the
Od Peacock presents.
mood music
for those who've given up on wax cylinder maintenance
Sarah June
"This Is My Letter to the World"
listen
sounds like: a Victorian tea party in an abandoned attic
Sarah June is a singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan. She has been singing and playing piano and guitar since childhood. In high school she began writing songs inspired by the haunting imagery of the industrial wasteland she was surrounded by. When she was 18 she began to perform in Chicago and Detroit, and put together an EP called "three-quarter view" in 2001. Currently she lives in San Francisco. Still inspired by bleak urban landscapes, and the loneliness that lurks within us all, she spent this past year writing songs that she compiled into her debut album: "This Is My Letter To The World". She recorded and edited all of the songs alone in her apartment, being careful to preserve the sincere and delicate sound-quality of the original recordings. Many of the songs' lyrics pay subtle homage to some of Sarah's most beloved literary figures such as Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ray Bradbury, and Gwendolyn Brooks. "This Is My Letter To The World" is a visual experience as much as it is aural, with imagery-rich lyrics woven into atmospheric and fragile melodies.
Though singer-songwriter seems too common a term to apply to Sarah June, however accurate it may be. Singer-songwriter she is, but the songs she writes and sings are both more beautiful and more haunting than the average fare. There is an uncommon ghostly aire to her album. Like the smell of flowers in a empty and abandoned house where sunlight comes shining through dusty window panes. Perfectly sparse and lonesome, these songs come from the edges of dreamland. 10 original compositions accompanied by 2 well-chosen covers (Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and a stunning version of Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You .”)
Track listing:
1. We Lurk Late
2. Dial Tone
3. The Illustrated Man
4. Charlotte
5. Radio Wave
6. My Red Shoes
7. Emmeline
8. Can't Help Falling in Love
9. Sailor in a Bottle
10. If You'll Be Nice
11. Jungfrau Maria
12. When Doves Cry
Nick Grey-"Thieves Among Thorns"
listen on myspace's dime
sounds like:Coil on the Titanic
“Thieves Among Thorns” features Nick Grey, Jasmine Pinkerton & Nicholas Davis (from the semi-romantic act Nick Grey & The Random Orchestra). This new collection of songs, stripped bare of the Orchestra’s usual members, reveals a quieter, sadder aspect of their work, and was recorded after Nick dreamed of commiting suicide with a Bible in a Geneva first-class hotel.
As a result, Thieves Among Thorns is all about forlorn piano lullabies, insecure percussions and torpid classical arrangements, eerie ballads and numbing rythms, terminological inexactitudes and sleepy hyperboles. Ten desolate tracks where Nick’s laptop arrangements and quiet, inconsolable vocals interweave with pianist Jasmine Pinkerton’s eastern-Europe sensitivity and Nicholas Davis' precise guitar.
A sound shaped by various failures, breakups and periods of intense doubt : perfect for heartbreaks and codeine addicts.
Beautifully packaged in cardstock 'arigato pak.'
Track listing: 1• Tammuz 2• Hail Heart! Clouds Upon Clouds! 3• Failure (Is A Lonesome Bitch) 4• The Endless Pink 5• All Lives Revolve in Bright Circles of Quiet Light 6• Spa Diva 7• Montreal (Vue Arienne) 8• Devolun Inis 9• End of All 10• The World Mountain
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Terry Earl Taylor-"Another Time"
sounds like: Murder balladry at its best
Terry Earl Taylor plays a Fender Allegro five-string banjo in the two-finger picking style. He draws from the folksong traditions of the UK and Appalachia , and like all the great banjo songsters, he adds much of his own style to the music. A comparison might be Clive Palmer (though Terry has never heard Clive’s music!), or perhaps Dock Boggs if he was from Edwardian England. But really, Terry is his own man, playing his own music, timeless and original.
“Another Time” is a collection of songs that range from originals, to the partly traditional (with additional lyrics by Terry), to the wholly traditional. This music resides in the lonely back roads, haunted dark hollers, and graveyards of the rural traditions that bore it. One listen to the spine-chilling “Go Make another Grave” will make it apparent why we felt this Dark Holler was the right home for Terry Earl Taylor.
Track Listing:
1. I’ve been Away
2. Where the Cock don’t Crow
3. John Lankin
4. Wish I had a Parker Pen
5. She came down to Town
6. Long Journey Home
7. Go Make another Grave
8. Motel in the Pines
9. Sadie Grove
10. Dock Boggs is Dead
11. Hanging at Picnic Rock
12. Prettiest Girl I ever Saw
13. Waterbound
14. Poor Clarence Hopkins
15. Billy Bones
16. November 31st
17. Going ‘round the World
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Eyeless in Gaza-"Bitter Apples"
sounds like: the most underappreciated essential band
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BITTER APPLES saw Eyeless In Gaza shifting the balance away from the many areas of spontaneous improvisation explored in earlier collections. BITTER APPLES saw the re-investigation of their own peculiar brand of song and avant-folk. Geared towards a live performance bias, BITTER APPLES focused on the vocal/ bass/ guitar/ drum axis - albeit very much in a distinctive individualistic EYELESS mode, perhaps closest to the DRUMMING THE BEATING HEART period in approach. Drawing on folk, imprpvised and European traditional musics, and also with a distinctive take on their own personal backrounds of pop and art-punk ethics, Eyeless In Gaza evoke a paradoxically uplifting nourishment from amongst the eclectic blend of melody and rich lyrical uplifting sound that is BITTER APPLES.
Track Listing:
1• Bushes and Briars
2• To Cry Mercy
3• Year Dot
4• No Further than the Shore
5• Jump to Glory Jane
6• Dear Light
7• Returning Over
8• Dust Alphabet
9• To Listen across the Sands
10• Likeness of Summer
11• Sorrow Came
12• Earth (Legend of Two Daughters)
13• Guide this Night
14• Bitter Apples
15• Sunset 1903
16• Harps in Heaven
