Babyshambles: The Blinding EP
To follow up on the Commander Venus post a few days ago, Park Ave. is another band that featured important players from the Saddle Creek/Team Love family: Tilly and the Wall’s Neely Jenkins and Jamie Williams, Clark Baechle from The Faint, and of course, Conor Oberst.
I found The Format’s demo session of Dog Problems the other day. Ironically, the Dog Problems Demo only features two tracks off Dog Problems ("Dog Problems" and "I'm Actual"). There’s also "Janet", a song from the Snails EP and I guess the rest are unreleased tracks. I just wished there were actually more demo versions from Dog Problems, but I am still pretty stoked about finding this.
If The Blow were to put out an instrumental version of Paper Television, and you had absolutely no prior knowledge of what The Blow sounded like, you would easily categorize it as a hip-hop, R & B, or 2-Step/Garage record. That is because musically, the record uses all elements from those genres (plus many many more), making it an unbelievably fun and dancy album to listen to. In a way, The Blow’s Paper Television is like half of Mates of State... by that, I mean, with the same (if not more) type of energetic up-tempo style, but doing that with one vocalist. So I guess if you like Mates of State, check out Paper Television by The Blow.
Moneen recently released a dualdisk EP/DVD combo: the EP features an unreleased track as well as four acoustic versions of songs off The Red Tree while the DVD contains four songs performed live at the Opera House in Toronto back in June 2006.
The Joanna Newsom show that I went to back in October featured one of the better openers I have encountered in recent shows. It was a local band called Ohbijou. The band had about six or seven... or eight members on stage playing countless instruments from the violin and cello to the trumpet and ukulele; every single one of those instruments sounded great and the lead vocal was beautiful. I want to buy a copy of their CD at that show; but unfortunately, they were all gone by the end of the concert. I was going to look them up on the interweb, but I kind of forgot about them until mid-last week. To be honest, I am a little disappointed by their debut full length, Swift Feet For Troubling Times. Nevertheless, my roommate and I concluded that this disappointment only exists because of the wonderful live performance we both experienced. I am pretty positive that for those who have never seen Ohbijou live, they would surly enjoy Swift Feet For Troubling Times. Ohbijou is talented and definitely very promising, so make time in your busy schedule and listen to the tracks below.
I was truly disappointed when I didn’t hear "Untitled #3" on The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me... but thankfully, it is featured on the "Sowing Season" single. Brand New gave the track a name: "Coca-Cola", and while the melody and timbre sounds similar, the lyrics are completely different from the demo version.
Commander Venus featured a number of important players from the Saddle Creek family: not only was it fronted by Conor Oberst, but the band included Tim Kasher of Curisve and The Good Life, as well as members of The Faint... crazy!
Head over to Punknews.org to read an excellent review on The Mars Volta live in Tokyo.
