Soft and Music

Jihae, pronounced “jee-heh,” has truly experienced the world, born in South Korea while growing up in Nigeria and Sweden and spending time in the UK before finally calling New York City home. A true student and practitioner of the arts, Jihae expresses herself through other mediums than just music, having acting, composing, and songwriting credits to her name. She released her debut album My Heart Is An Elephant in 2007 to much applause and acclaim. She revisits that LP with the Jeanluc Sinclair-produced EP Afterthought that includes four remixed tracks from the earlier LP and one new song “Simple Man” (download mp3 here). “Simple Man” is ironic. One, it’s confusing to listen to since the singer is a woman, even though Jihae has a deep untraditional female voice. Two, put extra emphasis on the first point, which is compounded by her equally hard-to-understand lyrics (“Don’t think that I’m not fake / It’s just been way too long”). But despite those obstacles, she still makes the song listenable with her troubled yet sympathetic harmonies. The rest of the EP follows that lead, showcasing Jihae’s lush and passionate self with laid-back electronic background beats behind it. Having not listened to the original tracks I can only assume the tracks still feature Jihae’s more vulnerable self, but are given more party-esque polishes and shines. It can be a good thing. The electronic beats prevent “Faint (Remix)” from being too depressing, yet moody enough to maintain a distressed aura. While Nina Simone was no stranger to moodiness, Jihae perfectly sustains the hope and truth of the famous “black classical” musician’s passion in the remixed quasi-blues cover of “Do I Move You.” But after listening to “Simple Man,” before the glossy remixes of the sensual “Black Pearl” and the Jem-like “Lazy Girls,” it’s apparent that Jihae’s alluring, yet mellow sensibilities are better enjoyed in less glamorous settings. She plays better around a raw, more intimate sound that compliments her raw and intimate sound that Trace Magazine calls a “brutally honest edge.”

With Yeasayer, the Killers, Atmosphere and Brother Ali, Blitzen Trapper, Mates of State The lineup for the fourth annual Stateside edition of the multi-day, multi-city Download Festival is upon us, and like a cluttered desktop folder saving the finest of the web’s offerings for later, it’s a little bit all over the place. But by design, of course: the Download Fest comes to San Francisco’s Shoreline Amphitheatre July 19, hits L.A.’s Gibson Amphitheatre the following day, July 20, and heads to Camden, New Jersey’s Susquehanna Bank Center on August 2. Not everybody’s making the long haul from the Bay all the way to New Jersey, so we’ve broken it down this way. The San Francisco show on July 19 features, among others, M83, Cut Copy, Yeasayer, Atmosphere and Brother Ali, Blitzen Trapper, RJD2, Mates of State, Flosstradamus, Tapes ‘n Tapes, the Duke Spirit, and Datarock, among others. They’ll lose Cut Copy somewhere outside of Bakersfield, picking up Caribou, Kaki King, the Night Marchers, and, er, Ghostland Observatory just in time for the L.A. show. (M83, Yeasayer, Atmosphere and Brother Ali, Blitzen Trapper, RJD2, Mates of State, Flosstradamus, Tapes ‘n Tapes, the Duke Spirit, and Datarock will all play in L.A.) Though there’s certainly some overlap, this nifty game of addition and subtraction doesn’t work too well for the Camden showcase, so we’ll just lay that one on you straight: Iggy and the Stooges, the Killers, Man Man, Mates of State, the Stills, the Duke Spirit, the Enemy, and, yes, Ghostland Observatory join the bill just across the river from Philadelphia.