...I'm sorry. These three are personal favorites of mine and having seen them numerous times its easy for me to say they are the math band to beat these days. Tight hardcore styled pure 90's emo with lots of twisty turny mathy goodness dripping all over. I covered them long ago with their first EP and heres another four to blow yer skull. By the by "Waking up with Dedication" has been a live favorite of mine for awhile, thankfully its here in all its structured glory.
This is another album I've slept on for far too long. This album had a lot of buzz (at least around Providence) back in the mid-2000s, but I never got a chance to pick it up until I found it in a used record store a few months ago. But since then, I've actually listened to this more than anything else I own.
Basically, this is an album of remixed indie rock songs. Not some annoying frantic mashups, but rather fleshing out existing songs and making them totally baller. The original songs are all pretty great, and surprisingly effective with some extra magical beats. Club-ready songs with depth. Mmmmmm... Indie Rock Blues
Some trivia: Guess who's in the blue shirt behind Joe Beats?
Despite my love of Battles and all the fuss surrounding the album, I never picked this up until very recently. (Shameless bragging alert: the first time I heard it was through the control room monitors at the studio it was tracked and mixed at while tracking the A Troop of Echoes album). This is possibly the most whimsical record ever produced. Its packed with fun noises, sweet guitar parts, and reverb-drenched vocals. The song structures can be a little wonky. While most of the buzz surrounds the classical-style compositions, I'm actually into the shorter, more pop-structured pieces a little more. The other stuff is interesting, but a little meandering. You gotta give it up to the guy, this shit is insane and sounds like nothing else out there. Central Market
This is a rather random post. As some of you may know, haruki murakami recently released his 2009 novel, 1Q84, in the States, translated from his native japanese into english. He is a very intriguing writer, with works that instantly grab you with their thoroughly detailed descriptions of mundane life that quickly turn surreal and engrossing, demanding your imagination in ways that relate to dream states and memory. 1Q84 is his grandest work, and throughout it he mentions pieces of pop culture, referencing songs and places and historical milestones to help you subtly set the scene as you read. As i have been reading along, whenever a song is mentioned i will quickly search it out and play it in the background as i continue through a scene. It is a fun way to "read along", as i am sure that while he was writing these passages he too was listening to the songs mentioned. He is an avid music collector, with an office lined with countless vinyl.
To make a longer story short, he mentioned a Bach piece called Well-Tempered Clavier early in the novel, as a focal character was introduced: I went to youtube and found the piece, preformed by the (apparently) legendary Glenn Gould. He was a highly regarded pianist that interpreted classical music with critically acclaimed style.
As i read, i had to stop my progress in the novel to watch the performance Glenn gave of this selection of the Clavier pieces. I thought of its execution as compared to watching a spider weave its web: you understand it fundamentally, as a flawless piece of mathematical construction; you can tell that the subject creating it has its scheme built into its nature, its very existence; and though you may doubt the slow, meticulous, ever-complicated crescendo of its progression while it is being created in front of your eyes, the end result is perfection.
For those of you not keen to most classical music, please skip to 3:40. Shit just gets out of control from that point forward. Below is Goulds interpretation of Bachs Goldberg Variations, another epic piece of classical solo piano subtlety.
