Listening Habits 10-11.14

The end of November brings us to the start of the festive period for music lovers everywhere: the time to share your favorite music with the world by making "Best of" lists! CMC will, of course, honor this tradition as well, but (sticking to our own habits) we will wait until the actual end of the year before we finalize our ever evolving annual list.

In the meantime, we bring you a Top 15 of our favorite albums for October and November 2014 featuring some strong candidates for the annual Top 50:

At the top of this list we have the seventh and, in our opinion, best solo album by Ty Segall. The extremely prolific musician took his time in the making of "Manipulator" (14 months is quite a long period for his usual standards) and the results are truly outstanding: 17 tracks clocking close to an hour of non-stop garage rock brilliance, not encountered since the heyday of The White Stripes a decade ago. It’s just three months since the release of this album, but "Manipulator" already sounds like a classic to our ears: the crowning achievement so far in Ty Segall’s impressive, ever increasing body of work.

Mary Timony has been among my favorite musicians ever since I first noticed her work with Helium in the early '90s. I still remember being blown away by "The American Jean", an early single I discovered in the Rough Trade Shops compilation "Unnecessary Niceness" sometime in the summer of 1993. Twenty-one years and many excellent albums later, Timony is delivering the goods once again with her fearsomely rocking new outfit Ex Hex and their awesome debut LP with the self-explanatory title "Rips". Lock up your sons, Ex Hex are casting some pretty irresistible spells out there!

In our Top 5 you will also find Thurston Moore’s latest solo effort channeling his Sonic Youth self with the help of his old band mate Steve Shelley, My Bloody Valentine’s bass player Deb Googe and Nought / Chrome Hoof guitarist James Sedwards, Shellac’s return after seven years with "Dude Incredible", their best album since the early '00s, and Goat with "Commune", the Swedish collective’s imaginative second effort, going deeper into our collective, primitive subconscious.

Here are all the autumn 2014 additions to CMC’s record collection:

Top 15 Albums

1.   Manipulator - TY SEGALL
2.   Rips - EX HEX
3.   The Best Day - THURSTON MOORE
4.   Dude Incredible - SHELLAC
5.   Commune - GOAT
6.   Brill Bruisers - THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
7.   The Hum - HOOKWORMS
8.   Plowing Into The Field Of Love - ICEAGE
9.   IX - ...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD
10. The Physical World - DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979
11. At Best Cuckold - AVI BUFFALO
12. …And Star Power - FOXYGEN
13. Barragán - BLONDE REDHEAD
14. Taiga - ZOLA JESUS
15. Strange Weather EP - ANNA CALVI

Top 15 Tracks

1.   Feel - TY SEGALL
2.   Waterfall - EX HEX
3.   Hide From The Sun - GOAT
4.   Dude Incredible - SHELLAC
5.   The Best Day - THURSTON MOORE
6.   War On The East Coast - THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
7.   So What - AVI BUFFALO
8.   On Leaving - HOOKWORMS
9.   Trainwreck 1979 - DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979
10. The Lord's Favorite - ICEAGE
11. Ghost Rider - ANNA CALVI
12. How Can You Really - FOXYGEN
13. Hunger - ZOLA JESUS
14. Dripping - BLONDE REDHEAD
15. The Dragonfly Queen - ...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

Have a listen to our October - November Top 15 here:

Cat Power, live @ Fuzz Club (Athens, November 21, 2014)

The long overdue comeback of Cat Power to Athens, Greece, for a live show has finally happened (she had first played here in a tiny bar at the beginning of the '00s). 14 years later and with several more excellent albums to her name (the most recent of which, 2012's "Sun", was Album of the Year for this blog), the 5-months pregnant Chan Marshall was back in town, sipping tea and facing solo a much larger audience, this time on the stage of the nearly full Fuzz Club.

With only her guitar and later a piano, Chan Marshall performed more than thirty of her own songs as well as several cover versions, including "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Paths of Victory", "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Sea of Love", in a two hour, 45 minutes performance that was warmly received by her audience.

It is well known that performing in front of a crowd has always been a challenge for Cat Power, who had to deal with severe stage fright at her early career. You might expect that the wide recognition of her unique songwriting talent and the relative commercial success of her music ("Sun" reached the Billboard's Top 10 in the US, making it the first record in the twenty-something history of Matador Records to achieve such success) would give her a greater level of confidence, but it was obvious from the many times she felt the need to apologize for something during her performance that she remains a loveable mess when it comes to live gigs.

However, and despite her final apologies at the end of the marathon set for feeling she had not connected enough with the audience and for lacking in energy, the rapturous applause of the fans must have shown her that her heartfelt and sincere performance had resonated with them and, sometimes, a song performance that might be lacking in acoustic perfection is more than welcome when it comes from the heart. And there was never any doubt where Cat Power's music comes from.

Chan Marshall with her bouquet of roses, apologizing(!) after a great, heartfelt performance

Another plus to this out of the ordinary night, was the solo performance of local artist Nalyssa Green, who presented her noir pop melodies with the help of synthesizers, theremin and guitar. She also included a few cover versions to her set, most notable of which was a faithful rendition of PJ Harvey's "Rid Of Me", a brave selection indeed.

Nalyssa Green, live @ Fuzz Club

It's hard to name all the songs in Cat Power's set, but I noticed that the record with the most entries in the set list was 2003's "You Are Free" (perhaps her favorite?), from where we got "I Don't Blame You", "Good Woman", "Werewolf", "Fool", "Names" and "Maybe Not", which you can watch below along with the Dylan cover "Paths of Victory" (from her latest album, only "3,6,9" made the cut - I would expect at least "Ruin", but I guess you can't have it all...).

Cat Power - Paths of Victory / Maybe Not (live @ Fuzz Club, Athens)

Check out also here my review for mixgrill.gr with many more photos from the show.

Public Service Broadcasting, live @ Six D.O.G.S (Athens, November 15, 2014)

Public Service Broadcasting are gearing up for "The Race For Space" (their second album, scheduled for February 2015), but before their space program begins, the eccentric London electrorock duo of J Willgoose Esq. and Wriggleswort brought to Athens for the very first time their very informative and certainly entertaining show.

The 60-minute broadcast, which was preceded by the electronic beats of local duo ice_eyes, began with images of Second World War London as the band started their set with "London Can Take It" off "The War Room", their 2012 EP that first brought them to our attention.

More educative war stories from the same EP came later on in the show with storming renditions of "If War Should Come" and my personal favorite PSB track, "Spitfire", which also appeared on their debut full-length "Inform - Educate - Entertain", the album with which the band made its mission statement known (and landed in our Top 20 list of 2013).

Most of this album's tracks were present in the duo's set list with the krautrockin' "Signal 30", "The Now Generation", "Theme From PSB", "ROYGBIV" and the excellent set-closer "Everest" being among the highlights of the show.

No tracks from the new album were revealed as it seems PSB are guarding closely the secrets that can win them the coming space race. We did get a song in Dutch, though, about ice skating, their Record Store Day single "Elfstendentocht, Part 2". I guess we'll have to wait until their next visit for some space age edutainment. Looking forward to it!

Check out below "Spitfire" from Public Service Broadcasting's first ever Athens gig:

 Public Service Broadcasting - Spitfire (live in Athens)

Jams Run Free: The first 100

After almost three years of publicly declaring our love for certain songs on This Is My Jam, picking one favorite track (old or new, but mostly new) each week, we have finally reached the milestone of 100 jams! The first selection, back in December of 2011, was "Nate Will Not Return" from The Fall's latest LP at the time, "Ersatz GB", while the 100th is "Waterfall", one of the standout tracks from the album "Rips", the excellent debut LP by Mary Timony's new band Ex Hex.

 To celebrate the occasion, we have compiled for you a Spotify playlist with 50 of these special jams, containing one song per artist/band and focusing on new music selections. To check out the complete list of all our 100 jams, you can visit our page on This Is My Jam here.

Let the jams run free:

The title of this playlist is, of course, borrowed from this Sonic Youth track (which I should be jamming in the near future):

Sonic Youth - Jams Run Free

New Releases: October 2014

Round-up of the most interesting albums and singles released in October 2014:

Albums

THURSTON MOORE - The Best Day
MARK LANEGAN BAND - Phantom Radio
EX HEX - Rips
ICEAGE - Plowing Into The Field Of Love
FOXYGEN - ...And Star Power
ALLO DARLIN' - We Come From The Same Place
PEAKING LIGHTS - Cosmic Logic
CARIBOU - Our Love
FLYING LOTUS - You're Dead!
RUN THE JEWELS - Run the Jewels 2
ZOLA JESUS - Taiga
JULIAN CASABLANCAS AND THE VOIDZ - Tyranny
…AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD - IX
ULTIMATE PAINTING - Ultimate Painting
KEVIN MORBY - Still Life
JOHNNY MARR - Playland
THE CHILLS - Stand By
LOLA COLT - Away From The Water
PHARMAKON - Bestial Burden
MEATBODIES - Meatbodies
THE TWILIGHT SAD - Nobody Wants to be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave
THE RURAL ALBERTA ADVANTAGE - Mended With Gold
BASS DRUM OF DEATH - Rip This
MELVINS - Hold it in
WEEZER - Everything Will Be Alright in the End
CHICKS ON SPEED - Artstravaganza
MECHANIMAL - Secret Science
LEE RANALDO AND THE DUST - Acoustic Dust
THE CORAL - The Curse of Love
THE FALL - Live - Uurop Viii-Xii Places in Sun and Winter, Son

Singles & EPs

SPEEDY ORTIZ / CHRIS WEISMAN - LAMC #14 

ALLO DARLIN - Bright Eyes
THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART - Abandonment Issue EP
INSTITUTE - Salt EP
SLEAFORD MODS - Fizzy
DANNY BROWN - Smokin and Drinkin
VINCE STAPLES - Hell Can Wait EP
EAST INDIA YOUTH - Hinterland
KING CHAMPION SOUND - Songs for the Golden Hour EP
THEPARADE - Connector
THE POPGUNS - Lovejunky
JOHNNY MARR - Easy Money
THE CHARLATANS - Talking in Tones
PETER BUCK - Opium Drivel
CHUCK PROPHET - Tell Me Anything (Turn to Gold)
THE WYTCHES - Burn Out the Bruise
DRESSMAKER - Glass EP
ADVENTURES / PITY SEX - Split
KODE9 & THE SPACEAPE - Killing Season EP
RED SNAPPER - Card Trick EP

Thurston Moore - Speak To The Wild