Beach Sloth

Various Artists

                Are you sitting down? You probably are since you are reading a blog. Various Artists returns with a new list of artists. Every month I find such great music. I want to share everything with you. Let me come into your heart with the sound of music. The blogs are alive with the Sound of Music. 

                Courtship ‘Hope’ starts of the series. This gets right to my heart. I am a sucker for a good, pulsing dance track. Get this stuck in your head. Happy to see so much of electro/dance music has been taking up Emo’s job. Now Emo kids can cry while they dance. ‘Hope’ is coming soon. Honestly I could live in hope. Yeah, this has everything I want out of a single. Right towards the end they even include twinkling keys. Man somebody has been inside my head. Please check this out if are you so inclined. 

                Cosmos V move out of the underground. Now they proclaim their artiness from the rooftops in their native country, the Netherlands. Her hair is so long. I want my hair that long. All two of her dance in a weird, trippy rhythm. I am glad Cosmos V has cloning technology. She is illuminati obviously because of all the triangles. How does one categorize this song? You can call it Witch House. That is a beginning. I simply call it good. 

                Hey Mother Death offers up a music video for ‘Desert of Trees and Water’. I remember this being a particularly bleak track. Do not fret. The video is more than dark enough. We are in nature. It looks cold and Canadian. Everything is bleak. By the end we see her again, looking out into the empty space. It is a heavy, sad song. Actually the video goes along pretty well with the piece. Hope to hear more from these brooders. 

                Birch Cooper informs us he was a teacher. He’s also a creeper. Judging by this video his mind is quite warped. The video matches the extreme discomfort one gets from the music. If you wanted to know what a slow motion breakdown of reality looked and felt like, you could do much worse than Birch Cooper. Avoid watching before you go to bed. Visuals in here are beautiful. ‘I was a teacher’ is pure uncut madness. 

                On the happier side of things (relatively speaking) we have ‘Land is my Arms – Low and Cold’. This is the most rock-orientated song of the whole group. You can see the whole band through black and white. I like how loud the song gets. At first the sheer amount of sound blew me away a little bit. It reminds me of the best of stripped down-rock. Garage rock immediately comes to mind. Miss rock this simple. 

                Remixes have been said to be the bubblegum wrappers of music. I remember reading that and saying to myself ‘Ouch’. Sometimes I encounter good remixes. Jensen Sportag basically does nothing but remixes. Their sound basically would not exist if it wasn’t for the 80s. Here in this remix they really show of their debt to the 80s. Part of me felt this had to be a long lost Trans Am song. Perhaps it is I’m uncertain. 

                In Flagranti offers 4 remixes that remind me of good old fashioned remixes from the radio. Yes they are a bit silly. Silly is perfectly fine with me if it is done well. Mouse on Mars basically made a career out of goofy loops. Based off of that criterion, Bear Damen’s mix is a lot of funny. With a sample repeating ‘Get Stupid’ and a flute, this is a joyful mix. It exceeds what I normally expect from a remix, which is usually a house beat with some neat gimmicks. Guess that’s why I tend to ignore remixes. My other pick would probably be the poppy ‘Marius Mix’ which is infectiously upbeat. 

                Like usual I want to focus on compilations. Digitalis recordings offer this up in celebration of a website design, the first one in 7 years. Even by my admittedly slow standards, that’s an amazingly long period of time. Anyway the new site looks beautiful. Some of these artists have been featured on this wonderful blog before (Emuul, Oxykitten, Charlatan, Thug Entrancer, Panabrite, Inez Lightfoot, Rambutan and Paco Scala). They are good, but the real stunners for me is Mohawk Park, whose weird playful shuffle feels like a combination between 70s drive rock and Psychedelia. Oh man, the whole thing is good, but this song is exceptional. Another pick would be Jerry Paper’s totally loopy pop song which stumbles around looking for coherence. It fails and its failure is sheer joy. 

                Glad so much is going on this summer. Here I thought summer would be a good way to relax. I thought wrong. Summer continues unabated.