Photos: Birthdays, booze and twins at Le Royale on December 29

Sorry you guys for how there aren't really a lot of photos at all from Monday night, but we were only there for like an hour-and-a-half to say hello and hang out with Katherine Kelly, who was celebrating her birthday (along with her twin brother!) at Monarch Mondays at Le Royale.  We left right before it got a little nuts there--in not a good way, but from what we gathered from Katherine's Twitter feed from the next morning, she was a little foggy about most of it anyways.

(mp3)    Kanye West - RoboCop

Godspeed!

Download: Ninjasonik vs. The Count & Sinden - "Hardcore Art School Girls"

And a happy new year to you from the boys in Ninjasonik, the skateboarding, DC hardcore-repping, Sparks-slamming, most dangerous kids in Brooklyn.  They're taking to the stage tonight at Studio B in Greenpoint around 10pm and they'll be opening up for Sinden, so they figured, what the hell.  Let's just remix one of his tracks real quick.  This comes just days after the boys also did a video remix of The Death Set's "Negative Thinking" which they dubbed "Negative Thinking About Tight Pants".

(mp3)    Ninjasonik vs. The Count & Sinden - Hardcore Art School Girls

Godspeed!

Download: Mustard Pimp unleash the "RER"

One of our favorite acts to watch in the last few months, Mustard Pimp, never ceases to amaze us with their striking blend of electro, the nuances of noise and the abstract musics of found sounds.  And just to top it all off, there's a new release out called RER, which is comprised of five parts (A - E) in just under fifteen minutes.  And we're more than sure that you'll be happy you spent the quarter-hour with these sweaty beats and slithery synths from the native Frenchmen.

(mp3)    Mustard Pimp - RER E (St Lazare Edit)

(mp3)    Mustard Pimp - RER C (Versailles Rive Gauche Edit)

Godspeed!

News: Matt and Kim announce date for Grand + show in Brooklyn

Not only will our next president, Barack Obama, have a milestone day on January 20 (his inauguration, duh), it's also going to serve as the release date for the sophomore effort from Matt and Kim, Grand.  There have already been tracks released since the band's debut ("Daylight", "Good Ol Fashion Nightmare"), but this will mark the first full length since then.  To celebrate, the kids are playing a show in Brooklyn on January 22, 48 hours after the release.

Deets:

Jan 22 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
$10
Buy tickets for the show now

(mp3)    Matt and Kim - Verbs Before Nouns

Godspeed!

Emerging: Catherine A.D.

(photo by Rebecca Miller)

A gentle, coy, nearly-too-endearing-for-its-own good emanates from Catherine A.D., a woman who hones her honeyed voice over lilting piano and simple orchestration of drums and chamber-pop-instruments.  Many comparisons have been made to a sort of hybridization of fellow countrymen Kate Bush and Patrick Wolf, but we actually hear much more of Stories From The City-era PJ Harvey.  She's just released an EP called Carry Your Heart, and in its three songs, we get all sorts of wonderful fire, chanteuse-like cooing and dark sturm und drang.  Seems like working with Liam Howe (Sneaker Pimps) and Bernard Butler (Suede) really seemed to have paid off.  You can preorder a copy of Carry Your Heart (a limited 500 hand-crafted discs are available) from her MySpace page.

Tracklist:

01 Carry Your Heart
02 Waiting To Breathe (Bedroom demo)
03 The Book Of Love (Magnetic Fields cover)

(mp3)    Catherine A.D. - The Book Of Love

Godspeed!

News: Download the original In The Attic Of The Universe from The Antlers for free

(photo by Sam Doyon)

The Antlers, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Peter Silberman's project, has been having quite a year, with tour dates all over the east coast, a high-ranking EP on our year-end list and the swooning of blogs all across the country.  And now, to celebrate the end of this wonderful 365 and to karmically bring on another, you can now download the original version of 2007's In The Attic Of The Universe, naming your own price.  In other words, if we're using the pay-what-you-want trend's pricing, free.

Says Silberman of the idea, "...this is the version I self-released back in March of 2007.  Upon its re-release in November of that year by Fall Records, the album was mastered in such a way that certain things changed (sonic quality, track breaks, etc), changes not everyone was necessarily happy with.  But since then, this original, unmastered version has all but disappeared.  So here it is, in a whole bunch of different audio formats."

(mp3)    The Antlers - Two

Godspeed!

News: Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard to marry; have most introverted children ever

Is it just us being snarky here, or is it unfathomable to the rest of you guys how up-in-arms people are about the impending nuptials between the girl in She & Him, Zooey Deschanel, and the witty, self-deprecating front of Death Cab For Cutie, Ben Gibbard?  Sure, both are totally crush-worthy for their target gender, but, well, we don't know.  We mean, no disrespect and we're totally psyched for the two of them to have found in each other something worth spending the rest of their lives together, but is this really important news?  Are we just playing along and feeding this fire by even posting about this?  Should we just shut up already?  Is it totally wrong for us to be hoping for some sort of Chris Walla-drunken-hook-up story?

(mp3)    She & Him - You Really Got A Hold On Me

Godspeed!

News: The Guardian (UK) counts down the year in music

Compiling a video with references to Vampire Weekend, "Put A Donk On It", the video game "Guitar Hero" and Jay-Z aka Hova performing at Glastonbury, three white Brits from the country's cultural beacon, The Guardian, talk up the year that was in 2008.  Pretty good summation, but we'd rather hear from the Aussies, as they seem to have taken over the world this year, with groups like Cut Copy and The Presets both being nearly ubiquitous.

(mp3)    Cut Copy - Hearts On Fire (Aeroplane Pop remix)

Godspeed!

The American Dream Team should have been bigger in 2008

For real guys.  If you haven't been able to flesh out how amazing the Brooklyn-based collective are, well, just take a look back at any of the photographs we've taken where they were a part of the festivities.  Locals ate them up like whoa.

But it isn't just in their live show that we became convinced that too many people are sleeping on them and as proof, let us give you one last remix, one last chance to understand the "Dream Team sound", one more breath of fresh, smog-and-smug-free air.  We're declaring it, right here and now in these, the final days of this year: The American Dream Team should will be huger than our deficits in 2009.

(mp3)    Shiny Toy Guns - Ricochet! (The American Dream Team remix)

Godspeed!

Download: Deadmau5/MSTRKRFT - "The Reward Is Bounce (Lights Over LA blend)"

Wow.  When a producer/DJ asks themselves, "will it blend?", it's usually one of those circumstances that can lead to disaster, a not-well-enough-thought-out mess of a thing that should be avoided and left on the table, never to be looked at with a fork and knife again.  That's too bad for this one though, because if we could irk a few more mixes of great tracks together (this one is Deadmau5 and MSTRKRFT [above]) on account of one, it'd be because of Lights Over LA's efforts.

(mp3)    Deadmau5/MSTRKRFT - The Reward Is Bounce (Lights Over LA blend)

Godspeed!