September 2, 2007

Today's Hotness: The A-Sides, The Answering Machine, Sigur Ros

The A-Sides>>[PHOTO CREDIT] Our big day-job goings-on have kept us from telling you the important news that you can stream The A-Sides' forthcoming sophomore set Silver Storms in its entirety right now over at Philebrity. We haven't even streamed it yet ourselves, although we did catch the studio version of the Philadelphia indie rock phenom's new tune "We're The Trees" on Jon Solomon's consistently excellent Local Support podcast a week ago. The Philadelphia Weekly here has an interesting question-and-answer with a couple of the guys from the band, and the most up-to-date fall tour dates were recently posted at The A-Sides blog here. The A-Sides will play the Middle East in Cambridge, Mass. on Nov. 4; Silver Storms will be released Sept. 18. We're checking our mailbox every day, oh great promo Gods -- please don't disappoint us. For the 10th time, here's an MP3 for "Cinematic," a track off the new record.

The A-Sides -- "Cinematic" -- Silver Storms
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>> The beer-drinking young folks in Manchester, UK-based trio The Answering Machine are easily as charming as their music, if this video (which takes forever to load) posted at the V Magazine site is any indication. The negative rap on this band is that they are very derivative of The Strokes, but we don't buy it. First of all, The Answering Machine appears to still not have a drummer. Additionally, saying an act is derivative of The Strokes basically ignores 30 years of rock history. But that's a conversation for another day. The Answering Machine recently did a BBC radio session -- you can hunt around the band's MySpace wigwam for the details and a link.

>> The trailer for the Sigur Ros documentary "Heima" has a very Harry Potter vibe working in it. Check it out here. And we mean the HP movies, of course -- we've yet to read any of the books. But the Sigur Ros video is stunning. Generally, we have to be in a specific mood to really get down to Sigur Ros, but this video is pretty inspiring, Spine-tingling even. Is this Icelandic band now out-Pink Floyding mid-'70s Floyd? If not, they're damn close.

>> We're in receipt of the new (or new-ish) Wombats EP. You Ain't No Picasso has the video of "Let's Dance To Joy Division" posted right here. With its iffy lyrics, it's not the sure shot that The Wombats' unstoppable cut "Moving To New York" is, but the track is still amply peppy. And the end of the video has some compelling visual surprises. Check it out here.

>> One of the things getting us through the 13 and 14-hour days we've been putting in at the day job recently is the forthcoming record from indie rockers Pinback. It is called Autumn of the Seraphs and it is due on Touch and Go Sept. 11. We hope to have the time to review the record in full sometime next month, but in the event we don't have the time (a second deadline-sensitive project is already in line behind the current Sisyphean task, and this is all in addition to our usual workload) we can tell you that a lot of the review will or would focus on the tone and energy of the set. Where other bands would use distortion, Pinback just dials back the edge and hits you with the clean. Where most other bands would deploy the fuzz-bass liberally to make their rock points strongly, Pinback uses in many places what sounds like one of those acoustic hollow-body electric basses that were popular in underground music circa 10,000 Maniacs. On top of it all, we love how Pinback's Rob Crow rocks the flight suit for the video for "From Nothing To Nowhere." Check it out here.

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