My Morning Jacket give names to all their Evil Urges

Louisville indie-rockers My Morning Jacket know how to lay on the reverb. They've done it, to pretty great effect, on two records so far, and now their third effort, Evil Urges, has a tracklist. Here it is:

1. Evil Urges
2. Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Part 1
3. Highly Suspicious
4. I'm Amazed
5. Thank You Too
6. Sec Walkin'
7. Two Halves
8. Librarian
9. Look at You
10. Aluminum Park
11. Remnants
12. Smokin From Shootin
13. Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Part 2
14. Good Intentions

Look for Evil Urges on June 10th via ATO.

Watch Sigur Ros's Heima for free

The documentary Heima on Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Ros is available on Youtube. The film was released alongside the Hvarf/Heima EPs, which are highly recommended.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4s7KeCbV8

Beck enlists Danger Mouse for new album

Beck Hansen, everyone's favourite Scientologist, is back for his follow-up to 2006's The Information. One can only assume that with Danger Mouse behind the boards, we can expect Beck to move further into the trip-hop vein his prior two albums explored (though Guero belied the Dust Brothers' influence). This is yet another notch in Danger Mouse's (increasingly notched) belt, what with another Gnarls Barkley album on the way. Details on the album have not yet arisen, but we will continue to report on this as events warrant.

Record Review: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing

SSLYBY's debut, Broom, was a real charmer. Though they might have laid on the Elliott Smith and Pavement pastiche a little too thickly, what indie record doesn't?

Here, only later tracks "Oceanographer" and "Heers" match the musical drama of the first record. The songs are rendered overly whispy, losing any of the stop-start rhythms or vocal acrobatics of Broom. Philip Dickey's vocals are especially weak, with all of the gravitas taken out of them, again with the exception of "Heers".

What Pershing is left with are generic pop-punk guitars, lame rhythms, and crowded production. Rather than letting any one track shine through, everything is coated in reverb and buried in a very busy mix. While the vocals or any especially interesting guitar melody on Broom took centre stage, the seemingly hooky vocal on "Think I Wanna Die" in tainted with excessive reverb and hidden under surf guitar, acoustic chords, and picked acoustic.

A parade of indie stereotypes come rolling by: jangly gutars, bright horns, hand claps, swooning strings, introspective lyrics. It's as if they were trying to record a Minus the Bear and Modest Mouse record simultaneously, without Jake Snider or Isaac Brock.

So much promise wasted.

5.4/10.0

-RJR

Record Review: Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel

Rating: 9.0 / 10.0

God damn it. I can't get David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick out of my head. From the first time I listened to Bradford Cox aka Atlas Sound's Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, I thought to myself, "Shit these songs would sound fucking amazing behind a really lurid film...about interstellar space travel...made in the 1980s (think Wild at Heart meets 2001: A Space Odyssey...can you see it...?)". I know that sounds like a pejorative to the nth degree, but it really, honestly isn't. In fact, it's actually one of the biggest compliments I could pay this record.

You see, making great music is often about achieving the elusive balance between things that run seemingly in opposition with one another: war and love, hope and loneliness, simplicity and relationships, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel balances the real and the fake, hiding shimmering, emotion-laden pop songs beneath layers of distorted guitar, effects, and ambient noise. The vocals are often double-tracked, and - pulling a page out of George Martin's playbook - one track is bare, and the other is soaked in reverb and echo. While Martin used it to give depth to John Lennon's voice, on Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, the contrast is exaggerated, endowing the vocals with an atmospheric, haunting, surreal character.

Cox has done the whole genre-blending thing here with great aplomb. Drawing heavily from shoegaze, electronic, pop, ambient, and folk, his songs are subtle, nuanced, and complex, but always accessible, always listenable. Naturally, experimental shoegaze rides shotgun, but this is by no means a Deerhunter record. This is, simply put, a far more peaceful, easy on the ears, effort than anything Deerhunter has done. Experimentation and aesthetics share the stage on this record in a way that rarely happens on Deerhunter albums. The stunning "Quarantined" exemplifies this balance, where hugely unorthodox instrumentation meets formidable melodic awareness. This level of attention to detail is never sacrificed, the record is the epitome of tact, subtlety, and a sort of relaxed precision from beginning to end.

What makes this beautiful balance more complex is that it's not just a musical one, it's a lyrical-emotional one too. Cox hides nuggets of emotion amid lyrics that are otherwise very abstract or sometimes too soaked in effects to be comprehensible. "I am waiting to be changed," Cox intones repeatedly on "Quarantined". It is a rare moment of bare vulnerability that reveals a tiny piece of what is beneath the synthesised surface of this record. Cox has hidden a reservoir of emotion beneath a carefully constructed shell of lyrical abstraction, and then he has allowed the shell to crack in a few places. There is a cautious pathos about this record that makes it more heartbreaking than all this bleeding-heart-on-sleeve emo crap we seem to be inundated with.

So in the rare event that David Lynch decides he wants to stop making shitty movies about farmers driving across the country on tractors, and Stanley Kubrick wants to come back from the dead to collaborate with him on one final masterpiece, Bradford Cox would be the ideal candidate to soundtrack that film. This record should tide us over until then.

-PTC

Mew and SSLYBY news

1. Danish proggers Mew are beginning work on the follow-up to And the Glass Handed Kites, one of the best records of 2005. Long overdue, certainly. No word on whether J Mascis will reprise his vocal contributions to this latest record. Production duties fall to Rick Costey, who manned the boards on Interpol's latest (absolutely shit) and Franz Ferndinand's You Could Have It So Much Better (their debut certainly was so much better). These guys seem to get better with every release, so look forward to this one. Oh, and they KILL live.



2. Missouri popsmiths Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, due to release their second album April 8th, which follows the excellent Broom, are launching a tour this spring. Their date in San Francisco is at Rickshaw Stop on May 14th, with Oakland's own Port O'Brien opening.

Glen Hansard on Hollywood

Oscar winner Glen Hansard (for Once) had this to say in a recent Pitchfork interview:

People kept saying to me all night, "So, what neighborhood are you going to live in?" I was like, "What do you mean?" They said, "Obviously you're going to come out here and get into film work." I was like, "No." Everybody just assumed we were going to move to Hollywood, and next year try to get another one. Dude, this is once in a lifetime. I'm going straight back to making music after this. I had this conversation with a few people who just didn't get it. People are trying to sign you up to an agency or write music for another film. As much as I would do it if it was the right thing, the last thing I want to do is move out here and try to make my money doing that.

A stirring sentiment. Check the full interview on the front page of Pitchfork, including words with co-star/winner Markéta Irglová.

Atlas Sound comes to Stanford this Sunday

Having recently dodged the bullet of having Tegan and Sara come sonically pollute our university, the Stanford Concert Network added another feather to their cap by recruiting Atlas Sound, the solo side project of Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, to come play a free show at the pub on campus. Look forward to exclusive coverage of that show from NLtS.

-PTC

Radiohead confirmed for Outside Lands festival

Checka:

http://www.outsidelandsfest.com/

As we mentioned a while back and have now confirmed, there will be a music festival this August in Golden Gate Park and Radiohead will headline. More to come.