Gavin B.

Seductive Electronica

Zero 7 is a seductive electronica ensemble that seems to reinvent itself on every studio album. For a couple of years, Zero 7 featured an unknown Australian songbird Sia as vocalist who has forged her own remarkable career as a singer and songwriter since leaving Zero 7.

Zero 7's most recent featured vocalist is another unknown singing sensation with a single word name, Eska. Eska has a winsome but soulful voice and she frequently uses off tempo vocal phrasing & will linger behind the downbeat to savor the final syllable of each lyric. Her unorthodox vocal style creates a leisurely, unhurried mood of seduction. Eska also plays a mean upright squeeze box accordion. Eska's spellbinding powers are well suited to Swing which is played in a jazzy 5/4 (or more correctly 3+2/4) time signature. Needless to say, I'm madly in love with Eska's voice.

Gavin B.

THE PSYCHEDELIC CHRONICLES: PART II

Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters & the CIA Funded "Acid Tests" at Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital


Ken Kesey: great American novelist, Merry Prankster, LSD evangelist, & cultural provocateur

Psychedelic music wasn't introduced as an element of of the LSD subculture until early 1965. From 1959 until 1965, the psychedelic subcultural landscape was populated by members of the literary and visual arts communities & a handful academics studying LSD use as a tool for psychoanalysis. The most notable academics were two Harvard professors, Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert, a pair of research scientists who presided over the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Psilocybin is a mushroom with psychedelic properties which Alpert obtained by piloting his own airplane to Mexico to obtain supplies. In 1963 Alpert & Leary were dismissed by Harvard for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student. After their dismissal Leary & Alpert drifted to California and crossed paths with Ken Kesey a promising author and notorious advocate of universal LSD use.

It all began in 1959, when a talented and promising young writer named Ken Kesey decided to expand his creative horizons by enlisting as a subject in a CIA financed medical study on the effects of LSD. The study was conducted at Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital, San Jose California. At the time Kesey was a master's program candidate in creative writing at the prestigious Stanford University.

Prior to 1959, Kesey appeared to be a paragon of the 1950s Eisenhower era version of the American Dream: Kesey was born & raised in small town Oregon; varsity wrestling star in high school; pledged to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at University of Oregon; married his high school sweetheart shortly before graduating from U. of O., was awarded the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to enroll in post graduate studies at Stanford University. On the surface Kesey appeared to be the incarnation of the all-American boy on the straight and narrow path to becoming a pillar of the community.

All of Ken Kesey's aspirations to traditional success by the conventional standards of the American Dream came to a crashing halt after his participation in the Menlo Park LSD study.

Perhaps the biggest paradox of the Sixties cultural revolution is that American’s primary agency of global imperialism, the CIA, unwittingly gave birth to the psychedelic culture by sponsoring the Menlo Park and countless other studies to evaluate the use of LSD as a truth serum to be used in interrogations of enemy agents.

Journalist David Price examined declassified CIA documents & summarized their contents: The CIA had discovered the existence of LSD from an unnamed insider at the Sandoz Laboratory where a chemist discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD in a lab accident.

LSD (shorthand for lysergic acid diethylamide) was an accidental discovery of research scientist, Albert Hoffman who was an employee of the Swiss based pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories. Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1938 as a medical remedy for respiratory and circulatory ailments and set aside the formula for five years without conducting any test studies. ON April 19, 1943, when Hofmann decided to reexamine his shelved LSD study. While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small quantity through his fingertips and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects. He described what he felt as being:
It was Hoffman's lab accident that gave birth to the psychedelic age.


A vial of Sandoz LSD 25

Ken Kesey was transformed into a psychedelic evangelist upon his first taste of Sandoz LSD 25 and hailed it's value as a tool of spiritual discovery and self enlightenment. Kesey wrangled a job sweeping the floors in the psychiatric ward of the Menlo Park Hospital which allowed him to hijack a large part the hospital's supply of 1.5 million doses of Sandoz LSD. Kesey simply waltzed his broom into the hospital's pharmaceutical supply room and stuffed his pockets with a couple dozen vials of LSD at every possible opportunity. Over three years Kesey estimates he liberated 500,000 doses from the uncounted inventory of LSD at Menlo Park. For the next six years Kesey passed out free vials of LSD 25 to thousands of chemically curious people along the California coast. Each vial yielded dozens of doses when diluted with water. Kesey used an eye dropper to dispense measured doses on sugar cubes, blotter paper or most notoriously in punch mixture Kesey called electric kool aid.

Most of the casual social users of LSD had no idea that Kesey was the source of all of those vials of Sandoz LSD that appeared out of nowhere at social gatherings all over California from 1963 until 1965. Sandoz LSD 25 was the fashionable drug of choice for artists, intellectuals & the social elites at the dawn of the Sixties. The music of choice in the early psychedelic era was improvisational bebop jazz of Monk, Miles & Coltrane which reflected the musical tastes of the Beat Generation peer group who were the earliest users of LSD 25. The psychedelic musical youthquake erupted relatively late in the game.

There's a sidebar story to Kesey's history at Menlo Park. In 1962, Kesey became a notable author when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published. Kesey's book drew largely upon his real life friendships with patients in the psychiatric ward at Menlo Park when he worked there as a janitor. Many of those mentally ill military veterans at the Menlo Park psych ward were recruited as Kesey's fellow guinea pigs in the LSD experiments at the hospital. Kesey was never a patient in the Menlo Park psych ward but the book's irrepressible central character Randle McMurphy, is Kesey's literary self-portrait.

As a result of his new found literary success Kesey was able to purchase a rustic mountain retreat deep in the remote woods of LaHonda in the Big Sur region of northern California. Kesey cultivated an entourage of eccentric LSD advocates he dubbed the Merry Pranksters who took up residence on the grounds of Kesey's property. Kesey and the Pranksters painted an old school bus in psychedelic colors and toured the coast of California spreading the LSD gospel and freaking out the local populous with their hit & run psychedelic pageants staged by Pranksters dressed in elaborate & colorful costumes.

Kesey invited his growing circle of literary & artist friends to his rural retreat to sample LSD in events he called "acid tests." One of the observers was Tom Wolfe, a New York based journalist with a growing reputation. Wolfe's fictional account of his escapades with the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test became a bestseller in 1968. Wolfe didn't even bother to change them names of Kesey and the real life Merry Pranksters in his fictional novel, which was 90% factual journalism & 10% speculative journalism. No journalist has been able to disprove the validity of Tom Wolfe's own claim that he has never taken LSD and only tried marijuana once.

Early on, the psychedelic counterculture appeared to primarily be a literary phenomena, like the Beat movement of the 50s. The earliest participants in Kesey's acid tests were authors like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Generation Beat icon Neil Cassidy, Beat poet Allen Gingsberg and of course Kesey whose promising debut novel made him the lion of the literary world in 1962. For his part, Kesey seemed more interested in being an LSD evangelist and agitprop performance artist for the psychedelic counterculture, rather than basking in the glory of his new found literary success.

Sometime in late 1964 or early 1965 Kesey's pilfered supply of Sandoz LSD was running out and he was in the market for a chemist to mix unlimited supplies of LSD for the acid test events held on his LaHonda ranch property. This is where the real fun begins and Kesey's encounter with the mysterious chemist Stanley Owsley will be the subject of my next installment.


Next Installment: The Psychedelic Chronicles Part III- Owsley, the Grateful Dead & the Psychedelic Music Explosion

Gavin B.

My Favorite Musical Eccentric


Neil Hannon frontman and director of the Divine Comedy, a musical orchestra specializing campy Bacharach style Sixties pop.

Neil Hannon is a pop star that I'm at a rare loss of words to adequately describe. The 39 year old Irish musician has been a mainstay on the fringe of the British indie pop music scene for two decades and I still don't know what to make of his campy musical project, the Divine Comedy. I became aquainted with the Divine Comedy with the release of the album Casanova in 1996. Neil Hannon has also involved himself in projects with other avant garde & electronica artists primarily as a featured vocalist. As of late the Divine Comedy has become a bit less campy and plays a highly polished version of Britpop that has influences in the baroque orchestral music of the Beatles, Brian Wilson and Love.

The first Neil Hannon song that caught my ear on Casanova was Becoming More Like Alfie which was a campy response to Burt Bacharach's song Alfie which he wrote for the sountrack of the 1966 movie with the same name. The Oscar nominated movie strarring a young Michael Caine was about an unrepentant ladies man in swinging London who is forced to come to grips with the consequences of his lifestyle choices. Neil Hannon's Alfie themed song is his own tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to original Bacharach song. This performace of Becoming More Like Alfie features Hannon in a live performance with his Divine Comedy orchestra backing him.




=============================

My second selection is live performance of Hannon with the Yann Tiersen Orchestra. The song is from Tiersen's brilliant score to the French film Amelie. Those familiar the music of Amelie will recognize Les Jours Tristes as the breathtaking main theme played by the Tiersen Orchestra in the film score. The addition of Neil Hannon's lyrics and his vocals are icing on the cake. Unfortunely the copyright police won't allow the visual portion of this live performance on YouTube




Hannon's secret musical weapon is his multi-octave tenor which soars to the upper reaches of the musical scale. His voice had made a featured singer on albums by Air, Yann Tierson, Charlotte Gainsbourgh, God Help the Girl & Scott Walker, a British singer with whom Hannon's voice is frequently compared to.

In my final embedded video Neil performs a show stopping version of David Bowie's Life on Mars as a featured vocialist with the orchestra of French musical icon Yann Tiersen. Tiersen is a kindred spirit and close musical associate of Neil Hannon. Tiersen's thematic noodlings on a pair of toy pianos is the perfect counterpoint to Hannon's expressive voice. I was stunned by Hannon's effortless mastery of the operatic upper register scale and he sings every note without once using falsetto. By some good fortune both the audio and video portion of this live performance was available on YouTube.



==========================


Divine Comedy- A Complete Discography

Fanfare for the Comic Muse – July 1990
Liberation – August 1993
Promenade – March 1994
Casanova – April 1996
A Short Album About Love – February 1997
Fin de Siècle – August 1998
A Secret History... The Best of the Divine Comedy – August 1999
Regeneration – March 2001
Absent Friends – March 2004
Victory for the Comic Muse – June 2006
Bang Goes the Knighthood - May 2010

Thanks to Right Track, Urban Hatemonger, Loathsome Pete & Freebase Dali for their able assistance in helping me get the YouTube embeds fully functional on my blog again.

jackhammer

Kudos for your Neil Hannon post. He is such an underrated musician and lyricist. The Frog Princess is as good as anything Syd Barrett ever did or that Noel Coward wrote lyrics for yet he barely gets a nod in fans circles which is a shame.

As for Zero 7. I personally find them one of the most hit and miss bands out there. Their debut is sublime and as good as Air's Moon Safari in terms of recent dinner table ambience but their follow on When It Falls was very patchy and lacked direction for me. Because of this I never checked out The Garden which was a return to form according to many reviews.

I think artist's such as Bonobo, Jose Padilla and Cinematic Orchestra have cornered that particular market with more gusto.

Awesome write up's as usual though

Divine Comedy at their very best I feel:

__________________

Gavin B.

Stars' Latest Album Deserves a Fair Hearing From Indie Pop Fans


Stars has relocated from Tornoto, to New York & more recently Montreal over the past decade.

Both Pitchfork & AMG gave a mixed review to the Stars' new album The Five Ghosts dismissing the band as moment in 00s indie rock that has passed. Indie pop has lost a lot of ground to electronica over the past decade, but it's hardly on it's last legs. I've never lost my taste for early twee music or some of the more baroque sounding indie pop groups like the Hepburns, Louis Philppe, the Acid House Kings, the Monocrome Set & the Field Mice. The music of those artists is timeless echo chamber of the Sixties pop masters like Burt Bachcarach, Serge Gainsbourg, & Lee Hazelwood. The best music of Stars elevates pop music from commerical product to high art, in the same manner of those early masters of baroque pop.

It may a decade or so but eventually Stars' music will be reassessed in a more favorable light by the music opinion makers.

I've liked The Five Ghosts as much as any other album release of 2010. I particularly like the mysterious & elegantly crafted lyricism of the album's opening cut Dead Hearts.



=====================================

The Five Ghosts isn't quite the unequivocal masterpiece as 2005's Set Yourself on Fire, but it comes close. It was my own introduction to the Stars as a band and I only bought the cd because the album title was irresistible to an aging punk nihilist like myself. I wasn't disappointed and the Orson Wells declaration at the opening of the song Your Ex Lover Is Dead was one of the finest moments in rock music at the dawn of the 21st Century.



=======================================

Bulldog

I'm not exactly an acolyte of the last ten years of indie music (be it pop or not), but I like the sound of these guys. It's certainly the newer song you posted that impressed me the most - dunno about anyone else, but I can hear a more mystical version of Belle and Sebastian in there. Based on the first listen anyway.

I'll keep an eye out for the new one then. Cheers for the heads-up, and thanks again for this little goldmine of a thread

Gavin B.

Bulldog's comparison of Stars to Scottish low-fi folk heroes, Belle & Sebastian is apt. I've always been a big fan of B&S member Isobel Campbell whose solo career has impressed me more than her contributions to B&S. On 1998's The Boy with the Arab Strap, Campbell delivered her first lead vocal, "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" She's my featured artist for today.

Life After Belle & Sebastian

Moderator cut: image removed
Isobel Campbell was a founding member of Belle & Sebastian

Time is Just the Same is from Amorino, Ms. Campbell's second solo effort. At first the orchestra arrangements of her folk music reminded me of the commercialized hootenanny folk music of Sixties artists like Bob Lind, Glenn Yarborough & Tim Hardin. The video even looks like a knock off of an old Sixties music video. The quirky songs on Amorino are alluring and after a few listenings the off-kilter orchestral tracks begin to have their own unique charm.



====================================

In 2006 Isobel Campbell began a musical partnership with Mark Lanegan the front man for the Screaming Trees. They were an unlikely duo, Isobel, the classically trained cellist with the ethereal voice & her striking wholesome Jean Seberg inspired fashion look, was a sharp contrast to Lanegan the scruffy, gravel voiced singer for the grunge era band, the Screaming Trees. It those sharp contrasts that made the Campbell & Lanegan such a compelling pair of performers. On the haunting Black Mountain, Isobel sings and plays the cello part.



=================================

The bluesy Come On Over (Turn Me On) demonstrates how Lanegan's Nick Cave-like baritone provides an erotic counterpoint to Isobel's soft and breathy vocals.



==================================



Hawk which was released last Tuesday is the newest release from Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan. I haven't spent enough time with the album to give it a proper review but so far I'm impressed with a couple of the three or four songs I've selectively listened to.

Complete Discography of Isobel Campbell

With Belle & Sebastian
Tiger Milk (1996)
If You're Feeling Sinister (1996)
The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998)*
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (2000)
Storytelling (2002)

Isobel Campbell Studio albums
The Green Fields of Foreverland (1999) (as The Gentle Waves)
Swansong For You (2000) (as The Gentle Waves)
Amorino (2003)*
Milkwhite Sheets (2006)*

Studio Albums With Mark Lanegann
Ballad of the Broken Seas (2006)
Sunday at Devil Dirt (2008)*
Hawk (2010)

* indicates the most notable album releases

Gavin B.

Jesca Hoop: A Leap Off the Musical Grid


Jesca Hoop- The New Weird American

Jesca Hoop was brought to the attention of the prestigious jazz & folk label by no less than Tom Waits, who became a career mentor for Ms. Hoop after hearing her rather unconventional musical approach when she was a nanny for his children. AMG lauded Jesca Hoop's off the grid approach calling her one of the "New Weird Americans" along with other musical iconoclasts like Devendra Banhart, Faun Fables & Joanna Newsom.

In a world where the Katie Perrys & the Lady Ga Gas work overtime to cultivate the image of weirdness, Jesca Hoop is the picture of authentic weirdness that isn't defined by haute couture fashion or shameless posturing for the paparazzi.

Jesca Hoop's first major label release Hunting My Dress was released late last month and copy fell into my hands a couple weeks ago & I've been playing it non-stop every since. On the song The Kingdom you can hear how she's thrown together her own musical operandi from scratch with nods to artists like Björk, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey & Tom Waits.



=======================================

Big Fish is from an 2007 indie release Kismet. At the time Jesca was still the Waits family nanny & Tom Waits offspring & their playmates are featured in the video. There's a definite Waits/New Orleans 2nd line jazz musical influence in this song.



=======================================

My final selection is a radio performance of Seed of Wonder also from the 2007 Kismet album. Notice how she effortlessly navigates the ever changing themes, key changes & tempos of this dark serpentine song.



======================================


Hunting My Dress, Jesca Hoop's latest album was released on July 27, 2010 & it gets a 8.5 rating on a scale of 10.

Jesca Hoop- A Complete Discography
Silverscreen Demos (2204)
Kismet (2007)
Hunting My Dress (2010)

Gavin B.

2010 Summer Reading Notes & Book List

I've had a couple of weeks off work & I'm caught up with all my short term writing projects which has given me time to pursue my two favorite leisure activities, reading & listening to music. Today I'm going to cover a few of the books I've read over the summer & my next post will contain some of my favorite music from the summer of 2010.

Review of the Kindle E-Reader

I recently bought a Kindle reader & I'm hooked on it. The biggest benefit of the Kindle is you don't have to lug around any more heavy tomes or wrestle around in bed with 800 page book that weighs 12 pounds. The book prices are okay. At Amazon a book with a $30 list price can be downloaded for between $9.99 & $11.99 but there's a lot of grumbling about the pricing practices of the publishing houses here in the USA. Now that people are starting to use E-readers the list price of book downloads are steadily ticking upward. The price of the Kindle, however, is ticking downwards. Two weeks after I purchased a Kindle for $249, Amazon cut the price of the same model of Kindle to $189. Since then Amazon has developed a non-wireless version of the Kindle that you can synch directly from your computer processor for $139.

Another advantage of an E-Reader is that nearly every book written prior to 1930 is pubic domain and therefore available as a free download. There are a couple of non-profit literacy projects that are putting all the great books of the world into the digital format so people can access those books for free. As a result I've gotten free downloads of books by some of my favorite authors like Poe, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Keats, Shelly, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce & Mark Twain. Now for the book reviews:
==============================

Gavin B's Book Notes for the Summer 2010



Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes- Matterhorn is written by an ex-Vietnam vet who spent almost 40 years putting together the great American novel about the Vietnam War. It's probably the best anti-war epic since Tolstoy's War & Peace. This novel isn't escapist fare & Marlantes' lucid storytelling is so vivid that reading the novel is an exhausting & harrowing experience but it's never dull. This book will make you feel you've done your own tour of duty in Nam by the time you get to the last page.
===================

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The recently deceased Swedish author Larsson's "The Girl Who" suspense/thriller trilogy have become the biggest sellers in the publishing world since the Harry Potter books. I read all three books of the trilogy early in the summer. They're great mysteries with an alluring & mysterious female computer hacker as the central character. At times Larsson will give you more information that you ever wanted to learn about Swedish politics but it all fits into overarching storyline of the three books.
===================

FDR by Jean Edward Smith- Every American high school graduate is aware of the historical significance of Franklin Roosevelt's 4 term presidency but can probably tell you little more than he was president during the Great Depression & World War II. Since our current worldwide economic situation has been compared to the Great Depression as of late, I decided to learn more about Roosevelt, his life & times. There are 3 or 4 first rate biographies of Roosevelt in print & after agonizing over the choices, I selected the Jean Edward Smith bio because it profiles Roosevelt from a psychosocial perspective & attempts to explain why a man from such a privileged blue blood family would end up become a traitor to his class and become a hero of the downtrodden & oppressed classes. It had a lot to do with Roosevelt's battle with polio which left him immobilized & in a wheelchair for his adult life. The are many parallels to Barack Obama & our current lean economic times. Roosevelt was also the target of hate mongering by the extreme right & the corporate titans who attempted to obstruct the New Deal & economic recovery in the same manner currently being used to deadlock Barack Obama.
====================



The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin- This 600+ page book is the first authoritatively written history of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and the epic cast of characters that were responsible for the hippie, LSD counterculture. It's the best history of the Sixties revolution I've ever read.
=================

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- by Thomas Wolfe- Since I've been researching the origins of the psychedelic culture over the summer, I decided to reread the book that started it all. Wolfe's 1968 novel is about renegade author Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, LSD chemist Stanley Owsley & Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead's role in pscydelicizing most of the state of California in 1965 & 1966 with their public acid test events. It's supposedly fiction but Wolfe doesn't even bother to change the names of any of the books central characters. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a classic relic of those bygone days when LSD was legal & live rock & roll was free to the public.
====================



The Passage: A Novel by Justin Cronin- The Passage is an epic horror/apocalypse novel that has been compared by many to Steven King's epic apocalypse novel The Stand. I'm a sucker for apocalypse novels & this one also has vampire themes. Cronin was a young and well regarded rising star among the highbrow literati, so his decision to dabble in the pulp fiction horror genre made his book the most anticipated book event of the early summer. He reportedly got a 1 million dollar advance from Ballantine Books to write the book & Cronin had optioned the film rights to the book to Hollywood überproducer Ridley Scott for another cool million before The Passage was even published. Paying out that much money for film rights to an unpublished book is unheard of in the film industry. I didn't like the book nearly as much as a lot of others did. Cronin took nearly 800 pages to tell a story that could have been told in 400 pages. It was an enjoyable read and I probably would have liked it better if it were written by Stephen King an author with less of a literary reputation than Cronin, but after reading The Passage, I'm wondering if King isn't the better writer of the two.
====================

Tomorrow or maybe the next day, I'll post my music notes for the summer of 2010.

Gavin B.

Summer Music Picks 2010

Here's my list of 28 songs that have gotten frequent rotation on my radio show & in my Zune player over the Summer of 2010. All of the songs are available for free download at my Media Fire page. See the end of my post for details on downloading songs.

===============================

I'll Keep It With Mine- Dean & Britta Great cover of a Bob Dylan song most identified with Nico who performed it on her classic Chelsea Girls debut album. It appears on Dean & Britta's latest album 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests.

Round & Round- Ariel Pink's Haunted Pink Graffiti- Even if Ariel Pink has crafted a more accessible sound & widened there audience with the release of Round & Round, the band remains stubbornly quirky & unconventional. This band is worthy of the lavish praise by music opinion makers.

Boyfriend- Best Coast- The Best Coast is an unapologetic primitive garage band that will win your heart with their ragged low tech soundmix & their earnest simplicity.

Praire Mussettle- Black Prairie Black Prairie is a neo-traditionalist folk group founded by three members of the Decemberists. They play an odd mix of swing, French cafe music, bluegrass, pop, and blues. Most of the album is instrumentals but their fresh approach to the folkways is joy to behold.

Dancing With the Mentally Ill- Club 8 A dark & mysterious offering from The People's Record by Club 8, everybody's favorite Swedish indie pop of the moment.

Memories- David Guetta & Kid Cudi Memories is from David Guetta's latest, One Love a sublime set of dance oriented electronica from the Parisian club deejay.

Go Back To School- Get Back Guinozzi! Carpet Madness by the French/British rock electronica project is one of my favorites of the year.

Rayuela- Gotan Project Ruyuela is from the Argentinian electronica/tango fusion group's third album Gotan Project 3.0.

Balloon Girl- Hungry Lucy Hungry Lucy is darkside electonica group that has made several sublimely beautiful albums that have gone unnoticed. Balloon Girl is from Hungry Lucy's latest & best album Pulse of the Earth.

Feast of the Heart- Jesca Hoop Ms. Hoop's latest album the idiosyncratic Hunting My Dress is my favorite of the year so far. She has an experimental approach & she reminds be of an English language version of the brilliant Argentinian singer/songwriter Juana Molina.

Golden Virginia- Jj The oddly named Jj offers off kilter pop on their latest album Jj No3. This band requires a learning curve to appreciate & one can only fully appreciate their deconstructed after several listening sessions.

Madame Van Damme- Lightspeed Champion Lightspeed is a black musician who's hard to place in a single category because he's equally comfortable singing & playing R&B, rock & roll, folk music & even cabaret & Broadway show tunes. He does a version of Flesh Failures from the Broadway show Hair that's a revelation. Madame Van Damme almost sounds like a 70s glam rock song.

White Heron- Mountain Man Mountain Man is another neo-traditionalist folk group that has three female vocalists with haunting otherworldly voices. Despite the low tech, 4 track sound Mountain Man's Made In the Harbor is a mesmerizing musical statement.

Dog With A Rope- Quantic Presenta Flowering Inferno Dog with A Rope is title song from the new album from QPFI the versatile Caribbean music ensemble that plays everything from dub reggae, to mambo, to Trinidad style socca. Most of their music is bathed in crashing waves of dubwise echo effects.

I Am a Child- Red House Red Horse it part neo traditional folk, Americana & indie rock. This beautiful cover of the classic Neil Young song is from their self titled debut album.

Funk De Umbigada- Saravah Soul Saravah Soul is a muscular Afrobeat jazz ensemble that recalls the blazing riddims of Fela & King Sunny best moments. Their new album Cultura Impura is one of the best of 2010.

Hold Tight Jamaica- Ska Cubano Ska Cubana is versatile Cuban band that is equally at home playing ska, Afro-Cuban styles, mambo & South American cumbia dance music. Their album Mambo Ska is essential to fans of ska or Latin dance music.

King of Spain - Tallest Man on Earth Tallest Man on Earth is Swedish folk singer Kristian Matsson who writes music & sings music that sounds like a lot like Bob Dylan circa 1963. His latest album The Wild Hunt has gotten critical nods and expanded his cult of followers. I think Matsson is on the tipping point of a big career break.

Struck Dumb- The Futureheads Originally produced by the Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill the Futurehead still retain much of their revolutionary fervor & post punk edge on their latest album The Chaos released 6 years beyond their stunning 2004 debut album.

The Queen of Lower Chelsea- The Gaslight Anthem This band reminds me of a UK version of Springsteen's E-Street Band in 1973. A lot of the song themes & music are similar.

Narcissus in a Red Dress- The Like An all girls garage band that often sounds like one of the early Phil Specter girl groups.

The Video Department- The Radio Department Elegant electronic fused pop from another promising Swedish band.

Black Smoke- Tindersticks Tindersticks are the old soldiers of early 90's chamber rock movement. What amazes me about Falling Down a Mountain, Tindersticks' latest album is bands rarely make 10th albums that are this good. This album is way too good for a band that's been at it for 20 years & I hope they reach a wider audience with this stunning album.

Causers of This Thing- Toro y Moi Causers of This Thing is the title song from the latest effort by Chaz Bundrick a South Carolina bedroom studio musician who plays dreamy electronica pop. He's been compared to other electronic rockers like Cut/Copy, Neon Indian, & Washed Out. I know very little about Mr. Bundrick except that I really like his stubbornly individualistic musical vision.

Single's Bar- Tracey Thorn Tracey Thorn vocalist for the popular electronica pop group Everything But the Girl has spent most of the decade raising children and has said she doesn't intend to go on the road with her latest solo release Love & It's Opposite. It's too bad because her latest set of songs rival those of Elvis Costello for keen eyed observations & bittersweet commentary on the nature of contemporary adult romantic relationships. Tracey is proof that rock music is still a continuing career option at age 48.

Live In Dreams- Wild Nothing Yet another Swedish indie pop group but their album Gemini is my favorite of the half-dozen or so Swedish albums I've reviewed for the Summer of 2010.

You can listen to and download all of the songs I've reviewed for the Summer of 2010 at my Media Fire web space at Gavin B @ Media Fire There are 28 songs on two pages & I did few test downloads & got a quick and effortless download of each file in under a minute. If you're having problems accessing the page or downloading the songs, let me know on this thread & I'll help you out.