RecaPitulation: You Say Party! We Say Die!, Kyp Malone, Pixies, Grizzly Bear

Quote of the day: "He has paid the penalty." -Dodgers owner Frank McCourt on Manny Ramirez

Club-crazed Canadian quintet You Say Party! We Say Die! are taking a more soulful direction with their just-announced third record, XXXX (Paper Bag). If the songs sound half as good as “Monster,” available for streaming on the group’s MySpace page, we’ll be sold. Look for the release, which was produced by Howard Redekop (New Pornographers, Tegan and Sara), on September 29. …

We’re constantly baffled as to why band names are getting simpler and simpler in a time when you’d figure URLs and Google searches would be spurring artists to make them more complex. The latest example: the xx, a silky-smooth new act that just signed to XL. Their avant-ambience reminds us a bit of David Sylvian (there’s a name you don’t hear every day); make your own comparisons when their self-titled debut drops October 20. …

You know it had to happen OK you didn’t but you were really hoping it would and now it has: According to an interview Frank Black just gave Spin, Pixies will be expanding their Doolittle tour to include North America. Lucky winners include L.A., Seattle, Denver, L.A., New York, Boston, D.C., L.A., Chicago and holy shit the Pixies are going to be playing Doolittle in its entirety in L.A. And hey, this gives us a chance to re-hype the Pixies post-reunion DVD roundup we just pubbed last week and updated on Friday. …

Damn, we wish we hadn’t blown all those frequent-flyer miles on that last-minute getaway trip to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival a couple of months back. ‘Cause if we hadn’t, we’d be using them to go to the Treasure Island Music Festival in San Fran on October 17-18. The lineup? Read it and weep: Grizzly Bear, Yo La Tengo, MGMT, Beirut, the Decemberists, the Flaming Lips, Bob Mould, Thao with the Get Down Stay Down, Spiral Stairs (yes, Scott Kannberg is officially not dead) … we’d tell you more but it’s too painful to talk about. …

Brace yourself for “14 new tracks of punk/metal mayhem full of piss and vinegar” from the Accused come August 18. On that day, the inextinguishable Seattle-area sods will squirt out The Curse of Martha Splatterhead - much more deadly than the Curse of Monkey Island - on Southern Lord. Doom-metal enthusiasts know SL as the home to Sunn O))), and wouldn’t ya know it, that lauded legion will be on tour with their new labelmates from August 5 in Seattle (Curse release show) through August 14 in Salt Lake City. …

It has come to this: Artists are now using Twitter to record new songs. Helado Negro - “black ice cream,” if your Spanish is rusty - is putting out a release with the even more hilariously named Tuitero Roto, which means “broken Tweeter” in the same tongue. Roberto C. Lange - the man behind the dubby, mostly instrumental Latin magic that is Helado Negro - is posting a track (less than 30 seconds in length) several times a day. The culmination of the series will result in Tuitero Roto. Someone had to do it. …

And in fact, Lange apparently isn’t the only one going that route. British popster Gary Go has taken the new Twitter-recording trend a step further by enlisting his fans to help him write lyrics for “The Heart Balloon,” a song inspired by what he spotted in a tree outside his house one morning last year. Since then, he’s been compiling words from those who have weighed in via Twitter - and get this, he plans to share with those peeps any royalties the Tweet recording generates. He also wrote much of the musical parts using apps he downloaded to his iPhone. This is getting scary. …

Kyp Malone has busted out some self-created, Eastern-looking, colored-pencil art for his September 22 solo stroll, Rain Machine (Anti-). We haven’t heard anything from the TV on the Radio duder’s effort just yet, but it supposedly has jazz, rock and bluegrass elements. We’re sure it’ll draw exactly zero praise from the critics. …

Here at IndiePit, we’ve got a soft spot for independent organizations that rely on no investment capital. Such is nonprofit Cash Music, a free open-source platform dedicated to facilitating the growth of artists online. You might have heard of the site through some of its participating artists - Deerhoof, the Thermals, Xiu Xiu and dozens more are among them - but even if you have, you probably didn’t know the whole operation is basically run by one guy. That man is Jesse von Doom, and he is starting to provide an inner look at the company via a new blog. Hats off to you, sir. …

Lots happening on the Lujo Records front: acoustic guitar imagineers A Lull - whose “Skinny Fingers” video we pointed to earlier today - are taking to the pavement for a tour in support of their still-frosty Ice Cream Bones EP. They’ll be trekking as a six-piece with two drummers. Look for their first full-length, Confetti, sometime in the future (you know, as opposed to the past). The finger-snappin’, finger-lickin’-good pop-rock side project by Baby Teeth drummer Peter Andreadis, All City Affairs, has made available on CD its new album Identity Theft, which was previously out there in digital form only. And the lite, keyboard-happy Firs - a venture involving Joey Cook of Pomegranates - are wrapping up work on their inaugural outing, Man in Space, due in August. But since that’s still a little ways away, Lujo just put out in digital form the band’s first two EPs, Firs and I Will Come Back as a Volcano.

Listen away to all three artists:

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And finally, the worst album name of the year is now a battle between Alice in Chains‘ Black Gives Way to Blue and a new one we just found out about: Static-X’s Cult of Static.

Posted Monday, July 13, 2009 by korzeck