Plastic Flowers may have released their sophomore EP Natural Conspiracy on cassette just one week ago, but their third release is already on its way. There’s no info about when Aftermath will be released yet, but while they were recording it in an old mansion outside Thessaloniki they played a two hour set for senselens, who captured this beautiful rework of a track off their first EP, “United Populists”, with added synthesizers and ethereal guitarplay. Plastic Flowers is a band constantly searching their own sonority and this take on an old song does a great job in showing that to the rest of us. (Plus, you also get one full minute of people talking in Greek, which is one of the most beautiful languages on Earth although I can’t understand it.)
Grab your Natural Conspiracy and Meltdown tapes (and free digital files!) now on Cakes and Tapes.
If you’ve ever been to an amusement park, certainly you’re familiar with that anxiety minutes before riding that humongous, scary and life-threatening roller coaster (even if at the last call you decide to quit, like my mother used to do a couple times). And although it’s not that sort of concert which you don’t have a clue of what’s about to be, this same feeling got into me, maybe just for the thrill of it.
I really admire young people doing good stuff and Young Man is a project that fits in my patterns of admiration and respect. Young Man is the alter ego of Colin Caulfield, a 20-something-year-old boy that presented himself in Paris this week, in a floating venue called Petit Bain.
If you had been following Young Man, I am sure that you noticed that he had been growing up. Colin gained some visibility thanks to a set of videos that he posted on youtube covering some artists like Beach House, Grizzly Bear or the huge Deerhunter. Boy, his first EP, saw the light of day in 2010 and afterwards he challenged himself to record an album trilogy in 18 months. The first album of this trilogy was Ideas of Distance, recorded in 2011 and this year he released the second album, which is ironically called Vol.1. In Vol.1 Colin shows to the world his passage from the adolescence to the adult life, a very important moment on his musical trajectory. Vol.1 is also the first album that he recorded on a studio and with a full band: Emmett Conway on the guitar, Joe Baley on the bass, Dylan Andrews on the drums and Jeff Graupner on the synthesizers.
All these folks came with Colin from Chicago to Paris, playing the concert at Petit Bain. I am a total mess when I try to identify the music genre of any band, but I never doubt when dream pop is the right answer. In fact, the entire concert was a beautiful experience of dream pop, in a way so much stronger than we can feel in the albums. Young Man played the right formula: the conversion of the melodic songs in the albums to intense themes in the concert was very wise.
The concert had only 8 songs, all of them long and perfectly connected. They started with “Fate”, a track off Vol.1, and after that they visited Boy and Ideas of Distance with “Just a Growin’” and “Felt”. In addition, they also played some new songs that are not recorded yet. Yeah, they played a bit of all of their work only with 8 songs.
I would like to have listened more songs of Vol.1 though. I really missed the beautiful tracks “Thoughts”, “By and By” and “21”. It would be great if they had stayed longer on board of Petit Bain and had played more songs.
Alone in the stage, Colin said au revoir to Paris with “Directions”, the joyful ending song of Vol.1. Colin, who lived and studied in Paris during a few months, started this song in French but eventually he switched to English, just after promised that he will sing the French version on his next visit to Paris. “I don’t know where I’m going. Am I already there? Is it already there?” repeated Colin at the end of the concert, as an exposition of some doubts of a youngman that is taking his own directions on his musical route.
“We all make mistakes”, sang Sharon van Etten at the beginning of her concert in Paris, last week in La Maroquinerie. In fact, it will be a huge mistake if you don’t run to see her every time you can! Besides of being an excellent musician, Sharon is so lovely… It’s nice how a girl with her arms tattooed and with a bunch of powerful songs seemed to be the sweetest thing on earth when she appeared on the stage with a pencil skirt and an elegant pair of black high heels. She denied during the concert, but I have to confirm: Sharon van Etten is so cool!
After “All I Can”, the first song of the concert, she proceeded with tunes such as “Warsaw”, “Save Yourself” and “Kevin’s”, a song that she confessed had sung a lot of times before.
Actually, Sharon talked a lot during the concert and I loved it more and more because of that. It’s nice to know a bit more about the songs, even if you can guess some things by yourself. When she sings that “You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city, you’re why I’ll need to leave” (not you, obviously), you know that she talks about love, but it’s sweet to hear from her that “Give Out” is a song written for a man that she loved. This song was such a nice and strong one (no, I didn’t cry, but I was almost there when Sharon sang with her heart that she needed to leave. Oh.).
On other side, she made me smile when she talked about her mother and about her hypothetic future kids. Her mum loves “Magic Chords”, which is my favorite song of Tramp, her last album released on February. “Magic Chords” is a perfect song and it starts to play very easily in repeat mode on our mind: “You got to lose, you got to lose, you got to lose sometime…”. It was also on this song that Sharon shown us her magnificent omnichord, a very weird musical instrument with a bunch of buttons that helps to create the amazing instrumental atmosphere on this song.
Another sweet moment happened in the end of “Magic Chords”, when an American girl on the first row asked Sharon about her tattoos. In a very kindly way, she explained to the audience each one of the tattoos that she has in both arms. The tattoo of a guitar on her left arm is my favorite one, because it fits her perfectly.
After playing a couple more Tramp songs, Sharon dedicated the encore to the previous albums, Because I Was in Love and Epic. “She made me love, she made me love, she made me love… more”, said Sharon in “Love More”, the last song of the gig. Yeah, that’s true: after I saw her for the first time last February in a mythic concert – as she and her manager referred after the show – at Point Éphèmére, Sharon made me love her even more in La Maroquinerie. Some girls are bigger than others… And Sharon van Etten is obviously one of the biggest.
Southern Portuguese singer-songwriter Mandrax Icon will finally release his debut LP on vinyl, Mary Climbed the Ladder for the Sun, this summer on his own label, Nostril Records. There’s no definitive release date yet, but this thing we know: Cakes and Tapes will be joining the party, releasing 33 copies of it on cassette. That’s how much I love this.
While we all wait for it, I’m proud to present you my fav track from the album, also named “Mary Climbed the Ladder for the Sun”, probably the best album/song name released this year. Kinda reminds me of 2010’s best one, Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Luckily for all of us, the song is even more amazing than the title itself; sprawling over almost six minutes, we get a certain The Tallest Man onEarth feel due to the finger-picked guitar (his major influences also include legendary guitar players like John Fahey or Jack Rose, so you know he gets things right). Love it when the hammond (played by guest Silas Ferreira, from Os Pontos Negros) kicks in at 1:18. You all should know by know that a hammond is strictly necessary to turn a good song into a great song, right?
