"Whenever I listen to Shook Foil’s self-titled EP, I see places and feel like going. I’ve got my car packed up and I’m racing past evergreen trees in “A Bit Of Levity,” which, with its upbeat tempo, ocean-inspired lyrics, and killer guitar/keyboard/tambourine ratio, starts Shook Foil off spectacularly. When I hear “Las Palabras,” a Spanish track, that, while surprising upon the first run through, just works, I’m at a party in South America. “Lullaby For Waking Up” works too, with its recorder/violin duet that sends me back 400 years and makes me think of the perfect collaboration of the Old and New Worlds.
If I wanted to use one word to describe Shook Foil, it would have to be multicultural, and I mean that in the sense of how I would describe the EP in two words: well-blended. Over the course of Shook Foil, I encountered the perfect unions of traditional and not so traditional, English and Spanish, and guitar, drums and bass with recorder, tambourine, and violin. Shook Foil manages to bring several worlds together, and I think that’s why I’m taken to so many places when I listen to their EP.
Has my imagery convinced you to give Shook Foil a chance yet? Because honestly, the more I listen to this EP, the more I fall in love with it. Shook Foil has an incredible command over an array of instruments and ideas, both traditional and exotic. Singers Aaron Hodgin and Anna Katie Espada, whose voice got me hooked on “Las Palabras,” make getting drawn into Shook Foil easy, and all the tracks flow together really well. A song will begin and you expect it to sound like the others, and then – bam! – you’re hit with something completely foreign. And although Hodgin croons that he’s still “trying to figure out exactly what [he wants] to be,” in the closing track, “Swimming In The Sea,” Shook Foil has created an identity for themselves by dabbling in so many elements rather than focusing on one." - Sarra Sedghi / The Blue Indian
Shook Foil on Facebook
Space Ghost is....well, imagine if Radiohead and MuteMath had sex on top of a synthesizer and their ambiguously gendered child grew up with a thirst for Salvador Dali and avant-garde filmmakers. Whoa nelly!
Upon leaving a Space Ghost show, the average concertgoer usually experiences one of these non-traditional emotions:
a) the sudden urge to become an astronaut and spread music to all our alien friends
b) explosive diarrhea
c) the hunger for bacon
d) dji4potu8pdjid;]
e) the desire for Emma Watson
Space Ghost on Facebook
"When you first hear a song, a part often leaps out as shorthand for the whole-- the singer's voice, the guitar tone, or a melodic phrase. As other parts come into definition over time, whatever hooked your ear first tends to stick out a little. "The Eye in the Eye of the Storm" by newcomer Lady Lazarus, a track that we reviewed last February, is a scarcer breed. From the first listen, you can take it in entirely. There's just a patiently elongated voice, a few shifting lyrics, and a C Major scale arcing up over and over. The scale begins at middle C, the eye of the keyboard, but a couple of slowly revolving chords in a lower octave create external pressure. The lyrics address the storm outside as if it were a house, "so unbearably quiet." The song's title, instrumentation, and words are all stabilized on a single conceptual base, but stability is undermined by the uneven tempo.
Appropriately for someone named after a poem, Lady Lazarus is all about the essential, a category that has not included a record label, a notable scene, or much of a public presence. I found out about her when her brother emailed me a brief "RIYL Beach House" message. I could hear some Beach House in her MySpace demos, though they reminded me more of early Cat Power or a folksier Grouper. I learned that her name was Melissa Ann Sweat; she lived in San Jose (though has since moved to Georgia) and was working on a proper album. The demos were mostly loose refrains played with a lot of feeling, wreathed in reverb and tape hiss. There was something very natural yet cloistered about the music.
I really liked the songs as they were, and worried that the hazy, magical feeling would be lost in "better" recordings. Melissa Ann Sweat had the same concern. She started to polish up Mantic, her debut LP, in a San Jose studio but found the results more "cold and clinical" than the home recordings, and she went back to her Fostex four-track. It was the right choice. She plays the atmosphere as much as the song, mostly with a reverb-drenched Yamaha electric keyboard on the grand-piano setting. On songs like "Took in My Diamond Heart", overtones gather and beat in elusive patterns around several alternating notes, and every part of the music feels responsive to the moment.
Had Sweat gone with a studio version of Mantic, some songs would've worked great. "Half-Life" and "Midnight Music for a Broken Heart Condition" fare gorgeously on the strength of Eluvium-like melodies, rather than textural accumulation. The same can't be said of "Immortal Youth", which seems mostly an excuse to try out the thumb-piano. But it makes sense in this context, where Sweat shrinks the gap between her everyday life and music to a sliver. The songs are full of places and things that were available to her: "Half-Life" was played on an upright piano in a backyard shed, "Twilight on a Steinway" in her employer's living room. People, though, are conspicuously absent: Sweat played every note. When she asks, "Who's gonna sing it but me?" on "Eye of the Storm", it doesn't feel like an idle question. Mantic thrives on the sense of being alone with the last voice in the world. Lots of people use music to try and escape their living rooms, but Lady Lazarus seems more interested in inviting us into hers." — Brian Howe, January 20, 2011 / Pitchfork Media
Lady Lazarus on Myspace
$5 for 21+, $7 for < 21, 18+
Doors @ 9 pm
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