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  • Awesome Free Download: Hot Chip and New Order’s Bernard Sumner with Hot City “Didn’t Know What Love Was”

    Hot Chip, Bernard Sumner and Hot City ”Didn’t Know What Love Was”
    I’m loving Hot Chip right now. In February, this very nerdy, London-based indie electropop quintet which formed around childhood friends Alexis Taylor (the skinny one with the glasses) and Joe Goddard (the chunky one with the beard), released their fifth full-length album One Life Stand.

    It’s one of my favorite records of 2010, full of sweetly sincere love songs about marriage and family, only set to synthesizer sounds and blippity beats stolen from thirty-year-old records by Kraftwerk and Heaven 17. But Hot Chip’s latest single isn’t from the album. It’s a collaboration with New Order singer Bernard Sumner and London house music duo Hot City called “Didn’t Know What Love Was”; and it was commissioned by Converse (as in the shoes) who, like Levi’s Jeans, have been giving me plenty of reason to hang out at their website for reasons other than interest in their product. (Converse recently opened its own recording studio in Brooklyn!)

    You can (and should) download – for free – the “maxi-single” of the song, featuring four different mixes, at Converse’s website. It’s a good old-fashioned Madchester house anthem that sounds like the proper follow-up to the 1990 hit “Getting Away With It” by Electronic, Sumner’s on-again-off-again collaboration with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. I keep expecting Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant to pipe in with the background vocals. And as if to prove this project was no cheap fling, an official music video for the single was released last week, and – well, it’s pretty wonderful. See it here:

  • Awesong Song Alert! Four Year Strong “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)”

    The triumphant (or rather triumphalist) return of the tri-cornered hat may go down as the most dubious – certainly the most strident – fashion (err- political?) trend of 2010. But who knew it would trickle down to the unwashed masses of New England’s indie punk scenes so quickly. Already this year, we’ve seen Titus Andronicus go all Revolutionary (while quoting pre-Presidential Abraham Lincoln) with their video for “A More Perfect Union”. Now, from Worcester, Massachusetts, we have the band Four Year Strong paying earnest tribute to the soldiers of the American Revolution in their video for “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)”.

    It’s a near-perfect video for both the song and the band in that the beautifully shot battle scenes match the song’s urgency, while the story highlights and is strengthened by the vocal interplay between the group’s three vocalists. It’s one of those rare feats where the video and the song are each better because of the other. It’s also a nice showcase for the band’s bounty of facial hair (including singer Dan O’Connor’s “expressive eyebrows”).

    You get a sense from the video that the band is pretty politically engaged, but at the same time, it’s pretty impossible to discern where there political sympathies lie; and the truth is the video itself isn’t at all political. It’s just a good, simply told story set to a song that, however confrontational in tempo and delivery, is maddeningly vague. My favorite couplet:

    You asked, What would I stand for?
    The truth is: I STAND FOR THIS!

    I have to say, that hits pretty close to home in a state (Wisconsin) that just un-elected one of the country’s most diligent, principled Senators in favor of a self-funded cypher. Check out the video:

    A couple weeks ago, the band, who outed themselves as unabashed 90s nostalgists with their 2009 covers album Explains It All, posted a new, “pop-up” version of the video. Enjoy:

  • Old Faces, New Music: The Return of Ace of Base and Jenny Berggren Gone Solo

    Ace of Base ”All For You”
    There are college freshmen right now who have no idea that all that she wants is another baby; who don’t know what it’s like to see the sign and have it open up their eyes; who don’t know that it’s a beautiful life – oh – oh oh oh. But it’s also true that whether they’ve heard of Ace of Base or not, anyone who’s heard Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” has heard what Ace of Base were all about – lightly Latinized, boldly synthesized, Eurodisco singalongs that sound fantastic on both the radio and the dance floor. Songs that are easy to love even though we know that each spin we give them reduces our IQ by at least a quarter of a point. To hear “Alejandro” dominate the airwaves this summer, it certainly seemed like the right time for an Ace of Base reunion, or at least an Ace of Base reconstitution.

    It’s been more than a decade since Ace of Base have had a hit song here in the U.S. and 8 years since the Swedish pop quartet formed around songwriter-producers Ulf “Buddha” Ekberg and Jonas “Joker” Berggren released their last studio album. 2002’s Da Capo, recorded as a trio, following the departure of Malin Berggren, wasn’t released here. Since then, the other original vocalist Jenny Berggren also left the group to pursue a solo career, while Ekberg served as the head judge for Sweden’s Idol 2009 competition and “Joker” Berggren… got really fat. Recruiting Idol 2009 finalist Clara Hagman and Julia Williamson to fill the girl’s roles in the group, Ekberg and Berggren re-convened as Ace of Base in the studio and released the group’s fifth studio album The Golden Ratio internationally this past summer (no U.S. release is planned). Here’s the album’s lead single, “All For You”, which, y’know, sounds like a possible Lady Gaga song.

    Ace of Base “All For You”

    Last month, Jenny Berggren released her debut solo album My Story. Here’s that album’s much more forward-looking lead single “Here I Am”.

    Jenny Berggren “Here I Am”