Recommend some great new music!

Parent Cafe
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<p>I’m always looking for recommendations for recently released music, so thought I’d start this thread to see if anyone here is listening to anything new these days. </p>

<p>I’ve certainly enjoyed recent albums from The Hold Steady, MGMT, Broken Bells, The Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons. However, I just played a CD that totally blew me away. It was “Interpretations” by Bettye Lavette. For those who haven’t heard her, Bettye is a soul singer whose unique voice is up there with the likes of Billie Holiday, Etta James and Macy Gray. In this CD, she takes familiar hits of the British Invasion-Beatles, Stones, The Who, etc. and just turns them inside out. American Idol wannabees really need to listen to this album to learn how to “take a song and make it your own”. After Bettye gets through with these covers, all that’s left is the lyrics and just a hint of the original melody. Search youtube for her version of The Who’s [Love Reign Over Me]( <a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJi6maTueSc”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJi6maTueSc&lt;/a&gt;) that she performed at the Kennedy Center honoring Pete & Roger.</p>

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<p>Excellent! I’m looking forward to checking these out!! My kids actually turn me on to some really great music. I don’t know that it’s really in the same genre, but one I really liked recently because it was different, was the acoustic version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under the Bridge. S2 was playing it and I was thinking ‘I know this from somewhere’, so he pulled it up on youtube. I really like the version. It’s worth a listen… Let me know what you think. If I think of others that might be up your alley I’ll post them.</p>

<p>btw, just pulled up one version on youtube to listen again. At the end there is a small clip where you hear one of the guys ask the other ‘did that sound a bit out off…I think my B string is a little flat…’. Cracked me up! I just like the version because they are sitting on the beach, no studio mix or backup, palms thumping on their guitars instead of a drum. It’s just more raw…</p>

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<p>Good thread. (We’re Avett Brothers’ fans here also.)</p>

<p>Have you heard Paolo Nutini? </p>

<p>My daughter has made it to a concert both times he’s been to the U.S. (One concert happened to be before a major math test - I totally understood ;))</p>

<p>[YouTube</a> - Paolo Nutini - 10/10](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O0TNMCmXJY]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O0TNMCmXJY)</p>

<p>His second album Sunny Side Up just won “Best International Album” at the 2010 Meteor Awards. Technically it’s my daughter’s cd, but I admit to having possession of it at the moment.</p>

<p>One of my daughter’s favorite songs from Sunny Side Up:</p>

<p>[YouTube</a> - Paolo Nutini - Pencil full of lead (live session)](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twuzki0ZpDo]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twuzki0ZpDo)</p>

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<p>I DISLIKE that we can’t edit posts past a certain point. I understand it’s for continuity, but frustrating when you want to add something… :)</p>

<p>S2 suggested this instrumental version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers…search on youtube:
igor presnyakov under the bridge.</p>

<p>IF you like rock…pretty hard rock. There is a remake of George Michael’s Careless Whisper. Talk about totally changing up a song! Perhaps not your style, but you may appreciate the new approach.
Youtube: Seether - Careless Whisper</p>

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<p>If you like Avett Brothers and Paolo Nutini, you might like Guggenheim Grotto.</p>

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<p>It is a little annoying, but I belong to another board where posts can be edited forever, and believe me, it’s better this way.</p>

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<p>^ Agreed in the long run… It’s frustrating when you go back and you know you are just minutes too late and you find a major spelling or grammar error that you didn’t catch! You’re stuck hoping someone does not call you out on it! :O</p>

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<p>audiophile: I love Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations. :slight_smile: I plan to order it.</p>

<p>I’m getting ready to explore to IloveLA’s recommendation (Guggenheim Grotto) now.</p>

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<p>Just checked out some Guggenheim Grotto on youtube. Very tasty music!</p>

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<p>Like: Guggenheim Grotto,
Like: Mumford & Sons.</p>

<p>both “found for me for my iPod” by my 18 year old.</p>

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<p>Really enjoyed Broken Bells. I also really like Conor Oberst’s new group, Monsters of Folk. Also, like the Weepies and Ingrid Michaelson.</p>

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<p>Gary Go released a nice album last year.</p>

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<p>igor presnyakov under the bridge</p>

<hr>

<p>I really like him, his RHCP covers and the Viva la Vida one is really good. </p>

<p>He even made a Lady Gaga song sound decent!</p>

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<p>I’ve been listening to a part-time pick-up band called, The Word.</p>

<p>It consists of:</p>

<p>The North Mississippi All-Stars
Luther Dickinson (guitar)
Cody Dickson (drums)
Chris Chew (bass)</p>

<p>plus</p>

<p>John Medeski (awesome jazz Hammond organ player)</p>

<p>plus </p>

<p>Robert Randolph (the Jimi Hendrix of pedal steel guitar)</p>

<p>They recorded one album back in 2001, which was Randolph’s first album, before he had played anywhere buy NYC churches. They now play the occasional gig or festival when their separate schedules permit. They tore down the Wanee Festival last month with their set. Even the alligators were dancing. Really fantastic stuff.</p>

<p>They’ve got a few songs from a live show on their website:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.myspace.com/thewordtheband[/url]”>http://www.myspace.com/thewordtheband&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I’ve recently gotten into Colbie Caillat. Very easy to listen to. :slight_smile: Emmy Rossum is the same.</p>

<p>If you’ve enjoyed MGMT, you might give Vampire Weekend and La Roux a listen. Vampire Weekend is much more mainstream; La Roux is an acquired taste. Might take you a few tries to really get into, but I LOVE them.</p>

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<p>ID,</p>

<p>That line up sounds phenomenal. I saw Randolph’s group open for Clapton a couple of years ago, and he came back out for Clapton’s encore to the Duane part in Layla. Clapton looked as thrilled as he was as they played it together.</p>

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<p>One of my favorite topics!</p>

<p>HGFM is right about Vampire Weekend. My experience is that practically everybody who hears them likes them, from oldsters like us down to tweens. Another very similar band (also based in Brooklyn, also Ivy-educated, also world-music-influenced, also 20-something) is Yeasayer. They’re not as whimsical or immediately engaging as Vampire Weekend, but they are pretty good at worming their way into one’s consciousness.</p>

<p>Taking off from Vampire Weekend, lots of people would probably enjoy The Very Best, a collaboration between two European DJs and a Malawian singer (and, on the single from their year-old album Warm Heart Of Africa, Ezra Koenig, the frontman of VW). Happy-sounding afropop with close harmonies.</p>

<p>I am loving the recent Spoon album, Transference (as I have loved ALL recent Spoon albums). I have never thought of Spoon as my favorite group, but inexorably they seem to be occupying an awful lot of my shelf space, and more mbs in my iPod than anyone else. Britt Daniel is not a great singer or a great lyricist, and no one in the group has extraordinary technique. Few of their songs sound like hits. But somehow, every couple years, they turn out another collection that pretty much never wears out its welcome, and keeps acquiring additional emotional resonance.</p>

<p>On the folky singer-songwriter front, check out A.A. Bondy (f/k/a Scott Bondy), whose recent album When The Devil’s Loose has one great song after another, and could have been released any time in the last 45 years. Formerly a controversial figure in Southern indie rock as the leader of Verbena, Bondy is as skilled at writing folk music as he was at constructing crunchy riffs that triangulated Nirvana and The Black Crowes.</p>

<p>For what it’s worth, from her perch as a Lower East Side hipster and English teacher to the types of students who often lead the way in popular music tastemaking, my daughter tells me that rapper Nicki Minaj is the Next Big Thing.</p>

<p>Finally, I’ll shill for my favorite underground multi-racial, live-music local hip-hop of the moment, a group called Black Landlord. Social commentary with a sense of humor, a killer horn section, and a lot of electric guitar, it’s what The Roots might have sounded like if they hadn’t taken themselves so seriously all the time. (I love The Roots, too, as is practically required for Philadelphia residency.)</p>

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<p>I really like the British duo “Dan LeSac vs. Scroobius Pip,” especially “Thou Shalt Always Kill.” Check the video, too.</p>

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<p>My Pandora Wilco station regularly plays the Foxymoron’s “Harvard Hands”, which I find extremely catchy.</p>

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<p>I meant to add another semi-obscure plug: a “group” (more like a solo project with sidekick) called Everybody Was In The French Resistance . . . Now! Really, that’s the name of the supposed band. It’s a side project for Eddie Argos of the often-humorous punky Art Brut, along with his girlfriend (whose name and band affiliation I don’t remember). </p>

<p>Every song is something of an answer or alternative take on some fairly well-known song, ranging from Rogers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”. Argos is great at deadpan speech-singing with a core of veddy British common sense. Of course “It’s OK To Walk Alone”, but “My Way (Is Not Always The Best Way)” – it’s a good idea to ask your friends for advice before making major decisions. The singer from “Scarborough Fair” beats himself up a bit for making silly, impossible demands on his true love in order to deal with his own insecurity, the father of the singer in “He’s A Rebel” talks back about tough boys who are all style and no substance, “Jimmy Mack” says what he thinks about a girlfriend who writes songs about “other fellas” to get him to cut short a trip that hasn’t been that long anyway, and we get to hear what the illegitimate child of “Billy Jean” might have told his father (“my mother always told me you, not me, were the mistake”). Almost all of the songs sound great and work as songs even if you don’t know the song being responded to (which can’t possibly be an issue for more than a few of them). They’re not parodies like Weird Al Yankovich, they’re independent songs with their own melodies and lyrics distinct from the inspirations. (Usually only a production touch or two – and of course the themes – link original and response.)</p>