WHITE DENIM - Fits

If you're looking for one of the best rock records of the year, look no further. White Denim's latest LP Fits is a true test in quick change ups, brooding funkadelic bass lines, and spastic 'fits' of adrenaline. The first single "I Start To Run" is a ferocious example of the band's ability to cause a sonic ruckus.

Fits is available now on Downtown Records.

HOT CHIP Announce New Album

British electronic band Hot Chip have announced the February 9th, 2010 release of their fourth LP, brilliantly titled One Life Stand. The new effort will feature guest spots from drummer Charles Hayward of This Heat and Leo Taylor of indie band The Invisible. The first track to emerge from the new album is "Take It In" and you can listen to it now below.

New ATLAS SOUND Virtual 7"

Bradford Cox continues his prolific output by posting this new free virtual 7" on his Deerhunter blog. "Doctor" is an awesome cover of The Five Discs. It also comes backed with the new track "Screens". Mediafire link below.

Download Virtual 7"

BEST COAST - When I'm With You

Yet another fan video made for a Best Coast track. These are so fun! This time we get the new song "When I'm With You", scoring some happy-dappy dance scene from "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort", an old Jacques Demy musical.

New MEMORY TAPES - Graphics (Edit)

Memory Tapes - Graphics (edit) [link]

Guilty Pleasure - LADY GAGA - Bad Romance

I can't help it. The best thing happening in pop music today.

ÓLAFUR ARNALDS - Found Songs

Icelandic neo-classical composer Ólafur Arnalds follows up his critically acclaimed debut with a stunning collection of new tracks, aptly titled Found Songs. Let yourself fall into this gorgeous masterpiece of a video for "Ljósið". The new album is available now on Erased Tapes.

Ólafur Arnalds - Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

3 Years of The Sky Report

The Sky Report officially turned three years old over the weekend! Thanks to everyone who reads this blog and has supported us in our infancy. We're looking forward to another year of music!

STRANGE BREAKS & MR. THING II

Back in early 2008 we went gaga for the amazing Strange Breaks & Mr. Thing compilation. Now there is a volume 2 and like it's predecessor, it is chalk full of rare and sought after breaks. You can stream tracks or download your own digital copy at BBE Music.

New GRIZZLY BEAR Video - Ready, Able

Directed by Allison Schulnik, the latest Grizzly Bear video is as haunting and beautiful as any of the band's previous videos. "Ready, Able" is taken from Veckatimest, available now on Warp.

M.I.A. Working On New Album

According to Pedestrian, M.I.A. is busy at work on her follow-up to Kala, the album that won her worldwide critical accolades and shot her to stardom. Word has it, Diplo and Switch return to the helm, along with additional undisclosed producers. Diplo recently spoke out about the new effort. "Been in the studio with M.I.A. working on her new record. It's like Gucci Mane meets Animal Collective. I think there are a couple of people [producing] but we're going to finish it off, me and Switch. We've done like four tracks already."

I'm in.

Previously:

M.I.A. Galang - Music video from marco ammannati on Vimeo.

CFCF - Continent

CFCF has made waves here before. Now he's back, and this time with a full-length album.

"Continent, the long awaited debut full length from Montreal's CFCF (aka Mike Silver), takes Silver's musical and visual influences and turns them to song, leading one through varying landscapes and moods. The album comes to us after a long string of remixes for HEALTH, The Presets, The Teenagers, and Hearts Revolution. In the time leading up to Continent, he released the Panesian Nights EP and The Explorers single, which featured label-mate and frequent collaborator Sally Shapiro."

You can purchase the album digitally at Paperbag Records.

CFCF - Monolith [mp3]

Previously:

SHARON VAN ETTEN, NATUREBOY, REY VILLALOBOS This Saturday in Brooklyn

Kevchino.com Presents . . . .
Sharon Van Etten, Natureboy, Rey Villalobos
Saturday, November 7th Union Pool
DJ Scot Bowman of The Sky Report will be spinning between sets
Reindeer Art show by Brad Nack in the lobby
$10 Advance online and $12 at the door. 21+
TICKETS

A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS - Exploding Head

Always a sucker for new music that sounds like Jesus and Mary Chain, Pornography-era Cure, or My Bloody Valentine, I am naturally smitten with the new A Place To Bury Strangers album Exploding Head. The Brooklyn band just wrapped a US tour and recently released a video for the first single, "In Your Heart".



Previously:



Exploding Head is available now on Mute.

Review:FLAMING LIPS - Embryonic93%

Flaming Lips: Embryonic (Warner bros.)
review by Matthew Lindsay

Call it willfully perverse career suicide or seeking out new musical frontiers but one thing is undeniable; the Flaming Lips' sprawling new 18-track disc Embryonic is a bold volte face away from the Hanna Barbera, orch-pop they have been mining since 1999's Soft Bulletin. If the day-glo quirkiness was becoming a bit too cloying by 2006's At War With The Mystics, Embryonic is a paradigm-shifting stroke of audacity that will alienate some, but entice others. Critical opinion is already polarized, making it 'vital, complex and new', at least according to Oscar Wilde.

Opening salvo "Convinced Of The Hex" crash lands the listener into the Lips' reconfigured aesthetic. A dense, swirling slice of dystopic psychedelia (imagine Can's "Mushroom" sound-tracking the 'happening' in Midnight Cowboy). This is where krautrock meets the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" in a foreboding slice of nihilism, apparently inspired by repeated viewings of The Night Porter.

The track's ricochet rhythms, sparkling fender rhodes and abrasive guitars are all over the rest of Embryonic. Indeed, "Aquarius Sabotage" could be "Bitches Brew"-era Miles Davis, retooled to the specifications of a garage band. When Alice Coltrane-like harp trills and other sumptuous flourishes seem to tantalizingly hark back to their former technicolour incarnation, they are quickly sucked back into the vortex of the mix. However, it's when they slow things down that the contrast with their former selves becomes most stark. "Evil" is a funereal dirge replete with theremin-on-downers synths and disarming jolts of distortion. This bleak terrain is topped off with a lyric of disenchantment ('people are evil...and they'll hurt you if they can') and a Wayne Coyne vocal of world-weary fragility. There's no reassuring sugarcoating on Coyne's existential musings anymore and The Flaming Lips soundlab here resembles some desolate, teutonic warehouse as opposed to the aural equivalent of Willy Wonka's factory.

Portishead's Third springs to mind as a kindred spirit not just in its palpable sense of unease, its destablizing bursts of noise or in its modus operandi being tearing up one's own rule-book. Both seem to update the ominous, apocalyptic strand of post-summer of love 60's rock. Of course, Embryonic's very structure recalls the profuse miscellany and indulgent creativity that characterized the doubles of that era (the aforementioned "Bitches Brew", "Electric Ladyland"). If The Beatles' White Album is a reference point at all, it's in the radiophonic voices (the lips enlist the services of mathematician Thorsten Wormann for announcements) and the tangential 'turning the dial' collage of Revolution 9 But the Flaming Lips are too liberating a proposition to succumb to slavish homage. Indeed, at one point "Powerless" breaks out into a frazzled guitar solo that recalls Roger McGuinn's channeling of Coltrane on The Byrds' "Eight Miles High". This is no xerox: it mutates into something entirely of its own distorted design.

Nowhere is the comparison with recent Portishead more apparent than in the marauding "See The Leaves" which comes off like camouflaged trip -hop with its furtive groove and rapid-fire drum fills. When it disperses in to a spooky spectral coda, occupying some bizarre midpoint between ELO and Tangerine Dream, the scope of the music on offer here seems breathtaking.

It's not always easy listening and as is entirely befitting of a disc called Embryonic, some tracks seem inchoate, as if they were conceived as they were recorded (it was sculpted largely from jams). But even when the hooks are obfuscated by turgid noise as on "Worm Mountain" (featuring a barely audible MGMT) , an unrelenting love of sonic tricks keeps things propulsive. Similarly, "I Can Be a Frog" veils its John Barry-worthy luxuriant opulence with the muffled animal impressions of Karen O. Embryonic often sounds like the work of several different bands sometimes playing simultaneously (remember the 4-cd Zareika was actually just that). This wall of sound never lapses into sludge simply because their protean grasp of music (what Coyne refers to as the 'psychedelic sword mentality') has a rarefied air about it, flying its freak flag in the face of prosaic ipod conformity.

So much so that two moments of relatively straightforward loveliness are buried amid the mire at the end of the disc. "Silver Trembling Hands" is a delirious ghost ride of a song, its juggernaut beat and b-movie, sci-fi effects sounding like nothing less than some obscure 60's garage band nugget shot through the lens of Luis Bunuel. It then shifts gears to break out into a haze of sun-drenched lysergic pop that is the closest they get here to the Lips of yore. "Watching the Planets" is a vast, strident finale where the otherworldly fantasia of vari-speed vocals is bed-rocked by a drum sound as colossal as Led Zeppelin. Such air-punching swagger suggests a band creatively rejuvenated by their 18-track odyssey.

Embryonic is an old-fashioned beast, a work to be enjoyed in its' entirety, preferably bursting forth from speakers rather than headphones (it can sound cluttered and diminished on an ipod). Its' too easy to suggest that the Lips could have excised some of these excesses and made a more economic record, if they had then it wouldn't be the warped, idiosyncratic thing of beauty that it is. And this is shape-shifting, questing music of the highest calibre.

-Matthew Lindsay, contributer

New RAVEONETTES - The Chosen One

Vice Records and The Raveonettes are offering up the new, previously unreleased track "The Chosen One" for free. "The jittery soda-shop stomp" is not a bad outtake from the new album In and Out of Control.

The Raveonettes - The Chosen One [mp3]

GIANA FACTORY - Trippin

Giana Factory are three girls from Copenhagen who just released the Bloody Game ep on October 12th. It's worth noting that the trio includes lead singer Loui Foo, sister of Sharin Foo of The Raveonettes. But the sound at work here has absolutely no other relation to The Raves. Here we have dark romantic electro pop. The new video for "Trippin" was directed by the OhhMaryMary team.

Giana Factory - "Trippin" from Music for Dreams on Vimeo.

PAPERCUTS - Future Primitive

San Francisco band Papercuts paid a visit to Yours Truly recently and they performed their recent single "Future Primitive". In my opinion, this is one of the very best tracks of the year. Watch the performance and grab the mp3 below.

Papercuts - Future Primitive [mp3]

Papercuts: Future Primitive from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

WARPAINT - Exquisite Corpse

Warpaint are three girls from Los Angeles who are putting out some stunning new music. Minimalist, dreamy, psychedelic, lo-fi canyon-gaze would pretty much describe the sound at work here. A gorgeous new video for the track "Stars" emerged today. I wish I could just project a loop of this clip on my wall all night! Also listen for the beautiful track "Billie Holiday", now in heavy rotation on The Sky Report Radio. The new ep Exquisite Corpse is available now on Manimal Vinyl.

Warpaint - Stars from Adam Harding on Vimeo.

LE CORPS MINCE DE FRANCOISE - Something Golden

Le Corps Mince de Francoise, or LCMDF for short, are an all-girl electro group from Helsinki. Their latest single is "Something Golden", taken from their forthcoming full-length, due in December on Kitsune. The track will also be including on the Kitsune Maison 8 compilation.

MARIONETTES OF SATAN

Marionettes of Satan simply bring it. And their performance tonight at our unofficial CMJ party will be no exception. Their blistering sound and unabashed stage antics will not be lost on the Bushwick crowd this evening. Fuck the playoffs, come experience some real shit. Marionettes of Satan are sure to deliver. See you there!

Marionettes of Satan - Remember Pepper Spray [stream]

Tonight - The Sky Report Unofficial CMJ Showcase

For more information visit facebook.

MeKaniKdolls

MeKaniKdolls are going to be awesome tonight at our unofficial CMJ party. All I have to say is, just come! An easy $4 and a PBR will get you in the mood for a wide array of underground Bushwick music.

EL PERRO DEL MAR - Change of Heart

I've been a fan of El Perro Del Mar since her first record back in 2006. Her unique blend of "melancholic lo-fi twee pop", as they describe her on wikipedia, has always managed to grab me when I'm not paying attention. The new single "Change of Heart" is one of her best compositions to date. It comes from the new LP Love Is Not Pop. Check out the new video for the track below.

postMagic

postMagic are brand new. The latest underground sound coming from Bushwick. This three-piece came together by way of Northeast Kingdom and Burlington, VT. Tonight they play their second ever live show at our unofficial CMJ party. Check out their brand new track "Buzz Around You", streaming now on myspace.

postMagic - Buzz Around You [link]