Saturday, August 25, 2012

Vol.3 Episode 33

It is time for another singles issue. I have been sitting on these for quite a while and I am very excited to share them with you. I couldn't wait another week. I wanted to put them out now!!

Here it is...


This is the first single from Echo Lake. It was released in July of 2011, before the first album was released. As I was not sure at the time that I wrote about Wild Peace this is the single from the album.

The A side of the single, Another Day, is included on the new album Wild Peace. The song has a heavy hand with echo but the vocals still seem to float up to the top over all of the music. Although you can’t understand the lyricist is still a very pretty sound and that is what is most important in the music.

Ths B side track, Breathe Deep, is only found on this single. This song has the light and airy/dreamy vocals that I love so much. The background vocals are just oos and ahs but they overlap the actual words that are being sung making for a nearly breathless sound in the vocals. It is really cool to listen to.

This was an interesting hunt into the background of Echo Lake. I liked the album so much that I had to find more from them. The only other collections that are out there from this group right now are the first EP, Young Silence, the first single as seen here and their first album, Wild Peace.

This is her first EP but her second release ever. This Ep was released in the summer of 2012. The EP was released as a 7” vinyl with three songs or as a download with five songs. I bought the 7” and downloaded the two tracks that were not included on the physical release. The record label that is supporting her is called Neon Gold. This is the same record company that put out Passion Pits’ first single, Sleepy Head. They are a very small record company.

The first release from this EP is called Warrior. I heard it through an email that I get that promotes indie bands, I think it is called Rcd-Lbl. I don’t keep the email after I have read it so I can’t be sure about that name. She has a beautiful voice and the backing music is usually slow and deliberate with lots of emotion. The music is electronic in nature and has some big beats that boll you over.

The second song, The one that I heard from Rcd-Lbl, called White Coats, has some really cool digital backing vocal samples that are very intriguing. It has that mountainous feel with tympani drums used in the chorus and the sampled vocals having a nice clear echo on them. She sort of has a bit of a whine in her vocals. Some people may not like this sound. For me, listening to Thom Yorke for so long, it is all right.

The third track from the EP is called In Her Arms. This track has a really awesome big distorted bass drum sound. The melody of the song sounds like it is coming from a set of pipe bells that are all bent out of shape. They have a slightly out of tune sound that works so well with the song. This track is one of the two that are only available on the download version of the EP

The other two tracks are a demo of Let Go For Tonight, download or vinyl, and Warrior done as a live acoustic version, download only.

This was Foxes first ever release. It was released early in 2012 on Neon Gold as well. The graphic on the cover reminds me of porcelain artistry. It is very pretty.

The A side of this 7” single is called Youth. The song start out with her vocals only with the music fading in slowly. There are lots of synth strings and a low under current bass line and light drums. It builds into a bass driven track with glitch drums that sound really good. The song drops this all off with only her vocals about half way through the song. The piano comes in slowly and then everything picks back up. It is a great song with great song craftsmanship in my opinion.

The B side of the single is called Home. This track is much simpler. It starts out with her vocals and a music box sounding melody behind. The drums pick up with a slow big sound. There is also some synth parts that support the music box sound that continues through the verse. There are some strings that pick up in the chorus to pick up where the music box leaves off. It reminds me of a child moving with his or her parents from town to town. The child in the story almost never gets to make any friends. It is a heart wrenching story that rings true to me through some of my friends who have had to live like that.

Lorelei – Asleep EP & Single
Both versions of this collection are long out of print. They were released in 1993. I was lucky to find both of them recently for cheap prices. Not many people know of this group so, if you look around, you can find them for cheap. The EP, which is a CD, has a different track listing from the vinyl single which is why I had to track down both versions. I was lucky to have tracked down the red vinyl version of the vinyl single.

It is called Asleep but they are in support of the song MostlyI Sleep, the A side of the single and lead track for the EP. The guys have younger sounding voices than what I have gotten use to on the new record Enterprising Sidewalks, There was nearly 20 years between this release and the new album that just came out. The song has a smooth beginning that slowly deteriorates into a staccato stutter. It really reminds me of something that Sunny Day Real Estate would have done. I like it a lot.

This leaves four songs that are not found anywhere else but on this EP and single. The B side to the single, called Float My Bed, starts out as an average song but bursts into a distorted mess at the end of each verse. It is an interesting way to craft a song, I will give them that much. I would not want them to float my bed away on that noise with me in it though.

The second track on the EP is called The Sky Is Falling. This is a slow song that doesn’t seem to do anything. There is so much dead space on the beginning of the song, I am just not sure that it is going any where until the second third kicks in. it is still slow but it does fill in the spaces better. The song goes back and forth between this dead sound and the full sound. It is a good song but really looses me in those dead parts.

The last two songs, Caterwaul and Stale Houses, are interesting but not tracks that I would sit down and listen to because I wanted to be enveloped in happy warm music. I will just put it like that. I will say that you need to be in the mood to listen to both the EP. I could probably listen to the single and be happy with that though.

This was a split single put out by K records. It was released in 1996. I got this as a freebie when I bought the Lorelei Single. I did not order it nor did I know that it was in the package when I got it. I was not even going to listen to it. I ended up cleaning it and putting it on as I was recording all of these singles for conversion to digital. There is one track from Heavenly and two from Bis.

I did not know what side was the A side or the B side as it was not labeled. I looked it up on Discogs to find that the Heavenly track was the A side. I listened to the Heavenly track, Trophy Girlfriend, and fell in love with the group instantly. The song has the classic 90s distorted guitar but has the clearest English accented female vocals. It was new and old to me at the same time. The song reminds me of something that Lush may have done on their last album, i.e. Lady Killers. I loved it. I am going to try to get some of their full length albums after hearing this song.

Bis had two songs on the B side of this single. The first song is called Keroleen. It has the licks of straight up punk. The problem that I have with the track is there is a slowed down sounding background vocals that is very distracting from the song. If they would have done that background as a normal voice I think that I would have liked it better.

The second song that they have on this single is called Grand Royal With Cheese. This song is just music, no vocals. The song is a very cool drum driven track. I think that this track is so much better than Keroleen. This is mainly due to the fact that there are no vocals and that it is mainly electronic/drum driven.

I don’t know who Other Lives are honestly. The 12” single was released just recently in 2012. I bought it simply because Atoms For Peace is Thom Yorkes’ solo band.

The A side of this single is written by Other Lives but remixed by Atoms For Peace. The song is called Tamer Animals. There are sound clips of the lead singer from the group but I can’t tell how much of the original song is in this remix. It is an interesting glitch styled remix of the song which is indicative of Thom yorkes’ style.

The B side is a remix of the song Other Side. The remix is labeled Stuck Together Remix. This is significant because Thom did a song called Stuck Together for some modeling thing a while back. This is another electronic track from Thom and reminds me of the Radiohead remixes that were put out over the summer of 2011. It also reminds me of the sounds that I use to make when messing around with the old windows music software called Rubber Duck. You would make a loop and just mess with the loop over and over seeing what kind of new sounds you could come up with. It is an interesting song but at eight minutes it gets a little long in the tooth.

There is always more to come...

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