Jo Mango - "My Lung". I'm writing this on a Sunday night but you, I bet, are entering into a Monday morning, drops dripping outside your window or else a full and lazy sun. And so I give you Jo Mango, the opening song on her debut LP, a song that's pretty and girlish but which more importantly has a distorted thumb piano, yes the thing of Konono no. 1 and Laura Barrett. Here it's not used for buzzy-booty-shaking or for wry indie-pop observations: it's just the sound outside Jo's window, like the one outside yours. Icicles dripping and then clattering to the ground, puddles filling, morning slowly slowly warming your bones. Wobbly notes that echo echo echo, gleam gleam gleam, that make me wish I was part harp, part viola. That make me wish I had strings that could be plucked.
[Out soon! Go see her gigs and buy her EPs.]
The Flaming Lips' "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", which you can just go and download at one of the other indie rock mp3blogs, is terrific, exactly the sort of thing for people like me who don't have much time for Lips albums but who love their best singles. (eg: "She Don't Use Jelly", "Do You Realize") It's a straight-ahead pop-song with lunatic interjections, a demented yah-yah-yah-yah hook, squelches of synths and a fantastic, fantastic bit in the third minute where there's a fool singing, like a fool, but also like me. While the last Lips show I experienced was among the best gigs I've ever seen (LINK FIXED), I'd been hemming and hawing about paying £18 to peer at them from the almost-sold-out balcony of Usher Hall. But now - well, I've got phone-calls to make.
I'm also not sure if I fully articulated how awesome this song from Moe Rex is (offered here to help spare his bandwidth):
James Murphy & Munk "Kick Out The Chairs (Replayed by WhoMadeWho)"
Moe says it got passed around mp3blogs two years ago, but it's new-new-new to my ears, and man, yeah, good. A ginger electric guitar, the requisite LCD Soundsystem cow-bell, some hoarseness of voice, and - oh so sweetly, - a truly-sung chorus to truly-sing along to. "Kick out the chizz-airs, motherfuckers!" He means it so kindly. "Sign me up!" Oh I can hear the smile. It makes me want to dance, obv, but when James begins to cheer his partner (Munk?) along, toward the end, what I want to do is be in the studio with them, being cheered along too. So I just imagine that I am, that as I walk down the street, yelling "All right!" like a madman, headphones on head, fast-footworking to the organic funk unhs, there's a gang of pals behind me, (carrying guitars and amps and horns, one guy with a drum-kit on his back,) who really really really want me to express the song's awesomeness, loud and glad.
Moe Rex provides context out the wazoo, the who-what-and-where of this remix, and you should be reading his site super-regularly anyway, because it rules.
[buy]
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mc DJ wrote me after my last post to point out his Regina Spektor remix. It's really, really good! Over at his site there are also Jens Lekman, Wolf Parade and Feist remixes to be had.
There's a new William Schaff print for sale at The Drama.
The Stypod ruminates on Spencer Krug and (new) Sunset Rubdown.
I have a few pieces in the latest issue of Plan B - a big review of a Belle & Sebastian gig a few weeks ago, and shorties on the Grizzly Bear and Yo Zushi records. (You need to buy it to read them.) Also some new stuff in The Skinny: [live] Regina Spektor, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Herman Dune; [album/single] Jo Mango, Mitford Girls, Audio Bullys, The Pipettes, The Hazey Janes; a Broken Social Scene preview/interview, and my Easy Gramophone column. Phew. The live writeups are the things I'm happiest with.