Top Covers

Not a lot to say. I love a good cover. Here're a few of my favourites:

Ted Leo - Since U Been Gone (Kelly Clarkson Cover) / Maps (Yeah Yeah Yeahs Cover)


Allison Weiss - Kids (MGMT Cover)


Elle240 - I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You (Black Kids Cover)


Tegan & Sara - Dancing In The Dark (Bruce Springsteen Cover)


phoenix7blue - Call It Off (Tegan & Sara Cover)
Embedding disabled by request, so go here to watch.

Alkaline Trio feat. Tegan Quin - Wake Up Exhausted (Tegan & Sara Cover)


Sixx and Seven - John Wayne Gacey Jr. (Sufjan Stevens Cover)


And a few mp3s:

Metric - Don't Think Twice It's Alright (Bob Dylan Cover) (zShare)

Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Bob Dylan, and haven't actually heard the original version of this song. I am, however, quite infatuated with this cover. It's actually just half of Metric, Emily and James, and I imagine they stick pretty close to the original (just vocals and a lone acoustic guitar), but it's a treat hearing the two of them trade vocals on the verses and harmonize on the choruses.

From War Child's Help! A Day In The Life comp (Canadian version only), available from Maple Music and iTunes. Proceeds go to War Child Canada's humanitarian programs.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Diamond Sea (Sonic Youth Cover) (zShare)

Another perhaps surprising cover, although not in the choice of song (the link between YYYs and Sonic Youth is not un-obvious) but in the execution, which is mostly acoustic. Karen O.'s singing regularly blows my mind but here the "ooh-ooh-ooh"s are really etherally beautiful. You can literally hear her voice cracking with emotion on every line, and when everything opens up with "You're never not alone on a diamond sea"... chills.

From YYYs' excellent iTunes exclusive live session, available here. Their latest, It's Blitz, is out this spring, release date TBA.

I will tear myself apart, if you promise to paint me, as a work of art

Bloc Party - Always New Depths (zShare)

The guitar starts up before you even have a chance to get your bearings, always catching me a little off-guard no matter how many times I listen to it. Then the classic Bloc Party assault of angular/melodic rhythm guitar riff + complimentary lead riff + killer bass line + dancey drums kicks in for a few bars, before the vocals start up. The lyrics are abstract, the delivery almost monotone throughout the intro, yet still begging to be sung along to, until Kele finally explodes like only he can with "Summertime has come and gone / All used up with wishful thinking / Get sussed out, get cynical / In this world there are no second chances". Throughout, Russell's lead guitar is building in intensity, almost anxiously, leading up to a climax you didn't even see coming until everything drops out at 2:19, following one of my favourite lyrics ever (found in the title of this post, not to mention the name of countless mixtapes I've put together). The drums, the bass, both the guitars, even the vocals, all clash chaotically together until the song finally explodes into shouted "Always new depths!"'s, maintaining its energy until everything fades out into a blanket of swirling delayed guitars. It's the kind of joyous explosion of sound that only early Bloc Party can evoke for me; maybe because they're one of the first bands, if not the first, that I truly fell in love with and felt like I'd "disocvered." I've loved everything they've done since Silent Alarm every bit as much as their initial releases, but in completely different ways, and sometimes it's breathtaking to look back at how much ground they've covered.

Bloc Party official site / Buy (Amazon) / Buy (Recordstore) / iTunes

2009 Albums I'm Most Excited About

Alright, now that all that year-end madness is finished with, allow me to present my list of the albums I'm most excited for in the (now not-so-)new year. I didn't deliberately go for 10, it just kinda happened that way. In no particular order:

Photo by David S. Rubin

Pin Me Down had talked about releasing their as-yet-untitled debut album last year but it didn't happen, so hopefully we'll be seeing it in 2009. The band is made up of 1/2 Russell Lissack from Bloc Party and 1/2 New York singer/songwriter/guitarist Milena Mepris (formerly of electro-punks Black Moustache), and is rounded out by drummer/producer extrordinaire Alex Elena (plus regular collaborations with ex-Battle guitarist Jamie Ellis and a whole bunch of other awesome people), so you can see why I would be more than a little excited about them. Their debut single, Cryptic, released last year via Kitsuné, did not disappoint, and the two other tunes on their MySpace have only added to my enthusiasm. Here's that debut single:

Pin Me Down - Cryptic (zShare)

As I may have mentioned a couple times previously, Norwegian electronica duo Röyksopp have a new album coming out, on March 23 via Astralwerks to be exact. It's been four years since their last studio outing, and that album (The Understanding) remains one of my favourites. New disc's called Junior and will be preceded on March 9 by the single Happy Up Here, which you may stream right here, or buy from iTunes here. The album was recorded and engineered in Bergen, Stockholm, Copenhagen and London, and features contributions from Robyn, Lykke Li, Karin Dreijer (of The Knife and Fever Ray) and Anneli Drecker (via Stereogum).

Anglo-Icelandic electronica-folk crew Fields created one of my favourite albums of 2007 with their debut Everything Last Winter, and it looks like they're back in 2009 to repeat the magic (sans guitarist Jamie Putman, who left on amicable terms). Not a lot of info on this one - their entire website has been taken down, replaced with a very purple MySpace page featuring a scary profile pic - but there are two new songs available for streaming on said MySpace page, and they sound hella good. They also did a fair bit of touring over the past year, so keep your eyes open for any more dates, especially if you're in Europe.

Photo by Edwin Tse

Metric recently unveiled the first single from their as-yet-untitled third (depending on how you count them) studio album, called Help I'm Alive. You can stream it at their MySpace or buy it at iTunes, or watch a lovely video put together by Emily Haines about it, and the evolution of her songwriting, at their website. The song is likely my favourite thing Metric have produced yet, which is really saying something, but I think its simplicity (discussed by Emily in the vid, you should really go watch) adds a lot to it, and it just sounds more focused almost than Metric's previous work. Expect the album early this year via Last Gang.

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

Back in Novemeber, Tegan & Sara spent some time in New Orleans writing songs together for the first time ever (see this post by Tegan and this one by Sara on their wonderful MySpace blog). The promise of new Tegan & Sara material, and the fact that Tegan plays "absursdly wonderful" drums (to quote Sara) on all of it, is enough to have me shaking in anticipation; even more exciting, they recently sent off a stack of demos (40, to be exact) to the excellent and talented Mr. Chris Walla, who produced their previous album, 2007's The Con, with plans to get into a studio and record in the spring. As if that weren't enough, they're also releasing a series of T&S books, designed by the ever-talented Emy Storey, with the first one coming out in the spring. Here's a pretty good-quality live recording of a new song that may or may not make it onto the album, from a show a couple weeks ago in Sydney (thanks to Autumn Nocturne for recording the whole show, you can download it at the Internet Archive here):

Tegan & Sara - Give Chase (Enmore Theatre, Sydney, Australia 08.01.09) (via the Internet Archive)

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

There isn't a lot of information about Silversun Pickups' upcoming second album, apart from its title, Swoon, and the number of tracks on it (17). Lead singer/guitarist Brian Aubert has said, however, that "some songs are very quiet and delicate, [while] others are just fucking loud." It's also been confirmed by the band that Darren Waterston and Sara Cumings will again be lending their considerable talent to the album's artwork and graphic design/lettering, respectively, as they did on 2006's Carnavas, which happened to be one of my favourite albums from that year (not to mention one of the most visually gorgeous). As well, Tony Hoffer and Dave Cooley are returning to mixing and mastering duties. Look out for it this year via Dangerbird.

Photo by Drew Reynolds

I love An Horse. Regular readers may have caught on to that by now. Technically their debut album, Rearrange Beds, was released digitally in 2008, but it just came out physically this month in Australia and is set for March 17 everywhere else, so it qualifies for this list. I seriously haven't been this excited about a new band in a long damn while, and I really want as many people to discover their greatness as possible. Go listen to some songs at their MySpace, or go back to this post to grab a couple mp3s from the album.

Uh Huh Her are a band I haven't talked about on the blog yet, mostly because I first listened to them just a couple a weeks ago, around the same time I first heard An Horse actually (and for the same reason; both bands were touring with Tegan & Sara). I'm kinda cheating with this one because their debut album, Common Reaction, came out back in August, but since I just came across it so recently (and because it's so great) I thought I'd include it. The band is made up of singer and multi-instrumentalist (and I do mean "multi", she litereally plays every instrument on the record) Camila Grey, formerly of Mellowdrone, and singer/synth-player Leisha Hailey, who played in a couple bands prior to this but more recently has been busy as an actress on The L Word. Uh Huh Her (named after the PJ Harvery album) have a rather cool sound, blending the best of 80s pop and 90s electronica to create something that's refreshing yet retro, without ever veering into irony. If that sounds like your thing, go stream some songs at MySpace. Here's the title track:

Uh Huh Her - Common Reaction (zShare)

Photo be Katie Evans

Now, Now Every Children are another band I've been addicted to lately, but then, with songs as catchy as Cars, it would be hard to listen to them and not get addicted (seriously, just try not to sing along with "Oh my god, I don't care about the car" at the top of your lungs). They basically just use guitars, drums and keyboards for their sound, but it feels much bigger than that, largely thanks to some amazing drumming that really pops out at you and interlocks beautifully with the guitars. The album's also called Cars and is available right now from Afternoon Records' online shop and iTunes (although Amazon's claiming it won't be released until Frebruary 10), and is highly recommended if you like urgent, driving, sometimes joyous, sometimes heartbroken indie pop-rock. Stream some songs at MySpace.

Finally, The Boss's latest, entitled Working On A Dream, is out January 27 via Columbia. Stream the whole thing right now at npr.org. 'Nuff said.

2008 Albums You Should Hear Wrap-up + One To Watch in 2009

So, first of all; profound apologies that it's fucking half way through January and I'm still catching up on my year-end stuff. New to blogging, didn't realize how long it would take to write (semi-)serious album reviews/underestimated my own lazyness, exams, excuses excuses, etc. Anyways, I'm all done, and since I didn't really offer any explanation at the outset, figure I should probably see to that now. Basically; I just wanted to turn people on to a few of my favourite albums from the past year, some of which happened to receive not a lot of attention from the general music-listening/blog-reading public. I enjoy reading other people's year-end lists, but I know I'm not capable of objectively ranking music that truly matters to me, hence the unranked, two-paragraph, two-mp3 format of the posts. Hopefully you've discovered something you like; that's really what this blog is largely about (actually I'm lying, it's largely about me working out my personal issues by whining to a crowd of internet strangers). Anyways, with that in mind (the discovering-new-music-you-love thing, not the personal-issues/whining thing. Actually, just forget I ever said that.), here's a band that's been dominating my listening habits since I picked up their album on the 4th of this month, and I'm sure will continue to due so for a very long time indeed.



The only reason I listened to An Horse was because they were touring with Tegan & Sara. Although, initially, that alone wasn't enough to pique my interest. Even Sara's glowing MySpace blog about them here, which you'd think would have been enough to convince a rabbid T&S fan like myself to give 'em a go, failed to do so due to the fact that I'm a total fucking idiot. So instead of taking advantage of the Interwebs and spending the two seconds at myspace.com/anhorse that it would have required for me to realize I was in love back in October, I waited until the beginning of January, when all my year-end list recommendations had run dry and I figured, Alright, fine, it's not like I have anything better to do, I guess I'll go listen to some An Horse.

SO DAMN GOOD.

That's seriously all I could think. (In fact, proof of my speechlessness can be found right here.) Following the initial rush of spinning all the songs on their myspace several (hundred) times, I started asking the important questions; namely, do they have any more music, and how might I purchase it? Why, as a matter of fact, they did have an album. It was called Rearrange Beds and was currently available on iTunes, with physical release in their native Australia in January and the rest of the world in March (on the 17th). After nearly two seconds of deliberation, I did something I almost never do and bought the whole album on iTunes. SO GOOD. I think you get that by now. But listening to it every night in my bedroom alone wasn't enough: I had to make sure as many people heard this band as possible, and make sure no one else fell into my (seriously, it's patented) deadly pitfall of equal parts ignorance and apathy. Hence, this post. Yes, it's not the greatest piece of journalism ever conceived, but at least I gave you an mp3! Anyways, to quote Sara's blog post, which put it excellently:

"i rarely, and with much less fever, promote/pimp what sends my heart racing but i feel compelled to drive the masses towards this band. if i was a teenager i would buy a poster and put it over my bed. but im just a nerdy late twenty-something and find it more appropriate to just carry a photo of damon and kate in my wallet. respectable. i adore them. please go see them. and tell your friends. also, their new album is available on itunes. it is SO good. please buy it."

So, in short; Kate Cooper and Damon Cox rock. An Horse roxxorz my soxxorz. You should all go stream some tunes at theirspace and maybe buy the album at iTunes. Or, if you happen to live in Australia, pick up a CD here and check tour dates here. Aaaaand here's two mp3s (the one I posted before and another one), enjoy.

An Horse - Camp Out (zShare)
An Horse - Scared As F**k (zShare)

(I seriously had an impossible time choosing which two songs to post, they're all equally amazing.)

An Horse on MySpace / Buy (Australia)* / iTunes

*Cheap international shipping, though.

2008 Albums You Should Hear: Thrice - The Alchemy Index Vols. III & IV: Air & Earth

2008 marked the 10th anniversary of Thrice, likely one of the most remarkable bands you'll ever hear. Formed by Dustin Kensrue (guitar/vocals) and Teppei Teranishi (guitar) while they were still in high school, Thrice was one of many acts to pioneer the melodic post-hardcore sound that defined much of punk music for the early 2000s. Building a strong local following due in part to their incendiary live shows and support of local charities, Thrice's first two albums showcased them as an incredibly talented band, leading to a major label deal with Island and a fair amount of commercial success for their third offering, The Artist In The Ambulance. It wasn't until Artist's follow up, though, 2005's Vheissu, that it became clear just how ambitious and talented Thrice was. Utilyzing a wider range of instrumentation and some incredible lyrics to expand well beyond their initial hardcore roots, that album still stands as a major accomplishment, but it's possible that The Alchemy Index is Thrice's first true masterpiece.

The Alchemy Index isn't exactly an album, though. It's basically four distinct volumes, each six tracks long, packaged as two double albums for CD purposes, with each volume corresponding to one of the natural elements (Vols. I and II, Fire and Water respectively, were released in 2007). If this sounds like pretentious concept album territory, don't be fooled; The Alchemy Index is one of the purest expressions of artistic deluge to ever be committed to the medium of music. Thrice (which is rounded out by brothers Eddie Breckenridge on bass and Riley Breckenridge on drums) has clearly never demonstrated a lack of talent, but the music on the The Alchemy Index is so transcendent and elemental as to defy description. Of no small part in this are Kensrue's lyrics, often biblical in topic and illuminatingly evocative, delivered in a voice that's expressive and weathered well beyond his 28 years. Slip on some headphones, turn out the lights and spend some quality time with Air and Earth.



Thrice - A Song For Milly Michaelson (zShare) (from Vol. III: Air)
Thrice - Come All You Weary (zShare) (from Vol. IV: Earth)

Thrice official site / The Alchemy Index official site
Buy The Alchemy Index Vols. III & IV: Air & Earth: CD / iTunes

2008 Albums You Should Hear: The Teenagers - Reality Check

I don't even know what to say about The Teenagers. Maybe it's easier to describe them like this; think back to high school. You there? Good. Now think about everyone you ever had a crush on, everyone you ever dated, all the painful rejections, your first kiss, drunken parties, prom night, emotionial insecurities offset by vodka-fuelled antics, awkward sex (lots and lots of sex). It doesn't matter if half this stuff didn't happen to you, specifically, because listening to The Teenagers is like living it all over again. Sound fun? Maybe that's not the adjective you'd choose, but the The Teenagers' debut album, Reality Check, may be enough to change your mind.

Calling most bands "formulaic" would be meant as an insult, but in the case of The Teenagers, it's a compliment. The songs on Reality Check are so effortlessly catchy and addictive that every time a track ends, I find myself thinking the next one can't possibly top that, and then, invariably, it does. The instrumentation is simple enough; a few guitars, plenty of synths, drums. The lyrics are a different story, often consisting of biting sarcasm coupled with potentially offensive subject matter that veers between deadpan and (perhaps deceptively) heart-on-sleeve earnesty, all sung in occasionally French-accented English. Fuck Nicole, for example, about a teenage girl strung out on "aspirins and alcohol", was allegedly inspired by MySpace fan messages, while Homecoming is the catchiest song you'll ever hear with a chorus of "I fucked my American cunt". Add to that a sweetly stalker-ish ode to Scarlett Johansson (You don't believe in monogamy / I'm not jealous, Scarlett / Will you marry me?) and you've got one of the cleverest, catchiest, most surprisingly intelligent and heartfelt albums you'll dance to all year. And if you don't think so, they don't care, just by their t-shirts and talk about them everywhere.



The Teenagers - Homecoming (zShare)
The Teenagers - Starlett Johansson (zShare)

The Teenagers official site
Buy Reality Check: CD / iTunes

You wanna camp out and I wanna fuck around

Photo by Amelia Shaw

An Horse - Camp Out (zShare)

This is the first song on the debut album by a band I've fallen desperately in love with, in a way that doesn't happen often. I don't feel sufficiently capable of saying anything else about An Horse right now, so: click here to get the album, entitled Rearrange Beds, from iTunes (it's worth it, I promise). Physical release is this month in Australia and March in the US.

Stream more songs at An Horse's MySpace.

2008 Albums You Should Hear: The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

The Tings Tings make insanely catchy, raw pop music with guitars, drums, vocals, and the occasional synthesizer. Simple though that description may be, it seems fitting for the UK duo of Katie White and Jules de Martino, who's entire aesthetic is based on nothing if not simplicity; following the implosion of their previous act, Dear Eskiimo, the two decided to get together and create a sound "driven by personality, unstoppable momentum, friendship and the love of great pop music - however stylised it arrives." (via their bio.) This passion and raw adrenaline, as well as an astonishing talent for instantly-sing-along-able choruses, comes through loud and clear on their debut album, We Started Nothing.

Catchy guitars and dance-punk rhythms aren't the only things The Tings Tings have going for them, though; in fact, probably more arresting than both is the sheer expressive quality of Miss White's voice. Growling and shouting through opener Great DJ before bursting into a chorus of ah-ah-ah-ahs and letting a chuckle slip through on kiss-off to her "foolish boy" Fruit Machine, then slipping seemingly effortlessly into a perfectly smooth delivery for Be The One and never dropping a syllable in Shut Up And Let Me Go's rapid-fire choruses, with her British accent always poking through, the vocal delivery throughout is sure to leave you wanting more. On the evidence of We Started Nothing, The Ting Tings are well on their way to achieving their goal of rocking the foundations of manufactured pop music, and the world is a little better off for it.


Photo by Karen McBride

The Ting Tings - Great DJ (zShare)
The Ting Tings - Shut Up And Let Me Go (zShare)

The Ting Tings offical site
Buy We Started Nothing: CD / Vinyl / iTunes