I suspect this news is a bit old, but Japan-based twee IDM pajama pop duo Lullatone have a new limited edition single out, the “official soundtrack to Hello Kitty Black Wonder”, whatever the hell that is (it sounds awfully goth for Hello Kitty). You can listen to the song on the Lullatone website, and if so inclined, pick the single up for six bucks while you’re there. It’s what you’d expect from a Lullatone instrumental, gentle cute and whimsical.
Posts Tagged Twee Pop
New Lullatone
New Music
Some stuff I’ve picked up recently:
Slowdive, Morningrise
My Little Airport, Zoo Is Sad, People Are Cruel – Catchy, delightful indie pop from Hong Kong. Really great.
Longwave, Life of the Party
Morningrise
Zoo Is Sad, People Are Cruel
Life Of The Party
One last batch of new music from ’08, Part 1
Wrapping up the last of my music purchases from ’08, in two parts to keep things a little more coherent. This post will stick to the indie pop, as the indie pop buying spree that started before Christmas lasted a bit after the holiday. I like my indie pop in small doses, so most of these are singles and EPs:
Bricolage, “Footsteps” b/w “Night Falls With Vertigo” – I know nothing about this band, except that they sound a lot like Orange Juice, and I think they’re from Scotland.
Lorelei, Asleep EP
Heavenly, P.U.N.K. Girl
Marine Research, Sounds from the Gulf Stream
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart EP – Another band I know basically nothing about, but this 2007 EP sounds pretty good. Noisy, jangly guitar pop. So far my favorite thing here.
Footsteps
Asleep EP
P.U.N.K. Girl
Sounds From The Gulf Stream
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart EP
Addendum to my top discoveries of ’08
Writing yesterday’s post about new bands I “discovered” this past year (yes, the same way Columbus “discovered” America), I debated for a while whether or not to include some bands that weren’t exactly new to me, but that I really got into this year. Ultimately I decided not to include them, but to give them a separate post instead. So here they are:
Aberdeen
Aberdeen — I used to hear “Toy Tambourine” on KXLU back in the mid-90′s and really liked it, but I never picked up anything by the band. A few months ago I picked up a few of their early Sarah singles off eMusic, and have been really enjoying their British-influenced guitar jangle. I wrote a bit about their first single here. MySpace.
Rocketship — This group had a couple songs on the Slumberland comp Why Popstars Can’t Dance that I absolutely loved (the comp was basically my intro to indie pop). I’d always intended to pick up their full-length A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness, but never got around to it. Having finally picked it up — again, off eMusic — I absolutely love it. One of the cool things about those two Popstars tracks is that, while they’re both basically indie shoegaze, they were really different — “Your New Boyfriend” was awkward, lovelorn indie pop with shoegaze effects layered over it, while “Like A Dream” was a more hypnotic, heavy track that would have fit well on several of the classic early 90′s British shoegaze albums. A Certain Smile follows up on this diversity, swinging between noisy twee and sophisticated, spacey compositions. MySpace.
Blonde Redhead
Blonde Redhead — I actually used to play these guys occasionally on my college radio show in the late 90′s, but I never really thought of them as much other than a Sonic Youth knockoff (and I was never particularly into Sonic Youth). But I picked up 23
Slumberland
I’ve been really behind on my blog reading lately, but I wanted to belatedly throw out a pointer to this interview on the finest kiss with Mike Schulman of the Slumberland Records, even though it’s almost a month old now.
Slumberland was the first indie pop record label I was ever really aware of, due to the excellent Why Popstars Can’t Dance comp, which my kid sister passed on to me in ’94 or ’95 (damn her for being cooler than me). It was a big stepping stone towards indie pop for me, so I’m pretty stoked that they’ve started putting out records again.
A bit more Linus’ Blanket
Story Of Dogs
I wrote a few weeks back about Korean indie pop band Linus’ Blanket, whose EP semester I really love. As I said then, they don’t seem to have a very deep discography, but I’ve managed to track down one more song, “Don’t Call It Puppy Love”, a cute bit of pop fluff with whispery vocals, strummed guitars, hand claps, and a bit of whistling.
It’s a very sweet song, and quite enjoyable, though it seems a bit light-weight in comparison to the tracks off semester, with a less ambitious arrangement and simpler production.
The song comes from a 2007 compilation called Story Of Dogs, on Korea’s Pastel Records (which I keep hearing great things about). The compilation (and its sister disc, Story Of Cats) is apparently a benefit for animal rights agencies, and yeah, all the songs are about dogs. Or so I’m told, since I can’t read Korean. Anyway, I’d guess that the band whipped this song out quickly, to match the album’s theme, which would explain its relative simplicity.
The rest of the album covers a fairly diverse amount of pop styles. I’ve only managed to give a few of the songs a good listen — mostly the ones with English band names and song titles, actually, since my ancient (~2002) MP3 player can’t handle unicode — but there are good tracks here by Elena (cheerful, slightly loony bossa nova pop), the Peppertones (upbeat electro-pop), Apls (enjoyable dance pop, somewhat marred by a dull rap in the middle eight), Lee Han Chul (brisk folk), and No Reply (narcotic bossa nova). There’s probably more good stuff there that I haven’t discovered yet.
Linus’ Blanket
I recently stumbled on Korean indie pop band Linus’ Blanket, and have really fallen for them. They play a jangly, wispy sort of pop music, twee in spirit but with stronger songwriting and musicianship than that label often implies.
So far all I’ve managed to find is their 2004 EP semester. The material is “light pop” in the best sense of the term: not too challenging, but catchy, charming, and fun to listen to. There are bouncy guitar songs like “Christmas Train” and “Summer Has Gone By”, soft bossa nova sway on “Blanket Song”, and even an instrumental, “Purple Scent”, that hints at surf music. The only song I’m not sure about is “Picnic”, which is possibly too chirpy and saccharine for its own good.
As far as I know, beyond this EP all they’ve put out is a four-song single Labor In Vain in 2006, and a track (“Don’t Call It Puppy Love”) on a compilation of songs about dogs. According to their website (which has a bit of English on it), they’re working on a full-length right now that should come out some time in 2009.
Aberdeen
Byron
I’m still trying to get my thoughts together about the My Bloody Valentine show last night. Hopefully I’ll have something up tomorrow or the next day.
Meanwhile, I mentioned a few days ago picking up a couple early Aberdeen singles on eMusic over the weekend. I’ve been listening to the first one, “Byron”, a ton since then. I actually have a weird history with this single, as I heard second track “Toy Tambourine” a couple times on KXLU back in ’94 or ’95, and was quite taken with it. I didn’t pick up a copy, though, and of course Sarah folded in 1995 and it got really hard to find records by their bands. When I starting DJing on college radio in 1996, one of my weirder reasons for doing so was to get an opportunity to hear the single again, from the station’s library – mercilessly crushed, I might add, as they didn’t have a copy of it anyway (blessedly, they did have a pile of rare Jawbreaker tracks).
The irony is, when the compilation What Do I Wish For Now?
I like it, though – the entire single is excellent, in fact. “Toy Tambourine” is actually the most twee of the three tracks, with a shuffling beat and a rather chirpy guitar part countering the rather melancholy vocal. “Fran” is a nice bit of jangle pop, elevated by some wonderfully melodic guitar. But “Byron” is easily my favorite of the three, with circular drumming and vaguely funky bass – reminiscent of the UK baggy craze from a few years earlier – underpinning an otherwise shimmering piece of dream pop. It’s really quite well done and masterful.
Lullatone
The Bedtime Beat
Dammit, I hate it when I find out about a “new” album that came out six months ago! In this case, it’s Lullatone’s The Bedtime Beat
Even more frustrating, their MySpace page has a really awesome remix of “Pajama Party Pop” which comes from the previously unheard of (by me) P-A-J-A-M-A In The USA tour EP (great name), which of course I’ll likely never have a chance to listen to. ざんねん！
Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous
Lullatone is Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida, a boy-girl duo from Japan. Their music is quiet and sweet and ridiculously cute, with hushed awkward vocals, nursery rhyme melodies, and tinkly instrumentation. It really does sound like lullabies, and should be entirely too cute and saccharine by several orders of magnitude. But in fact I adore the aptly named Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous
Also: I used to play it to help me sleep. Seriously.
