Up to SCALE: Bat For Lashes

            My favorite thing about modern music is how unabashedly weird it is.  I will stave off my love for Gaga this post and focus on a more off-the-beaten-path kind of girl.  The Brighton-born Natasha Kahn known as Bat for Lashes has the audacity to write songs about wizards, bats, and the karate kid all while taking herself and her music very seriously.  I first got into her when she released her debut album, Fur and Gold, a couple of years ago and from the get go loved how legitimately odd she is.  Bat has since shown up at every hipster bar and music festival across the world to show off her fur and gold and feathers and immaculate piano skills.

            Her new album, Two Suns, evolves her music into a more electronic and hypnotic place, which is one of my favorite places to be.  She is like the best parts of Imogen Heap and Joanna Newsom with a button nose.  The lead single, the aforementioned song about the karate kid Daniel, has pumping melancholy beats that menace over Kahn’s haunting pipes.  Bat has the ability to layer a complex web of sounds and then paint over them in watercolor strokes of melody that mesh each song into its own sonic playground.

            There is nothing better than a brash songstress that can at once use strings and synths to transport the listener to her world.  The power in that ability has transformed into the staying power for ladies like Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Cat Power.  And like those other artist Kahn has her silver tongue a bit in her check.  She gets that not everyone will get what she is talking about, and for them there is the shear sonic pleasure.  Everyone else who can connect to not only the music but also the words will find themselves touched by Bat’s power, and they may even cry a gold tear like Kahn does on the cover of Two Suns.   

Up to SCALE: The Go! Team

More and more these days the music scene is receiving new acts that are all about the mix of yesterday and today. And by mix I mean the remix. Lead by amazing DJs like Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk, who I saw in February and was flawlessly dope, acts have started to realizes that music is not only about what you do, but about how you can morph what others have done.
In this vain is the Brighton based The Go! Team. Formed by Ian Parton in 2000 as an attempt to fuse Sonic Youth style guitars, double dutch chants, and car chase music. What he got was a band whose music is most compared to theme songs, cheerleader chants, early hip hop and 70’s funk.
What he also got was the band's 2004 debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike. While touring with Franz Ferdinand Parton recruited more members to flesh out the live show and in doing so evolved the band away from the record and into its current state.
Their new album Proof of Youth is a slamming, bumping, and grinding non-stop ride. It feels like the cast of the Electric Company doing hip hop funk. It is every Saturday morning cartoon theme song you ever wished played in the club, and until acts like Girl Talk are more readily available, The Go! Team is the closest thing to the mixed and remixed music populating the current indie scene available to the masses. Plus their lead singer's name is Ninja; you just can’t argue with that.

Up To SCALE: There Will Be Blood

I saw There Will Be Blood this weekend and I really… appreciated it. I know most movie reviews either gush or slander, I really can’t do either when it comes to Blood. I can’t say I really enjoyed it, I don’t think it is necessarily an enjoyable film, but that doesn’t stop it from being a remarkable movie.
If you haven’t heard this is the movie on everyone’s top ten lists, and it should be. Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Boggie Nights and Magnolia, does a beautiful job on the script as well as creating an atmospheric mood that literally does not let you relax for two and a half hours. The film is based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, but from what I have heard it is a pretty loose interpretation so it is sort of inconsequential.
The movie is indisputably held up by Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a ruthless and plagued oil man in the early 20th century. He is captivating in the part and keeps the audience connected with the story for the entirety of the movie. The only caveat about Lewis in this role is that it sort reminded me of Bill the butcher from Gangs of New York. They are sort of similar characters in their lack of sanity, but at points Lewis can take an accent and character and shift it slightly towards cartoonish.
I also have to talk about Paul Dano as Eli Sunday. We first saw Dano in the so-overrated- I–cant-watch-it-anymore Little Miss Sunshine where he didn’t speak and he does a semi- 180 in Blood where he is so intense you feel like at any moment he is going to kill someone with his bare hands. I appreciate how he kept his role as an evangelical lunatic well below campy caricature.
The soundtrack is done by Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and it is beautiful and awful and creepy as hell; which is to say fits the movie really well.
There is a nonlinear element to the story in There Will Be Blood which is interesting to me since it is an element I have seen in two other highly acclaimed movies in recent history Atonement and No Country For Old Men. This style of story telling has always been present in indie movies and so it is interesting that is bleeding over into the mainstream in such a prominent way.
Bottom lining it, even if you see There Will Be Blood and hate it as an experience; I hope you will realize what a cool and innovative mainstream movie it is, and why Daniel Day Lewis is so picky about the roles he takes.

up to SCALE: MGMT

I just bought the MGMT (pronounced Management) album Oracular Spectacular and I am currently considering how I can take it intravenously. I really enjoy groups that take specific reference from music past and play them off one another, which to me is the prevailing force on Oracular Spectacular.
The Brooklyn based Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden started the band when they were freshman at Wesleyan and took a spin down noise rock and electronica before forming their own brand of psychedelic pop. Psychedelic is the first word that I thought of when I first heard them, they have a very seventies rock vibe to them that comes out in the vocals and use of electric guitars. MGMT’s other influences come out in how they layer synth and pop on top of this to create a more ambiguous, yet not any less enjoyable, sound.

Eric Harvey of Pitchfork said, "Knowing
that the Almost Famous notion of stardom doesn't exist anymore (if it
ever did), the duo of Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser realize they're
"fated to pretend." It's a charming idea-- making a career out of fantasizing--
and on Oracular Spectacular, they not only accept their playacting destiny, they
demonstrate that, just maybe, it's a path more people should take."

They have been on tour with of Montreal and have worked with the same producers of The Flaming Lips. Oracular Spectacular came out in October and they are one of Rolling Stones “Artists to watch in 2008”. You should buy their album, it looks like this.