Fader

So you know we've loved No Age since they were born basically—our first mention of them on this blog coming way back in February of 2007, then a weird one-off profile on the label that first put out their singles Teenage Teardrops, then a Gen F in FADER 44, then a full-fledged feature in FADER 48, a million blog posts, FADER shows, and finally the coup de grâce… a hat. Yep, No Age designed a New Era fitted for us (don't worry we'll be giving some away soon), and we were so stoked on it that we threw a party the day before they unleased the Pitchfork 9.whatever-scoring Nouns upon the world. And here is a somewhat crappy video of the dudes playing a song from that album, "Here Should Be My Home", in full technicolor SCHNIPPERVISION.

It may have been a couple dozen issues since we put Josh Homme on the cover of this magazine but we continue to jam Queens whenever we decide to lift weights (coffee cups), drive hella fast (the F train) or cruise babes (shop for pants). In fact, if it weren't for the beautiful 55-degree rain in New York City right now, we would totally bounce down to sunny Atlanta for QOTSA's headlining slot at the Southern Comfort Music Experience at Centennial Park tomorrow. It's first one this year, and the next one, June 28th in Denver, is Gnarls Barkley, with more headliners and events to be announced later.

It's kinda obvious why Thurston Moore signed Tall Firs to his Ecstatic Peace label. They are prone to epic drum freakouts (like on the standout "Warrior"), as well as total slacker vocals that makes them sound like they stepped straight out of a time machine from 1992. Luckily since it's 2008 and the internet exists, we don't have to read about it in some dude's mailorder zine that has breadcrumbs in the middle from when he was eating a sandwich while hand-stapling it. In a move we fully support, the band offered up Too Old to Die Young for free download for one week presumably hoping that people will listen to it and then spend dollars on it. Not a bad idea at all dudes! Download (for a limited time) below.

Download: Tall Firs, Too Old to Die Young

Over the course of three albums and a grip of other songs Castanets main dude Ray Raposa has shown that he is capable of creating some of the more atmospheric country-folk we've heard in awhile. Granted, sometimes he misses the mark, but when he's on he makes us want to go home and lay down for days—not exactly the feeling most of us are looking for in music, but sometimes you just want shit to get a little heavy. "You Got Lucky" is the first song from the next Castanets release. It was recorded in the desert in Arizona, and while he was probably in a house on a regular street, this song makes us imagine him alone in a trailer in the middle of a Roadrunner style desert, full of jagged cliffs and like one winding road that always seems really far away. You can check out the rest of the Castanets/Daytrotter songs here.


Download: Castanets, "You Got Lucky"

Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's two seconds from the song "Teen Creeps" off Nouns by No Age. Buy Nouns here, watch a video of them playing it here (though the times referred to below reflect the album version) and read about it sort of after the jump. more...

Anytime some new Ratatat comes out, we put it on the hi-fi and clear out the hallways. Not because it sucks but because we are then forced to run through the office en masse airshredding and growing our beards out. Shit is wild. It's like if bears could play double-knecked guitars. "Shiller" is the Tat's new vinyl-only single and it's going to cause some problems around here. Buy it at Beggars and get the mysteriously LP4 attributed "Mahalo" on the b-side. (from GvsB)


Download: Ratatat, "Shiller"

We spent two nights in a row seeing Ladyhawk last weekend (where's the graph Kuo?). They were good at Mercury Lounge and awesome at Union Hall. The hugest bummer about Ladyhawk is when you go to see them and there aren't as many people there as you'd imagined and everyone walks around saying Why aren't there more people here? And then they get on stage and totally shred, and you feel worse because so many people are missing out. But the best thing about Ladyhawk is that, when they are on, they can make brothers and sisters out of strangers. In fact, by the end of the extra-long set of Ladyhawk classics and even a couple new songs, we found ourselves in a weird group bro-down with the rest of the audience and then we bought a t-shirt and some Hawk shot glasses. Check out a video by Joe Angerone of their most recent single, "I Don't Always Know What You're Saying" from their Union Hall performance above.

Are we blogging about Portishead regularly now? Apparently so. We totally weren't planning on it, but then this video popped up and reminded us of when we took an eastern European animation class in college. We had to watch large blocks of earth-toned cartoons for like 4-5 hours at a time that were about the trials of living in a city and how the bus was terrible and everything was Too Crowded. Also, how did we never notice that this is basically a straight up folk song? We're not mad.

There are very few artists who can put out a new video for a five or six year old song and get us to post it. Ariel Pink is one of them. "Gray Sunset" is a song off The Doldrums, an album which Ariel explained as "really weird in the sense that I don't know of anything—historically speaking—that is predicated on a generation of mistakes that led the course to a final product," in Issue 27 of The FADER, and we gotta say that it still sounds as strange and mistakenly great as the first time we heard it. The video was shot and edited by Travis Peterson in LA last week on a 1983 Sony tube video camera and debuts Ariel's new androgynous look which oddly looks like a genetic splicing of a couple people in this office.

Did you know we put Love is All on our cover? (Issue 37!) We gotta be honest and say that they never really took off like we clearly hoped, but they did gain a cult following (especially among FADER-staffers. "Busy Doing Nothing" is our shit on Saturday mornings when it's raining and cold but we still want to wake up and not feel like we are wrapped in like seven blankets of gauze). Annnyyyyywayyy, We thought the band fell off the face of the earth for a minute, but it turns out they didn't! After a date in DC, they're hitting New York for a show at Cake Shop on June 12th, then hopping on over to Philly for a night before coming back to NY on the 14th for a show at the Market Hotel. Both New York shows will be stifling hot, but we'll be there regardless because we love Love Is All. Check out a video of them performing for Hand Held Shows outside with a really loud keyboard above.

We can pretty safely file this one in the Things We Should Have Paid More Attention To folder (thanks to Daniel Arnold for making sure we didn't overlook this one any longer), because Pepi Ginsberg is making some excellent Joni Mitchell-esque piano folk that also sounds like Dr Dog with a female singer. That's probably not even a coincidence considering they are on the same label and have done songs (including this one) together. Seriously though, this is music for summer morning subway rides to work and walks in the park, both things that we plan on doing constantly. Happy Times dudes!

Depending on where you sit in the FADER office, you are likely to be lapping it up with a gigantic fan of ELO and ABBA orrrrrrrr Anticon b-sides. We are a diverse (and forgiving) crew. If the former is your shit, then so will be "Light of Love", the first in a series of 12" single releases on Secretly Canadian by LA band Music Go Music, who remain somewhat of a mystery but whose 12" cover has mountains made of stockinged legs on it.


Download: Music Go Music, "Light of Love"

When we first heard Whalebones, one of the first things we thought was that they would sound great making rough and intimate lo-fi acoustic songs. They must have been reading our minds, because just recently they hit us off with "The Beach," which, besides sounding like an empty beach on a grey morning, also has someone blowing on a jug in the background. If there's anything we've been missing in music it's jugs. We would normally make a suggestion that the band should release a lot more of these acoustic demos, but since we already know that they are going to, we're going to hold off and just wait patiently for that.

Last night Schnipper and his friend went to see No Age and High Places at Bowery Ballroom. it was fun! Gchat interview about the show between Schnipper and J after the jump. more...

In the new Grand Theft Auto IV (have you heard about it? Kind of been flying under the media radar...) there are a dizzying number of in-game radio stations that the GTA creators designed to "feel like what you would want to hear if you came to New York. Not necessarily what you do find here, but what you ought to hear if it was like the way you'd imagined it." Which means reggae don Bobby Konders gets to host a Massive B station featuring Bunji and Mavado and Green Lantern and THE FINISHER!!! Mister Cee have a fake Hot 97 of their very own. But the alternarock station ("Radio Broker") is probably where art and life diverge the most - it's Juliette Lewis playing !!!, LCD Soundsystem, and this previously-unreleased (and amusing) Rapture b-side, a four-minute diss of Gucci Soundsystem DJ Ben Rymer ("Lookin like a poor man's Arthur Baker...") that sounds not unlike Lo Fidelity All Stars. Maybe that's how they get down in Liberty City, but everytime we've turned on NYC rock radio lately it's been drop-D tuning butt-rock. Or STP. Where's the Weiland, bros?

England remains a constant source of entertainment for the FADER staff. From "Cockney Boy" to terms like "chav" and "jammy bastard" to our very own wildly entertaining style editor Chioma Nnadi (source of said terms), THIS COUNTRY NEVER STOPS GIVING. And it's with this in mind that we are now enjoying another import from Leamington Spa known as the Post War Years. "You And Me Both" is the b-side to their new Chess Club single "Black Morning" and we are giving it constant rewind presently. It's sort of a mix of prog and rave and jazz. Doesn't that sound awesome? No it is. You can pre-order the "Black Morning" single from Rough Trade and watch the video here.


Download: Post War Years, "You And Me Both"

Patrik North at Summer Lovers Unlimited sent us this track from guy-girl duo three person band Salem a little bit ago, and we've been trying to wrap our minds around it since. Basically it's a Bruce Springsteen cover that sounds like Glass Candy spent ten years as goths and were inspired by things like snow and ankhs instead of italo disco and Portland. Their MySpace has a bunch of other songs to listen to, as well as many pictures that people posted of things like that one picture of the Harry Potter kid naked next to a horse.


Download: Salem, "Streets of Philadelphia" (Bruce Springsteen Cover)

The 6th edition of the highly-coveted, always banging FADER/Southern Comfort 7" Series is now in the office, and maybe it's the smog, but we are tripping heavily on both the cover and songs within. For this one we got our dudes BLK JKS to tear up "Umbzabalazo", given the Super Freq mix by Greg Mann, and Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit sent us a snazzy version of the epic "Chilombo." Not to be outdone, quiltmaker extraordinaire Ian Hundley sent us a gigantic pattern which we then shrunk to fit.

All of this can be yours for the mere price of nothing by emailing contests@thefader.com with "quilts" in the subject line.

Once in awhile the sky finally opens up and we come out of hibernation to enjoy things like the air and lots of live music. Basically, shit just aligns real nicely and like every band we've ever ridden for comes to New York to perform in the span of one week and we freak out and go to all of the shows. We know we just did one of these last week, but this week is INSANE. Check out some of the stuff that's going on after the jump (including ultra bros for life Ladyhawk and Dr Dog, coming back to New York for the first time in what seems like a million years, but is actually less than one year). more...