It's So Downtempo

Between its title and content, the Phoenix-based trio Mr. Meeble’s sensual and soulful pop meets dark electronica record is bound to drop jaws, turn heads and offend, oh, maybe about a billion people. It’s nothing personal… well, except for the one nameless female who inspired this collection of songs that tell stories of the denial and despair of lost love, personal accountability, remembering, mourning and finally, just maybe, a glimmer of hope.

Reminiscent of fellow French band Air, Never Trust... has moments of smooth, breathy vocals over spacey synths, chilled-out Rhodes and orchestral strings. At other times, it sounds similar to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Thom Yorke’s Eraser with its emotive, pained vocals over minimal, tense electronics.

Never Trust's curious mix of stops, glitches, pops, whizzes, bleeps, stutters, and scratches together with sweeping, sometimes unnerving, visceral emotion is as close to opposites becoming singularly effective as you will find in music, or any art form, for that matter.

Download: Fine
Download: I Fell Through

With With With Mit Mit Mit

MIT are three German teenagers who used to make noisy electronic punk and now, with their first full length CODA, have mutated their sound to hypnotic electro-neo-kraut-extravaganza. America meet Tamer, Felix, and Edi.

It’s doubtful you’ll understand anything they’re singing about, unless you speak German, but these three young men will keep you interested with all their instruments, layers, computers, and drums.

Their resulting minimal electronic punk sound is soaked with urgent rhythms, aggressive tribal drums and of course, mesmerizing synthscapes. This is the sort of stuff that will beat you up and leave and you out on your own in the cold all by your lonseome and you'll love every minute of it .

It's good stuff in that oh so German cold as ice way and that's why you need it in your life.

Download: Beispiel
Download: Zwei
Download: Park
Download: Rauch
Download: Goodbook
Download: War War Es

Leopold and his Fiction

Leopold and his Fiction is the balanced reincarnate of a sultry era of Western darkness underneath big city lights and country back roads leading to the morning shore of a transpiring musical horizon. The honest and transcendent San Francisco Rock ‘n' Roll band escalating into the west coast music scene, Leopold and his Fiction acquires a moody-pop frame derived from distant genres and unwavering imagination in an attempt to reinvent what each member feels has dissipated from the greater measure of music.

Leopold provides Detroit filth and guitar orientation breathing parallel with rasped vocals soaring to a grave reflection. Of the trio's American bicoastal familiarity and British influence, Daniel, along with the recent addition of bassist Micayla Grace, and drummer Jon Sortland contribute to a very diverse sound through personal interests.

Together Leopold and his Fiction offers a morbid cohesion of California and a gentle open plains reminiscence stimulating a reason and energy for people to listen closely. A new vision in music and thought offers an alternate take to the repetition of a-sides with their own traditional sounds and elaborations.

Download: Come Back (Now That I'm Here)

Don't Quit Smoking Now!

Tobacco creates unique, compelling pop from the power and constrictions of his available technology. He makes music that is at once buoyant, danceable and unmistakably eerie. He plays "lo-fi" music for high yields, and he gives his simplest constructions a powerful dramatic sweep. He makes music with suave passion, burning vitality and cinematic depth. And he never stops searching for the perfect beat.

On F***ed Up Friends, his first solo album, Tobacco explores a darker, starker and altogether more badass dimension of his complex vision. With his group Black Moth Super Rainbow, Tobacco distinguished himself as a master of jagged beats, glowing melodies and pronounced tension. This time, he works alone, in rural Pennsylvania, away from conventions and interference.

As always, Tobacco recorded F***ed Up Friends using analog synths and tape machines, which gives his work a timeless distance from digital pop music at large. His tracks evoke sonar, mellotrons and deteriorating cassette tapes. His windshield-rattling beats thump hard against their technological limitations. His hooks emerge from thick ponds of distortion, which heightens their hypnotic power. His music is equally cosmopolitan and self-contained, the soundtrack for an imaginary underwater cop show, a welcome stranger anywhere in time and space.

Download: Truck Sweat
Download: Hood Internet vs. Tobacco (via Sendspace)
Download: Songs to Get Killed In The Woods Too (via XLR8R)

Remember Them?

Matt Sims began startling audiences since 2000 with his unusually provocative performances that mix equal amounts political satire , surreal imagery and sensual debauch. With three dancers (à la The Fall), this performance group explored the contemporary connections between media, consumerism, sex, and entertainment. Gaining comparisons from artist Paul McCarthy’s food work to James Brown’s hip work, this show caused enough of a stir to get the attention of DJ Hell who quickly signed them to his International DJ Gigolo Records label alongside the likes of Tuxedo Moon, Terence Fixmer, CROSSOVER, Vitalic and Linda Lamb. The release of Mt. Sims’s first album Ultrasex on Emperor Norton Records, now a cult classic electro-pop album, put Sims on the map internationally with the hit song “Hate Fuck.”

After releasing a second album Wild Light and touring extensively throughout Europe as a three-piece band (as opposed to a performance art piece as was the case with Ultrasex) Sims decided on breaking the band up and relocating to Berlin, Germany. It is here that Sims began working on the new incarnation of the band with Randy Twigg on bass, Andre Lange on drums, and Thomas Stern of Crime and The City Solution at the behind the sound and production. A long-distance friendship between Sims and Hungry Eye Records (New York City/ Montreal, home of The Bellmer Dolls, Sixteens, The Holy Kiss) led to a collaboration and the release of a limited 12”, the A Grave EP, and now the third full length, Happily Ever After.

This new album is an even further departure from electronic dance music and is creepier and more aggressive in its content than any other Mt. Sims album, featuring guest musicians Jessie Evans (Vanishing, Autonervous, Subtonix) and Toby Damit (Swans, Iggy Pop). Happily Ever After is set for release on Hungry Eye Records this fall and sounds something like a less electronic She Wants Revenge meets Joy Division stuck at the Hacienda on a lot of bad pills and blinded all the fog in Britain at once. It's manic dark stuff that rocks like a mother fucker. Who knew that Mt. Sims still had it in them, but they do and that's a good thing.

Download: The Bitten Bite Back

The Middle East via The Second City

Chicago by way of New Orleans duo Telefon Tel Aviv has signed to BPitch Control, who will release the band's third official full-length, Immolate Yourself on January 20, 2009. It's the band's first official full-length in five years. Judging by the track below, this record should be very very good and very reminiscent of old Mute Records stuff.

Prior to working on Immolate Yourself the band remixed tracks for the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Apparat and Bebel Gilberto, to name a few.

The band's previous albums were released via Chicago label Hefty Records but will now be available worldwide thanks to the fine folks at BPitch!

They will also tour North America this Fall with Ghostly artist Matthew Dear. The tour will stop at the following cities...
10/08 Seattle, WA Chop Suey
10/09 Portland, OR Holocene
10/10 San Francisco, CA Mighty
10/11 Los Angeles, CA Avalon
10/15 Montreal, QC Club Lambi
10/16 Toronto, ON Wrong Bar
10/18 Ann Arbor, MI The Blind Pig

Download: Helen of Troy

What's the Pattern?

Following their first three records and the transition from five-to-four-to-three-to-two members, Pattern Is Movement turned themselves inside out and made the record that started this frenzy: All Together.

Rising out of Andrew Thiboldeaux's and Chris Ward's left-behind evangelical childhoods (see Jesus Camp), best friendship (kindled as kids listening to The Chronic), and life in Philadelphia, All Together continues the mysterious narrative of the band, both documenting and foretelling the pounding energy of their near-legendary live show: Chris and Andrew side-by-side, hammering drums and keys (among other things), sweat flying, voices hollering.

And really if you don't have All Together yet, you should really get on that before they pass through your city on their latest tour.

Here are some dates...
10/01/08 – Los Angeles, CA - Spaceland
10.03.08 – Philadelphia, PA - Theatre of the Living Arts
10.04.08 – New York, NY - Webster Hall
10.07.08 – Austin, TX - Mohawk – w/ Balmorhea
10.08.08 – Dallas, TX - House on Swiss
10.09.08 – Atlanta, GA - Georgia Tech
10.11.08 – Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club
10.14.08 – Chapel Hill, NC - Local 506
10.15.08 – Harrisonburg, VA - Clementine
10.16.08 – Pittsburgh, PA - Carnegie Mellon University

Download: Right Away
Download: Bird