indie rock | ChinaShop

Featured Music Cold Beats and Warm Calls: The Handsome Furs

June 22, 2011 - 8:58 am

The Handsome Furs is the Montreal-based indie rock project of husband and wife duo Alexei Perry and Dan Boeckner (of Wolf Parade & Atlas Strategic). The band, who describes their sound as “a juxtaposition of cold, metronomic, electronic beats” paired with “ jagged dissonant and frail, broken or breaking guitars,” are gearing up for the release of their latest album, “Sound Kapital.” The disc drops in Canada on June 27th and in the US, UK, and rest of the world on the following day.

ChinaShop sat down with Alexei Perry who discussed the concept behind the new album. Perry also talks about how music serves as her sense of euphoria and tells us how she and her husband became the unexpected stars of a CNN.com web travel series titled “Indie Asia.”

Read the full story →

Music Kitsuné Maison #11 is an Indie Dance Party

by Rich Thomas

May 12, 2011 - 10:43 am

Everything is sexier in Paris, especially when you start combining the worlds of music and fashion, which is exactly what Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki did back in 2002 when they founded the Kitsuné label. With releases from notables like Alex Gopher, Wolfmother, Hot Chip, Fischerspooner and Phoenix (along with countless others), the Parisian label grown into one of the country’s most eclectic and well-respected culture institutions. One of the biggest reasons? Their compilations.

The latest Kitsuné Maison compendium—#11 in the series if you’re taking notes—seeks to combine sultry house music (what they’re known for) with more indie rock undertones (which they’re slowly become known for). The Indie Dance Issue drops May 16, and you can purchase it from iTunes or your local good music purveyor. In the meantime, label boss Gildas Loaëc waxes poetic about each song on the compilation, three of which are available for download after the jump.

Read the full story →

Featured Gallery Music Jukebox The Ghost Haunts The Echo

by Nicole Pajer and Sidney Bensimon

October 5, 2010 - 10:30 am

Jukebox The Ghost hasn’t played in Los Angeles in a year and a half, so when the guys took the stage at the Echo last Thursday, they had a full house of eager followers. Fans packed into the modest venue, clogging the dance floor, and spilling out into the doorway to watch the rock-solid chemistry of Ben Thornewill, Tommy Siegel, and Jesse Kristin as they performed songs off their new album, Everything Under the Sun, like the dance initiating Schizophrenia, as well as favorites such as Hold it in, Under my Skin, and Good Day. Ben kept the crowd captivated with his animated facial expressions that acted out his keystrokes, while Jesse held it all together on drums. Tommy rocked out so hard that during the song Mistletoe, he hit the mic stand and it swung around and nailed him in the face, to which he replied, “Wow! Did you all see that? I thought that was an earthquake!”

Before the show, I sat down with the guys backstage. As always, when you snag a band for some quality Q&A time, you never know where the conversation might lead. This time it was all about gum, cows, and tornadoes…never a dull moment when you are in a room full of musicians who were born with an impressive amount of the creative gene.
Read the full story →