Music

The Raveonettes' new EP Into the Night is business as usual for the Danish duo. But when "business as usual" means visionary noise pop and velvet-black melodies, who's really complaining?

The four tracks sound a bit like B-sides from last year's full-length Raven in the Grave, but that's not to say that they aren't as engaging. The first descending guitar notes lead you into a underground of sound grown thick with fuzz, from which shadowy noise pop and Sune Rose Wagner's and Sharin Foo's androgynous harmonies echo.

Their lyrics, always a highlight (despite their dark tendencies), are still that great balance of self-aware humour and teenage-blind emotion: "Oh heartbreak, I hate you," or, "Do you care if I die? Do you care if I die?"

Silversun Pickups' brand-new single "Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings)," which premiered yesterday, is out on iTunes today. A cocktail of modern and retro sound, it's a signifier that the best 90's band not from the 90's is ready to take on 2012.

The first single off their upcoming third album Neck of the Woods, "Bloody Mary" showcases what a few years ago saved the band of 30-somethings from life in a garage: transcendent melodies, mature musicianship, and a grunge aesthetic that pulls the heartstrings of everyone who used to almost-kill themselves speeding and blasting "1979" by the Pumpkins out their car windows.

SSPU, from their official site, during promo for 2009's Swoon.

"It was mainly disbelief," Christopher Stopa, a Toronto-based singer-songwriter told The Vancouver Observer, about his reaction after hearing his own voice and music being attributed to Radiohead on Youtube. "I thought, 'I know that's not Radiohead', and people are really getting excited over it, but I didn't share that same happiness as my friends."

Here's what happened. Last week, a song called "How Do You Sit Still?" was touted as Radiohead's unreleased single from their Bends album era and it quickly became a hit on YouTube.

"WHY was this song not used (in Radiohead's albums)? It's brilliant," lamented one listener after hearing the song. Another wrote that the song was about "putting truth back into Radiohead".

If you missed the Apollo Ghosts’ stellar show at the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre recently, you have one more chance to catch them before they embark on their Maritime tour. 

Hot on the heels of the For What They Do They Do song and short story collection, the band celebrates the release of their new five song 7” Money Has No Heart on July 8th at the Zoo Zhop (223 Main). The place is little bigger than a bathtub, so if some of the crowd spill out on the sidewalk, I’m sure the band will too. And Adrian Teacher will do his usual part to free up floor space by staying airborne on a sea of hands for half the show.

I’ve been a fan of the Apollo Ghosts for about a year and a half. There may be a couple of local bands I love more, but none that invite the kind of literary reckoning that seems to go hand in hand with being Ghosts' fan. So here are a few of my personal takes on this extraordinary band.