Trawling for New Music: Brilliant Pebbles, Low Red Center, Gay Beast
It's being more than redundant when a person points out the blundering faults of the half-assed hacked together monolithic garbage that is MySpace. But even with the unimaginably shitty code, bad design, a sometimes functioning music player and lots of spam, I still find myself trawling MySpace's shaky corridors for new music. However terrible the design of the site, I know where to find the information I need on an artist in an instant instead of having to figure out someone's clever flash site (unless they have cluttered up their MySpace page with ten megs of graphics, forty YouTube videos and annoying transparent text). With that being said, even though I hate introducing new and good music as "music found on MySpace", here is an initial small collection of bands I found through MySpace or who only have a MySpace page for their music.
Brilliant Pebbles is fronted by Monika Bukowska, a "hyperactive immigrant from Poland" clad in day-glo and encrusted in cheap party jewelry. She roars and chirps through a hyper-emotional and theatrical mix of New Wave, Prog and Disco. It's a mixture made even more unique by the video game sounding keyboards of Samuel Ng, "a classically trained alien from Hong Kong".
Cougar's Secret Door
Beez
Battlemattertime
These songs are from a studio session at Chicago station WLUW. Although rough around the edges, they exhibit the group's penchant for seemingly cute melodies which reveal an angry and dark undercurrent.
Low Red Center - There are a couple weirdo scenes brewing in Austin and Low Red Center come from the self-made Zolo style. Arising from the ashes of Oblong Boys and Zom Zoms, Low Red Center takes the quirky Renaldo & the Loaf inspired blip-blop to a more atmospheric, darker minimal synth level.
Fantagaga
Panic Role
Momentary Switch
Whereas older material such as Fantagaga take a cue from Xex, Low Red Center's most recent material (Panic Role) is an alien howl of throaty vocals and clusterfucked synths...although the YouTube link below really shows what sort of ominous squall fuckery they are working towards.
Gay Beast - "Formed under the premise of making queer-political music more ambitious in arrangement than their previous bands", Minneapolis based Gay Beast is a guitar/synth/drums trio that creates a fractured form of dance music melding the ugliness of Arab on Radar with the disparate sound jumble of Palais Schaumberg.
These songs are from their recent LP Disrobics...an album which is aptly titled as I envision spastic skinny guys flailing around in front of a television hurting themselves with Thigh Masters as Suzanne Somer's legs methodically open and close.
Thank you so very much for rightfully skewering those myspace denizens who overload their pages to such a degree that it shuts down browsers. It's a sickness that I surely don't understand, as in the case of a friend who's a Dave Matthews Band obsessive and predictably subsumes her online persona to the iconic balding grin of Dave to an absurd degree...but it's not matters of taste (or even musical-related mental illnesses, a roomful of which attend every record convention) to take to task, but rather this idiocy of depth-charging pages with excessive graphics, audio, video links by the score, etc. that seems to cry out to the viewer "Because I am insecure about my own creativity, here's some frilly stuff to distract you as your browser locks".
Posted by: Jim | January 15, 2008 at 05:51 PM