Your new favorite band is your other favorite band...

I just picked up an album by the band Cybotron. You know, the pioneering Australian prog-electro band? Wait, I mean the pioneering Detroit tech-electro band. No no no no no. The AWESOME Cybotron. Wait. Which one do I mean?

It's pretty rare that two bands that knock you on your face have the exact same name. But, in a world with a finite amount of prefixes and suffixes suggesting a totally rad future, I guess there was bound to be some overlap.

The Detroit Cybotron is already enshrined within the lucite pantheon of electronic music. Vacuum-sealed, ice-cold, breakdanceable, afro-futurist bliss. Their tunes are as "classic" as anything less than 30 years old can be. Clear is the most famous song, having been homage/sampled by the likes of The Rich Man's will.i.am.

Right now though, I'm feeling Cosmic Cars.

The automobile-worship makes it a sinister Detroit auto industry counterpart to the Germanic beauty of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. (Cybotron's Juan Atkins would go back to this well again with his other band Model 500.)

Speaking of Kraftwerk, the Australian Cybotron may as well be a krautrock group. They'd be neatly filed beside Ash Ra Temple and Tangerine Dream. Instead of urban futurism of the other Cybotron, here we have a spiritual ecstatic dreamworld filled with allusions to classical mythology and Frank Herbert's Dune.

Here's Colossus. It will crush you

These guys had the name first and apparently resented the americans for using it. Let's reconcile everyone! Sometimes great minds just think alike!

Mystic Lady / Olden Sleaze Mash-Up

The Mystic Lady employed for erotic commerce: The music of Joanna Newsom's "Sprout and the Bean" is featured in a Victoria's Secret ad.

Lingerie is one thing, but if you wish to improve your sexual potency the old fashioned way; by employing arcane mystical lore, I invite you to listen to Louise Huebner. Oh, she's the "Official Witch of Los Angeles." This is from her 1969 spoken-word album "Seduction Through Witchcraft." Use at your discretion.

Heading for the 90s!

The long-flogged dead horse of eighties revivalism still has some meat on it's ragged bones.

But the nineties are closing the gap! Now that almost every teenager alive was born in the 90s, full scale revival will be hitting Walmart shelves some time next year. Until then unholy chimeras like this will guide us through the netherealm between nostalgic decades:

Every critic immediately noticed how Get Your Boots On was a throwback to 90s schlock-rock U2. 5 seconds later, everyone gleefully realized that it was exactly the same as Escape Club's Wild Wild West. Cue the tape:

Now a new Justice Remix of Get Your Boots On is on the interwebs. Listen to it here.

It's too perfect! Justice dress like Escape Club, and the remix teases even more of those Late 80s/Early 90s ticks.

That Trent Reznor beat! Those house pianos and synth strings! Someone's been reading the Crystal Waters playbook! I need to dust off my Dwayne Wayne glasses.

In My Room....

30 seconds into an Ariel Pink show at the Empty Bottle a couple weeks ago, Ariel stage-dived into a crowd that wasn't there to catch him. Our heart goes out to Ariel and his jacked up ribs.

But it also seems fitting that an artist who has become synonymous with solitary, no-fi home recording would end wounded in a vulnerable venture out in the big wide world. Ariel Pink is one of my favorite pop musicians, one of the best of a genre that I like to call "Shut-In Pop."

Shut-In Pop is built around a production style that balances glistening pop aspiration with the emotional heft of compulsive home recording. It's the sound of AM Gold filtered through the monastic solitude of parent's basements and crummy tape decks. It's the sound of social misfits who find confidence controlling a personal musical world.

That is, it's the sound of the ultra-prolific R. Stevie Moore.

It's easy to write-off the Shut-In Pop of today as a Moore rip-off, feigning social disfunction for "authenticity." But they, like we the listeners, find this sonic space to be one of creepy intimacy that touches the depressed, romantic, arrogant, adolescent in us. So why not keep exploring it? Stay inside. Stay weird.

Here's some of the new breed of Shut-Ins:

 Mystic Lady

The musical persona of the Mystical, dare I say Witchy, Woman has made a huge comeback recently. While ol' Stevie Nicks is probably the most famous pioneer of this sort of style (drug-damaged and ethereal, a sort of hippie version of the femme fatale), I prefer Kate Bush.  

Wild eyed to the point of seeming possessed, draped in modern-dance widow's weeds, in the gauzy light of this video she appears as a wraithlike cunning woman performing weird musical spell-casting.  It's a powerful feminine persona, a pagan spiritual alternative to the futurist androgyny of a Patti Smith or Laurie Anderson.

Compare "Babooshka" to the brand new "When I Grow Up" by Fever Ray.  

The same disheveled drapery, possessed/wounded robot dance moves, and over all, the same mysterious mystic aura.  (This time married to Laurie Anderson's vocal distortions).  She'll put a spell on you.  Compare also:

Bat For Lashes

Gang Gang Dance

Ladyhawk

etc