I Love You But I've Chosen Indie (Indie Central XIX)

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Op zondag 2 april 2006 02:45 schreef hydraulix het volgende:
Gaan er nog mensen naar het concert van de Yeah Yeah Yeahs in de Melkweg (weet niet meer wanneer; ff te lui om het op te zoeken). Heb wat problemen met het charteren van mensen hier

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Good music will always find an audience - not automatically, mind you, and not without surmounting a few hurdles along the way - and Howie Beck is living proof.

If you weren't part of the small, but ardent cult that developed a few years ago around the unassuming Toronto singer/songwriter's brilliant second album, 1999's Hollow - the follow-up to 1997's Pop And Crash, a princely pop debut Beck nonetheless now regards with baby's-first-album humility - it wasn't for lack of its admirers' trying. A modest, home-recorded labour of love quietly released in his native Canada on Beck's own 13 Clouds label that quickly found an audience of enthusiastic and supportive critics, musicians and indie-rock aficionados in his hometown, Hollow managed to amass a small army of devotees on at least a couple of continents over the next two years.
The start-up U.K. label Easy!Tiger came calling, lured by the record's unnaturally accomplished bedsit songcraft and lavish domestic praise that had proclaimed the disc, among other things, "a staggeringly good pop album…a fragile, forlorn mini-masterpiece." Tellingly, upon its belated European release two years later, the Hollow phenomenon proved itself not restricted by the Canadian borders. Publications such as Mojo, Time Out and The Face raved, while the magazines Uncut and Record Collector went so far as to include it on their year-end best-of lists, respectively dubbing the album "a brilliantly evocative portrait of emotional loss and mental comedown" and "a classic debut."
Since then, it took five apartments intermittently rendered unlivable by string sections, drumkits and entire refridgerator-loads of groceries sacrificed to the recording process (Beck has a tendency to ignore his own "FRIDGE IS OFF" signs) and a comparable number of irate landlords to birth the 13 immaculately arranged songs that make up his first full album of new material in five years, the laconically titled howie beck.
The results, as the saying goes, speak for themselves. Howie Beck introduces a new spaciousness and a remarkably surefooted, classic-pop polish to the music, but not at the expense of the whispered, 4 a.m. intimacy and naked honesty that led so many to hold Hollow so close to their damaged hearts. It's a bedroom record that has graduated beyond the typical sonic trappings of the bedroom, proving that one can write and sing - as Beck self-deprecatingly puts it - "songs about loneliness, love, death and betrayal" (and girls; Howie loves his girls) from a vivid, up-close-and-personal point of view while still aspiring to the pristine, three-dimensional audio environments that encourage listeners to sink into the material with new ears again and again. Guest appearances by chums like Feist ("I Need Light") and Ed Harcourt ("Don't Be Afraid") and artistically adventurous forays into bossanova, waltz-time folk and gleaming New Wave pop likewise haven't compromised the disc's pronounced sense of self nor its authentic, right-here-right-now urgency.

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Op woensdag 5 april 2006 13:48 schreef Grobbel het volgende:
Ik dacht tot dusver altijd dat Howie B en Howie Beck één en dezelfde persoon waren, maar een snelle check wijst uit dat ik er compleet naast zit. Ken in ieder geval nog weinig van Howie Becks werk, zal er eens naar gaan luisteren.

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Op woensdag 5 april 2006 14:26 schreef lienelien het volgende:

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Ik heb je gisteravond niet kunnen vinden in roosje. toe het leeg was, zag ik 2 mogelijke grobbels, maar het werd best vol, toen raakte ik het overzicht kwijt

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Op woensdag 5 april 2006 14:35 schreef Grobbel het volgende:

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Welja zeg, heb ik voor niks de hele avond met een rode roos op mijn maatkostuum gespeld rondgelopen.

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Op woensdag 5 april 2006 16:20 schreef bartrid het volgende:
is dat sophia als in ex god machine robin proper-sheppard? Zo ja absoluut waard om live te zien.

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Op woensdag 5 april 2006 22:41 schreef Z het volgende:
Spinto Band staat binnenkort ook in de Paradiso.