some great jams by Octave Cat here.

This video has dozens of likes! but is worthy of so many more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKLFEotMc9U

#music #indieBands #liveMusic

🛠️ Ah, #Galois and their magical #GREASE, the tool that promises to make #vulnerabilities pop like pimples - because who knew binary code needed a skincare routine? 🧴 Meanwhile, they're tackling bold topics like Advanced Cryptography and #AI, but maybe it's just a smokescreen for their real expertise: crafting tools with names that sound like failed indie bands. 🎸
https://www.galois.com/articles/introducing-grease #AdvancedCryptography #IndieBands #HackerNews #ngated

Silversun Pickups Play “Lazy Eye”

Listen to this track by four-piece Los Angeles-based indie-rock purveyors Silversun Pickups. It’s “Lazy Eye” a well-known cut from their 2006 debut record Carnavas. It served as lead single to that release, appearing in February of the following year and being a feature on their late-night TV appearances on Letterman, Leno, and a phalanx of other shows of the period. The song’s video was a stand-out, set at an all-ages music venue, and fraught with tension between youthful patrons. The song even appeared as a playable tune for the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games, and therefore etching itself even deeper into the cultural consciousness of the mid-to-late 2000s.

“Lazy Eye” rides on a Smashing Pumpkins meets Neu! style motorik beat, locked in with earnest focus. Singer, guitarist, and co-writer Brian Aubert’s voice spans the spectrum of low-key contemplation to an angry roar, all of that wrapped in a restrained and ambient soundscape of guitars, bass, drums, and whisps of electronic effects that drift in and out, showing that the palette of guitar-based indie-rock was just as diverse and expansive as any genre.

The groove is mesmeric with the words adding value for the way they sound as much as they are a means to convey the story. And what a powerful story it is. Its exceptionally compelling opening statement really hits the ground running on that score: I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life. But it’s not quite right. That set of lines contains whole worlds of emotional geography. And what about the titular Lazy Eye, anyway? Is it meant to be literal, or does it imply something that’s more symbolic? Interestingly, the answer is a resounding yes on both fronts.

First, the lazy eye was real. Aubert had one as a kid; a bad time to have anything about you that other kids can point out and label you with. It’s not the physical nature of the thing that’s the focus. It’s about how you feel when you’re stuck with it, and how you then perceive the effect it has on other people.

In turn, it’s about how the lowest common denominator responds to that thing that makes us an object of their curiosity or revulsion. This is one of those things that lives in the province of uncomfortable self-consciousness that we all experience, especially when we’re young. For Aubert at one point, it was a lazy eye. But it could have been anything and can be for anyone.

In this, “Lazy Eye” joins a tradition of pop songs that is all about what it feels like to be young and in a world where one feels everything very keenly. Being young often involves struggles which are imbued with life and death urgency experienced from the inside out. It means big overwhelming feelings that bear down on the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world. It connects with how we believe other people may or may not think of us and with many blurry lines in between. Big Star’s “Thirteen” and even The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be Nice” hover around these same themes.

“Lazy Eye” keenly locks into this mindset: to suddenly, and for the first time in our lives, come to an awareness that we are presenting ourselves to others whether we wish to do that or not. This is one of those things we do not miss as we get older, even if we may miss so many other things about being young; to experience big emotions that include feeling exposed to the world and finding that we don’t have the capacity to really understand where those feelings come from, what they mean, or what to do with them.

Further to that, the song also touches on another malady profoundly felt by the young and in some ways can stick with us beyond our youth, too; everyone has it all figured out but me.

“Everyone’s so intimately rearranged
Everyone’s so focused clearly with such shine
Everyone’s so intimately prearranged
Everyone’s so focused clearly with such shine …
That’s why I said I relate
I said we really
Need to fight to relate.”

~ “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups

In a state of mind like that, the common advice to just be yourself, kid seems hollow and distant. It’s a chasm apart from where we find ourselves while young and unused to managing or even recognizing the difference between our true selves and the costumes we feel we have to wear to fit in, to fight to relate.

“Lazy Eye” captures so much of the feeling of youthful uncertainty, with the narrator imbuing the moment he’s waited for all his life with the importance of scaling Everest. Really, it seems like the scene he’s experiencing is really about finally getting to talk to that person he likes while feeling like he’s messing it all up; I like this person so much and everything I’m saying to them right now sounds so stupid. Perhaps it’s the song’s video that conveys that scenario more overtly than any hard-coded lines in the song itself. But otherwise, what is more indicative and uncomfortably relatable to how it feels to be young and unsure of oneself than that?

Besides the groove, which is undeniable on a musical level, this lyrical distillation of youthful awkwardness and earnestness hits dead center. It’s well-observed. But it’s also full of empathy, too. Most of us felt some form of it when we were young, and more of us feel it when we’re older to a greater degree than we’d perhaps like to admit.

When we cast our minds back to the heady days of youth, we either edit it out or inwardly (sometimes outwardly!) cringe when we recall some of the things we’ve said, thought, or did. But awkwardness and clumsiness in social situations is just as much a part of the human experience as anything. In many ways, it’s a vital part of our apprenticeships as well-adjusted people, even if it never entirely goes away.

Silversun Pickups are an active band today. You can learn more about their output and their recent movements at silversunpickups.com.

For more on this tune, here’s a video about its background from the band themselves.

Enjoy!

#2000sMusic #IndieBands #IndieRock #SilversunPickups #songsAboutChildhood

Monday September 9th at 8pm - we join Aligned Alchemy in their studio for a collaboration show on Twitch! Free to watch from anywhere #twitch #livemusic #collaboration #indiemusic #indiebands

Listen to this track by brassy and wanderlusting indie-folk band Beirut. It’s “Santa Fe”, a popular cut from the band’s 2011 release The Rip Tide, their third album. Beirut’s sound is a mosaic of disparate musical traditions from various countries and cultures placed inside of pop music’s general framework. This is all while using unconventional instrumentation to give the music unique texture and atmosphere. Principle songwriter and creative head Zach Condon’s main instrument is trumpet, an instrument he’s played since he was a teenager. But much of the band’s sound also relies on drum machines, organs, and analogue synths.

Condon’s wide interest in folk music and movie soundtracks from all over the world, particularly from Europe, is an inspiration for and an extension of his own personal urge for going. He’d been bitten by the travel bug as a teenager after he’d become an avid appreciator of foreign cinema and culture. On “Santa Fe”, listeners find him returning home to the city where he was raised. And like so many songs about homecomings, “Santa Fe” suggests a heady brew of contrasting emotions and perspectives that come out leaving the place where one has grown up, later to find themselves returning there over a course of years and with some distance logged on their personal odometers.

What might inspire a dedicated world-traveler to do that? In Condon’s case, it may have been due in part to the unpleasant circumstances that led up to this song’s recording. As recounted in a 2011 interview with Zack Condon in The Guardian, Beirut’s 2010 stop in Brazil found him exhausted. This was even without the issue of damaged vocal cords that, among other things, kept him from singing to his own standards. On top of that, an accident during this stop caused a perforation in one of his eardrums, which is not the best place for a musician to sustain an injury.

There’s more still. Playing the show there, a crowd misunderstood his exhortation in broken Portuguese to get up and dance, inspiring a throng of fans to surge toward and eventually onto the stage. This resulted in broken instruments, stolen gear, and a general pall on the whole affair of touring the world. As an impetus to bring it all back home, these events might have been a very compelling for Condon to do just that.

The irony is that he’d always made his music as a vehicle for traveling the world in his imagination. Songwriting was the means to make an escape from his mundane surroundings, transcending what was close at hand in familiar environs to reach for something more exciting, more exotic. Yet, the place where one grows up has a profound effect on our perceptions and identity whether we notice it or not. We carry those things with us on our travels no matter how far away they take us. And as the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are.

Sign me up, Santa Fe
And call your son
Sign me up, Santa Fe
On the cross, Santa Fe
And all I want
Sign me up, Santa Fe
And call your son

~ “Santa Fe”, Beirut

In coming out of a harrowing period in Condon’s life, “Santa Fe” is certainly happy-sounding, even if its emotional profile is likely more nuanced for its author. This is a song that finds him considering his roots and origins after a time spent away. That process is often a mix of facing the ghosts of the past as much as experiencing the comfort of being in a place we know well. That aside, a call in any language to get up and dance to this song is not even necessary. The music manages that call very handily, unlikely to be misunderstood by anyone, brassy and ebullient as it is. This makes “Santa Fe” more of a tribute than it is a confrontation.

At a certain point, especially after a time spent away, one’s hometown becomes a state of mind that we cherish, revile, or struggle to account for on both sides of that fence in our present lives. This song suggests a well-travelled author who once sought to kick off the dust of his hometown coming to the realization that his identity and his perspectives rely just as much on where he came from as on where he seeks to go. These are things one can only learn after time has passed and after one has explored the world a little, geographically and otherwise. As such, his lyrical statement “sign me up, Santa Fe” feels like a kind of reconciliation. It imbues the whole song with an appealing restfulness and sense of affection.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t conflict in it. “Santa Fe” is also about the contrast between the young person he once was, living in that town with aspirations to leave, and the person he is as he seeks to recharge and re-evaluate his direction years later when he returns there. What comes out of that contrast between who we were in a place, and who we are when we return can be revelatory in all kinds of ways.

Of course, there’s also always this: when the world at large kicks your ass, sometimes it’s those very things you’ve carried with you from home that provide the most solace. A return home after we’ve wandered a bit can open up just as many vistas to understanding who we really are even if we make our new home somewhere far away. It helps lend perspective on what’s most important to us, and sometimes on the distance between where we are and where we still need to go.

Beirut is an active musical entity today. Learn more about them at beirutband.com.

Also, check out this video of Beirut’s Tiny Desk concert, which includes a heart-warming rendition of this tune, among other delights.

Enjoy!

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https://thedeletebin.com/2024/08/12/beirut-play-santa-fe/

#2010sMusic #Beirut #IndieBands #indieFolk

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In der Mediathek der ARD ist gerade eine interessante zweiteilige Dokumentation über die Musikszene der Hamburger Schule zu sehen.

#HamburgerSchule #Musik #Gitarrenrock #IndieBands

https://www.ardmediathek.de/serie/die-hamburger-schule-musikszene-zwischen-pop-und-politik/staffel-1/Y3JpZDovL25kci5kZS81MDA1/1

Listen to this track by American indie-rock trailblazers turned internationally recognized hit-makers from Athens, Georgia, R.E.M. It’s “Daysleeper” their hit single as taken from 1998’s Up, their eleventh record. This song served as their first musical statement in a new era for the band. Drummer Bill Berry had left the group before it was recorded, retiring as a musician to pursue a career in farming. This left R.E.M. as “a three-legged dog” as the band described it at the time, with all of the allusions to injury in place with no scorn placed on Berry’s head at all. They were quick to mention that a dog with three legs is still a dog.

Feeling the impact to the creative partnership they’d forged in their twenties, R.E.M had to decide on what the trio version of the band would sound like as they edged onto and continued into their forties. The resulting record was a re-tooled R.E.M., focusing on atmosphere and texture via electronics and other technology rather than purely on the interplay of a guitar-based indie-rock quartet. The songs presented in this new milieu would diverge from their norm, too. This cut in particular had singer and lyricist Michael Stipe creating a character at the center of an internal drama instead of his usual impressionist approach to lyric-writing.

As such, “Daysleeper” is imbued with a kind of groggy empathy for the person we hear speaking. Maybe this is because this is a song that touches on a universal theme that goes beyond the narrator and the challenges of the 11-7 shift.

The idea for the song sprang from an observation Stipe had one afternoon while visiting a friend who lived in a New York apartment building. During his walk down the flight of stairs, he noticed a sign on one of the apartment doors that read, simply: Daysleeper. In noting the sign and being more mindful of the sound of his footfalls on the stairs, Stipe considered how the perceptions and even the physical make-up of a person who sleeps by day and works by night might be different from that of most people, including the songwriter himself.

Even the concepts of light and dark and certainly night and day would alter as circadian rhythms adjust to a new routine, diverging from what’s accepted as universal experience. But this song isn’t just about how relative the world is revealed to be through our physical senses. It’s about human connection, how we perceive our own identities, and about how the routines of our lives affect all that. When one must adjust to someone else’s schedule on this front, malaise is a natural consequence.

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While the rest of the world sleeps, and one finds themselves monitoring callbacks and complaints in the wee hours, it’s easy to imagine a certain unreality setting in. Under those conditions, it would be easy to feel like a lonely satellite instead of being a part of the connected constellation of friends, family, lovers, and acquaintances. Instead, where the central figure in this song is concerned, the danger lies in becoming a functionary of a routine instead of a well-balanced person in supportive relationships with others; becoming the screen, and not the observer of that screen.

“I cried the other night
I can’t even say why
Fluorescent flat, caffeine lights
It’s furious balancing
I’m the screen, the blinding light
I’m the screen, I work at night …”

-R.E.M., “Daysleeper”

“Daysleeper” is a song about being confronted by issues of identity, the awareness of one’s own feelings, and the rhythms in one’s life that feel the most comfortable and appropriate to health and happiness. These themes seemed applicable for a band who found that they had to redefine themselves as they took on a new routine of being a trio and not a quartet of musicians.

R.E.M. knew that it was a new era for them, and not just because of the loss of one of their members. They were interested in making other music, certainly. The expansive sonic landscape of this song alone helps to prove that thesis. But they were also maturing as artists wanting to express different artistic angles. As musicians and as people who had been on a unique kind of journey together, purportedly this was not an easy process.

Beyond the possible unconscious emotional connections between this song’s subject matter and the conditions under which it was recorded, “Daysleeper” is concerned with how important it is to feel connected to the wider world beyond just a single role. It’s about the need for self-determination, and wanting to stop from becoming the screen, following a routine while having little control over what one does and who one is, either as an individual or part of a group.

Maybe that’s why the three remaining members understood Bill Berry’s reasons for leaving, despite their disappointment and sadness at his departure. In light of the above, who were they to be angry at his decision to move on to other things and find fulfilment in a new phase and new set of rhythms in his life? Why would they instead want to keep him on as a daysleeper, filling a space without feeling it was as true for him as it once was? Who would want that for a friend and long-time bandmate?

The band would carry on in their trio form, playing with a variety of guest musicians in the drum seat both live and on record. By 2011, they came to the conclusion that they were slowly succumbing to being daysleepers themselves in their own band, set on a rhythm that no longer provided what they needed to thrive as artists and as people. Rather than continuing in a pattern of work and life that no longer suited them and their goals, they decided to take control of that identity and end it on their own terms. Perhaps they felt like they’d heard a wake-up call, knowing it was time to start a new kind of day.

R.E.M remain to be a respected musical entity, continuing to be influential across multiple generations of musicians.

Last year, they helped celebrate the release of an EP by Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, a musical hero of theirs who covered four of their songs. You can learn about that release right here.

And thanks to a unique project by actor and singer Michael Shannon, all four members enjoyed his performance of their first album Murmur earlier this year. This took place during a stop in the band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia and turned out to be kind of a reunion of sorts. You can read about that here from the pages of GQ magazine.

Otherwise, visit remhq.com for a history of the band and new individual projects from Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills.

Enjoy!

https://thedeletebin.com/2024/05/27/r-e-m-play-daysleeper/

#90sMusic #IndieBands #IndieMusic #REM

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Pre-order album on #Bandcamp: https://bluebottlekiss.bandcamp.com/album/never-leave-town-live-in-sydney

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