Webcuts Music

Webcuts totally fell for Twin Sister‘s 2010 double-EP combo Color Your Life / Vampires With Dreaming Kids, in particular the exquisite dreampop shimmy of “All Around And Away We Go”, so it’s only expected that we’ll excitedly prick up our ears at the sound of fresh rumblings from their Long Island camp and report forth. [...]

With a year spent travailing the globe leading alterna-rock heroes, Pavement, through their reunion parade, it’s back to the day job for Stephen Malkmus and his Jicks. Their latest album, Mirror Traffic, is out August 22 through Domino Records. Produced by Beck ‘Beck’ Hansen, who recently helmed Thurston Moore’s latest effort, this is Stephen Malkmus’ [...]

Having to write a live review on the fly, almost two weeks after it happened, from notes hastily scribbled, while packing to go to a festival will show us this is not the way to be. There’s no time to go into great detail, to labour the point, to draw comparisons between George Lewis Jr’s physical appearance (a little bit Prince, a little bit Morrissey), or the sound (a little bit Prince, a little bit Morrissey, albeit on a synth-sprung landscape). Twin Shadow, at least from this writer’s perspective, has adequately filled the gap that LCD Soundsystem left by their absence, in making music that moves and is moving, that is confident without being arrogant, and is just too perfect for words.

Esteemed Louisvillian rockers My Morning Jacket have returned with their sixth album Circuital, to be released on May 31. To celebrate the occasion, the band have joined the likes of Arcade Fire and Duran Duran to appear on the “Unstaged” internet live broadcast which pairs a well-known band up with a well-known director. This time around My Morning Jacket go toe to toe with Todd Haynes, better known for the multi-actor Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There” and the loved but banned “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story”, a short film acted out by modified Barbie dolls.

Subtle and beautifully and unexpectedly intriguing is “Calgary”, the first single to be lifted from Bon Iver‘s long-awaited follow-up to For Emma, Forever Ago out June 20 via 4AD. With a little surrendering of your digital details, you can download the track now from www.boniver.org. The physical format will be released on July 4 on [...]

An act that many have been holding their breath for the return of for as long as they’ve been absent from the stage are Haledon, New Jersey’s The Feelies. Arriving in the late 70′s, and releasing one of the first great new wave/post-punk albums of the early 80′s (truly. no hyperbole here) in Crazy Rhythms, The Feelies were the Velvet Underground and Television’s geeky Jersey cousins. An enthralling percussive ride, full of jerky rhythms and wild, melodic guitar interplay, the sound of The Feelies would evolve over the years, drifitng away from the arty CBGB crowd toward a more refined pastoral ‘college rock’ sound that typified an era when bands like R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven loomed large.

Cold Cave‘s debut album of 2009 Love Comes Close was a unique display of synth-oriented mood disorder, venturing out from the bedroom to the dancefloor, full of tales of veiled seduction and bleak vicissitudes. Songwriter and vocalist Wes Eisold’s spin on the world appeared to share a voice (in both dour baritone and content) with Stephin Merritt if he’d spent his adolescence listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode instead of showtunes. On their second album, band leader Wes Eisold has taken the testing of the waters that was Love Comes Close and turned its successor Cherish The Light Years into his dark dream made manifold. The clip for the album closing, New Order channeling “Villains Of The Moon” showcases the new and improved Cold Cave, Eisold rising out of the gloom like a new goth messiah to lead the fold, all the while enjoying a pleasant afternoon’s Staring At The Sea moment down the beach. Cherish The Light Years is out now through Matador Records and the band are currently on tour in the States with The Kills.

Titled like you’d expect a Sonic Youth album, Demolished Thoughts is Thurston Moore’s latest Beck-produced solo record. In the same vein as 2007′s Trees Outside The Academy, it’s a stripped back affair that the very Sonic Youth sounding (if violins were drumstick jammed electric guitars) “Circulation” would attest. In typical Thurston Moore fashion, he explains [...]

It’s been said by Webcuts in the past that Destroyer‘s Dan Bejar is the Woody Allen of pop music. His idiosyncratic, poetic touch is less that of a lyricist but a storyteller with a revolving cast of characters (mostly women), and picking up on the ripples and waves they create to make them a part of his own interior monologue. An essential eighth of the mighty New Pornographers, Bejar has been recording as Destroyer since the 90′s. Kaputt, his ninth album is a sumptious, rhapsodic slice of 80′s melodrama, immersing itself entirely in the era from the vintage instrumentation to Bejar’s own penchance for seeking the sublime out of what some might find the ridiculous.

Is it wrong to fawn over a band’s debut when they’ve just returned with their first album in 20 years? We’re still ashamed to admit that we gave New Jersey’s, The Feelies a wide berth for the last few decades purely because of their name. It sounded like a something straight from the heart of [...]