Monarch

Cocoon’s Secret Playlist

We checked in with Mark Daumail from French duo Cocoon to find out what music he’s been getting down to lately: ‘Emily Jane White’s song the Demon [listen below] is beautiful. She must have listened to Cat Power and Fiona Apple too much, but it made her write better songs than them!’ Read the rest of Mark Daumail’s Secret Playlist.

Gojira’s Vacuity

Like any fan of a genre, I can’t stand bands that water down the basic elements of said genre in order to make it more accessible to the masses. I used to consider Gojira one of these bands, but it may be because I couldn’t get past their lame album covers. To be honest, they’re still a little too influenced by hardcore on their new album, but I have to admit, the debut video from The Way of All Flesh is brutal as hell. As a matter of fact, the tracks that the French four-piece is streaming on its MySpace page are pretty freaking incredible — unapologetically death metal, but with a few left-field elements, and again, some hardcore-isms with the vocals I could do without. I have to stop being so prejudiced.

French band, Cocoon

We’re big fans of French duo Cocoon, so we spoke to frontman Marc Daumail to prove it. Ahead of their upcoming tour of Australia in November, we asked him how vibrant the French music scene is right now: ‘It’s such a relief to be considered like a real band singing in English in a country like France, which is very conservative about its music traditions. We know Moriarty and The Do. They are nice. We all worked a lot to make this scene exist’. Which folk acts have most excited you recently? ‘My albums of the year are not very folky: Grizzly Bear, Lee Fields, The XX. But The Tallest Man On Earth just made one of the best folk albums of all time’. Read Cocoon’s Secret Playlist.

Papercraft Skull

Ravensblight, an old-school-looking website featuring tons of free internet knick-knacks, has a bunch of cool spapercraft models, including the skull above. Hopefully no one tries to put candles in them.

October posters from Alamo Drafthouse

I wish people gave presents on Halloween rather than Christmas — then I’d have asked someone to get me these awesome posters by Alamo Drafthouse available through Mandotees. Read more

Topaz Rags

California-based drums-bass-piano trio Topaz Rags may or may not have tumbled out of a desert roadhouse, but their sound evokes the kind of gleefully sinister goings-on you might imagine beneath thrumming bug zappers and a flickering neon glow after the bartender has locked the front door and Bubba has donned his purple cloak.