THE 88 @ echoplex

liamfinn

Liam Finn calls his beard “well-traveled” for a good reason. Over the past year alone, the troubadour performed over 180 times at venues far from his New Zealand abode, opening for The Black Keys, Pearl Jam and Wilco. Yet Finn’s most impressive venture to date has not been to any geographical location, but past the barriers of a comfort zone. Although he considered his former Betchadupa bandmates his closest friends, Finn kept to himself the songs he had written of heartbreak and evictions, ultimately the reason why 2008′s I’ll Be Lightning became a solo record. But Finn has since opened up to a born-again collaborator, with his involvement in father Neil’s 7 Worlds Collide project and an EP he created with fellow folk vocalist Eliza-Jane Barnes. What they created, recently released on Sept. 1, was Champagne in Seashells. Fresh from working on 7 Worlds Collide in April, Finn called forth new anxieties that coalesce in the EP’s first track, “Plane Crash.” A self-created nightmare in slow motion, the song spends more than half of its time building up tension through a rumble of broken chords, before exploding into a storm cloud of guitar noise. – Paste Magazine

with:
jasonlytle

Jason Lytle || Listen

“Hold my hand while everything blows away, and we will run to a brand new sun,” Jason Lytle sings in his high, scratchy voice. That sense of willed optimism rising out of catastrophe could be about the end of a band, a romance, a friendship, an economic boom or all of them at once, and it runs through the songs on “Yours Truly, the Commuter” (Anti-), Mr. Lytle’s first solo album after 15 years of leading Grandaddy. Mr. Lytle moved to Bozeman, Mont., and recorded the album by himself, playing all the instruments. It’s a fragile recollection of California rock from more auspicious times, with stately melodies and vocal chorales over jerry-built foundations: elegies for vanished certainties. – NY Times

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The 88 || Listen || Watch

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