Zach Gill is notable for the fluid motion he exhibits while playing. An animated pianist, he rarely stops moving in his trademark jellylike, swaying way. His piano stylings ranges from haunting (Shapeshifter) to upbeat and controlled-substance induced (Wasting Time) to mythic sounding (Barbeque).
He is a notable accordion player. On Jack Johnson’s DVD release A Weekend at the Greek, Gill joined Johnson onstage during the song Belle. That song, combined with another song, Banana Pancakes, are part of what is referred to as The Accordion Set.
Gill also plays the melodica. He played one during Jack Johnson’s Live Earth set.
He is currently featured on a song with Jack Johnson and Matt Costa called Let It Be Sung and he recently collaborated with singer/songwriter Aimee Mann on a song called At the Edge of the World. This song is the opening track for the Paramount Pictures release Arctic Tale He also wrote The Sharing Song in the Imagine Entertainment, David Kirschner Productions’ animated film "Curious George" featuring the the voice of Will Ferrel, Drew Barrymore and the music of Jack Johnson.
Gill’s latest album with ALO called "Roses and Clover" is available on Brushfire records and the band is touring in North and South America, Europe, Japan and in support of it.
Gill’s solo debut, Stuff, was released July 28, 2008 via Brushfire Records. The album features guest appearances by Steve Adams from ALO, Tristan Prettyman, Merlo and Adam (his Jack Johnson bandmates). The first single from the album, Family, features Jack Johnson on drums and appeared in the movie "Baby Mama" with Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Greg Kinnear.
‘Watch Me Disappear’ is the title track from the follow up to the bands 2006 breakthrough, Moo, You Bloody Choir. Which of course spawned the all-encompassing single ‘One Crowded Hour’. Recorded in New Zealand with US producer Joe Chiccarelli (The Shins, White Stripes, Beck) and mixed in LA, Watch Me Disappear is set for release October 11.
Springing largely from a driving bassline, the five minute track is uncharacteristically bare for the band. Not to mention positioned amongst their "best set of songs to date". Explains Glenn Richards on the band’s site:
"Funny track, wholly written with bass and drums not unlike a lot of the Dark Satanic Mills EP. Quite distinct from the rest of the album structurally. Thematically a return to the Eden subject previously explored in the Sunset Studies track ‘There is no Such Place’.
However, in place of trembling dilettante, now find shivering buccaneer on last voyage, minus sea legs. Driving on Paradise? Or one way ticket to Narragonia? You decide, (or don’t!)" - Augie March songwriter Glenn Richards
Apologies for not posting much new music lately but here is a song that I have been really enjoying lately, Feel free to download it, the link is below.
Emerging in late 2006, Bird Automatic began to play shows and record homemade demos. Since then, they’ve sure been busy, touring with the likes of The Shout Out Louds, Art Brut and The 1990s! Bird Automatic’s sound is a marriage of Light Electronica with elements of Post Rock and Indie-Pop.
Jim Bianco - “I write songs. Sometimes about love, sometimes about sex, sometimes about stalkers, or music or folly or the Devil. I notice that most songs around are about love, which reminds me of another quote, by Frank Zappa:”
“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we’d all love one another.”
This is my favourite new track of the week, it has been on high rotation since I discovered it a few days ago.
Click the Download button to get it for free.
Lucky, the title of Nada Surf’s fifth album, is at once literal and ironic. Like the songs that singer- guitarist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot crafted for their previous two albums, Let Go (2003) and The Weight Is A Gift (2005), Lucky is filled with images of restlessness, longing and the elusiveness of love. Yet the band counterbalances the lyrical bittersweetness with a musical buoyancy. Intimate songs become in-it-together anthems, thanks to the chiming guitars, propulsive rhythms, and the emotional candor in Caws’ vocals. A song like “Beautiful Beat” segues from a sparsely arranged, confessional first verse into a harmony-laden chorus and reaches multi-layered, canon-like proportions before the track fades out. If Caws is often suggesting that romance and resolution may still be an inch or two out of reach, he’s also proffering immediate musical solace. Turn up the volume, hit the repeat button, and your troubles, for a blissful three minutes or so, will disappear. “I tend to be pretty hopeful about things further in the future, but can be relatively anxious about the next eight hours or so,” half-jokes Caws, “Unlike my friend John Flansburgh [They Might Be Giants], who says he’s manic depressive without the depression, I think I’m manic depressive without the mania. Yet I’m ready to be cheerful at the drop of a reason.” That’s reflected in the seemingly contradictory minor-key joy in Caws’ melodies. As he explains, “My immediate family is not religious, but we went to church whenever we visited my grandmother in North Carolina at Christmas and Easter. I loved singing hymns and I liked the solemnity of the service and the feeling of release when the pipe organ was played as we walked out. I think I’m always looking for that same rapture in music.” The three members of Nada Surf have played together now for a dozen years. They’ve survived overnight major-label success and the inevitable morning-after bleariness, persevering past obstacles that would have sunk a less resilient combo to become one of America’s most truly independent bands. Experience has only made their work richer, bringing gravity to the subject matter and lightness to its presentation. Keeping things honest – and often rapturous — has become a modus operandi. Lorca, who first met Caws at their mutual grammar school, explains, “When Matthew and I decided we were going to start our own band and that we were going to sing, we set a couple of rules. One of them was that we would not sing in any affected sort of way, that we would sing the way we talked. Another is that we would write about things that were close to us and about our lives. “ Thus, on Lucky, “Ice on the Wing” references Caws’ family lore: his grandfather’s adventures as a fighter pilot and an ambulance driver in two world wars and his father’s rearing in (and escape/excommunication from) a British religious cult. “See These Bones” was inspired by a visit Caws made a few years back to the Crypt of the Capuchin Monks in Rome, who created a macabre but stirring environmental sculpture from the bones of their departed brethren. (Caws says, “It’s a chilling place. Seeing all those old bones up close really drives home that this is it – and you better make the most of your life. Ultimately, it’s uplifting. I left there in a bizarrely good mood.”) “The Fox” melds the personal and the political, the delusions in a relationship mirroring lies from the government. The image in the chorus – “On the grass at Beachy Head/On the cliff to which you’ve been led” – almost pilfers the scene in the Who’s Quadrophenia when protagonist Jimmy launches his scooter off the enormous grassy cliff on the Southern English coast: “We visited Beachy Head when I was a kid and I remember standing on the slope and sensing that if I took two or three more steps down the soft grass, I would just tumble off. I remember feeling like I was standing right next to death.” For all the fatalism in the lyrics, there are hints of rapprochement, renewal, maybe even a happy ending. “Are You Lightning?” and “I Like What You Say,” for example, chronicle the beginnings of a long-awaited romance. On “Here Goes Something,” Caws, the father of a young son, deals with the sea-change of excitement and concern that parenthood brings: “Once you’ve brought someone into the world, even if you think that world is going down the tubes, you have no choice but to be hopeful and root for things to improve.” The sessions for Nada Surf’s previous album had been a nomadic experience for the band, involving several studios, engineers and mixers. This time, the trio eased into the process with brainstorming sessions at Lorca’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn home that the band dubbed “the sitcom” because, Lorca says, “You’d never know who was going to pop in the door or what was going to happen next.” “We got together in the loft,” Lorca continues, “and we just played. It was such a low-pressure atmosphere. Some days, instead of sticking to the game plan, we’d play acoustic and cook dinner. Other times, we’d just mess around, have a few laughs and a few drinks and play garage riffs over and over, whatever. One time Coralie Cle´ment was visiting from Paris and she put down a bunch of really creepy, super-high vocal tracks on “The Fox”. Another day we arranged ‘Beautiful Beat’ having lunch with [photographer] Peter Ellenby and his family, right before a photo shoot. We did that sort of thing for a few months off and on, and then it was time to go to the west coast and record.” Once settled in Seattle’s Robert Lang Studios, John Goodmanson (Blonde Redhead, Sleater-Kinney), who had mixed part of The Weight Is A Gift, produced and mixed all of Lucky with due interference from the band. Other players kept popping in the door out there, too. Among the guests were Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (“See These Bones”), Long Winters singer John Roderick (“Ice On The Wing”) and Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger (“See These Bones”). Ed Harcourt contributed piano parts from his home in London for “Weightless” and “Beautiful Beat” and Martin Wenk of Calexico recorded horns for “Ice On The Wing” in his hotel room while on tour. New York City collaborators included keyboardist Louie Lino and session whiz-about-town Joe McGinty. Lianne Smith, arguably the most gifted New York vocalist without an album to her name, swaps harmonies with Caws on “The Film Did Not Go Round,” written by NYC indie musician Greg Peterson – “kind of a bluegrass song,” explains Caws, “that I made spookier.” It’s of a piece with the band’s own material, sketching out in a few vulnerably rendered words the parting of lovers at an airport or maybe at the end of their lives: “Everyone’s got to leave their love sometime/If not now than at the end of your lifetime.” Having survived and thrived, Nada Surf indeed has a lot to feel lucky about. After listening to this new album, though, it becomes clear that we are really the fortunate ones.
The Dirty Secrets are a Perth based four piece who have been touring extensively over the past 12 months and recording some fine rock tunes. 2005 saw The Dirty Secrets share stages and festivals with such bands as: Regurgitator, 67 Special, Wolfmother, Eskimoe Joe, End of Fashion and a swag of other fine Australian acts, while 2006 kicked off with a slot at Australia’s biggest festival, the Big Day Out. Lighthouse is the new single and you can Download it here.
I received this song from the Triple J New Music Podcast a few weeks ago and since then it has been on high rotation on my Ipod.
The song is available as a Download. Or you can get this song from Amazon at - Tunng - Bullets
Review by Anthony Carew in The Age
When they met outside a pub in London in 2003, Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay didn’t seem like a perfect musical match. Genders was a fresh-faced singer-songwriter from Matlock Bath, in Derbyshire. Lindsay was a sound engineer and electronics geek who made incidental audio for advertising and television.
The two began to collaborate on folktronic outfit Tunng. Lindsay had a "dark, dingy little basement studio", beneath a women’s clothing shop accessible only through a changeroom door.
"We’d get together on Sundays, lock ourselves in there, and just try out ideas. We didn’t have any view to it actually being an album, let alone a band."
Yet, after a year of Sunday sessions, their music - Genders’ acoustic songs submerged in Lindsay’s gentle electro flickers and buzz - started to pile up. At the behest of London electro record label Static Caravan, they fashioned it into an album.
It wasn’t easy. Halfway through recording, Genders moved back to Derbyshire, making the weekend commute to continue the "basement tapes". During the week, Genders hardly thought about music, focusing on his day job, working with adults with learning disabilities. And, when the time came to play in public, he wasn’t having it. "I didn’t really want to play live," he says. "I was interested in pursuing a career and the whole area of working in the helping profession."
Neither Genders nor Lindsay had "thought of what kind of response (Tunng) would get, if any". Yet their debut album, Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, was released in 2005, when the folktronic movement was growing in London, though Tunng were unaware of its existence. "We were very lucky with the timing," Genders says. "It wasn’t something we were aware of until after the record came out.
"We didn’t know that there was this whole scene of things happening; people to play with, places to play."
With similar acts such as Adem, Four Tet and the Memory Band working in London, there were plenty of offers for shows.
But Genders never set foot on a stage.
Lindsay, who was much more enthusiastic about live performance, roped in other players and singers to replicate the songs he and Genders had painstakingly built together.
Among them were Becky Jacobs, sister and collaborator of madcap electro weenie Ben "Max Tundra" Jacobs; Ashley Bates, drummer for forgotten shoegazer pin-ups Chapterhouse; and Martin Smith, a clarinet player-cum-adhoc percussionist with a yen for using teeth, seashells, pebbles and rusty chains as instruments.
While the Tunng live band played with Scottish folkies James Yorkston and King Creosote, and toured with popular rock band Doves, Genders stayed home.
So, when the time came to make the second Tunng record, 2006’s Comments of the Inner Chorus, Genders was both on the inside and on the outside, having written the songs but not played with the band.
Then Tunng took their first steps away from claustrophobic studio partnership towards socially functioning ensemble.
Genders packed up and moved back to London, starting his first tour the next day. The travelling that followed brought the members closer together, both musically and personally, and by the time Tunng made their third album, 2007’s Good Arrows, they’d become a band.
And, on the record, they sound it, too. These are no longer the rough sketches and dense mixes of a studio-bound pair but fully formed songs played by many hands.
Genders’ lyrics have grown darker and odder.
"Talking about darker things in a song can highlight the more beautiful, more positive aspects of the music, in a strange way," he says.
Gender has grown used to life on the road, his former career goals shelved indefinitely.
"I can’t turn around in five years and say: ‘I’d like to go to Australia now,’ " he laughs.
"The chance is here, now, so I’m doing it while I’ve got the opportunity."
