Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

My cop show theme

2009-11-08T00:40:28Z

In 1993 a left-hand keyboard exercise I came up with evolved into a full-fledged cop show theme, which I called "Theme from Gunnerman" because that sounded suitably unsubtle for a 70s cop show. I got to play it with the band (Cafe de los Muertos),...

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A deep funk travelogue from Breakestra

2009-11-05T01:32:05Z

Getting back to this year's bumper crop of deep funk releases, I found that L.A.'s Breakestra has done in one song what I attempted to do in blog posts two years ago: give a worldwide overview of the deep funk scene. Many of the acts name-checked ...

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Bernard Sumner still has it

2009-11-05T00:47:33Z

Bernard Sumner is not looking so great lately, but his musical talents are undiminished, possibly even better than ever. "Sink Or Swim" by his new band Bad Lieutenant has been lodged in my brain for a week now: That is ten different kinds of ...

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Scandinavian short takes

2009-11-03T01:23:04Z

My search for bands similar to high-energy Norwegian jazz-prog-rockers Elephant9 paid off again with the discovery of Shining, another Norwegian jazz-prog-rock band with whom, not coincidentally, Elephant9 share a drummer (Torstein Lofthus). Shin...

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Steampunk music?

2009-10-30T01:15:12Z

Steampunk as a literary subgenre seems to have garnered more adherents, and thus achieved more staying power, than cyberpunk ever did. There is even a sizable body of both animated and live-action films to go along with it (not to mention that se...

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Naikaku, or Last.fm to the rescue

2009-10-23T23:26:06Z

Elephant9's DodoVoodoo is such an exciting slab of jazz-rock fusion that I wish they had more than just the one album. So I thought I'd try out some of those Web 2.0 music visualization and discovery tools to find similar music. Back in 2007 I b...

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Norwegian jazz revisited again: Maria Kannegaard

2009-10-22T02:52:47Z

It's time for another Norwegian jazz jag: from the meditative lyricism of trumpeters Mathias Eick and Nils Petter Molvaer, to the dusky vocals of Sidsel Edresen, to the energetic power fusion of Elephant9, Norway is at the forefront of (my percept...

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Cocteau Twins' secret influence: Styx

2009-10-13T22:09:34Z

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler. But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, ...

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Videorama addendum

2009-10-08T02:14:16Z

The cool animated videos just keep on coming! Here is "The Sunlamp Show" by The Aliens, a band formed by ex-members of the Beta Band (who I really only know from High Fidelity):

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Air: Love 2

2009-10-07T02:52:17Z

The "Sing Sang Sung" video is gorgeous, but a single track is not enough to appreciate how good the new Air album is. So why not listen to the whole thing right here? Air brings the music of 70s soft-porn soundtracks into the 21st century for pu...

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