Wild Throne: Blood Maker EP
The Unsemble: s/t
Nick Waterhouse: Holly
Spirits and the Melchizedek Children: So Happy, It’s Sad
Alexandre Desplat: The Grand Budapest Hotel soundtrack
Brokeback: Brokeback and the Black Rock (Thrill Jockey, 1/22/13)
The new album from Western-psych-rock group Brokeback featured “more than a little reverb, a sense of wide-open space, and a strong kinship with Americana,” and we here at ALARM thought it was pretty good. Now the band has premiered a video for “The Wire, the Rag, and the Payoff,” which we premiered last month.
Various artists: Moonrise Kingdom Original Soundtrack (ABKCO, 5/22/12)
Alexandre Desplat: “The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 1: A Veiled Mist”
Alexandre Desplat: “The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 1: A Veiled Mist”
Classical and country/western, as genres of music, are about as polar opposite as they get. For director Wes Anderson and music supervisor Randall Poster, though, they make perfect sense to combine in a film. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderon’s first film since Fantastic Mr. Fox, the director who’s so obsessed with the eccentric and eclectic situates the work of classical composer Benjamin Britten side by side with Hank Williams, with the addition of Alexandre Desplat’s subtle suite.
Father John Misty: Fear Fun (Sub Pop, 5/1/12)
“Hollywood Forever Cemetary Sings”
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Father_John_Misty_Hollywood_Forever_Cemetery_Sings.mp3|titles=Father John Misty: “Hollywood Forever Cemetary Sings”]Everyone who wants to see a man rip his arm off and beat himself with it, line up here. It’s opening day for Joshua Tillman’s new act, and he promises some violence as part of the transformation from J. Tillman as Sad-Bastard Acoustic Folk Singer to J. Tillman as Father John Misty, a new moniker for a new style and new album, Fear Fun.
Fredrik: Flora (The Kora, 4/12/11)
Fredrik: “Rites of Spring”
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/rites-of-spring.mp3|titles=Fredrik: “Rites of Spring”]Fredrik is an experimental folk-pop band from Malmö, Sweden. On its newest album, the simply titled, elegantly crafted Flora, layers of organic instrumentation meet dark, thundering electronic elements. As its name alludes, it was recorded in the band’s own “ramshackle garden studio.” In this piece for ALARM, the band decided to go to an eccentric local flower store to explore the theme of its new album.
The Flowers of Flora
by Fredrik
As you may or may not know, we are Fredrik, a band from Sweden. We’ll be releasing our third album soon called Flora. People have started describing it as being about “things that grow.” Fair enough. But we always start out building on dream stuff and freewheeling association. So when a music journalist recently asked us, “Dewds, which flower is this record about?” we sort of didn’t agree.
One of us said, “All of them.” The other person said, “The ones that grow in darkness.” Third person said, “It isn’t.” So, to settle the confusion, we figured that we’d find out for real. In our neighbourhood in Malmö, there’s a really old, strange flower store that literally has 10,000 varieties of exotic plants (allegedly the biggest collection in the whole of Europe). So we headed there, intent on finding the all-star representative of this album’s alt-conscious musical theme. Here’s the top 15.
The Flower Store
15. Some damn orchid
Okay. Thank you. Nice. But here’s one for the record: orchids are for wimps.