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Tuesday, Nov 14 2017, 2PM
Check out Car Seat Headrest performing this song, "Vincent," live during an In-Studio from earlier this year. www.youtube.com
Ought's new album, Room Inside the World, comes out on February 16. It will be their first on Merge. The Montreal post-punk four-piece play Chop Suey on March 23 with Slasher.
Joan Wasser's new album, Damned Devotion, will be her first since 2014's The Classic. In a song premier on The Line of Best Fit, Wasser said of the song: "'Warning Bell’ is about being a romantic and the naiveté that goes along with it. While I don’t ever want to lose that innocence, I’ve been in situations where I wish there had been an alarm to wake me from my dream state.”
Beautiful performance from Regina Spektor at KEXP: www.youtube.com
Kishi Bashi is playing a sold-out show at Neumos tomorrow night, 11/15. Kishi Bashi has previously toured with artists like of Montreal, Sondre Lerche, and Regina Spektor.
Seattle eight-piece Polyrhythmics play two nights at the Tractor Tavern on November 24 and November 25.
Funk band Mandrill formed in 1968 in Brooklyn. The group is perhaps best known for this song, "Fencewalk." Their songs have been sampled by many hip-hop acts such as Johnny D, Public Enemy, DJ Shadow, Shawty Lo, Big L, Kanye West, Jin, Eminem, and 9th Wonder. Omar Mesa played the wicked guitar solo on this song.
Big Leon Bridges fan? The Texas soul singer sang the hook to "Across the Room," a track on ODESZA's latest, A Moment Apart.
RIP to the Screaming Eagle of Soul, Charles Bradley. You are loved and missed here at KEXP and around the world. Charles Bradley passed away in September after a battle with stomach and liver cancer. Read more about him here: blog.kexp.org
"Mercy Works" is the debut album from this Toronto post-punk four-piece. Casper Skulls have played with Screaming Females and Perfect Pussy, whose frontwoman, Meredith Graves, is a big supporter of the group. Check out more of their music here: casperskulls.bandcamp.com
The Eternal is Sonic Youth's 15th and final album. Interesting side notes: 1) The seminal noise-rock band dedicated the album to Ron Asheton of the Stooges. 2) Texas guitarist John Fahey painted the album's cover art.
John Maus is an experimental synth pop artist from Austin, Minnesota. Maus is friends with Ariel Pink, who he met while studying experimental music at the California Institute of the Arts. Pink (aka Ariel Rosenberg) spurred Maus' interest in pop music. Screen Memories is Maus' first album since 2011's We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves.
Cock & Swan are an electronic duo from Seattle. This song, "PERG (Honing)," was recently featured as KEXP's Song of the Day. You can read more about the song here: blog.kexp.org
When The Cure released this song as a stand-alone single in 1983, many listeners speculated that The Cure had plagiarized New Order's "Blue Monday." In actuality, any resemblance between the songs was purely coincidence. The Cure had recorded "The Walk," before New Order released "Blue Monday."
In a recent Instagram post, Mercury Prize-winning Scottish hip hop trio Young Fathers recently announced that they've finished a new album, though no date is set at the moment. In that same post, they shared this new song, "Lord."
Flat Worms are an LA punk trio featuring Will Ivy and Tim Hellman from Oh Sees and Justin Sullivan, who also plays with Kevin Morby.
Music fans around the world, and especially here in Seattle, were stunned when Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell died by suicide earlier this year. The KEXP blog featured many posts about Cornell and Soundgarden in the weeks following Cornell's death. One of the posts asked simply: "what does Soundgarden sound like to you?" Some of the answers included: "Soundgarden sounded like a shared isolation" and "Soundgarden sounds like Seattle to me." Read the rest of the beautiful descriptions and stories here: blog.kexp.org
Thunderpussy play the Showbox on New Year's Eve. See a performance of this recently-released song, "Speed Queen," on KEXP: www.youtube.com According to the Thunderpussy website, the band will soon release an official music video for "Speed Queen."
Charlotte, NC hip hop artist. As mentioned in a line in this song, Lute is signed to J Cole's Dreamville Records.
Jurassic 5 are an LA hip hop group that formed in LA in 1993. Though the group split in 2007, they eventually got back together to perform at the Coachella Music Festival in California. Since then, they've continued touring and releasing new music since. They played in Seattle as recently as June of this year.
British trio the xx played KEXP earlier this year. Check the session out here: www.youtube.com
HUNDRED WATERS are an electronic trio originally from Gainesville, FL. They have toured with the band you heard before them, the xx.
Moses Sumney is a solo artist based in L.A. His latest album, Aromanticism, critiques the value of being in romantic relationships. In his live performances, Sumney makes extensive use of looping pedals to layer his gorgeous vocals.
Ages and Ages are a Portland-based six-piece. They recorded this song in an old church with friend and producer Sylvia Massy, who has previously worked with Prince, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash and more.
Fun fact: Alvvays singer Molly Rankin is the daughter of John Morris Rankin, a fiddler with the Celtic folk family collective the Rankin Family, who rose to international popularity in the 1990s.
The album was produced by Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla. Half of this album was recorded at Hall of Justice in Seattle.
Check out a live performance of this song at ye olde KEXP studio: www.youtube.com
Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Juan Maclean recorded this track while awaiting the return of bandmate, Nancy Whang, who is currently on tour with LCD Soundsystem.
Many strange and unexpected things have happened this year, not all of them good. The surprising return of New York dance-punk pioneers LCD Soundsystem was one of the bits of good, maybe even great, news. Before the release of their latest album, american dream, which has received near universal praise, the band played a set at the Sasquatch! Music Festival in rural Washington. You can read a review of that triumphant set on the KEXP blog: blog.kexp.org
Playing the Crocodile on February 16. In an announcement on Typhoon's website, lead vocalist Kyle Morton described the new album as "a seventy-minute exploration of memory and sacrifice in three movements." You can listen to the first movement, accompanied by striking, surreal visuals here: www.youtube.com
Built to Spill and Phantogram are playing SMooCH, a benefit concert for Seattle Children's Hospital, on December 2. The concert is sold-out but KEXP has a few tickets to give away. Tune into the Morning Show this week for your chance to win!
New music from Swedish folk sister act who first rose to prominence after posting a cover of Fleet Foxes on YouTube. They'll be playing the Moore Theatre on Sunday, January 28, 2018.
The Waterboys are a Scottish and Irish band formed in Edinburgh in 1983 by Scottish musician Mike Scott. Critics dubbed the band's early aesthetic "The Big Sound." This description was both a reference to a song on the band's second album, A Pagan Place, and an allusion to the band's athematic sound. The band has been compared to other alternative acts of the time including U2, Simple Minds, and Big Country. Fun fact: The Waterboys take their name from a line in the Lou Reed song, "The Kids." The line goes: "I am the water boy, the real game's not over here."
Music from three-time Grammy winner Ben Harper. When Harper was 9, he witnessed Bob Marley bring out Peter Tosh for an encore at a show in California. Looking back now, he considers seeing that performance to be a significant moment in his musical journey.
The Atlanta-bred soul singer played a sold-out show at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard last Saturday, November 12. Local neo-psych act The Knast opened. Harding honed his chops singing back-up vocals for Cee Lo Green before he went solo. Harding and Cole Alexander (Black Lips) play together in a group called Night Sun.
Formed in 2008, this Brooklyn seven-piece take their name from a Nigerian boogie album. Some of the bandmembers play and record in other groups like Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings and The Monophonics.
Kurtis Blow is a hip hop artist and producer from New York. He became the first hip hop artist to sign to a major label. This song, "The Breaks," was one of the first hip hop songs to be certified gold.
Happy Birthday to Joseph "Rev Run" Simmons of Run-D.M.C.! Run-D.M.C. are considered to be one of the most influential hip hop groups of all time. King of Rock, whose title track you just heard, was the first hip hop album to be certified multi-platinum.
Versing are a four-piece from Seattle. Members of the band met while working at KUPS, the student radio station at Tacoma’s University of Puget Sound. Nirvana is their debut full length. Read more about the band here: blog.kexp.org
Julien Baker plays the Neptune Theatre on December 8. www.stgpresents.org
Recognize that sample? It's "Strawberry Letter 23," a song originally written by guitar prodigy Shuggie Otis. Here, Pretty Lights samples the famous cover of "Strawberry Letter 23," as performed by funk band The Brothers Johnson.
Five virtuosic voices united in complex harmonies against innovative rhythms rendering fresh interpretations of Cuban classics, dynamic new compositions and unique covers of pop songs. These classically trained singer-musicians hailing from various provinces of Cuba. Most recently they had the honor of representing Cuba’s LGBT community by jointly performing with Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington at Instituto Cubano de Amistad con Los Pueblos (Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples) during the group’s visit to Cuba. The first cultural/diplomatic exchange of this type between the Cuba and the United States.
Brazil. In a country where 343 LGBT people were killed in 2016, singer and openly gay drag queen Pabllo Vittar has become a symbol of resistance by the rising influence of a self-appointed moral minority who have won a string of recent victories in the country’s culture wars.
restless minds that roam the city absorbing the essence of the streets, the ghettos, terreiros, of every corner that brings with it the truth, the resistance. the swingue is the merger.
Lebanese indie-rock band Mashrou’ Leila, whose openly queer frontman Hamed Sinno sings of homophobia and misogyny in his native Arabic, formed in Beirut just two years before the Arab Spring. Jordan has twice barred the band from performing. Even back home, it’s unheard of for Mashrou’ Leila to get radio play. And less than a month ago, rainbow flags unfurled by audience members at a concert in Cairo sparked a violent anti-LGBTQ crackdown by the Egyptian government, complete with a media blackout intended to mask mass arrests and subsquent human rights abuses. www.nytimes.com
Formed in Zagreb, in 2009, the four-piece audio-visual band Zen combines intricate arrangements and immersive live visuals to create a fully authentic psy indie rock experience. The new album of the Zagreb three-musicians-a-VJ-combo appeared like the first I onda je sve počelo at the queerfeminist label Unrecords.
Pimienta identifies as queer. She is of mixed Afro-Colombian and Wayuu descent. She took the Polaris Prize over Leonard Cohen. Toronto-based, and Colombia-born singer, producer, winner of this year's Polaris Prize, which includes $50,000, and is intended to recognize the "best Canadian album of the year based on artistic merit without regard to genre, sales history or label affiliation."
Yasmine Hamdan is a Lebanese singer, songwriter and actress, now based in Paris.
While Yasmine's vocals are definitely connected to traditions of Arabic music (to which she takes an unconventional and fresh approach), the structures and arrangements of the songs are very remote from its codes, and take in elements from contemporary Western electronic, pop and folk music.
Yasmine Hamdan has no identity. At least that is what she believes herself: I do not think I know what it’s like to belong somewhere. Hamdan was born in 1976, a year after Lebanon’s brutal civil war broke out, but even after the adolescent years in exile she has partaken in so many different cultures that hardly a single one of them could be called her own.
By singing in Arabic, she continues her artistic struggle against populism manifesting itself politically as well as musically. Being nomadic, pluralistic and impossible to pin down is after all what it means to be a true citizen of the world.
Hercules & Love Affair have always known how to tear the roof off a festival dance tent but their new live set-up takes things to a whole new level. From his teenage years, DJing at underground leather nights in his native Denver, to his escape to New York, home to the original wild gay nightworld that gave birth to rave, to inventing Hercules & Love Affair as an outlet for his songs, music was always at the heart of Butler’s universe.
Rubio is the solo electronic project of drummer, singer, and Chilean national treasure Fran Straube, who is best known for fronting and drumming in electronic rock band Miss Garrison. Fran Straube’s queerness is neither secret nor a defining feature of her music, serving as a marker for the acceptance and respect she has gained through her art and work ethic.
Bozo Vreco is a singer, songwriter, and an artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. His eccentric style which often combines dark clothing both for male and female, his tattoos, thick, black beard and hair make him often stand out of the crowd. And that is the moment when he isn’t singing. When you hear his voice, melody and the lyrics he sings, you ask yourself:“Where was he hiding so far?“
Lila Downs is a Mexican-American singer-songwriter and actress. She performs her own compositions and the works of others in multiple genres, as well as tapping into Mexican traditional and popular music. Diego Ramon Jimenez Salazar, known as El Cigala, is a famous Spanish-born Romani Flamenco singer and will be performing in Seattle 4/7 @ Meany Hall
Amadou & Mariam are a musical duo from Mali, composed of the couple Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia. Amadou & Mariam Live in KEXP studios www.youtube.com
For over 40 years, Orchestre Les Mangelepa have been a dominant force in East Africa’s music scene, making people dance all across Congo, Tanzania, and Kenya with their energetic live performances and signature sound.
Taking influence from 1960's Thai funk their name literally translates to "Engine Fly" in Thai. Texan trio Khruangbin is performing live in Seattle with Chicano Batman 11/18 @ Showbox.
Hadag Nahash, meaning Snake Fish, is one of the most successful acts in Israeli popular music today. Though usually described as hip-hop, Hadag Nahash music also incorporates funk, jazz, electro, rock and even Middle Eastern sounds. Hadag Nahash is in Seattle 11/30 @ Stroum Jewish Community Center.
The Pazific (pronounced just like the Pacific Ocean) is a musical collective led by Seattle-based duo Alex and Jefferson Rose. The Fusion EP, is a wave of Seattle sound, blending the spirit of the West Coast with inspiration from around the world.
Blessed with an exceptionally wide vocal range and expressive voice, Emel's impassioned live performances go far beyond the sounds on the album. Her powerful, heartfelt music defies genres, melding together electronica, Tunisian textures and a cinematic universe. Emel LIVE in KEXP studio recorded earlier this year www.youtube.com
The new record of Fatou Seidi Ghali and Alamnou Akrouni “Les Filles de Illighadad” might be called “traditional music,” for lack of a better word. It’s that music that fills the day to day aspect, a constant familiar sound. It’s hard to talk about, because its corollarly so clearly does not exist in the industrial centers or the so-called “Western” world. It’s rural music. It’s village music. It’s music for when you don’t have electricity.
The great Polyrhythmics of Seattle are back & better than ever with their epic album, Caldera. Rich with bold brass and hypnotic percussion, it showcases the instrumental eight-piece's impossibly tight grooves and virtuoso musicianship as they tear through a singular blend of Funk, Soul, psychedelic rock, R&B, progressive Jazz, and Afrobeat. They are performing in Seattle November 24th and 25th @ Tractor Tavern.
Rainbow Riots, an album of artist from Uganda, Jamaica highlights the grass roots movements in areas rife with anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and violence. "Equal Rights" is part of an official campaign for the UN's Global Goals For Sustainable Development. It's the first single from the album Rainbow Riots which is released June 16th, and is composed and produced by Petter Wallenberg and features queer voices from some of the worlds most dangerous countries for LGBTQ people.
TAMIKREST in tamasheq language means junction, connection, knot, coalition. The story begins at Kidal, capital of the 8th Region of Mali, while making tea of course. Pino, Cheikh and Mossa had just finished a guitar workshop with Juhan Ecare (guitarist for Meiway) when they decided to form a group with only two old “home made” guitars.
Katsuya Yokoyama was an internationally renowned player and teacher of the shakuhachi, a traditional vertical bamboo flute of Japan.
Lying between the mountains of northwest Tunisia and the Algerian border, the Bargou valley and the village named after it lie isolated, away from the world. It’s poor, barren country, but standing apart, Bargou has developed its own culture that had never been documented until Nidhal Yahyaoui began the task. Nidhal began collecting songs from all over the valley more than ten years ago. He listened to the women, to the village elders, and he learned all the variations on the songs.
Tetsuo was born in Tokyo. He started to play bass when he was 13 years old. He had been a member of the Japanese band named ”Casiopea” during 1976-1989, ”Jimsaku” with Akira Jimbo during 1990-1998. Now, he is composing and playing his own music as a solo artist with domestic and foreign musicians.
In a truly global effort, Australian musician, producer and visionary Jake Dominic Savona aka Mista Savona invited Cuban and Jamaican veterans as well as accomplished artists and newcomers from both countries to join forces for an exchange of talent and ideas. The result is as unique as it is exemplary: thirteen tracks and three interludes enable the listener to travel through space and time.
Vera Bila is a Romani musician and singer of Romani and Indian folk and pop songs. She is the lead singer of Kale and has performed songs in Romani, Czech, and Slovak. She is of Indian origin.
Sibusile Xaba carries forth the Maskandi / Mbaqanga tradition of the KwaZulu Natal midlands, from where he originates. Steeped in the lineage of Zulu guitar giant Madala Kunene (Sibusile’s first mentor) & warrior chants of vocal master, Shaluza Max, he not only owns these influences, but pushes the envelope as only a maestro with a keen ear for the future does.
