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Music From Real Estate, Dada Plan, Timbre Timbre, Panda Bear, More

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Welcome to Endless Volume, a new Nic Bragg column that details all the good tunes he currently has on heavy rotation, plus one local show on the immediate or near horizon that shouldn’t be missed. Scroll, press play, enjoy.

On Heavy Rotation

DADA PLAN Helpless

A few nights ago I took a trip to the little East Van studio run by members of Dada Plan. In the corner of the room were a pile of silkscreened LP covers for their new release, ‘The Madness Hides’. Above that there was a wild entanglement of cords, tape machines and other relics from the bygone era when bands ruled the earth. The new LP is deadly, and due to the small pressing run it’s guaranteed to sell out instantly. Bonus: Dada Plan are playing a day long performance on April 25th at The Western Front to celebrate the release!

TIMBRE TIMBRE Beat The Drum Slowly

Couldn’t resist posting this again as supreme musician and animator Chad VanGaalen just received an award for his work on this surreal music video. Amazing stuff!

PANDA BEAR Tropic of Cancer

Panda Bear’s latest kaleidoscopic psyche-pop listen, ‘…Meets the Grim Reaper” is a really lush headphone-listen full of dense interwoven lines of bubbling synths and processed voices. Tropic of Cancer is one of the more epic tracks, which here gets an equally heady video treatment.

RACHEL GRIMES The Herald

Indie chamber music has always been with us. It’s just that sometimes it makes sense to bloggers and they decide to shine their flashlights its way. Rachel Grimes made a series of records for the defunct Quarterstick label in the 90s and now resurfaces with a new record of piano, sax, and strings. The music is brooding and intense…listen to it now before she disappears for another years!

ANDREW BIRD The Fake Headlines

This is actually a New Pornographers cover. The video follows the story of a marionette puppet that happens to look kind of like Carl Newman, and wants desperately to be alive and real. Andrew Bird has a close relationship with the guys in The New Pornographers and only he knows what exactly is going on. Regardless, his folked-down take on the number is pretty decent.

THE SOFT MOON Wasting

Soft Moon have released a series of creepy videos to position their latest LP ‘Deeper’ as a dark Gothic post-punk mood piece. Add their recent move to more theatrical lighting and staging and you have a band that is clearly trying to edge out Interpol et al as leaders of the melancholic melodramatic rock genre. Bonus: they play the Electric Owl on April 25th.

REAL ESTATE Talking Backwards

Here’s some new footage of perennial indie rock darlings Real Estate performing at SXSW. It’s basically an ad for Austin as a city for young people to move to. The inter-cut scenes showing marshmallows roasting, etc. are indicative of the indie rock Mardi Gras vibe that the festival has morphed into.

THE SHOW

Jose Gonzalez at The Imperial | April 25th.

Swedish folk-rock superstar Jose Gonzales could probably pack out The Commodore, but instead Timbre Concerts has him holding court on the Downtown Eastside on April 25th. If you haven’t checked out the cozy room at The Imperial yet, you should probably jump on this show and see why more and more local promoters are using the newish venue for intimate live shows. When an artist with such a hushed Nick Drake-esque sound performs you want to be as close to the action as possible. Gonzalez has a mesmerizing stage presence and his complex finger-picking guitar style is hypnotic to watch. His lush new album Vestiges & Claws is his first in over seven years and feels like a deeply pensive meditation on the essential folk rock themes of love, loss, and alienation.