For your especial delectation: love songs from new artists including “Puddles” by UNA, “New Chain” by Two Bad Bricks, and “dirty little lovers” by Dead Oak. Dead Oak’s album waking comatose seems pretty remarkable on first listen — we’ll be playing more from that in coming weeks. We also enjoyed the single from Reds, Pinks & Purples, a cover of a Japanese band called Pervenche, as well as the entire new album Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth by Friends of Cesar Romero. The wincingly appropriate “Royalty Loyalty” by XOXO Xopher is a real toe-tapper too…
Signature Sounds Showcase: Winterpills, And The Kids, The Suitcase Junket
| Radio
Considering that we practically live in their backyard, it’s surprising that we never noticed Signature Sounds Recordings until now. Signature Sounds is a label out of Northampton, Massachusetts, originally focused on folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter music, and more recently branching out into rock and indie. Folk is not usually my thing but recently I discovered […]
Jamila Woods – HEAVN
| Records
Poetry and hip hop are an obvious pair – the rapper and her rhymes — but while most rappers are poets in their own way, not as many poets are rappers. Jamila Woods has the skills to do both. She’s a recognized poet in the tradition of Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, and now has […]
Accidental Showcase: Bunyi Sembunyi, Orchid Tapes, Fixture Records, Jamila Woods and more
| Radio
Usually our Bubble Wrap shows are an assortment of tracks from near to far and then to now, but recently whole chunks of related music have been falling into our laps, and this week, we decided to showcase some of it. It gave us a chance to acquaint people and ourselves with indie labels and […]
For John Cage
| Music
John Cage, 20th century composer and innovator, is probably best known for his piece 4’33”, consisting of the sounds of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of “silence.” Audiences were confounded and not altogether pleased. Cage continued to pioneer an entire method of music composition based on “chance operations,” such as tossing coins or pulling slips […]
If I were from the Big Town, I would be calm and debonair: Summer Sounds
It’s August here in the small Vermont town where I live, and even here, in the so-called north country, we’re experiencing a bona fide heat wave. To celebrate, we watched Seven Year Itch while eating take-out sushi and drinking basil vodka. Yeah, it’s that kind of summer night. This week’s Bubble Wrap show was not […]
Old, New, Borrowed and Blue Songs
| Radio
With a wedding in our recent history, we went with a tried and winning formula for our August 3, 2016 show: old, new, borrowed, and blue. We pulled together tracks by Galaxie 500 and the Go Betweens (old), a pretty cover from Winterpills (borrowed), a bunch of stuff from 2013 through this year (new), and […]
Everything Is Moving So Fast: The Sad Show
| Radio
Life was meandering along in a happy midsummer kind of way when suddenly, out of nowhere (well, almost nowhere), we were hit with a double whammy of unhappy occurrences. First, our cat Birdie, nearly 20 years old and barely awake most of the time, wandered off one evening and didn’t come back. We were not […]
Games That We Can’t Win: More Songs of 2011
| Radio
2011 had a revolutionary heart and a crazy optimism that uplifted while still flying in the face of conventional logic. We all know how Occupy ended up – park cleared by riot police in the early morning hours one day in late November. Arab Spring did not produce much in the way of obvious positive […]
Your Empire Is Burning: Songs of 2011
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was pop music in 2011. In the larger world, there were eruptions of populist sentiment accompanied by chants and machine gun fire, depending on what part of the world you experienced “spring” in that year. Arab Spring rolled through the Middle East […]
On and Ever Onward: Songs of 2010
| Radio
This week on Bubble Wrap, we dove headlong into songs from 2010 which turns out to be the year when disillusionment really set in. Bjork’s exhortations notwithstanding, we had some SOS’s from the Black community with The Roots How I Got Over and Beeda Weeda’s Baserock Babies. The Scissor Sisters reminded us that we are […]
Beeda Weeda – Baserock Babies
| Songs
One of the better songs of 2008 seems to have vanished without a trace — Baserock Babies by Oakland’s Beeda Weeda. Like The Roots and How I Got Over, they don’t bother to sugarcoat the reality of urban life for people of color. Sure, the song is funny in a grim kind of way but […]
I Look Psychotic In A Balaclava: More Songs of 2009
| Radio
I was ready to move on to 2010 for this week’s Bubble Wrap show, but my partner said no, so I dove back into the playlists and we came up with our usual glom of everything that we didn’t play last week. I was in an electro mood for some reason (all popped out) so […]
Swim Until You Can’t See Land: Songs of 2009
| Radio
2009 was one of those years for me. Without a lot of warning, my life turned upside down and my father died — not exactly a happy time. That’s why it surprised me when I listened to the music I collected in 2009 and discovered just how much good music there was that year. The […]
The Department of Foreseeable Outcomes: More Songs of 2008
| Radio
On Bubble Wrap, we continue our review of indie music of the recent past with more songs of 2008. It was the year of hope and change, although you couldn’t tell that from the music. 2008 brought us a few memorable debuts — Santigold put out Les Artistes that year (from her Santogold CD), introducing […]