Catching The Waves

In which I'm late, lazy and help a struggling band

Coldplay released a free live album nearly two weeks ago. Left Right Left Right Left places you in a front seat at one of their concerts as they reprise songs such as Clocks and Viva La Vida. You may have heard of them. Please note the album will only be available until the end of Coldplay's 2009 touring schedule.

And that's the end of my review. Everyone and his dog will already have reviewed this, and professional reviewers will make a much better job of it than I could - so I'm shutting up.

Thank you to Coldplay for releasing a free slab of fun that, would you credit it, also doubles as a useful promotional tool. Give them an email address, admit to which country you live in and it's yours.

Thank you also to Kymberlie R. McGuire & Sean Fournier for their stint in Thunderbird 5 monitoring worldwide announcements of free albums. I do the heavy lifting in Thunderbird 2. If you're unfamiliar with the inhabitants of Tracy Island, prepare for an adrenalin rush. ;)

Coldplay - Left Right Left Right Left (link to zipped album)

Coldplay Home Page

Funkenclickengeschlagzeugenpoppen

 

I've read somewhere that Bach's Brandenburg Concerti are considered the ideal musical accompaniment for students who can't study unless there is some form of music playing as they read. (My terrible memory hints that this may have been the opinion of Peter Jay, the former British Ambassador to the United States, but the same terrible memory is so untrustworthy that I'm willing to concede, just this once, that I may be spectacularly wrong. Perhaps I shouldn't have been listening to music when I first read that anecdote.)

Tracknames I Can't Pronounce by Erdbeerschnitzel, the latest release from Alt Recordings, is a bipolar album that goes one better than old Johann Sebastian: you may use its five tracks for background music while you study for exams or paint a fence, or you could turn up the volume and reveal that your nethers are, in fact, the long-thought-mythical perpetual motion machine. How so? Well, there are no great dynamic flourishes in these tracks; they sound like well-oiled machines that get funky when no one is looking. Yes, there are myriad thumps and bumps but no great melodic or percussive swellings to scorch your eardrums. As such, they're like my trousers: understated but ready to rumble.

Normally, I would recommend the first track, Drehundangelpunk, and its use of everyday minimalist motifs such as ...elephants, chickens, horses and cows, but its successor Klaus Kroete is a pristine example of groovin' German minimal. The triangle clinches it for me, so now it gets one of mine:

Erdbeerschnitzel - Klaus Kroete

Potentiopeter gets down and grooves, courtesy of a flanging snippet of white noise that provides the pitch-shifting meat in the bass and electronic drum sandwich. (Metaphors fear me.)

Miez und Muskel veers dangerously near my patented Theory of Dance Music: "all dance tracks are a third too long", but gets away with it because, like the rest of this very classy EP, it's stuffed with beautifully panned and mixed ticks, pops, clicks, scratches, snipped vocals and warm bass lines, the last being similar to oxygen in that you notice them only when there's no more.

The Tone Def remix of Drehundangelpunk is the most kick-heavy of the five tracks. Worry not: its sparseness is interrupted by an insistent bass line and leavened by the occasional angry elephant. (I'm not making this up.)

In Tracknames I can't Pronounce, Tim Keiling of Mainz (for it is he) has manipulated micro-samples with Teutonic aplomb and no little ingenuity to produce a superb free album of joyful funky minimal that will occupy your ears while your fingers leave a fervent "thank you" on his MySpace and Facebook pages. You can use your toes to leave offers of money and no-strings sex in CTW's comments section. I'm waiting.

Tracknames I Can't Pronounce – Erdbeerschnitzel (link to individual mp3s & zipped album)

Erdbeerschnitzel's home page and MySpace & Facebook thingies.

Alt Recordings

A Face In The Crowd

        

   

That cover is a slice of summer, isn't it? Curiously, the album's six songs are tagged as “blues”. That's a misnomer, pop-pickers, for Oh My is folk-pop and perhaps the cheeriest album ever to appear at Catching The Waves.

Oh My is composed of newly recorded versions of select songs from Sean Fournier's two commercial albums, Put The World On Stop and Paper Tiger. All the tracks are fine examples of the songwriter's art – well, they got me singing along with them. (My neighbours love me.) It enjoys a stellar vocal mix, although a more sonorous piano would strengthen the sound considerably. However, there's nothing wrong with the sparkling guitar in Broken Stereo, a jaunty opener that will give you a suntan.

Speaking of pop, Goodbye's call-and-respond cadence between piano chords and vocals seems to have occupied the pop charts for the last few years, and Sean is also guilty of committing that crime against music, Autotune, on Holding The Hand Of The Hurricane. But the charm of Oh My is that any minor faults are laid waste by pure, infectious melodies and touchingly optimistic lyrics.

If MTV or VH1 were to get hold of Holding The Hand Of The Hurricane, it would no doubt remaster it and then set it to a video of a rainswept raven-tressed lass running through lightning-lit cobbled streets: its air of gothic/Latin romance demands no less. And, would you believe it, MTV & VH1 recently licensed Oh My, so keep your eyes peeled. If they do set it to said video, I shall buy a lottery ticket.

Another Like You is a beautiful, sensitive, piano and cello-laden paean to true love. Send it to your other half and they'll let you touch them in their naughty place.

If you happen to need cheering up, listen to Put The World On Stop, an upbeat tale of recovery from ennui that will put you in a good frame of mind:

Oh, my God, I put the world on stop

Somehow I gotta add to something

One time before the curtain drops

I'm all right, I'm all right

Today's recommended song is the final one, Falling For You, which you should file under “Exemplary Good-Natured Catchy Love Song” in your music collection. Oh My is currently riding high at Jamendo; here's their natty music player so that you can ignore me and play the songs in whatever order you damn well please:

You're right – I still can't get Jamendo to tell me how to insert one, and one only, mp3 in Yahoo's media player. *shakes fist at cruel world* Jamendo is fast becoming the iTunes of the Creative Commons music world. Let's hope that's a good thing.

Sean Fournier currently has a single, What I Must Do, on release. There's also lyrics, videos and more info available at his very pretty website. You'll see that he's also a talented graphic artist. Yup, I'm envious.

Slap a couple of extra songs on Oh My, get a top producer to polish the sound and there's no reason why it shouldn't enjoy an outing in the upper reaches of the charts. (Failing that, please investigate Sean's two commercial albums if you wish to hear an alternative fuller mix of these songs.) If you know someone who likes to sing into their hairbrush, tell them about this album. Then tell them that it's a tribute to the last words of James T. Kirk. We geeks are evil.

Sean Fournier – Oh My (link to individual mp3s and zipped album)

Sean Fournier home page

Jamendo