Today's Hotness: Hush Delirium, Infinity Girl

>> While certain indie rock elder statesperson are content to mount nostalgic (and sometimes quite lucrative) reunion shows, Mark Gardener of early 90's British shoegaze titans Ride has taken an interesting alternate route. After an "exile" from music following the dissolution of Ride, and with only sporadic forays since, Mr. Gardener has returned -- not with a band, however, but rather as co-curator of a music and art collective called Hush Delirium. The cohort's aptly titled debut The Taster is a self-released effort (and for a limited time, free to download here) bearing a nifty premise. Musicians within the collective each compose an atmospheric piece that is then used as inspiration for a painting. The result is a multimedia installation that tours galleries bringing shoegaze-inspired aural headspace to arts patrons, and presumably anyone else who walks through the door. Among others, the collective features the art of Hush Delirium founder Simon Welford, whose artwork is likely familiar to Ride fans. Other participating musicians include Adam Franklin of Swervedriver, Aziz Ibrahim of The Stone Roses and Dean Garcia of Curve, making this elite new club one of the swirliest and psychedelic currently going. Gardener's own piece on The Taster, "3rd Floor Elevation," grooves on a Brian Jonestown Massacre-styled, heroin-cool groove, while Mr. Ibrahim's "Heavens Rain" is a meditative sitar instrumental that echoes the wanderings of The Rolling Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Cult of Dom Keller and SPC ECO (a moniker used by the aforementioned Mr. Garcia) turn in more traditional songs. One of the real gems on this set, however, is Jaq Gallier's rainy, female-led "Wild Is The Wind." Opening with ambient vocal sibilance and lilting background hums, the brief, almost-folksy tune works marvels with a gentle minimalism. Overall, The Taster is a great introduction to a hopefully thriving multimedia enterprise from an exciting community of artists merging their influences and styles as a means of looking forward instead of back. -- Edward Charlton



>> Boston-based shoegaze giants Infinity Girl today revealed details about a forthcoming EP. The quartet will self-release next week the short collection Just Like Lovers, which includes five songs and is the band's second official release of the year; the quartet issued its brilliant full-length debut Stop Being On My Side in May [review]. The new set (whose cover art you can inspect here) includes the tunes "Untitled (July)," "Taking Nothing," "Read Yr Mind," "Summer Gold" and "Not My Hang," and it will be feted with a sure-to-be-tremendous release show next week featuring Boston(-area) scene luminaries including power blues drone lords The New Highway Hymnal, noise rock behemoths Soccer Mom and the brilliant guitar wranglers Speedy Ortiz, who Monday celebrated the anniversary of the band's very first show. The release show next week at TT The Bear's Place in Cambridge, Mass., may be one of the few remaining times we'll see Infinity Girl before drummer Sebastian Modak leaves the country for an extended period, so all the more reason to get out and see this ridiculously great slate of bands. Full details of the show are at this Facebook event page, so click over and pledge your allegiance. We are given to understand that Just Like Lovers will be mastered between now and next week, and we hope to have some sort of music to share with you before too long. In the meantime, there's always Stop Being On My Side, which we encourage you to revisit via the embed below.

Today's Hotness: CNC, Van Gumby, Portastatic

[PHOTO CREDIT: Zuzia Skoczek] >> As our 2003 trashing of the debut by poptrash audioporn puppets T.A.T.U. suggests, we are interested in learning about music scenes in non-English-speaking countries. So we were eager to listen to Polish shoegaze duo CNC when we received a pitch from their organization late last year announcing the November release of the new EP No Mood. The band casts itself as "shoegaze psych-pop" (its MySpace blurb charmingly promises "same f*cking riff again"), and we suppose that is a pretty apt description, although we hear elements of straight guitar pop in "Magenta Ants" and even Darla Records-styled ambient trip-hop (Junior Varsity KM, Sweet Trip) in the icy gleam of the droning title track. About CNC we know little. The act is comprised of Borys Dejnarowicz (also a principal behind CNC's label Draw Records) and Piotr Maciejewski, and we're told its music isn't typical of what is going on in Polish popular music (since they are a shoegaze band, this does not surprise us, after all, where is shoegaze typical?). Typical or not, we think there are more than enough sparkling moments to warrant recommending to your attention No Mood. CNC has permitted us to offer a teaser, so we are posting below the title track.

CNC -- "No Mood" -- No Mood
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[buy No Mood from one of these various outlets 1, 2, 3, 4]

>> On the day that we read of Gumby creator Art Clokey's death, we received our second email missive from Florida-based indie pop quartet Van Gumby. Odd coincidence. We had been mildly intrigued by Van Gumby's prior release "Mostly Chimp," but had doubts as to whether the home-spun-sounding production effectively presented the combo's music. Van Gumby's new EP She Has Arrived is a sonic step forward, and the four songs clearly benefit from clearer production. The title track, written in London in 2008, is a mid-tempo strummer appointed with a surf guitar lead that will fit nicely into your picnic playlist once warmer weather arrives (it is 21 degrees fahrenheit in Cambridge, Mass., as we type this). The second track "Astrogirl" is an acoustic ballad with tons of phaser on the vocal. The phaser is a little distracting, but the Oberst-y vocal, synth and melodica make up for it. The highlight of the four tunes is "Seasons Go" (co-written by band fronter Spencer Tricker and Shomik Chakrabarti) which recreates the chiming electric guitar lead over acoustic strumming that underpinned the title track, but with more insistent pacing and a weary vibe that reminds us of some of our favorite Okay Paddy tracks (Van Gumby cites Teenage Fanclub, Stone Roses and Blur as influences on this latest collection). You can stream the entire She Has Arrived EP at the Van Gumby Bandcamp page right here, at which page you may also purchase tracks for a price of your choosing. Van Gumby has graciously allowed us to offer "Seasons Go," so have a listen.

Van Gumby -- "Seasons Go" -- She Has Arrived EP
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[download/purchase Van Gumby releases here]

>> While we expect you have seen this file all over the Interzizzles by now, we couldn't ignore the fact that Portastatic has released a free download of its cover of Destroyer's amazing "Foam Hands." The original was one of our top songs of 2008. Merge Records is selling the track as part of Portastatic's Make It Sound In Tune digital-only covers EP, the proceeds of which will go to benefit certain charities selected by subscribers to the SCORE! subscription service.

Portastatic -- "Foam Hands" -- Make It Sound In Tune EP
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[purchase various Portastatic musics right here]

Today's Hotness: The Cribs, The Couriers, The Stone Roses

>> It's been a long time since we've thrown together an odds n' sods post, mostly due to our increasing use of Twitter to deal with smaller news items. You should follow us at @clickyclicky, yeh?

>> We've never fully gotten behind West Yorkshire, England-based indie rock quartet The Cribs, perhaps because they've never had a domestic record deal? Maybe they have and we're just lazy? Whatever the reason, we've been reading raves in the UK-based blogs we follow, and then there was that business about Johnny Marr -- who is sort of famous, yeh? -- becoming a full-time member of the band. They've covered The Replacements and collaborated with Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. All that piqued our interest. However, it took the freely available, firestorm of a track "We Were Aborted" to move us from "interested in the band" to "on Ebay to look for their new record." The track -- upbeat, guitar-heavy and with the sort of desperate and shouty vocals that draw us like a moth to a flame -- is a promo cut from the band's fourth full-length Ignore The Ignorant, which was released in the UK by Wichita Sept. 7. The new record entered the UK Top 10 last week, according to the quartet's web dojo, and the band is touring the U.K. to support the record release through mid-October. We think you'll dig the track, so here it is:

The Cribs -- "We Were Aborted" -- Ignore The Ignorant
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[buy Ignore The Ignorant and other Cribs releases from Banquet Records UK right here]

>> Compadre Jimmy Carl wrote us with a tip in recent weeks about a dynamite power pop track he'd heard on MIT's 88.1 WMBR-FM Cambridge by an outfit called The Couriers. This name was new to us, but it only took one listen to concur with Jimmy Carl's assessment. The New York-based quartet's "Time Away From Time" is an insanely catchy rocker that pushes a number of the right buttons, including piling every odd time signature one can think of next to each other while still delivering a lethally melodic attack. The band issued its debut --- and perhaps only -- record Stay These Couriers in 2005. How we missed this track for the last four years is something of a mystery to us, but people we can not be everywhere and hear everything! Which is why we dutifully distribute props to Jimmy Carl for bring The Couriers and their song to our attention. It is unclear whether the band is still a going concern, as the most recent show listed at its Internet Home Page was in December, and that show is referred to as a reunion show. Nevertheless, "Time Away From Time" rocks most steadfastly, it is available for free from the band, and we'll save you a trip and post it below.

The Couriers -- "Time Away From Time" -- Stay These Couriers
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[buy The Couriers' music from the band right here]

>> We are enjoying listening to the expanded reissue of The Stone Roses' epic self-titled debut, but we have a hard time adjusting to the running order not including "Elephant Stone." The song was on the U.S. version of the original release, but apparently not the original U.K. version. A demo of "Elephant Stone" is packaged with the second CD of the expanded reissue, but the absence of the proper version -- which the liners to the U.S. version tell us was produced by New Order's Peter Hook -- is hard for us to get used to.

>> Very alert readers may recall that when we first met The Hush Now the band was recording its sophomore set last summer. During the evening we sat in on the sessions, fronter Noel Kelly and his cohort were tracking a tune called "The Atheist." The track was noticeably absent from Constellations, The Hush Now's sophomore set that will finally be released next month (read our review here). Well, we caught up with Mr. Kelly after The Hush Now's set supporting The Beatings last weekend and asked him what happened to the track, and he said it will potentially be used as a b-side for a forthcoming single. The quintet's single "Hoping And Waiting," taken from Constellations, has already made some waves in the specialty radio charts.