toosday grooves

The snow is gone, and you can smell the cut grass outside. But I digress, here are tuesday's grooves...

kraftwerk - Minimum/Maximum: Has that grandiose live album aura that I associate with orblive93, mainly because it's two discs worth of live performances from various far away trans continental locations. The major difference, however, is that kraftwerk are in their nostalgic prime as opposed to their artistic prime, so this set comes off as a little sterile. But since their music was never known for being especially warm and fuzzy to begin with, this does serve as a handy career spanning compilation, which is fine by me.

day at the fair - The Rocking Chair Years: I got a lot done yesterday while I was listening to this emo/punk affair, simply because it's quite peppy. If you like this kind of music, this is a prety good one - not as good as say, alkaline trio, but nowhere's near as bas as say, good charlotte. Emo is as emo does.

minotaur shock - Maritime: BZz, bzz, bzz. That's the sound surrounding David Edward's debut full length. First off, let's not confuse this with that little red radiohead mascot, the crying minotaur, even though a lot of the buzzing sound could probably be traced back to radiohead's favorable mentions. I recall first being introduced to MS by way of his remix for the Badly Drawn Boy track, 'the shining'. At times Maritime is a decent dish of [insert prefix here]tronica, it kind of reminds me of a more (dare I say) organic kraftwerk. But, overall this lacks direction in that way that people who are great at remixing, but not producing, does (i.e., it could benefit from some vocals).

the ponys - Celebration Castle: A good 80's sounding jangly guitron group with marbles in the mouth vocals. Their sound and vibe feels a bit more honest than many of the poorly executed synth-ladden tributes to that era. They sound like the band that the Young Ones might hire should they throw a party. Island records wishes they signed these guys instead of the shit whistle they got with The Bravery.

roué - Heroic Upward Motive: Nice linearly aggressive, somewhat fugazi-ish, play in an abandoned house type punk. Good for lazy afternoons, sitting in a lawn chair on afformentioned cut grass with a cooler by your side.

-cabin fever, neph-