Mind Spiders

Mind Spiders
Meltdown
Dirtnap

The Mind Spiders started spinning a couple of years ago, when Mark Ryan's Marked Men compadre Jeff Burke left for Japan, effectively ending one of Texas' best garage rock bands. Ryan had plenty to do, with at least part time duties in a slew of other outfits - Wax Museums, Bad Sports, High Tension Wires, etc. - but he started Mind Spiders as an outlet for his more personal, four-tracked material. The self-titled debut was more or less a solo effort, dragging in band mates from Wax Museums and Bad Sports in for cameos, but largely conceived in solitude. With Meltdown, Ryan expands on his tuneful, new-wave-into-bubblegum aesthetic with a full band, a killer band, in fact, with two drummers (Mike Throneberry from the Marked Men and Greg Rutherford from The High Tension Wires) and a wonderfully wandering, psychedelic keyboard.

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Not easy posting from an iPod.

I'm going to be gone for a few days

My uncle died over the weekend and I'm driving to Toronto tomorrow for the funeral. He was a really lovely man, very polite and kind and sweet...I hadn't seen him in about five years. He'd been sick for a while, but still died suddenly.

I'm not sure whether I'll be online or not, but let's just assume not. I should be back home late Friday.

Emily Wells

Emily Wells has one of those fascinating, cracked voices, pitched somewhere between country and blues, mostly grounded but with this crazy, otherworldly upper register, not angelic or witchy or any of the usual adjectives, but absolutely skewed from conventional reality. She's also a very accomplished violin player and, here's the kicker, has a real interest in electronic music (she's working with Dan the Automator on her next project). All of which means that her new album Mama is extremely hard to pin down, with its gap-toothed, country-girl vocals, its sleek, classically tinged strings and its eerie electro-beats and tone-washes. It's out on Partisan (also the home of Deertick and the Avett Brothers), and there's certainly some traditional music in there, but shot through time from the past to the future without ever really touching down on the present. I like it a lot.

You can check out Passenger" if you want a taste.

Mux Mool

Not really in sync with last night's festivities at Hampshire College, went to see Shigeto whose album Lineage I am liking a lot, but a bit flummoxed by the youth and informality of the gathering. (I'm used to being the oldest one in the room, no so much being the only one over 20, and I do mean way, way over 20.)

I believe Shigeto was playing when we got there (it looked like him from the photo), though with some other guys who might have been in Mux Mool and it didn't sound anything like the record (or, indeed, very focused or good). Second act(no one announcing anything, BTW, so they might have been Mux Mool, see if you can tell from the photo) included 2-3 guys from the first set, and was much better sounding...big booming beats that shiver through your clothing and altered soul-type vocals, a bizarre mix of viscerality and technology, but good. Also all hail the paper glasses, which looked like 3D specs, but shattered all the lights into rainbow shards and made things look pretty cool.

We left early, no idea which of the three (Shigeto, Mux Mool or Expensive Looks) we missed. Wow, college was a really long time ago.

TheeSatisfaction

Probably no one expected Sub Pop to put out one of last year's best hip hop albums, Shabazz Palaces' Black Up, but they did. (and while it's true that my opinion is worth nothing on this, plenty of other people who know better agreed.) Possibly even fewer would have anticipated a repeat performance from the Fortress of Grunge, but god-damned here it comes with the all-female, jazz-influenced, intricate and cerebral TheeSatisfaction, whose album awE naturalE is out in March on (you guessed it) SubPop.

TheeSatisfaction is comprised of two very capable and self-confident young women -- Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White -- who met in college at the University of Washington. I am not really sure how they do what they do, whether one of them is primarily concerned with the chilled contrapuntal arrangements, the other with the dressed-up soul vocals that slither over them. Or maybe they switch off. Or maybe they both do a little of each. In either case, makes no difference, this is sophisticated, multi-layered stuff, touched with fusion jazz and piano bar torch and consciousness rap, cool but not at all unemotional.

I believe in supporting women artists, but I don't think it has to mean pretending to like Whitney Houston or to find deep meaning in Madonna's half-time show...why not celebrate something female-powered that's aimed at your heart and brain, rather than your wallet?

"QueenS"

Yair Yona

It's interesting how the genre of "American primitive" has become so global...case in point, Yair Yona, who follows Fahey, Basho, Kottke in many ways, but interjects interesting elements of his own Middle Eastern background. I reviewed his latest in Dusted today.

Yair Yona
World Behind Curtains
Strange Attractors Audio House

Two years ago, reviewing Yair Yona’s first album of Takoma-style finger picking with Middle Eastern elements, Bill Meyer said that he hoped that the young Israeli guitarist would someday “get further past his influences and, like Basho-Junghans, into a sound that is completely his own.” With World Behind Curtains, Yona is still wearing his influences on his sleeve (literally: the sleeve notes reference Bert Jansch, Glenn Jones, Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho and Kelly Joe Phelps), yet he has indeed moved along. His sound on this second album shows a deep affection for, and knowledge of, the American Primitive tradition, yet it is less confined by this tradition — less confined, even, by its instrument. World Without Curtains is, in some ways, like James Blackshaw’s last couple of albums, a document of a skilled guitar player in the process of turning himself into a composer, conductor and arranger.

Only the first track of World Behind Curtains showcases Yona alone. The very Blackshaw-esque “Expatriates” is a stirring exploration of the 12-string, its plaintive melody surrounded by shimmering curtains of overtones. A howl of feedback erupts halfway through the piece, shattering its placidity and injecting an unexpected violence into the exercise. “Bella,” at the album’s end, adds a piano to Yona’s restrained acoustic picking, the two instruments intersecting and answering each other, but most of all leaving space. The quiet between chords and picked melodies speaks in this piece almost as much as the notes themselves.

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Wooden Dinosaur

I'm pretty sure I've seen these guys in Wooden Dinosaur, who play a very slightly "alt" version of alt-folk on traditional instruments. They're from Burlington VT...I think maybe they played Thing in the Spring in Peterborough one year. Anyway, they've got a new album out called Spaces, which songwriter Michael Roberts describes on the Wooden Dinosaur blog:

It was sometime in the warm months of 2010. I was driving through Somerville, Massachusetts, and I was listening to a CD that Katie Trautz, WD’s fiddle player, had given me, called “Homegrown Yodel.” Katie went to W. Virginia for a fiddling festival and took a yodeling workshop and they gave her this CD. It is a remarkable compilation that someone made. If you want it, email me and I’ll give you a download link.

Anyway, there is a Bob Wills track, a version of a classic called “I Ain’t Got Nobody” on this homegrown yodel CD. It changed my life. I listened to it probably 1,000 times that day driving around in Somerville, Massachusetts. If you listen close to our album, you’ll realize that the yodel line from “Talkin’ About Death” is very similar to Tommy’s yodel in this track. Also that “Pistol” has the same joyous feel. Also yodeling.

But basically it was this: country music, with horns. Jazz with banjos. Rock with an upright bass. Our band is just a crappy, contemporary version of the Texas Playboys. We throw it all in there together and see what happens. It’s not always perfect, but we like to think it is always real.

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