.

Mattiel

Mattiel is performing tonight at the venerable Earl.  I've got tickets and no cancellations or dire announcements have appeared online, so if the creek don't rise and unless it starts raining, I'm off to see her perform!

Man Man

Man Man at Terminal West, Atlanta, July 2019

After a seven-year wait, the band Man Man are finally releasing a new album later this year.  The lyrics video for the fist single, Cloud Nein, was directed by frontman Honus Honus.  

Hopefully, they'll tour again in support of the new album.

Berniepalooza

This is getting ridiculous, but in a good way.  It's not officially a Bernie rally and I don't think the man himself will be in attendance, but next week there will be a fund-raising event for presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders that will include performances by Julia Holter, Dean & Britta of Luna, Hand Habits, and Dustin Wong, with d.j. sets by Oh Sees and Jessica Pratt. 

This following performances at Bernie rallies by The Strokes, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Miike Snow & Lykke Li, Killer Mike, Cardi B and Ratboys.  You can make a damn fine Spotify playlist of musicians who've performed in support of the 78-year-old Sanders.

Forget Bonnaroo!  If you want to hear great indie rocks bands, go to Bernie Sanders campaign rallies!

This year alone, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, and The Strokes have all played at Bernie rallies. Killer Mike, Cardi B, and Chicago's Ratboys have played Bernie rallies in the past.  And now today, this afternoon, the band Miike Snow and the singer Lykke Li will perform at a rally on the UNLV campus in Las Vegas.

I don't want to be too literal about it, but the Instagram announcement says "performances by Miike Snow & Lykke Li," plural, not "performance" (singular) by the two.  However, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they didn't collaborate for their set.

They have a lot in common, not the  least of which is they're both from Sweden. Back in 2012, Lykke Li, along with Andrew Wyatt and Pontus Winnberg of Miike Snow and Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John formed their own label (Ingrid) in Stockholm. Then, in 2016, they formed a supergroup of sorts called liv along with producer Jeff Bhasker.

Don't fell bad if you've never heard of liv.  They've only released a handful of singles back in 2016 and 2017 but never recorded a full album, and have only performed live on a couple of occasions. They're all busy musicians, and their individual projects keep them all quite occupied.  So if Li and the members of Miike Snow do collab at today's rally, even without Bjorn present, it would be an important milestone in the story of supergroup liv.  At the very least, it might be two great sets by two great Swedish acts.

I imagine Bernie will give some sort of speech as well.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters can enjoy the musical stylings of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.

Wolf Parade

Wolf Parade at Shaky Knees, 2017

Wolf Parade is a Canadian rock band fronted by Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner. According to Pitchfork, their 2005 debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, "was one of the great statement albums of indie rock’s blockbuster era, paving the way for years of similarly jittery, nervy bands."  

After Queen Mary, the band released two more full-length albums before taking a five-year hiatus in 2011. They announced their return in 2016, releasing a self-titled EP in May of that year and a fourth album, Cry Cry Cry, in October 2017.  

Wolf Parade's new album, Thin Mind, came out January 24th. As described by Pitchfork, the opening track, Under Glass, "opens the record with the charging gusto of Elvis Costello’s new wave stompers." 

The Shins

I don't remember it, but for some reason I apparently meant to post this song, the titular track of The Shins 2017 album, back three years ago.  Then for some other reason that I don't remember, I didn't post it and today I discovered it in my Blogger queue of "draft" posts, dated February 2017.

Still a good song, though.  I don't remember it and it sounds new to me now, so I might as well post it today.

Great Grandpa

Brace yourself for some adorableness as Seattle singer Alex Menne of the Seattle band Great Grandfather covers Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi in a studio performance at Seattle's KEXP while she and the rest of the band wear the most Seattle clothing possible.  

Great Grandpa formed in 2014 but I didn't become aware of them until last November when I heard the song Bloom from last year's Four of Arrows album. The song made my Best of 2019 playlist both for Menne's sparkling chorus in the first half but mainly to the way Great Grandpa breaks the song down in the middle of the piece and then reconstructs it in the second as a lovely wordless composition.  

Peach Pit

Peach Pit are from Vancouver, British Columbia, but other than that I don't know too much about them.  Their sound is characterized by a soft spoken vocal style over guitar-driven rock melodies and has been described as sad pop and surf rock.  According to their Wikipedia page, they've worn "the same clothes for every live performance since buying them for their first music video shoot," so there's that.  Apparently, they're popular enough that they're headlining at Terminal West on May 5.

Shampoo Bottles is about the personal belongings and other detritus left behind after the end of a relationship.  How long do you wait before throwing out that other toothbrush?  The lyrics are generally universal but the video by Lester Lyons-Hookham considers several different specific scenarios for the end of a relationship, including the scattering of ashes at the shore.

Half Waif

Nandi Rose Plunkett of the band Pinegrove also records as a solo singer-songwriter under the name Half Waif.  The New Yorker described her music as "globe-twirling prism pop in search of a home."

On her song Ordinary Talk, she sings about the heaviness of ordinary moments, the tears and chores and self-doubt and small talk that comprise being a person. 

"Recognizing your own ordinariness can be depressing, or it can be a relief. In Ordinary Talk, I wanted to honor and celebrate my ordinariness as an incredible tool for making me feel less alone. The song is a reassurance that feeling bad - or 'ill' - isn't something that needs to be corrected. There's a depth of experience that comes from feeling emotions at their extremes. And it is, in fact, this vivid, varied messiness that makes us human and ordinary."

The video, a collaboration with director Kenna Hynes, tracks the progression from isolation to communion as it moves from a troupe of theatrical characters to the neon lights of a house party. 

A Take Away Show

Shot in Paris, November 2019

Meanwhile, On Late Night TV

 . . . And on the 31st of January, when Great Britain showed its true xenophobia by leaving the European Union and the U.S. Senate showed its true cowardice by refusing to hear testimony or evidence in the sham impeachment trial of the so-called President, Algiers, the Only Band That Matters, performed their song Dispossession on Stephen Colbert's late-night television show.

Bernie and the Ratboys

After announcements that Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend will be performing in the next couple of days at Bernie Sanders rallies in Iowa, today it was announced that The Strokes will be performing for Bernie next month in New Hampshire.

We have to admit that we like Bernie's taste in music (not bad for an old man), but also wonder why, in addition to his rally headliners, so many musicians (Cardi B, Killer Mike, The Thermals., L.A.'s Ozomatli, Seattle's Tacocat, etc., to name a few) are attracted to his cause.  Yesterday, Mother Jones magazine even ran an article titled Hear the Bern: Why Bernie Sanders Strikes a Chord With Musicians.

We here at the MDW desk aren't big fans of The Strokes.  Their music had a sort of nostalgic, return-to-the-roots charm when it debuted 20 years ago, but today we can't get behind that whole nostalgia-for-past-nostalgia thing.  

So instead, we're posting a video to accompany this article by another band that's performed at Bernie rallies, the fine Chicago band Ratboys (not to be confused with the punk/hip-hop band Rat Boy). Ratboys (one word, plural) are one of our favorite bands, and apparently they've garnered enthusiastic support in some corners of the internet (Ratboys Are Such A Good Fucking Band according to The Editor of The Alternative).  

Here's a new (2020) single from Ratboys' to-be-released album Printer's Devil.  You'll probably enjoy this more than some 20-year-old cut from The Strokes.

The Turning of Mitski

Mitski Miyawaki, who performs simply as "Mitski," is a singer-songwriter with several albums and a fawning New Yorker article under her belt.  We first saw her perform on March 8, 2015 at The Earl, where she opened for the band Hundred Waters.  At the time, she was touring in support of her 2014 album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, which we liked a lot.  

A couple months later, literally two moths to the day - May 8, 2015 - we saw her perform again at Atlanta's Shaky Knees festival.  After those two Atlanta performances in 2015, she released the albums Puberty 2 (2016) and Be the Cowboy (2018).  However, we started finding her songs, such as Your Best American Girl from Puberty and Nobody from Cowboy, while pleasant, a little too pop-leaning for our tastes.  They were well-written and had thoughtful lyrics - we'll grant her that - and she has a fine singing voice, but her style seemed to be turning more toward mass consumption than our peculiar tastes, and we basically stopped following her after those 2015 performances.

Our loss.  Here she is performing the song Happy on Austin City Limits, and between the  music and choreographed moves, she's almost approaching performance art.  

Mitski is to be ignored at one's own risk, and the worst that can happen if one continues to follow her through thick and thin is that you might get subjected to some polished, highly professional pop songs, thoughtfully composed and performed well, which isn't so bad.  The best that can happen is you'll catch performances like this.

Meanwhile, Mitski released a bruising new song, titled Cop Car, from the soundtrack to Floria Sigismondi’s upcoming horror film, The Turning. (featuring Finn Wolfhard, aka Mike Wheeler from Stranger Things, top).  We're glad to note that the heavy, gothey music and death-obsessed lyrics of Cop Car sound light years from the pop ingenue into which we had feared she might be turning.

Meanwhile, In Iowa

Okay, maybe nobody likes him as Hilary Clinton claims, but he clearly has better indie credentials than any candidate since Obama. 

OBAMA'S "BEST OF" LIST 

It's been said  that the Bernie bro culture  may perpetuate sexism, racism and misogyny, but these two shows are the first and only time I've actually wanted to go to Iowa for a campaign event.