SEVEN NOISES

And another release from the people of Mexican Summer, this time L.A. band Dunes, who will also release pretty soon a 4 song 7" single for Art Fag. Taking into account the two labels they are releasing their music with, we'll sure will hear a lot about them soon.
Dunes music reminds me enormously of the first Cocteau Twins, the same guitar effects, evocative vocals and it has a deliberated 80s retro sound. A bit of Siouxsie and the Banshees as well.
The 7 songs EP was supposedly available from the Mexican Summer website from two days ago but the vinyl option is crossed. Not sure if this means it's already sold out or it's about to come. We'll hope is the second and keep on checking.

The Samps are sometimes members of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti but this is not going to help you to think you know how it will sound. It's like computerized funk, like music for old video games that were never produced, like a nightmare sci-fi soundtrack you can try to dance to. The basslines are huge, the melodies from playful to dark and scary, and the rhythms changing and unpredictable. It's sci-fi future funk as it would have been imagined 20 years ago but technology was not enough in order to produce it.
This self-titled EP will be out next week on Mexican Summer, which means it will probably be sold out but the end of the week, even more after being mentioned all around. Not available for pre-order though, so check the website on the 5th of may before it's too late.

If you want to be cool in this life you always have to have a limited-only-Japanese record. it's been like this since long ago and new bands know it so they keep on doing it. The record label Big Love from Tokyo has been the place many new artists have chosen to make us spend lots of money in order to get these very limited and hard to find items via import in specialised record shops or ordering directly from the label which means you'll spend more in post than what the record actually costs. At least, the people at Big Love, after realising we the western world are not very keen on learning their language, have finally made a English friendly ordering page for us to understand and order them without having to guess every single step and failing on every attempt (yes it happened to me). They've previously put out very interesting records from The Big Pink, Salem, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Cold Cave or Nite Jewel and are about to release new stuff from Veronica Falls, Your Twenties, The XX and this single I'm posting about, the second vinyl release, and first 7", of Pearl Harbour. Both tracks were previously available on the CDR Wish We Were Here that, as far as I know, is only available at their shows, but it will be the first time these songs appear on vinyl. Both tracks are quite similar to the stuff they previously released on their Mexican Summer EP, dreamy post punk pop with chorus guitar and a drum kit for people who misses when (pseudo)popular music used to be sad and melancholic. Keep on checking the website to know the release date as it's limited to 300.

This Pearl Harbor EP has been out for a while and after all the Internet fuzz thanks in part to the fact that it was released by the every time more famous and relevant Mexican Summer. Anything they release, although they have extremely high prices, even more if you live in the UK, is sold out within days. That's the case of this four songs EP and this and also the fact that you could see information all around the web, made me think it was not worth to make a post about these two blonde sisters. But after seeing you can still get some copies on Rough Trade (although for £18) made me want to inform you you can still get a copy if you haven't yet. The songs of these two sisters, being one just 15 years old, are silky pop tracks with spacey guitars, voices and synths, nothing particularly new but good songs like Sunburn and specially Luv Goon, that sounds like an instrumental lost The Cure demo from 1980 with their voices on top, makes it worth enough to get this EP, the self-released CDR Wish We Were Here, and keep track of future 7 inches for Big Love, Gloriette and PPM and a 12" for Art Fag.

After the overexposure of end of the year (and decade) best of lists, this year for the first time in ages, I've decided not to do one myself. Whoever has spent a bit of time checking this blog during its nearly one year of existence will already know some of the singles I considered worth of checking and buying so you can do the review yourself going through the old posts. Anyway, after checking some of those lists you can just see some are just repetitive and some have nothing in common, looking as if they were from different planets taking into account the source they've been brewing in.
Anyway, If I don't do any kind of review about the last 12 months, it doesn't seem end of the year so I thought I would just comment what's been about in general 2009. And this year, more than the previous years and as it used to be in the nineties, everything's been about the record labels so i thought I would resume 2009 through them.
If there's been a label that has been the protagonist of the year this is Captured Tracks: managed by Blank Dogs, it has brought us not only his own releases but also great singles and EPs by Dum Dum Girls, Woods, Ganglians or Christmas Island. Together with them, the Brooklyn label Woodsist has worked as a parallel label to Captured Tracks. Managed by Woods, every single release they've put out has got the attention of the media, from Fergus and Geronimo, Real Estate or The Mayfair Set to Fresh & Onlys, Ganglians or Woods themselves.
We've seen as well the resurrection of a mythic label which was 20 this year; Slumberland Records, mainly thanks to Pains of Being Pure at Heart, has also brought us great records from Crystal Stilts, Brilliant Colors, Lichtenstein or Frankie Rose.
In the UK, Transparent Records has brought us great limited singles from Washed Out, Small Black or The Smith Westerns, Young Turks discovered us The XX and released singles by Wavves and Tanlines and No Pain in Pop brought us A Grave with No Name, Deep Sht or Trailer Trash Tracy's. Other great labels of the year were Mexican Summer (Washed Out, Weekend, Pearl Harbour), Art Fag (Crocodiles, Best Coast) , Black Iris (Foreign Born, Fool's Gold), Upset the Rhythm (Xiu Xiu, Future Islands) or Moshi Moshi (Kindness, Thecocknbullkid).
We also see how stablished record labels were as good as ever (Sub Pop and its singles Club) or got back on track (Matador releasing Girls, Cold Cave or getting Sonic Youth).
According to sounds this has definitely been the year when Lo-Fi was back in track and popularised again, folk overlooked and electronic music mainly resting. And yes, it was the year when Animal Collective got full coverage in the mainstream world, something that, looking way back, looks like it could never happen so maybe not everything's lost in popular music.

Weekend is an amazing young Californian band that is just about to physically release their debut (already available for download) at Mexican Summer. The two tracks 10" single All American / Youth Haunts sounds like a ferocious shoegaze incarnation of that late 80s British sound some American bands like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart or Crystal Stilts have gracefully updated lately, if we want to give a current point of reference. Travelling way back to the past we should mention bands like My Bloody Valentine, JAMC, Ride or Sciencepheric as influences. While All American is a bit more candid and conventional the distortion explosions and epic of Youth Haunts makes this track the reason to follow them, to get this item and to look forward to seeing them live. As far as I know, both tracks are live takes and have recently gone to the studio for the first time to record some new tracks for future releases, mentioning on their website a still unnamed / unknown split 7" to be out at some point next year. Here you have Youth Haunts that I highly recommend to listen to at high volume.

As it happened before this year, we are again in front of a project that has been growing the attention of the public through blogging before any physical release has been put out, to the point Washed Out is one of the most commented artists online thanks in part to the permanent coverage and attention of Pitchfork, Stereogum and all the kings of music online that, we have to say, are the ones who own and decide the development of music these days (and I don't say this with any kind of bitterness as they made us discover many good bands we could never have the possibility to know).
Washed out, another one-man-project, is Ernest Greene, a guy from Georgia who creates a strangely original music that takes many influences from synth pop, balearic beats, italo-disco and dub and transforms it with a dream-pop lo-fi production that generates a sound that makes you feel like you forgot his tape inside the car, under the sun, and then tried to play it in a mono walkman you bought on sale about to run out of batteries. If this happened to you during the 80s, you know what I mean. If not, and you didn't get the image, just listen to the tracks and maybe you will get it then. Life of Leisure, his first EP, has been out for a month digitally only, and will have a proper physical release in October while, High Times will be out next Tuesday the 15Th on cassette only through Mirror Universe but they promise they will post it as a download once they run out of the 200 tapes, which I calculate will be before lunch time. Here you have a track for each release to make you an idea.