Tagged with " Austin"
Young Pharaohs - “I Do” & “Don’t Go Down”
Posted under: Recently relocated to Austin, Texas from Denver, power-duo-of-brothers, Young Pharaohs, are back with two brooding RnB-tinged electropop cuts. Exciting!
“I Do” builds a steady, mechanical foundation of unrelenting 8th notes that work well in contrast to tender coos and psychedelic guitar brilliance. “Don’t Go Down” finds singer, Ben Martin, unrelentingly channelling hope from a dark place. Emerging from the steady crescendos of rich filter sweeps as well as jittery percussion, he trades melodies with ethereal chimes in a way that is addictively positive. I’d even go so far to say that my overall impression of “Don’t Go Down” is nothing short of motivational.
Listen to the duo below, and be sure to visit the Young Pharaohs SoundCloud to keep up with their future sounds.
I also got the chance to catch up with Ben on the band’s recent happenings and the creation of the two tracks:
It’s a wild and wonderful time for Young Pharaohs. The seeds that became these songs were planted last summer while we toured the west coast in a big green school bus. Due to some poor DIY tour booking on my part, we ended up with a few days to kill in San Francisco. There was a lot of aimless (and somewhat penniless) wandering around the city. Turns out it’s illegal to sleep in your vehicle in San Francisco, not to mention that it’s not the easiest city to park a school bus in, so there was a lot of cop-dodging going on. I remember Sam first showing me the demo for “Don’t Go Down” on a haunted, foggy morning in an empty parking lot in the Presidio.
We spent some time in Mexico at the end of that tour. My girlfriend and I split off from the rest of the group and drove down the Baja through hours and hours of endless desert. We met a lot of beautiful people and saw a lot of beautiful things on that trip, and the night before we got back into Tijuana on our way home, all the words for these songs were just pouring out of me.
I really felt a deep connection to my muse on tour last summer, and I’m happy that these tracks owe both their sonic and spiritual origin to that trip. The actual recording and mixing process was done here in Texas though. We moved to Austin this fall, and there are an incredible amount of creative people down here doing really wonderful work. It’s perpetually inspiring. So it feels like the songs are a bridge from where we’re coming from to where we’re going. I’m enamored with writing music right now. Every song I write feels like such a privilege to me. I can’t wait to put more of it out into the world.
Boy Friend - “Labyrinth” (Official Video)
If there is one thing I can say about Austin dream pop trio Boy Friend it is that they have their aesthetic down pat. If you’re a fan of the band you probably know what I mean, but if not just have a look at the photo stream on their Tumblr page for an idea. Just a few days ago the band released the video for their latest single “Labyrinth” off their Secret City EP. The ladies shot and directed the video themselves on location in a swampy marsh which suited its ritualistic fantasy vibe just fine. I hit up vocalist Christa Palazzolo for some words on the video and release. Here’s what she had to say:
‘Secret City’ is our first release with Tiffanie Lanmon (she’s our new bassist & drummer) as part of the band. It’s basically a teaser of what’s to come. We wanted to just let go & have fun, so doing a cassette with Night-People was a great opportunity. Shawn Reed released me & Sarah’s first tape when we were in Sleep ∞ Over, a very limited cassette release we still love, so it feels great to hit refresh and have another one with Shawn’s great artwork on display.
The video for “Labyrinth” was shot at Lake Caddo on the border of Texas & Louisiana. It was absolutely stunning there. We actually had a hard time focusing on the video because we wanted to just gawk at the sights the whole time, but with the help of a few amazing friends it all came together. We’re very proud to have had our hands on every aspect of production & editing, but we totally understand why the pros get paid to do this stuff! All of us work full-time, so it was no easy feat, but we’re very proud of the final product (Sarah’s sci-fi books were a big influence).
Troller (Finally) Press Self-Titled Debut to Vinyl
Austin band Troller‘s underrated self-titled debut album was officially released in December of 2011. That doesn’t seem too terribly long ago, but in blog years that might as well be decades. At the time of its initial release, the album was stream-only on their Bandcamp page (I can’t even tell you how many times I revisited the page). Then somewhere along the line in 2012 the album saw a limited edition cassette release through Holodeck Records (see our Introducing piece with them here). Now cassettes are great (I even run my own tape label), but if you were to ask me, I’d say that Troller was an album that just begged to be pressed to vinyl. Well thankfully, as of today, that is exactly what is going on over at the Holodeck headquarters. They’ve reissued the album and pressed 300 vinyl copies for immediate sale. Hallelujah, hit up the Holodeck store and grab one before they’re gone.
The band is also hitting the road later this week for a mini-tour up the west coast with Thousand Foot Whale Claw. Check out the details below and definitely catch them if you get the chance.
THUR 1/24 – San Francisco
@ The Lab w/ Believe, Chasms, and Black Jeans
FRI 1/25 – San Diego
@ The Void w/ TBA
SAT 1/26 – Los Angeles
@ Synchronicity w/ Gul Bara and Sneaky Snake
SUN 1/27- Los Angeles
@ The Echo (c/o PART TIME PUNKS) w/ Savage Republic and Tearist
LAY BAC - “Gone B/C”
Since 2010, the Austin, TX-based duo LAY BAC have been making their way through the underground blog community with a slew of excellent singles and an out-of-nowhere French House-inspired EP, which aimed for a crispier, hi-fi sound in terms of overall production quality. Their debut album SHRILLER officially dropped just a few weeks ago—a wondrous 8-track journey that breaks away from everything hi-fi and goes straight back into their signature, lo-fi glam-pop aesthetic (or should I say ‘sex pop’ ?).
“Stay Out Tonight” and “KASUMI (孤独)” are some of the well known classics that they’ve completely re-visioned and remastered, but it’s the last track on the album “Gone B/C” that has really struck a chord with me over the past few weeks. It starts things off with a low-key, barebone drum kick and slowly morphs into a 4:00 AM disco-dream, with reverberating vocals that will swallow you whole. This is the kind of music that will leave you stoned out of your mind without smoking anything at all. It’s quite brilliant.
Stream “Gone B/C” below and snag SHRILLER via Bandcamp:
Smokey Emery - ‘Quartz’ EP
If you look closely at the artwork for Smokey Emery‘s most recent EP Quartz, you’ll see that it is a collage made up of images from various terrible disasters. Plane crashes, car wrecks, fires—is that a volcano? And yet with all of that carnage, it’s still pleasing to look at in the way that Daniel Hipolito has arranged it. That sort of attention to detail speaks to the EP itself, a collection of ambient drone pieces made up of carefully selected loops, samples, and recordings that have then been constructed into gorgeous sound collages of their own. The first time I listened to the EP on proper headphones, it swallowed me up. Daniel has established a sound that is cavernous yet claustrophobic and is lonely as it is timeless. Like lost transmissions being emitted from some long abandoned hotel, if you listen closely you can hear snatches of the music these samples used to be. It’s a haunting experience, but one that is totally entrancing. I reached out to Daniel to see what he had to say about the EP. Here’s what he responded with:
Smokey Emery is an ongoing and evolving music project since 1993. I use tape machines to record and manipulate both performed and found sound. The EP was recorded by my friend Guy Taylor at his home studio here in Austin, live to computer. Jon (from Silent Land Time Machine, Lumens. and Amasa*Gana) was nice enough to release it as a vinyl. The ‘Quartz’ EP is a companion to a yet-unreleased LP ‘Quartz And Decay’, which contains the remaining movements of the piece. Quartz is the second most common mineral in the crust of the planet Earth and is piezoelectric. It releases a charge under pressure and is essential to electronics as we know them. Around central Texas you can find it everywhere: in the dirt, at the edges of roads, paths, parking lots. There are theories of magnetic atmospheric resonance dubbed the ‘Violet Crown’ regarding the area, supposedly connected to the large amount of quartz in the area, said to influence the vivid coloring and qualities of the dusk and dawn.
The Quartz EP is available both digitally as well as on 7″ vinyl from Austin label Indian Queen Records.
