Dave Greek

This one gets song of the day for an amazing music video concept. Dan Deacon is an Electronic musician from Baltimore who has enjoyed relatively wide spread popularity during the last decade, in which he has prolifically produced 13 albums. His most recent, America, was released in August and included this fun track.

The video is based off a drawing/acting version of the game telephone. Deacon and film maker Ben O’Brien start the video by creating a scene. The scene is then shown to the next team, who has an hour to try and recreate it from scratch as best they can. The 19 teams in the video are all members of the Baltimore art scene – including members from art collective Wham City and indie rock group Future Islands. Take a look after the break! Read More »

Hip-hop has changed the name of the American Dream. It has transformed white-picket fences into 22” rims on a blacked-out Escalade. It has changed a dutiful wife and kids to a harem of women and a loyal entourage. Climbing the corporate ladder has become burning the corporate ladder, just to build it again, but this time with diamonds. In the same line as fast cars and quick women, hip-hop moguls rise swiftly, but fall faster. Face Off is here to pick up those tattered, dusty pieces left behind by the has-beens and once-was, polish them off, and present you with a sparkling competition.

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Depravity reigns supreme in today’s intellectual music circles. It seems the more ripped up and worn down you sound, the more indie street-cred you are entitled to. A correlation has developed between your Pitchfork score and the number of visible track marks on your arms. Even quality sound mastering is often dismissed as overly “corporate” or pandering to a public uninformed to the virtues of the “lo-fi” revolution.

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The Faceoff Manifesto

Comrades,

Today we are challenged by a formidable adversary: the unstoppable onslaught of information. From Ethics to Accounting, forcible redistribution of brain cells has left us forgetting our roots, forgetting what we once held so dear. Too many times we let the shallow, angsty, one-time hits of our adolescence get lost amongst the impertinent sophistication of “adulthood!”

Today, we return to our roots. We reclaim what was once ours. We take back those simple, addictive tunes that inspired our younger selves! Read More »

Six Organs of Admittance is a project of incredibly prolific guitarist Ben Chasny, maybe better known for his work with psychedelic group Comets on Fire. Considering Asleep on the Floodplain is Six Organs’ 26^th release since its formation in 1999, it’s hard to see when Chasny gets time to sleep.

Asleep on the Floodplain simultaneously invents and masters a new genre I can only dub “world-folk-trance.” The primary sound of the album is a simple unadulterated acoustic guitar playing technically and mathematically simple phrases, layered above a mixture of electronic drones, rumbling bass, and the occasional exotic instrument or vocal accompaniment. The album crawls at the pace of a lullaby and spends a lot of its time re-voicing old melodies, reiterating the dream-like quality through instrumental “chanting.” Read More »

The album cover of Mine is Yours displays what one might expect of the has-been indie hard-hitters: a sloppily written note scrawled across a plain white background. Cold War Kids made their career out of the loud, edgy, blues-laden improvisation of fuzzy guitars, and the infectious passion of lead singer Nathan Willet. The main problem with Mine is Yours might be the fact that it contains none of these crucial elements. Instead, one wouldn’t be entirely at fault if you popped in the CD and mistook the album for the latest Daughtry release. Read More »

The guardian called them “Fantastic, if bemusing,” Pitchfork compared them to the insanity of MTV’s pop phenomenon Jersey Shore, and their front man has a Lady Gaga-esque drive to take over the world. You might be asking yourself who the hell Die Antwoord is.

I was asking myself the same question as I stood on New York City’s Governor’s Island this summer, in a crowd of ten to twenty thousand hipsters waiting between sets by Sleigh Bells and M.I.A., when a tiny woman in a sliver dress and a man in a white robe took to the stage. At first I thought it might be a couple of high schoolers about to go streaking, but was soon corrected when a heavy synth beat dropped and Watkin “Waddy” Jones (the scrawny white lead) began to sing his anthem “Enter the Ninja”.

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My high school art teacher once told me that no art is truly original. Everything, he said, is borrowed or inspired from something else, and inevitably contains references to previous works, even if it is unintentional. If you examine the chronological progression of music, you will notice that each “new” style is simply a slight deviation from a previous one. Each new musical era borrows elements from styles preceding it.

This in mind, I think it is difficult to state that one is actually opposed to the idea of a mash-up. Musical purists often claim that they distort the meaning of the original songs. What mash-ups actually do, however, is reinvent the original songs by combining them with foreign sounds and lyrics, creating a wholly new song with its own sound and meaning. Even jazz musicians borrowed melodies from hymns and spirituals, like Django’s “Ol’ Man River”. Mash-ups are like the DNA splicing of the musical world, an expedited and entirely unnatural version of an evolutionary process.

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