Month: January 2023

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“Con Todo El Mundo” – Khruangbin

Album cover, "Con Todo El Mundo" by Khruangbin. Features a beige cover with a small photo of cows standing in a field with the title of the album underneath.

Took a little detour on revisiting my top 100 albums but we’re back with Con Todo El Mundo by Khruangbin. It’s easy to see why this album didn’t make the cut in 2016: It wasn’t released until 2018.

I think I stumbled on Khruangbin via an NPR Tiny Desk concert. It was an instant click, love at first sound.

The band’s sound is a fusion of influences from around the world. Largely instrumental, you’ll be able to pick out a lot of pop, funk, surf guitar, psychedelic and other influences that all come together to form something really special.

Con Todo El Mundo is still my favorite Khruangbin album, though they’ve been quite prolific since its release with Mordechai, Mordechai Remixes, Texas Moon, and last year’s Ali. (Plus a few singles thrown in and contributing to Paul McCartney’s McCartney III Imagined with a remix of his “Pretty Boys.”

But this album just has that extra something that puts it over the top. Listen to “Lady and Man” for example. It’s got a monster funk groove, some vintage 70s guitar work, with a background chorus that you’ll be singing to yourself long after the album ends.

“Maria Tambien,” is a slinky number that always has me dancing or tapping my feet. Such solid percussion and bass work, it’s deceptively simple and draws you right in.

My favorite track, though, has to be “Evan Finds the Third Room.” Yes, this is the Third Room. Yes. Mark Speer’s guitar is nimble and perfect, Laura Lee’s bass and DJ’s drumming plus a little spoken word chorus make for an instant classic.

They’ve had quite a bit of attention since 2018, but if you haven’t caught up with Khruangbin yet, start with this album. I had the good fortune to snag tickets to see them at The Lincoln in Raleigh at the tail end of 2018 before they really took off and started doing much bigger shows. They’re just as good live as they are on record, which is to say amazing.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=906393946 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

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Deep-dive into the “Dune” font, Davison Art Nouveau

Whether the Dune series is your cup of tea or not, anybody who’s spent more than a little time in the sci-fi section of a book store is likely familiar with the series’ book covers and the unusual typeface. I caught a link off the Orange site to a story on Fonts In Use about the history of the typeface that graces Frank Herbert’s series, and it’s right up my alley.

My dad had a few lettering books lying around the house at all times. The Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering being the book I remember best. (And have a copy of, though it’s getting infrequent use.) He’d refer to them sometimes when laying out signs or patterns for lettering on vehicles. He’d have to improvise when adding characters that weren’t in the books or weren’t quite right.

All that to say, interesting lettering always catches my eye. What I know about Dune, as a series, hasn’t compelled me to pick up any of the books. But the covers? I have to say, the lettering does call out to me.

The font was drawn by Meyer M. “Dave” Davidson for a typesetting company in New York (PLINC) and first showed up in the PLINK 1967 Alphabet Yearbook. From there it made its way onto some of Herbert’s paperbacks and then became part of the “visual identity” of his books.

The post goes into great detail and has lots of cover images and the history of Davidson Art Noveau. No spoilers here, I encourage folks to go read the post and check out all the wonderful book covers.

Today we all have thousands of fonts at our fingertips to choose from, of varying quality and ranging from open source to proprietary licensing. I’m not entirely convinced things are better though.

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Coming soon: Instrumental album from Robyn Hitchcock

Cover of "Life After Infinity" by Robyn Hitchcock. It features the title in cursive, with a fish on a blue background with a rose superimposed on top of the fish.

The past few years I’ve been seeking out more and more instrumental music. Khruangbin, The Comet is Coming, Material, Pharoah Sanders… but I wasn’t expecting to add Robyn Hitchcock to that list!

Robyn has released a few instrumental tracks in the past. I Often Dream of Trains is bookended by two short instrumental tracks, “Nocturne (Prelude)” and “Nocturne (Demise)” that are hauntingly beautiful. But the vast majority of his catalog includes his unique vocal stylings. (If you’ve never listened to Robyn, you should correct that immediately. But if you want a description, just take equal parts John Lennon and Syd Barrett with a dollop of Bob Dylan and there ya go.)

Anyway, I was excited to see the announcement this week that he’s releasing an all-instrumental album Life After Infinity in April. Two tracks are already live on Bandcamp, and you can pre-order the album there in the format of your choice. Unless your choice is 8-track, in which case you cannot, but why would you?

“Celestial Transgression” reminds me a lot of the aforementioned Trains. “Come Here, Little Ghost” has a twangier, folkier feel than I’m used to with his music. Maybe a touch of bluegrass? That’s the genre that comes to mind, but admittedly I’m not a big bluegrass listener so I could be way off target there.

At any rate, I love both tracks and can’t wait for the full album to drop in April.

 

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Monday fluffs

Lots of bad vibes on the internet today. Here’s a little cat action to boost your mood.

Sir Wobbles loves the silvervine.

“Woooo!”

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The Looney Tunes purge, and the difficulty of collecting them all

Slate has a post about HBO Max pulling Looney Tunes cartoons from the service unexpectedly. Specifically they cut more than 250 cartoons from the service, from 1950 to 2004, including the classic “What’s Opera, Doc?” The thread on Hacker News led me down the rabbit hole (heh) to a great post about trying to find all of the Looney Tunes episodes on disc.

I have a great love of classic Looney Tunes cartoons and snapped up the “Golden Collection” discs as soon as they came out. It was disappointing to find out, in the end, the six box sets didn’t actually constitute the entire collection.

It’s frustrating that Warner Bros. won’t just release an “everything” collection, in release order. The “Golden Collection” is a pain to navigate, so I was really happy with the access to Looney Tunes on HBO Max. Naturally, nothing good lasts forever. Given the way HBO Max is being managed right now, I doubt we’d continue subscribing if we weren’t getting access for free as part of our AT&T bundle.

And entertainment companies wonder why people torrent things…

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“The Olympians” – The Olympians

Album Cover: The Olympians by The Olympians

The Olympians by The Olympians was released on October 28, 2016. If it’d been released a year or two earlier, there’s a better than even chance it’d have made my Top 100 list the first time around.

The Olympians is something of a throwback record, with a strong nod to 70s funk and soul. You’ve got generous helpings of horns, slick guitar, and sweet, sweet strings to soothe your mind. At the same time, there’s plenty of groove that is virtually guaranteed to put some swing in your step.

The Olympians’ 11 tracks are all instrumentals with titles that evoke Greek gods and myths, like “Sirens of Jupiter,” “Apollo’s Mood,” and “Europa and the Bull.” It’s left as an exercise to the listener to piece together a narrative that goes along with the song title.

Given the album’s cinematic feel, that’s not hard at all. You can close your eyes and just imagine some of the myths (if you’re like me) you read in middle school and summon epic action scenes on a cosmic scale. One of these days I want to sync up The Olympians with the original Clash of the Titans and see how well some of the tracks mesh with Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation creatures.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3950293300 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Every track on this album is pure gold. I don’t know that the album breaks any new ground, but it really doesn’t need to. It brings players from The Budos Band, The Dap Kings, El Michels Affair, The Arcs and more under the direction of Toby Pazner to cook up a “temple of sound.” Sign me up for the Church of The Olympians, because I’m ready to convert!

The only bummer about this album? Since 2016, the band hasn’t convened again to produce a full follow-up. (At least as far as I know.) Since its release, there’ve been two singles released via Bandcamp but still holding out hope we’ll see a full length LP sometime soon.

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“With Birds” – The Coconut Monkeyrocket

Album Cover "With Birds" by The Coconut Monkeyrocket

When describing an album, one might start with a familiar genre or reference point to help the uninitiated prepare for the experience. This approach isn’t possible with The Coconut Monkeyrocket’s only full album, With Birds.

With Birds is a one-off album by a band (or perhaps one person project) called The Coconut Monkeyrocket with very little online presence and pretty much zero backstory and damn little follow-up since its release. While I’d really love more music like this, it may be impossible to replicate. It may be that the band or artist nailed it on the first try and decided to just pack it up.

One comment on Bandcamp calls the album “uptempo cartoon funk.” I’ve also seen it connected with “loungecore” and it’s tagged with “electrokitsch” as a genre on Bandcamp. I think of it as the sound a Chuck Jones cartoon would make if it grew up and started a band.

It’s aggressively uptempo with driving funk undertones, loops, vocal samples, and a bombastic feel. Plenty of horn samples, upbeat rhythms, and goofy sounds. From the intro track “Juicy Jungle” to the closer, “Thank You” it’s an unpredictable ride. Hints of disco, polka, spoken word, 50s strings and horns, and electronic beats all co-mingle into an album that sounds effortless but is intricate and deeply weird. Whatever it is, genre-wise, it’s 100% earworm.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3240639490 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

It’s a great album to put on while you’re making dinner or doing some housework, or as a soundtrack to a party. It’s like candy for your ears.

 

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“Photographs and Memories: His Greatest Hits” – Jim Croce

The annals of music history are full of artists cut down in their prime. John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Andrew Wood, the list is entirely too long, and the world is poorer for the music they never got to make. One can only imagine what Jim Croce might have written if he hadn’t died at 30 in a plane crash, heading from one university gig to another. Continue reading ““Photographs and Memories: His Greatest Hits” – Jim Croce”