By Less Lee Moore
Danny Echo has been blessed with a great big rock and roll voice. This was apparent when I saw the band live at NXNE 2008: they played their hearts out and even though there were only a handful of people in the crowd at Lee’s Palace, you’d never know it by their enthusiasm.
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I received Kajagoogoo’s White Feathers at my 13th birthday party. I’d asked for it on cassette because my family and I were going to Disneyworld the next day and I wanted to be able to listen to it on my Walkman. (Ah, the pre-digital age when you had to have blank tapes handy and couldn’t just rip a CD to your hard drive and then transfer it to your MP3 player.)
MTV blew my mind in 1981. I would spend hours Velcro’d to the screen of my grandma’s wooden console TV waiting for my favorite videos to come on. Even then, my mom was uneasy about the sort of “messages” I was getting from this weird new music.
Adam Ant’s allusions to S&M were the naughtiest of the lot, but nothing compared to The Cramps. I actually heard them before I saw them. By 1985, I was fully ensnared by WTUL New Orleans, the student-run college radio station of Tulane University. It was there that “New Kind Of Kick” wormed its way into my eardrums.
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By Less Lee Moore
Music can evoke memories so intense that it can be painful to listen; the feelings linger long after the needle leaves the turntable. But scents are more primal, often both more and less specific. So what do memories smell like?
By Less Lee Moore
5. Weep is completely without marketing savvy and has no idea how to “make-it”. Therefore: your love of Weep will never be sullied. You can always enjoy your hip status of loving an underground band.
—From the Weep Manifesto
By Less Lee Moore
Listening to these songs on Sebastien Grainger’s MySpace page and hearing them on CD is like the difference between reading about eating a crème caramel and actually eating one. Granted, the MySpace music player doesn’t have the greatest sound quality, but that does not adequately explain it. There’s something more, something that makes this album better than the sum of its parts.
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Image from EquilibriumFans
John Preston: What’s the point of your existence?
Mary: To feel. ‘Cause you’ve never done it, you can never know it. But it’s as vital as breath. And without it, without love, without anger, without sorrow, breath is just a clock. . . ticking.
By Less Lee Moore
In 1983, having just experienced Adam Ant performing live to support Friend Or Foe (my very first concert!), I was a certified fan. I loved the videos for “Strip” and “Puss’n Boots” and was psyched for the upcoming Strip album.
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By Less Lee Moore
The Bicycles are a Toronto-based band, but one for whom the word “band” seems terribly limiting. Their live shows traditionally feature not only the four core members—Matt Beckett, Andrew Scott, Drew Smith, and Dana Snell—but also members of several other local bands and musicians such as Henri Fabergé and the Adorables, Laura Barrett, and many others.
Oh No, It’s Love, reflects the collaborations of this collective of musicians but also retains the signature sound the band established on their first album The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly: captivating pop with ironic lyrics.
Yet Oh No, It’s Love is far more ambitious and fully-fledged than the band’s first album, and not just because it features more than twenty contributors (in addition to the four “official” band members) and a vast array of instruments, from harp and harmonica to kalimba and pedal steel. Although there are many current bands who also use less traditionally rock & roll instruments, many of them are utterly boring and passionless. The Bicycles are the complete opposite.
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By Less Lee Moore
After seeing Jay Reatard’s name pop up all over The Big Takeover blog last year I grew curious. Then I saw he was also profiled in Spin a few times and I became suspicious. Was this more of the typical music press hype and hysteria?
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