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Dusted Features
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Danish producer Anders Trentemøller and Los Angeles indie act Wounded Lion.
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Listed: Trentemøller + Wounded Lion
Trentemøller
Danish producer Anders Trentemøller busted on to the techno scene with 2005’s “Physical Fraction,” then took it cross-genre with 2006’s celebrated LP The Last Resort, which hit home with late-night music fans all over the world. Trentemøller is about to make his return to the spotlight: his proper follow-up Into the Great Wide Yonder comes out in Europe on June 1 and offers a different peek into Trentemøller’s listening habits, namely his love for indie rock. The album’s first single, “Sycamore Feeling,” is out now on 7” and 12”.
1. Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See and Among My Swan
These two albums are some of my all time favorites. I simply can’t get tired of listening to them. The beautiful hypnotic sound of Hope Sandoval’s voice is a constant inspiration to me. I think it fits David Roback’s guitar sound so well. Heroine-psychedelia that really touches me! Both albums are fundamental to my music understanding.
2. Low - Trust
Another favorite of mine. Low’s melodic harmonies and dark, warm and fuzzy production really does it for me. They dare to take the tempo dooooown and give the needed time for the tracks to grow and work. Just listen to the opening track “(That’s How You Sing) Amazing Grace” and “Candy Girl” and you know what I mean.
3. Plastikman - Consumed
This album was an eye-opener for me regarding electronic music with its deep and mystic vibe. I just dive into the repeating pulses and three-dimensional layers of pads and 303 not played the usual ‘acid’ way. A very organic drone tech album that still sounds so fresh!
4. Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Lo-fi- dreamy. simple and fine melodies emerge out of the fog on this great album. Reminds me of some early dream/shoegaze pop from bands like Slowdive and Cocteau Twins. A lot of atmosphere and vibe. The mix of acoustic folk guitars and warm noisy electric guitar pads builds a beautiful melancholic soundscape around Liz Harris’ ghostly voice.
5. Suicide - Suicide
Another top favorite all time albums of mine. This classic!!! album is an album I listen to again and again. It’s just so much coolness and rock’n’roll attitude without the use of any guitars. Only semi- distorted drum- machine patterns blended with a dusty Farfisa organ and Alan Vega’s Elvis-like punky vocals. And this, in my opinion, is also their best album. “Ghost Rider,” “Girl,” “Cheree” ...
6. Slowdive - Pygmalion
Great songs like “Rutti” and “Blue Skied An’ Clear” are slowly building up in a underwater kind of universe. Slowdive, with their typical warm and pure guitar sounds, is another band that keeps on inspiring me. Melodic lines under a dreamy surface. Beautiful! “Rutti” was playing on repeat in our tour bus last time we played in the states, so for me this album is also like a soundtrack from that tour.
7. The Raveonettes - Whip It On and Lust Lust Lust
This is the best band coming out from Denmark. I’m a big fan of Raveonettes, and Sune Wagner’s songwriting and production skills are brilliant! Their debut album, Whip It On is so minimalistic and uncompromising and was a big inspiration for me. Lust Lust Lust, also produced by Sune, returned a bit to that rough, noisy, poppy rock ‘n’ roll attitude from their debut album. I had the pleasure to remix two tracks from Lust Lust Lust.
8. The Cure - Disintegration
This album, among the earlier Cure albums, were one of the soundtracks of my teenage life. I still listen to the Cure with a lot of joy, especially Disintegration, which is very atmospheric and dark. And again, I really love that they manage to put seductive pop songs like “Love Song,” “Pictures of You” and “Lullaby” into the doom’ish hypnotic universe. The epic sound of “The Same Deep Water as You” is another favorite of mine. A classic album!
9. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
What can I say? The sound on this album inspired so many different artists, me included. I can’t tell how many times I have listened to and learned from this album. “Venus In Furs!!!”
10. M - Bande Originale Du Film Ne Le Dis À Personne, Musique Originale
A very inspiring soundtrack by the French guitar-player and composer M. This is a minimalistic album, with music nearly only made on guitar with delay and reverb. It works so well as a soundtrack to the movie, but even better as a stand-alone work. M’s way of creating poetic layers of chords and pulsating rhythmical echoes is unique and very effective.
Wounded Lion
Los Angeles’ Brad Eberhard is well known for his modern art, which defies easy categorization. He counters that part of his persona with music that is easily, even comfortably identifiable as the lead singer of Wounded Lion. The band’s ramshackle pop conjures indie touchstones like the Clean, the Modern Lovers and countless bands that formed and faded in the early 1980s. Dusted‘s Doug Mosurock wrote in Still Single two years ago, “I like Wounded Lion, a sloppy, slightly arty pop band from Los Angeles, fusing scruffy college-rock ideas with earnest, even sincere make-believe lyrics.” Eberhard and Co.’s self-titled debut LP was just released on the dependable In the Red label last week.
1. The Equals
I’m starting the list with the Equals because they are one of the most enthusiastically agreed upon bands within our band. Everyone likes the Clean nowadays, so there’s no use in talking about them here. Almost everyone that likes the Cramps has funny hair and we don’t want to be associated with that. That leaves the classic recordings of the Equals as our touchstone. Powerful, unintentionally cryptic (I’d love for someone to explain to me what "Help Me Out Simone" is about), and catchy to the max. Although they are not as "important" as the titans of mid-1960s English rock, they are the closest thing Wounded Lion has to a patron Saint.
2. Tyvek
Both live and on record, Detroit’s Tyvek are the pace car for current rock ‘n’ roll bands. I don’t have anything clever or insightful to say about them other than that I believe them, and that goes a long way.
3. Roger Miller - "Reincarnation"
My band mate Monty Buckles would choose "My Uncle Used to Love Me but She Died" as his Roger Miller fave, but he already made one of these lists (as a member of the LAMPS). Sample lyric: "If I was a bird / and you was a fish / what would we do / I’d guess we’d wish / for reincarnation." Great groove, guitar sound, mysterious under-breath noises between vocal lines, and a medium-to-small amount of novelty baggage, this song locates an enchanting land between an early Charley Feathers cut and the one good song in each Elvis movie.
4. Home Blitz - Out of Phase
This is the most exciting and creative rock ‘n’ roll LP I have heard this year.
5. The Seeds - A Web of Sound
Better than Daydream Nation - even today.
6. The Fall - "Paint Work"
Imagine, just for a moment, the difficulty of picking a favorite Fall song (and you thought being in a band was easy). For me, it is between this and a live version of "Jawbone and the Air Rifle" that I got from somewhere. A lot of people perceive Wounded Lion as "fun" and our songs as simple, and I can’t fault anyone for that. Nonetheless, these "people" are wrong and that’s what I think is "fun."
7. Minutemen - Buzz of Howl Under the Influence of Heat
A friend gave this EP to me as a young person because it wasn’t punk enough for him. Turns out, he was listening to it at 33 instead of the proper 45 rpm. There are a strange amount of things to talk about from such a brief record. The two things I will mention today are the ecstatic unhingedness of the vocal delivery and the loping, repetitive beauty of the bass line in "The Product."
8. The Intelligence - "Like Like Like Like"
I’ve already mentioned the word "catchy." Obviously, most everybody enjoys songs that are catchy and it is a central aspect of pop music. Nonetheless, I think catchy is regarded as a slight thing. Well, in my experience, catchy is mysterious. Catchy is mantra as well as nursery rhyme. Outsider music is often very catchy (are the voices in your head saying catchy things?). Catchy is spiritual, primal, potentially disturbing, and the best. This song first appeared on a 45 on Raw Deluxe and will also appear (in a re-recorded version) on Males, the next Intelligence LP on In the Red.
9. Squire - "Debbie Jones"
Combine catchy with melancholy and you get something as hot as Tracy Reed or Diana Rigg in their prime. Catchy combined with exquisite force probably has something to due with Lee Marvin. This forgotten wimpy-mod number from the early 1980s is definitely the former. Furthermore, it has the awkward charm possessed by imitations of imitations, i.e. the well-documented phenomenon of teenagers imitating the Who/ Yardbirds, who where imitating various R&B/ blues sources. In this case, however, it is Squire imitating the second-person narrative, everyday sadness of the Jam’s "Smithers-Jones," which was imitating the Beatles’ "Eleanor Rigby." Originality is a gas, but it is not the only way to gas, cats.
By Dusted Magazine
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