Welcome to the weekend! It’s time to choose MTV Iggy’s Artist of the Week!
This is a round-up of the best global bands we found this week. You have a week, until next Friday morning at 9 a.m. USA Eastern Standard Time to vote for your favorite new artist on MTV Iggy, using the bottom poll!
The band with the most votes will be have prime real estate on MTVIggy.com this week, along with a tell-all interview!
Good luck!
Kishi Bashi
Credit: Kishi Bashi
Kishi Bashi might be the savior of the lonely sub-genre of being alone and singing with loops and laptops, bringing to it a grace that more than meets the technology halfway. An accomplished violinist who studied jazz violin at Berklee School of Music (after flunking out of Cornell engineering/devastating his Asian parents), K has opened for Regina Spektor and currently tours with and produces for Of Montreal. Last year he put together a Kickstarter campaign to fund a second EP, 151a, and instead of the $12,000 he aimed for, he made $20,000 in three weeks.
Los Vigilantes
Courtesy of Slovenly Records
The self-titled debut album from Puerto Rico’s Los Vigilantes doesn’t do them any kind of justice. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a completely vital piece of garage punk en Español. But you do not know what you are dealing with until you’ve seen the San Juan quartet live. I’m talking about Carbonas/Oblivians levels of sonic annihilation. A salient piece of biographical information here is that their drummer Rafa has spent most of his musical career in hardcore bands. But it also helps to know that frontman Javier Garrote played lead guitar for fellow PR garage punks Davila 666 on their first tour of Europe and their second (and rockingest) album Tan Bajo.
Punks Jump Up
Courtesy of Punks Jump Up
Punks Jump Up is a name — a damn good name in the scheme of band names — that bubbled up organically without any major promotion. Suddenly the UK/Swede dance duo was cropping up either in remix or straight duet form with the likes of Gossip, Crystal Castles, and most recently, Chromeo. Since quietly dropping their first EP Be You (Beep Beep), Joe and David of Punks Jump Up have earned a rep for stripped down dance beats and neon fashion. Armed with their own colorful T-shirt line and a few funktastic anthems, these guys were tailor-made for the label Kitsune, so not surprisingly, the French label released their subsequent track “Dance To Our Disco” and “Blockhead.”
Tricot
Courtesy of Good Charamel Records
Maybe you loved Godspeed You! Black Emperor and all of Q and Not You’s post-hardcore twists and turns, but you thought post-rock kind of lost its relevance in the early oughties. Tricot from Japan might make you reconsider. Rather than seeing how savagely they can play technical music, the Kyoto quartet looks for beauty and the movement in their intricate rhythms and austere melodies. They have the subleties of Electrelane and the tight angles of Turing Machine, but their style is more springy than the lumbering and chugging you might be used to. They’re not light, but they’re not heavy. They’re right on, and when frontwoman Ikkyu Nakajima takes an ethereal, melodic approach to vox, they’ll take your breath away.
Batida
Credit: Manuel Lino
Nobody, so far, has done what Batida is doing in kuduro. Batida (whose name means “beat” in Portuguese) is an alias of Pedro Coquenão, a Portuguese-Angolan DJ and producer who is working to bridge musical worlds in his own way: across time. While hustling to promote Angolan music in Europe through his Portugal-based radio show, he realized that nobody in Luanda was making kuduro that reflected Angola’s rich musical history. As an experiment, he started making his own mash-ups of freshly-cooked kuduro beats with samples from old ‘70s recordings of semba, a bouncy, guitar-pop sound. Thusly, Batida was born.
Voting Booth!