Audiocæneat! - Red Sessions (2011)

Post-rock can be a tricksy beast. It is often a  downright boring and formulaic genre affair (as anything can be) But when you are distilling many different genres down the roots system you've gotta have your weapon enchanted with just the right amount of elemental forces to stand ahead.  This brings us to Audiocæneat! from Germany who play a classic post-rock (think epic guitars) pounding drums, some great structure and shoegaze thrown in to flesh out the proceedings.  What I can and always do give props to is the attention of production, everything is in your face and crystal. Also if you think that this is your grandpas old post rock with down time they remain always interesting. Do I hear some metal influence in those guitars? You bet your bottom. These guys put a lot of the main streamers to shame. So what does that mean for you? it means clickity below fellow's.

Red Sessions (2011)

The New Year - Newness Ends (2001)

 Eh?  Eh? Ok I know it might seem a bit cheeky to do what with it being New Years Eve and all but lets talk stock.

So The New Year features the talents of the Kadane Brothers formerly of the kings of sadcore Bedhead. Certainly check into some of their other amazing albums as well as they practically invented the genre. Newness ends doesn't really tred new ground but its incredibly solid with some really nice lyrics about getting older.  No blistering solo's here these guys are all about the slow burn rock and its moody as all hell.  You can practically smell the cooling rods from the time machine powering down after being transported to the early 90's with these guys but honestly I find myself yearning for that simpler rock music landscape sometimes. So crank these jams and be safe tonight. Happy New Year everyone.

Newness Ends (2001)

Harsha Iyer- Curious Toys (2011)

*BUMP UPDATE*

After listening to Harsha a bunch, and talking to him from india to Boston over the facebooks chat, i have come to realize how wide a range of music this dude digs on and ends up subtly and at times overtly adding to his own songs. My initial review favored the comparison between Overcautious as a pop song to songs by The Kinks and OTC. But that is the tip of the iceberg; Overcautious is one song in the style of Pop Music this dude enjoys writing. And needless to say, dude is prolific. Hes working with a lot of different musicians while writing solo stuff. Hell yeah. Tracks like Not Yet Dead really blew me away in listening to Curious Toys: it is moody and sparse, dark, with excellent vocal melodies, guitar work and string arrangements.

Below Not Yet Dead is my initial review of Overcautious, with a link to his bandcamp page for his 2011 album, Curious Toys:

Harsha Iyer - Curious Toys - 06 Not Yet Dead by ninko

Dull Blades and Guilty Trades

This is a post for all of those albums of yester-year that creep in and out of your life like old friends. They could be albums you still enjoy but that you feel secret shame or just albums you have thus far in your life out grown. A lot of what we do here is to inform those of the new music that we discover whether through friends, file sharing, music sites, seeing live shoes, ect. But realistically these choices have all been informed by music of our past. I have invited each of our resident swordsmen to partake in this and hopefully we can have some fun.


As a side note to all of our readership: Please feel free to mock and laugh accordingly.

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ACEROLA:
Osker - Idle Will Kill
(Pop-punk with bad vocals. Although isn't that built into the genre? Still surprisingly catchy)

AFI - Black Sails in the Sunset
(Some sort of punk, alt., emo glam beast. All of their records were pretty good.)

Juliana Theory - Love
(Catchy Alt - Prog-lite. Over produced and all the better for it.)

Thursday - Full Collapse
(Sadly one of my first intro's to post-hardcore. uninspired but very loud and dramatic about it. 16 year old me loves this)

Millencolin - Pennybridge Pioneers
(Catchy pop punk. so good)

Green Day - Dookie
(No link? because if your around my age you listened to this enough. my cassette of this broke because I listened to it too many times. true story)
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METAGHOST:
Shootyz Groove - Jammin in Vicious Environments (RAP-METALLLLLLL!!!)
Another Society - S/T (Couldn't find a link. They were like... a Nirvana knockoff from Alabama or something)
self - Subliminal Plastic Motives (Pretty sure this was the first album I bought. Still kinda ok.)
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NINKO:

blink 182- dude ranch (Dammit was the first song i NEEDED to learn)
metallica-..and justice for all (this is where my guitar teacher took me)
barenaked ladies- stunt (i also really dug this in middleschool)
phish-a live one pt1; pt2 (then i smoked pot and wound up here)
blues traveler-four (somewhere in the middle, i heard this)

korn- follow the leader (before smoking pot, i was angst-y)
limp bizkit- three dollar bill ya'll (and i really liked the finger tapping going on in this)

gruvis malt- sound soldiers (and then this happened)
sigur ros-agaetis byrjun (i got really into this at music school)
beastie boys- hello nasty (favorite hip hop of mine in 9th grade)


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FRANKLINDC:

I was all about Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Garage a Trois, Dave Holland, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, and a local alt/emo band called Premonition. Actually I should post them soon. The only emo band I know that had a djembe.
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Merry Merries from the Swords!

Merry Merries, dingleberries! This will be brief. Hope all of you are enjoying some awesome time with your families, listening to dope jams and jibbin' plenty of flibbits. Again, we want to extend a heartfelt thank you for checking in here and conversing with us about the things we love; its a great community and we are so glad to be a part of it.

As thanks, I want to show you something i just dug up from my oldschool iPod, which is packed with all the music i was listening to from highschool through my early 20s, as well as being filled with things i was recording at that time. Two good friends and I were out visiting Metaghost and abigail wonder at their college, where Ghost had access to an amazing recording studio. One night, Ghost and i were in studio jamming out some Father Geoghan when the pals i drove out with showed up with more of our friends. We decided to record some random zombie noises to use in unspecified projects; prior to this, i had been practicing Proud Mary by Creedance. If the first 4 minutes of zombie nonsense/ jamming does nothing for you, skip to 4:15 where i decided to kick into Proud Mary. It was hilarious. And the quality of the recording was so good. Just ridiculous. Happy Holidays pals.

00 - Zombie Chorus by ninko

Ninetails - Ghost Ride the Whip

Ninetails hails from England and play an interesting blend of rock music's.  Love the name by the way. We get a small idea of what these guys are bringing to the table with this three song EP.  Post rock, indie rock, indie pop, math rock yet pretty vocal driven as well. Structurally these songs are interestingly arranged and its nice to be kept on your toes a bit where each song is going to turn to. HOWEVER some kind of synthesizing would be appreciated as I can see a full length of this sort of strategy getting a bit flim flammy. For a short player it's nice to see a group spreading its feathers and I certainly look forward to more.

Ghost-ride-the-whip bandcamp

Strange Mangers - S/T (2011)

Kids these days.

Strange Mangers are a new-ish band of teenagers from Boston that includes a heavy dose of jangly guitar in their indie rock brew. The songs tend to be pensive and catchy. The rhythms aren't at all mathy, but there's so much jangly guitar, effective dynamics, and well-placed vocal harmonies that you'll forget everything is in 3/4 and 4/4. The vocals are sparse, airy, and strong.

The one iffy moment is a misguided sample-based piece about the financial crisis in the middle of the EP. It doesn't really add anything and kills the EP's momentum. But thats what skip buttons are for, I suppose.

Stream/download Strange Mangers on their Bandcamp.

The Velvet Teen - No Star & Cum Laude

The Velvet Teen are an alt indie group with some rocking gutairs. Most interesting and delighting to me is their drummer Casey (one of my favorites) also drums for The America's
(click the link to time travel)

This group is something of a shape shifter and can sound pretty radically different depending on where you catch them. The No Star EP is a pretty guitar heavy album which is why its one of my fav's.  Also of note is their album Cum Laude which is just straight awesome sauce and has some nasty keyboardage. It's a must have so please Seek and Destroy

Cum Laude

No Star

The Cabs - First Incident

Japanese emo/ indie rock with some math rock flirtations. Some pleasant vocals mixed  screaming. When the tempo slows down these guys seem at a disadvantage but raise the BPM's and suddenly the drums and guitar go all kinds of math wonky.  Its pretty good stuff but I cant say for sure how long it will stay in the rotation. Is it worthy of a look? Hellz Jess.


First Incident

Ninko/ Carved in Clouds- Original Linkzz

Yo. So again, i have been digging through old things that i was working on right as my old computer crapped the bed. Through this digging, i have a few things i want to show to you. First, as a follow-up to Sunrise in Cloud City, the track i wrote to come in immediately after, Trouble Brewing:
Trouble Brewing by ninko

I was talking to Metaghost about this next one; we agree that it was something we jammed on after listening to lots of Toe. We jammed out, and i returned home and recorded all the things i remembered by myself:

king:
King by ninko

Finally! The grand jewel of all halted projects! I have rediscovered a 2 minute clip of the first section of an epic, 12 minute piece called Arcobot. Metaghost and i composed this beast of a song over multiple writing sessions, which we pieced together into a truly epic jam. Our goals were beyond our means though, and the project stalled, but we have the grooves under our belts; it is ready to go. This intro track is one of my funnest guitar creations to date; it is just a melodic, tricky guitar part that took me long hours to master. I hope you like:

Arcobot by ninko

Vasudeva - Roots of The Tree EP

Quartet hailing from Brooklyn, Vasudeva have dropped a pretty rollicking EP here with their brand of instrumental tap happy math rock. The drums keep things driving along at a pretty nice clip not to mention a pretty varied attack. The guitars actually launch into some fairly memorable melodies (sometimes not often enough). If what your reading sounds like something you've heard before...chances are your not to far off. Believe me when I say though that its worth a listen. Perhaps with some more structural twists and turns it could be elevated to another level of awesome.

Roots of The Tree (EP)

maudlin of the Well - Part the Second (2009)

I don't know why it's taken me so long to make a post about this record. Probably has something to do with why I rarely make posts about any records — I let acerola do that shit, fuck finding links!

But no, this is some top-notch music that does a great job of bridging the gap between the previous pair of maudlin of the Well records, Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, with the more ornate modern classical compositions of Toby Driver's solo work and Kayo Dot. As with all of his projects, there are always those elements that can be a bit grating if you don't keep an open mind towards the experiential nature of what he writes (like all the groaning on Rose Quartz Turning to Glass), but there's simply not a whole lot in the world that's like this, just things that are somewhat similar. A must listen for fans of Henry Cow, Final Fantasy 7, and slutty guitar solos.

Free download in FLAC and all that other shit: Cha-Ching!

Stage Kids - Killer Tofu (2011)

Previously on Plenty of Swords..... 

They are back and JESUS MAGIC CHRISTMAS this couldn't get any better. Those of you out there that thought they were too young or lacked ideas well your face just got noise checked. This is as sure footed as it gets for instrumental math rock. Super well produced and spit shined. I think its also safe to smack about the fact that everyone must have leveled up on their instruments at least 5 times as well. The ideas flowing here are numerous and are just curve ball enough to make you fist pump at the same time as your brain smiles. Electronic elements are sprinkled into the math rock this time ever so slightly as well as the completely electronic songs.

If you missed them the first time then heres your second chance at a brand new life filled with lush guitars and complicated poly-rhythms. Put this under the tree because your entire family will thank you for it.

Killer Tofu

(also nice Doug reference.....)

Jo Jo and the Scooters- Inspiration (Graceland, 1986)

I will not say much, because i do not feel entitled to talk about something of this magnitude with my insufficient knowledge of it. The other day, on a break at work, i had the sudden urge to hear You Can Call Me Al. And luckily, now that i have a nerdphone, i looked that shit up and watched the hilarious video with Chevy Chase. Later that night, i went to see a friend play an acoustic set at Owen O'Learys, and at one point in their set, the excellent Ryan McHugh, who was serving as a stand-in-for-the-night guitarist, kicked into a nice version of Graceland. When they finished, i mentioned to my drummer pal vince that i had just had that sudden urge to hear Call Me Al; Ryan the guitarist said "oh yeah? lets do it" and Mia B and the two of them kicked it out proper. I returned home and immediately found myself a copy of Paul Simons landmark 1986 release. I have not absorbed it fully yet; I have been alternating between Phontes latest and Graceland.

All that said, Graceland is one of those albums, like Moondance or Thriller, that are just untouchable: Pop Music cornerstones. I am deep in this right now. Perfect pop sensibilities to keep in mind for Jo Jo and the Scooters. So that covers a classic of undeniable pop which enters into the Olivia Tremor Control category of the band equation; next, please cite a math/rock/pop outfit that influenced excellent current bands like Mister Metaphor. Part 3 is electronica.. lets see what you got.



graceland

Ninko- Sunrise on Cloud City (Linkzzzzz)

Fellas requested for linkz; here is one. Just as my old computer began its downward spiral, the 2011 RPM challenge was under way and i had a game plan. I created a few tracks, but was sidelined by my malfunctioning audio software. It was a concept album about a galactic fight taking place on earth and in the cloud cities above it, and the first track is one of my better electronic works. I had different plans for it, but once my computer wasnt able to allow me to record live audio i was at a stalemate. This is how it ended up:

Sunrise by ninko

there ya go.

The Prophet Nathan

Get ready for this.... "Tennessee Two-some" as they embark on a stylistically interesting musical adventure. like some sort of math-pop monster that at times tears up the landscape with awesome drum and guitar.  Other moments shift to some soft singing or samples but always the drums remain consistently great.  Influences drip off the sleeve but there is a large honesty that keeps me pulled in. Not too mention the previously stated instrumentation.  Both releases are well worth the gandering.


The Prophet Nathan

Phonte- Charity Starts at Home (2011)

I have proclaimed much love for The Foreign Exchange, and afterwards Little Brother, and a big part of my appreciation of these two groups came down to the Phonte factor; Phonte fronts Foreign Exchange, and began his music career in Little Brother. He is a gifted vocalist/ rapper, renowned (in not only my own world) as a chorus genius, proficient foremost in creating vocal harmonies that go 6 parts deep with hooks to match. I mean, check out the chorus of the Foreign Exchanges track, Maybe She'll Dream of Me. Ain't no room for suckers in that studio; just the straight sickness right there.

So, 2011 finally saw to Phonte releasing his first solo effort as an artist, Charity Starts at Home. As usual, when given the mic to talk about what is on his mind, Phonte rises above any fronting and speaks about life as an artist making it through each day to rise and shine with the next. His rhymes are very personal, introspective and creative, and he knows when a tracks melancholy only requires subtly, and knows when to drop a serious chorus to enrich the positive emotions he talks about (as he does in Sending All My Love). It seems Phonte favored focusing on his rhyming on his debut solo release, letting some lovely female vocalists fill in on his hooks while he focused his own vocal parts on the verses. Great stuff; he worked with a number of producers for this release, including a much anticipated (for myself) reunion for a few tracks with 9th Wonder as his beat maestro; track 2, The Good Fight, properly kicks the album up a notch after starting so very strongly with Dance in the Reign (produced by Swiff D). Blam: The Good Fight:

Phonte - The Good Fight
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charity starts at home

Jo Jo and the Scooters

So, i have big personal news for all you Swordsers: i finally have a working laptop capable of letting me produce intense, gigantic audio recordings. I am very excited. Ive been talking to Metaghost about how liberating and exciting it is to have a high-class machine ready for me to use its audio functions to their potential, and i have a lot of ideas that have been laying dormant since about six months ago, when my previous computer stopped working properly.

One of these ideas was borne from a fake band name my father referenced a while back; i was home, listening to some random music when my dad peeped his head in to ask what i was listening to: "who is this? Jo Jo and the Scooters?". He makes up names like this all the time; his standby fake band name is Mickey and the Finns, but he often gets creative with it. Jo Jo and the Scooters stuck with me for some reason; i was listening to a lot of Mister Metaphor (for the first time), and had also rediscovered my love for Olivia Tremor Control. At the same time, i was deeply involved in electro-pop, listening to loads of Hot Chip, Starfucker and Miike Snow; expanding my technical production ideas by absorbing myself in electronic-heavy dance/pop outfits.

Anyways, this mostly goes out to Acey and Franklin (as metaghost already is in on this): Here we go gentlemen. When my father first uttered the words Jo Jo and the Scooters, i thought of classic do-wop pop music, only updated to modern standards. I expanded this initial idea to becoming a mix of Olivia Tremor Controls vocal stylings, Mister Metaphors polyrhythmic math/pop skills, and added electronica as bonus points. Im ready to go. Things to come. This is a warning.

Anathallo - Floating World (2006)

The now defunct Anathallo (hailing from Michigan and Chicago) had a couple releases under their belt before dissolving in ought 9 . Floating World being the one in which left the greatest mark on me. Think a mess ton of soulful singing and harmonies. Baroque pop and indie pop make the solid base with an emphasis on rhythm and interesting structures. First of get the thoughts of "sleepy pop group" lulling you to sleep out of your head. Sure some songs are crawlers but they are nice enough to get through to the brass and percussion awesome that more often than not makes its presence known.  Not the usual post for me but don't let that fool you, there is more than enough here to like.

Floating World (2006)

metaghostin' Vol. XII - Film School on Paper

Film School on Paper - 32'01"

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1. Possessed / The Great Unraveling / The Great Unraveling (1997)
2. Several Circles / Tidal Arms / The Sun Exploding (2011)
3. Frame by Frame / King Crimson / Discipline (1981)
4. Behaving Badly / Animals as Leaders / Animals as Leaders (2009)
5. Let's Get Tired / Zona Mexicana / 3 Song EP (2009)
6. Landscape with Gun and Chandelier / Upsilon Acrux / Radian Futura (2009)
7. There's Nothing More / Jonny Classic and the Classic Johns / Your New Favorite Record (2005)

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When you listen to music in public, is that music a diagetic soundtrack to your own experiences or an extra-diagetic score for the world around you?