You can always count on Matt at You Ain’t No Picasso to find a sweet bootleg or two, and he’s come through for all Radiohead fans again.  He’s got a link to the band’s Haiti benefit show at L.A.’s Music Box last Sunday, and now you have it, too.  The setlist spans the band’s career (except for Pablo Honey) and features just a single new track, “Lotus Flower”.  Still it’s a great live set, and it was all for a good cause.  Cheers to Matt for passing it along, and a big shout-out to “hardlylurkin” from the Ateaseweb.com for posting the gig in the first place.  Atease also reports that Radiohead will be covering Peter Gabriel’s “Wallflower” as a return favour for Gabriel’s cover of “Street Spirit” which will be on his forthcoming Scratch My Back album. (photo of the benefit show’s poster by Sung Kim via pitchfork.com)

ZiP: Radiohead live at the Music Box 24 January 2010

You know me, I’ve always been a sucker for exotic music from Scandinavia and Iceland, so this little treat is right up my musical alley.  I’ve not had a chance to explore Iceland’s Seabear discography fully yet, but I like what I’m hearing from their sophomore release, We Built a Fire (Out in March on the excellent Morr Music). They’ll be showing their goods off at SXSW in March.

MP3: Seabear “Lion Face Boy”
Myspace: Seabear

NYC’s Ball of Flame Shoot Fire say they love Scott Walker, Harry Nilsson, Tom Waits, and The Residents, and have been opening shows for Yeasayer, Man Man, Grizzly Bear, Ponytail and Here We Go Magic.  That’s an impressive pedigree if you ask me.  They’re working on new material but sent a couple samples my way to share with you:

MP3: Ball of Flame Shoot Fire “Mugs”
MP3: Ball of Flame Shoot Fire “Patience”
Myspace: Ball of Flame Shoot Fire

(photo:Sarah Cass)

I wrote about Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies back in September of 2007, and that feels like ages in blog years.  Back then I was digging Goldberg & co.’s self-titled debut of elaborately orchestrated pop songs, which grew out of a project of Goldberg’s while attending Carnegie Mellon University School of Music.  The band is back with a new EP called Labyrinths, and while not a huge leap forwards from their debut, it solidifies Goldberg’s reputation as a great songwriter.  Matt Picasso has given it his thumbs up, saying it “sounds like the Lucksmiths covering Bishop Allen with Beulah’s horn section helping out in the background”.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The band is offering the EP up as a stream or you can download it for a reasonable pay-what-you-want fee by going here.  I think it’s noble of the band to offer the music up to anyone for free if they wish not to pay, but I truly believe this is a record worth paying for.  Matt’s dead one with his comparison to a band like Bishop Allen, and I hope that sometime soon, some label somewhere gets wind of what Steve and the guys are doing and gives them some proper backing.  In the crush of mp3s in my inbox, and countless, “hey man, these guys are great you should check them out” pseudo referrals, finding a band like Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies can seem like finding that needle in a haystack, but good music always comes through.  By the way, today is also Steve’s 25th birthday, so just like you did when I wanted to wish my friend Krista a happy birthday, why don’t you all leave Steve a nice birthday comment below, too.  It’d make his day.

MP3: Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies “The Ballad of Cherry Hill”
Mysapce: Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies

There’s definitely a restraint to the songs on Chris Page’s new solo album, A Date With a Smoke Machine, but don’t take that to mean the songs are in anyway restricted.  Page’s work with Camp Radio or The Stand GT may be rooted in punk and rock, but on this solo album he’s let his inner singer-songwriter out for some air, and he’s certainly breathing deeply.  The more I listen to this record, the more it reminds me of prime Billy Bragg, like Worker’s Playtime, an album of fierce intensity that doesn’t get loud to get it’s point across.  You can feel the tension just bubbling below the surface of songs like “Slideshows” that can clearly rock out if they’re allowed, but Page manages to hold that in and channel the intensity internally, letting the emotions out but not letting them get the better of him.  It works amazingly well, especially on the somber and haunting “Quit While I’m Behind”.  The 12 songs are over in a flash (just under 40 minutes), and you’ll find yourself wanting to go back and listen again and gain, to catch what you might have missed, and relish in what you loved the first time ’round.  It may seem like a cliché but A Date With a Smoke Machine is one of those albums that gives more and more with each listen.

Page will release A Date With a Smoke Machine on February 16 (on Ottawa’s Kelp Records), and is in Sudbury, Ontario on the 13th of the month, and Toronto on the 18th.  Camp Radio should have some new music coming out this year, too.

MP3: Chris Page “Two Twenty Twos”
Video: Chris Page “Coax the Ending Day”
Myspace: Chris Page

(photo: Autumn De Wilde)

Have you ever stared at a piece of art for a long, long time, knowing that somewhere within your mind and body, a reaction and opinion is formulating, but for the time being it’s not coming to you?  “I know it’s making me feel something but I’m just not sure what that something is yet.”

That’s the way I felt the first few times I listened to Spoon’s Transference:  the reaction was coming but it wasn’t coming quickly.  “Got Nuffin” the first early release from the record was a decent enough song, but it didn’t really impress me on any great level, and definitely not as instantly as “the Ghost of You Lingers” (from their last LP, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga) did.  That song was like a sucker punch that hit my in the gut and made me double over.  It still has tegh power to stop me in my tracks when I hear it, and just thinking about it, writing about it, or talking about it makes me want to hear it.  You could say that “Got Nuffin” got nuffin’ on “The Ghost of You Lingers”.

So how odd is it that the breakthrough response to Transference came while listening to “Got Nuffin” for the fourth time in context with the rest of the album?  Shocked the shit out of me, let me tell you, but there it was, that sucker punch feeling again, and the dawning realization that Transference is quite possibly the best Spoon has ever sounded.  It’s certainly taken it’s place as my favourite Spoon album, given that I’ve only really been a fan through their last three (the aforementioned Ga Ga… and its predecessor Gimme Fiction), and that’s even with the annoying and frustrating way so many of the songs end abruptly as if the tape in the studio had run out.  If there’s any beef I have with Transference it’s exactly that:  it sounds like the best moments of some studio time has been stitched together as a cut-and-paste record.  Even so, it’s that cut-the fat quality that makes Transference so special.  You see, while Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was an album with a lot of art, Transference is an album with a lot of heart.  It’s not indulgent or overwhelmed by its own sense of self and purpose.  It’s the sound of a band whose giving us goods, a band who’s got nothing to lose.

Spoon are in the UK and Europe next month doing shows before returning to their hometown of Austin, Texas on March 17th for a show at Stubb’s to kick off this year’s SXSW Festival.  Transference is available now from Merge Records.

MP3: Spoon “Got Nuffin”
Myspace: Spoon

(photo: Bobby Bulat)

Sometimes the best way to improve on a winning formula is not to change very much at all.  That’s what my ears are hearing when I listen to Heart of My Own, the sophomore release from Basia Bulat (now on Secret City Records).  The follow-up to Oh, My Darling, her Polaris nominated debut, picks up where the previous record leaves off, with the focus on Bulat’s distinctive timbre and sweet melodies.  Most of the musicians who played with her on the first album are back, as is producer Howard Bilerman, so there’s similarities a-plenty between the two albums, but where Heart of My Own sets itself apart from its predecessor is the burgeoning sense of grandiosity and ripening of Bulat’s songs.  On album number two, things feel just that slightly bit more polished, confident, and grand.  If Oh, My darling, were the tentative first steps of an artist finding her legs, Heart of My Own is the confident stride of a songwriter and musician who’s put one foot in front of the other enough times now that it’s all second nature.

Bulat has spent a lot of time on the road between now and her last record, and the songs here have that road- and world-weary flavour of one whose experienced a lot in a short period of time and had to process it all quickly.  “Gold Rush” is evidence of a new skepticism and reserved emotions, even as she tells us that “this is the story of the one you lost/And I want it to run over your love.”  All in all, Heart of My Own is a most appropriately named album, for in performing it, Bulat has not succumb to any pressure to conform, confound, or compromise her art.  She has moved into the next phase of her career a voice and heart of her own.

MP3: Basia Bulat “Gold Rush”
Mysapce: Basia Bulat