An Alternative History of "Pop" Music: Part 3, 2004 -

[jamiefairlie]

Diefenbach - Glorious

https://youtu.be/xQzya3mY_nE



Formed in Copenhagen in 1999, this quintet started as an instrumental post-rock band. This is from their third album "Set & Drift"

[jamiefairlie]

Elbow - The Everthere


https://youtu.be/drMNvWOpgM0









Formed in Bury in 1997 by Guy Garvey (lead vocals, guitar), Craig Potter (keyboard, piano, backing vocals), Mark Potter (guitar, backing vocals) and Pete Turner (bass guitar, backing vocals). This is from their third album "Leaders Of The Free World"

[Brundle-Fly]

Mrs. Pilling - Half Cousin  Released on For Us in 2005.





A lovely wintery track with a spoken word section that evokes Ivor Cutler.

Half Cousin is a collective revolving around main songwriter/singer Kevin Cormack. The ethos behind the music of Half Cousin is "short, melodic songs made from junk!". It's perfect pop, but rather the pop of Tom Waits or Arab Strap. Not trying too hard. Music made with accordions, clarinet and wooden blocks all tripping over each other. But like all great music it just doesn't need to try, it just is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3t0y3WI-nE

[daf]

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names – Loop Duplicate My Heart



Featured on on the album '#3' - released in Sweden in October 2005

[jamiefairlie]

Engineers - Forgiveness

https://youtu.be/Y62I4mzA14Q



Taken from their self-titled debut album.

[jamiefairlie]

Low - Be There

https://youtu.be/gEuJZZb6q5g



Taken from the "Songs For A Dead Pilot" EP.

[jamiefairlie]

Pela - Episodes

https://youtu.be/yCw7Raqbp_I



From Brooklyn, this is taken from their debut release. the "All In Time" EP. They released one album before splitting in 2008.

[jamiefairlie]

Stellastarr* - The Diver

https://youtu.be/qrEeIzG2nWs



Formed in New York in 2000 by Shawn Christensen (vocals, rhythm guitar), Amanda Tannen (bass, vocals), Arthur Kremer (drums, percussion, keyboards), and Michael Jurin (lead guitar, vocals). This is taken from their second album "Harmonies For The Haunted".

[jamiefairlie]

The House Of Love - Gotta Be That Way

https://youtu.be/0nVFwd3L-8U



Back after a 13 year absence, it's from their, otherwise disappointing, fifth album "Days Run Away".

[jamiefairlie]

The Organ - Let the Bells Ring

https://youtu.be/tkypnc0qwGA



Released as their third single just as the band was imploding.

[jamiefairlie]

Gravenhurst - Velvet Cell

https://youtu.be/Elmj7wXgdVE



Taken from their third album "Fires In Distant Buildings"

[jamiefairlie]

Ok, time to wrap up 2005. we'll start 2006 later on Tuesday so get your last 05s in soon.

[daf]

Hafdís Huld ‎– Tomoko



Featured on the album 'Dirty Paper Cup' - released in 2005

Icelandic singer and actress Hafdís Huld Þrastardóttir began her musical career as a member of the electronic band GusGus in 1995. After leaving the band she started writing her own songs, and collaborated with FC Kahuna, co-writing their singles "Hayling" and "Machine Says Yes", which were included in the 2002 album 'Machine Says Yes'.

Her official debut album 'Dirty Paper Cup' was released in 2005 and won the Golden Icecube award for best pop album at the Icelandic music awards.

[DrGreggles]

Eels - I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart
[E] {Vagrant}
(from the Blinking Lights and Other Revelations album)



Taken from Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, Eels' 6th album, I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart finds E in downbeat mode - which arguably produces his best stuff.
There's something hauntingly beautiful about this, and it reminds me of Madrugada's Majesty and Chris Isaak's Wicked Game in terms of mood.

[Astronaut Omens]

The Tears- Europe After the Rain (live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORyPDVIDsmw

An intriguing song for Suede fans. Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler reunited in 2005 in a new band called The Tears, which only made 1 album before disbanding. They claimed that people's interest in their personal relationship overshadowed the music, but my god, they ARE an odd couple. Maybe with another pair of musicians this onstage bit of larking about wouldn't seem quite so loaded. Kneel, worm!

"Europe After the Rain" is an unreleased track they played on the 2005 tour, and so was perhaps a glimpse of what a hypothetical second LP might have sounded like, and to my ears its the furthest either Anderson or Butler had stepped since 1994 away from classic pop/rock and towards the weirder moments on Dog Man Star, with some deliberately jarring transitions and chords from the wrong key thrown in making the sound a little like Syd's "Jugband Blues", but also a little bit musical theatre. The lyrics, though not very inspired, do with their sense of Europe slouching again towards fascism seem rather on-the-money today. (Though even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, I suppose).
P.S. I've never seen Bernard Butler live, but I remember reading a review of of one of his last Suede gigs in 1994 which said he did a Benny Hill salute at the end, and lo and behold if he doesn't do the same at the end of this lovely version of the Tears best song "Apollo 13" . Does he always do that?

[Astronaut Omens]

Debbashish Battachyra- Aandam

Debbashish Battachyra's experiments in making traditional Indian music on Western guitars has lead him to invent several of his own instruments. What strikes me about his sound is that though the melodies are obviously more Indian than American, there is something in the tone so suggestive of that loneliness   that can be heard in blues music.

[Astronaut Omens]

AFX- W.32 Mydoom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMj6ioMflY

In 2005 Aphex Twin released 11 12" EPs with over 3 and a half hours of music on them. The material, generally simpler and closer to classic techno/ electro/acid, and less like the complex compositions on the RD James album and Druqks is very enjoyable if a little morose at times. This minor key groove has a lovely bit of Casualty-theme-esque ace up it's sleeve that it holds back till the end.

[Astronaut Omens]

Broadcast- Tears in the Typing Pool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WVVWXcbBJs

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Phosphorescent - Endless, Pt. 1

https://youtu.be/UgmxrgJRFxw

Phosphorescent is the name under which Alabama-born singer/songwriter Matthew Houck records and performs. This track is from his third album, Aw Come Aw Wry.

[Astronaut Omens]

Hal 9000 and Sylvie Marks- My Computer Eats an Acid Trip (Dexter Remix)
More Berlin Techno shenanigans, again from the bpitch record label. I seem to recall hearing quite a bit of acid-house-revival type stuff at the time. Maybe the repeated riff here is a bit on-the-nose.

[Astronaut Omens]

Acid Mother Temple- Eat a Pebble

Ludicrous male-voice-group delirium from the Japanese psych group. It's not a big stretch to imagine a group making music like this combined with a laddy, hooliganish image becoming absolutely massive all over the world, and people's lives being made a misery by Clockwork Orange style gangs singing this sort of thing.

[Astronaut Omens]

Edan and Mr. Lif- Making Planets.

Speaking of psychedelia, one of 2005's most memorable album's combined hip-hop with a "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" style collage of sounds. I guess all the regulars on hear will be delighted to hear the music concrete sample of the Beach Boys in the middle of this, and back in the sixties Brundle-Fly made a reference to this LP and an Israeli folk musician sampled on it, so this one is dedicated to all the thread regulars.

[jamiefairlie]

Welcome to 2006!

[jamiefairlie]

Amusement Parks on Fire - In Flight

https://youtu.be/xAhmp4EJdtw



Began as solo project by Michael Feerick in 2004 in Nottingham, he recorded nine songs on a small budget and released them as the self-titled debut album in 2004. This is from the full-band follow-up album "Out of the Angeles".

[Astronaut Omens]

Mariee Sioux- Buried in Teeth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTGn1JcJy1A
A fingerpicking guitar and mandolin folk song, by a Nevada singer-songwriter and buddy of Joanna Newsom who uses a lot of imagery and ideas from Native American culture. The lyrics to this song seem to be drawing lines between eating and eternity, as if every time we start chewing we throw off our modern selves and disappear into the food chain.

[Astronaut Omens]

Digital Mystikz- Anti War Dub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9H3i0T1iN4

Digital Mystikz are a dubstep duo from Norwood in London. I think this one of the strongest anti-war bits of art made during the 2000s.

Protest outside UK parliament, 2006


Iraq Veterans against the War protest, 2007

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Fionn Regan - Be Good or Be Gone

The opening track from The End of History, the 2006 debut album from Fionn Regan, a folk/folk rock musician from Bray, County Wicklow.

I've always liked the line 'I have become an aerial view/of a coastal town that you once knew'.

The album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2007 but the prize was won by Klaxons (whatever happened to them?... actually the main guy released a solo album last year I think)

[Brundle-Fly]

Or At Least - The Slapped Eyeballers. Released on Sonar Kollektiv in 2006.





Wonky jazz folk from Deutschland.

The Slapped Eyeballers are Balt Mirczok (Vocals) and Dimitri Grimm, known to some as Dimlite.

Dimitri:"I've spent much time of last summer swimming in the river that goes through Berne, and when I got back home I sat down with the instruments that surround me or that I had to lend from friends... Balt came up with some simple lyrics, in english and Swiss German. I was tired of tinkering beats during this period, and the approach here is clearly a whole different story – it's kind of libbing to record 1 song a day, instead of working on an semi-electronic instrumental piece for weeks.I can not really play guitar and Balt can not really sing, and this is a very spontaneous thing, everything done very sloppy... so i say: this project might return at some point, and it will sound different, for now TSE are just passing through, quasi dying at birth, and we leave this little extract... may it help you through everyday life."

[Clatty McCutcheon]

Lambchop - Paperback Bible

The opening track of Lambchop's 2006 album 'Damaged' has an unusual set of origins. It was originally commissioned for one of a series of radio documentaries on Chicago Public Radio about life in Middle America. Songwriter Kurt Wagner was sent some excerpts of a Tennessee radio program called 'Swap Shop', a radio version of the classified ads where people could sell anything from tractors, to appliances, to a ten-acre farm. Wagner wrote 'Paperback Bible', taking the lyrics directly from the show.

Wagner croaks his way through some of these oddly phrased attempts to sell and barter mundane items over a background of strummed acoustic guitar, orchestration and tinkling piano. For about seven minutes. On paper, it sounds dreadful, but through some kind of alchemy it's oddly moving (I think so, anyway).

[Lungpuddle]

The Beautiful South - There Is Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3sl1rD4fyI

From their last album, Superbi, it's the kind of song they could do in their sleep by this point but I love it, especially the last section when the harmonica comes in. Makes me think of being out in the street, heading for my front door just as the sun's coming up with the lightest of rain patting me on the back. I'd put it up there with Sail This Ship Alone but that might be taking nostalgia too far.