Local Natives

Gorilla Manor | Daytrotter Session

I've never jumped out of a plane. I've never even considered jumping out of a plane. I've barely ridden on a roller coaster - the only one being a slight, very kid-ish, girly, weiner coaster when I was very, very young. It's never happened again. The roads winding through the Rocky Mountains and those bordering the Black Canyon of the Colorado River and Lake Mead around the Hoover Dam are like torture riding along. Heights are bad for these nerves. Looking out of glass elevators on floors higher that five up makes this guy awfully squeamish. A helicopter or hot air balloon ride would be an immediate no-no, as vomiting would be eminent. You could count on it. These are my own characteristics and shortcomings and what they have to do with Silverlake, California band Local Natives might seem very peculiar and unclear right now, but just go with it good sirs and dames.

The band is so suave and persuasive that all of my apprehensions toward death-defying stunts and activities could be placed on hold - at least figuratively, maybe actually. The band's dreamy and accomplished debut album is a complete thought of white-watered rapids and wide open skies. There are dizzying heights to be sucked in, to be washed over by. It feels as if - without leaving the ground, without peering over the bottom lip of an open airplane door - you're already doing it. The blues and whites of the upper layers of travelable air get blended right into your skin, through a different kind of osmosis. It feels death-defying to me. It feels like an unexpected splash of the iciest and coldest water that could come out of a hose or put into a bucket and heaved. Suddenly, before you've ever been able to get acclimated to what you were to experience, you've already been struck by a sensation of free-falling and exhilarated flushing. Your eyes are peeling off at the corners with water - could be tears - and you're only hearing the collected harmonies of Kelcey Ayer, Ryan Hahn, and Taylor Rice.

They create the kind of feeling - with a musicality so ambitious and daring, but immediately satisfying - that you can only attain if you're head over heels with the very thought of maximizing all that's in your heart and soul, of actually listening to and responding to those two colluding and difficult parts of a person. The band may get the soul. REALLY get the soul. They may be in cahoots with more than their own and that would explain a lot. The music seems to just stream forth like uncontrollable cleansing and excitement, as if there were no way a man could harness or suppress it. They are in possession of the unfathomable dimensions of the mind and the body and the fine lines that are drawn between being a spectator and grabbing your own happiness by the very long tail and letting it shake the dust off of you. It's a spoken language with the greatest of heights. It's communicating with the heavens and it makes it so that none of us should ever have to do something do freaky as leap out of an airplane to feel like we've partied with the heavens.

Once (Single)
download
1. Once
2. Sunlight
3. Jumping Into Rivers (Frou Four Central Mix)
4. Four Leaf Clover (Acoustic Version)


Songs from the Tainted Cherry Tree (Album Sampler)
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1. Once
2. Remake Me and You
3. The Boy Who Murdered Love
4. Put it Back Together Again
5. My Hip

Pop/Electronic/Dance

Body Talk (2010)
Tracklisting:

01 Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do 4:13
02 Fembot 3:37
03 Dancing On My Own 4:50
04 Cry When You Get Older 3:37
05 Dance Hall Queen 3:41
06 None Of Dem (featuring Röyksopp) 5:14
07 Hang With Me (acoustic) 3:20
08 Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa 2:10










Robin Miriam Carlsson aka Robyn (born June 12, 1979) is a Swedish singer and songwriter from Stockholm, Sweden.

She scored massive successes in the summer of 2007 with her hit single “With Every Heartbeat” which was most notably #1 in the UK, but also had chart success in her native Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and Germany.

Some child-like wonder

Folk

Natalie Merchant - Leave Your Sleep [2CD] (2010)

Disc 1
1. Nursery Rhyme Of Innocence And Experience 5:10
2. Equestrienne 4:39
3. Calico Pie 2:42
4. Bleezer's Ice-Cream 5:16
5. It Makes A Change 3:31
6. The King Of China's Daughter 2:39
7. The Dancing Bear 5:38
8. The Man In The Wilderness 3:45
9. Maggie And Milly And Molly And May 4:07
10. If No One Ever Marries Me 2:22
11. The Sleepy Giant 3:19
12. The Peppery Man 5:06
13. The Blind Men And The Elephant 5:31

Disc 2
1. Adventures Of Isabel 3:23
2. The Walloping Window Blind 4:16
3. Topsyturvey-World 5:09
4. The Janitor's Boy 3:52
5. Griselda 5:51
6. The Land Of Nod 4:04
7. Vain And Careless 4:43
8. Crying My Little One 2:26
9. Sweet And A Lullaby 3:04
10. I Saw A Ship A Sailing 2:12
11. Autumn Lullaby 3:22
12. Spring And Fall: To A Young Child 3:04
13. Indian Names 5:50


"'This album captures so many magical moments, the best times I've ever had as a musician,' declares singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant of 'Leave Your Sleep,' her ambitious, two-disc Nonesuch debut. Merchant, celebrated solo artist and one-time voice of 10,000 Maniacs, took on what could have been a daunting task: she's adapted 19th and 20th century British and American poetry - well-known and obscure works, anonymous rhymes, children's lullabies, all of it timeless material full of direct emotion - and fashioned new songs from these words. Among the poets she chose were Robert Graves, Charles Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The project, five years in the making, has clearly had a liberating effect on Merchant. Never has she sounded so free-spirited, so full of musical adventure, whether backed by small jazzy combos or elegant chamber ensembles. The tracks she's created range from exotic ('The King of China's Daughter') to earthy ('Peppery Man'), soothing ('I Saw A Ship A-Sailing') to swinging ('The Janitor's Boy'), mischievous ('It Makes A Change') to moving ('Spring and Fall'). The string arrangements are particularly stirring, recalling Joshua Rifkin's now-classic work on Judy Collins' 'Wildflowers.' There's plenty of child-like wonder, counterbalanced with grown-up sophistication.

Says Merchant, 'It was an exciting, new approach for me to work with rhythm and rhyme schemes created by other writers. The poems inspired vastly different musical settings with their themes that ranged from humorous and absurd to tragic, romantic, and deeply spiritual. Over the course of three years I wrote 40 of these poem-songs and 30 were eventually recorded.' Merchant co-produced 'Leave Your Sleep' with Venezuelan musician-composer Andres Levin, a frequent collaborator of David Byrne and Arto Lindsay, and one of the creators of the eclectic Red Hot charity series. Over the course of a year's worth of exhilarating, musically shape-shifting sessions, they drew upon no less than 125 musicians from the varied worlds of, among other things, Cajun, country, jazz, chamber music, R&B, Celtic, and reggae. The revitalized Merchant explains, 'I called on old friends and approached many new musicians I only knew through admiring their work... The sessions were recorded in live ensemble workshop settings that captured pure and authentic sounds played with incredibly fresh and spontaneous energy.'"

(Similar artists -Sarah Mc Lachlan, Melissa Etheridge, Beth Orton)

Magnetic North (2010)

01. New Friend
02. Reel Me In
03. Sundowning
04. 36 Hours
05. Fingertip
06. Lost
07. Time Moves Slow
08. California
09. Remember Us
10. Hummingbird
11. Thin Air
12. Magnetic North






Matt Hales (born January 17, 1972), better known as Aqualung, is a British singer/songwriter best known in the United Kingdom for his song “Strange And Beautiful”, which was featured on a television advertisement for the new Volkswagen Beetle during the summer of 2002 and went on to become a Top 10 hit in the UK singles chart later that year.

"Magnetic North" is Aqualungs first album of all new material since relocating from England to sunny Los Angeles last Autumn. All 12 tracks were co-written and produced by Aqualung. Co-writers include: Ben Hales, his brother, his wife, and the legendary Paul Buchanan (of the Blue Nile). Guest vocal appearances include: Kelly Sweet, Alison Sudol (A Fine Frenzy), Sara Bareilles, and others.

Dave Grohl

One of the first times I heard of Dave Grohl I was in college, I'd entered a competition on Student Cents and I won a Dave Grohl t-shirt, later that year I would see them (Foo Fighters) live at Oxegen, squashed to death 3 rows from front, moshing my little heart out.

This post it thanks to Metal Bastard.

Grohl through the years, it's not everything, but it touches the surface of his ingenius talent!

(zip) The Evolution of Dave Grohl (85 mb)
1. Dain Bramage - The log (1986)
2. Scream - Gods look down (1989)
3. Late! - Throwing needles (1992)
4. Nirvana - Scentless apprentice (1993)
5. Dave Grohl & Louise Post - Touch (1997)
6. Foo Fighters - Enough space (1997)
7. Iommi - Goodbye lament (2000)
8. Queens of the Stone Age - The sky is fallin' (2002)
9. Killing Joke - Asteroid (2003)
10. Probot - Shake your blood (2004)
11. Nine Inch Nails - Getting smaller (2005)
12. Tenacious D - Beelzeboss (The final showdown) (2006)
13. The Prodigy - Run with the wolves (2009)
14. Them Crooked Vultures - No one loves me & neither do I (2009)
15. Slash - Watch this (2010)

F**K the ash cloud!