We’re adding a new feature to the blog starting………. now. Each week we’ll update you about the latest vinyl to grace the shelves here at Pure Pop. From the latest releases from your favorite artists to hard to find special used pieces, to collectors edition limited release vinyl. If vinyl is your game, Pure Pop’s your… pitcher? Team Mascot? Line-judge? (We’re not quite sure how to finish that analogy.)
If you don’t see the latest release post, just click the latest release button in the sidebar and you’ll be taken right to the listings. Easy as pie.
-Pure Pop
The Chemical Brothers – Further
While it continued the Chemical Brothers‘ trend of chart topping releases—2007′s We Are The Night was the duo’s fifth consecutive album to go #1 in the UK—the album awkwardly relied on a bevy of unusual collaborations (though, in reality, no more so than 2005′s Push The Button) which left it bearing little consistency. With Further they bucked the trend of reaching out for external collaboration (save for vocalist Stephanie Dosen who backs up Tom Rowlands on three of Further‘s tracks) and in doing so they have created a piece of music that oozes continuity; each track morphing into one another without the slightest bit of hesitation. Further is an album that sounds more like the Chemical Brothers of old than the group that released “The Salmon Dance” as a single; which is to say that it’s supurb. Read the full review
Wolf Parade – Expo 86
Wolf Parade’s greatest asset is the ability to appear on the verge of falling apart while marching ahead with lockstep precision. The Canadian indie-rock outfit’s third album, Expo 86, begins in the middle of a pounding drum lick that’s quickly joined by Spencer Krug’s quivering vocal, a zig-zagging guitar, a bloopy synth doodle, and a pulverizing bassline. Then things really get ramshackle on the opening track, “Cloud Shadow On The Mountain,” but not at the expense of the song’s twitchingly brisk forward velocity. The track sets the tone for an album that thankfully leaves Wolf Parade’s lackadaisical 2008 effort At Mount Zoomer on the couch for a long nap. Read the full review
Scissor Sisters – Night Work
A more troubled second album, still unshyly titled Ta-Dah!, featured a hit dance single whose lyrics pouted: “I don’t feel like dancing.” It was a move which proved that the Sisters were not merely the empty partying vessels routinely deployed at the wedding discos of heterosexual breeders. Camp – that cosy, normalising caricature of gayness – is what allowed the Scissor Sisters sell to a wide constellation of demographics. And that pesky camp is what they have tried to excise from their third album, Night Work, potentially threatening their tenure as Middle Britain’s tame wild things. With all its talk of dicks between legs, “Whole New Way” will probably not inspire the family singalongs the way “Take Your Momma Out” did.
This more hardcore Scissor Sisters outing is, really, their fourth: singer Jake Shearscorrect decided to scrap an album’s worth of songs and decamp (profuse apologies) on a sabbatical to Berlin, where the unbridled hedonism of that clubbing metropolis restored Night Work’s frisson. Read the full review
It’s world cup time… and if you’re reading this post from somewhere in the United States, their is a good chance you don’t give a shit. But for the rest of us, and the world – this is a big deal. Like the Olympics, but with more swagger and focused excitement. And like any proper world class event, sporting or otherwise, it comes with assortment of officially recognized merchandise, memorabilia, product tie-ins, and of course songs.
This year’s Official offering is from Shakira (and ostensibly, Fozzie Bear.) “Waka Waka” A colorful and frankly goofy song that bounces around to a tribally 2-step rhyme while Shakira does what she does best; shake her ass and belt out asinine lyrics like…
You’re a good soldier
Choosing your battles
Pick yourself up
And dust yourself off
And back in the saddle
(If i didn’t know better, I’d say she was positioning this track to be the official song of the US Occupation of Afghanistan… too soon?)
Ok. All things considered, not too bad… not to good, but lets see what else we can find…
Get on your Boots – U2.
The only nice thing i can say about this one is that the remix they did for the world cup featuring the Soweto Gospel Choir mercifully pulls out much of the original tracks elements and replaces them with Africany sounding stuff. You know what i mean, you’ve all listened to Graceland. It’s like that, but guileless and with 100% more Bono. Ewwww…
Oh so we need a “Good” entry now in order to make this post true to the title… Why don’t you, dear readers, post your favorite World Cup Songs. I’ve exhausted my good will from repeated viewings of World in Motion…
The Roots – How I Got Over
The Roots set an exquisite mood on this record. A fully and entirely live production, it flows seamlessly like a stream of consciousness conversation between instrumentalists, vocalists, and the universe. For instance, “Dear God 2.0,” the impressive already leaked single, features an impressive co-mingling of such magnitude that it feels more like a sermon than music. “Why is the world ugly when you made it in your image?/And why is livin’ life such a fight to the finish?/For this high percentage/When the sky’s the limit/A second is a minute, every hour’s infinite.” In writing and producing a track that speaks to the Lord, well, the band expressly tries their damndest to reach him. Jim James’ vocals on the hook, Black Thought’s intellectual preaching, and Questlove providing the backbone of the entire enterprise really takes that track in a rarefied direction. Read the full Review
Stars – The five Ghosts
On the group’s fifth and latest studio offering, The Five Ghosts, Stars continue to add to their impressive discography. A bit more lo-fi, electronicky, and subdued than its predecessors, The Five Ghosts is filled with a solid smattering of melodic indie pop that is accessible, catchy, and pretty without being cloying. Read the full review
The Gaslight Anthem – American Slang
The Gaslight Anthem are not a band simply awash in nostalgia; their songs are about the very concept of nostalgia. And most importantly, they understand that nostalgia is not a lens through which we fondly reminiscence about the past, but a gauge by which we evaluate our troubled present. On American Slang, the follow-up to the Gaslight Anthem’s 2008 triumph The ’59 Sound, frontman Brian Fallon is utterly consumed by the idea that his best days are behind him– three songs contain a variation on the dewy-eyed phrase “when we/you were young,” and on another, he seemingly gets frustrated with his own backward-glancing impulses, angrily demanding, “Don’t sing me the songs about the good times/ Those days are gone and you should just let them go.” So in this sense, the Gaslight Anthem’s Springsteen/Strummer worship is less about idolatry and mimicry than a defense mechanism against a modern world that’s presented them with no new heroes to aspire to. Read the full Review
Derek Trucks – Roadsongs
Roadsongs is a 14-track, two-disc extravaganza with some of the DTB’s most inspired playing, pre-hiatus, or otherwise. Recorded at a two-night stand at Chicago’s Park West, the band methodically burns through their catalogue with an emphasis on several of the tracks from 2009’s Almost Free, superb covers, and other original material. Perhaps the key to the highway, which immediately manifests itself here, is the way that Trucks’ slide guitar work developed a unique sonic fingerprint within this context after years of continuous duty under the vast Allman Brothers Band umbrella. Read the full Review
Grace Potter & The Nocturnals – Self Titled
Grace Potter means business. She lets you know from the get go with the first “UH!” on her band’s new self titled album, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. This isn’t some poppy, Adult Alternative record; it’s a gritty, passionate affair with swagger, soul and plenty of classic rock influences.
The opening track, “Paris” kicks things off with a heavy guitar riff and the sleaziest drums this side of Don Henley’s The Long Run days. Singing about getting what she wants, Potter proves that she’s a woman with strength and conviction and knows how to work it. Grace Potter & The Nocturnals is full of songs that have a deep groove and a bit of an edge to them, such as “Oasis” and “Medicine,” which feature the kind of exemplary guitar work you’d expect to hear from the Allman Brothers on any given night. This may come from the Nocturnals’ years of touring, or it could be the new chemistry in the band. For this new album The Nocturnals include lead guitarist Scott Tournet and drummer Matt Burr joined by newer members bassist Catherine Popper and rhythm guitarist Benny Yurco; Potter covers the piano and organ. Read the full review
Ratatat – LP4
Past outings from Brooklyn duo Ratatat have been marked by bright lines, big blocks of color, and a sort of inoffensive coolness. It was electronic music delivered by cock-rocking guitarists, but with most of the gristly bits polished away: Think arena-electro for grocery-store aisles. But LP4 is refreshingly strange, the kind of album that’s fine to zonk out to, but even finer to pick through with a big set of earphones. Read the full review
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
We know from interviews that Ariel Pink grew up absorbing throwaway pop from the 70s and 80s, finding a way to make it all fit into his cracked worldview. Something overlooked about those songs, though, is that the people writing them were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder. Ariel Pink’s best songs are surprising, and there’s a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected. So “L’estat (Acc. to the Widow’s Maid)” goes from a rollicking organ-led opening section to a catchy call-and-response chorus hook the Monkees might have liked to a short double-time instrumental section to a jubilant coda, and all the while the stitches never show. Songs like “Little Wig” have so many interesting interlocking parts that they can almost feel proggy, despite their relative brevity and tight pop structures. Read the full review
The Cure – Disintegration (remastered / expanded)
For the huge number of fans who discovered The Cure through the pop hits off 1985’s Head on the Door and 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the release of the band’s eighth album, in May 1989, was something of a revelation: Disintegration found Robert Smith sliding back into the thematic darkness of the Pornography era, but with that record’s bleak, brittle sheen replaced by much-needed melody and musical depth.
The resulting album still stands as The Cure’s greatest achievement, a work that’s both filled with despair and heart-rending beauty — as if Smith, however fleetingly, finally struck the right balance between his twin musical personas. Now, 21 years later, Disintegration is the subject of a wildly anticipated three-disc retrospective that not only delivers a sonic upgrade to the original album, but offers before-and-after context via a disc’s worth of demos and outakes, and a full live airing of the record. Read the full review
***The Following Article contains Crass Language***
The BP Gulf Disaster is at the forefront of our minds at the moment. It has been inspiring a multitude of thoughts and emotions, none of which are pleasant. Lurking amongst the despair, fear and uncertainty is a considerable amount of anger towards BP and their ilk: all-powerful corporations that don’t think twice about jeopardizing the global ecology in pursuit of wealth. Grrrr!! Well fuck them. Here are some songs that we feel capture that sentiment:
The Kinks – “Powerman”
Lyric Excerpt:
And he’s got my money
But I’ve got my faith
Powerman, Powerman
I’ll never be your slave
Super Furry Animals – “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck”
Lyric Excerpt:
You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else
You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else
You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else
You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else
The first real hot day of this year melted my brain and made me wander around aimlessly in a daze. The streets were full of zombies like myself, staggering around sun-drunk and with poor judgment. After a dude narrowly missed hitting me at an intersection, a looker-on commented that “it was too bad you didn’t have a gun so you could’a shot ‘im!” Put these people in a room with some cold brews and Maniac Meat and you’ve got a heat-stroke hallucination puke party a.k.a. the best party of the year.
Like his work in Black Moth Super Rainbow, Tobacco is heavy on vocoder and analog synth, but the difference between overall sound is yin and yang. Tobacco’s is dark, dank, heavy and pounding where BMSR creeping psych pop. Maniac Meat is like drinking radioactive slushies on a hot day in 2012 and slowly mutating while watching b-movies VHS. Actually, in an interview with Kotori Magazine in 2008, Tom Fec described the influence of old vhs as such: “they make me feel awful, but really good and curious at the same time. With this Tobacco stuff, I’m trying to translate that feeling.” Two years later, that feeling has only gotten grimier and farther tripped out. The dizzying bass and crashing percussion introduced on Tobacco’s first album Fucked Up Friends seems almost wimpy in comparison to his new effort. 80′s space documentary synth drips and melts over hip hop breaks. Two songs feature Beck’s surrealistic scientologist drawl (Fresh Hex and Grape Aerosmith) meandering in and out like a transmission from the 90′s. “Lick the Witch” is a futuristic haunted house hypnotizer. “Heavy Make-up” is a sluggish and pervy fist pump anthem that stumbles like a prom queen. “Sweatmother” is like taking basement chemist diet-pills, and has a chopped Jane Fonda workout music viddy (youtube it). Get into it this oil spill summer.
Sleigh Bells – Treats
When you see the hipsters and geeks strutting as if they’re prizefighters this summer, you’ll have a good idea of what’s probably playing on their iPods. Indie takes on intro music for a heavyweight bout, “Riot Rhythm” and “Crown on the Ground” are dance-punk juggernauts, brimming over with pounding beats that are cut across by piercing guitars and slicing sound effects. In particular, “Crown on the Ground” walks out to a fevered pitch with guitars blazing from the start, yet somehow keeps building up the intensity, with layer upon layer of blaring keyboards, fuzzed-out rhythms, and anthemic vocals. That M.I.A. is Sleigh Bells’ biggest booster—and investor, since her N.E.E.T. label is co-releasing Treats—makes a lot of sense when you hear the boisterous swagger of “Kids” and “A / B Machines”, though you might wonder who’s teaching whom a few new tricks if you consider the latest tracks leaked from the upcoming album /\/\/\Y/\. Whichever way the influence is working, Krauss’ scattershot speak-singing and the hypercharged melodies of both songs have a similar feel to M.I.A.‘s playfully aggressive sound, just if the latter had its worldly eclecticism shorn down to its most brutally infectious elements. Read the full review
Jack Johnson – To The Sea
At this point in Johnson’s career, on his fifth studio album, a listener might expect some twists in the formula, but Johnson isn’t interested in risk. Time and again, his choices are predictable, but it’s comforting and hard not to like in its gently strummed affability. His music is on permanent vacation — it should be pumped into cardiac clinics across America, lowering the blood pressure of harried patients. Read the full review
Melvins – Bride Screamed Murder
Perhaps the most surprising moment on The Bride Screamed Murder comes in the slow, plodding cover of the Who’s “My Generation”, a seven minute endurance test that can best be described as ______________ (a somewhat endearing gimmick/a bigger waste of time than the space program/more alluring that Kelly Ripa naked and slathered in margarine). Who guitarist Pete Townshend, when reached for comment, exclaimed _______________ (”I fink it wuz brill-yunt!”/”I’m not hearing the fire that made Houdini burn so brightly, but I can admit I checked out on these guys years ago.”/”I wish Dale Crover had played on It’s Hard.”) Elsewhere on Bride, a snippet of the Knack’s “My Sharona” can be heard. This is a clear reference to ________________ (the recent death of Knack singer Doug Fieger/Obama’s health care plan/the domestic failure of the Wolverine: Origins). Read the full review
