The Poetry of Reality

One of our favorite projects, Symphony of Science is back with another song: The Poetry of Reality, making this the 5th release from John Boswell. We’ve really loved his other works, and this one features a whopping 12 personalities, including Michael Shermer, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Carolyn Porco, and PZ Meyers.

One of the really cool things that this project does is help to show some of the greatest scientists in a very new and different light, putting their words to some very catchy tunes. Poetry of Reality does this once again, and while I’m not sure that any of them have really topped their first release, it’s still a delight to listen to!

The Poetry of Reality – Symphony of Science

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Grace Potter & The Nocturnals Album Announcement!

After a bit of waiting, we finally have some news on the upcoming Grace Potter album. Slated for release June 8th, 2010, the album will be a self-titled affair, a followup to 2007′s fantastic This Is Somewhere, and the first with the band’s new lineup. To say that we’re excited for this one is an understatement. This album is already looking good to us.

This album also marks the first time that the band will be shooting a music video, for the album’s first single, Tiny Lights. According to the press release for Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, this album is the product of a lot of hard work from the new lineup, and having seen the group in person, it’s clear that they’ve got a bright future in front of them. If you’re attending the South By Southwest festival coming up, the band will be showcasing the new songs, although they’ve already played a number in concerts already.

The Nocturnals have demonstrated already with their existing albums, that they’ve been making changes all along, going from folk-rock with Nothing But The Water to big time rock with This Is Somewhere, and it’s a refreshing change of pace from a lot of bands out there. Now, with new members, the group seems poised to really explode, with a number of high profile concerts and appearances, plus the inclusion of their oft-covered song Jefferson Starship song White Rabbit appearing on a companion album to Tim Burton’s upcoming film Alice in Wonderland, coming out on March 2nd. The band’s about to get really big, I think, and so far, I’ve liked what I’ve heard, and can’t wait for more.

Here’s the album’s tracklist:

1. “Paris”
2. “Oasis”
3. “Medicine”
4. “Goodbye Kiss”
5. “Tiny Light”
6. “Colors”
7. “Only Love”
8. “Money”
9. “One Short Night”
10. “Low Road”
11. “That Phone”
12. “Hot Summer Night”
13. “Things I Never Needed”

Here’s some live cuts of the songs that they’ve been going over in concerts:

Medicine – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Oasis – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Money – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Things I Never Needed – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Colors – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Low Road – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Hot Summer Night – Grace Potter & The Nocturnals

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Kina Grannis – Stairwells

Kina Grannis’s fourth album, Stairwells, is the one that’s likely that’s most likely to bring her to wider attention to the mainstream music culture. Released today, it’s my first introduction to Grannis’s music, and of all the introductions, this one’s a good first impression. Stairwells is a soft, sweet album that is reminiscent of a number of other artists, such as Tristan Prettyman, Sara Barelles, Sara Wheeler and Priscilla Ahn.

Stairwells, on the surface, is a fairly typical indie-singer/songwriter album. It’s the girl and her guitar, and while it’s easy to fall into a larger pool of artists that way, Grannis is supported by her sound and songwriting skills that come out here. Songs such as Stay Just a Little, World In Front Of Me, In Your Arms, Strong Enough, and, well, most of the album, focus strongly on individual stories, ranging from love to love lost, and using the music to support the story that she’s telling, rather than the other way around.

What I appreciate the most about Stairwells, and Grannis’s sound is how reminiscent it is of a number of artists that I discovered in college, and I can’t help but think that her music would have fit right into what I was listening to just a couple of years ago. Given that this is her fourth album, it’s clear that there is a lot to catch up on. The album is light, acoustic-pop music that really has no pretentions as to what it is: it just plain sounds good, which isn’t to say that it isn’t smart or mindless drivel that comes with similar artists – namely Jack Johnson – by essentially repeating the same sound and song over and over and over. Stairwells feels fairly fresh throughout, and feels much like the perfect album for a summer drive. (Which is good, as spring is right around the corner).

Moreover, Stairwells feels polished on all fronts: from 14 very good songs, lyrics, sound/tone and packaging, something that I feel is pretty important. Grannis’s sound lends itself well to a wide audience, from radio to being featured on a television show from the likes of ‘House, MD‘ and others, and hopefully, that’ll be the case. This album is well worth listening to, and is out today.

World In Front Of Me – Kina Grannis
Valentine - Kina Grannis
Stairwells (Album Stream) – Kina Grannis

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Vampire Weekend – Contra

Vampire Weekend is back with their follow up to their critically acclaimed self-titled album with Contra, a collection of ten songs that are sure to please the very same hipster crowd that brought to them to the world a couple years ago. The album has done very well for itself, debuting at the #1 spot on the Billboard 200 list.

I don’t have much against Vampire Weekend themselves, except for their image and the sorts of fans that I’ve come into contact with here and there. I don’t have much to say about them, other than I dislike it, but the album is a good follow up to their first album. Opening with the energetic Horchata, the album moves through the tracks with much of the same quirk, energy and odd vocabulary/diction that characterized the first album. Indeed, their unique sound is what attracted such a wide following to the group, and for good reason.

This album is full of the quirky sound and feel: Horchata comes right out of the gate with interesting percussion and deliberately stilted lyrics, White Sky with it’s high pitched chorus, the Caribbean-sounding California English, Run, with its driving beats and horns, the hyperactive Cousins and electronically infused Diplomat’s Son. There’s a lot of sound packed into this album, a bright range of styles and themes all brought together by this group. The album doesn’t feel overburdened as some others might, which is a huge plus for the group – they’re able to manage their weird sound by expanding their styles, using that as part of their image. And it works, really well.

Contra follows up Vampire Weekend nicely with a lot of the same tone and feel, but there’s some additions here. The music feels a bit more energetic, especially with their first single, Cousins. Like Vampire Weekend, their sound is precise, clipped and very polished. More importantly, it doesn’t feel as if this album is trying their other works, which is important, given how much hype the first album generated upon its release.

This is much of what I’d been hoping for – when the band first hit, their sound attracted a lot of people to it, and it seems like the band was one of the most popular ones for 2008. Generally, meeting the hype for another album is an incredibly difficult task, and there’s a number of popular artists out there, such as Norah Jones, Coldplay (With X&Y), and A Fine Frenzy, who’ve put out quality work, but work that doesn’t *quite* make the same impression that their original work did when it was first released. It’s always a bit disappointing, but we move on with it. So far, Contra has really impressed me in that it doesn’t copy the successes of Vampire Weekend exactly – there’s still a bit of innovation here, and a demonstration that there’s room in the band for more sounds and changes.

Hortchata – Vampire Weekend
Giving Up The Gun – Vampire Weekend

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New Broken Social Scene – World Sick

The Canadian Indie Supergroup Broken Social Scene is back with a new record, and a new song, announced earlier this month. The song, entitled World Sick, is fairly typical fare for the group: electronica-blended track with a rich blend of sound. There doesn’t seem to be any title for the album yet – the website suggests ‘Forgiveness Rock Record ‘, which doesn’t seem all that likely for a record title, but that information will come when it comes.

Overall, I like the song – the group has a good sound with their prior works, and I think that this track is a promising one when it comes to this upcoming album, which drops May 4th of this year. Also, interestingly, this album is reported to have a song with Amy Millan, Emily Haines and Leslie Feist all together, marking the first time that line up has worked together.

World Sick – Broken Social Scene

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A Geek Interlude

We’re big fans of geek music over here at Carry You Away, and there are a couple of artists who’ve come through lately that we’ll feature together in one bundle.

The Sea Kings

The first artist is The Sea Kings, a small indie rock/folk group out of the UK with their song appropriately named The Ship In Distress. There’s always been a bit of a fascination with the sea life for geeks, what with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise bringing about a huge comeback to the whole pirates genre, as well as with with A-List authors such as the last Michael Crichton penning a book about them called Pirate Latitudes.

I really like this song, Ship in Distress. It’s about, what else, a ship that’s gone adrift and damaged, with the crew trying to figure out how to survive to the next day. Lots are drawn and people are selected to die, but are soon rescued by a ship that comes along. It’s a short, to the point snapshot of a story, and I like it for it’s quaint, folksy nature, something that feels much like some of the bands that I grew up listening to, such as the Wood’s Tea Co. from around these parts.

If you pop over to their myspace page, there’s a couple of other nautical-themed songs, which are really fun to listen to.

Tom Slatter

Another artist, one of our favorites from a couple years ago, Tom Slatter, of the since metamorphosed We’ll Write (now called Comrad Robot), has released a solo album with a steampunk theme called Spinning the Compass. If you liked We’ll Write, Slatter has kept a lot of the same feel from that group with the same nerdish themes of machines and humanity.

Steampunk, if you’re not familiar with the term is a sort of sub-genre of Science Fiction, essentially set within the late Victorian to early 1900s period in time. The idea takes its name from the Science Fiction genre Cyberpunk, but where wires, electronics and communications are a major theme, imagine science fiction style technology, but just powered by steam powered technology. It’s a neat idea, one that’s slowly growing on me. Slatter’s put his album together with a lot of the imagery here for a neat collection of songs with a really cool sound, all of which are available for free here.

Ezequiel Ezequiel

The last song is from artist Ezequiel Ezequiel, an Argentinean-born guitarist who’s recently put together a song called Raise the Dead, a quiet little song with a really haunting sound. He’s recently put together a solo EP called Winter Rise, which you can listen to here. This album has a real ambient/experimental and acoustic vibe to it, and it’s a decent effort for someone starting out.

The Ship in Distress – The Sea Kings
Ingenious Devices – Tom Slatter
Raise the Dead – Ezequiel Ezequiel

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Holy Fiction – Hours From It

Rarely am I floored by an album that I’ve received to review, but let me get this out of the way right now: Holy Fiction’s debut album, Hours From It is a stunning masterpiece of sound, and is already one of my favorite collection of songs from this year. The album has been on a constant rotation between my iPhone, computer and car, and it’s one that I’m going to be listening to for months to come.

Holy Fiction’s start seems to be like a lot of other bands: A pair of musicians started to collaborate in their spare time from work with their regular bands, and when their bands folded in 2008, this current lineup formed as more of a priority. The original lineup up Matt Geissler and Evan Lecker later expanded to include Jordan McCune, and later grew to six people with Asher Pudlo, Sally Wafik and Sam Lee. This diverse group of people came together, bringing their own voices and styles to the group to what it is now.

Hours From It opens with Iron Eyes, which has a summer-like, rich sound that just seems to hit the right notes with a sound that falls right into place for me. There’s a certain vibe that I get from Vermont in the springtime, and for some inexplicable reason, this reminds me much of that feeling. The rest of the album gets better, with Exit, More Than Ever, Golden City Lights, Song 10 and Yes, They Were Here. Two Small Bodies and the title track, Hours From It serve as the album’s weaker moments but even then, this hardly registers, and they’re both easily stronger than a lot of other songs out there. As a whole, the album reaches near perfection for me.

The more tangible elements of the album are clear when you closely listen to this album. The lead vocals from Evan Lecker are set apart from other indie bands in that you don’t really have to get used to his voice first before enjoying the music. The supporting players layer on the sound, with a great ambient sound from the keys, guitar and strings, while the drums and bass in particular deserve to be singled out, for their exemplary work over the course of the album. My biggest complaint is that this album is about four songs too short for this to be a full album: I’m left with wanting a lot more, and I desperately hope that the group will be working on new material soon.

While listening to the music and lyrics, I’m even more impressed with some of the wordplay and how the group worked the music and words together. In Exit, one line is: “Of undiscovered lungs/lay your hands down, breathe deeply”, which is laid out smoothly and lyrically in a manner that works well, and is repeated later on in that same song – lines move from one to another effortlessly in the lead up to the launch of the chorus. This is something that’s repeated often throughout the album. While I read through the lyrics from the songs, then listen to them, I’m amazed at how evocative they are – there is some great imagery here, with implied stories throughout, but just enough to prompt some ideas, leaving things open-ended throughout.

Listening over the album once again, it’s clear that this is a remarkably consistent and interesting album that has just enough differences between songs to avoid the photocopier effect when it comes to lyrics, tone and the sound, but they’re not so far apart from one another that there’s disorganization and chaos from this. The end result is an absolutely stunning debut album from an unknown group, one that will hopefully put them on the map over the next couple of years. Mostly, though, I appreciate the fact that this album just feels right, soothing, interesting and exhilarating all at the same time. This is by far and wide the best album that I’ve listened to over the year thus far, and I have a feeling that there will have to be a lot of effort for others to impress me just as much as Hours From It has.

Holy Fiction’s Hours From It is due out February 23rd.

Iron Eyes – Holy Fiction
Yes They Were Here – Holy Fiction

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Spoon – Transference

Spoon is back with their latest follow up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Not to be confused with Lady Gaga), titled Transference. Continuing their style of very minimalistic indie-rock, Transference is a fun album for the group, with a bit of a lighter fare than their 2007 album. The only work that we’ve had in the meantime was the 2009 release of the EP Got Nuffin, which I was really let down by, and which left me a bit worried for this coming album.

Transference is a good album through and through, and where I usually pick out a couple of good songs from their older albums (Such as Don’t You Evah, Underdog, I Summon You, I Turn My Camera On, My Mathematical Mind, The Way We Get By and Small Stakes), this album is no different in that there were a number of songs that I really enjoyed, with a couple of other songs that I enjoyed, but was somewhat indifferent about. Is Love Forever?, Who Makes Your Money and Written in Reverse all make that short list of really notable sounds from this particular album, and are among my favorites from the group so far.

What is interesting to me is the continuity between albums with this select list of favorites that I pull out individually. While there are minor differences here and there in style and sound, the overall sound, lyrics and rhythm that the band employs is something that is remarkably uniform, and the songs from this new album fits extremely well within their catalog of songs that have since been released. While with some groups, this is something to be avoided, Spoon is able to avoid this by keeping elements such as style consistent, while keeping their lyrics somewhat unpredictable. Spoon has always employed a very different sound from most bands – a sound that is minimal, off-kilter and energetic – and they do it very well.

Transference is really marked by a driving beat throughout most of the songs. The drums take on a real presence here, as much as Brit Daniel’s voice. Combined with their fairly unique guitar chatter, as well as some really cool effects n Who Makes You Money, and the album is graced with an interesting sound throughout that makes it distinctive. If you like Spoon, you’ll probably like this album. While you’ve heard it all before, that’s not a bad thing.

Stream Album – Spoon

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Fictionist – Lasting Echo

Out west, everything seems bigger than their counterparts here on the east coast. The sky, mountains, fields, the states, everything. Thus, it comes as no surprised that Fictionist, with their latest album, Lasting Echo, seems far more impressive, grander and epic than anything that really comes out of the East Coast. Hailing from Utah, the size difference might be the key, but the band certainly does their part to fill that role nicely.

Lasting Echo is a really solid album. There’s no reason why I should particularly like this album, the indie-music fan in me tells me, but there really is a lot to this album that I like. With a sound that really reminds me of Civil Twilight or Low Millions, they have an easygoing alternative-rock sound that I found really suited my ears while in the car. “As gentle as gentle as a summer breeze,” is one of the lyrics off of the second track, Human Wings, and that’s a lot of how it really sounds with some of the tracks. Other tracks, such as Blue-Eyed Universe and Time to Time lay down a good driving beat that that set me back with my feet tapping along. Several other reviewed mentioned similarities to older classic rock artists such as Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and I can see the comparison, especially with some of the guitar work that comes along with some of the songs. But there’s a wholly unique feel to this music, despite the comparisons to music new and old.

Like a lot of artists that I’ve come to listen to, I really appreciate that the band varies its tone, sound and themes between songs over the course of the album. This is a crucial element to really good albums (although not universally) because it brings a band out of a one-dimensional sound that either staples the band to one image, which ultimately, in my mind, is harmful to the overall effect on the music. Music is supposed to be versatile, interesting and surprising, all at the same time. Listening to Fictionist just once may give that impression, with a fairly average alt-rock sound, but upon other listens, I hear some very interesting guitar tracks during Suffering Angel, and other little things that crop up against the sound throughout that gives Lasting Echo more character and a richness to it that few albums really have.

The band is on tour in the following locations:

Feb 15 –  Amarillo, Texas

Feb 17 –  Wichita, Kansas

Feb 18 –  Tulsa, Oklahoma

Feb 22 –  Texarkana, Texas

Feb 24 –  Lafayette, Louisiana

Feb 26 –  Lake Charles, Louisiana

Feb 27 –  Beaumont, Texas

Mar 03 –  Greenbrier, Tennessee

Mar 04 –  Chicago, Illinois

Mar 06 –  Carmel, Indiana

Mar 10 – Toronto, Ontario

Mar 15 – Brooklyn, New York

Mar 20 – Austin, Texas

Apr 01 – Provo, Utah

Lasting Echo is due out on March 2nd.

Suffering Angel – Fictionist

Blue-Eyed Universe – Fictionist

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Valentine’s Day

This weekend is Valentine’s Day. This year, it’s good.

Say Hey (I Love You) – Michael Franti & Spearhead

Arms of a Woman – Amos Lee

Skinny Love – Bon Iver

Such Great Heights (Postal Service) – Iron & Wine

You & Me – Dave Matthew’s Band

Yellow - Coldplay

Comfort - Carbon Leaf

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