Shaking Through Vol2 Ep8: Family Band from Weathervane Music on Vimeo.

The awesomely talented eMusic Selects alum Family Band took a trip to Philly a few weeks ago, teaming up with Grizzly Bear‘s Dan Rosen to arrange and record a new song live in the studio. The resulting song, like all things Family Band, is both gorgeous and unsettling, but my favorite part of the above video is watching the band push and pull and fight a little and try to work out a song while the clock is ticking. It’s a great, up-close look at the writing and recording process. After you’ve watched it, go here to download the finished product and watch another outtake.

BOOM! Today! Brand new eMusic Selects form our old friends Army Navy! The last Army Navy record was a bit of a surprise hit on eMusic, and so when the band found themselves label-less around the time of record number two, adding them to our Selects Roster was a no-brainer.

And, man oh man, did they ever deliver. They somehow made a second record that topped their debut, fueled by a tumultuous relationship that tossed around frontman Justin Kennedy over the course of 2009 (he and I talk a bit more about it in this interview).

If you loved the shimmering guitars and hooks-for-days approach of the band’s debut, you’ll find even more to love here: angelic choruses, pristine hooks and heartsick lyrics, all making for the absolute ideal summer record. Download free track “Ode to Janice Melt” to get a taste, then plunge into the album in its entirety. Army Navy! Selects! The Last Place!!! GO TO TOWN!!!

Well, it certainly is a banner day for eMusic Selects alums. This morning, we brought you the gripping new video from Strand of Oaks. No sooner did we post it than our Inbox brought us more ex-Selex happenings — a song from the forthcoming Hooray for Earth album. Taken from their upcoming full-length True Loves, out May 3 on Dovecote Records, the song has all the same woozy glory as their MOMO EP, just blown up giant size. Big bass rumbles, nervous percussion and Noel Heroux’s soaring voice. It’s busted pop for the post-nuclear age. Enjoy!

Read our interview with Hooray for Earth.

I don’t think there is any way we could possibly be any more psyched for Tim “Strand of Oaks” Showalter. Ever since he released his excellent second record, Pope Killdragon through eMusic Selects, dude has been everywhere. His Kickstarter project to press up vinyl of Killdragon quickly met its goal, he scored an impressive 8.1 on Pitchfork, and today they’re taking their Strand of Oaks love affair even further, premiering the above video for the incredibly potent “Last to Swim” on Pitchfork TV.

This could not possibly have happened to a nicer guy — Tim is unbelievably down-to-earth, warm and funny, and his music comes from way down deep. If you have not heard Pope Killdragon yet, I ask you: what are you waiting for? It’s the kind of sprawling, intricate concept record you didn’t think they made anymore. We love Tim so much we interviewed him twice: once for his stark, moody debut Leave Ruin and then again when we chose him for Selects.

Strand of Oaks: 2011 is theirs for the taking.

Those of you that were around on the site in 2008 are already familiar with the darkly beguiling, quietly disturbing little emotional puzzles that were the four pieces on Victoire’s 2008 EP A Door Into the Dark. The all-female indie-classical ensemble, led by the dynamic young composer Missy Mazzoli, was eMusic Selects’ first foray into music that could be roughly classified under “classical,” but the music exists in some genre-less netherworld — if you’ve ever been lying awake at 4am and found that the ceiling cracks are starting to move and squiggle in front of your eyes, than you can find something to tap into with Victoire. Their full-length debut, the magnificently named Cathedral City, is up on eMusic now, and it contains re-recorded and significantly expanded versions of all the songs from the EP as well as four gorgeous new compositions. I caught up with Missy last week, before her group’s album-release-party show at Joe’s Pub. We talked about A Door Into the Dark and its gradual evolution into Cathedral City…

How did the four core songs of the EP develop or change as you lived with them and re-recorded them?

The EP came out a year and a half ago, and that came together really right after we’d formed the band. We did the recording all by ourselves, and it was a much more raw sound. But when eMusic invited us to do the EP, it really forced us to think about how these pieces work together as a recording. I wrote the final four pieces after that EP came out, with the idea that they would all be on a full length album. We re-recorded everything that was on the EP. But to me, it feels like I’ve been working on one piece for like, two years. I really think of the album as a kind of symphony; it’s like my Symphony No. 1. All these pieces are movements of the symphony, and while they stand alone, we did a lot of thinking about how they would exist together. Some of the pieces overlap; there are some tracks, like “The Diver” and “India Whiskey,” that are like these massive, dense, complicated tracks, but I think that they’re balanced out by pieces like “Like A Miracle” or “I’m Coming For My Things,” which are a little more repetitive and digestible.

Our relationship to that material definitely changed dramatically over time, having played it live so many times in the last two years. We’ve been playing them in such a huge variety of spaces. We just played a punk club in Detroit, and the day before that we played for Chicago’s Millennium Park for 2500 people. We’ve played it on concert halls; just kind of bringing the material into all that spaces showed us what people responded to, what kind of spaces it filled and how it reacted. With “I’m Coming For My Things” and the end of “Like A Miracle,” we pushed this distorted grittiness, because I felt like the album needed more of that. In things like “A Door Into the Dark,” we pushed the mellow, more romantic side of the sound, which we found was coming out more the more we played it. It was able to leave the page, where we could really let the melodies sing.

I was impressed, listening to it, how much more depth there is in the sound, how much more there is beneath the surface to plumb into. The pieces acquired a whole new bottom floor, which I wasn’t sure was a result of having a studio or what you discovered about the pieces.

Definitely a little of both. We had this amazing engineer, Lawson White, who understood the music completely. I don’t know if anybody else in New York could have understood it like he does. We recorded it like an indie-rock band, but using his knowledge of classical music. The strings sound really great, because he knows how to record a violin.

So let’s talk about the new compositions, one by one! Starting with …

“Cathedral City:”

“Cathedral City” was written when I was spending some time at the MacDowell Colony and happened to be there at the same time as Oliver Sacks. He told me about this man who learned to see, for the first time, in his fifties. I thought, “oh my god, what does the world look like to someone who was born blind and is able to see for the first time that far into their lives?” It’s a really crazy thing to imagine what was going on to his head. So that’s sort of what the lyrics and words are about.

I also really wanted to work with my friend Melissa Hughes, who is a classical singer who’s also had experience in rock and pop music, and I wrote it for her. It deviates from this dark, dense sound of the rest of the record; it starts with this huge unison, which is another departure. The beat for that is made up completely from samples of power tools, like hedge clippers and saws and just chopping them up into little pieces and making a beat out of them.

You guys are getting your Matmos on!

[Laughs.] I know!! Don’t tell them that!

The Diver:

This is not a brilliant observation, but this is the longest piece on the album. Is there anything worth saying about that, or did it sort of happen that way?

“The Diver actually began as part of my opera, Song of the Uproar. I really wanted to play some of that music live myself. That’s one of the hardest pieces for us to play on the album; there are a lot of little canons and complicated counterpoint. I wanted something that was relentless, this big, hovering thing in the middle of the album. So that’s our epic track!

“India Whisky:”

“India Whisky” was not on the EP, but it was one of the original pieces you submitted to us a long time ago, so that one’s been around, right?

It’s been around, but it’s changed a lot! This is the most malleable piece on the album; it’s really focused around our bass player Eleonore doing this crazy improvisation and then everything kind of snaps together into this really tightly composed section. Before I wrote “The Diver,” “India Whisky” was going to be my epic track!

“A Song For Mick Kelly:”

That was inspired by the character of Mick Kelly from the Carson McCullers novel The Heart is A Lonely Hunter. Mick Kelly wants to be a composer, but she can’t because she’s a girl and lives in the South in the 1930s and her family’s really poor. So she builds a violin out of a cigar box and goes around listening in to her neighbors’ windows as they listened to Beethoven on the stereo. So I wanted to imagine the kind of music she would write if she had been given the chance.

DOWNLOAD:
A Door Into the Dark EP
Cathedral City

As you may have heard, eMusic had a little showcase in Austin where we announced our new Access and Rewards program and also spotlighted our amazing Selects bands, Man/Miracle and Hurray for the Riff Raff. To say that they were great would be an understatement. Man/Miracle’s brand of hyperactive post-punk blew minds. I wasn’t sure they’d be able to pull off the Afropop-inspired interlocking guitar lines live but, man oh man, was I ever wrong. You can see their phenomenal version of “Up” above.

And Alynda, as always, was spellbinding. Working through a combination of songs from both her Selects album Young Blood Blues as well as its predecessor, It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You, her voice raised gooseflesh and her banjo playing was hypnotic. A video of “Slow Walk” is below.

For more performances from our showcase, be sure to visit our YouTube page.

(Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Slow Walk,” Live at eMusic Lunch in Austin)

Man/Miracle, The Shape of Things: Oakland’s Man/Miracle specialize in spazzy unhinged indie pop that manages to somehow channel Talking Heads, The Cure and King Sunny Ade all at once. I have been playing this record non-stop for the last week — after a mood-settling opener, “Hot Sprawl” gets the party started and, from that moment on, it is a nonstop energetic floor-filler. Some of you may remember the song “Pushing and Shoving” from our Selected and Collected compilation — The Shape of Things delivers fully on the promise of that song — it’s a striking, thrilling rave-up that demands repeated listens. I know we put it out, but I have to say, this is going to end up one of this year’s strongest releases. You can take that to the bank! Free Track: “Hot Sprawl”

Read Jayson’s interview with Man/Miracle here

Hurray for the Riff Raff, Young Blood Blues: Words cannot express the level of awe and admiration I have for Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Lee. She has an ability like few others to pour herself into her songs, each one a reflection of her battered-but-still-beating heart. Her life story is the kind of thing that makes for liner notes in a Folkways collection: she ran away from her Bronx home at age 17 and rode boxcars across the United States, eventually ending up in New Orleans where she fell in with a group of travelling musicians called the Dead Man’s Street Orchestra. She more or less taught herself to play banjo, and began writing songs that fall squarely in line with the best of classic folk and blues. This record gets me to the core — the title track, “Young Blood Blues,” is easily one of my favorite songs of the year. Alynda writes like she can read my mind, and the songs and this magnificent collection are clear evidence of her talents. Free Track: “Slow Walk”

Read my interview with Alynda, where she talks about her fascinating life, here

We could not possibly be more excited about our two newest Selects acts! From Brooklyn, NY (by way of Boston, MA), Hooray for Earth and from sunny Los Angeles, Best Coast. Both bands do what we love best: put their own singular spin on irresistible pop hooks, spanning pop history, condensing it, and turning it back out, all inside of 3 minutes.

With their fondness for thrift store synths and low-throated vocals, Hooray for Earth at times recall classic Magnetic Fields. Noel Heroux is a songwriting genius, and their Momo EP moves from one peak to the next. In conversations leading up to the release of the album I was trying to persuade Noel to change the order of the songs. He resisted, insisting that the EP was specifically structured to ‘progress like a movie.’ And, as usual, I was wrong: the album does have a very deliberate flow, gliding from the steady buzz of “Surrounded By Your Friends” to the full-on “Needle in the Camel’s Eye” freakout of “Form.” You can read more about Hooray for Earth in our interview here, or watch the video for “Surrounded By Your Friends” here:

“Surrounded By Your Friends” by Hooray For Earth from Mathematical Park on Vimeo.

Just a note: “Surrounded” is the free track, but my money is on “Get Home,” which is probably going to end up on my top songs of the year list.

And speaking of “top songs of the year”: Best Coast is primarily the project of Bethany Cosentino, formerly of Pocahaunted. And I have to give a special shout-out to flamgirlant here: you were saying how much you loved Blackblack the other day? Flamgirlant, Best Coast is a band for you.

In truth, they’re a band for everyone. Cosentino boils the whole of pop history — Motown, girl group songs, 60s pop, lo-fi and punk rock — down to its barest elements, retaining the choruses but pairing them with fantastically fuzzed-out instrumentation. I have been playing this EP — particularly the dizzying “Over the Ocean,” constantly. To hear the songs a single time is to remember them, so sharp is Cosentino’s ear for melody. You can read more about Best Coast in our Q&A here.

We’ve got a second component to this round of Selects that we’ll be posting here on 17 Dots the week of 12/14. For now, though, meet the two newest members of the Selects family — we think you’ll love them as much as we do.

An exciting announcement today from our good friends and eMusic Selects alumni the Rural Alberta Advantage. They’ve partnered with the fantastic T-Shirt company Threadless (who I was spending large chunks of my paycheck supporting for a while there!) to give fans the opportunity to name a heretofore untitled song.

You can find out all about it in the videos here:

Help Name a Rural Alberta Advantage Song? from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

Needless to say, an exciting opportunity for fans of the RAA – a chance to be a unique part of the band’s history. You can say you knew them when! Post your song titles here.

Just a reminder — you can get the Rural Alberta Advantage’s fabulous Hometowns here, and read our eMusic Selects interview with the group here.

Can I talk about Glasser for a sec and about how she was on the eMusic Selects compilation and she played this awesome/awkward show at SXSW that I loved and how her new Apply EP is really really great? Can I please? The EP starts with “Apply,” the song that made the compilation, and then it’s followed by “Glad,” a song I love even more. “Glad” has always sounded to me like Bjork’s “Unravel” (watch this amazing Bjork performance video on repeat pls), this rinky-dink, dot-to-dot melody that has hints of the Far East. And then the way Cameron (the woman behind Glasser) does this teetering thing with the vocal line, sort of a slow-dancing preying mantis kinda song. (That made no sense and I’m sorry.)

Literally every track on here is great. “Learn,” the Lucky Dragons remix of “Glad,” the John Talabot remix of “Learn.” All wonderful. But none of them — none of them — compare to the Tanlines remix of “Glad.” It pulls in the steel drum, calypsotic feel of the Knife’s “Pass It On” and has this general bounciness that will charm you to death. (Joe says it sounds like Siouxsie and the Banshees, too.) Yeah, so consider this an endorsement. Download this!