The Underground of Happiness

Happy New Year. Just a quick hello to land you with a list of 46* (edit - make it 48) albums that did the rounds many times in here in the past year. Another great year for pop music, I think you'll agree. A couple of other miscellaneous highlights underneath. I'm not bothering with lots of links and pictures and videos in this post - that's what the rest of the blog is for, go digging and you'll find. Most, if not all, of the list have been represented in these pages over the last year. And I might also mention that interviews with Crystal Stilts, Efterklang, (The) Caseworker, Hotels, Josh T. Pearson and Neville Skelly from the year gone by are also over there on the right hand side of the page. I may well have left a few people out, and there were a few borderline cases - if anyone has any particular beef with me on what's below, give me a shout. I'm all on for, like, engagement. Say no more. (I'm making one exception, I can't get enough of this) ...

We had a couple of excerpts on the show this week of an interview with Conor Devlin of dream-pop trio (The) Caseworker . (Notice I haven't specified where they're from, because it's hard to say exactly, being that each member is resident in a different part of the world. You could argue their spiritual home is the U.S. west coast, where at least two of the band were based for a good number of years, due to a certain burnished guitar sound, although they are from Dublin originally.) You can listen to the whole interview now here, in which Conor talks about... ...listening to Radio Luxembourg on Tuesdays as a child, older sisters with Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd records, travel, Pro Tools, Ethiopian athlete Miruts Yifter, the process of making music together/apart in the internet age, the love of 7-inch vinyl, The Undertones, random brackets, ska, late Byrds, a West Coast Sound, and more. It's interesting, at a time when Irish people are leaving the motherland in ...

The Underground of Happiness uplifting pop music of every creed www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com www.facebook.com/theundergroundofhappiness Playlist 193 Tues Oct 18 2011 11.00am-12.00pm (repeated on Tuesdays 8.30pm) UCC 98.3FM listen live on the web at www.ucc.ie/ccr *listen back to this show here https://rapidshare.com/files/1051330603/The_Underground_Of_Happiness_18-10-2011.m4a Playlist Wooden Shjips - Lazy bones Amiina - Asinn ( playing Opera House, Cork, Oct 30 ) Portishead - Chase the tear ( Amnesty International ) Giant Sand - Recovery mission ( Tucson Together Fund ) Apparat - Song of Los ( playing KOKO Theatre, London, Oct 20 ) Atlas Sound - Lightworks (The) Caseworker Interview Interview Excerpt 1 (The) Caseworker - National runner Interview Excerpt 2 (The) Caseworker - The slow track *d'load the full interview here http://conorot.podomatic.com/entry/2011-10-17T08_17_50-07_00 Yann Tiersen - I'm gonna live anyhow ( playing Jeff ...

(The) Caseworker – Letters from the coast (Hidden Shoal) *Brother and sister Conor & Eimer Devlin (originally Irish) form the core of this three-piece. They’ve produced a beguiling album of sunburst guitar melodies, sitting on a foundation of drone, with a thin gauze of hazy suspense draped over it. We’ve already spoken about the chiming single National runner - written about the Ethiopian long-distance athlete Miruts Yifter and it shares something of his relentless drive. The widescreen feel of Boats is created with banks of ringing, Byrdsian guitars, which combine for a thrilling crescendo. The beautiful Sea years has Eimer’s hushed, low-in the-mix vocal set against a driving bassline (reminiscient of Yo La Tengo a little bit). There’s more than a shade of shoegaze about both Sister song and Little good it did you , with fuzz smears and high-fretted bass. And I love The slow track with its ingenious uplift of trumpet, coming in the wake of a closet bossa nova. Enigmatic but a...

Jesus, the great music just keeps piling in this month. (Is it the pollen or what?) This is a new single from (The) Caseworker on another one of our favourite labels here at UOH, the Perth-based Hidden Shoal . First things first, we like a band with brackets (parentheses, if you prefer - see what I did there). And the song is about the Ethiopian long-distance runner Miruts Yifter , which I think I'm safe in saying makes it unique in pop music. The press release describes the sound as the " Velvet Underground reared on the Flying Nun label ", which is a lovely idea and I wouldn't argue. There is definitely a drone rock foundation but my first thought was The Byrds I must say, in terms of the dynamics of the twin chiming guitars. There's also a beautiful shoegazey feel off the chorus, with a wash of fuzz and banks of backing vocals. Take a minute. [The] Caseworker - 'National Runner' by Hidden Shoal Nice eh? Play it again, it gets better every tim...