Yazen Hits Up: Skate and Surf Festival at Six Flags Great Adventure (5/18/13)

Skate & Surf Festival made its return this spring after John D, the founder of The Bamboozle Festival, announced that Bamboozle wouldn’t be making a return in 2013. When the details about Skate & Surf were announced, the main attraction would be Fall Out Boy headlining the festival after their four year hiatus. Along with Fall Out Boy, some other bands played at the smaller stages who have been nothing short of phenomenal.

((SHOW REVIEW)) THE BABIES, Party Boat, & Birthdays at Valentine’s 5/3/13

It was one of the first days of spring — white flowers were blooming hard all over Albany and people were driving by with open windows spilling music on to the streets. At the time of this writing, Albany Medical Center has not taken over this block where Valentine’s stands and hopefully if you are reading this in the future, it has not done so!

It is Friday night, May 3rd, with locals Birthdays and Party Boat opening for THE BABIES. We were all really excited to see The Babies play live – A lot of the rock DJs have played the hell out of Our House on the Hill since it was released in November 2012. One concert-goer proclaimed, “MY HEART IS A JITTERY BUTTERFLY” while we waited for them to start and I forced a “Kodak Moment”:

THE BABIES – I had so much fun during their set – They had lots of energy and played all the hits! Their live show translated well from their studio albums — Seeing them live made me love their songs even more because the instruments sounded bolder all around and it really did it for me. I hope one day I can see them play a basement show. There were a lot of dancers in the audience which made the set even more fun.

They had Our House on the Hill on record, cassette, and CD, their self titled CD, Moonlight Mile/Places 7” (review below), T-Shirt, and an AWESOME TOTE BAG (A++++++)

Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

“In a world dominated by Avicci and David Guetta, Daft Punk steps in once again to show us what we need to be hearing”

NOTE: This album releases worldwide May 20th.

Turn it off. Turn off the mindset of all the current trends, the music you currently like, and be ready to listen to something completely different. It’s electronic too, but nothing like you’ve heard in the past. I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece and superior to everything else, but rather blows you away in how radical the sound is. I truly believe a new standard has been created in the music space, and Daft Punk has once again innovated the world of electronic music.

Two LPs//One EP (No split this month)

It’s Yazen again, giving an update on some quality music dropping in May. This month is going to be a crazy month for Pop Punk, and I’m going to be discussing some new releases from The Wonder Years, Man Overboard, and Misser.

LP 1: The Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation. (Hopeless Records.)

The Wonder Years have been a massive name in Pop Punk since they released “The Upsides,” and their new album is proving to be their best. The band claims it’s the third part of a trilogy about growing up, and they’ve been building hype for it with a 24 hour record release tour, in-store performances, and they even auctioned a pre-order bundle and donated the proceeds to The One Fund – Boston. The three singles that have been released so far show signs of progression, with more vocal harmonies from Matt Brasch and Josh Martin, and some of Dan Campbell’s most personal lyrics.

HEAT’S MINI REVIEWS: Purling Hiss, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Chelsea Light Moving, Bleached

Purling Hiss – Water on Mars 4/2013
ATTN: Dinosaur Jr. Fans, Malkmus, Anybody that loves great dirty delicious guitar tones, solos and flourishes.
I pretty much headbanged, danced, and/or swayed through this whole album. I plan on blasting this in my car with the windows down this summer. Guitar driven album, riffage galore, love all the note bends!!!
Song Picks: “The Harrowing Wind”, “Mercury Retrograde”, “She Calms Me Down”, “Lolita”

Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin – Reverse Shark Attack
And HE’S BACK!!! Ty Segall is churning out albums like crazy the past few years. This album is a collaboration with Mikal Cronin, who is in his current band. THIS IS DIRTY GARAGE ROCK, high throttle, blow your speakers out loud. They literally sound like they recorded this in their garage surrounded by Jay Reatard posters. I like how it sometimes sounds like they are running their instruments through a chainsaw. Tracks 1-6 are fun, loud, and 2 minutes or less while the last track is a 10 minute soundscape and definitely my favorite song on the album. If you like Ty Segall’s music, you will like this. Reverb, distortion, vibrations, underwater kingdom, wild!!

Song Picks: “Reverse Shark Attack”, “Ramona”, “High School”, “Drop Dead Baby”

Chelsea Light Moving – s/t  4/2013
If you are a Sonic Youth fan, don’t worry, you can feel Thurston Moore’s influence on these songs. Sometimes the guitars are creepy sounding, vocals are awkward like they should be from Moore, and these songs are sometimes darker/heavier than Sonic Youth. If you don’t know Sonic Youth, it sounds like weird rock: guitars tuned strange, rambling songs, being on a strange journey that you’re not sure if you should be on. I say that with love!

Song Picks: “Empires of Time”, “Heavenmetal”, “Sleeping Where I Fall”

Bleached – Ride Your Heart

Two sisters bringing you a concoction of reverb guitars and vocals, California, simple and straightforward song structure, titles and lyrical content, catchy and feeling good. I bet they are fun live. It sounds like they had a good time making this album. NO STRESS HERE, they take it easy.

Song Picks: “Looking for a Fight”, “Next Stop”

Oberhofer- Notalgia EP

One of the best parts of being involved with the radio station is that you get exposure to bands that you wouldn’t have heard about before. The best example of this is Oberhofer, a band from Brooklyn who released their debut album Time Capsules II last March and quickly became a favorite at our station and on the CMJ charts. Back when it arrived at CDB I remember choosing to review it based upon the marketing label on the front that described it as indie pop and listed the major festivals they were booked to perform at, and within a calendar year they would be performing in Albany for both Pearl Palooza and as the second headliner for our station’s 35th birthday anniversary.

Time Capsules II was instantly accessible and consistent, and I wrote about it on this blog naming it my favorite album that came out last March and my 5th favorite album of last year. Still there were some complaints that I’d routinely make about the band’s style despite loving the album, which is well summed up by my quote in the second link of how “Oberhofer has to find a way to keep the pop sensibility without whistling, playing the xylophone, and singing “oooo”‘s in every song; they have to progress to more meaningful songs”. And that’s where the Notalgia EP comes in to play.

Melissa’s Top Albums of 2012

I have been sitting on ranking these albums for quite some time and now it’s a year late!  Oh well.  It’s not like the music of 2012 just disappears and is forgotten.  So these are my top albums of [last] year that still remain relevant a day into 2013.  Happy New Year!

Kyle’s Favorite 25 Albums of 2012

Hey there everyone, my name’s Kyle and I’m the Alternative Rock director over here at WCDB Albany. I’d like to preface this list by saying that I’m by no means a qualified music critic, I’m solely a college kid who loves music and has a lot of access to it. This being said I’ve been looking forward to making this list forever because comparing albums to each other is an amazingly fun process for me. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to high five me or question if I have ears in the comments below!

Sufjan Stevens says it’s time for Christmas

Sufjan Stevens has just released the second Christmas EP box set of his career, Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas, Volumes 6-10. Stevens started his career as a pretty straight forward indie folk artist but his sound has progressed to include electronic aspects to the point where his latest album can hardly be defined as folk at all. This collection consists of covers of classic christmas tunes that Stevens works with to make them sound like Age of Adz outtakes mixed with some original music, and it serves as a tremendous way to get into the holiday spirit. To hear all the songs I was once in love with because of the associations they carried be torn apart and rebuilt into electronic pop is wonderful, and it leads to a product that makes the transition to the holiday season more welcome than ever.

Click to learn more about each volume

KC ‘s take on CMJ

Hey all. No better time than before the power goes out to draft out a quick blog post right?

I went down to the city for CMJ a couple weeks ago with the hopes of learning something. Pretty simple goal and as you can imagine, I met it with ease. I was really excited about the fact that music industry types would be flocking to NYU to shed some light on their day-to-day experiences working in music. As someone who hopes to pay my bills with a job relative to the music industry, it’s safe to say that I got more out of the panels than some. I took notes, I asked questions, I gave out business cards.

I attended several panels during the week, and my favorite talked about a day in the life of a modern career DJ (which was the only of the three to talk about college radio specifically) and also one focused on how art galleries are creating a hybrid venue for shows these days.

The panels, in my experience, were what separated CMJ from other festivals I’ve attended. Otherwise, CMJ is just like any other week in the already event-saturated city. The schedule for the week was packed and it was more realistic to accept that you’re going to stick to a neighborhood and enjoy 10% of what is actually offered as part of CMJ. It’s just not realistic to go from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Brooklyn in a night, though that may be where ideally the music would lead. Given the opportunity, I would definitely attend again. I will say, a “full” CMJ experience is for the ambitious and the perhaps unemployed.

You can check out my formal recap over on Beatport News.