Your Daily Song Fix

Baltimore indie power-couple, Wye Oak, are making it in the music bizz.  Maybe.  I don’t actually know how they define, “making it big.”  I would say that a feature in Spin, a record deal with Merge (Spoon, Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, etc.) and no 9-5 job definitely denote the term.  This track, taken from Wye Oak’s latest album, features the angelic voice of Jenn Wasner.  Come to think of it, most of Wye Oak’s songs feature the angelic voice of Jenn Wassner.  She wails on the guitar like an ex-member of Sonic youth, and her man, Andy Stack, plays the drums, the keyboard AND sings backup vocals.  Two people haven’t made this much noise since overweight people realized that they, too, could have sexual intercourse.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is an ensemble band led by Alex Ebert, vocalist of the power pop group Ima Robot. After breaking up with his girlfriend, moving out of his house, and joining Alcoholics Anonymous, Ebert began work on a story about a messianic figure named Edward Sharpe. According to Ebert, Sharpe “was sent down to Earth to kinda heal and save mankind…but he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love.”

The band’s first full-length recording, Up from Below, was released on July 7, 2009. “Home” was voted number 15 on the Australian Triple J Hottest 100, 2009 countdown, the largest music poll in the world. Shout out to my sister, Neekole, for recommending this song.

I previously posted “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit and have another great one to share. “Little Secrets” is another great song off their album, Manners, released on 2009.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, released on August 18,2008, was a collaboration between two amazing artists – David Byrne and Brian Eno. Leo Abrahams helped produce the album and also co-wrote “Strange Overtones.” This electronic gospel album was born after a dinner conversation where Brian Eno told David Byrne that he had accumulated a lot of music that he had never formed into songs.

“Fake Palindromes” is off Andrew Bird’s 2005 album The Mysterious Production of Eggs. The album displays Bird’s continued progression towards an eclectic indie–folk sound, and layered samples of sound constructed using multi-track recorders and loop pedals. He is musically proficient at the violin, whistling, guitar, mandolin, and glockenspiel.

“Everybody Knows You Cried Last Night” is an upbeat tune off of The Fratellis’ 2006 album Costello Music. It did very well in the U.K. but doesn’t seem to be a well known album in the U.S. Enjoy this great unknown song and grab the album if you like it.

( @guillemots ) I’m really diggin the album From The Cliffs by Guillemots right now. I have been on a bit of an indie rock craze since Pitchfork released their list of the top 500 songs of the 2000s which translates to their list of “the top 500 indie, pop, and rap songs of the 2000s.” “Trains To Brazil” got some good recognition by iTunes in 2006 as it was given out as “Single of the Week.”

Steven Patrick Morrissey (a.k.a. Morrissey) is an indie highly regarded indie singer. His solo albums have generated ten Top 10 singles in the U.K. and The Independent has stated that “most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status that he has reached in his lifetime.” After participating in multiple bands in the 1970s and 1980s, he started a solo career in 1988. “First of the Gang to Die” was released in 2004 as one of four of his Top 10 hits in the U.K. for that year alone, a record breaking score.