Tag: Shannon + The Clams

Arab Strap return with their particularly caustic sense of delicacy.

It was a night for mazzy music, starting with a startlingly woozy track from Maya Hawke and following up with entries from many other exemplary female vocalists with a unique sense of melody and delivery. Also, it’s now light when I leave for the radio station, and midnight when I return, which adds a sense of interdimensional time travel to the broadcasting ritual, I’m going to enjoy that for a few more shows before it’s back to operating under the cover of darkness.

Shannon and the Clams are far more new-fangled than their name might lead you to think.

Back to the tried and true formula of new, old, obscure, and occasionally weird with tonight’s set, which features the return of Les Savy Fav and their always welcome abrasive electropunk. It’s now that time of year when I enter the studio in daylight and exit in pitch black darkness, which I always appreciate. In between, there were lots of exciting discoveries. Expect more heavily-censored Guppy in coming weeks!

The mysterious Snapped Ankles are descended from the forest people, though it seems they took a detour through some harsh industrial spaces to bring their stuttering electro-strangulation to our ears.

Hailing from the southwest of France, The Llamps build on a sound that's equal parts New York City grit, San Francisco psychedelia, and spaghetti Western twang, which makes for a pan-global main dish.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.

Uwe Schmidt has had an extensive career, recording under many names as electronic musicians do, but it's his work as Señor Coconut (and now as Atom™), where he deconstructs familiar songs into something Kraftwerk would play if hired to play a quinceañera, that brings me this very particular weird glee.