Digits – The Face of Desire

The latest single from Death and Desire, coming out on April 2, as a free download right here on this website.

In the meantime, help yourself to my last EP for free. And sign up for my e-mail list to the right to get my first album for free, and for a reminder message on April 2 to come grab Death and Desire. Thanks for listening!

And see those “Like” and “Tweet” buttons below? Please click on those!

Digits – Modern Mess

New song for you all. It’s been a while! Hope you like it!

For new visitors/listeners, you can still download my EP Lost Dream for free and there’s some other singles I’ve put out since: “Because It’s Wrong” and “Changes”. If you like what I do, please share it with others. And sign up to the mailing list to stay in the loop. It’s in a little box in the bottom right of this page.

Digits – Because It’s Wrong

I’ve got a new song for you! It’s called “Because It’s Wrong”, and it’s going to be on a new EP I’m releasing soon called Only Affection. Join the mailing list and I’ll let you know when the EP is out and where you can download it.

Lost Dream, the EP I put out in April, is still available for free download here.

Digits – Changes (Gordon Lightfoot Cover)

The great Canadian music blog Herohill put together a compilation of Gordon Lightfoot covers for Canada Day and I signed on for the project. I covered “Changes,” which is off of his first album. There are other great versions on it too – my favourites are The Natural Shocks doing “Rainy Day People” and A.A. Wallace’s cool electronic cover of “Early Morning Rain.” Visit the Hill to grab the whole compilation.

So this song is pretty awesome, and a good choice for the first day of summer. Tennis are a duo from Denver.

NXNE is keeping me mighty busy right now. I played guitar last night with my old band The Ghost Is Dancing and had a lot of fun. We played a stacked bill including Free Energy and Warpaint, here’s a couple of great songs from them.

White Hinterland are a dreamy pop group from Portland. They began as lead singer Casey Deniel’s solo project, but multi-instrumentalist Shawn Creeden joined up for the second album Kairos. On the wonderful single “Icarus,” the main melody is beautiful and very catchy, with Casey’s voice sounding alternately sounding like Victorias Legrand and Bergsman. The percussion is very spare, just an electronic kick with some very expansive snare (or rim?) hits. Lots of ambient washes and sustained dreamy organ chords complete the picture. Their record’s pretty solid too, so if you hunger for more, check it out. Pretty interesting stuff, sometimes venturing into pop-mode Dirty Projectors territory, gives off Little Dragon vibes at other times, but they synthesize these elements well.

They’re currently on tour supporting Kairos so if you live in North America or Europe, check ‘em out. All the dates are listed on their myspace.

The Selmanaires

Back in late October, I got to see Broadcast for the first time, at Lee’s Palace. The opening band that night was a group from Atlanta called The Selmanaires. I had never encountered their music before, but they basically stole the show. Impeccably tight and confident musicians, their music switched from genre to genre, sometimes in a single song. Generally I’d say their sound centered around electronic psych-rock, veering occasionally into disco-ish territory.

I spoke a bit with a couple of the members of the band and they were really nice, and extremely happy to be on tour with the legendary Broadcast. They were doing double-duty that night, performing in Atlas Sound as Bradford Cox’s backing musicians. Their most recent release is a lengthy EP called Tempo Temporal and it’s fantastic. The whole thing is streaming and purchasable on their myspace. I think I like the second half best: “Spun From Witch’s Daughter” has a great C.A. Quintet feel, “Deep Sleep” reminds me of the Talking Heads, and it finishes with the hugely epic “Vacant Land”, which was probably the highlight of their live show. The EP is great, the live show is even better. I can’t wait until I can see them again.

Here’s my favourite track from the EP:

Sinn Sisamouth

They also have a blog, wherein they introduced me to Cambodia’s most famous singer from the 1950s-70s, Sinn Sisamouth. His voice is amazingly haunting, and the production quality of the music (which I’ll guess has been affected by numerous tape transfers) has a really cool feel. Here’s his killer take on “A Hard Day’s Night.” I’ve managed to track down a couple of compilations of Cambodian music of the era, and they’re incredible. I have got to find more.