It’s been nearly two years since we mentioned City Reign but don’t take that to mean that the lads haven’t been hard at work. As it stands the band is preparing for the release of their debut full length album to be called Another Step which will be out February 25th.

The lead single from the album is a remastered version of the demo track released in 2010. The remaster was

completed with Sam Jones (Bromheads Jacket, Alex Turner) in Sacred Trinity Church in Salford, UK this year and spruces up an already rather enjoyable track that still reminds me greatly of Idlewild.

It’s going to be nice to talk about something regarding the postal service without it having to do with Lance Armstrong the doper.

The Ben Gibbard & Jimmy Tamborello collaboration as The Postal Service in 2003 only produced one album, Give Up. The band did very little touring behind it and yet it still became a cult classic of an album with plenty of covers of “Such Great Heights” to be found all over the internet. Over time, I think, the excitement of the album wore off as many other great acts came in to replace The Postal Service but now hearing that there’s a reunion on the way, it’s time to go back and revisit Give Up to become acquainted with an old friend.

There is very little news about what 2013 will hold for the band but there is a website and rumors of them headlining Coachella. New album? Tour? Who knows?

Just a few more short weeks until the highly anticipated release of Local Natives’ sophomore album Hummingbird. The last time that such a huge buzz was put around a sophomore release was probably in 2010 for Vampire Weekend’s Contra, and we all know how that one went. Right down the drain, in my opinion.

“Heavy Feet” is the only track that we’ve been privileged to hear so far from the upcoming album but it holds some promise if this is the sound the band is going with. In an interview drummer Matt Frazier said that the “new songs are purposefully spare and bare”. This will be quite a change from the tracks on Gorilla Manor that were based around heavy (and welcomed) percussion, stacked harmonies and complex arrangements.

On January 11th LA station will be airing a session with the band on Morning Becomes Eclectic. You can get a sneak preview of the performance here.

ideo for the track. Sometimes the tracks are great and some of them have not been so great but the videos are almost always entertaining. This year is no exception as the band has released “I Feel It In My Bones” along with its accompanying video which features a psychotic, biker Santa as he

goes about the more dirty work of his job, namely “taking care of” the naughty kids. Members of the band try to sleep as they await their impending doom.

As usual, all sales go to benefit (RED)

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While we sit here fidgeting through the final few days before the release of Keaton Henson’s upcoming EP Sweetheart, What Have You Done To Us we’re treated to yet another heartbreaking video which features Henson himself. If this was a video from just about any other musician then I’d question the authenticity of the tears and apparent emotional anguish but considering the fact that we’re talking about Keaton Henson here then I truly believe that the tears and needing to leave the camera shot because he’s breaking down is genuine.

Sweetheart, What Have You Done To Us is a slight taste of what’s to come next year with the release of his sophomore album which is due out February 2013. Debut album Dear… received grand acclaim from iTunes, Radio1 and others which should see the young musician rise in stardom during the coming year. The question will be whether he can overcome his stage fright in order to take it as far as he can.

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Sans Parade is a three-piece chamber-pop group from Fin0land that record songs that are so full that you’d expect there to be a dozen or more musicians involved in it’s creation.

The band’s first single is titled “This Last Song Is A Love Song” starts out innocently enough with lullaby xylophone but then surges to soaring heights around frontman, Markus Perttula’s, voice. There’s a hint of Sigur Ros as far as progressive sounds and textures but you’ll find that Sans Parade is quite a bit more accessible with their easy to love songs. Unlike Sigur Ros, it really only takes one listen to “get” the song.

There’s no date for the release of Sans Parade’s debut album but it’s expected to be out early next year.

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For those who fear that the withering film review is a dying art, it isn’t. To wit, The New York Observer’s unrelenting pan of Cloud Atlas:

All you can do while you puzzle over it like a board game is try to figure out which member of the hammy all-star ensemble, unrecognizable in lurid makeup, wigs, period costumes and rubber prostheses, is playing which man—or woman—while the viewer-unfriendly screenplay squirts and splatters all over the place. Characters fade into and out

of past, present and future centuries with the grace of a battering ram. They include Tom Hanks, in his worst performance since Joe Versus the Volcano, as a crooked doctor who looks like Benjamin Franklin on the Pacific Ocean in 1849; a balding cockney skinhead who becomes a pop celebrity by throwing a critic off the roof of a literary party in 2012, and a dark-skinned one-eyed native goat-herder (you can’t make up this stuff) in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, in 2346,

babbling away in a language that hasn’t been invented yet.

Ouch.

We first came across David Mitchell’s novel when Time Released Sound issued their Chocolate Box Series, which included Four Peaks by Sonmi451, AKA Bernard Zwijzen. The character of Sonmi451 first appears in Cloud Atlas as a clone waitress, although she is eventually worshiped as a deity for being set up, encouraged to learn, and inspiring a revolution. (Most reading is banned in this dystopian vision of a future, unified Korea.)

Anyway, it sounds like we should stick with the book. And with Zwijzen.

There

aren’t many better live concerts than DeVotchKa, the sounds of a dozen musicians are somehow melted down

to a few members on stage as the emotion and grandeur of each song is replicated before your very eyes. If you haven’t had this opportunity yet then your time has come.

Shortly after the release of Little Miss Sunshine (2006), DeVotchKa began working on composing music for a full symphony. Violin, viola, accordion, piano player, Tom Hagerman, took it upon himself to construct each painstaking note while locked away in his garage for months. Concerning the experience, frontman, Nick Urata says: “We have been working towards this moment ever since the band began. We’ve always had orchestral leanings, we wrote for more and more players with every album, when the chance to perform with an entire symphony came, we jumped at it. We thought it would be the perfect night for a live recording and hope the listener feels like

they are in the room with us.”

You can listen to the live recording of “Along The Way” from the band’s 2008 album A Mad & Faithful Telling. I must say that I’m a little disappointed by the quality of the recording though.

DeVotchKa – “Along The Way” (Live)

DeVotchKa Live with the Colorado Symphony is out November 13th via Cicero Recordings LTD. Pre-order the album here and the band will sign and personalize it for you.

Tracklist
01. The Alley
02. The Clockwise Witness
03. Along The Way
04. The Common Good
05. You Love Me
06. All The Sand In All The Sea
07. Firetrucks On The Boardwalk
08. Comrade Z
09. Undone
10. Queen Of The Surface Streets
11. We’re Leaving
12. Contrabanda
13. The Enemy Guns
14. How It Ends

age from Remo)

Jose Pasillas has developed into one of music’s most prolific drummers since picking up stick at the age of 16

in Calabasas CA. as one of the founding member of Incubus. His art has been used extensively by the band on album covers and CD’s and now Pasillas will see his love of art and music combined by SceneFour in the collection “Abstract + Rhythm Landscapes” being released on November 1st. The collection will be limited to 100 pieces and, from what Jose tells me, will range in prices from $250 to $1,000 as a way to try and allow as many people to own the art that want to.

Jose took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to talk with us about the project.

The Muse In Music: How did you get connected with SceneFour and how long does it take to put a project like this together?

Jose Pasillas: There’s a girl, Danielle, associated with SceneFour and I actually went to school with her sister, she went to Calabasas High School and she was actually the one that suggested me. I agreed to do that with them and they knew that I was a painter as well so we agreed to change it up a little bit and actually augment two or three of the pieces with my art on top of it.

tMiM: I was looking through some of the musicians that SceneFour has worked with and they’ve collected some of the biggest names in drumming such as Rick Allen of Def Leppard, Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses and Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction, how intimidating is it to have your name added to that list?

JP: I’m definitely humbled and honored to be on that list with these other drummers, it’s been pretty amazing.

tMiM: I’ve looked at some of the work that SceneFour has done with Stephen Perkins and Frankie “Kash” Waddy, can we assume that your work is going to be in the same vein as these?

JP: Exactly, it’s the same concept, they get the images using the same technique.

tMiM: How are you going to make your pieces unique and personal?

JP: I’m going to augment a few of the pieces by hand and that was one of the original idea going into this project, that I would alter them myself in order to make them more unique and individualistic. I’m going to paint directly on top of them. I use a lot of mixed medium at home with spray can, acrylic and paint markers so it’s going to be a mix of all those things. Exactly what I’m going to do to them, I’m not exactly sure yet, we’ll see what I’m inspired to do when the time comes.

tMiM: So you haven’t started working on these yet?

JP: I just started on it. I’m getting to the point where I’m getting ideas and putting

them down and still have a ways to go to realize what it is I’m doing.

tMiM: They debut in a little over a week and a half. That doesn’t give you a lot of time. You need to get some inspiration pretty quick.

JP: Yeah, I have a lot of work to do but I’m very inspired. It will definitely be completed on time.

tMiM: The description of your pieces says that “…each depicting a sonic landscape where rhythm is translated onto canvas through the use of a sophisticated process that converts drumstrokes into color and light.” This is a pretty vague statement; can you elaborate on this process for us a little?

JP: Yeah, it’s the right description for it without telling exactly what the images are. I’m basically being shot in the dark with sticks that are lit up so with a 30 second exposure the image that is laid down is very complicated and abstract when it’s said and done. Exactly how the photographers does it, I’m not sure. I’m not a photographer but the images that you see on the canvas are images of me playing a beat for 30 seconds and it being splattered on canvas with light and that’s kind of the result that you get. It’s kind of complicated and kind of difficult to grasp but that’s the best way of describing it.

tMiM: When I interviewed Ben Kenney a few years ago for the release of his solo album I had this next question for him as well and it works well for this situation as well. When you work with a band you have a number of different people to bounce ideas off of but when you’re working on a piece of art, whether it be a painting or a song, alone there’s no one else to use as a sounding board.

JP: I think it’s easier, only because there are not so many conflicting ideas being thrown into the pot. They’re not always conflicting but you’ve got 5 other artists with 5 different ideas. I can see how it would be difficult to work alone though. For music I need the guys to bounce off of and inspire me so that’s where it works really well as a group, but for art like this it’s a very individual thing.

tMiM: The hard part would seem to know when the work is done. When you work with a group there’s a definitive point when the song is complete but with this project it’s just you deciding am I done or not?

JP: It’s a good question. I feel as though I could keep going when I’m drawing. I just have to put the brush down at some point. I can over think things and keep adding and adding but at some point I just have to look at it, feel good about it and just stop. That is one of the more difficult things to do is to know when to stop.

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Two weeks ago we announced we announced a new soundtrack project for William Ryan Fritch (Vieo Abiungo). The film is titled The Waiting Room, and it has attracted its share of attention, including that of outspoken documentary veteran Michael Moore. While clarifying his remarks about Oscar eligibility, Moore named The Waiting Room as one of two documentaries “essential” for documentary viewers.

By the way, this isn’t the only way you’ll read “The Waiting Room” and “Oscar eligibility” in the same sentence. The film is being shortlisted by all of the right committees, including most recently the 2012 Gotham Independent Film Awards. The Gotham is said

to be a leading indicator of Oscar nominees.

Keep your fingers crossed. Fritch could use an IMDb hyperlink to an Academy Award-winning film. It would be richly deserved. Here is the trailer again: