by jim duthie

Hooray! Benoit Pioulard (aka Thomas Meluch) is bringing out a new album in October – according to his official website:

i am pleased to annouce [sic] the release of the next benoît pioulard album for the fine folks at kranky.
it is called lasted & will be released in cd, vinyl & digital formats as krank145 on 11 october 2010.

i am also currently assembling a handmade edition which will be limited to 25 copies to be sold
through this site in the weeks leading up to the official release.

thankyou to everyone for all the love & support.

A new album means a new tour – can someone please tempt him to play this side of the world? I would love them forever.

i am also planning a north american tour for the month of october 2010.
all booking inquiries are welcome at centroclinal [at] gmail [dot] com (west coast / south)
and thegrandtheftottomanempire [at] gmail [dot] com (east coast / canada)

My friend and super-blogger-extraordinaire Nialler9 tweeted me this lovely video of Benoit/Thomas playing four songs for the Circle Into Square blog recently. It’s wonderful to hear the songs played acoustically and without loops/effects.  Usually when he plays live, his songs are layered and looped, wrapped in gauze and presented as one; here they’re alone, stripped down to the bare bones of guitar and voice.  Beautiful.

Brilliant news! Plugd is reopening!

According to an interview in the Cork Independent:

Jim tells the Cork Independent that Plugd will be re-opening on Saturday 28 August in the ESB Substation on Caroline Street. But it won’t stay there for long. “Early next year we will be following the Triskel back to their expanded Christchurch space on Tobin St. The shop will be on the first floor, about the same size as the Substation. If anyone likes lifting vinyl give us a shout!

“The extra space has opened a lot of possibilities for us – for a start we plan to have weekly gigs which will be programmed in collaboration with Triskel and The Black Mariah,” he says. Plugd will share space with their old partner The Black Mariah in the ESB Substation.

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The plan is to expand the range of what they can sell, now that they have extra space to play with, according to Jim. “We will be expanding our magazine / book section, and introducing elements of poster and t-shirt design from distributors while also encouraging local artists to submit proposals for clothing designs and posters to sell in the space. There are other ideas floating about which will be considered.”

………

The shutting of Plugd caused sadness in Cork music circles. “The response was incredible,” says Albert. “There was lots of goodwill and support; it was hard not to be emotional at times.”

Jim echoes the same sentiments. “Myself and Al didn’t realise what Plugd meant to so many people. The shop reopening has a lot to do with that response.”

I’m delighted. Congrats Albert and Jim, this is brilliant news for Cork!

Let them know what you think on the PROC.

http://stereogum.com/455122/teengirl-fantasy-cheaters/mp3s/

Remind you of this:

*Major childhood flashback*

http://www.myspace.com/teengirlfantasy

Teengirl Fantasy’s 7AM is out on True Panther in the US and Merok in Europe – release date, 14 September.

I love the fact that female-fronted fuzzy garage pop bands like the Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast and Vivian Girls are now ‘en vogue’. For some of us, the love for that sort of music never went away, but others are just discovering how wonderfully brilliant it is.

Thanks to the fantastic feminist music blog Don’t Dance Her Down Boys (I can’t recommend Steph’s mixtapes enough) I’ve been turned onto Costa Rican band Las Robertas. While they don’t have the same sense of melliflousness as Best Coast, for example, there’s something really sweet and hypnotic about their harmonies. You can picture them, with smeared eyeliner and sweaty palms, jamming in a bedroom or scribbling down love-letter-lyrics.

Find them on Bandcamp, Blogspot and Myspace.

Listen to and download their songs here:

Album cover designed by Ruan Van Vliet, using photos by Cait Fahey and Jody Miller

Dublin band Groom are getting ready to release their latest album, ‘Marriage‘, which is scheduled to drop this month. To launch the record, they have a gig planned for 21 August at the Lower Deck in Portobello, Dublin.

I’ve had a sneaky listen to the album and it’s a beautiful thing – the band have stepped it up a notch since last year’s ‘At the Natural History Museum’, and crafted an album that flows together perfectly.  It is, as you would expect, about love – but not just any ordinary run-of-the-mill love stories. There’s a song about a lab worker remembering an ex-colleague that’s a total hoot.

Groom, like other Popical Island bands such as Land Lovers, have funny, odd lyrics that will bring a wry smile to your face. It’s a joy to hear this band getting better and better.

Popical Island – All the Bored People

Moon Duo are the mystical side-project of Erik Johnson from bearded space-rockers Wooden Shjips. With bandmate Sanae Yamada on keyboards, Erik gets to delve further into the hazy world of fuzzy electronic-tinged psychedelia and the results are pretty damn lovely. There’s a real blissed-out feel to their music….like Silver Apples, Moon Duo carry you into a trance and leave you crumpled in a zoned-out heap.

I send a list of questions to the band for an interview for Cork newspaper The Evening Echo before their recent Irish gigs, but because the band were on tour they didn’t get the answers back to me in time. So here they are, unedited. Though brief, I hope they give a little glimpse into the curious world of Moon Duo.

Here’s the show in its entirety – the interview is at the beginning. We met in the busy Library Bar in the Central Hotel, so excuse the background noise!

ps If you’re having problems listening to the track here, visit the SoundCloud site.

Irish musician Laura Sheeran – one of my favourite musicians at the moment and a woman whose live shows are simply mesmerising – has become the first person in the Republic of Ireland to start a Pledge Music account.

This is a way of helping Laura to release her debut full-length album proper as well as a means for fans to access exclusive material. To find out more, simply visit Laura’s Pledge Music site and have a look at what you need to do to take part. Here’s how Laura herself explains it:

Hello dear friends!
My debut double album “Lust of Pig and the Fresh Blood” has been in development for almost 4 years now and is ready for final mixing, mastering and pressing. By making a pledge you can help this happen. You will also have an opportunity to get exclusive access to a wide variety of irresistible extras (check out that list – there’s some interesting stuff there!), as well as receiving a free download of the double album on release so that you can listen to it while you wait for hard copy goods to arrive in the post. Note – this freebie is for pledgers only. With your valued support providing the final push, the double album will be released in September on CD, vinyl and as a digital download. So if you like what you’ve heard of my material so far, take the pledge – help me give birth to this baby! A percentage of all pledges will be donated to De Paul Ireland, a totally worthwhile and necessary organisation that has been making a big difference to the lives of many.

The thing is that all the pledges need to be made in the next 47 days or the pledge project won’t go ahead. The music project will go ahead anyway but the pledge project would really help it off the ground.

I saw Laura perform at The Exchange last week, as one of the support acts – alongside the wonderful Squarehead and Patrick Kelleher – for former Beat Happening frontman, Calvin Johnson. Calvin made some remarks about Laura during his set, but they weren’t negative comments, more about how she is very different when performing on stage to talking to the audience between songs.

For me, one of the wonderful things about Laura is how she can switch between being a focused, bewitching singer with a huge voice to a quirky, funny young woman while setting up between songs. I love that – it’s so fun and engaging. Her songs are so deep and dark, and yet when she makes little mistakes or gets excited about choosing her next track, she’s almost childlike (I mean that in a positive way). She has a really strong energy and charisma and her joy while performing is infectious.

Performers are often expected to be detached or ‘above’ their audience, but she draws them in by just being herself. That, to me, is what is so special about her shows – and the fact her voice sends shivers up my spine!

(Laura recently joined Twitter, say hello here.)

For the second and final time, Dave and Julie of Dublin’s Road Records have announced that they are to close the doors on their independent record store. Since it opened in 1997 it has been a mainstay for music nerds, musicians and record collectors, and a constant fixture on the Irish music scene. Just like Plugd records was (and still is, in its current half-life) to Corkonians, Road was a place to go and meet friends, pick up the latest Bonnie Prince Billy record, leave your band’s records to be sold and just drop in to chew the fat with Dave, Julie or one of their equally sound staff members.

Growing up in Cork,  I was always aware of Road’s place in Ireland’s musical landscape, as any teenager was in the late 90′s and early 2000s.  Since the ‘unthinkable’ happened and Plugd closed last year, I know exactly how Road customers feel right now. The loss of Road isn’t just the loss of a ‘shop’, it’s the loss of a cultural and musical hub, a place of friendship, a meeting place, a centre for like-minded people. And Road wasn’t just a ‘business’ for Dave and Julie, it was a passion. Dave has been so wonderfully friendly and kind to me a number of times since I moved here – including very, very generously donating a prize for the raffle at the Haiti benefit gig I organised – and I would like to say thank you once again to him for that. I’m sure that the regular customers over the past decade or so have so many similar tales they’d like to share, memories that they will treasure.

Since Road first opened, the business landscape has changed. With the advent of digital technology, music collecting became easier and cheaper. A generation of people are being raised without the experience of shopping in independent record stores, because they know how easy it is to buy music off iTunes or torrent a Led Zeppelin back catalogue.  Every single one of you reading this has probably bought at least one record online, no matter how much of a technical philistine you claim to be, and most of you have probably downloaded a few albums. That’s how things go these days. The last two years have been hell for record buyers, because most of us simply don’t have the money to buy records as regularly as we used to. Through no fault of their own, many people have had to greatly curb their record buying habits. And the people who feel that first are the independent record stores.

I don’t know if things will change, if somehow a new business model for record stores will appear and enable small indie stores to remain afloat. For a family-run business like Road, there isn’t a question of carrying on while constantly taking a financial hit. So what should indie record stores do? What can save them? I don’t think it’s a matter of people buying more records – it seems to have gone further than that. Perhaps the old model of a record store is dead, and something needs to be created in its place, a store that combines digital with physical album sales.

I don’t want independent record stores to die, and neither do you. But what can we do about it?

Here is Dave and Julie’s letter to their customers. I’d like to thank them and wish them – and their son – and their staff all the best for the future.

How do I begin a piece like this, without repeating everything I wrote nearly two years ago now.

I suppose I would have to say its with great sadness to inform you we are finally closing the doors of Road Records.

Its been a difficult two years since we first faced the prospects of closure and we have literally worked night and day to try and see if we could save the shop and make it a viable business again. The current economic situation in this country added to the many problems we faced in the past have finally caught up with us and we can no longer sustain this little shop.

This time, I am sad to say, there is no alternative for us, we have literally tried everything in our powers to keep this place operating and nothing has worked for us. It hasn’t been an easy decision to make, if anything its even more difficult than two years ago, we have had amazing support from people but nothing we do seems to work anymore.

With debts beginning to build again Julie and myself have finally decided that we cannot take any more risks personally and before things get any worse we will have to finally walk away from the shop for the last time.

I have to say I still have no regrets about the last 13 years, its been a real blast and a pleasure to be here over the years. We have met some amazing people and have become friends with some truly amazing bands. The level of support we have received since last year has been truly mindblowing but so much has changed economically since then that its just not possible to sustain such a small record shop like this anymore.

I am not going to give out about the music business this time around, its just one of those things and we have finally come to a stage where I think the days of the small indie store are numbered. It’s sad to have to admit that but this time I think its true, we can’t blame digital sales, illegal downloading etc, the world is a changing place and I can’t see any room in it for kooky little indie stores like ourselves.

We will be starting our closing down sale this Saturday [17^th July] and everything will be on sale at a 25% reduction. We will be open for just one more week after that with the final day being Saturday 24^th of July. Literally everything will be going on sale so if you want to pick up a cheap stereo, cash register or stapler, then do drop in.

We would both like to thank each and everyone of you for your support over the years, maybe we will catch up at some point in the future.

We would also like to thank all our wonderful staff from the last 14 years, in person they are – Dylan, Jonny, Jimmy, Gib, Colm, John, Chip and Aengus.

As for what we will do next, the honest answer is we really don’t know, hopefully we can pay off any debts we have and then at least we have a beautiful little baby boy to try and put a smile back on our faces.

Thanks & Adios

Dave and Julie

Today I am mostly listening to this gorgeous mix made by a dear and talented friend of mine, Kim aka Daydream Nation, (man, I wish I had her mixing skills!!) which features:

art ensemble of chicago – proverbes
scott ferguson – revolution (main mix)
black jazz consortium – steps beyond
workshop 06 – untitled b1 -
omar s – miss you
dubbyman – green sunday
christopher rau – soulful
anton zap – i’m fine
claro intelecto – b (warehouse sessions 4)
lawrence – gilbert
john daly – solar lights

Grab your headphones and join me in listening here: