Mike McClain

Mike McClain gives you a brief introduction to three new tracks for your spinning pleasure. This week, hear new music from Dirty Beaches, Hunx and His Punx and Crystal Stilts.

Dirty Beaches taps into inspirations not often heard in today’s scenes (besides beaches, of course…), filtering rock and roll before it knew what it was through psychobilly. Mimicking the haunted off-kilter warble of Gun Club or The Cramps, Zhang Hungtai achieves some kind of sleazy delight through twisted haze. “Lord Knows Best” is carried by a repetitive piano line, dancing between his  murmurs of infatuation: “Lord knows best that I don’t give a damn about anyone but you.”

♫ Dirty Beaches – Lord Knows Best

Read More »

Beatlemania never died. No, the girls don’t yell quite enough anymore (er…), and yes, moptop epidemics are likely to remain dormant (er…), but I’ll never deny my love for Beatles tribute bands. We pretend we don’t see John’s wig slip off, laugh along when Ringo slips into his Midwestern drawl by accident, and give George the benefit of the doubt when he takes the solo to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” slightly over the top. Unlike most acts, their catalogue is endlessly coverable. Where for most songs a cover does the most justice when it offers some new spin, when it comes to Beatles covers, the more authentic the better. But only a handful actually stand apart as songs worth listening to outside of a tribute show in the park.

All of us in The Beatles’ wake aren’t the only ones guilty of plagiarism though. In fact those good boys from Liverpool were the guiltiest culprits in the early 60s. While ripping open Western culture to the earliest rock and roll and R&B, their first five albums are heavy with covers spanning a wide territory that shows off the ingredients that went into the early Beatles sound. I now give you the best of covers by The Beatles and the best of covers of The Beatles.

Read More »

As music fans, we could hail some upsurge in human passion and creativity as the driving force the behind the 21^st century’s proliferation of styles and artists, but Chuck Berry begs to differ. It seems to be resources the modern musician has to take advantage of that have continually reshaped the structure and modes of music—overall increasing points of contact between the creators and waves of insatiable listeners who drive bands to bend the rules to near breaking point.

Kickstarter.com is one of those resources. It is a massive platform for funding art of any medium, connecting thousands of starving artists each week to every illuminated screen in the world, where eager faces can help bring their visions to earth with a simple monetary donation. Everyone from a poor Portland photographer capturing the battle between nature and concrete in “Built vs. Grown” to Magicsparkle, an alien rock duo from Brooklyn, can make a plea to elevate their art to new levels.

Read More »

“I have decided that the journalistic depiction of my life as tragic is actually an expression of profound jealousy by people who have never done anything even marginally interesting in their own.” You would expect a twenty-something year old songwriter brooding these smacks at onlookers with no more than a cocky smirk would let it show in his music. Such a hermetic sense of pride goes a long way to sterilize empathy and reduce awed reverence for a musician in the flesh and blood to a respectful nod at just his sonic prowess.

Scratch that. No, not the whole thing…just—let’s start. Holding Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson to today’s standards makes him come across as an outright contradiction. He snarls at most criticisms of his music, fighting openly against the uniformity of opinion about what is good in independent music anymore, and the fact that not jumping on the “wavve” (so to speak) is just shooting yourself in the foot. He tosses out the classic “you don’t know me” more often than most, brushing off psychoanalysts who place his debut masterpiece (more on that soon, promise) within the context of his standoff with drugs, depression, and fight for survival alone in New York and take all too many liberties with the truth to suit their journalistic ends.

Read More »

The increasing roots and influences of today’s independent music seem to have blown up recently, in the scheme of things. Tracing steady lineage through punk and guitar-rock aesthetics through the 90’s, it seems at the turn of the century and with the onslaught of the digital boom, musicians have shifted focus from fast, loud and verbose music heroes to—just about anyone.  Califone’s second EP from 2000 proves how the organic vibes of folk and blues are not challenged by newer, digital production and sonic manipulation, but that indeed the mechanical whirs and synthesized rhythms are just as applicable to classic songwriting techniques. In essence, Tim Rutili’s defiantly states that the perfect ballad can be rewritten, as fresh as it was when songs of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music were being circulated and were reaching the new and eager figures that revived folk music in the 1960’s. Cut-and-paste production is turned on its head, as it here results in something as lively and intimate as the guitar and a sentimental croon formula of bygone times, rather than the shiny beat driven genres those methods are typically associated with.

Read More »