What the CL Music Team is listening to on this fine Monday to rocket launch the work week. Click here to check out previous entries.
Leilani – Icy Demons, Tears of a Clone (2006); Plants and Animals, The End of That (2012); Portugal.The Man, In the Mountain in the Cloud (2011)
Tears of a Clone is an old favorite that's been MIA from my collection until my husband scrounged it up this weekend, and I have been loving all over it. The offbeat Chicago outfit featuring producer/multi-instrumentalist Griffin Rodriguez (Bablicon) and drummer Chris Powell (Man Man) craft post-jazzy experimental indietronica with hints of New Wave and Zappa, unexpected time signatures that somehow manage to be catchy, and instrumental shimmer on clarinet, vibraphone, strings and percussion that gives it an overall rich feel.
I'm writing a story about Canadian trio Plants and Animals (they play Crowbar on April 10), and I've been enjoying their third and latest record, which is stripped down from the psyche-roots grandiosity of 2010's La La Land to breezy, lightly twangy, bluesy-sauntering folk rock marked by lots of acoustic guitar, the delicately melodic interludes cutting through the dirty Southern grooves.
I've also been rocking the new Portugal.The Man LP as they, too, are hitting town in the near future (April 11 at The Ritz). In the Mountain in the Cloud, their sixth and first major label release, could very well be their strongest and most cohesive effort yet, an effervescent marriage of retro glam, driving prog and modern psychedelia built on heavy-textured washes of dramatic organ and synths, driving guitar, bass fuzz and grooves, transcendent multi-voice chorales that are angelic or foreboding and raised in wailing harmonies that bolster the piping falsetto of frontman John Baldwin Gourley. Check out the video for "So American" after the jump along with the rest of this week's entries.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2012.