The Underground of Happiness

Grace Cooper from San Francisco treats us to some tasty slowcore from the irresistibly titled album Life with Dick . Insistent. Unpredictable. A little bit dangerous. Two guitar chords and a high hat are the tools employed as Cooper croons somewhere between Chan Marshall and Kurt Cobain. There’s a wonky slacker feel to the fuzz chords which is particularly endearing. To add to the sense of intrigue. Lovely stuff.

Bracing new single from the San Francisco band... ...as if John Fogerty was stepping out with The Byrds. So. Muscular. But cosmic in that harmony drift. Glorious and uplifting pop music to coin a phrase.

There’s a gorgeous Byrdsian flow to this single from the San Francisco band’s third album, the wonderful Animal races . The vocals and guitars unfurl in unhurried fashion, culminating in some glorious steel guitar work. It chimes and rings like (probably) only a Californian band truly can and the arrangement is all the more affecting for the counterpoint against the lyrical discussion of death and mortality. It is roots music brought into contact with something very groovy. A piece of class is what it is. Animal Races by Cool Ghouls

There’s a great freshness about this brand of psych pop from San Francisco band Cool Ghouls . Unlike many of today’s psych purveyors, they come at it from more of a roots than a shoegaze perspective. Think Creedence Clearwater Revival, for example, a phalanx of clean, jangly but strident guitars with buzzing riffs aplenty. That’s not to say there aren’t some lovely fuzzy interludes - album opener and single ‘And it grows’ unleashes a great one just 2 minutes in, before reverting to thrilling core values. But for the most part, the swingingly insistent tunes are carried by sharp sounds and banks of glorious Byrdsian harmonies, with the fuzz pedal being reserved for extra emphasis. The wonderful ‘What a dream I had’ is the perfect example, a hazy medium pacer that produces a guitar solo with a kick like a chilli pepper. ‘Orange light’ takes on the theme, uncoiling an Eastern European-sounding riff, before wrapping it in head-bopping 60s power pop. After this blistering...

This album has the great feel of the desert off it, parched and shimmering. There’s also something ageless about it, a spanning of boundaries which feels really nourishing. Cosmic is about right. Every Thrill Jockey release is worthy of attention, this one perhaps more for those late night slumbering/narcotic times of life. Here’s some bio on the band – Date Palms revolves around the core duo of Gregg Kowalsky (keyboards, electronics) and Marielle Jakobsons (violin, flute, electronics). They employ traditional rock instrumentation to create music informed by Indian classical music, country, minimalism, and spiritual jazz, arriving at a style that is wholly their own. On their third album, The Dusted Sessions, the duo expanded the line-up to include Ben Bracken on electric bass, Michael Elrod on tanpura, and Noah Philips on electric guitar (a first for the band). Kowalsky and Jakobsons are both accomplished solo musicians in their own right: Kowalsky has released ambient alb...

A brilliantly fuzzy celebration of outcasts and hedonists the world over. A little bit garage-rock, a little bit glam, it could even be a love song to Segall’s hometown of San Francisco (if the reports we hear of that sensual paradise are true). He also sounds uncannily like Brett Anderson of Suede, but happily, the deep quake rumble of the bass, amid the other various delights of the arrangement, make that a footnote to something glorious.

A couple of things came together recently. First, there was the new Damon & Naomi "video" made by Chris Marker (here's the post - http://theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com/2011/03/damon-naomi-chris-marker.html ) Then the new Erland & the Carnival album Nightingale (Full Time Hobby) arrived, and track 3 on it, Emmeline , begins with something like a prelude sequence, which bears a great resemblance to the Prelude from Bernard Herrmann's score for the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo . This caught my attention straight away because I'm a huge fan of this soundtrack, as well as Herrmann (and Hitchcock) in general. Chris Marker is probably best known for his seminal film, La jetée , which is made up almost exclusively of still images. But he's also responsible for a wonderful film called Sans soleil , in which, among other things, he explores the theme of "insane memory" in Hitchcock's Vertigo . It got me wondering if there were any connect...