Joe Corrales Jr. aka Yppah, is back. The young Mexican-American from Texas debuted on Ninja Tune in 2006 with his album, You Are Beautiful At All Times, and now releases his sophomore effort, They Know What Ghost Know. Fashioning a rockier sound than last time out, the album draws on a cultural heritage that took in My Bloody Valentine alongside hip hop and which is heavily influenced by various forms of electronic music, psychedelic soul and rock.

Suicide / Cheree
This is a song I could listen to on repeat for hours. I love the atmospheric drone mixed with Alan Vega’s pleading vocals. There’s not much to the structure, and the melodies are pretty simple, but something about the way it all works together keeps me eternally interested, as if I’m going to hear something that I hadn’t heard before. This is definitely in my Top 5 heartbreak songs. The haunting vocals, the minimal spacey melodies, the driving drums, it’s perfect.

Spacemen 3 / Walking With Jesus (Sound of Confusion)
This song is the creation of a band whose lyrical content mainly focuses on drug problems and trying to find Jesus. I know it sounds kinda lame, but when coupled with the crazy distorted psychedelic guitars and head pounding drums, it creates a great atmosphere for some introspective thought or just something to jam when you’re drunk with your friends and feeling vulnerable (ha ha). The repetitive chant and loop go on for about 6 minutes, but it’s not at all boring if listened to with the volume all the way up.

Hombres / Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)
Countrified psych rock from Memphis, with a laid back feel. The bright twangy guitar riff tied in to those drums and hand claps make it a head-nodder. I like throwing it into DJ sets and having the intro throw people when the dude at the beginning starts talking all that Southern preachiness.

Ride / Like A Day Dream
This is almost the perfect pop song. It starts with the reverse cymbal crash, a slight pause then bam! Right into it. I love that. Though, I’m not usually big on vocals, Andy Bell’s vocal melodies are always right on for me. I like how the song as a whole has a sensitive feel, but still retains some edginess to it. It reminds me of laying under the stars at the beach.

Nick Drake / River Man
I’m not usually into the singer-songwriter spectrum of music, but Nick Drake is definitely one of my few exceptions. I remember the first time hearing his voice, I had pictured this old man strumming on an acoustic, but after doing some research, I found out he was this guy from the UK who died at 26. What a great talent. What a shame. This song is just strictly acoustic guitar and strings. I get goosebumps as the strings swell throughout the song. It feels like the whole song is breathing, like you can almost hear nature in the background.

Broadcast / Man Is Not A Bird
Starting out with just a toms driven drum, this song builds into a full on unexpected laidback-banger. I like that dynamic. It’s like you can get super hyped to it, but it’s not overwhelming. You don’t even expect it, because Trish Keenan’s vocals are so smooth and droney. Then at the end you’ve got the rhythm section locked down with the bass and drums and an endless flow of fills. Awesome.

My Bloody Valentine / Clair
My Bloody Valentine captures the psychedelic sound perfectly on this song. It’s straight-up guitar rock with no frills. Big drum break, loud guitars, and topped off with unimposing vocals. That’s probably what sets this song off so much for me. Pretty noise.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead / Another Morning Stoner
After this song came out, it pretty much set the bar for qualities I look for in an indie rock band. That guitar line is incredibly catchy, and Jason Reese’s drumming kills it! I love their epic, swooning song structures. And the fact that they do it on almost every song they make doesn’t bother me a bit. It’s a great formula.

Related posts:

1. Casper Bangs Casper Bangs is the recording project of DC based...
2. Davey Brozowski, Black Whales After blowing people’s minds at the Capital Hill Block...
3. Harry McVeigh, White Lies A dark-edged trio hailing from London, White Lies take...

The Drones are a noisy but very interesting group from Melbourne, Australia. They’ve put out four albums. They tour a lot. Some say too much. Well, they say too much, anyway. 

The Tammys / Egyptian Shumba
When this came out in the late fifties, it must have sounded completely insane, chiefly because it does to this day, still. Three young (presumably innocent) girls screaming, screaming and SCREAMING through this hundred-mile-an-hour freak out about Egyptians or something. 
 
 


Traditional / Carrickfergus
This traditional Irish ballad is enough to make the hardest of men weep until their stout glass runneth over. The last wishes of a dying man to be beside the grave of his one true love: ‘But the sea is wide, and I can’t swim over’. Poor, poor bastard. I heard an old man sing this once in a hushed-up pub in Ennis, Ireland. It had just as much power and soul as twenty Iggy Pops and fifty Nina Simones. 
 
 

Maurice Ravel / Bolero
One of the most satisfying climaxes of all time (apart from the obvious). If ever anybody makes the mistake of asking me to play records at their party, I usually opt for this as the closer. There’s about five minutes of abuse I have to endure at the start, but by the end, all of my friends are sort of having sex with each other. Ole. 
 

Louis Prima / Just A Gigolo
This recording is one of the most electrifying four minutes and forty-two seconds in the history of good-time music. David Lee Roth was aware of it, but his version compares to Louis’ in the way that picture of the all the dogs playing cards compares to Picasso’s Guernica. For the life of me, I’ll never understand how people lost the knack of making records that sound this good. 
 

Alex Chilton / Walking Dead
Sometimes I feel like listening to something that would make all those dull, boring and straight people in the world feel confused and ill, because that’s what they sometimes deserve. This demented song from the Big Star vocalist, comes from his first solo album, Bach’s Bottom. A completely unhinged and beautifully deranged recording, which gets many a spin from me. 
 

Karen Dalton / Something’s On Your Mind
She died early and left us with not nearly enough recordings, but this song from her LP In My Own Time manages to do what most can’t over a long career. She sings like a hillbilly Billie Holiday. Cracked and broken-hearted. I listen to this song when I’m fed up with feeling happy. 
 
 
 

Suicide / Suicide
I’m including a whole album here. This is one of my favourite all-time albums. Released in 1977, and sounding like it came out next week. It’s one of the greatest American works of art, really. Hard to explain. Listen to it. 
 
 

Van Morrison / You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push The River
This comes from his album, Veedon Fleece, which contains nothing resembling a hit single because people were allowed to make things like that in the olden days. We listen to this album a lot. Pastoral, meditative, soulful and the perfect antidote to the raucous racket we make of a nighttime. 


Related posts:

1. Screaming Lights Liverpool based four-piece, Screaming Lights, signed to Anti- Records...
2. Michael Palmer, We Were Promised Jetpacks Boasting perhaps the greatest band name on the planet,...
3. Murray Lightburn, The Dears Having received bouquets for their earlier low-fi recordings, with...

Enon is a band from Brooklyn and Philadelphia. John Schmersal, Toko Yasuda, and Matt Schulz, have all been in a bunch of bands, and are still in a bunch of bands. But all that doesn’t really matter, right? What does matter is that these three, together, are Enon, always, and they’re always amazing. Some bands are content to develop a ‘trademark sound’. Enon continuously expands on every aspect of their music, managing to bring something new to the table with each release while still weaving a common thread through all of them.

Brigitte Fontaine / Brigitte
It makes me feel calm when I put this song on.

Suicide / Shadazz
My favorite Suicide tune. I don’t know why I like it so much.

Elizabeth Cotten / Shake Sugaree
Her voice sounds so innocent to me. She makes the song sounds more sweet than depressing. I admire her as she created her own style of guitar playing. I wish I got to see her perform.

Os Mutantes / O Relogio
I like Os Mutantes. I don’t get sick of listening to their music ever.

Quasimoto / Players of the Game
I just picked one of the tracks from The Future Adventures. It’s like listening to the cartoons, with plenty of sweet samples and jamming. It’s humorous and fun.

Love as Laughter / Coconut Flakes
Sam Jane writes a lot of sweet songs. This one has been my fave. You should listen to the record if you haven’t already.

Love of Diagrams / Pyramid
I like this solid rock tune: the melody, the sounds and Antonia’s voice. What else can I say?

Black Lips / Veni Vidi Vici
This album put me in a good mood. That’s good.

No related posts.

So, we have a wickedly talented and creative producer and DJ laying down what’s good and what’s, well, not so good. Yes it’s, wait for it, just a little longer, nearly there. Ok, it’s Moby, from some otherworldly universe.

John Lee Hooker / I Hated The Day I Was Born
‘If I could sing, I’d love to sing like John Lee Hooker. Him or David Bowie. I don’t have a beautiful singing voice, so I really appreciate the deep and gravelly voice that Hooker possesses. I really like everything about John Lee Hooker’s music. I’m a big fan of old blues anyway, especially music from the pre-war era. It was so much simpler back in the day. You plugged in and you played. Studios are like instruments now. This song is one of my all-time favorites. “I love depressing music”: that was a quote in my high school yearbook’.

Pantera / Great Southern Trendkill
‘Not a week goes by when I don’t listen to a Pantera album. I grew up playing in punk rock crossover bands and I love the complete lack of subtlety about Pantera’s music; the precision of it. Pantera staked this territory early on and just got nastier as they went along. War Nerve has to have the nastiest lyrics ever written. If the Devil wrote lyrics, it would be War Nerve’.

Donna Summer / I Feel Love
‘This is the best electronic club song ever recorded. It breaks my heart to know that I’ll never write anything as good as I Feel Love. I always play it when I DJ, though not the remixes; the original version. I never play remixes. I saw Donna Summer perform once and I went backstage afterwards to say hello, terribly drunk and stumbling about. She was polite and friendly, but she must have been horrified at the sight of this scruffy drunk accosting her after her show. I found out later that she was a tea drinking Christian’.

The Gun Club / Miami
‘I listen to this album constantly. It’s one of those records that I play in my iTunes when riding the subways or walking around Manhattan. One of my great regrets in life is that I didn’t see The Gun Club play back in the day. During the early 1980s, I used to hang out at a bar in Connecticut called Pogos where I’d see so many amazing bands, but I missed these guys. Their first two albums are the best records ever made, in my opinion’.

TV On The Radio / Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
‘Over the past eight years there has been so much good music coming out of New York. And these guys are the best of them. Their approach to music is so original and unique. Staring at the Sun in particular is really, really distinctive. In terms of New York music, I can’t hear much difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn bands because there are no Manhattan bands! Very few musicians can afford to live in the city these days’.

Suicide / The Second Album
‘This is one of the best and most inspiring albums ever made. It comes with a bizarre passion and emotion, which is interesting as it’s just a duo with a drum machine and organ. I’m a huge Suicide fan and this album is deserving of all the love and attention it gets. I remember buying it as a teenager, working a series of odd job to earn enough money to spend on records. I even worked in a vinyl store once, though it didn’t stock the sort of music I was into and actually morphed into a drug den during my time there’.

Kudu / Death of the Party
‘I first saw Kudu play at a bar in New York, a tiny dance club that always has good music. The singer in this group actually sings on the first song (Ooh Yeah) on my new album. When I stumbled in on this particular night, I was floored! Kudu create mutant dance music, similar to Liquid Liquid. It’s very atmospheric. They would like to have a larger audience, but A&R people don’t know what to do with them’.

X / Los Angeles
‘I’ve always loved X. Their first three albums are amazing. I got to introduce them at the recent SXSW festival, which was one of the greatest moments of my life. I met Lou Reed there too, which was fun. The X show was so good! It brought tears to my eyes. I never got to see them play back in my youth, so this felt like karma was repaying me some, and more. For what, I’m not sure. But it was an unforgettable experience’.

Related posts:

1. Michael Palmer, We Were Promised Jetpacks Boasting perhaps the greatest band name on the planet,...
2. Jason Thomopoulos, Slaves To Gravity Brighton-based hard rock band Slaves To Gravity have just...
3. John Ferguson, Big Fresh Lexington, Kentucky’s pop superheroes Big Fresh have been hard...