Tag: Music

Recommended: Telekinesis

In a month of blizzards that blanket my house in snow and ice, it’s hard to feel like the Spring is ever going to come back – let alone the Summer.  Yet, two minutes into Telekinesis! – the 2009 release by the band Telekinesis – and it’s all sunshine, road trips, and slush puppies.  The band – whose only permanent member is Michael Benjamin Lerner – writes smart, hook-filled pop that Michael describes as “heart on my sleeve” type songs.  The result for the listener is pure joy… it is, I feel, fundamentally impossible not to feel good while listening to Telekinesis.

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Iron & Wine Visits Daytrotter

This week, Daytrotter released a lovely session with Iron & Wine, which you can listen to as well as watch.  Of the music, they write:

He takes the fog right out of us, counteracts our insecurities with the beautifully hushed uncertainty. It’s as if he has a way of gathering up all of the bumps in the night, all of the fire light and all of the tender touches of a young mother or father, of a dying grandmother or grandfather and bringing them all into the picture to put us at ease. It’s as if all of the things that we’ve ever feared in our lives – bringing life into the world, growing older and passing out of the world we lucked into, and all of the craziness in the whirlwind in between – are summed up in Iron & Wine songs, distilled into his leafy version of silence and love and shown to us in a way that makes them more enchanting than scary.

How could you not use a little more of that in your day?  So, have a listen – and then watch the session!

First Listen: Iron & Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean (Live)

One of the albums I’m most looking forward to this month – Iron & Wine’s Kiss Each Other Clean – comes out on January 25th.  But thanks to the excellent people over at NPR and WNYC, we can bide the time with a bit more cheer… as of right now, you can see the band perform the entire album live!  Why wait?  Head on over and check it out!

First Listen: R.E.M. – “Oh My Heart”

Another great one from NPR today, as the track “Oh My Heart” from R.E.M.’s forthcoming Collapse Into Now has been released for our listening pleasure.  The song, which features a nice callback to Accelerate‘s “Houston” (“The storm didn’t kill me… the government changed.”) is a lovely continuance of the energy and focus of that earlier record into a more acoustic setting.

Michael Stipe told NPR this about the song:

It’s a very quiet and very meditative song dedicated to New Orleans — about New Orleans. Jacknife [Lee] is great as a producer, because he saw that we were struggling with what is a very quiet song. We were standing really far away from each other in the room, and it was hard not only to actually physically hear each other, but it felt dispersed. He brought us into the middle, and instantly, of course, the song worked.

Head on over to NPR and check it out!

First Listen: The Decemberists – The King is Dead

One of the albums I’m most looking forward to in 2011 – The Decemberists’ The King is Dead – comes out on January 18th.  But thanks to NPR’s First Listen series, you can now hear the whole thing in its entirety for free on their site.  The album will be available until Jan. 18th, and I heartily recommend you check it out.

Go here to hear The King is Dead, now!