Tag: Kid Koala

All hail the mighty kraken — it’s about time some brave band took up the Squid name for themselves.

I meant to write the notes for this show sooner than a month after the fact, but travel plans got in the way and here I am struggling for an intro. I can tell you that hearing Sparklehorse take on Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians’ “Listening to the Higsons” for the first time, mere weeks ago, felt like someone became obsessed with the same cassette as I did thirty years ago, but actually got around to letting the hen out.

The music Clark makes is suitable for rage cleaning and nighttime neon drives.

I am proud to bring you KNOWER, despite the fact that I constantly stumble over how to announce the name of the band, trying to tease out the magical diphtong that distinguishes it from “nowhere” to the listener. I love them so much I will even respect their penchant to spell their name in all-caps. Led by Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi and often spiced with cameos, their take on modern jazz funk / funk jazz is always on tap to fix a day going wrong.

The Boo Radleys are eager to share their sweet shocking intensity and it will instantly lift your day.

Orange Drink can be sweet, it can be tart, and sometimes it will even remind you of citrus.

No pan flute, no washes of synthesizer textures, just Olivia Jean doing her best impression of a land-bound siren and kicking up the octane in the Enya original to unsafe levels. It’s a hot summer so far, with lots of great releases crowding the older stuff out of the playlist, and it shows no sign of letting up. There’s a new album from the Boo Radleys (it’s been a while!), and I am obsessing over motorik sounds from Orange Drink and Motor!k. It’s far more than will fit on a single cassette, unless you get one of those ultra-long ones that your car deck will eventually eat up.

“You missed the white crocodile,” the chipa vendor told them. The mycologist and the munitions expert gave the expected sounds of disappointment, the same as any tourist drawn to Paraguay’s Ojo de Mar would. One of them spread a blanket by the lake side while the other one got busy with entering the passcodes and unlatching the efficient-looking metal case they had extracted from the moped. Opening it once the blanket was ready, they began taking out the 3D-printed pieces from the foam molding with quick, efficient movements as the Easy Star All-Stars blared out a David Bowie song from the vendor’s portable radio.

Every so often, I’ll gather up some of my favorite tracks from the last sixty minutes of my three-hour radio show and create an entire episode of The Final Hour, this one being the third such installment. This is the music that is played between 11pm and midnight, and it’s generally darker, more instrumental, sometimes even experimental, and this is an opportunity for the chronologically challenged to experience some of that closer to their regular waking hours.

I always admired The Hold Steady’s narrative approach to songwriting, but I didn’t imagine it could be applied to this particular Western Colorado town, and tonight’s opening track clearly shows my lack of imagination. Elsewhere tonight, I’m happy to bring you new music from The No Ones, featuring the unmistakable holler of one Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, R.E.M., The Baseball Project, and so much more.