Just Another Snake Cult

I’ve been enjoying listening to Berndsen’s debut album, Lover in the Dark.  The album came out last year, a project of Davíð Berndsen.  Nine nuanced nuggets of Giorgio Moroder-style ’80s synthpop, maybe a little Duran Duran, a dash of Aha.  Dynamic arrangements. Sometimes bright, sometimes dreary, sometimes fantastical.  No aggressive pretention.  No over-the-top, self-reflective, sassy irony.  Just some sincere, competent synthpop worship of the type I described.

Berndsen photo by Wenjing

The first thing I noticed when seeing them play live is that what may have been expertly sequenced tracks on the album, there was no backing track — everything was played live.  Obviously the result was not as tight as their recorded output but nonetheless much more impressive to see — the intricate synth parts, saxophone solos, guitar and bass work, vocoder, and drums being performed.

I apologize that I messed up recording these tracks so they’re not as clear as they could have been.

Recorded at Sódóma in downtown Reykjavík on April 23, 2010.

I’ve been slacking on posting tracks for the Reykjavík bootleg series.  It’s been sort of a dry month for shows for me.  More will be forthcoming!

Photo by Wenjing.

For this installment we have Reykjavík’s very own delta bluesman, Johnny Strongarms.  The track I managed to record happens to be his tale of a recent birthday night out on the town during which though he tried with nine different prospects at the end of the night did not manage to get laid.

Recorded during the Grapevine Grassroots festival at Hemmi & Valdi on March 19, 2010.  Audience was particularily noisy this night.  One of the PA speakers keeps cutting out, but if you even notice it in the recording it mostly just sounds interesting.

Johnny Strongarms may not be doing anything new with blues, but he captures an admirable amount of its original character.  His love and appreciation of the old genre shows, and he pays it a good tribute.

Though I don’t in earnest know much about blues–I never listen to it myself–I feel it is a genre that’s been badly abused — typically distilled of its soul down to cliches, played by people applying generic principles instead of the nuances of the culture in which blues is really embodied.  I guess that happens to everything extracted from its roots into larger civilization.  But in blues it can be so exceptionally bad — in my head typified by four lame dudes in a bar playing A7 D7 A7 E7 D7 A7 E7 on modern rock instruments and belting lewd things.  To me, Johnny Strongarms recalls the likes of Robert Johnson, bluesmen from a time when it still had inventiveness and earnestness.

This is the very first post in my new “Reykjavík Bootleg Series.” I’ve attending shows steadily since arriving and recently find myself having the equipment to make decent quality field recordings. So, it’s time to introduce the world to samples of the more interesting music being performed on this small, mild-weathered, volcanic rock.

If you’ve ever seen the footage of the tsunami as it hit Thailand, then you have an image of what this band delivers. Slowly and steadily, wave by wave, the girth of the ocean encroaches upon the land until you’re hitting the bulk of civilization–its desperate protests ignored and engulphed by what’s no longer a series of waves but rather an unstoppable flow. The land in this case being a desert; the vacationing Swedes, cactii; the spas, Cadillac graveyards.

Introducing to the world, The Heavy Experience. Third and final song of their first ever live performance, 4 mars. 2010 at Sódóma in downtown Reykjavík.

Sódómas overcompensated sound system saw rare good use during this set. You can’t feel it on your home speakers, but this slow meditation did indeed get heavy. While not loud to the point where it sounds indescernably bad and kills your ears (which defeats the whole point of music, duh!), it really hit a sweet spot where I could hear everything, even the sax, and could feel as each wave crashed into me. Also goes to show that the key to intensity is dynamics–a technique I wish were more widely applied.

This last weekend I was filling in on keys for James Rabbit, and we played with one of my favorite bands, Pangea!  They were freakin’ amazing as always.

They’re from the Los Angeles area.  They’re a part of an association of friends that call themselves the Griznar Collective.  They play some raw, stripped down, keyboard-y, energetic, and dancey-as-all-hell pop.

Here’s a couple videos to give you an idea:

Last year they self-released an EP called OUTTA YER SHELL into my mouth. From the openning track, “You Sleep Too Much,” onwards, it is absolutely amazing.  Before that I think they did a self-titled full-length that I remember being pretty damn good as well, but I don’t have it any more.  Now they just released a 7″ called Never Not Know Nothing, which is great too!

Here’s my favorite of their new material:
Pangea - Not Anyone Knows

This time last year I was living in Santa Cruz’s Crystal Palace with, among other people, my good friend John Tyler Martin–the mastermind behind the sesame-street-new-wave band/home-recording project, James Rabbit.  I was playing the part of bass player for the group at the time.  We’d just gotten home from an awesome tour with the amazing Da Bears, and were continuing the process of recording a new album entitled Perfect Waves.  We’d boarded up one of the front doors to our house to better sound proof it, and for months our “music room” was the Perfect Waves recording studio.

If you don’t know James Rabbit, it’s time that you do.  Tyler’s recorded 40+ albums in 10 years, in his bedrooms, with his friends.  He writes elaborate, sincere, meaningful, positive pop albums, each of which he has given away.  The two previous albums, Colosusses and Coloratura were both exciting and new in their own ways.  The former was a fabulous set of concise pop songs recorded over a layer of pots and pans.  The latter was a triumphant and heartfelt ode to the importance of friends.

Perfect Waves is the most recent; it came out this year on the first day of spring.  Here’s a video we put together last winter with footage from the recording process over clips from the album.

It’s a 20-song journey.  It’s distinctly James Rabbit, but also breaks new ground once again.  The best way I can describe it is sophisti-pop.  It’s a mix of pop, new wave, indie, with bits jazz, funk, African music, musical.

The fidelity is the best of any James Rabbit album hereto, and I’m very proud of having a hand in that, especially the bass tone.  It was magic how it came together.  For the final EQ we analyzed a Dexys Midnight Runners song and matched that.

You can download the full album for free.

I’m a big fan.

I’ve been moving around quite a bit in the last half-year.  It’s been unsettling.  I’ve recently found myself wanting to listen to music that is fresh.  The old stuff is part of my old lives.  It’s good, but it’s not where I am right now.  Here are a few albums that I’m really liking most recently:

“Oh, the Places We’ll Go” by LAKE

Brian Echon from Santa Cruz showed me this band, but I never really had a chance to check them out until after I’d left.  I guess they started out as a Fleetwood Mac cover band.  I’m glad they moved on to their own material.  These songs all work really well together as an album.  They even put the titular track on there twice!  (I love it when bands do that, but Heart still have them beat–Dreamboat Annie occurs 3 times.)  There’s a guy and a girl singer and they trade off.  Lots of good syncopated rhythms, and a precise soft pop sensibility.

“White Tiger” by Tremblexy

This is such a cool band!  I’m a huge fan of the sights and sounds that come from this duo.  Futurist pop?  Borrowing from early avant garde electronic music, ’70s-flavored basslines, psychedlic pop, shoegaze, they create a soundscape at once alienating and enlightening.  Like like stepping out your door and finding your are on the planet Mars.  Their music is sort of reminiscent of the band Air.  Sara’s vocals are haunting.

You can download the album for free from their website.

“Clangour” by Sin Fang Bous

I discovered Sin Fang Bous while living in Iceland last month.  I have no idea how to pronounce the band name, which is a problem when trying to tell people about it.  I heard the track “Catch the Light” on his music profile page and was instantly hooked.  This is a fresh album.  His voice is soft, the rhythms driving, the guitars organic, the keyboards glitchy.  It’s pop music–little folky, but pretty dynamic, and with a western flare to it.

You can listen to his tracks on gogoyoko.