If the newly-embraced digital models of music distribution and promotion have convinced industry pundits of anything (and pundits they have become, spending as much time commenting on these developments as they use to highlight new and worthy releases), it's that record labels are now superfluous entities, the Internet having rendered such rock and roll middlemen obsolete.
Fact is, however, that labels are not only serving as valued gatekeepers between your ears and the overwhelming tidal wave of musical aspirants armed with little more than MySpace URLs, but that even the indiest of indies, equipped with modest budgets and sorely believed-in line-ups, continue to shine lights into the dark corners of the underwater performaverse.
I got to thinking about this recently because of a U.K.-based label called Melodic. An album, the oddly titled Puddle City Racing Lights, released in the U.S. last week by Brooklyn's own Friendly Fire Recordings (it was on Melodic's 2007 European roster) and credited to an unknown-to-me entity named Windmill, had come to me mysteriously in the mail.
The 12-track LP, Windmill's debut, kicks off with trippy single “Tokyo Moon, “setting a rough template for what's to follow. It’s a deft piece of indie piano pop, with elegantly swelling strings and heavy, snapping drums. The truly ear-bending component of track, and really of all the record that follows, is the strained, atmospheric voice of Matthew Thomas Dillon, the one-man band behind Puddle City.
Dillon's voice is manufactured from the same cracking ether as Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne's, but even as sandpaper singing has slowly become ubiquitous in College Radio America (from Sparklehorse's straining Mark Linkous to Granddaddy's high-nosed Jason Lytle) Dillon skips to the end of the evolutionary chart and graduates from occasionally breaking to flat-out broken, deliberately shifting into falsetto just to hear his own vocal chords give way on the last syllable of every line (“catch a cold/ blow your nose “).
Lurking underneath “Tokyo Moon “ is a frightening relative of rock's distorted, mumbling background ranters (a practice whose heyday spanned “I Am The Walrus” through Dark Side Of The Moon). “The results were thus!” announces Windmill's reverby shadow, bringing paradoxical mad scientist continuity to Dillon's stream-of-conscious squeak.
Windmill lead me, almost inevitably, to Arms, the solo recording venture of Brooklyn's Todd Goldstein, whose album Kids Aflame is out this week via (here it is again) Melodic, this time seeing simultaneous release on both sides of the pond. The slightest amount of Googling, in an attempt to find out about Windmill and the label that originally unleashed Puddle City, and I was ear-deep in Kids’ sing-along title track and “The Frozen Lake”’s succinct, chugging drive.
By the time I got a full copy of Kids Aflame, I had already familiarized myself with Goldstein's style—an affecting, generally low voice, one that can sound invigorated by a backing band or poignantly downtrodden when stripped of multi-tracked ambitions—and wanted to ingest the full narrative.
Sparse, plaintive bummed-outro album closer “Ana M” showcases a touch of twangy, singer-songwriter melancholy. And the un-intuitively titled “Shitty Little Disco” turns out to be Kids Aflame’s emotional centerpiece, spanning violence and romance: “Brother, lay a hand on me,” Goldstein sings, “I haven’t been in a fight in years”; it sounds, in a track that veers up and down on cue, like an epic, drunken evening.
Goldstein, it would turn out, is guitar player in New York’s own Harlem Shakes, a personally beloved band I wrote up for the Press last year. It all leads me conveniently back to my starting point: the Shakes
hadn’t directed my attention to Arms; the Brooklyn scene (which I comb exhaustively) had failed to do the same; it took a confluence of circumstances, the nod of various someones with resources and convictions, to not only bring these records out, but to bring them to our attention.
Windmill’s Dillon and Arms’ Goldstein are both bedroom musicians, with the songs and equipment to home record on laptops or four-tracks, but the Internet alone was not, at least for now, enough to spread the word. Puddle City Racing Lights and Kids Aflame have hardly set the Web ablaze, but I can scarcely imagine how self-releasing these albums would have made them better or better known. If that point seems obvious, remember how quickly it’s being lost in the point-and-click shuffle.
Cheers to Melodic and Friendly Fire, and let no one naysay the idea of indie label. The results, pleasingly, are thus.
Greg Burgett resides at songsaboutknives.com.
Fact is, however, that labels are not only serving as valued gatekeepers between your ears and the overwhelming tidal wave of musical aspirants armed with little more than MySpace URLs, but that even the indiest of indies, equipped with modest budgets and sorely believed-in line-ups, continue to shine lights into the dark corners of the underwater performaverse.
I got to thinking about this recently because of a U.K.-based label called Melodic. An album, the oddly titled Puddle City Racing Lights, released in the U.S. last week by Brooklyn's own Friendly Fire Recordings (it was on Melodic's 2007 European roster) and credited to an unknown-to-me entity named Windmill, had come to me mysteriously in the mail.
The 12-track LP, Windmill's debut, kicks off with trippy single “Tokyo Moon, “setting a rough template for what's to follow. It’s a deft piece of indie piano pop, with elegantly swelling strings and heavy, snapping drums. The truly ear-bending component of track, and really of all the record that follows, is the strained, atmospheric voice of Matthew Thomas Dillon, the one-man band behind Puddle City.
Dillon's voice is manufactured from the same cracking ether as Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne's, but even as sandpaper singing has slowly become ubiquitous in College Radio America (from Sparklehorse's straining Mark Linkous to Granddaddy's high-nosed Jason Lytle) Dillon skips to the end of the evolutionary chart and graduates from occasionally breaking to flat-out broken, deliberately shifting into falsetto just to hear his own vocal chords give way on the last syllable of every line (“catch a cold/ blow your nose “).
Lurking underneath “Tokyo Moon “ is a frightening relative of rock's distorted, mumbling background ranters (a practice whose heyday spanned “I Am The Walrus” through Dark Side Of The Moon). “The results were thus!” announces Windmill's reverby shadow, bringing paradoxical mad scientist continuity to Dillon's stream-of-conscious squeak.
Windmill lead me, almost inevitably, to Arms, the solo recording venture of Brooklyn's Todd Goldstein, whose album Kids Aflame is out this week via (here it is again) Melodic, this time seeing simultaneous release on both sides of the pond. The slightest amount of Googling, in an attempt to find out about Windmill and the label that originally unleashed Puddle City, and I was ear-deep in Kids’ sing-along title track and “The Frozen Lake”’s succinct, chugging drive.
By the time I got a full copy of Kids Aflame, I had already familiarized myself with Goldstein's style—an affecting, generally low voice, one that can sound invigorated by a backing band or poignantly downtrodden when stripped of multi-tracked ambitions—and wanted to ingest the full narrative.
Sparse, plaintive bummed-outro album closer “Ana M” showcases a touch of twangy, singer-songwriter melancholy. And the un-intuitively titled “Shitty Little Disco” turns out to be Kids Aflame’s emotional centerpiece, spanning violence and romance: “Brother, lay a hand on me,” Goldstein sings, “I haven’t been in a fight in years”; it sounds, in a track that veers up and down on cue, like an epic, drunken evening.
Goldstein, it would turn out, is guitar player in New York’s own Harlem Shakes, a personally beloved band I wrote up for the Press last year. It all leads me conveniently back to my starting point: the Shakes
hadn’t directed my attention to Arms; the Brooklyn scene (which I comb exhaustively) had failed to do the same; it took a confluence of circumstances, the nod of various someones with resources and convictions, to not only bring these records out, but to bring them to our attention.
Windmill’s Dillon and Arms’ Goldstein are both bedroom musicians, with the songs and equipment to home record on laptops or four-tracks, but the Internet alone was not, at least for now, enough to spread the word. Puddle City Racing Lights and Kids Aflame have hardly set the Web ablaze, but I can scarcely imagine how self-releasing these albums would have made them better or better known. If that point seems obvious, remember how quickly it’s being lost in the point-and-click shuffle.
Cheers to Melodic and Friendly Fire, and let no one naysay the idea of indie label. The results, pleasingly, are thus.
Greg Burgett resides at songsaboutknives.com.
