New video from Metric, "The Shade"

A perfect start to my weekend is a new video from Metric, of their song "The Shade," which will be their upcoming album, Pagans in Vegas, out September 18th.

Theme Tuesday - Gold

Ok, so normally it's Theme Thursday, but Thursday is not only Thanksgiving - it is also my Golden birthday! (for those of you who don't know what that means, it means I turn 25 on the 25th.) And since I will be busy opening presents and stuffing my face, I am doing Theme Tuesday, with the the theme being Gold in celebration of my upcoming golden birthday.



Golden Birthday [mp3] - Anni Rossi ( Amazon / iTunes )

Golden Years [mp3] - David Bowie ( Amazon / iTunes )

Realms of Gold [mp3] - Hopewell ( Amazon / iTunes )

Black Gold Blues [mp3] - Laura Veirs ( Amazon / iTunes )

Gold Guns Girls [mp3] - Metric ( Amazon / iTunes )

Best Albums of 2009

As you might be able to tell by our lack of posting, we were hard at work over the holidays putting together our end of the year lists. Today is the first of three lists - our Best Albums of 2009 list. So in no particular order, we present them to you:
 

The Antlers - Hospice
This intensely beautiful, heart-wrenching album is full of more tragedy than we would hope any one person would experience in a lifetime, much less a person of front man and writer Pete Silberman's young age. Hospice launched The Antlers to indie fame this year, and deservedly so. The haunting melodies strike us deeply in our cores and stay with us long after we've listened to them. Not that it's ever that long between listens, since the album has pretty much been on repeat on our playlists since it first came out in March.
Sylvia [mp3] - (iTunes)

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

This anticipated album encompassed ingenious songcraft, never-ending unwinding textural and melodic flourishes, languid beatuy and sweeping rhythmic cavorts that cut to the center of any listener's ear. With painstaking attention to detail, Veckatimest soared above any fears of overproduction and swooped right into the land of absolute prowess.

Passion Pit - Manners
In a year stockpiled with celebrity deaths, who anticipated that Stanley Kubrick would be resurrected to orchestrate the best indie-pop album of 2009? Every moment of Manners contains a purposely placed hook - Kids singing! Catchy synth lines! A horn section! - but the album would amount to nothing more than a dizzying Go Team! disciple if not for the pitch-perfect layering of Michael Angelakos' heartfelt falsetto. Without it, Manners - and Passion Pit by proxy - would be an indistinguishable novelty act instead of a polished pop catharsis.
The Reeling [mp3] - (iTunes)

Matt Jones - The Black Path

We wrote about this album back in 2008, but it didn't technically come out until 2009, so we're going to write about it again because it's that good. Simply put, Matt Jones is a one-of-a-kind genius and this orchestral folk album is full of gorgeous, rich instrumentation and complex, deeply expressive lyrics. Matt Jones' music and unique voice are truly mesmerizing.

Waltzing With Lady Dawn [mp3] - (iTunes)

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
While they've been on the music scene for a while, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was the album that really put French band Phoenix on the map. With catchy hits like "Lisztomania" and "1901," they rocketed through the indie masses alongside the album's vivid revivalist melodies and danceable indie-pop beats. A small smear of brit-pop shoegaze added for fun and the love for the film Breakfast Club that was reignited made this album a clear standout in 2009.

Metric - Fantasies

Emily Haines always manages to create songs that are simultaneously melancholy or nostalgic and yet are awesome dance songs. You can rock out, yet feel an incredible emotional pull, and the songs are so catchy that they'll stay in your head for hours. Fantasies is no exception to this rule, and "Help I'm Alive" has not-so-slowly risen to be one of our most-played songs this year.

St. Vincent - Actor
St. Vincent's sophomore album, inspired, she says, by Prince, can take a little warming up to at first. Her songs are complex and many of them can't truly be appreciated on the first listen. But the more you listen to it, the more masterful layers you discover and the more you appreciate this virtuoso. Rocking guitar harmonics burst forth from fluttering wind instruments and St. Vincent integrates these two contrasting sounds flawlessly, even within the same song.

White Rabbits - It's Frightening

This percussion-driven band became a sensation this year with their aptly named, explosive "Percussion Gun." But these are no one hit wonders - their album was full of other good, very catchy, rumbling, crashing, banging, tapping songs. And while it might be easy for a band with such a focus on percussion to get in a rut where all their music sounds the same, they've managed to utilize a nice variety of sounds and genres, while still maintaining a cohesiveness over the entire album.

Florence and the Machine - Lungs
Florence's powerful, rich voice and epically dramatic music make her debut album Lungs a force to reckon with, alternating between dark and stormy, with drums booming and her imposing vocals, and then flowery and romantic with plucky harps. But no matter what the style, the album never loses the dramatic flare that hooks you within the first few bars.

Discovery - LP

The brainchild of Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles, this debut album, which was recorded over the course of three and a half years, makes for an unique and pleasantly intriguing experience. Inventive beats, playful rhythms and slick rushes of harmonious vocals dapple throughout this album, producing indie electro-pop at its finest.

Fanfarlo - Reservoir
Reservoir is a package full of odds and ends that takes a while to unpack. The British sextet has created a well-crafted propulsive album that will make you laugh, cry, dance, sway or stand still in total revelry all within the same album. Their music has a warmth to it that is downright lovely. The exquisite instrumentation and lead singer Simon's distinct, cozy voice is enough to warrant more than a couple rounds of continuous listens.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

It's perplexing that an album translating to "Please Killer Whale" would lead Brooklyn's experimental class into the pop realm this year (along with Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear). Differentiating this effort from its Yale-crested musical-composition predecessors are the hooks. That's right: hooks. "Stillness is the Move" is an outright jam - not just by Dirty Projectors' standards, but by Left Eye Lopez (R.I.P.) standards. It might have been the track of 2009 that best defined the shift (for those aforementioned bands) from strictly creating songs principled in deconstructionist methodology towards a welcomed practice of lavishing in mind-bending indie hymnals, i.e., running the musical gamut - in styles, genres, tempos, key/time signatures - during every featured track on the album.

The XX - XX
This debut album blew everyone away, with many describing it as downright perfect or fantastically innovative. Pitchfork called it "so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it." Indeed, it was a perfectly executed product from the London band of 20-somethings, with quiet instrumentation full of purpose and lyrics riddled with poignancy.

Elizabeth and the Catapult - Taller Children

Elizabeth & the Catapult's sassy debut album that juxtaposes the freedoms of youth and the responsibilities of growing up is a delightful listen from beginning to end - with bubbly, bouncy child-like songs such as "Race You" to the serious Leonard Cohen cover of "Everybody Knows," it's a well-rounded album and a very solid debut indeed.

Momma's Boy [mp3] - (iTunes)

Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
Comprised of star players like M. Ward (She & Him), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes), Monsters of Folk ventures into lands of varied and weathered styles, delivering quality and seamless song-work amongst the loose sea of rock-folk acoustic guitars and lush harmonies. Conor Oberst pens GFP writer Diana's favorite lyric of the year in "Temazcal," summing up a relationship that was never meant to be in less than 10 words: "love we made at gunpoint wasn't love at all."

Metric @ First Ave tonight!

Those of you who live in the Twin Cities better get your arses over to First Ave tonight for a stellar concert by Metric, hosted by my favorite radio station in existence, the Current. Front woman Emily Haines is truly a musical genius and an energetic performer that I've raved about before, and GFP has been praising the entertainment value and solid talent of Metric for a long while now. It pains me that I personally won't be able to make it, but I urge you all to go and check it out if you can, cause no doubt the concert will be AMAZING and well worth the cheap ticket fare of just 15 bucks. 

Sebastien Grainger (rock) and Smile Smile (indie folk pop) will open.

Find out more about the venue and acquiring concert tickets here.

new Metric album: Fantasies

The new Metric album, Fantasies, is out today. I've been listening to it on repeat for the last couple days and watching the videos (see below). Emily Haines is my new girl talent crush I think. She has this ability to write songs that are all at once dark rock 'n' roll, catchy pop and meaningful ballad. It's upbeat music with kind of nostalgic/melancholy undertones that tug at your heart strings. She is one of the rare people with the ability to really affect me emotionally while simultaneously causing the urge for me to dance, and I always feel as if she wrote her songs specifically for me because they are very relatable. The best part is that acoustic versions of the songs (see the videos in the widget below) sound just as good as the upbeat versions because the core of the songs are that well written. So far my favorite album of the year I think.

Tracklist:
1. Help I’m Alive
2. Sick Muse
3. Satellite Mind
4. Twilight Galaxy
5. Gold Guns Girls
6. Gimme Sympathy
7. Collect Call
8. Front Row
9. Blindness
10. Stadium Love

Stream the entire album (and watch cool videos) here:

Help I'm Alive (The Twelves Remix) [mp3] - (iTunes)

The "Metric" System

I first discovered Metric from a Paste Magazine music sampler. Even though they're most recent album came out in back in 2005, I am writing about them because they are going on tour, kicking off tomorrow in Toronto. They'll be in NYC on September 21st (at Webster Hall) and Minneapolis on September 26th (at First Ave). Check out the other tour dates on their site or their myspace.

Well I wouldn't call them a dance-rock band, a lot of their music is relatively upbeat. I like their sound. It's fun. Emily Haines' voice is interesting. A good rock and roll voice. For some reason their music is ever so slightly reminiscent of the 90s for me (maybe The Cardigans?), which was, in my opinion, a great rock decade. Maybe that's just my nostalgia kicking in again though...

And, as is everyone who's anyone right now in indie music, they are Canadian. In fact, a few of the members - vocalist Emily Haines and guitarist James Shaw - are also part of Broken Social Scene.

I have to say I'm a little disappointed they haven't come out with an album this year, since their three albums were released in 2001, 2003 and 2005. The next in the pattern should be 2007 right? But they all have a lot of side projects, so they're all really busy. Although, there's still a few months in 2007... Maybe (even though they're on tour...) they'll come out with something yet.

So anyway, go see them on tour! Here are some samples to get you interested:

Poster of a Boy [mp3] - Metric - "Live It Out" (iTunes)
Monster Hospital [mp3] - Metric - "Live It Out" (iTunes)
Combat Baby [mp3] - Metric - "Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?" (iTunes)
The Twist [mp3] - Metric - "Grow Up and Blow Away" (iTunes)

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