Pitchfork

Part 2 of Bradford Cox's Pitchfork Music Festival bumrush finds the Deerhunter frontman goofing around with Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, the slightly confused-looking members of the Dodos, and King Khan, before sitting down for a frank conversation with High Places that finds everyone switching roles. (Part 1 is here)

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The producer, DJ, writer, and restless sonic explorer Jace Clayton, better known as Dj/rupture, recently released a new mixtape called Uproot. As with predecessors like Gold Teeth Thief and Low Income Tomorrowland, Uproot draws connections between highly varied tracks from all over the globe. The opening selection, by Baby Kites and Nokea, is a wistful instrumental with a haunting melody, a tough rythym, and a slightly prickly edge. A video for the track, directed by Pan Optic, looks at the structure of a city at the most geometric level, as a stream of architectural renderings, blueprints, and images of construction and decay slide in and out of view.

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

[from Uproot and Uproot: The Ingredients; physical copies due 10/03/08 The Agriculture]

Well, you have to hand it to Metallica-- the first track released from Death Magnetic doesn't sound like a rock radio sure-thing. It's about eight minutes long, with builds and discrete parts and lots of shredding just for the sake of shredding. Though I haven't paid much attention to Metallica's records since their 1990 self titled album, during which time they've seemed more like a media phenomenon than a band to be reckoned with, "The Day That Never Comes" sounds like the work of dudes thinking about music first, anyway. The track is streaming over at their MySpace.

MP3:> Metallica: "The Day That Never Comes"
[from Death Magnetic; due 09/12/08 on Warner Bros.]

Shad is rapper from London, Ontario, and he remembers the 1990s, specifically, the Will Smith vehicle "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". The video, from the Hot Dog Garbage production house, is a remarkably detailed (and pretty hilarious) tribute to the show's opening segment. Pretty high production value, too, until... well, just watch.

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

[from The Old Prince; out now on Blackbox Canada]

Growing up, I used to play in an abandoned cemetery in the woods behind our house. There were no headstones anymore, and the only remnants of the graves were oblong depressions in the ground, some covered by sheet metal. Only the wrought-iron fence remained to suggest what it had been, creating a strange space in the woods that even as a child I knew was old and possibly haunted, but not necessarily scary.

I hadn't thought about that place in years before listening to Horse Feathers' "Rude to Rile", off their upcoming sophomore album, House with No Home. Like that cemetery fence, the song defines an eerie space where the skeleton of a story lies: no exposition, no names, just hints of a grief and outrage and a widow (possibly) beset by suitors. The music offers no foothold either. The Portland-based trio hit the heraldic hook and move on quickly, returning to it again and again as Peter Broderick's violin eddies manically and Heather Broderick's cello provides the story's undertow. His voice high and unreadable, Justin Ringle skims the melodies as the arrangement builds haphazardly, creating an eerie insistence that gives his lyrics added heft. "Rude to Rile" doesn't feel like it was composed, more like it was abandoned to the undergrowth years ago.

MP3:> Horse Feathers: "Rude to Rile"
[from House With No Name; due 09/09/08 on Kill Rock Stars]

The soaring and ethereal "From the Top of the World" gets an appropriately dreamy video by Ryan Roregger. We see Shara Worden singing in front of surreal imagery, a puppet comes to life, and a rain of shark's teeth (a thousand?) tumbles from the sky.

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

[from A Thousand Shark's Teeth; out now; also from the "From the Top of The World" single; due 09/23/08; both on Asthmatic Kitty]

The title track from the forthcoming album by the Streets is up and streaming at MySpace. It's a meditation on the meaning of life, noting that we come into this world with nothing and leave the same way, and the stuff we pick up along the way is just borrowed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and so on. Unfortunately it's a super low-quality stream, so it's hard to tell what the production really sounds like, but I hear some string samples and backup voice in there somewhere.

MP3:> The Streets: "Everything Is Borrowed"
[from Everything Is Borrowed; due 09/15/08 in the UK on 679]

Contrary to popular indie-rock belief, beauty and joy aren't just something obscure to be sought after in dusty record bins. They're there in nature, in everyday emotions, and in this charming indie-pop ditty from Lake. The Olympia, Wash.-based collective have recorded 12 albums, released three, and gone through multiple lineup changes, but on "Blue Ocean Blue", from their Seussically titled K Records debut, Oh, the Places We'll Go, they manage to maintain just enough guilelessness to keep their simple themes from coming across as cloying or overly calculated.

A Crayola box's worth of handclaps, drums, synths, bass guitar, cowbell, and horns color in this ocean's "Blue", ending up not far off from Architecture in Helsinki's In Case We Die. The lead vocal has the unaffected lightness of High Places' Mary Pearson, observing, "How stealthily joy creeps in when it's surrounded by destruction." Lake's members, including K vet Karl Blau, are also involved a variety of other projects, such as Kickball, -a, Live Active Cultures, Number Bear, the Palisades and the solo efforts of members Ashley Eriksson, Eli Moore, and Lindsay Schief.

MP3:> Lake: "Blue Ocean Blue"
[from Oh, the Places We'll Go; due in October on K Records]

Watch what happens when we give Bradford Cox of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound a microphone and set him loose at this year's Pitchfork Music Festival. He talks Batman with Dean Spunt from No Age, voice care techniques with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and sex with King Khan.

Performance footage of a costumed Sigur Rós performing live with backup musicians galore is used to fashion a new video for Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust's galloping fanfare "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur". (via Stereogum)

[from Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust; out now on XL]