RegnYouth ArchivesRegnYouth ArchivesThe RegnYouth Archives provides the reading audience with music related selections, reviews, and interviews, introducing new and upcoming artists and bring older, extraordinary artists back into the spotlight. 
Articles
Ben Folds/Regina Spektor Duet, MGMT, & Ms. Amanda Palmer
2008-09-02 07:23:00 Back in July, singer-songwriter Ben Folds leaked “fake” versions of six tracks from his upcoming album Way to Normal that he recorded during a late-night session in Ireland. Bundled with them were three real deal tracks, including the first single, You Don’t Know Me, a duet featuring indie-pop starlet Regina Spektor . The plucky tune has ... More About: Palmer , Amanda
Jaguar Love - Take Me to The Sea
2008-09-01 22:32:00 Johnny Whitney may be in possession of the most distinctive voice in contemporary indie rock–a near-hysterical, helium-injected falsetto that seems to portend Armageddon’s swift approach. His inimitable nasal screech helped define the Blood Brothers’ oppressively riotous post-hardcore until that band broke up last year. Jaguar Love , his new project with ex-Blood Brother Cody Votolato and ...
Orange Juice - You Can?t Hide Your Love Forever
2008-09-01 20:23:00 Amidst the recent wave of early-?80s reissues, one would think that early Orange Juice recordings will finally get their due?not only as one of the best bodies of work from their era, but among the most resonant in indie history. The flagship of Glasgow?s influential Postcard Records, Orange Juice?led by chief singer and songwriter Edwyn ... More About: Love , Soul , Forever
James Yorkston - When The Haar Rolls In
2008-09-01 19:49:00 Tall, avuncular and with the reassuringly tweedy air of a financially insecure Kelsey Grammar, James Yorkston is the quietly rising future of folk-tinged British songwriters. While still a member of East Neuk’s Fence Collective, a loose conglomeration of songwriterly souls that also spawned KT Tunstall, King Creosote and The Beta Band, Yorkston’s forthcoming album, When ... More About: Pop
Truckasauras - Tea Parties, Guns & Valor
2008-09-01 17:27:00 Though Truckasauras leaves room for a great deal of humor in their work?their debut album features toasting by the decidedly un-Jamaican DJ Collage, and its booklet comes streaked in a raging Hulkamaniac font?the music they make should not be taken lightly. Sequencing an armada of old Roland electronic machinery via a circuit-bent Gameboy, Truckasauras makes ... More About: Guns , Parties , Valor
Azeda Booth - In Flesh Tones
2008-09-01 04:43:00 In Flesh Tones , the debut full-length from Calgary collective Azeda Booth, follows the heels of last year’s Mysterious Body EP and finds the band members expanding their brand of glacial, atmospheric dream pop on a much grander scale. From its opening notes, its clear that they’re shooting for a regal, ambitious vision, one that contemporaries ...
John Cale - Fear
2008-09-01 00:21:00 Hardly a banner year for pop music, 1974 saw soft rock ruling the airwaves, John Lennon releasing the utterly inconsequential Walls And Bridges, punk still a good year-and-half off, and Elvis redefining the term “sloth” as he slouches toward the inevitable. Even Stevie Wonder released the weakest of his masterful soul-funk albums, Fulfillingness First Finale. ... More About: Fear , Cale , John Cale
Jape - Ritual
2008-08-31 22:50:00 One thing Dublin isn’t short of is songwriters, so it’s not as if one-man band Richie Egan has much novelty value. He does have a black-humoured way with words, and, as Jape, sets them to beats and electronic squiggles idiosyncratic enough to make cult stardom feasible. Hot Chip fans will appreciate his fey-but-edgy quality, which ... More About: Ritual
Ron Sexsmith - Exit Strategy Of The Soul
2008-08-31 21:36:00 Canadian Ron Sexsmith is one of those artists who never lets you down. His albums are consistantly great and his latest, Exit Strategy for the Soul , is no exception. He?s also one of those artists who?s destined to be on the periphery of things, never quite hitting the big time or popularity he deserves. In ... More About: Pop , Exit Strategy
Black Flag: Defining American Hardcore Punks
2008-08-31 16:48:00 Black Flag was, for all intents and purposes, America’s first hardcore band. They emerged from Southern California to gain international prominence, touring enough to become a major attraction in virtually every city where a scene existed and undoubtedly inspiring others to get in the game. Via the band’s still-thriving SST label, Black Flag played an ... More About: Punk , Black , American , Hardcore
Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
2008-08-31 16:16:00 At first listen, Abe Vigoda sounds a bit like fellow Los Angeles band No Age. Both go in for blasts of dreamy, thrashed pop shot through with subtle melancholy. Yet in marked contrast to No Age’s ever-tightening, world-weary sound, Abe Vigoda’s third, and latest, album Skeleton is propelled by a cacophonous urgency. Beneath the pretty ... More About: Experimental
Delta Spirit - Ode to Sunshine
2008-08-31 05:32:00 Don?t be prideful son. Just do what?s right. A hard, simple lesson which could perhaps have been repeated many-a-time to the children of America?s hardscrabble Nineteenth Century pioneers. Some of these hard-living pioneers are depicted inside the album cover of Delta Spirit ?s masterful Ode to Sunshine album. The new record is an homage of sorts ...
Maps - The Wick and the Fire
2008-08-30 22:13:00 If there is anything that has been forgotten in the whirlwind atmospherics of the instrumental post-rock milieu, it?s that there are times when genres can be of benefit. For better or for worse, it seems that all the lines have been blurred beyond recognition, leaving both critics and fans of music to wonder just what ... More About: Fire , Maps
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2008-08-30 19:07:00 Country music has, as an element of the genre arguably intrinsic to the form, a certain emotional resonance. Whether it belongs to the method of strumming or the supposed connection to an older, weirder America (ala Greil Marcus), country as a genre is capable of packing a startling amount of emotion into relatively simple melodies ... More About: Hotel , Wilco , Foxtrot
Milosh - III
2008-08-30 18:51:00 Toronto’s Michael Milosh earned his stripes via two warmly received albums for Plug Research, and this latest effort (his first for !K7) finds him in great form. His third album, III, was written and recorded during a year’s stay on the Thai island of Koh Samui (a long way away from Toronto), where he was ... More About: Toronto
The Game - L.A.X.
2008-08-30 07:21:00 Is it a bad omen when your album opens with a prayer by… DMX? Well, it should be. And yet, throughout the course of L.A.X., The Game ?s gruff bark punctuates an unexpected variety of sounds that, even when they?re a little too slow, keep things rolling on an even and interesting keel. After DMX rebukes Satan ... More About: Hip-hop , The Game
A Study In Blues: From Delta To Chicago To Texas
2008-08-30 05:41:00 To evaluate almost a century of blues recordings and narrow it down to thirty albums takes much thought. First and foremost, you must include recordings that were important for their wide influence. Early Delta musicians like Charlie Patton and Son House influenced Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, respectively, who themselves started in the Delta and ... More About: Blues , Study , Chicago , Texas , Stevie Ray Vaughan
The Automatic - This Is A Fix
2008-08-30 00:50:00 One nagging doubt must have eaten away at The Automatic while recording This Is A Fix: how could they possibly top Monster? This indie-pop anthem, with its radio/advert/football terrace-friendly chorus and walloping great riffs, overshadowed their debut album, Not Accepted Anywhere, entirely. It seems unlikely that the rowdy Cowbridge rockers will enter the nation’s consciousness ...
Pop Levi - Never Never Love
2008-08-29 21:14:00 Pop Levi ?s 2007 effort, The Return to Form Black Magick Party, was everything a pop album should be. Balancing infectiously sugar-coated rockers, hypnotic acid-blues dirges, it came across like T. Rex on a sugar high, minus the mysticism. Inexplicably, no one listened to it, and the album remained frustratingly under the radar. If there?s any ... More About: Pop , Love
Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson
2008-08-29 19:46:00 If ever an album lived up to proverbial hype, Histoire De Melody Nelson does so and does so gloriously. On a mere coolness level, Melody Nelson outcools the Velvet Underground?s White Light/White Heat and Miles Davis? On The Corner, which makes it pretty damn cool. On a deeper level, the album is a haunting documentation ... More About: Serge Gainsbourg
Bird Show - Untitled
2008-08-29 18:25:00 This is the third album from Ben Vida as Bird Show , and, as usual, he falls head over heels for the drone, pleasantly sculpting dream worlds of electronic buzz and empyreal hum for his audience to float around in. In this instance Vida teams up with like-minded avant-garde luminaries like Greg Davis and Lichens’ Rob ...
Bowerbirds - Hymns For A Dark Horse
2008-08-29 17:28:00 North Carolina has produced its share of folksy backwoods farmers and hunters who love to pick on guitars around the campfire. Bowerbirds is the latest installment, and they deliver a very good performance on their debut album, Hymns for a Dark Horse . Phil Moore and company deliver a vast array of melodies using harmonicas, ... More About: Folk , Dark Horse , Americana
The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
2008-08-29 06:03:00 The Queen Is Dead appears to have retained a status obscure enough to call it a ?cult? record, despite it?s frequent appearance in the top end of most ?best album ever? lists in music magazines. The year was 1986, and the Queen was alive, well and 60 years young. It seems incomprehensible that the visceral ... More About: The Smiths , The Queen
31knots - Worried Well
2008-08-29 00:29:00 It?s obvious 31 Knots like a little art mixed with their rock. More and more, the Portland trio have injected their quirky prog punk with everything from classically-leaning piano to stop-start math riffs to ProTools-treated samples to whatever the hell they can think of. It?s the kind of forward thinking, everything goes approach that over ... More About: Experimental , Worried
Category Addition
2008-08-28 21:06:00 What makes for a great rock record? Not great rock and roll, mind you, but a great album: The White Album, Daydream Nation, Automatic for the People, Tim. Both categories are obviously subjective, and everyone would have their own list, but nonetheless, there exists the phenomenon of the great album, and it is something worth ... More About: Site News , Category
Matt Bartram - Arundel
2008-08-28 20:48:00 Multi-instrumentalist Matt Bartram recorded Arundel as a bedroom project on an 8 track back in the spring of 2007, while on hiatus his regular band, Brighton-based post-rock group Air Formation. As one would expect, Bartram pretty much has this whole nu-gaze thing down to a science here. His repertoire of six-strings sounds like a Sam ... More About: Experimental
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
2008-08-28 20:12:00 So what to make of this noise now, with British pop restored/reduced to chirpiness, choppiness or chippiness, everyone running around like idiots? One would suppose it should sound dated. It doesn’t: My Bloody Valentine ’s breathy roar, even in a new century, stands outside of time, is stronger than time. Their flaws are perhaps more obvious ... More About: Loveless
Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista
2008-08-28 19:01:00 It’s hard to pin down precisely what it is that’s so alluring about this Finnish outfit. Paavoharju is part of an intriguing scene that subsists in Finland but seems to hail from a spirit world where the natural and the ethereal blur. On their impressive debut, Yha Hamaraa, they managed to marry a myriad disjointed ...
Human Highway - Moody Motorcycle
2008-08-28 04:53:00 The quality of a musical collaboration is determined by the interplay of two factors ? the unique elements each artist brings to the table and the extent to which they are able to work together to find a middle ground. Nick Thorburn and Jim Guthrie?s Human Highway excels on both fronts. Thorburn?s work with Islands ... More About: Motorcycle , Moody
100 MORE Indie Cover Tunes
More articles from this author:2008-08-27 23:30:00 If you’re experiencing déjà vu, don’t worry - you really have heard it all before. Cover ing other people’s material is a mainstay in indie music and after the popularity of our first posting of covers, it seems people really enjoy hearing them. When deciding on a cover, many artists choose to cover an artfully crafted ... More About: Tunes , Indie 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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