Free For All: the new Saturnine album
Posted on May 10, 2007 at 5:29 am | No Comments
It’s with real pleasure that I’m able to play a part in helping Saturnine get their latest and last full-length offering out into the world: “Remembrance of Things Past” is the band’s sixth and final album, and rather than release it through traditional (i.e. physical) means, they’ve decided to share it digitally, and free of charge, under a Creative Commons license. The entire eight-song, forty-five minute album is available for download below, as well as on the Internet Audio Archive and any other blogs who want to join in.
Saturnine circa 1997:
Original guitarist Jennifer Baron, Mike Donofrio, Matt Gallaway, & Jim Harwood
Since their formation in NYC in 1994, Saturnine has always had a literary element to their music, expressed in certain song titles, lyrics, and themes, but “Remembrance of Things Past” takes things a step further: It’s a concept album, based on French writer Marcel Proust’s famed work of the same name (titled in French, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”, and also translated as “In Search of Lost Time”), with Saturnine singer Matt Gallaway playing Marcel’s role of the narrator, and vocalist Frances Gibson of seminal Australian band The Cannanes as his lover, Albertine.
Saturnine circa 2000:
Jim Harwood, Mike Donofrio, John Pisani, & Matt Gallaway
Guitarist/vocalist Gallaway, bassist Mike Donofrio (The New Year), guitarist John Pisani (Cookie Galore), and drummer Jim Harwood recorded the music and Matt’s “Marcel” vocals for “RoTP” in May-June 2004 at The Echo Lab in Denton, TX, with Matthew Barnhardt at the studio desk. After continued sonic tweaking, the songs were shipped off to Sydney, Australia, where Gibson added her “Albertine” vocals and sent them on their way back to the band. The mixed and mastered results are what is shared here. While the band is now geographically dispersed, and are viewing this as their final release, they’re not ruling out a certain alignment of stars that would allow them to play these songs in front of an audience someday. It was originally conceived as a rock opera, after all, so some kind of eventual staging would bring it full circle…
“Remembrance of Things Past”
Released on Victoria Land Records in 2007 under an
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Creative Commons License
01. “Marcel Remembers The Summer He Met Albertine”
02. “Later, At A Bar”
03. “Albertine”
04. “Marcel Remembers He Tried To Stop His Obsession For Albertine”
05. “I Can’t Shake Her From My Mind”
06. “Some Months Later, At A Club In New York City,
Marcel Sees Albertine Dancing With Another Girl
(With Whom He Suspects She Is Having An Affair)
And Leaves, Jealous And Upset”
07. “Later, On A Walk Together”
08. “Later, Albertine Alone At The Apartment”
Download all eight 192kbps Mp3s
as one 58MB zip file
Download higher quality versions of each song at
the Internet Music Archive
Here’s a list of all five of Saturnine’s previous discs and their release years, along with an Mp3s of my favorite song from each…
Autoguider
(1994 Dirt Records, released as “Saturnine 60”)
Mp3: “Almost Impossible“
Wreck at Pillar Point
(1995 Dirt Records)
Mp3: “Ground Truth“
Flags for Unknown Territories
(1996 Dirt Records)
Mp3: “Palomar“
Mid the Green Fields
(1998 Victoria Land Records)
Mp3: “The Raven“
American Kestral
(1999 Motorcoat Records)
Mp3: “Old Flowers“
Pleasure of Ruins
(2002 Motorcoat Records)
A final note for my fellow music bloggers: feel free to link to or share these Mp3s however you please…
Mp3s: Albert Hammond Jr. in Boston
Posted on May 9, 2007 at 6:25 am | No Comments
I hope it’s not too much of a back-handed compliment to say that Albert Hammond Jr. surprised the hell out of me. I’ve been a pretty passive Strokes fan, having listened to their albums but never liking quite enough songs to add them to my collection, and never having gone out of my way to see them live. And while I wasn’t overly anxious to hear what their guitarist would sound like on his own, I was at least curious to check out his first solo album, “Yours To Keep”, when it came out in the UK last year. I didn’t get a taste until I came across the first singles (“101 and “Everyone Gets A Star“) on satellite radio, and was struck enough by them to look forward to his opening set for Bloc Party when they came through town in late March.
And I really, really liked it. It’s fairly unavoidable to make comparisons to his other band, but I found the songs more instantly catchy, more dynamic, and was struck by how solid a singer Hammond Jr. is, especially considering his guitar-only role in the Strokes. He’s also put together one seriously talented backing band, who added an energy to the material that already sounds pretty rockin’ on the disc (which I picked up after it’s domestic release in March). Bonus points for the Frank Black and Guided By Voices covers, as well as sharing a new song called “In My Room“.
Here are the Mp3s of the set, during which you might here a commotion as some fool tries to storm the stage… and gets his ass handed to him by the ‘event staff’ before he even comes close. Ejection accomplished. Considering the ticket price for a Bloc Party show nowadays, I can’t imagine that was money well-spent…
Live at the Orpheum
in Boston, Massachusetts
on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
01. Everyone Gets A Star
02. In Transit
03. Old Black Dawning (Frank Black cover)
04. Bright Young Thing
05. In My Room (new)
06. 101
07. Holiday
08. Scared
09. Postal Blowfish (GBV cover)
10. Hard to Live (In the City)
Some added A.H.Jr. linkage…
His MySpace page, Wikipedia entry, and his Scratchie Records label page. Mp3s: “101” (live on Conan O’Brien); “In Transit“ (from “Yours To Keep”). Stream: Four songs on MySpace. Video: There are two different clips for “101”, with one that’s mostly studio footage from the recording of the album, and another directed by Patrick Daughters that follows AHJ’s sad, suited ghost. As usual, many more live clips can be found with a YouTube search. Event site Hey Let’s Go has re-christened itself as Going.com, and they’re putting on some free concerts to mark the new branding. One of them is with Albert and his band, and takes place tomorrow, Thursday, May 10th, at the Hiro Ballroom in NYC. To RSVP for the free show, head here. You may have to sign up for the site first to view that page. Albert Hammond Jr. will return to the road for a month-long headlining tour that starts May 20th in San Francisco, and winds up in NYC on June 18th. Boston’s own The Dead Trees will offer their support for the entire tour, but unfortunately the closest they’re coming to our area is a Northampton show on June 13th. There are some open dates near the end of the trip, so perhaps a Boston stop will show up at some point. Guilty pleasure alert: Can’t resist sharing my favorite Strokes song, which exists thanks to the mash-up skills of The Freelance Hellraiser. It’s the collision of the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain” with Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle“. Mp3: Freelance Hellraiser – “A Stroke of Genie-Us“. Listen to all ‘Nac-hosted tracks on the Hype Machine.
the post-script… If anyone has an issue with these Mp3s being made available, just say let me know (contact info in the ‘nac faq). Recorded with a Sony ECM-719 mic and a Sony MZ-RH10 minidisc, converted to .wav and then edited to 192kbps mp3s. Mp3s are made available for a limited time, and are not reposted once removed.