Monday, November 03, 2008
flickr
Indies & Exposure: Oh No! Oh My!
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
I know it's been forever, but I'm back in business. Here's the newest addition to the I&E series: Oh No! Oh My! To me, these guys are kind of happy, fun indie band that doesn't get annoying despite being jangly. The lead singer sounds a little like the singer from Blind Melon, at least in terms of tone. Musically, they are sort of like a mixture between Modest Mouse, (early) Built to Spill, and maybe Tokyo Police Club (although the band's site claims they get their influences from the more 60's retro sounds of Belle and Sebastian & Magnetic Fields). Most of the songs are sung with a sort of chorus-style effect over the vocals to give them some depth. The music uses a lot of layered sounds, usually underlain by handclaps and simple repeated keyboard melodies.
The band is made of up 3 guys, based out of Austin, Texas. I suspect they made a lot of hay at the SxSW shows. Their "indie pop" sound is pretty infectious and I often find myself reaching for them when I get bored with whatever I've been listening too much of recently. They are about to release a new ep and they have been touring like crazy, so they are probably coming somewhere near where you live (although no me!).
I was first exposed to Oh No! Oh My! by my trusty friend Karen, who had wedged some stuff from their self-titled first album (released last year) onto a disk of music she made for me. I've been wanting to put them up on the site for a while now, but I kept getting deterred by things. Anyhow, you can check out some of their music, including one song from their new EP at they myspace page (I haven't found any direct links).
Labels: music
Thursday, June 14, 2007
For some reason, my virus protection decided that my blog template had some code in it that it didn't think was safe, so it disabled my blog for my home computer. Kind of funny, but it makes updating my blog a bit difficult. I guess I am going to need to set up a new template for it so I can view my own webpage. Until then, I probably won't post much.Indies & Exposure: My Brightest Diamond
Monday, May 14, 2007
I'm trying to slowly gain ground on my I&E series by posting them a little earlier than the last week each time. This week my recommended band is My Brightest Diamond. The band is mainly one person, Shara Worden (pictured above), and they are signed to the indie label run by Sufjan Stevens, called Asthmatic Kitty Records. Like several other bands on Asthmatic Kitty, Shara Worden was a background musician in Sufjan Steven's band at some point. Now she's on to doing her own thing.
My Brightest Diamond sounds to me like a perfect mixture of PJ Harvey and Portishead. The dark moody guitar with these soft, breathy, Kate Bush-like vocals over top. Lyrically, the songs are thoughtful and even somewhat poetic, usually they tell a sort of dark or mysterious story, often with a transfixing imagery. They don't have that electronic feel that Portishead had, but the texture of the music is still surprisingly similar - as is the vocal style in places.
I came across MBD from several sources - probably the first of them was my friend Erik who was a post-doc here at UNL with me. We had strangely similar tastes in music and he is a huge Sufjan fan, so I'm sure he found MBD while digging around on the Asthmatic Kitty website. Even with Erik's head's up, though, I didn't seriously start listening to the band until we got the XM radio for Christmas, because they started playing some of the songs regularly on XMU and K and I both got sucked in a bit (I think my friend Karen also sent me some stuff in there at some point as well).
For those people who might be interested in the band's history, they used to go by the name Awry (see this link)and under that moniker the band looks like it was even more artsy. There are some links to their previous releases as Awry on that site, but I haven't really listened to them. The band also has their own website away from the label and that site has a lot more music available for download and a ton of other information, photos, video and whatever else.
Downloads and other junk:
From the album Workhorse:
Something of an End
From an AK sampler:
Riding Horses
There are also a bunch of radio performances and other sources of music to listen to that are available on the music section of the MBD website.
And of course there is always the band's myspace site.
The myspace site also has this photograph of Shara in a superhero costume complete with a cape and a sword, which cracked me up.
Labels: music