Coffee Prince

I can’t tell if Coffee Prince is a Korean TV show, a Korean movie, or a Korean band. But I like this song, “Sad Thing”, which is sort of Mazzy Star-ish.

Coffee Prince, “Sad Thing” [mp3]

MySpace page

Meghan Coffee

Meghan Coffee’s work was an unexpected treat. Her songs — particularly this one, “Jericho”, are near-perfect pop gems. They remind me a bit of early Sarah McLachlan, though Coffee sings more like Sam Phillips or Lamb’s Lou Gabriel, or a more restrained Tori Amos. This track’s going into my personal mix.

Meghan Coffee, “Jericho” [mp3]

MySpace page

Buy Meghan Coffee’s Songs to Sail By @ Amazon.com

Lunar Coffee

Lunar Coffee is an “interstellar spacetraveller on a music mission” from St-Gall, Switzerland. His music is electronic, trippy sort of dance stuff. I don’t really know what else to tell you, other than that I think the above photo is the most awesome band pic I’ve ever seen on MySpace.

Lunar Coffee, “Plutonian Kiss” [mp3]

MySpace page

Athens, Georgia can’t be said to have a “sound”, precisely; the famous bands from the college town (REM, the B-52s, the Indigo Girls, Matthew Sweet, Vic Chesnutt, Neutral Milk Hotel and the other Elephant 6 collective bands) don’t particularly sound like one another. Call it, instead, an attitude, or perhaps a shared love of 60s kitsch, pop psychedelia and close harmonies (Byrds, Beach Boys) and the less traveled roads of country-rock and folk (Nick Drake, Gram Parsons).

(The same could be said of the early 90s Seattle scene, by the way, as my friend Alex points out. Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam sound nothing like each other, or Mudhoney, or 7 Year Bitch or Screaming Trees or The Gits or Tad or Alice In Chains or any of the other bands that came out of Jet City in those days. Hell, Mother Love Bone — the band that spawned Pearl Jam and whose lead singer Andrew Wood’s death inspired the Temple Of The Dog project — sounded more like fellow Seattleites Queensryche than the proto-punk stuff that supposedly inspired Nirvana.

But I digress mightily.)

So along come Modern Skirts, who don’t sound much like any of the bands their town is known for. But they have that same eclecticism, that same sense of pop experimentalism. The songs on their second album, All Of Us In Our Night, veer from Weezer-esque indie pop to tracks like “Astronauts”, a minor key ditty that’s cheerful and melancholy simultaneously. Good stuff.

Modern Skirts, “Astronauts” [mp3]

MySpace page

Ah, the post-rock, she is like a sweet mistress to me. Her grand guitars and, er, random noises made by doing odd things to the guitars, they lift me on wings of angels.

Um. Sorry. Where was I? Oh, right, Cloud Archive. I know nothing about Cloud Archive except that they’re from Oakland, which is across the bridge from San Francisco, and that “Never Catch A Falling Knife” is a cool track.

Cloud Archive, “Never Catch A Falling Knife” [mp3]

MySpace page

[via Kata Rokkar]

People from Venus are a three-piece out of Miami Beach, Florida. Their debut online single “Lipstick” is a nice piece of synth-enhanced New Wave rock that’s had over 10,000 downloads since they dropped it a couple of weeks ago on MySpace. Pretty impressive, guys.

People From Venus, “Lipstick” [mp3]

Myspace page

[via Off The Radar]

So I’m a total sucker for post-rock. (I’ve been listening obsessively to Mogwai’s Mr. Beast for months now.) Anything that sounds like Brian Eno and My Bloody Valentine thrown in a blender will always pretty much get my Evinrude cranking.

Austin’s The Calm Blue Sea make big, epic anthemic songs that sound like the soundtrack to a Michael Mann film. (In point of fact, Mann used Mogwai’s “Auto Rock” all over Miami Vice.) Their work reminds me a lot of the Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks Eno did with Daniel Lanois back in the day. Good music for driving through the desert.

The Calm Blue Sea, “The Rivers That Run Beneath This City” [mp3]

Myspace page

[via Allan's World Of Music]

Have you heard this yet? M.I.A. covering Tom Waits‘ classic “Way Down In The Hole” (which you may know as the theme to The Wire) with Baltimore artist Blaqstarr.

I’m a major Tom Waits freak (like, I have bootlegs), so I was a bit apprehensive to hear this, even though I adore M.I.A. But I dig this. It has a nice creepy street feel, bringing Waits’ midnight blues to the Developing World via M.I.A.’s rap.

What do you think? Blasphemy or a successful syncretization of disparate musical forms?