The Easy choice...

Summer means more time, later nights and lots of gigs. Time to start looking in our favorite place in town to go, Whelan's. The next few weeks of gigs wasn't looking too promising until I stumbled across these guys...

Ezio are a British Acoustic-y Rock indie band from Cambridge. They're similar to Elbow, in so far as they've been going since 1990 and have yet to make it into the mainstream. It's always good to see bands going for that length of time without the desire to get rich/famous and sell out into the popular music scene.

The songs they write are quite varied, with interesting influences from classics like The Stones or The Who mixed with a good bit of originality. Head over to their Myspace page. The songs to listen to are "Higher" and "Woohoohoo (Song for a fired waitress)".

They'll be playing upstairs in Whelan's, on Sunday 24th. I think you'll know where we'll be. Today's lovely photo comes from someone, known only as Rachel.

The Queen of Indie?

It's a question that's been floating around since we crowned the King of Indie, and we didn't wanna rush into it. Now i think it's time to name our main contender for the title....
Miranda July



This lovely lady from the indie capital of the America; Portland, Oregon has been able to create some really special work, in so many different mediums that it's hard to know exactly where to start. So i think i'll start with my first introduction to Miranda, which was a film which she, wrote, directed and stared in. Me and You and Everyone We Know, this is a great platform to begin the journey into Miranda's work. The movie gives away the theme of most of Miranda's work. Take very average everyday people, add just a drop of weird to each of them and suddenly you've got a whole lot of weird, that your going to think seems perfectly normal, because the moral of the story is that everyone is in fact a little weird. This is a fantastic film, and it's worth your time to get it.

In other fronts she has a website where she would ask people to participate in doing something like (Assignment #11) Photograph a scar and write about it, people do so and you've got yourself an online exhibit. take a look here. there's some really interesting ones.
She also has herself a very odd experimental spoken word album as well as a really enjoyable book of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You. There is lots more stuff out there that Miranda is up to and it's a lot of fun searching around and trying to find what she's up to next. i've certainly become a big fan of hers.

This'll put Manners on ya!

New York Indie pop favorites, Passion Pit are back... and this time with an album. Their EP Chunk of Change was one of the best EP's I've heard in a long while. It subsequently spent nearly three months on repeat on my music player.



The album is exactly what you'd expect from these guys. "Manners" brilliant collection of indie pop tunes in that certain indie style you get from having three people playing keyboards at the same time. There's definitely some awesome songs, "Little Secrets" is one of my favorites, and only one song, "Sleephead", made it from the EP to the LP. It seems to me that is has been re-produced in a subtly different way (if I'm imagining this, which is a distinct possibility, do tell me). There's a few more slower, more introspective songs, like "Swimming in the Flood", to contrast all their usual upbeat stuff you've come to expect.

One song I do not like, is "The Reeling", the single off the album. It sounds like something off the soundtrack to a movie in the 1980's. It just seems to be lacking in that originality that I love from these guys.

Head over to their Myspace page to hear some of the lovely tracks...