Music Report

Summer has arrived with all of its exposed love handles and skin cancer-inducing UV rays in tow. Cel-e-brate Music Report come on!

The Music Report was questioning the inclusion of the following artist based purely on her musical chops but Haley Bonar’s name made it hard not to. Out of the Great White North, Bonar brings the emotion of Cat Power, the charm and wit of Feist, and the indie-cred of Kimya Dawson according to one sympathetic blogger. On the heels of her third release, Big Star, see her live Thursday night at the Knitting Factory or Friday at Brooklyn’s Southpaw.
http://www.haleybonar.com/

VDRK is a New York DJ and designer who’s getting terrific accolades for the Subdrive Selektor mix he dropped a couple of Saturdays ago. It is 40 tracks jammed into 35 minutes with each and every track is expertly mixed and lushly overlapped. VDRK can get a little dancey for us straight folk but he usually steps back toward the mainstream just in time. Plenty of upcoming gigs including tonight, Thursday, at Savalas in Brooklyn and next Friday, the 13th, at Europa.
http://www.3onota.com/vdrk/
http://www.subdrivemedia.com/vdrk_subdrive.mp3

Somehow, it has taken this long for Fleet Foxes to make into The Report. They’re indie darlings out of Seattle who describe their style as “baroque harmonic pop jams.” Signed to Sub Pop records, hallowed home of Nirvana and their grunge brethren, Fleet Foxes. They released their first LP, following a pair of acclaimed EPs, this past Tuesday with apparent Hieronymus Bosch-inspired cover art. The FFs swing through Liberty City with a show at the Bowery Ballroom on July 9th and a performance at Brooklyn’s Union Hall the following eve.
http://www.myspace.com/fleetfoxes

Another NYC electronic act makes it to press this week in the form of Ratatat, the duo of Evan Mast and Mike Stroud. The sheer miscellany of Ratatat’s samples might be disastrous in the Mac’s of others yet they never fail to bring in a excellent rhythm despite sometimes working with sonic elements that were (seemingly) sourced from Atari’s archives and the Bronx Zoo. Ratatat productions have landed everywhere from the movies Knocked Up and Cloverfield to commercials for Hummer and the television program My Gym Partner Is a Monkey. A new album entitled LP3 drops August 8th
http://www.ratatatmusic.com/

Lykke Li arrives as the latest in a line of Swedish pop imports. Fader magazine infers that Sweden provides the world with a disproportionate amount of its catchy pop music because they don’t look down on it as an inferior genre artistically as others tend to. That being said, Li’s pop music is more like that of Feist than Britney Spears. Li’s debut album Youth Novels was released this past Tuesday in the UK. Some songs are better than others but overall it makes the grade.
http://www.lykkeli.com/

To close, here’s the Indian remake of “Thriller.” Maybe this is funny, maybe it’s simply an illustration of the growing influence of globalization. Either way, it’s 100% legit.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LbvP7dT3Dx0&feature=related