What the CL Music Team is jamming this fine Monday to rocket launch the work week. Click here to check out previous entries.
Leilani - Ponderosa, Pool City (New West, 2012), Lawrence Arabia, The Sparrow (Bella Union, 2012), Sweet Valley, Stay Calm (Fool's Gold, 2012), Ape School, Jr. Violence (Hometapes, 2012)
These four albums all dropped within the past month and caught my attention within a matter of days of each other. Before this week, I hadn't heard a lick of music by any of these bands. All four are brand new to me, a fact I find very exciting...
Lawrence Arabia's The Sparrow (the third outing of the New Zealand outfit) is warm piano-driven indie rock with strings and horns adding symphonic drama and big fat basslines bringing a casual pop-grooving balance. The whole thing has a warm and indecipherable retro quality - it could be the '60s, it could be the '70s, but whatever it is, it definitely reminds you of something, even if you can't quite put your finger on what that something is.
Sweet Valley is the screwed, sampled and spliced experimental electro-break side project of Wavves' frontman Nathan Williams and brother Kynan. Stay Calm is a little spooky and out-there in the vein of The Avalanches, but with more bright island appeal and soulfully screwball moments.
Ponderosa's Pool City — which actually came as a physical copy (very rare these days) — captured me after about five listens with its hazy mix of roots rock, dream pop and alterna-folk; the direct sonic by-product of a band weaned on My Morning Jacket, Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear. This is the Atlanta band's second album and according to what I've read, it's a big departure from their more Southern rocking debut.
Finally, Ape School is the alias of of Michael Johnson, his music a mix of acid bouncing electro pop, Beta Band-esque experimentalism and light New Wave ambiance marked by lots of synth texture, sonic blips and embellishments, and all manner of psychedelic flotsam and jetsam. Totally loving on "Marijuana's on the Phone," which apparently began as a drunken strum into a tape recorder that filled out the next morning with analog synths and a swinging baritone sax. Listen to the track after the jump and check out the rest of the CL Music Team's entries for our 75th edition of MusicMonday...