Elephant & Castle teams up with tUnE-yArDs for “En Memoria”

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The namesake. (Photo courtesy of http://thirdculturerecords.com/)

As a nomad, David Vincent Reep is accustomed to trying new things. It comes with the lifestyle. With travel tickets that blaze a trail across the United States and Europe, Reep is a wanderer, whose fleeting whims and curiosities can change into passions just as easily as he changes his home. Take music, for example. Inspired by the likes of DJ Shadow and plugged into the local rave scene while in South Bank, London, Reep picked up his first synth, giving birth to a musical science project.

Elephant & Castle, named for the famous London intersection, is the culmination of a few years of experimentation, which has wandered with Reet to his new Bay Area digs. Started on a whim, E&C has been refined at sound engineering school. It’s been polished at the legendary Studio 880 in East Oakland and then in Los Angeles at Low End Theory, the finishing school of Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing. And now it’s ready with Reet’s debut LP, Transitions.

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Polica’s Give You the Ghost

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Anyone else subliminally reminded of Postal Service? (Photo courtesy of tellallyourfriendspr.com)

What’s the deal with double drumsets? The arrangement always instantly adds depth and variety to music. It always takes a few measures to figure out why the snare hits sound fuller, why there seem to be far more frequent symbol hits than other songs, or why such intricate bass drum grace notes can be played – but two drumsets is nearly exclusively the culprit. We at Treeswingers have seen Radiohead, Brand New, MuteMath, and others add a second drummer at live shows, but this new band has gone ahead and embedded it in their style.

Calling Minneapolis home, Polica is set to release their first album, Give You the Ghost on Valentine’s Day. How cute. The video below shows Polica performing the stand-out track from the album, “Wandering Star”. Watching the unique instrumentation for a four-piece band provides a nice context for later listens of the song, which you can grab below. Don’t miss Polica’s autotuning and double drumming when the album comes out next month.

Polica – Wandering Star (download)

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House Of Blondes’ “Do It Yourself (Landscape)”

Posted on January 20, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Straight out of the neighborhood where hipsters live when they can’t afford hipster prices, House Of Blondes, seems like your average Brooklyn bedroom project. Adept at twisting nobs and maybe even better at adjusting their laptop screens, the Bushwick pair of John Blonde and Chris Pace may seem like they’re adding to the clamor of ambient indie poppers ready to flood Soundcloud with every fleeting inspiration on their way to piecing together a shoddy album.

That’s not really their point though. Instead of top-down, Blonde and Pace went bottom-up. Instead of beginning with the goal of an album, they started simply with a half-baked idea, eventually recording 20 minutes of ambiance that would be molded into their first song. Idea to song t0 band to album.

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The Big Pink’s Future This

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I am not sure whether it’s politically correct to call an album “anthemic” in the indie world. Perhaps it’s too close a description of arena rock, an antithesis to the exclusivity that the excluders like to define as “indie.” So when I say that The Big Pinks’ Future This is anthemic, I want to make it clear that I mean it in the least offensive sense of the word.

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ZZ Ward’s Eleven Roses

Posted on January 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

With a voice that cuts to the soul of matters, ZZ Ward seems like everything you’d want from a blooming female songstress. Gritty, confident and wounded, Ward hails from Eugene, but sounds like an old blueshand from the Mississippi Delta.

Already have given us a taste of “Better Off Dead,” a rendition of Tyler, The Creator’s “Yonkers,” the singer-songwriter debuted her full mixtape this week, an experimental arrival on to the scene that mashes sampled beats with pure soul. With four mixes on deck, including a beautifully reworked rip of Freddie Gibb’s “Oil Money” (see: “Criminal”), Eleven Roses borrows the best from hip hop’s up-and-comers, paving the way for a rising minidiva. Other mixes include “Morphine,” which borrows from Wiz Khalifa’s “Rooftops,” and “OVERdue,” a Childish Gambino collaboration of sorts.

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