All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Each week Wired.com will serve up a hefty helping of sonic treats in the form of Free Music Friday. You'll get an earful of fresh, full-length tracks from new and upcoming albums as well as tunes you should already know just because they utterly rule, and free MP3 downloads when possible. (If the format of this recurring feature looks familiar, it's because the weekly playlist was formerly called Sunday Soundtracking.)
To kick off the new slot, we've assembled a batch of stellar tunes from shoegaze revivalists Asobi Seksu (pictured above), post-rock brainiacs From Monument to Masses, polio-stricken Afro-beaters Staff Benda Bilili, space-westerners Spindrift and punk rock original Iggy Pop, whose immortal Lust for Life track "Neighborhood Threat" shows up in the seminal Watchmen comic (but not the cinematic adaptation, due next Friday).
Open your ears and say, "Aaaahh."
Who: Asobi Seksu
__What: __"Me and Mary"
__Where: __Hush, out Feb. 17 (Polyvinyl)
Sounds like: Lush, My Bloody Valentine
Spiel: Casual sex in any language sounds fine indeed. But translate it into colloquial Japanese, then soundtrack it with James Hanna's reverb-drenched guitars and fetching siren Yuki Chikudate's dreamy vocals and you've got a perennial hookup. Sure, Asobi Seksu's latest effort has abandoned its so-called shoegaze sound for bouncier pop, but even My Bloody Valentine made Strawberry Wine. Check out Asobi Seksu's transformation on its North American tour starting March 2 in Montreal, and just try and tell us the band doesn't deliver walls of narcotic sound.
__What: __"Beyond God and Elvis"
Where: On Little Known Frequencies, out March 10 (Dim Mak)
Sounds like: Mogwai, Fugazi, Tortoise
Spiel: This fiery trio of political and cultural activists concocts dense, dizzying instrumentals with one hand in post-rock's cookie jar and another on a sampler, which never fails to deliver a perfectly relevant soundbite. Drummer and programmer Francis Choung, guitarist Matthew Solberg and bassist and keyboardist Sergio Robledo-Maderazo create interlocking epics that simply never run out of steam, citing everything from George W. Bush's speeches to Frank Herbert's Dune the whole way.
Wired.com will explore the band's deep knowledge base and smokin' riffage in a future interview. For now, check out "Beyond God and Elvis" and see if you can source the esoteric sci-fi sample. Free disc to the first one who nails it in the comments below!
Who: Staff Benda Bilili
__What: __"Moziki"
Where: Tres Tres Fort, out March 24 (Crammed Discs)
Sounds like: Fela Kuti, Refugee All-Stars
Spiel: Wired.com can't get enough of Staff Benda Bilili's electrified one-string lute, which is shredded within an inch of its life by the Congolese collective's teenage guitarist, Roger Landu, on "Moziki" — and pretty much every other tune on the group's debut effort, Tres Tres Fort, come to think of it. We also can't get enough of its polio-stricken members, its gripping back story involving street life in Kinshasa or its modded bikes that give the band its mobility. Read our earlier piece on Staff Benda Bilili's immunization music to catch up on the musicians' current events, and keep your eyes out for a world tour later this year.
Who: Spindrift
__What: __"The New West (Vocal Version)"
Where: The West, out November 2008 (Beat the World/World's Fair)
Sounds like: Ennio Morricone, Norman Greenbaum, Spacemen 3
Spiel: Somewhere between spaghetti westerns and space rock resides this Los Angeles-based bizarro band. Spindrift specializes in head-trip epics that owe as much to Once Upon a Time in the West and Ennio Morricone as they do to Brian Jonestown Massacre and Kraftwerk. We'll chart the various influences of Spindrift's cinematic space-rock hybrid in an interview next week, just in time for the band's mammoth American tour, which saddles up March 1. Meanwhile, take a listen to the vocal version of "The New West" and screen your favorite Western in your mind. Or check out the western that Spindrift architect Kirkpatrick Thomas actually wrote, Legend of God's Gun, which is based on Spindrift's 2002 album of the same name. Speaking of movies ...
Who: Iggy Pop
What: "Neighborhood Threat"
Where: Lust for Life, out September 1977 (RCA)
Sounds like: Iggy Pop
Spiel: Now that Zack Snyder's cinematic adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' once-unfilmable comic Watchmen is exploding like a nuke on the big screen, you're probably going to hear quite a bit of its musical source material in the media, mainstream and otherwise. From My Chemical Romance's cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to Jimi Hendrix's cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" and beyond, music that made it onto the comic's canonical pages will be cool once again.
One track that did not make the Watchmen soundtrack, due March 3, is Iggy Pop's fearsome rocker "Neighborhood Threat," from his 1977 classic, Lust for Life. Too bad, as it's the perfect sonic portrait of Watchmen's doomed hero Rorschach. The song's lyrics show up in the graphic novel's first chapter, which introduces the character and kicks the hyperdense plot downhill to its apocalyptic conclusion. Is it too late to put Iggy's tune on the soundtrack and take out KC and the Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man?" I'm just asking.
Photos: Asobi Seksu/Polyvinyl, From Monument to Masses/Dim Mak, Staff Benda Bilili/Crammed Discs, Spindrift/Louise Fenton, Lust For Life/RCA
See also:
- Sunday Soundtracking: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Trail of Dead, More
- Sunday Soundtracking: The Drones, Robyn Hitchcock, More
- Sunday Soundtracking: Iran, Black Dice, More
- Sunday Soundtracking: Heartless Bastards, Psychic Ills, More
- Sunday Soundtracking: Animal Collective, Goblin Cock, More
- And You Will Know Trail of Dead by Its Love of Comics, Independence
