Sunday, January 29th, 2006

Sunday Cleaning – Volume 21

Maryrose Crook with The Renderers / Ghosts Of Our Vegas Lives (3 Beads Of Sweat)

A longtime mainstay of the New Zealand underground music scene, Maryrose Crook and her band The Renderers will release Ghosts Of Our Vegas Lives on February 7, some two plus years after it was originally recorded. Consider Jesse Syles fronting the Bad Seeds and you’re in the ballpark. Her smoky, mournful vocals blend with The Renderers’ ghostly, mildly creepy backings to create a work of atmospheric, gothic country noir. The album starts out in rather somnambulant territory but on later tracks like “Blood Of The Angels” and “Sea Of Total Darkness”, they raise the tension and energy levels to rather electrifying effect before closing with the gentle “Outgoing Queen”. It’s like moving from an unsettling dream to full-out nightmare before waking up. Catbirdseat calls it “David Lynch-ian”, and that’s as good a description as any. Recommended.

MP3: Maryrose Crook with The Renderers – “Night Train”
MP3: Maryrose Crook with The Renderers – “Storm From The East”

Jonny Lives! / Get Steady! (Eleven Seven Music)

The press release for Jonny Lives! overreaches a bit by initially comparing New York’s Jonny Lives! to The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Who, but comes down to reality later on in namechecking Fountains Of Wayne and The Mooney Suzuki. This EP, which precedes their debut full-length due out in May, is pretty straightforward power-pop delivered with a good amount of energy and attitude, but thankfully no snottiness. They’re may not stand out in the crowd on paper, but they’ve got the potential to churn out that one hit single that will get in everyone’s faces and be horribly annoying after a couple weeks/months – probably via a soundtrack – but make the band rich. And really, isn’t that what music is all about?

Jonny Lives! @ MySpace
Jonny Lives! @ PureVolume

np – Cat Power / The Greatest

By : Frank Yang at 10:28 am
Category: Uncategorized
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  1. 1/29/06 7:15 pm

     good music needs to get out there. says:

    Frank, you should check out In-Flight Safety, new album "The Coast is Clear" was recently released Jan. 24, same night they played an amazinly tight yet short set at the Horseshoe.

    Hailing from our East Coast, I’d say they sound like Doves, occasionally hanging out with Sigur Ros. Was listening today and thought there was a bit of CW in there at times with some of the arrangements.

  2. 1/29/06 10:32 pm

     Jonny Lives says:

    Frank:

    Apologies for our shitty bio! Our friend wrote it awhile back for us. We found this blog post through the google blog search enginge thing (pretty cool).

    THANK YOU for taking the time to listen to our ep. We’d love to get you out to one of our upcoming shows (feb 4 @ Galapags & feb 16 @ Mercury Lounge).

    We recently posted a new bio on our myspace page.

    rock
    jonny lives!

  3. 2/5/06 7:10 am

     llf11 says:

    jonny lives sucks. quit kissing ass, jonny.

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