MP3: M. Ward – “Primitive Girl”
Full album stream: M. Ward – A Wasteland Companion
In between Coachella weekends, bands looking to capitalize on their downtime fanned out to L.A., Vegas, San Diego, and elsewhere. By some stroke of luck, San Diego got M. Ward, who played to a sold-out Belly Up crowd last Monday. Continue reading…
Jesse B. Marchant, also known as JBM, is a singer/songwriter from Montreal. A classically trained guitarist, he only recently began to write lyrics, sing, and record. His debut album, Not Even in July, was written in Los Angeles but recorded in New York’s Adirondack mountains, and it proves that he’s capable of sitting with other indie favorites like Bon Iver and AA Bondy.
JBM will open for AA Bondy at the Casbah on September 1. His Poetic Memory is below.
The Avett Brothers are all about feeling. On Emotionalism, their last proper full length, the Avetts certainly didn’t shy away from feeling; they celebrated it. The songs from Emotionalism were mostly led by banjo, upright bass, occasional strings and the just-twangy-enough vocals of one or both brothers. Everything about that setup said these guys were playing bluegrass music, but what came out of the speakers felt different.
That element, that unique style of bluegrass that sounded more like an alt-country-influenced indie band, clearly set the Avetts apart from anything I’d ever heard before. But there was more to them than that. There were also those straightforward and heartfelt lyrics, melodies that felt nostalgic and comforting, and an overall sense that these guys grew up loving American music and wanted to make it their own, to take it somewhere new while keeping everything that was great about it intact. Continue reading
(500) Days of Summer is a formulaic, twee romantic comedy masquerading as an iconoclastic rethinking of the date movie designed to lure in unsuspecting hipsters by flattering their self-perceived sophistication and esoteric musical taste (“You like the Smiths?“) that ultimately perpetuates the same silly, shallow, and juvenile worldview it claims to transcend, and, in doing so, sends the increasingly trite and predictable indie-rock film aesthetic careening even further toward the mainstream whilst offering a version of He’s Just Not That Into You for Buffalo Exchange shoppers.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
Case in point: the new video for She & Him‘s “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” (courtesy of USA Today), which stars (500) Days odd couple Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel (aka the She to M. Ward’s Him) in the charming tale of a mid-heist boogie session. Had this video been included in the movie, it would have stood out as a rare reprieve from watching Gordon-Levitt agonize over Deschanel’s vacuous, Ringo-loving heartbreaker.
You can watch the video, preceded by an introduction from the perpetually dazed pleasant Deschanel, after the jump. Continue reading