Verboten is a newly created band featuring members from My Teenage Stride, The Consultants and Birds and Bees. The band resides in NYC and includes two drummers who play guitar and bass, and Jenny on vocals. As they point out on their page neither of the drummers can actually drum while playing guitar or bass, so they could use a full-time drummer to accompany them on their various adventures in pop. You can head to their MySpace page to listen to their first demo song; "Girls in Cars".
My Teenage Stride, fronted by one Jedediah Smith, caught my notice long before I got to see them play live in the USA last fall. They were amazing live and yet I was stupid enough not to buy their record then and there. Check out "Reversal of a Red Bird" and that amazingly catchy song "Happy Mondays".If The Consultants page is to be believed then NME once wrote of them: "The Consultants are so indie that they make Belle & Sebastian sound like Cannibal Corpse". I've never heard them before but I'm pretty sure I've been seeing this name rather often lately. It probably has to do with their CD being released by Shelflife whose whole catalog I could very well imagine in my possession.
In other more shoegazey news, The Year Zero is about to release their first album next month and you can hear what it will eventually sound like on Skipping Stones Records MySpace Page. Lili de la Mora has one of the most beautiful voices since Lush and My Bloody Valentine. Albeit not as loud, their music certanly has much of the same elements as the shoegaze I loved in my heydays and still love. And they use a Dr. Rhythm drum machine which is always cool in my books.Lili also happens to sing in a band named Sidecar, another dreamy band that probably stares at their shoes in deep concentration when playing. Head to their MySpace page and take a listen to "I have known Love" in particular.
Update 14. may I just found out that it seems to be a problem pasting links copied from MySpace into the blogger.com editor. The links contain a space in the name of a variable, i.e. the song name in the url, and so the link eventually saved in the editor contains no info after that space. Thus preventing you from downloading the songs, but linking to the MySpace main page instead. Until I figure out how to bypass this stuff, I have removed all the direct, and unusable, links and suggest you head to the band pages and stream their songs.
the links work if you do a regular left click and not a normal right click to save