tone
SPECIAL INTERVIEW EDITION
SPRING 2013
WOODKID Meet Yoann Lemoine
Austra The Beat and the Pulse
ALT-J Selah Sue
AND MORE
Rizzle Kicks
Nicolas Jaar
Broken Bells Round Table Knights
tone magazine 3
Editorial
4
Broken Bells. The Odd Couple
6 Austra. Delve deeper into the electronic world 8
The Evolution of Woodkid
10 Alt-J. A cut above 12 Discoveries. Rizzle Kicks / Selah Sue / Nicolas Jaar... 14 Discoveries Part 2 16 We Love: Old & New
2 tone magazine
When the Music’s over...
...turn off the Lights. We’re
back for Spring! Now that the days are getting longer, we prepare for nights under the stars with plenty of nice tracks... We bring you young NEWCOMERS, some stories and a full range of fresh music to warm up your ears or cool them down...see for yourself. Enjoy!
edmée dopfeld
. tone magazine
Listening to bands that don’t even exist yet.
3 tone magazine
Interview
Broken Bells -The Odd CoupleA Personal Experiment James Mercer is the driving force behind The Shins, America’s premier league indie stars. In Broken Bells, he is paired with Brian Burton - you may know him better as Danger Mouse - producer extraordinaire, and one half of genre-busting Gnarls Barkley. Together, their strengths are united in Broken Bells’ melodic and sparkling reverie.
How long have you somebody and make something known each other? new and different, and maybe James: About five and even turn into a band of some a half, almost six years. kind, and that’s what we did.
Was it just a friendship first or did it start as a musical collaboration? James: We were just aquaintances. I was a fan of what he was doing and... Brian: Yeah, I was a big fan of The Shins, so I was always listening to his stuff. We’d see each other on tour and things Their first album together is the like that, but it only turned into product of sessions based com- a more musical thing in 2008. pletely on spontaneity - relying on each other’s instincts to pro- Was there something you vide the direction for each song. had in common, or were you The results - like the lazy, trippy more interested in what the lead single ‘The High Road’, the other person was doing? funky electro falsetto of ‘The Brian: I wanted to work with Ghost Inside’, or the taut ro- him as a singer and songwriter, botic ‘Mongrel Heart - combine myself. I thought we could do the finest moments of both au- something really different and teurs, yet manages to sound cool with it - I didn’t know what like neither of them at once. exactly, but there was an appeal for me to do that. It was just timtone caught up with the duo in ing - the timing was really right their West London label offices, to do something different. I didn’t the morning after their night out want to just produce a record with friends Modest Mouse. Cue or anything like that; I wanted plenty of water and coffee... to kinda jump in and write with 4 tone magazine
Where were you recording? Brian: We recorded it in Los Angeles in my studio the whole time. He would just come down and stay with me and we would go in every day like a nine to five kind of thing, just go in and write and record at the same time. It must give you freedom when working in your own studio? Brian: It’s great, yeah. And we didn’t tell anybody about it either, when we were doing it, so there was no pressure.
“By the end of the week we had about four or five songs” Did your working relation-
ship start easily or was it something you had to work at? Brian: Yeah, it was very easy. Right at the beginning, we had an outline, the rough song, within an hour or two the first day we went in. So, it was pretty cool. It was like, ‘This works!’
And by the end of the week we had about four or five songs. Does it always happen like that when you’re working with someone? Brian: Not always, no. Definitely not like this. This definitely was probably the most fun album I’ve ever made. Well, not probably; it definitely was. I’ve had fun making a lot of albums, you know, but this was definitely the most enjoyable for myself.
Brian: Yeah, you do a lot of searching and you find the good stuff. You don’t have to worry about the bad stuff, the bad stuff doesn’t wind up on the record.
“It’s not how consistent you can be, it’s just finding the really good moments”
I’ll sit there on a keyboard for twenty minutes, and if I get one good thing, it was worth doing. Same thing on the drums or whatever, How were the duties split I’ll just try and find something. between you in the studio? It’s just that search. It’s not how James: Everything was writ- consistent you can be, it’s just ten there on the spot. We didn’t finding the really good moments. have any rules as to who would play what instrument. It defi- James: I’ve got a friend who’s nitely turned into Brian playing a really, really proficient piano the drums a lot and keyboard player, and he sometimes feel stuff, which he’s real good at. I that in a way it limits him, bewould be like guitars and singing. cause he has a huge library of shit he can do, and so he just Were there any instrumental kinda refers to it all the time. He areas that you thought you just goes, ‘Okay, I could do that might be lacking in as a duo, thing’, instead of being forced to and how did you cover that? come up with something new. James: Yeah, sure, but then there are also some things where Does the future of Broken Bells we both surprised ourselves: depend on the success of this ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool!’ (Laughs) album, or is this something that
In the album’s brightest moments, there are enough swooning harmonies, replayable choruses, and psych-baked production elements that you might not even notice Mercer’s dark thoughts. Besides, the singer is clearly attempting to move on here, taking advantage of this fresh setting to try on new looks: cer’s nearly unrecognizable falsetto on album standout “The Ghost Inside” recalls the high, cracked croon of another Danger Mouse collaborator, Blur/ Gorillaz singer Damon Albarn.
5 tone magazine
might continue regardless? James: Oh yeah, I think we’ll definitely keep doing this. We’ve already got a lot of stuff for the next thing. It’s just really enjoyable working with Brian. Brian: It’s exciting to think about what else we could do given the time that it took for us to do this. Hopefully all the promo and touring won’t hold back more music - I think creating the music is always the most fun part. It is necessary to do these things to let people know that it’s there, but I think it’s a lot more fun [making the music]. Interview: Simon Harper Mercer and Danger Mouse’s debut as Broken Bells is not quite up to the level of either’s best projects, but in its own quiet way, it hits its marks. The pair first worked together on the David Lynch/Sparklehorse project Dark Night of the Soul, and Broken Bells picks up the sadsack spirit of that record-- it’s a deceptively catchy album centered on personal loss.
Interview
AUSTRA
Delve deeper into
f
the electronic World
To consider Austra, the Toronto- beauty of Stelmanis’ voice com- in based electronic group currently touring with The XX, is to constantly trip over the trends and references the project evokes. Frontwoman Katie Stelmanis, who first began experimenting with electronic music while studying opera, has a stage presence that echoes the aura of Stevie Nicks while her voice comfortably calls Kate Bush to mind. Her classical student come pop star status is a trend in itself. But Austra’s relation to efforts, past and present, does not undercut the band’s originality. The
a bedroom project. I’d done everything myself almost, and then since we started playing live, my band has really been contributing. They’ve been bringing in new parts, new instruments, and then some writing on this new record. It’s definitely not a bedroom project anymore. We’ve spent a lot of time in the studio and we’ve had lots of real drums, lots of real percussion. What is it you like most about the process of writing something and then considering how it’s going to be received
a live performance? bined with the dark, melodra- Well I think that the performmatic tones of each song recall ing live for a long time has really the familiar appeal of an edge, shaped the way we’ve written the kind of uncertainty that’s a lot of our new songs, because so terrifying it’s sublime, which I think that we were able to esis all to say that feeling it break tablish kind of what worked and ultimately feels pretty good. what didn’t work, and what we needed, and what we wanted You began working on Austra to bring into our set and that reas a solo project, but you’ve ally changed the way we wrote. said more recently that things We pretty much wrote have become very collaborathe new songs for the live tive. How did that shift occur? stage Well, it kind of happened slowly. Feel It Break was essentially And so, like all the parts that are 6 tone magazine
created with parts that we’re actually able to play live, whereas, you know, the previous record, it was a challenge to bring the computer music to the live stage. So live
you’re electronic
creating music?
Yeah, more now so than ever before. We’re doing a lot of MIDI mapping, which is essentially a computer playing live synthesizers, which is a cool trick we’ve learned. So we can have multiple instruments going at once and it sounds like there’s eight or nine people playing, but really, you know, there’s only four or five people playing instruments on stage. And it’s just little tricks like that that I think have been beefing up our set a lot, which we’ve been having fun with and experimenting with. You started out studying opera and learning music classically and academically. What was your primary motivation for leaving behind more acoustic sounds? I think I kind of started making electronic music by accident. It was mostly because I was coming out of the classical world and opera world and I was really interested in writing soundtracks like for movies. I was writing soundtracks for my friends who were dancers and performance artists and my way of doing that was tinkering with orchestral samples on my computer. So that’s
actually how I got involved in electronic music, I was using fake violins, and fake cellos, and fake oboes, and then eventually I just got really partial to the synthetic sounds. I kind of just delved deeper into the electronic world and slowly but surely discovered dance music. It took me a long time though. Before, I was unable to write music on the piano Do you think your classical training has given you sort of an analytical perspective on music? Not really because I think I was delving into a territory I was pretty unfamiliar with so I was relearning a lot of stuff and I think that kind of trumped any sort of analytical tenden-
Austra: Maya Postepski,Katie Stelmanis,Dorian Wolf
cies that I had toward music. When I first started writing actually I was originally writing on the guitar and I remember thinking that I couldn’t write on the piano or keyboard because I had such a traditional way of playing and thinking about it I just wasn’t able to write music on it. So I played guitar because I could strum out these chords and kind of write music like that and after a while of getting used to writing music I was able to do it on the piano. All of your music videos seem like they are made up of disjointed human or camera movements that are synced up to certain sounds. Was that your input, or where did that direction come from? I don’t know I have actually never really thought about that. I guess we were kind of into not having a storyline, we were kind of into creating moods and imagery and that’s probably why we chose the treatments and to work with certain directors that we did because we wanted to try and do something a little more obscure, and yeah, based on imagery that would complement the music. It was also a time where I wasn’t really very good at writing at lyrics. I mean, I was able to get them out, but I didn’t really have stories behind them all, so it would have been hard to make a linear video around a song that didn’t have a story, essentially. Interview: Eleneanor Hooker
7 tone magazine
Interview
Does the a certain
name Woodkid significance to
have you?
It’s a mix of themes I like, wood, folk, emotion, and youth, of course. I wanted to make a difference between directing and music. Yes, it’s important that I keep a little frontier between them. Your first EP feels very tribal and raw, but ideas of melancholy and nostalgia exist in your video. Is this project within the scope of your previous work or does it represent a new turn in your identity as an artist? It’s definitely a new turn. I’m exploring more intimate and personal visions. I’ve never been able to do it before on commissioned projects. How would you describe your musical style? perceived differently if you wear tight or baggy jeans… I would say it’s a very emotional and epic pop.
By directing the video of your first release “Iron,” did you want to make a statement to the future generation of multifaceted artists like yourself, to stand on their own and be in control of every aspect of their projects?
Your latest work, the short film “Lights,” was commissioned by Vogue Italia for A Shaded View Of Fashion Film and “Iron,” featured models Agyness Deyn and Matvey Lykov. Does fashion It’s not about controlling everything or standplay an important role in your creative process? ing on your own, it’s more about expressing yourself in an exhaustive way, being complete in what you want to create. I have a lot of people workIt’s not about ing on Woodkid and bringing a lot to the project. c o n t r o l l i n g I listen, and I use it if it’s going in the right direction. e v e r y t h i n g Yes, I love clothing. I don’t like to say I love fashion because it’s not accurate; most of the fashion world is rubbish to me. But I love clothing, I love the art of making costumes and clothes, I love the movement of the fabric, how it modifies your body, your attitude, how you are
Do you feel that one side of your creativity could ever step over the other or would you rather keep things distinct and separate? There are a lot of paradoxes in me like there are in everybody. I like impossible mixes, things and
8 tone magazine
What are you working on at the moment? “A very big project in a brand new field of creation for me, and my album, of course.”
The Evolution of Woodkid by Marine de la Morandière eo making? Do you think we will eventually return to a more stripped down style?
themes that are not supposed to live together.
I don’t know. One thing I see now is a big comeback of real crafted and entertaining videos, videos that involve work, craft and a sense of technical mystery, which make them beautiful and unreachable. People seem to be sick of homemade, cute and funny videos. They want real entertainment again.
As an image-maker, do you like to experiDo you like the challenge of constantly start- ment with different visual styles? Is there ing anew in your creative and professional life? one with which you feel most comfortable? Yes, it’s important. I don’t want to die think- No, not really. I’m comfortable in any field that ing I only dug in one direction without hav- is emotional and that allows me to express my ing experienced more things as an artist. sensibility for craft and beautiful imagery. Nostalgia is a recurrent theme in your work and you grew up with 8mm films. Do you long for the days when filmmaking was more intimate? I’m not nostalgic for medias or technologies. I love technology actually, and I love the very digital direction of “Iron.” I’m nostalgic in a more universal and metaphysic way. I’m nostalgic of childhood itself — the age of innocence. How do you envision the next 10 years in vid9 tone magazine
“Directing my first feature film would be my ultimate professional challenge “
Interview
Darius is the head trimmer at Legend’s, a smart London barber that specialises in traditional wet shaves. Before he came to the UK, Darius trained in Poland, learning how to perform a cut-throat shave by smothering an inflated balloon in shaving foam and then removing it with a single blade. Awaiting his razor-sharp skills are four Cambridge lads sporting varying degrees of bum fluff. Keyboardist Gus (a little shadow above his top lip), guitarist Gwill (a coating of wispy blond pelage), drummer Thom (early-onset beard) and singer Joe (as close to clean shaven as you can get with an old disposable on the seventh go of a disposable Wilkinson Sword).
nominations are a week away from being announced. They are playing sold-out shows in the US, and have charted in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. At a time when guitar music is in the doldrums, they have come from nowhere to buck the trend.
about us,” says keyboardist Gus. Gwill is first in the barber’s chair. He is the baby face of the band, all black-rimmed emo glasses and blond floppy hair. His face is smothered in pink shaving foam and Darius gets to work with the blade.
“Gwill uses quite a lot of long words Tessalate became a radio hit in interviews,” Joe warns me when before anyone knew who they he’s out of earshot. “He keeps talking about our songwriting style bewere ing nomadic or rhizomatic, but I don’t Yet while most British bands think he knows what that means.” spend years slogging through Much of my conversation with Altmagazine interviews, starting J is almost town-planning meetfake tiffs with other bands for ing in tone. Instead of answering column inches and touring the questions, they often descend into nation’s Barflys in hope of some elusive buzz, Alt-J have somehow managed to find success without fame. The group’s first single, Tessellate, an onomatopoeic puzzle of angular beats and pointed sexual advances, became a radio hit before anyone knew who they were. This is probably the first time So far, the indie band ha you’ve seen their photograph.
They are Alt-J, and by almost all accounts they are the most successful new British band of the year. Their album went top 20, the single is all over the radio and they are now oddson favourite to win the Mer- “We’ve got this far with pretty cury music prize, even though much nobody knowing anything
10 tone magazine
Alt-J : a c _____
enjoy success without the be about t
discussions of whether they’re giving a boring answer and what another band would say. At times I think we are all part of a meta in-joke, undermining the whole charade of a music interview. “We only have two rock’n’roll stories,” says frontman Joe, trying to be helpful. “The first one is that we were chucked out of a hotel for peeing off a balcony. Well, I wasn’t personally, but our guitarist Gwill was. In fact I was the one suggesting he just went upstairs and did it in his own hotel room, but he ignored me and just started … hosing it. The other one is we were
cut above ____
as come from nowhere to fame. But that could all to change
doing a gig in Sicily and I met line of ket before an interview.” some people and went back to their house and I fell asleep and It was the same when they met missed my flight the next day.” at Leeds University. While most of their friends spent three years Joe sighs, realising his tales getting smashed and dancdon’t pack the punch he was ing to electroclash, they formed hoping for. “We are actually a little bubble in their student pretty tame. We have a lovely house. “Oh God, we didn’t go collection of magazines on- out much,” remembers Gus. “We board when we’re on tour.” weren’t socialites at all. We’d Alt-J are far more endearing than just keep working on the record.” they realise. Their genuine disregard for the clichés of being in a “We’re our harshest critics,” band means conversation is re- agrees Joe. “We’re not one of laxed, while their rarefied wealth those bands that bash things of music, film and TV geekery out really quickly. We didn’t makes for good gags. They find want to look like morons, so we the idea of sleeping with fans re- spent ages on the little things.” freshingly garish and are “just too knackered” to drink every night. Was there a concerted effort to make something that “We like to be polite “ would get on the radio? “Not at all. We don’t even know They’re not apologists for their where the choruses are. Our middle-class background either. producer helps us with that! Do they ever want to have a night of excess? “I suppose the Interview: Sam Wolfson thing is that we like to be polite,” says Joe, “and you can’t do that when you’ve just done a fat
11 tone magazine
Discoveries
Round Table Knights These days, it’s rare to find talented producers who are also world class DJs. Often a Beatport No.1 can result in an artist getting booked for gigs they’re not quite ready for. But for Round Table Knights, there’s no such problem. Starting their love affair with turntablism over a decade ago, Biru Bee and Marc Hofweber honed their skills cutting and scratching together hip hop, jazz and early electro. An infatuation with house music followed: it was the one genre they felt they could handle their diverse tastes. And so with the help of producer and friend Benfay, they started to release high-caliber 4/4 infused with a huge range of influences. The tracks became essential tunes in the record bags of the globe’s best house DJs and led to years of gigs in the best clubs and festivals: Panorama Bar, Sonar, Igloofest, Creamfields...
Selah Sue was not destined to become an artist. “I grew up in a really little town in Belgium, and none of my family was into music,” reveals the twenty-one year old, with refreshing sincerity. Her story is like a fairy tale. It’s the story of a young musician who ignores her fate, and pours her anxieties into her songs and her guitar. “I had all these worries and depressions that I wrote down, it was a way of structuring my thoughts”. She turns her doubts into soul, funk and reggae melodies, trying hard to be worthy of her idols, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Bob Marley. She sings in local clubs on the weekend and attends high school during the week. She records in homestudios, at friends houses, and publishes drafts of her songs on Myspace, without a thought of making a career in music. What happens next seems almost unreal. Thousands of fans respond to her on the net, attracting the attention of professionals, and the interest of Because Music, which eventually leads to a record deal for the young musician. Then Farhot (Nneka) and Patrice take on the production of her first album. Meshell Ndegeocello stays with her in the studio for two days to produce the track “Mommy”. Cee Lo Green agrees to accompany her on a duet and ends up asking her to put the track (“Please”) on his own album. And, last but not least, last autumn Prince offered her a coveted support slot at his show in Antwerp, Belgium. To put it in a nutshell, in just two years, Selah Sue has fulfilled her dreams. To keep her grounded, she has insisted on keeping the songs she wrote during her teens for her debut album. It’s a way of reminding the world that she has not been unfairly spoiled by destiny and that before Prince, Cee Lo Green, radio play and incredible press, there was just a teenage girl, with her guitar, who was chosen spontaneously by fans on the net. For example, her first single “Raggamuffin” is one of her oldest songs and was viewed more than a million times online. “This track symbolizes me” she explains. “It shows my soulful and singing side, but also my hard side, between rap and ragga. When my manager asked me who I wanted to work with, I said Farhot straight away, as I’m a fan of Nneka. But I also wanted an intimate, dark, melodious record, with light and lively beats. Farhot is crazy about digital sounds and Patrice, who I know well, was the ideal man for the melodious part. They were my two accomplices in the studio.” Her first album is ambitious. 12 tone magazine
An electronic musician finding inspiration in comparative literature courses might sound a little far-fetched, but the concept of text as muse speaks well to the type of music that artist and current Brown University student Nicolas Jaar seeks to create. School and work “kind of go hand-in-hand,” he says. “I’ll read a text that’s a pain to get through, but in the end it’ll give me ideas for music. It’s more of a challenge, it’s more difficult, of course, but it’s really worth it.” The sultry electronic beats on Jaar’s forthcoming album Space is Only Noise represent a step away from the heavy techno commonly associated with the genre; what comes across instead is a trippy, dreamlike exploration into themes of melancholy and separation interspersed with the occasional hip-stirring bassline. We spoke with the New York-born, Chilean-bred Jaar while he was on vacation from school and a break from touring.
STARTING OUT: I started making music when I was 14. I had heard some electronic music and was very taken by it and just decided to try my hand at it. I heard this album by Ricardo Villalobos, Thé Au Harem D’Archimède. It was really interesting, it had a really bizarre sense of timing and space, just a very loose, impatient, sad texture that I thought you couldn’t do with rock, couldn’t do with hip-hop. In the US, electronic music is not anything compared to what it is in Europe. I’ve never really liked clubs and all that—I kind of hate techno—so it’s really bizarre for me to be in this electronic music world. At first, I got into the artists who were really at the edges of all that. YOUR SOUND: It’s going against the really fast, harsh techno sound, against the whole clubby aspect of it. It’s kind of also going against the drug aspect of it and the wasted aspect of it. It appeals more to emotions, it’s much slower. INFLUENCES: I’ve been very much into instrumental hip-hop, like The Alchemist, DJ Babu, Madlib, J Dilla, in the past year. I’ve always been into Ethiopian jazz, Keith Jarrett. I don’t have any real electronic music influences apart from early Villalobos.
13 tone magazine
RHYE
The identity of Rhye has remained a mystery since they - there’s two of them - posted songs online early last year. Striking imagery and alluring video footage soon followed without so much as a sly wink to their personas, made only more confusing by the vocal - un-pinnable in both geography and sex. After The Guardian described the voice as a “heroine” and trendy blog sites likened it to smooth funksters Sade and Tracey Thorn, they finally revealed themselves as Robin Hannibal and Michael Milosh - two male indie veterans who insisted in their recent first interview that they genuinely weren’t trying to fool anyone. Fortunately, the confusion doesn’t cast even a pale shadow over Woman. ‘Open’ begins with a confident string section that eventually unearths an intimate and hauntingly coy vocal with a - yes - Sade-esque timbre, and the gliding orchestrals and hangover house of recent single ‘The Fall’ is smoky and sensual chamber pop at its very finest. ‘Three Days’ and ‘Shed Some Blood’ each blend immaculately produced shoulder-rolling funk with beautiful yet disarmingly honest lyrics (“We’ve shed some tears babe, let’s shed some blood”), while the anonymous title track ‘Woman’ proves their music credentials sans the love story lyrics. The result is a timeless-sounding and utterly gorgeous debut that will prove tricky to beat.
Discoveries
It might be early in the year for such a statement, but we are pretty confident that UK hip-hop duo, Rizzle Kicks, is going to rank among our favorite discoveries of 2012. The band, made up of childhood friends Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule, is part of a new wave of indie, throwback hip-hop along with The Cool Kids and Das Racist. Stephens and Alexander-Sule combine an early-Beastie Boys sense of fun and Q-Tip style beats with slightly more contemporary samples from The Strokes and references to our favorite Josh Schwartz primetime soaps. For example, the duo’s single “Down with the Trumpets” opens with the lyrics “You might hear me make a racket like Wilson, because I love summer, no Rachel Bilson!” We managed to catch Jordan Stephens on the phone to chat about famous fans, plans for the New Year, and what sort of animal he’d like to be reincarnated as.
Rizzle Kicks STYLE OF MUSIC: I’d probably say it’s hip-hop, but if you wanted me to build upon that, [laughs] then I’d say it was hip-hop influenced by the golden age, the days of De La Soul, The Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest and people like that. That’s what influenced us, I don’t know if we reflect it. FIRST MEETING: Harley and I met when we were a lot younger, because my auntie works with his step-dad at a record label. There were two six-year gaps when we didn’t really know each other, we both moved to Brighton when we were about ten and then we both went to the same [high school] when we were about sixteen. By the time we went to the same [high school] we were quite close, and then we just started making music together.
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tone magazine
James Justin Gardens are a reoccurring theme in James Justin Burke’s musical life. From his cozy cottage in Folly Beach, South Carolina, the songwriter tends to an ever-growing plot of heartfelt tunes, tilling their verses and melodies with positive energy. With debut album Southern Son, So Far, Burke has solidified his name as an invigorating new face in Americana music. Recorded at Johns Island, S.C.‘s Plowground Productions Studios, the album features Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell singing harmonies on “The Rescue”while fellow Folly Beach favorites Dangermuffin back him on “I Know You Will.” “I wanted to find players who would come in and love the music and organically start playing,” says Burke. From honest country to soul, the nine-song album showcases Burke‘s strengths as a solid guitarist, strong vocalist, and songwriting craftsman. “The songs grew, like a child. I’ve had all these tunes for about four years,
“For me,” says Tegan, the older by eight minutes of Tegan and Sara Quin, “the scariest thing would be to try and write a song that isn’t self-deprecating or self-loathing oriented, but instead was just really romantic and sweet.” It is a challenge that she and her identical twin sister set themselves when recording their seventh album. The pair have made their name not so much because there’s an easy way to sell their image – more of which later – but because their music has always spoken so clearly to an audience that shares their anxieties and fears. But now, they say, they’re a group with a different ambition as well as a song in their hearts. “Sara used words like ‘unsable’ when we discussed wanted to go with this Tegan continues, squintthe sun, backstage at a tival in Mexico City. wanted to do something and new and to explore a ent side of ourselves.”
recogniwhere we record,” ing into music fes“We really f r e s h differ-
The result – Heartthrob group’s most accessible date, one crafted with on expanding the band’s way beyond its fanatiBut listen to Tegan talk about album opener Closer, the most sexy song the pair have made (sample lyric: “All you think of is getting underneath me”) and any of the faithful’s fears will
– is the album to an eye fanbase cal core. unabashedly lately ... be allayed.
“It truly is a romantic pop song,” she says, “but I’m writing about being a teenager and how I’m haunted by how it allseems so simple now. For everyone I know in their 30s, life is just so complicated – love just looks so complicated – whereas when you were 16 or 17, it was a coup just to hold hands with a girl you liked, or to have a sleepover. “We felt traumatised being separated from our mom and anxious being separated from one another. We had a close-knit family which only fed the fires of co-dependency, which ignited in our teenage years when we became co-dependent with our first best friends and girlfriends ... it was like a domino effect.” In the early years, the pair would rile each other easily, but now that they are older and in settled relationships – even separated by a national border, with Sara living in New York and Tegan in Vancouver – their bond seems tighter than ever. We don’t work each other over intentionally any more,” says Sara. “We’re just much more confident of who we are – and we
TEGAN AND SARA 15 tone magazine
We love: Old & New
Guru - Jazzmatazz Vol.4 (2007) Back to the future, Guru’s fourth offering in his Jazzmatazz series, consistent with its title and its predecessors in that there’s an emphasis on the fusion between jazz and hiphop. But even though there is indeed experimentation throughout, the strongest songs here are the straight-up hip-hop tracks, not the attempts to transcend genre classification.
The National High Violet (2010) Their fifth studio album is nothing short of a gem. Met with wide critical acclaim, each track weaves rich melodies with deep, husky vocals and suitably melancholy and complex lyrics to create mesmerising tracks. Equally, there’s the interesting and eclectic blend of emotions presented track by track. While the lyrics often deal with everything from unrequited love to drugs and depression, the tone of the songs often seems oddly optimistic.
Refused - The shape of punk to come (1998) Almost thirteen years have passed since Refused played their last. Wracked with self-doubt, fatigue and disillusionment, Dennis Lyxzén, David Sandström, Kristofer Steen and Jon F Brännström spiralled from each other, leaving the world with their final, posthumous manifesto: The Shape of Punk to Come. A farewell communiqué which was as ferocious as it was laboriously crafted; a kaleidoscope collage of instruments and samples, polemic and radio static, which fulfilled its prophetic title perfectly. 16 tone magazine
Daft Punk – Random Access Memories. After the Nile Rodgers assisted number one, Get Lucky, t’s safe to say nobody was expecting a return to the punishing techno routine of Human After All. Yet people may still be surprised by the laid-back, jazzy and often melancholy sound on display here. That’s not to say this is a bad thing, or that there aren’t frequent moments of brilliance here over the album’s 75 minutes – from the spoken word Giorgio By Moroder to the rocket-powered climax of the finale, Contact.
Pupkulies & Rebecca - Looking for the Sea This is proven by their fourth long awaited album “looking for the sea”, undoubtedly Pupkulies & Rebeccas’ most matured to date. As with their second album the current album was recorded mainly in the south of France. Ingredients and recipe are the same as their previous albums. The main thread is house, not in the traditional American sense but in a more European version. Not Chicago but Paris and Berlin are to be heard. Eurovision in the true context without the contest. The songs are sung in English and French.
Calexico- Algiers On Algiers the band’s various elements – the brushed drums, upright bass, mariachi horns and aspiring-novelist lyrics – make for a lovely, evocative mix. However, it occurs to you that the band’s status as soundtrack favourites is a bit of a backhanded compliment, an acknowledgement that for all their considerable musicianship, their music has the ability to simply drift right by. There are moments that really jump out, though. ‘Sinner In The Sea’, for instance, has a real urgency, both in its Cuban-inflected arrangement and in its surreal narrative. These uncharacteristic turns represent bright spots on a consistent, but self-effacing album.
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