Le Stink

You can't become Le Stink, you gotta be born with it. Le Stink is a long-distance collaboration between Pling.se and Plong.com, siblings, and originally representatives from the great state of Illinois. Pling.se now hails from the noble, neutral, arctic stronghold of Stockholm, Sweden. Meanwhile, Plong.com is ringing her southern belle from just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. A pair of multi-instrumentalists and lateral thinkers, they agreed to begin with no set lineup of instruments and no apparent direction other than the name of the band, Le Stink.

Besides the sounds of traffic, we like the sounds of the piano, harmonica, guitar, accordion, ukulele, strings, drums, stamping and clapping. We might also like the sounds of our own voices, but we'd never admit to that publicly.

Le Stink songs are like a lesson in geology. Though timeless, they're full of stress fractures, with the occasional volcanic eruption. There's the odd hidden gem or vein of gold, but you're going to have to dig a little bit. Beautiful, natural and aesthetic, though not warm or snuggly.