BA DA BING

Over the past two decades The Renderers have crafted albums of intimate psychedelia infused with Americana and noise.  A Rocket Into Nothing is another extraordinary display of Brian and Maryrose Crook’s talent as songwriters and sound sculptors. The Renderers are still as essential a piece of the diverse New Zealand indie rock puzzle as they were on their first Flying Nun album.

For fans of the Dead C, Terminals, and Alastair Galbraith

Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, the group’s 1991 final album, took a year to make, and yet it has required decades to fully appreciate. Following up on the abstract and composerly Spirit of Eden, which sufficiently alienating pop fans of the band’s earlier material, Laughing Stock took spaces in recorded music to new extremes, with layers of silence breathing through strings, woodwinds, percussion and Mark Hollis’ delicate vocals. The record exists as one complete thought, albeit with jagged diversions and tangents. Laughing Stock will be released on October 11, 2011.

Released for the first time on vinyl in the USA.  Seven years after Talk Talk’s final record, Laughing Stock, Mark Hollis completed this self-titled album, to date the last thing he has put out. Where his previous band’s music started as hard synth pop and disintegrated into abstraction, Mark Hollis begins with silence, a full twenty seconds of room ambience.  That breaks into compositions sprinkled with woodwinds and acoustic guitars, spread delicate and cerebral like Ulysses written on parchment paper. Mark Hollis will be released on October 11, 2011.

Zach Condon’s music often parallels the exotic mysteries of world travel. Since Beirut’s last album, 2007’s The Flying Club Cup, sang a love-letter to France (with a 2009 stop-off in Mexico for the March of the Zapotec EP), many asked where his songs would voyage next, but few predicted the inward journey Condon takes on The Rip Tide, an album with the most introspective and memorable songs of his young career.

Recorded in Upstate New York, Brooklyn and, of course, Condon’s hometowns of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, The Rip Tide marks a distinct leaping-off point for Beirut. Beginning life as small melodies conceived on piano or ukulele, the songs were built upon by the entire band in the studio before Condon’s paring down and retrofitting. The results sound like they were recorded in a single session, with exciting rhythms matching the upbeat horns and contrasting the mournful strings. No direct geographical affiliation was exhumed; rather, the style that emerges belongs uniquely and distinctly to Beirut—one that has been hinted at all along.

Lyrically, Condon’s deep honesty outstrips the simplified nomadic troubadour image of his past. The tracks speak of love, friendship, isolation and community, touching on universal human themes that are less fabricated stories than impressions of life at a quarter-century of age. This dramatic shift expands Beirut’s palate without weighing down the music. “Santa Fe,” a jumpy ode to the town of his youth, is the best pop song he has written yet. Of particular note is “Goshen,” a torch song that wraps itself in Condon’s delicate piano phrases at a level of intimacy never heard before on a Beirut song.

The performances of the band—Perrin Cloutier on accordion, Paul Collins on bass, Ben Lanz on trombone,Nick Petree on drums and Kelly Pratt on horns—are spot-on. With contributions by such esteemed colleagues as violinist Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) and Sharon Van Etten, The Rip Tide reveals greater levels the more the listener explores. And one need not even travel very far.

• First pressings of LP and CD in a special foil-stamped, clothbound edition

• Vinyl includes download postcard

Also from the dark recesses of the BaDaBing basement comes: The Dead C’s Eusa Kills shirt in black! It comes in S or M (Large is sold out).

For the dark recesses of the BaDaBing basement emerges, The Dead C tan shirt in S, M, L.

Release date: May 9, 2011

Damon & Naomi celebrate their 25th year as performers together this year, and nothing displays that celebratory spirit more than False Beats and True Hearts, their first album of new recordings in four years. An album of lush possibility and depth, FB&TH fuses the skill of music veterans with the fervor of artists continuing to create at the top of their craft.

T-shirts are printed on gray American Apparel tri-blend shirts with blue ink.

SOLD OUT!

Armed with a variety of experience (be it as leader of the modestly titled Paul Collins Dance Machine, creator of numerous cassette releases of droning experimentation or bass player and general rabble-rouser in Beirut), Collins cuts through any stylized muck on Soft Landing’s self-titled debut to find something essentially human and teeming with emotion.

Patience is both appropriate and inappropriate as a title for the latest release by The Dead C. Inappropriate because it’s been only two years since the last album, which in Dead C Time is but the flicker of a candle; appropriate since the key to enjoying the Dead C is willingness to sit down, listen and let the music take over your mind.