30 seconds over

My second favorite album so far...Sharon Van Etten's Tramp

2012-02-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

On reflection, I think the first paragraph is a little too flowery, but judge for yourself.

Sharon Van Etten
Tramp
Jagjaguwar

Sharon Van Etten’s debut, Because I Was in Love, was a work of aching purity, just a little guitar and doubled vocals to underline the luminescence of Van Etten’s voice, the plain spoken lyrics transmuted to radiance by sheer loveliness. She sounded like a long-lost 1960s icon — fragile, haunted, and not quite grounded in the real world. Her follow-up, Epic, was a larger, denser, more empowered undertaking, opening up her self-lacerating songs with layered harmonies, a full rock band and a sense of wild, against-all-odds triumph. Epic was a gigantic leap forward for Van Etten, proof that she had exploded right out of the coffee shop genre, but it shorted the transfixing vulnerability, the shuddery, silvery delicacy of the singer’s debut. With Tramp, her third, she has brought both elements together in a record that will surely be among the year’s best, a gorgeous, fully realized expression of her potential.

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Hell Songs

2012-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

Kind of a bizarre thing, but not without some interest, a new live recording from Swedish trio Hell Songs...which continues their easy-listening interpretations of landmark metal anthems. The new record, which is called Long Live Lounge was recorded with the band () and members of the Gothenburg Symphonics. You have really never heard "War Pigs" until you've heard it sung by a pretty soprano with strings and piano and so on...it cleans up unbelievably well. (with the accent on the "unbelievably" part.)

Here's the video...their version of "Run for the Hills," which, you probably remember, started life as an Iron Maiden song.

I also kind of like the closer "We're Not Going to Take It," in a distinctly what-the-fuck, why-are-they-doing-this kind of way. Just beautiful music...by Twisted Sister. Awesome.

The Veda Rays

2012-01-31T10:32:00.001-08:00

Another pretty good record I almost missed...the first from Brooklyn-based Veda Rays, Gamma Rays Galaxy Rays Veda Rays, which seems to have come out at some point last year and has probably been sitting on top of my desk for months. It reminds me a lot of Achtung Baby-era U2...yes, that large in scale and ambition, though obviously recorded with far fewer resources. You can also draw connections to more critically-accepted bands like Spaceman 3 and Radiohead. (and, by the way, for the record, I kind of like U2 in small doses and up through about Achtung Baby)

"Honey Pot" is probably the album's best, dark and clattery and gothy in the verse, but reaching out of the murk, occasionally, for triumphant Bunnyman-ish climaxes. It's the video, too.

Sonic Avenues

2012-01-31T04:57:00.000-08:00

This new album from Montreal's Sonic Avenues is quite good, but it gave me a vaguely queasy feeling that it was attempting generational anthems for a generation that doesn't exist anymore...if it ever did. My review at Dusted today:

Sonic Avenues
Television Youth
Dirtnap

The last generation of television youth has already crossed puberty, succeeded in malls and 7-11 parking lots and all-ages clubs by a group of kids raised on YouTube and Facebook and texting. It’s been a long time since anyone rushed home after school for Gilligan’s Island or zonked for most of a summer in front of MTV.

All this is a way of saying thatTelevision Youth is an anachronism, not just in its musical references – The Jam, The Clash, The Only Ones and certain harder-edged elements of The Kinks – but in its way of looking at the world. It’s just not the same being a punk kid in a dead-end town anymore. No matter where you live, no matter how far away the nearest rock club or comic book store, there are kids just like you at the other end of your Wi-Fi connection. It’s harder work to be alienated. The romantic figure at the center of pop-leaning punk – from The Clash’s Jimmy Jam to Green Day’s St. Jimmy to The Exploding Hearts’ pretender – isn’t up against the world by himself anymore.

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Carlos Paredes..an amazing Portuguese guitarist

2012-01-30T12:35:00.000-08:00

A really fine reissue from Drag City of two albums from Portuguese guitar master, Carlos Paredes...

Carlos Paredes
Guitarra Portuguesa; Movimento Perpétuo
(Drag City)

Carlos Paredes was a master of the Coimbrian guitar, a shortened, rounded version of the instrument, strung with six sets of double wire that was developed partly by his father, Arthur Paredes, also a famous guitarist. Born in 1925, Paredes lived and played through one of Portugal's most tumultuous periods, and was jailed as a communist in 1958. While imprisoned and instrument-less, he continued to write and develop his technique, incessantly playing an imaginary guitar so that the guards thought he had lost his mind. His music, which combined the rigor of classical styles with the emotionally expressive traditions of fado, became a touchstone for the new Portugal. In 1974, when revolution toppled the country's dictatorship, Paredes' music could be heard at all hours on the radio and in the shops and cafes.

Paredes' two best-known albums -- Guitarra Portuguesa from 1968 and Movimento Perpétuo from 1971 - are works of astonishing skill and emotional depth, melodic sophistication and bravura technical accomplishment. Never available in the United States, they have been out of print even in Portugal since 1989. Drag City, most likely influenced by Ben Chasny, who dedicated 2005's School of the Flower to the guitarist, has reissued both early Paredes albums, with original artwork and Portuguese liner notes (and an English translation).

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Golden Calves

2012-01-30T05:22:00.000-08:00

My review of an early project from Wooden Wand's James Jackson Toth runs today at Dusted...it's not a uniformly enjoyable listen, but sort of interesting...

Golden Calves
Money Band / Century Band
Woodsist

James Jackson Toth was just 18 when he recorded this material, not long out of Purchase College and just discovering the outer fringes of folk, free jazz and noise. Four-tracked in mostly one- and two-minute bursts, these are fragile, fragmentary ideas, not nearly cooked enough to qualify as songs, not wild enough to make the cut as improvisatory noise. A decade later, critics would take Toth to task for releasing every fucking thing that ever came into his head, exhausted and bewildered by the two and three full-lengths a year that spewed forth under various permutations of the name Wooden Wand. Here is where it starts, Toth, barely legal to vote, already spouting reams of unfinished, tossed off, poorly played, fuzzily recorded, and yet intermittently affecting material.

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Screwed again

2012-01-29T04:25:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was kind of a crazy day...we had to get up at 5 a.m. to get Sean to a ski race (we got him to the bus and then drove three hours in the car to watch). He did pretty well, though how well we don't really know, because there was a problem with the timing system that will take a couple of days to unravel. (I clocked him at 15:54, which is a significant improvement, but that's unofficial.) So we came back afterwards with one of his friends in the car and had a pretty good diner lunch on the way back, but were all obviously exhausted by 4 when we got back.

Except that I had told a publicist that I would go see Brown Bird in Keene that night (before knowing that I'd be getting up at 5 and driving 300 miles the same day), so around 7:30 I got in the car again and went to the show. The show was at the Starving Artist in Keene, which is a pretty small venue and apparently they have to finish shows at 10 p.m. or violate noise rules. So anyway, I get there just before 8 p.m. when the thing is supposed to start and there's a line all down the block, and we all stand around in the cold for half an hour until they start letting people in. There is no guest line and it's overbooked, although the woman at the door is telling the people ahead of me to wait and they might get in, though they'll have to pay $25 a ticket. (Which seems a little steep for, ahem, Brown Bird and O'Death...and also the poster very clearly says $10 advance, $15 day of show.) So I get to the front and of course there's no guest list, and if I could just go stand out in the cold for another hour maybe they will try to get me in. By this point it is almost 9 p.m. and not a note of music has been played, so I say fuck it, fuck Brown Bird, fuck O'Death and fuck Forcefield PR, and go home.

Imperial Teen

2012-01-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

I gave Imperial Teen a five for their last album, The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band, in a PopMatters review subtitled Just add water. That was five years ago, but now they're back with a record that I really, really like, Feel the Sound ....reviewed at Dusted today:

Imperial Teen

Feel the Sound

Merge

The last time that Imperial Teen broke a five-year hiatus, with The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band in 2007, it was a bit of a letdown. The old peppy exuberance was stretched thin, the subject matter apologetically drawn from midlife. It sounded like the four principals had gotten distracted by the trappings of maturity and were unable to commit fully to the bubblegum joys of power pop. Sure, there were some good songs, some catchy boy-girl harmonies, some cheeky, in-your-face lines, but the album never caught fire. The band kept reminding listeners of all that had changed over the half decade, never really honing in on what had stayed the same: their fixation with the music.

With Feel the Sound, they’ve left the distractions behind. This fifth full-length, as the album title suggests, is all about the sound. Digging deep into the most elaborate power pop traditions – ELO and the Beach Boys seem like prime reference points – Imperial Teen crafts a super-clean, super-sharp, inordinately complex collection of songs that, nonetheless, go down like cherry cola.

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You can stream the whole thing at Spinner now.

Cheyenne Marie Mize

2012-01-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

Not a total rave, but I did really like the first couple songs on Bonnie Prince Billy compadre Cheyenne Marie Mize's new EP, We Don't Need. The review runs today at Blurt.

Cheyenne Marie Mize
We Don't Need
(Yep Roc)

Cheyenne Marie Mize, out of Louisville, is nothing if not self-assured, taking up every inch of sonic space in her latest six-song EP, strutting and stomping and occasionally revealing heartbreaking vulnerability in a broad range of rock and Americana styles. A versatile singer, she navigates the spoke-sung, blues-y chants of stand-out "Wishing Well," the tremulous self-laceration of "Call Me Beautiful," the road-house diva-isms of "Going Under" and the indie rocking directness of "Keep It" without a miss. She even plays all the instruments - raucous washboard scrapes and cowbell rattles, plaintive guitars and enough piano rolls and slides to make a Western's saloon doors rattle.

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"Wishing Well" is, hands down, the best cut on the EP.

Laura Gibson's La Grande

2012-01-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

I got into Laura Gibson through her collaboration with Ethan Rose, but her straight folk pop stuff is pretty good, too. Reviewed today at BLurt.

Laura Gibson
La Grande
(Barsuk)

Laura Gibson has a voice that flutters and trembles, hopping octave-length intervals weightlessly like a bird jumping from a low branch to a higher one. There's cranked Victrola aura of old-time-i-ness around her vocals, sometimes accentuated with static, which makes her sound like an old radio transmission, crossing not just space but time. And, yet, though there's much of the past in these pretty, warmly arranged introspections, there's also a strong thread of determination. Gibson wants to know that she is the lion, not the lamb, the crow and not the swallow. As lovely, as delicate, as seemingly vulnerable to the slightest breeze as she is, Gibson has reservoirs of strength and clarity.

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"La Grande"

Zomes

2012-01-24T05:25:00.000-08:00

I've got another review up at Dusted today, this one of Improvisations, the third album by Asa Osbourne's Zomes, in which he turns towards the long-form. It's out this week on Thrill Jockey.

Zomes
Improvisations
Thrill Jockey

For two full-length albums as Zomes, Asa Osbourne has constructed short, mesmeric meditations out of the most rudimentary materials, squawky keyboards mostly, reinforced by the steady thwack of drum machines and occasional bits of guitar. Over the first two albums, the self-titled debut in 2008 and last year’s Earth Grid, Osbourne kept his compositions concise and disciplined. No track on the debut lingered much past the three and a half minute mark. Earth Grid‘s compositions topped out at just over five minutes. And most, if not all, of these staticky, hypnotic cuts relied on beats to keep them moving.

With Improvisations, originally released as a cassette tape in 2010 by Imminent Frequencies, Osbourne has left movement behind. Three long tracks sprawl over the disc’s half-hour duration, all alike enough to blend into one another, none especially tethered to rhythm.

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zomes - improvisations (album preview) by experimedia

I also reviewed the first Zomes album for Dusted.

Rhyton

2012-01-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

Another year, another band from Dave Shuford of NNCK, D. Charles Speer and other projects...reviewed today at Dusted.

Rhyton
Rhyton
Thrill Jockey

The word “Rhyton” is Greek for an ancient drinking horn, as well as a homophone for the 1960s all-purpose acclamation “right on!” Rhyton, the band, reflects all these nuances. The band is a partnership between Dave Shuford of NNCK and D. Charles Speer, Jimy SeiTang of Psychic Ills and Spencer Herbst of Messages. It grew out of the ending of Dave Shuford’s Greek-influenced Arghiledes project, started among drinking buddies at a bar in Brooklyn, and borrowed liberally from the open-ended blues-droning, psychedelic experiments of the 1960s.

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There's a video for Stone Colored" here".

Fujiya And Miyagi

2012-01-21T12:59:00.002-08:00

I've been unexpectedly hooked on Ventriloquizzing, the sublimely unsettling electro-pop record from the U.K.'s Fujiya And Miyagi. It's definitely electronic, but reminds me more of the sleeker, more decadent end of Brit pop, Pulp for instance, and if you have to go to a dance comparison, Death in Vegas is possible. Anyway, it's utterly poised and sophisticated, with just the right amount of menace. "Ecstatic Dancer," which can be had after some hoop-jumping at Yep Roc, is not on the album, but it's the main single and also the video.

No idea what they'd be like live, but you could find out and tell me all about it:

1/21 - Mercury Lounge - NY, NY
1/22 - Great Scott - Allston, MA
1/23 - La Sala Rosa - Montreal, QC
1/24 - Wrong Bar - Toronto, ON
1/25 - Lincoln Hall - Chicago, IL
1/26 - Electric Owl - Vancouver, BC
1/27 - Neumos - Seattle, WA
1/28 - Mississippi Studios - Portland, WA
1/30 - The independent - San Francisco, CA
1/31 - Casbah - San Diego, CA
2/1 - Echo - Los Angeles, CA

More from the floor: Or, the Whale

2012-01-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

A very belated shout for the 2009 second release from Or, the Whale, a country-rock band named after the second, less famous half of a Melville title. The band, out of San Francisco, uses all the accoutrements of Americana -- twangy guitar, righteous straight-ahead drums, banjo, tightly harmonized gospel harmonies -- in a way that seems fresh and un-archival. In his review of Or, the Whale two years ago, PopMatters' Joshua Kloke noted that "Or, The Whale succeed where others in the country-rock genre have failed: they keep things very, very authentic."

"Rusty Gold" is, quite possibly, the best of a very strong group of songs, not least because it starts with the line "My dog died and he broke my heart," which, considering that I think about my dog every day, four years after he went, is something I can relate to. It's also pitched at that sharp but loose country level, which reminds me of Neil Young and Oakley Hall and the Band...all outfits that could put a little spine into their down-home and make it rock.

I've been updating Dusted all week, which is way more work than you'd think, especially on dial-up. Last night I thought I'd brought the whole site down, but it came up again about an hour later and now I'm done.

Live Wire ...The Black Sessions

2012-01-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

I've been really liking this live Wire record, The Black Sessions, recorded last May in Paris and including 13 tracks from various points in the band's career, including a long, stretched out version of "Pink Flag."

It doesn't look like they're giving any audio or video away with this, but here's the band playing "Pink Flag" in NYC a few years ago.

Pazz & Jop

2012-01-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

So, I spoke too soon...i've got two loners this year (albums I picked and no one else did)...David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights and UV Race's Homo.

Here's the big site

and here's my ballot.

I think my highest ranking pick was in the 130-ish range...out of touch as usual. Nice to see Shabazz Palaces do so well, though.

Petticoats and crinolines and theremins and violins...

2012-01-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

A new one from a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, reviewed today in Blurt.

Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes
Bones for Tinder
(Five Head)

"Petticoats and crinolines and theremins and violins, uh-huh, " goes the chant in "Bright Diamonds," as a deadpan observer itemizes the tipsy, traditionally-instrumented, but anything but old-fashioned stew that Justin Robinson has cooked up in his first post-Carolina Chocolate Drops recording. "Bright Diamonds" builds tension out of old-time elements, a percussive slash of violin, a shimmer of dulcimer, syncopated rhythms of foot thumps and handclaps, and a criss-crossing nexus of spoken word parts that sounds more like hip hop than mountain hop. Like many of the other songs in Bones for Tinder, it starts in folk, but heads unexpectedly in other directions. "Ships and Verses," turn hand-clapping syncopation into a sepia-tinged beat-box, as Robinson raps about "rock[ing] it like old-school Janet. " Classic soul gets a nod, too, in "Vultures." Here Robinson threads a line from Marvin Gaye through eerie glimmers of dulcimer and billowy ribbons of fiddle music, crooning "You're all I need...to get by...oh-oh" in a ghostly cabaret tenor. "Kissin' and Cussin'" could be from Erykah Badu, except for the dulcimer, a slow-jammed, female-MC'd rap running into Robinson's cracked folk verse.

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Bonfire (Bones for Tinder) by Justin Robinson & the Mary Annettes

Bollywood Bloodbath

2012-01-16T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's just kind of cool that this exists...a compilation of soundtrack music from Indian B horror movies, which, hell, until I saw this on the Dusted board, i didn't even know there were Indian B horror movies.

Anyway, it's a little bit of Bollywood, a little bit of disco, a little bit of scary soundtrack noises....

I'm doing a bunch of administrative stuff for Dusted this week, just what I need, more unpaid work.

Here is Hemant Bhole's "Sansani Khez Koi Baat"

Goldmund, Loney Dear and Michael Yonkers

2012-01-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

I did end up reviewing that Goldmund album, All Will Prosper, using some of the same language that I first posted here but, you know, longer.

Goldmund
All Will Prosper
(Western Vinyl)

Composer Keith Kenniff recorded this lovely collection of traditional songs over several years, arranging the melodies simply for piano and guitar, and recording them in an exceptionally clear, unadorned way that nonetheless suggests memory, loss and nostalgia. Many of these mostly Civil War-era songs are very familiar. We are, after all, talking about standards like "Dixie" and "Shenandoah", and ubiquitous spirituals like "Amazing Grace." Yet all have a glow of otherworldliness, of spectral weightless-ness, as if they were the memory of these songs, packed away in dusty attics and captured in faded daguerreotypes, and not the song themselves.

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Also, this ran a long time ago in the Blurt fall print issue, but it's online now, my review of Loney, Dear's Hall Music

Loney, Dear
Hall Music
(Polyvinyl)

Emil Svanangen has often blown his wistful little pop songs out to grand proportions, whether surrounding them with a jubilant indie chorus, as on Loney, Noir, lacing them with pounding drums on Dear John or, this time out, enlisting classical instruments. Here, on a record inspired by his year-long collaboration with Swedish chamber music orchestras, Svanangen's wavery voice flickers in and out of thickets of brass, plays tag with flights of xylophone and emerges, bruised and pining, from fog-bound forests of synthesizer. A broader palette of instruments, however, seems only to accentuate the personal nature of Svanangen's work.

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And finally, my friend Michael alerted me to a new documentary about one of my very favorite rock and roll people, Michael Yonkers, who, you may remember, I interviewed for Dusted a few years ago. Here's the clip that Michael sent me:

Have a nice rest of your weekend then. We're going to go to the Y later to work out and try to catch a little of one of those football games, I think Saints/Niners. Sucks not having TV this time of year.

A sunnier Larkin Grimm

2012-01-13T03:55:00.000-08:00

I've been struggling with Larkin Grimm's Soul Retrieval lately. You might remember Grimm as one of Michael Gira's proteges, a dark-ish sort of voice, whose Parplar in 2008, seemed to herald a significant talent. Grimm has a really fascinating story, growing up in redneck country, going to Yale on art scholarship, meeting up with Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth and finally, through a nanny job, establishing a relationship with Michael Gira. [Who said, on hearing her sing, she says, "Girl, you've got the darkness in you."]

Soul Retrieval is substantially lighter than Parplar, happier, even to the point of a whistling chorus. She's gotten married in the interim, had a baby and settled down, which, okay, good for her, I love my family, too, but it's just not as interesting. "there is nothing to worry about...everything's fine," she sings, in a kind of Motown soul voice for "The Road Is Paved With Leaves," and the song is full of ease rather than vertigo, bland assurance rather than danger. I've been listening to Parplar again just to confirm my impression and, yeah, I like it a lot more than Soul Retrieval.

Other people seem to be enjoying it though, see this Village Voice piece "Download: Larkin Grimm's Pulsing, Luminous "Paradise And So Many Colors" .(by Christopher Weingarten) for the positive perspective. There's a download of the album's opening track embedded in the article.

Grimm did a Daytrotter session about six months ago, but it's mostly old material. Check it out here.

The Habit....crazed Americana from Brooklyn

2012-01-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

I'm too late to actually write about this, and, to be honest, it's a little trad for my tastes, but if you like your folk music unhinged and wild-eyed and altogether unconcerned with decorum, why not give Brooklyn's The Habit a spin?

The band has not one but four songwriters, which, perhaps, explains the diversity of musical styles on Lincoln Is Dead, from murmur-y guitar-strumming ballads, to to shuffling skiffles, to full-on, raging barn-stoms like "War Is Done" which just happens to be the single.

They must really like this song, because it's the only one with a video, too.

So that's two Civil War themed blog posts in one week. Let's see if we can't move on to WWI for tomorrow.

More giant hits from the big floor: Strand of Oaks

2012-01-11T06:36:00.000-08:00

Continuing yesterday's theme of appreciating the world around you, going back to things you'd overlooked and finally listening to all the damned CDs that litter the floor, I've gotten pretty into Strand of Oaks' 2009 album Leave Ruin. Strand of Oaks is a mournful, Americana-tinged singer-songwriter project, essentially one Timothy Showalter. Showalter, like me, is from Indiana, but unlike me started life as a Mennonite. He has all the plain-spoken virtues, simplicity, sincerity, a willingness to consider small, concrete details and how they fit into a larger picture. You envision him working a song like a craft, carefully, without any hurry and without a lot of messy elaboration either. I'm liking the father-son dynamic of "Lawn Breed Songs" and "Mourning Worker" the best, but it's a very nice, quiet, understated and honest endeavor all the way through.

Showalter did a Daytrotter session in 2010, which includes "Lawn Breed Songs". You can find it here.

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Greatest hits from my floor: Simply Saucer

2012-01-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

So, if you read my year-end, you'll know that I'm trying (and mostly failing) to get a grip on the piles of CDs that are threatening to completely submerge my house. (Help, I'm drowning in indie!) I hauled another pile up from the floor and ripped them, pending quality, onto the iTunes a week or so ago, and gotta say, there's some good stuff getting stepped on down there.

I might get to some others later (Strand of Oaks, Hello Marseilles), but for now, let's have a look at this Half Human/Half Life CD, released by Sonic Unyon two or three years ago, and featuring the 1970s Canadian psychedelic-garage-blues-punk band known as Simply Saucer. The name, obviously, derives from Pink Floyd's Saucer Full of Secrets, and the sound, too, borrows heavily from Floyd's pedal-altered interstellar overdrives.

The band broke up almost as soon as it started...there were no proper studio albums at all, just a retrospective called Cyborgs Revisited in 1989, which was named one of the best Canadian albums ever by numerous sources, including Forced Exposure. Half Human/Half Saucer is the product of a 2008 reunion and, as the title suggests, half of it is live and archival, the other half post-reunion new material.

It's good trippy, sprawling, guitar psyche, a little blustery in parts, but well worth a listen. And, even better, I can now walk from the door to the light switch without breaking plastic.

Sao Paulo Underground Trio

2012-01-10T05:38:00.000-08:00

So, you might have run into the Chicago Underground Duo (or Trio or Quartet, depending on who shows up), at some point in your wanderings...an ensemble focused around Rob Mazurek, a cornet player from Chicago. Turns out that the number of players is not the only permutation in his equations. He also moved the whole concept to Brazil, found some like-minded players and started the Sao Paulo Underground...reviewed today at Blurt. I said:

"Três Cabeças Loucuras is the group's third album, a lighthearted but not unserious romp through space-age Latin and non-Latin styles. The sound ranges from vibraphone plunking, eccentrically metered Chicago post-rock ("Six Six Eight," which brings along Mazurek's Exploding Star compatriots, John Herndon, Jason Adasiewicz and Matt Lux) to heat-shimmering, electronically embellished Tropicalia ("Pigeon" based on a traditional maracatu and Takara's lilting, hip-shifting "Carambola"). The main constants are complex rhythms, a futuristic use of synths, electronics and effects and Mazurek's high, fever-dream cornet trills, which float like jet trails over jungle-y tangles of funk-jazz syncopation."

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Artist: Sao Paulo Underground (feat. Rob Mazurek) - Song: Jagoda's Dream - Album: Tres Cabecas Loucuras by CuneiformRecords

Boring as Me?

2012-01-09T03:44:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one left cold by Tom Waits' late 2011 album Bad As Me?

I picked it up over the holidays (with cash money, no less), because it was Blurt's #1 pick, and expected it to be at least interesting. But, god, I could hardly get through it four times without wincing...Waits' oddball persona gets pushed to caricature on the "good" songs ("Chicago", "Bad As Me", "Satisfied", "Hell Broke Luce") and seems thin and flat and hollow on the slower, ballad-y ones ("Kiss Me", "Last Leaf", "New Year's Eve"). I don't see how anyone could pick this as #1 for 2011, unless they had given up on anything new or interesting ever happening again.

Of course, there are lots of people who have. We call them babyboomers.

For the record, I really liked Get Behind the Mule and Swordfish Trombones, but am not a huge, historic, buy-every-album Waits fan.

Maybe you'll like this more than I do.

Jennifer O'Connor

2012-01-07T10:17:00.001-08:00

Still catching up on a pretty busy end of last week, here's my review of Jennifer O'Connor's I Want What You Want, out since late last year on her own Kiam label.

Jennifer O’Connor
I Want What You Want
(Kiam)

“I want what you want,” Jennifer O’Connor confides twice, first in the brief solo guitar and voice treatment of “Another Day” at the beginning of this fifth solo album, and later in a keyboard-driven, pop-leaning reprise of the same song near the end. It’s an interesting sentiment, one that relinquishes, right off the bat, most of the self-centered egotism of contemporary confessional pop. It acknowledges, in a way that it’s hard to imagine Dylan or Darnielle or Ryan Adams or any of our male lyrics-oriented balladeers doing, that the other is primary, that his (or her) desires take precedence, even before knowing exactly what those desires are. O’Connor never really elaborates on what is wanted, or how the whole thing plays out (it seems to end badly). But she does set up a very interesting dynamic, one in which the voice we hear is self-effacing, reticent, and not always the hero of its own stories. All but one of these songs are written in the first person, yet that first person remains in the background, detached, acting mostly as an observer.

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"Running Start"

Eddy Current Suppression Ring

2012-01-06T11:14:00.001-08:00

I've got a lot of stuff up around the web today, so I thought I'd double up for today with this review of Eddy Current Suppression Ring's career-spanning singles compilation So Many Thing...a total blast and out now on Goner.

Here's my review from Blurt

Eddy Current Suppression Ring
So Many Things
(Goner)
This collection of singles and compilation tracks covers pretty much the entirety of Eddy Current Suppression Ring from their raucous, first-ever single "Get Up Morning" to the dissolute fade-out of last year's "Rush to Relax." Regardless of vintage, it's all fine, loosely constructed punk rock, centered around Brendan Suppression's yowling, drawling, let-it-all-hang-out vocal delivery, but beefed up considerably by the headlong, brutally simple but excellent playing. Iggy Pop is the patron saint of this sort of thing, but you'll also hear shades of the Fall, Radio Birdman and the Troggs.

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Eddy Current Suppression Ring - You Don't Care (from the new release "So Many Things") by GonerRecords

Dan Melchior

2012-01-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

I posted about Dan Melchior's latest album Catbirds and Cardinals before I even had a copy...on the slim basis of one Soundcloud stream and a spot near the top of WFMU's heavily played list. And, as sometimes happens, a few days later, I had an email exchange with the label, a week or so after that, the full album and then, just before the holidays, an hour-long conversation with Dan Melchior...who is completely fascinating and if you ever have an opportunity to buy him a beer, do it.

So thanks to the miracles of internet communication, I went from "whoa, this sounds like an interesting album," to "here is my completed profile of Dan Melchior" in less than a month. I guess I do some sort of random post on Bryan Ferry now, eh?

Here we go:

AN ENGLISHMAN IN NORTH CAROLINA: Dan Melchior

The über-prolific lo-fi maven reflects on a recent past beset with personal and professional challenges, but manages to remain optimistic and upbeat.

BY JENNIFER KELLY

"Living in America is quite difficult for an English person," says Dan Melchior. "Americans really think they know all about you. And they all think they can do an English accent, which they do, to your face, over and over again."

Melchior has lived in America for more than a decade and during that time has made little headway in convincing the locals that he has no interest in the Gallagher brothers, Posh and Beckham, the Royal family or any of the other topics that that all Brits are supposed (by Americans at least) to obsess over. Yet he is quite British, in his way, from the thick cockney vowels that clot his speech, to his penchant for surreal English comedy, to his obsession with World War II. "English Shame" from his latest (though by no means new; more on that later) album, takes a wry look at America's misguided Anglo-philia, setting trash culture icons like Sting and Jagger up against Melchior's real British heroes.

"William Blake is a hero of mine. J.M.W. Turner is a hero of mine. I just drop those in as people that I would hold up as being English, rather than some of those other people that I would rather forget. They're the equivalent of Carrot Top, you know?" says Melchior. "They're not someone you want to think about when you think about your nationality."

Catbirds and Cardinals is Melchior's 19th full-length in a career that has spanned decades and continents. In the late 1990s, he recorded with cracked primitivist Billy Childish and, later, with Holly Golightly. In the ‘00s, his band, the Broke Revue, signed with In the Red, made three records and toured with the White Stripes, Jon Spencer and Mudhoney. In 2004, he ditched his band and started playing all the parts himself. Dan Melchior Und Das Menace is another way of saying Dan Melchior and Dan Melchior. It's all one guy on all the instruments.

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Jakob Olausson's Morning and Sunrise

2012-01-05T07:20:00.000-08:00

My first Dusted review of the new year...of Ben Chasny favorite Jakob Olausson...

Jakob Olausson
Morning & Sunrise
De Stijl

Jakob Olausson, who divides his time between beet farming and psychedelic home recording, made a modest splash in 2007 with his debut Moonlight Farm, a whispery, ominously beautiful collection of songs that hovered around the borders of new folk, near where the genre began to bleed into experimental drone. If you didn’t know what you were listening to, you might easily have assumed Moonlight Farm was a reissue, coming from the same evocative, eccentric vein of outsider 1960s folk as Gary Higgins or Ed Askew. And yet, Olausson is a contemporary, still working at his isolated Swedish farm, still making dreamy, reverb-hazed recordings that seem to exist in a time of their own. Morning & Sunrise, his second, has the same slackened, slo-mo meditativeness as the first Olausson record, but it is noticeably clearer, cleaner and more guitar driven.

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This song is from the first album, but you get the idea...
Jakob Olausson : Riding on the Wind by destijlrecs

Goldmund's now that's what I call music: 1864-style

2012-01-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

Goldmund's All Will Prosper is a little out of the ordinary, but gorgeous. The album, by electronic composer Kenneth Keniff, collects 15 mostly-Civil War-era folk songs, reconceived for spectral piano and guitar, in the simplest possible, most emotionally evocative way. There is something, for instance, about the way that the piano notes reverberate that conveys memory and loss. these are not exactly faithful renditions of living melodies, but rather their ghosts, pared down almost to transparency and -- even the lively ones -- infinitely sad.

Western Vinyl has decided to give away one of the most familiar tunes on the album, "Amazing Grace" but the ones that give me the chills are the two "Johnny" battle songs..."Johnny has gone for a soldier" and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again."

I've always loved "Shenandoah," too. (I used to have a lot of these songs in a collection of american songs that I learned how to play the piano from.)

I asked about reviewing this at Blurt, but I don't know if I'll get it.

Damien Jurado

2012-01-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

Damien Jurado's last album St. Bartlett was one of my favorites of 2010...so i was excited to get a copy of Maraqopa in the mail last month...and even more excited to hear what's inside. My take: Maraqopa is not quite so devastatingly spectral, so ghostly pale, so haunting as St. Bartlett. But on the positive side, it is significantly more warm and human...and it's got some really wonderful, sort of Richard Thompson-ish smouldery guitar on the opening track, which is also the giveaway single: "Nothing is the News"

Desertshore

2012-01-02T05:22:00.000-08:00

Red House Painters' guitarist Phil Carney's Desertshore project is like Neil Young through a codeine buzz, slowed-down, fuzzily atmospheric and, fundamentally, really lovely. Second album Drawing of Threes, which came out late last year on Caldo Verde, burns pretty slow, but it burns...loving "Diana," "Vernon Forrest" and "Molle" all with guest vocals from Mark Kozelek.

Nite Jewel with the edges rubbed off

2012-01-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

What I liked the best about Nite Jewel's Good Evening, back in 200x, was the uneasy truce between dance and outsider music...the sense of looking in, at disco of all things, from a fogged window, with longing but no hope of getting inside.

In my review at the now defunct Pure Music, I said, "Nite Jewel, in real life visual/installation artist Ramona Gonzalez, makes dream-blurred, disco-folk music. It’s a kind of lo-fi dance soundtrack for whacked out teenage girl poets who boogie slowly, by themselves and mostly inside their own heads....It’s an infinitely personal, infinitely eccentric take on electro-pop, an inward looking dance music for the sad girls who never get asked."

But now Gonzales is on Secretly Canadian, and she sounds pretty much like any other diva...witness the first single, "One Second of Love" which can now be streamed on Soundcloud.

The record, which is also called One Second of Love, is coming out March 6.

By the way, happy new year. We had kind of a quiet one, chinese food in Amherst late in the afternoon, then home to watch a whole bunch of 30 Rocks and drink a little champagne...which oddly, I enjoyed a lot more than a lot of New Year's parties and events I've been to. I've really enjoyed hanging with my two guys this week, not that we did much, but they're fun to be with.9

Blurt writers' lists

2011-12-30T07:08:00.000-08:00

When I say that I love "best of" lists, what I mean is individual lists, which seem, in most cases, to be honest appraisals of the music that people loved and listened to. (I've heard about people putting records into their lists that they didn't really listen to, just because they thought they should, but I don't know anyone like that.)

Anyway, BLurt has a whole bunch of them up at the site now. Mine, which you are undoubtedly familiar with (and probably a little nauseated by at this point) is in Part 1. There is also a Part 2, equally worth a browse.

I spent some time on Wednesday listening to the New York Times Popcasts on best albums and best songs, so now I've heard bits of a lot of the mainstream albums that made mainstream writers' lists, and I've got to say, Beyonce, Paul Simon, Drake and Feist are not doing anything for me, but I kind of like that Adele song, "Rolling the Deep" and I might be into Tuneyards if I listened to it enough.

Luke Roberts

2011-12-29T07:28:00.000-08:00

Blurt is still running reviews this week...and I've got one up today.

Luke Roberts
Big Bells and Dime Songs
(Thrill Jockey)

"One time...I spit and hit a dime," Luke Roberts' growls over a spare, rough-hewn scrim of picking. His "Dime Song" sounds as if it were recorded as if in the back room of a deserted bar in the bleary beginnings of a morning after. His voice breaks and stretches over the notes, mournful and exhausted and beaten. It's an old-time sound, the kind of thing that ought to have been recorded, originally, on wax cylinders. It speaks of hard times and discouragement and endless persistence with few rewards, an artifact, perhaps, from the Great Depression. Yet Roberts is 20-something, scraping by in post-credit crunch America rather than the 1930s. He laid the track down a year or two ago, with Harvey Milk's Kyle Spence sitting at the boards of his Athens, Georgia recording studio. His spiritual contemporaries may be Karen Dalton and Woody Guthrie, but he is about the same age as Lady Gaga. Strange world, isn't it?

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Got room in your head for one more list?

2011-12-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Blurt's is up today...Waits won.

See it here.

Writers' list tomorrow.

Colin Stetson

2011-12-28T06:35:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, the time when you realize that you never heard a bunch of the records that everybody else loved and if you had, who knows, maybe they'd have been your favorites, too. Anyway, I've been catching up on Colin Stetson's New History of Warfare, Part 2: Judges, and liking it a whole lot.

Here's what Dusted's Adam Strohm had to say about it:

"New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is an album of somber beauty, its flashes of color existing amidst a broad spectrum of grays. Like experimental films than toy with narrative and bend the viewer’s expectations in terms of plot, the album hints at some underlying tale, but, in the end, Judges is more concerned with atmosphere than event. “A Dream of Water,” with its visions of the chaos, despair and confusion, and Stetson’s cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes” are the disc’s most evocative tracks, the former featuring Laurie Anderson’s familiar spoken delivery, the latter a slow, sorrowful performance from Shara Worden. Many of Judges compositions are relatively straight lines, explorations of a theme or technique that, save for a few exceptions, aren’t especially demonstrative in their emotion. This way, Stetson avoids much of the constructed inevitability and dynamic shifts that can so blandly constitute emotional import in instrumental music. The inclusion of a choir on “All the Colors Bleached to White” and some of Anderson’s spoken work can feel a little too heavy, but moments of melodrama are fleeting, and change is always afoot. It’s rare that a track sounds too much like those that come before or after: in one of the most striking pairings, the beatbox-esque “Red Horse (Judges II)” is followed by the ecstatic “The Righteous Wrath of an Honorable Man,” with its hints of Albert Ayler, Stetson’s purest nod toward the sound of classic free jazz."

The rest of the review.

"The Stars in His Head (Dark Lights Remix)"

Even if you're not familiar with Colin Stetson per se, you've probably heard him playing for various high profile bands, including Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Tom Waits, the National, etc. etc. He's just been nominated for the Polaris Prize, too.

Sharon van Etten

2011-12-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

I'll be writing about Sharon van Etten's third album Tramp later for Dusted, but meanwhile, let me just say that it's great and it builds on the guttier, more empowered things she was doing with Epic without, in any way, compromising the fragility and purity that you heard in her self-titled debut.

It's gotta be top ten for 2012 -- along with Shearwater's Animal Joy -- and if you live in a major city in the eastern half of the U.S. or Canada, you've got a pretty good shot at seeing them together. Lucky you.

Dates
02/10/12 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's w/ Shearwater
02/11/12 Washington, DC - Black Cat w/ Shearwater
02/12/12 Carrboro, NC - Cat's Cradle w/ Shearwater
02/14/12 Columbus, OH - Wexner Center w/ Shearwater
02/15/12 Newport, KY - Southgate House w/ Shearwater
02/16/12 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall w/ Shearwater
02/17/12 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall w/ Shearwater
02/18/12 Minneapolis, MN - Cedar Cultural Center w/ Shearwater
02/21/12 Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace w/ Shearwater
02/22/12 Montreal, QC - Il Motore w/ Shearwater
02/23/12 Boston, MA - Paradise w/ Shearwater
02/24/12 Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg w/ Shearwater
02/25/12 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom w/ Shearwater

Here's "Serpents" from Tramp

How the sausage gets made

2011-12-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Interesting piece from the Wire's blog about how they ended up naming a record nobody particularly liked as #1 for the year.

Pyrolator

2011-12-23T04:24:00.000-08:00

Another review up at Blurt today.

Pyrolator
Neuland
(Bureau B)

It's probably a lot of fun to watch Kurt Dahlke, the electronic composer and DJ who records under the name Pyrolator, perform his pulsing, pounding music. He uses a Buchla Lightning II to sculpt his sounds, manipulating beats, tones and samples by moving two rods in the air in front of this machine. He also employs a Marta, controlled by touch. So, unlike many electronic artists who sit, in a fairly static way, behind their laptops, Dahlke's performance is roughly as kinetic as his music, which blends the thump, thump, thump of the club with delicate, sometimes otherworldly melodies.

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Sort of interesting how he does what he does

Tycho's Dive

2011-12-22T11:40:00.001-08:00

A really beautiful, serene bit of melodically-anchored electronica from Ghostly artist, Scott Hansen a.k.a. Tycho, reviewed yesterday at Blurt.

Tycho
Dive
(Ghostly)

Tycho's Scott Hansen explores the warmest corners of electronic music, using well-worn vintage synths to float dreamy melodies over insistent stutters and clatters of percussion. He splices organic sounds - scratchy acoustic guitars, the distant boom of bass, human voices - into otherworldly soundscapes seamlessly, so that notes made by instruments sound as luminous, as idealized as those elicited from synths and programming decks.

Listen for instance, to the way synthetic washes of tone crest and fade in "Hours," the album's standout track, one synthesizer laying a foundation, while another picks out a cerebral melody. A crisp, minimalist rhythm kicks in on snare and cymbal, lending a twitchy sensuality. And then there is the bass, soft, but insistently physical, as it grounds "Hours" in the world of blood and breath and sweat. There are lots of different elements in "Hours" but they co-exist in a sort of super-real clarity. You feel no confusion or complexity, just a bright, warm rush of serenity.

"More"

I really like the cover art, too.

Here's "Hours"

Mountain Goats do holiday cheer

2011-12-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

Let's add this Darnielle take on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to the annals of unlikely covers...despite his last record's Bible verse titles, I've always more or less thought of him as a fellow secular humanist. But, you know, it's Christmas and why not? From the AV Club, enjoy.

The Mountain Goats cover "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

Cardinal...after a long wait

2011-12-21T07:02:00.000-08:00

Cardinal, the extremely intermittent collaboration between Eric Matthews and Richard Davies of the Moles, has a new album out called Hymns and if you like clever, ambiguous, insanely catchy but not-quite-graspable pop, this is one for you.

The record is out in January on Fire Records. And just worth mentioning: It's been 18 years since the last Cardinal, so you might want to, I don't know, buy two to tide you over.

Meanwhile, Here's "Love Like Rain"
Cardinal - Love Like Rain by FIRE RECORDS

Lijadu Sisters

2011-12-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

Knitting Factory Records is re-releasing four long-out-of-print albums from the Afro-Beat pioneers the Lijadu Sisters, one of the very few female-led acts to gain traction in Nigeria in the mid-to-late 1970s. The Lijadu sisters were second cousins to Fela Kuti (and also Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka), but had difficulty breaking through taboos against female songwriter/artists in Africa in the 1970s. Ginger Baker was a fan and brought them to Europe, including an appearance at a cultural festival connected to the Munich Olympics in 1972.

The sisters recorded four albums in the 1970s, now considered classics. I've got Danger, recorded in 1976, and it's a wonderful blend of African and reggae rhythms, American funk and soul and socially conscious protest music. Knitting Factory is also reissuing Mother Africa (1977), Sunshine (1978) and Horizon Unlimited (1979). They have a song, "Orere Elejigbo" on the fabulous Nigeria 70 compilation.

The Lijadu's run ended when Kehinde suffered a terrible accident, falling and breaking her spine. Though expected, at first, to die, she recovered, but the pair was unable to perform afterwards. The two now live in Harlem together.

Here they are (briefly) performing with Ginger Baker.

and longer track from Danger, but without live footage.

Do U Really Wanna Fight?

2011-12-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

There are probably all kinds of nuances and genre-specific excellences to Africa Hitech's recent single "Do U Really Wanna Fight?", but being kind of a pop-punk-garage dumbass, I obviously am not the one to point them out. However, I will say that it is absolutely the best psych-yourself-to-run-in-single-digits song in quite some time, and slow as I am, it makes me go a little faster.

As you might infer from the photo the Nordic season has started and Sean skiied his first-ever 10K in Craftsbury VT this weekend and did quite well. There was no real natural snow, but they managed to make enough to cover a 1.4 K loop, which means that he had to do this particular hill six times...yikes. He passed someone every time I saw him climb it.

So anyway, he was racing against Olympians and state champions and college team skiiers, so he came in pretty close to the back, but he is definitely in much better shape and likely quite a bit faster than last year, so yeah for Sean!

I went to see Pterodactyl last night

2011-12-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

Live, they're a lot noisier, less pop, more like Parts & Labor (though not as intense) and you can hear their drummer better. For some reason, and maybe it's the management, all the Brah bands seem to have good drummers.

Also totally insane boy-girl duo called Math the Band, like Matt & Kim, but way, way, way more caffeinated, using guitar and one tom and lots of vintage synths, to make something between Peelander Z and Atom & His Package and Shonen Knife. Fun.

And, before that Whore Paint from Rhode Island, whose singer's lovely voice was often pitched at a teeth-rattling screech, but sometimes quieted to spooky, gothy Zola Jesus-ish spirituality. Musically, the band was more punk than metal, found myself wandering down ill-considered if Ozzy was a girl thought paths, but that's not really it. Also funny, these girls were all wandering around in very demure cardigans and long sleeves before they went on...and then they all peeled down to black spaghetti strap dresses.

Severe Severe was before that, though, alas, i hadn't decided whether I was going to work for my ticket (because, in truth, I had to pay for my ticket) and have no photos. This was an interesting psych-rock, double-drumming outfit, whose members have obviously heard an Amon Duul record or two. They had this bizarre movie about Turkey or some other middle eastern place running the whole, and I kept getting sucked into watching the movie and forgetting the music, which was, maybe, the point? Anyway, one of the drummers was the guy from the Bunnies, the Bennies and about 600 bands. He's everywhere.

I still haven't made up my mind whether I'm writing about this. I've got a lot to do...probably not.

Hey, look I'm back at Philly Weekly

2011-12-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

I have a little blurb this week about Saturday's War on Drugs show.

The War on Drugs
With this year’s Slave Ambient, the War on Drugs moved up into a select group of alternative universe stars, bands that might be huge except that, these days, rock bands don’t ever swell to Zeppelin-esque proportions. Aaron Dessner, who plays guitar in the National (clearly another of thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifese outfits), called the record “ridiculously good” and “incredibly ambitious sonically,” pointing to the way that simple song structures got blown to outsized, anthemic scale. And indeed, WOD frontman Adam Granduciel has a way of hitching road-toughened, working man’s rock to a knob twiddler’s smorgasbord of interesting effects. Live, the band emphasizes its arena-rocking, blue-collar tendencies, though they’re swirled in drone and dipped in haze. -Jennifer Kelly

Sat., Dec. 17, 8pm. $14. With Sun Airway + Ape School. Union Transfer, 1026 Spring Garden St. 215.232.1200. utphilly.com

I really like "Baby Missiles"

And here's the Aaron Dessner interview I referenced.

New Sole single...with Carla Bozulich

2011-12-14T06:42:00.000-08:00

I've got a little news piece up at Blurt today about a new EP from Sole and the Skyrider band, which features an unlikely partnership with Carla Bozulich.

Here's the article.

And the single itself.
Sole and the Skyrider Band "Challenger" (feat. Carla Bozulich) by sole...

Also, my review of Sole's last album (my #12 for the year) Hello Cruel World at Blurt.

The Jigsaw Seen

2011-12-13T06:01:00.001-08:00

I have a piece up at Blurt on mod-psych band, the Jigsaw Seen, and its new not-really-a-holiday album Winterland

HOLD THE EGGNOG The Jigsaw Seen

In which we learn how to make a not-exactly-a-holiday-album.

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Why would any self-respecting rock band make a Christmas album? The bargain bins are tipping with seasonal detritus, ill-advised forays into holiday cheer. My own favorite, a cassette that wore out years ago, was The Reggae Christmas, which, I dimly recall, had Eek-A-Mouse's version of "The Night Before Christmas." It was just the thing to clear the room of all relatives over the age of 30, damned useful in those days. But really, after a whole month of schlepping through Target and Macy's and waiting on hold for a Lands' End operator, who has any real need for more Christmas music? Surely we can agree that no version of "Jingle Bell Rock" is either a) music, or b) any kind of holiday.

Tell that to the Jigsaw Seen, LA's best mod-referencing, power-chording, melodic rock band, an outfit that has made not one but two holiday recordings, the first a 2006 EP called What About Christmas, the second, out now, a full-length named Winterland. And here's the shocker: they're both pretty good.

The secret, says Dennis Davison, is to not really make a Christmas album. "Very few of the songs are actually about Christmas," he says. "Even those are not really so much about Christmas. They just happen to take place during Christmas. So, yeah, we were very conscious of the idea that we didn't want the whole concept to come across like a bunch of cornball Christmas songs."

More

What About Christmas? by The Jigsaw Seen

Snow Angels Of Pigtown by The Jigsaw Seen

Duchess Says

2011-12-12T05:46:00.000-08:00

Canadian synth-thrash-punk band located somewhere between early Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Ponytail...reviewed last week for Blurt.

Duchess Says
In A Fung Day T
(Alien8)

Sparks fly when Annie-Claude Deschênes lights into "Antepoc," an industrial strength, punk-speed, strobe-lit track just a little too ferocious for the dance floor. Deschênes' scrappy, abrasive delivery is the main attraction in Duchess Says, but not the only one. Ismael Tremblay, he of the buzz-sawed riffs, the crazed horror-scape keyboard lines, is much of factor, and you just can't pump it this hard without a rhythm section on steroids - that's bassist Phillipe Clément and drummer Simon "Says" Besre.

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Thee American Revolution

2011-12-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

A side project from Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo and fellow Athenian Craig Morris has been in deep storage for years. Their debut album Buddha Electrostorm finally got a release via Fire Records, and it's pretty fine, loosely structured, lo-fi psych a la the Dukes of Stratosphere. I really hated the last Apples in Stereo, but I kind of like this.

Here's a video for the song "Grit Magazine," which, oddly enough, my grandmother used to subscribe to, and I can remember reading old issues at her house. (They were full of homespun humor and uplifting stories and, I think, crafts projects...very heartland in the 1970s.) I may have even had a poem in there once...can't remember.

Anyway, check it out

Mats Morgan live

2011-12-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Mats Morgan band pursues a virtuoso kind of jazz rock fusion, playing with fugue-state complexity across in multiple, difficult time signatures. The band is anchored by its two founders, Mats Oberg on synthesizers and keyboards, and Morgan Agren on drums, both hyper-skilled but with a playful edge...it sounds like fun rather than a math problem. Both founders toured briefly with Zappa, towards the end of his career and near the beginning of theirs, and that's not a bad reference when you consider how cerebral and complex this music is. For this live recording, made in Stockholm's Fasching Club in 1999, they were supported by Morgan's brother Jimmy on guitar, Tommy Thordsson on bass, and Eric Carlsson and Robert Elovsson on additional keyboards -- that's right, three keyboard players.

The record, called Mats/Morgan Band Live, is out now on the reliably proggy Cuneiform label.

I reviewed a couple of Mats/Morgan CDs a few years ago for PopMatters. If you want, you can read about it here.

You kind of have to see it to get it, though.

Hardboiled Wonderland

2011-12-08T05:36:00.000-08:00

I put this album, by the electronic duo Hardboiled Wonderland onto my iTunes because it referenced one of my favorite books, Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland accomplishes the unusually difficult feat of pursuing two wildly different plot lines for most of its length and then, just at the end, showing how the two plots were really one plot all along. It's the kind of book that you want to read again the minute you've finished it, because now you know something that will maybe help you understand the story better.

Anyway, the musical Hardboiled Wonderland is a two-fold project as well, with Martin Birke building sinuous beats out of synthesizers and drum machines and Percy Howard adding a florid, ornate, classic soul tenor over. If you like what Antony did with Hercules and Love Affair, or that Konkylie record, I think there's a pretty good chance you'll enjoy this.

Candy For The Meatman-club mix by HARDBOILED WONDERLAND

Doug Jerebine

2011-12-07T08:01:00.001-08:00

I would probably love Drag City's re-release of New Zealand cult guitarist Doug Jerebine's Jess Harper a whole lot if it did not sound EXACTLY like Jimi Hendrix. I mean it's great that we have record companies scouring the earth for rare stuff that no one would hear otherwise...but, wow, everything, the voice, the guitar style, even the songs themselves are so close to Jimi that I'm having trouble taking it at face value as its own thing.

Though, if you'd never heard of Jimi, it would probably sound pretty sweet.

Here's a little background on the guy, courtesy of Drag City:

Who is Jesse Harper? Doug Jerebine is Jesse Harper. And who is Doug Jerebine? Born in rural Tangowahine, of New Zealand's North Island, Doug became one of New Zealand's finest guitarists thate cut his teeth on guitar from the age of 12, learning first from a half-Maori, half-Greek instructor who introduced him to everything from George Van Eps to Hank Marvin. And one day, he found Doug teaching him. Even though he was only a high schooler, Jerebine was ready to play out. By the early 1960s, Jerebine was hopping around in Auckland bands, including The Embers and The Brew. After hearing the overdriven sounds of Steve Winwood and Jimi Hendrix in 1966, Doug refined his own approach to a similar effect. At the same time, dove deeply into the virtuosic sitar sounds of Vilayat Kahn and Ravi Shankar, and learned to play that instrument as well. His interest helped form his spiritual beliefs, and Doug eventually decided his true path was Hare Krishna. Before landing in India, however, he stopped in England for a chance at making something big happen musically. In 1969 he recorded the Jesse Harper record, playing everything but drums, with the encouragement and assistance of Dave Hartstone, another London-based Kiwi-transplant from the scene.

Wow I just listened to the new Shearwater eight times in a row

2011-12-06T11:26:00.001-08:00

It's extremely good.

It's called "Animal Joy" and it's out in February on Sub Pop.

More later.

It's bird, it's a plane....it's a Pterodactyl

2011-12-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

I caught Pterodactyl in mid-evolution from a Brah-released noise band into a baroquely arranged, harmonized art pop outfit a la Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear in the new album Spills Out.

My review runs today at Blurt.

Pterodactyl
Spills Out
(Brah)

Pterodactyl comes out of a noisy, aggressive, art-punk tradition, a white noise enclave of tortured guitars and rapid-fire drum rampages. They record, after all, for Oneida's imprint, and once shared a guitarist with Seconds. Their earliest records were more likely to draw comparisons to Lightning Bolt or Ex Models than Brian Wilson. Yet somewhere along the way, this Brooklyn band seems to have been infected with the Animal Collective/Grizzly Bear virus. Their third album, Spills Out, downplays frenetic energy for layered vocals, harmonies, tunes and a nod towards pop.

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("Nerds")

My year-end is up

2011-12-05T05:24:00.001-08:00

Read all about it here. By the way, there's a button you can press to listen to music from my list while you're reading. It obviously doesn't work on dial-up (what does?) but if anyone wants to try it and tell me what it's like, that'd be cool.

Or, skip the words, and just check out the list:
1. Skull Defekts, Peer Amid (Thrill Jockey)
2. Psychic Paramount, II (Important)
3. David Kilgour, Left by Soft (Merge)
4. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, Diamond Mine (Domino)
5. Dirtbombs, Party Store (In the Red)
6. Gem Club, Breakers (Hardly Art)
7. Mogwai, Hard Core Will Never Die But You Will (Sub Pop)
8. Sidi Toure, Sahel Folk (Thrill Jockey)
9. UV Race, Homo (In the Red)
10. Bonnie Prince Billy, Wolfroy Comes to Town (Drag City)
11. Veronica Falls, Veronica Falls (Slumberland)
12. Bats, Free All the Monsters (Flying Nun)
13. Sole and the Skyrider Band, Hello Cruel World (Fake Four)
14. Demdike Stare, Tryptych (Modern Love)
15. Get Help, The Good Green Earth (Midriff)
16. Arrica Rose and the Dot, Dot Dots, Let Alone Sea (PopRock)
17. Sam Phillips, Solid State (Littlebox)
18. Emperor X, Western Transport (Bar/None)
19. Ty Segall, Goodbye Bread (Drag City)
20. Bad Sports, Kings of the Weekend (Dirtnap)

The Fall...#29

2011-12-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

I've got a review of the new Fall album up at Blurt now. It's not as good as the last couple, but still worth a listen...that's the gist of my opinion. Actually, I really liked Douglas Wolk's review of the same album in PFK yesterday and wonder if I'm one of those people who's been blinded by Smith's persona. Our main difference is that I really liked the instrumental backing and Wolk thought it was weak. But anyway, here's a bit from mine:

"Ersatz G.B. finds him in fine and vicious form, savaging Snow Patrol and laptop users and British folk singers with geriatric venom. His band, the same since Your Future Our Clutter, locks in behind him, furnishing the hard-hammered foundation, the funk-punk-robot rigor, that give his rantings scale and drama and a weird euphoric edge. Consider, for instance, how "Mask Search" bounces bodily on an elastic bass line, how its guitar twitches with ecstatic tension, how the whole thing shimmies and pulses with sensual life, and how Smith hems and haws above it all, muttering about encaustic and lime. Or, the bizarre, metal-crunching "Greenway" how Smith's gargling, ravaged voice rises above the mayhem to inject some existential uncertainty. ("Channel hopping the other day through Danish Rock TV, I noticed a video where the person had a remarkable, coincidental resemblance to myself, to the video I was in recently," he recounts, entirely discounting the possibility that it was him.) The band's discipline, its blocked out musical precision, contrasts powerfully with Smith's visionary wanderings. Neither would work nearly as well by itself."

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And here's Wolk's take.

There was also a rather good profile of Smith and the Fall in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago.

Live Fugazi...up for grabs

2011-12-01T03:27:00.001-08:00

This is pretty cool. The Fugazi Live Series Archive has posted an initial batch of 130 live Fugazi shows...and plans to release mp3 versions of as many as 800 of the shows recorded by the band's sound engineers between 1987 and 2003. There's a suggested price of $5 per show (about what you'd have paid for a ticket), but it's a sliding scale and if you don't have $5, you can pay what you want. (But really who doesn't have $5? I'm not sure I have $627 to pay for heating oil, or $800 to pay for flying to Chicago to see my parents, but I definitely have $5.) There are also photos, set lists, flyers etc. wherever available. It's maybe not an adequate substitute for going to see Fugazi, but let's deal with the possible. It's pretty good.

Check out the archive Here.

Fucking hell, it's December already.

Rob Crow hates the Beatles...and so do I

2011-11-30T09:14:00.001-08:00

I had a pretty entertaining interview with Rob Crow a few months ago...read all about it at PopMatters today.

Beets

2011-11-30T08:49:00.000-08:00

Seems like just the other day i was digging the Beets debut out of one of the piles on my floor, two years late, but just as enjoyable. They've come out with two albums since then and cleaned up their sound considerably. I'd say that right now, they're one of the really good, promising garage rock bands...sort of where the Fresh and Onlys were a year or two ago.

Anyway, I reviewed the third (very quickly) for Dusted and it runs today.

The Beets
Let the Poison Out
Hardly Art

“A collection of 13 songs about letting the poison out of your system by the Beets,” reads the line-drawn cover of this third album from the Jackson Heights band. The art, as per usual by Matt Volz, is colorful and primitive, showing grinning girls murdering ghosts in various ways (cutting, burning, whacking with a baseball bat). And so, right away, before even listening, we are confronted with the main elements of this album — the childish glee, the violence, the giddy-colored simplicity of its sawed-off garage pop.

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Doing As I Do"

Erkin Koray

2011-11-29T04:41:00.000-08:00

This was freaking great…a singles comp from one of Turkey’s foremost rockers.

Erkin Koray
Meçhul: Singles and Rarities (LP)
(Sublime Frequencies)

Erkin Koray is widely regarded as the father of Turkish psychedelic rock, a polyglot stew of alternate Eastern-tinged tunings and American- and British-style guitar bravado. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing to this day, Koray has blended traditional Anatolian folk with the fuzz and swagger of amplified distortion. Like his home city of Istanbul, he stands at the conjunction of many different traditions, in geographic terms spanning the music of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, in temporal ones, the folk melodies of pre-history, the psych ferment of the 1960s, the progressive experiment of the 1970s, the new age-y ethno-explorations of the 1970s and 1980s. Using primarily Western instruments - guitar, bass, drums - but also an amplified lute-like instrument called an electric baglama, Koray juxtaposes the swirling, psychedelic excesses of Nuggets-era rock and roll with the primal longing and fundamental rootedness of Turkish folk. His music sounds at once like a lost 1960s band you never heard of, and a dazzled meander through a souk, foreign and familiar elements shifting second by second, measure by measure.

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erkin koray - mechul - singles & rarities (album preview) by experimedia

Dan Melchior Und Das Menace

2011-11-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

Checking out WFMU's Heavily Played 11/23/11 edition and found this right at the top, a new-ish record from Dan Melchior called Catbirds and Cardinals on the Northern Spy label.

I don't have the record, but the soundcloud giveaway is cracking me up...with some pretty good side swipes at Posh and Beckham, Liam Gallagher and others who arose a uniquely "English Shame." Anyway it's fuzzy and rough and primitive, but in a very smart way. Enjoy.

Dan Melchior und das Menace - English Shame by Northern Spy Records

Geoffrey O'Connor

2011-11-25T09:24:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a whole bunch of promos people had sent me, put them all in a file on my thumb drive and imported them simultaneously into iTunes. All of which was very time-efficient and practical, except that some of them hadn't been tagged properly (i.e. at all) so I had a bunch of stuff that I didn't know what it was and which album it belonged to, and all in all a big mess. One of the ones that got most screwed up was Geoffrey O'Connor's Vanity Is Forever. I'm still not sure I've heard the whole album and there are a couple of tracks that might or might not be part of the album, who knows? But in any case, what I've heard is pretty good, medium-sad synth pop which reminds me, at its best, of Scritti Politti, especially this give-away track "Whatever Leads Me to You."

"Whatever Leads Me To You"

Hope you all got to Walmart in time for the $300 laptops, if that's your thing, or if not, that you are enjoying a free Friday ...I know I am. Now for that Erkin Koray review.

Imanaren

2011-11-24T08:38:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving day, yeah, turkey's in the oven, half an hour done, four hours to go...and meanwhile a shout to the Dutty Artz label and DJ Rupture for discovering Moroccan singer and banjoist Hassan Wargui of the band Imanaren, whose mesmerizing, hypnotic, otherworldly self-titled album is out now.

Says Dutty Artz:

Imanaren is beautiful mystical music from the south of Morocco. Jace found them during our Beyond Digital residency project last summer in Casablanca- and after becoming close friends with the band leader Hassan, we decided to re-release their self titled, DIY full length. We traveled to Hassan’s hometown of Issafen via a grueling 12 hour drive into a sublime desert of martian rock formations and dusty oases. Nearly half way through our stay, Hassan’s father finally asked us why exactly we had come. Hassan isn’t allowed to play music in the house, so we recorded with his local friends and fellow musicians in a natural amphitheater carved out by a waterfall in a dry gorge. We will be selling an extremely limited number of the original Moroccan CD pressings that Hassan had distributed on a small scale through Morocco- other then that, stream it all on Hassan’s youtube channel – or cop it amazon, boomkat, or any other fine digital shop. Watch the video we shot in Issafen for “Flowering Of The Wise” and Hassan’s first collabo with Nettle below.

Have a lovely day.

Until the telephone started ringing, ringing, ringing

2011-11-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so I'm interviewing Jimmy Tamborello in about an hour, supposedly, about the new deluxe reissue of Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities...which I bought when it came out but hadn't listened to in ages until recently...and it's holding up really well, I think.

You might remember the single "This Is the Dream of Evan and Chan" which Ben Gibbard sang and which formed the basis for the Postal Service (the band, not the mail delivery organization...remember the copyright wrangle over that?).

Anyway, wish me luck.

After that I'm going to do some cooking, so tomorrow isn't so busy. Have a good thanksgiving and drive carefully, if you're driving.

Susanna...without the Magical Orchestra

2011-11-22T13:51:00.001-08:00

I've got a review up today at Dusted of an interesting project from Susanna Wallerud...the "Susanna" part of "Susanna and the Magical Orchestra." This particular album is a cycle of poems by Guvnor Hofmo, one of Norway's foremost modern poets...and it's pretty good, though only so far released in Norway.

Susanna Wallǿumrod
Jeg Vil Hjem Til Menneskene>
Grappa

With her Magical Orchestra, Susanna Wallǿumrod has made some of the 2000s most haunting music, transforming over-heard chestnuts like “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” into evocative, nearly otherworldly experiences. She has, up to now, seemed strongest as an interpreter. Her last album with The Magical Orchestra, 3, was mostly originals and mostly fairly forgettable electro pop. With Jeg Vil Hjem Til Menneskene, Wallumrǿd sets herself to the task of interpreting the work of one of Norway’s leading modern poets, Gunvor Hofmo, whose earliest published work “Jeg Vil Hjem Til Menneskene,” or “I Want to Go Home to the People,” provides the album’s title.

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There are some song samples at the Forced Exposure page.

Nordic Nomadic

2011-11-21T06:01:00.000-08:00

This one slipped by on Friday at Dusted, my review of the second album under the Nordic Nomadic name by Deadly Snakes' Chad Ross.

Nordic Nomadic
Worldwide Skyline
Tee Pee

A lattice-work of acoustic picking is ruptured abruptly by thunder-rumbling electric guitar. A nature journal’s litany of plant-and-animal-life metaphor shifts suddenly into talk of the devil. This second album from Nordic Nomadic explores the interstices of quiet folk and louder psychedelia, of ordinary life and its supernatural undercurrents. Chad Ross, the group’s sole member and a veteran of Deadly Snakes and Quest for Fire, inserts Six Organs-esque drones and Greg Weeks-like acid leads into placid country forms, in a transcendental meditation on the elements of freak folk.

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I'm not really finding any media to go with this, but there's a clip in the Dusted review.

We had a pretty good time in Chicago. My son and I did our first college visit at Northwestern, and also saw my parents and went to a football game. The interview/tour went really well and though NU was Sean's first choice before this, it is probably even more so now. He wants to major in theater, which is a really, really strong department there.

Anyway, I'm already missing him and he's still here, but I can see him happy there, so that's something.

Amen Dunes

2011-11-18T04:51:00.001-08:00

I had a pretty big week at Dusted, three reviews, including this one of the drony, folky, Velvet Underground evoking Amen Dunes, whose album Through Donkey Jaw is out now on Sacred Bones.

Again, I'm just going to give you my favorite paragraph.

"The main thing with Through Donkey Jaw is texture, a haunting, indeterminate mesh of sounds — usually electric guitar, sometimes keyboards, often shaken percussion — that coalesces around a dreaming, haunted mood. The primary colors vary — 'Not a Slave' is 'Venus In Furs' style Velvetiana, 'Lower Mind' evokes acoustic Kurt Vile, 'Baba Yaga,' the folkier elements of Michael Yonkers — but they are all smudged and strung out and attenuated to the point of dissolution. Even the more abrasive outings, nightmarish 'Jill,' endless, static 'For All,' are falling apart as you look at them. Decay is not just part of the sound. It is the sound. This is a boy in his bedroom fighting against entropy, dropping fragile observations about love into the roar of an abyss."

The rest of the review.

Amen Dunes - Christopher by sacredbones

In other, far less cool and acceptable news, I was listening to an NPR report on the demise of R.E.M. and decided that I just had to hear those songs again, so I have loaded Murmur, Green and Automatic for the People onto the iTunes. Because of my own OCD mental illness tendencies, that means I will have to listen to all of them at least three and preferably four times over the next couple of weeks, so expect to see the last.fm tilt noticeably towards Athens. Weirdly, my husband and Bill Barry were almost exact lookalikes roundabout Murmur, so looking at the photos in the expanded reissue are kind of like looking at the guy I decided to marry, all those years ago. No idea if they still look the same.

Also, I'm going to Chicago for the weekend and will probably not be around to post and/or respond to comments. (though who knows, I'll have an iPod touch with me and I do get bored....)

So have a good weekend and go Northwestern!

Shocker: I love the new Bats

2011-11-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I gave it all away in the title didn't I? After about half a lifetime of really enjoying the Bats, I am, unsurprising, quite taken with the eighth and newest album, which is called Free All the Monsters.

Here is my favorite paragraph from a review up at Dusted today, in which I fumble to explain why my favorite part of the album (which is not going to be everyone's favorite part) is so great. All together now..."Hey-ey-ey-ey-aye."

"You could spend a lot of time unearthing middle age insecurities in Free All the Monsters’s lyrics, the simple things that no longer satisfy, the days that drag on, the years that fly by. It’s all there, observed obliquely but accurately, and without self-pity. Still, I have to admit that my favorite line is the “hey-ey-ey-ey-aye” that brackets each verse of “Fingers of Dawn.” There’s a warmth and assurance in these meaningless syllables, a serenity that transcends any linear narrative. The song is about waking up from a dream, relinquishing an imaginary haven and coming to terms again with ordinary life. It’s an unpleasant process, this daily rebirth and reorientation, but I like to think of the “hey-ey-ey-ey-aye” refrain as the sunlight streaming through the window, making another day of the quotidian struggle possible, even somewhat attractive."

What, you still want to read the rest of the review? Inexplicable.

Here's an official video for "In the Subway," which raises the question, "Are there subways in Dunedin?" Who knew?

In other breaking news, I am also totally loving Ersatz G.B., the 900th (or is it 901st?) album from Mark E. Smith & Co. (Did I mention that I hung up on his wife once? No? Hah, get me drunk and I'll tell you about it.)

Crystal Stilts do Hazelwood, Blue Orchids

2011-11-16T06:13:00.000-08:00

A five-song EP from the Brookyn drone-pop romantics who were, last time I saw them, dreadful live, but pretty damned good on record. The EP is most remarkable for its two interesting covers -- one of Lee Hazelwood's "Still of the Night" the other (the main reason I put it on the player in the first place) Blue Orchids' "Low Profile."

anyway, reviewed for Blurt a day or two ago.

Crystal Stilts
Radiant Door
(Sacred Bones)

Crystal Stilts has always worked in a glamorous murk, submerging spectral melodies in pools of reverb, shrouding strident post-punk rhythms in a penumbra of distortion. Their debut, Alight of Night, threaded hopelessly romantic hooks through a dungeon cavern of echo, the doomy miasma as much a part of the sound as the tunes themselves. Yet here, on this five-song EP, the band reaches for a measure of clarity. Perhaps it's the assistance of Gary Olson, he of the super-clean, super-clear Ladybug Transistor; perhaps there's more money for production; or perhaps the band just feels that their music has matured enough to bear closer scrutiny. In any case, Radiant Door is sharper and more focused than any Crystal Stilts recording to date. The hand-claps (yes, hand-claps) on opener "Dark Eyes" practically leap out of the mix, and the guitar strums that keep time with them are only a hair less startling. Yes, there's a fair bit of organ drone for blurry continuity and Brad Hargett is still singing as if from the bottom of a well, but this is a brighter, more lucid Crystal Stilts than before.

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Crystal Stilts - Dark Eyes by sacredbones

Nathan Salsburg

2011-11-15T11:16:00.000-08:00

Very nice solo acoustic guitar album from Nathan Salsburg

Nathan Salsburg
Affirmed
No Quarter

Nathan Salsburg makes intricate guitar figures sound uncomplicated and sunny. A veteran of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational AnthemM project, he picks with brio through a septet of front-porch blues originals (and one traditional cover). The notes fly thick and fast, landing with precision and a swaggering bit of swing, yet there is never any sense of hurry. Salsburg, who has worked as an archivist for the Alan Lomax project for more than a decade, and whose Root Hog or Die blog and radio program document historical picking styles, has clearly learned not just the technique but the pace of pre-automobile, pre-internet America. Whether bouncing merrily through buggy-trotting, country-lane evoking “Sought and Affirmed” or taking a more meditative turn in “Eight Belles Dreamed the Devil Was Dead,” Salsburg seems to have all the time in the world.

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"Sought and Hidden"

Oneohtrix Point Never

2011-11-14T04:32:00.000-08:00

A short review of Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica at Blurt today...

Oneohtrix Point Never
Replica
(Software/Mexican Summer)

Synth wizard Daniel Lopatkin injects a sense of rhythmic play into Replica, turning the boundless, water-colored landscapes of last year's Returnal, just like that, into kinetic sculptures. Early single "Sleep Dealer" dusts synth-washed undercurrents with glittery-high keyboard flourishes, transforming deep mystery into primary-colored child-like wonder.

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A lot of people really don't like this video, apparently.

Kathryn Calder

2011-11-11T06:50:00.000-08:00

Sometime New Pornographer Kathryn Calder has a pretty good album out now in Bright and Vivid, which I reviewed for Dusted and it ran today.

Kathryn Calder
Bright and Vivid
File Under Music

Kathryn Calder makes bright, uneasy pop. Its surfaces glitter, its interior a spider-web of hairline fractures. Her second album, following 2010’s Are You My Mother?, explores existential dread in the chipper textures of synthesizer and diva pop.

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"Who Are You"

We were going to see the Feelies tonight, but the roads are still out from Hurricane Irene and I couldn't figure out how to get there. So we're watching more of Season Three of Fringe instead...and I'm kind of psyched about it.

Sunbears!

2011-11-10T06:08:00.001-08:00

Like that dreamy psychedelic pop? Willing to brook sweeping, Liberace-style piano runs and even the occasional harp flourish? Obsessed with the fact that someday, you and everyone you know will die? Boy, have I got a band for you.

It's Sunbears! (punctuation required), a Florida-based duo whose lavish, cosmically-minded debut You Will Live Forever (no you won't) debuts next week on New Granada records. It's large scale, pop madness, along the lines of Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and MGMT, though obviously on a smaller budget.

Why not "Give Love a Try" a try?

"Give Love a Try"

Lemony Snicket weighs in on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-09T06:12:00.001-08:00

I love this.

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Jennifer O'Connor -- I Want What You Want

2011-11-09T06:07:00.001-08:00

Female singer/songwriters are a dime a dozen, but very few of them as are raw and honest and intelligent and just good at what they do as Jennifer O'Connor. You might remember, she used to record for Matador, but has lately been releasing on her own Kiam label. Her latest, I Want What You Want came out yesterday, apparently her birthday, so in addition to everything else, we're practically twins. (go team scorpio!)

Anyway, you can stream the whole thing here on Soundcloud. I've been enjoying it a lot and may try to review it somewhere when i finish up some other stuff.

Buraka Som Sistema

2011-11-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

Pretty good afro-electro-dance type stuff from Buraka Som Sistema, out today...

Buraka Som Sistema
Komba
(Enchufada)

The Angolan-born, Lisbon-based Afro-dance collective Buraka Som Sistema makes a "day of the dead" style offering of the year's spookiest, butthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-shaking-est grooves. Komba, the band's third album, ups the techno factor from 2008's Black Diamond, pushing Buraka's infectious kuduro-samba-house-rave hybrid into shinier, more modernistic directions.

At the same time, though, the band digs deep into tradition, mining Angolan theories of the afterlife. The first song, an insouciantly, body-moving cut called "Eskeleto" concerns a skeleton. The second, "Komba" describes a ritual party held seven days after a person's death, graveside, with singing, dancing, food and drink. A clear highlight, the song rattles with street parade snare cadences, burbles with organs and quick-steps to a better world on chant of "We're setting up the komba, they cry for me, the komba, they dancing at the komba, celebrate my life, the komba." The komba sounds like fun. It's a shame you have to die for it.

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Look my Bonnie Prince Billy review turned into a feature...

2011-11-07T11:01:00.001-08:00

It's up at Blurt now...here.

I concluded..."These are subtle songs, sparely arranged and underplayed, murmured, sighed and spoken as much as they are sung. There are a few showy passages, but mostly Oldham whispers to you. He gives you space to lean in and listen. He allows time between the notes for you to ponder along with him, the transience of life, the cruelty of disappointment and the saving grace of music. Wolfroy Goes to Town haunts you quietly, in a private way that is, somehow, all the more devastating."

This is a remix of "Quail and Dumplings"

Agent Ribbons

2011-11-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago, i put on the two disc Friend of Friends compilation from the Tender Loving Empire label, 47 tracks in all, and, to be honest, most of it pretty high on the "meh" factor. However, There is one cut on the second disc that has caught my attention, called "I'm Alright" by Agent Ribbons.

Agent Ribbons is not, technically, a Tender Loving Empire artist. They're on the uniformly excellent Antenna Farm instead, and Antenna Farm is, very generously, sharing this track.

"I'm Alright"

I won't bother you with the other 46.

Hey, it's my birthday. It's a big round one, too (hint, the last one that is a factor of 100 until I actually hit 100, if I am so lucky) ...one that may just tip me over into the "too old to write about music" category, I don't know.

I'm still younger than Michael Gira, Thurston Moore, Ian MacKaye...but older than pretty much everyone else.

Yikes.

Emperor X's Western Transport

2011-11-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

A very late addition to my year-end list, this more or less one man effort from hyper intelligent Chad Metheny. Emperor X reminds me a lot of Hallelujah the Hills in its overpacked, nervous upbeat-ness and the way it runs roughshod over a very dense mesh of references and associations. I called it, "an intricate, but convoluted kind of pop, in my review at Dusted, and noted that, "There’s a buzz of feedback at the back of many of these percolating melodies, a sense they could turn feral at any given moment, that they’re held in check only by the intense concentration of their multi-talented ringmaster."

The rest of the review is here.

Anyway, the album, which is called Western Teleport has been out for a month or two on Bar/None records. There are a couple of free downloads ("Erica Western Teleport" and "Canada Day") at the Western Teleport website.

Gringo Star

2011-11-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

In the category of not life-changing but really, really fun, I offer Gringo Star, the Atlanta-based shamble-pop outfit, whose second album Count Yer Lucky Stars is out now on Gigantic Music.

My fellow Blurt writer, Barry St. Vitus, reviewed it effusively a week or so ago, saying "Folks that frothed over the first album will find that the band has ripened some in their songwriting, but that it still carries the exuberance, as well as the Puckish mixture of Brit-pop, a la Supergrass and The Kinks, some ‘50s ducktail, and the surfy-garage sound they're keen on. Fans of Harlem, the Sorrows, the Soft Pack, and the Gringos' fellow Atlantans The Black Lips, will eagerly clamber on board for these guys."

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I like "Got It" the best, and it reminds me of something that I absolutely cannot put my finger on...but of course, they're pushing "Shadow" instead.

They're supposed to be pretty good live, too, if you happen to live in any of these towns:

11/3 - Urban Lounge - Salt Lake City, UT
11/4 - Triple Nickel Tavern - Boulder, CO
11/6 - Turf Club - Minneapolis, MN
11/8 - Club Garibaldis - Milwaukee, WI
11/9 - Firebird - St. Louis, MO
11/10 - Subterranean - Chicago, IL
11/11 - Loading Dock - Traverse City, MI
11/12 - MOTR - Cincinnati, OH
11/13 - Black Cat - Washington, D.C.
11/14 - Kung Fu Necktie - Philadelphia, PA
11/15 - Slim's - Raleigh, NC
11/19 - Star Bar (Album Release Party) - Atlanta, GA

Human Instinct reissues

2011-11-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

The great reissue house Sunbeam has resurrected the New Zealand psyche-blues-acid-prog band Human Instinct's three full-lengths including the classic Stoned Guitar form 1970, which featured the antipodes best response to Jimi Hendrix in the guitar work of one Billy TK.

Here's Human Instinct's page at Sunbeam.

The official Human Instinct web page (warning, no music of any kind, not even streams or 30-second samples on offer.

A promotional video

Time is round and space is curved

2011-11-01T06:08:00.005-07:00

You could do a lot worse than spending a week with Robyn Hitchcock's new best-of collection, Chronology...which is what I've been doing. My review runs at Blurt this morning, but there's actually not much to say about this, except it's a good listen, a reasonable entry point and an excellent, manageably-sized reminder.

I wrote, "There are no real surprises here, nothing new for the devoted fan to chew on. Still pretty much every track is a winner, from the opening salvos of punkish "I Want to Destroy You" through the spare melancholy of acoustic "Queen Elvis" through the shadowy, charcoal smudged mysteries of "Goodnight Oslo." Look at Chronolology as the world's oddest Whitman's box sampler. Choose any one of these truffles of eccentricity and bite down. You can hardly go wrong."

The rest

Weekend's Red

2011-10-31T07:57:00.000-07:00

My weekend was more white than red. We got about a foot of snow, to be specific, which is at least a month early by historical standards. Anyway, it's all showeled and we got home from Manchester okay. (My son Sean's state meet was Saturday, really nail-biting drive back, then I'd let him go back on the bus with his friends, so I had to go out in the worst of the storm with no snow tires to pick him up in town...but as I said, all's well that ends well).

Anyway, that was my weekend...here's someone else's, Slumberland's to be precise...it's a five-song EP from the San Francisco noise-drone-rock outfit, and actually, a pretty good one, though Veronica Falls is still my favorite Slumberland this year, and after that Gold-Bears, and maybe this third.

Stereogum has the sing,e "Hazel", up for grabs.

I freaking love this new Beets album

2011-10-28T07:20:00.001-07:00

It's called Let the Poison Out and it's just as goofy, just as loveable, but way, way, way more clean and listenable than anything they've done before. I see them as the East Coast version of Nodzzz, sloppy but smart.

The record is out now on Hardly Art, which, I don't know if you've noticed, this, is releasing a whole lot of really fun records.

Here's "Doing As I Do"

Kiran Ahluwalia

2011-10-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

Odd but interesting collaboration between an Indo-Canadian classicist and the Tuareg blues band Tinariwen, reviewed yesterday at Blurt.

Kiran Ahluwalia
Aam Zameen: Common Ground
(Avokado Artist)

Kiran Ahluwalia is an upper class Punjabi who grew up mostly in Toronto, fascinated at an early age with the ghazal, a form of poetry (and singing) fascinated with love and loss, but couched in sophisticated, literary written language. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, by contrast, grew up in the deserts of Northern Mali, watched his father killed by rebels at the age of 4, drifted in and out of refugee camps, fought for Quaddafi's Libyan army as a young man and broke finally out of the most abject poverty into international stardom with the desert blues band Tinariwen. You could hardly imagine two life stories more different, and yet, the two meet here in sinuous hand-drummed rhythms and droning, hypnotic textures. Aam Zameen: Common Ground finds an unlikely meeting place between Malian proto-blues and Indian classical traditions.

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Noveller's Glacial Glow

2011-10-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

A really wonderful experimental guitar album from Sarah Lipstate who has, among other tihngs, played guitar in Parts & Labor.

Noveller
Glacial Glow
Weird Forest

Guitarist Sarah Lipstate started out in the noisy environs of the not-fun crowd, crafting her first couple of solo works out of feedback, rather than guitar. She has focused more and more, over the course of four albums, on the guitar itself. In Glacial Glow, she filters her tones through an array of pedals, loops and effects, creating ghostly, luminescent textures of sound, but they are recognizably guitar sounds, however altered.

More

There's a good bit of Noveller at the Free Music Archive.

I went to see Grass Widow last week

2011-10-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

My write-up went live today at Blurt.

"It's a pretty good night for girl power at the Flywheel. Grass Widow, maybe the best of the current crop of female-centric post-punkers, is here from San Francisco to headline, while Coasting, a guitar-and-drums duo from Brooklyn and Nashville that is just starting to make a splash, has the #2 slot. The locals on the bill are more gender neutral - with jazz-rock-fusionists Troop of Echoes holding down for the boys, and shout punk Outdates two-thirds male, but with a long-haired and ethereal looking girl bass player thumping out a Wipers-esque low-end."

The rest

There's a whole bunch of Grass Widow at the Free Music Archive

And also one from Coasting

Mark Sultan's Whatever/Whenever

2011-10-25T08:06:00.001-07:00

Had an entertaining troll through Mark Sultan's blog to write this review of the one-CD summary of two vinyl records, all of it out now on In the Red. I concluded: There’s a powerful, surprisingly complicated interplay of emotional currents in these songs, so that even in the most overt party anthems (the Jay Reatard-ish “Let Me Freeze,” for instance) have a raw and wounded underbelly. That’s probably what makes them interesting, in a way that most 1960s-referencing garage rock is not. Mark Sultan breathes fire into genres that, in most hands, only gather dust. He’s learned to embrace his anger, and if that doesn’t save rock ‘n’ roll, it does at least make for a gripping take on it.

The whole review

Tycho

2011-10-24T09:58:00.001-07:00

Really beautiful, serene, down-tempo electronic music from Tycho, who is known in real life as Scott Hansen. I've been listening for a couple of weeks, off and on, and Dive is a grower, fairly minimal sounding if you're not paying attention but gaining depth and nuance and variety as you go on. It reminds me a little bit of Oneohtrix Point Zero, but a bit more anchored in beats. It's on Ghostly.

Anyway, you can check out "Hours" here.
Tycho - Hours [Dive LP - Nov. 2011] by Tycho

My lost Ty Segall story

2011-10-23T05:38:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote this for the Quietus, and they must not have liked it, because it never ran. I thought I'd share it with the 5-10 people who read my blog anyway.

Ty Segall: All Alone No More
SF’s one-man punk phenomenon Ty Segall has grown up quickly, collaborating with most of the Bay Area’s psych garage mainstays and churning out a series of increasingly melodic, psychedelic albums, but these days Segall says he can feel the aggression coming back.

“You can literally hit a drum and sing and it’s a great song,” say Ty Segall, the Bay Area garage rocker who has evolved, in less than five years, from a frenetic one-man punk band to one of his generation’s best psychedelic songwriters . His latest album, Goodbye Bread, swirls blues-based 1960s-influenced romps with Beatle-esque multi-colours, slows things down and ponders looming questions like whether or not to purchase a couch. It’s a far cry from the fuzzy mania of early records like “Horn the Unicorn” or the ramped-up, amped up raves of the 2008 self-titled LP, but Segall shrugs off the differences. “I don’t think there are any rules about what makes a good song good.”

Segall, raised blocks from the shore in Orange County, first found punk rock through skate-boarding videos, latching on, as an early teenager, to Minor Threat and Bad Brain, the Dead Kennedys and the Misfits. He knew right away, he says, that he was going to be more than a bystander. “The thing about punk rock is that anybody can do it,” he observes. “It’s kind of understood that from the beginning, you just have to want to do it.”

Segall formed Epsilons while still in high school, playing guitar and singing in a band that released three full-lengths before he packed off to college in San Francisco. There he hooked up with the Traditional Fools, whose lo-fi and primitive take on Nuggets-era rock caught the attention of Eric Butterworth at Make a Mess records. Butterworth, who is also in Nodzzz, asked Segall if the Traditional Fools could play a show in San Francisco sometime in 2007, and Segall agreed. Then he forgot to tell his bandmates about it, they couldn’t make the show at the last minute, and, just like that, a solo career was launched.

“Instead of cancelling it, I asked if I could just come and play. I had some songs I was working on – the songs that ended up on the first record -- so I was just going to show up and play the guitar,” says Segall. “Then I got there, and I saw a kick drum and a high hat, and I said, ‘Man, can I borrow a kick drum and a high hat and try to make some noise with my feet?’ I had never done that before. “

The show went well enough that Segall began performing by himself, one foot on the bass drum, one on the high hat, a guitar cradled in his lap and a tambourine within swatting distance. His high-energy stage show won some key fans. In a spring 2008 Listed feature at the online magazine Dusted, John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees included Ty Segall and The Traditional Fools in his ten favorite bands of the moment, saying “Ty has started doing a one-man band thing that is ridiculously killer.”

Mike Donovan of Sic Alps remembers an Oh Sees, Sic Alps, Ty Segall tour through the south in the fall of 2008, where, he says, Segall impressed him as “supremely talented and a great singer.” Afterwards, Sic Alps invited Segall to join the band, and he and Donovan played a series of East Coast shows with Eric Bauer shortly after. (Donovan also penned Segall’s Goodbye Bread bio, as a joke signing it Andrew Loog Oldham.)

Dwyer’s Castleface Records released Segall’s self-titled album, the record that documented Segall’s one-man band phase, late in 2008. “I recorded that first record live in a buddy’s basement,” says Segall, adding that, as at the live shows, he played all the instruments and sang, sometimes all at the same time.

“After we did that, I was like, ‘Cool, that sounds good, but I don’t really know if I want to do another one-man band record, ‘ “ he adds, “That’s the one man band record. It’s pretty unique.”

Segall was also just plain worn out from his madly-energized live show. “It’s definitely tiring,” he says. “If I haven’t done it for a while, I have to take a week or two to get back into it. It’s really hard for me to just jump back into it. And my legs…it’s just kind of a full-on feeling. You have to get back into it.”
He adds, “It’s fun now, when I haven’t done it for a long time, but I was doing it for two years straight. I realized it was just too much pressure. If stuff gets screwed up, it can go downhill. It really sucks because everything is you.”

So, with his first album finished and his body aching from night after night of constant thrashing, Segall began to think about forming a band. He went first to his college friend, Emily Epstein, a drummer. “I had to convince her to play with me, because she hadn’t played drums in a band for a long time,” he says. “I was like ‘dude, come on, please, please!’ and it took a month or two of trying to convince her to play. I think she was just shy or something.”

He also began working with a succession of bass players, Shayde Sartin of the Fresh & Onlys, then Mikal Cronin (with whom he later recorded Reverse Shark Attack in 2009), then Tim Hellman, then a girlfriend named Renee and then back to Cronin.

With a full band in place, Segall was able to push his songwriting in different directions, evolving towards a slower, more melodic, trippier sound in Lemons , Melted and, finally, Goodbye Bread, his first on Drag City. “I guess I’m just trying to make things sound a little different than they have in the past,” says Segall, struggling to articulate a process that is, clearly, at least for him, mostly intuitive. “It’s just experimenting with how to write a song, with tunes or whatever…I’m just trying to get better. I don’t know how to explain how I’m doing it.”

One thing that has changed is Segall’s mix of influences, which has broadened considerably since his skate-punking days. “For sure, back when I did that first record, I was mostly into garage rock. But now lately I’m into glam and pop and softer music and weirder music, like noise music and really crazy psych music and krautrock and stuff like that. Definitely I think that me being interested in types of music than in the past probably has gone into my songs. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.”

As a result, like Melted, Goodbye Bread has a definite downtempo vibe, its sounds winding hazily through folky guitar cadences, Segall’s voice slowed to a codeine-sticky crawl. If the self-title edged evoked the Ramones and Dexter Romweber, Goodbye Bread sounds like late Beatles psych, though a bit unstrung and more casually delivered. Segall acknowledges the change in pace, but says he might be almost done with this particular phase. “I did kind of mellow out for a while, but the aggression is coming back,” he comments. “What I want to do is to make music like Goodbye Bread but with more aggression. I want to do that for the next record.”

Meanwhile, Segall is living the life of a working musician, spending 40% or more of his time on the road and re-acclimating grudgingly, in his rare time off, to mundane tasks like paying rent or buying groceries. You can hear some of his reservations – about the 9 to 5 and, conversely, about its more bohemian alternative – in Goodbye Bread. In “Comfortable Home,” for instance, he struggles to understand why a girlfriend wants to buy a couch. “I Am With You,” later on, lists a litany of things that Segall has had enough of: trumpets, kids, hats, dresses, the man and home or, as he puts it, “the place with the fuckin’ fog.” The dog on the cover of Goodbye Bread is not Segall’s dog. There’s no way he could have a pet given the way he lives right now.

Both on the record and over the phone, Segall sounds like a man who hasn’t wholly decided whether a regular life is preferable to touring, or vice versa. “That’s definitely part of the record, “ he says, when asked about the tension between home and the road. “but it’s not just about wanting that [settled] lifestyle because part of me doesn’t want that. There are things that I miss having but there are also things that I’m thankful for being able to do.”

For instance, when we speak, Segall is just back from Australia, where he played shows with Melbourne’s UV Race, hung with Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Mikey Young and absorbed a scene that is very much like the one that surrounds him at home. “It’s maybe the combination of the surfing, having the ocean near by, and the music scene,” he says. Punk rock, obviously, doesn’t require sun and surf, Segall says, and some of its greatest bands have come out of snowy, landlocked cities like Cleveland and Detroit. Still, there’s something about the combination of garage-rock energy and sunniness that sets San Francisco’s current scene apart from the others.
“It’s hard to say whether there’s a San Francisco sound,” says Segall. “There’s a psychedelic element and a pop element that everybody shares – well, not everybody, but bands like Thee Ohsees, Sic Alps and Kelley Stoltz.”

“I’m definitely influenced by my friends,” he adds. “It’s not like I pick up something from John Dwyer, or learn something. It’s more like I say, ‘Oh shit, this new Oh Sees album is amazing. Damn, I’ve got to make a good record, too.’”

Supreme Dicks reissue...Breathing and Not Breathing

2011-10-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

Pretty awesome stuff from the vaults...Jagjaguwar is re-releasing the complete catalog of Western Mass's Supreme Dicks, a band whose flexible line-up occasionally included Lou Barlow. This reminds me of Gira's Angels of Light, based in folk, but proceeding from those roots in really dangerous, violent directions. Anyway, I like it a lot, and notwithstanding the fact that we're practically neighbors, I had never heard of this band until the promo came in the mail.

Mine is another one of those sampler thingies, but if you buy this, it's a four-box set including: The Unexamined Life, The Emotional Plague, Workingman’s Dick (a collection of early archival recordings) and the EP This Is Not A Dick, plus some unreleased tracks.

Fuck yeah, happy Friday.

"In a Sweet Song"

Human Switchboard

2011-10-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Another forgotten post-punk band getting the reissue treatment, this time from Bar/None...It's well worth checking out if you like this sort of thing.

Human Switchboard
Who's Landing in My Hangar: Anthology 1977-1984
Bar/None

“In this town, a third can’t find work. Another third drink to go to sleep, but everything, everything still seems possible.” Bob Pfeifer murmured into the mic in a tremulous baritone remarkably like Lou Reed’s, his guitar alternating between jangle and brutal stabs, his partner Myrna Macarian throwing up a keening, reeling swell of organ behind him. It was 1981, perhaps the bleakest year of the Rust Belt recession. Cleveland’s Human Switchboard was recording what would be its one and only studio album, a nervy, sexually fixated jitter along the peripheries of post-punk, girl-group and new wave. Who’s Landing in My Hangar?, released on IRS’s Faulty Products imprint, turned out to be Human Switchboard’s commercial and artistic highpoint, and by 1985, after a deal with Polydor fell through, the band broke up.

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(Say No To) Saturday's Girl by Human Switchboard by BarNoneRecords

Dreamers of the Ghetto

2011-10-20T05:36:00.000-07:00

think about it. How long has it been since you've heard anyone use the word "ghetto"? It's like a 1960s word, isn't it? You could only use it if you lived pretty far from any actual inner city in, say, Bloomington, Indiana, for instance.

That's where Dreamers of the Ghetto comes from and, to be honest, I have a soft spot for Indiana bands. but not this one. It's that kind of big rock Coldplay-into-U2 anthemry (and yes, I know U2 ranks really high in my last.fm playlists, but that's my son's fault, not mine) that died out, mostly, a decade or two ago.

I gave them a four out of ten. (Pitchfork.liked the album a lot more and even remarked on the strength of the songs, which kind of blew me away.)

I said, "The sonics are undeniably impressive, ragged-cornered soul longing and technologically enhanced guitar trickery. Yet the songs, over repeat listens, never develop past this impressive facade. The drama becomes bombast as you realize no tunes are actually is actually holding up these enormous gestures."

You can read the whole thing here.

"Tethers".

Downpilot

2011-10-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

Paul Hiraga has been doing this understated alt.folkish Downpilot project long enough to have a Splendid review in the file (which is a long time now), and his latest, New Great Lakes is his fourth album. Noel Murray of the AVClub gave it a B-, but noted that, "Hiraga’s lovely vocals—and the way he uses those vocals to keep pushing his melodies upward—never fails to enchant. And when Downpilot has all its pieces in place, as on the woozy, hypnotic title track, the band rivals Dolorean and The Low Anthem in the 'achingly gorgeous Americana' game." You can read the whole review here. I like it at least B, maybe B+ personally.

Tapete Records has short versions of three songs at SOundcloud.
Downpilot - New Great Lakes by Tapete Records

Bitch Magnet reissues

2011-10-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

Temporary Residence is reissuing all three of Bitch Magnet's late 1980s/early 1990s full-lengths -- Star Booty, Umber and Ben Hur (which had David Grubbs from Squirrel Bait on it). They were all remixed by John Congleton and with some bonus, previously unrecorded tracks. I got a nine-song sampler, three from each record, and though I seem to have missed the Bitch Magnet phenomenon the first time, the sound is very recognizably late Reagan era, hard-core-into-post-rock, with crashing waves of guitars and, inside the din, a bit of angry tune-ful-ness. I've been enjoying the sampler a whole lot.

Here they are in Berlin in 1989

Letting Up Despite Great Faults

2011-10-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Wow...these band names are getting so long now.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults makes a kind of quietly shoe-gazey, guitar-fuzzed, synthesizer assisted pop, with the vocals (that's Michael Lee, the band's sole member, so it's all him) buried under a eider-down quilt of soft noise. There's an EP out now on Old Flame Records called Paper Crush which I like a whole lot. It reminds me of Maps' EP from a few years ago, which was so much better than the full-length. But anyway.

Here's the best song.
Letting Up Despite Great Faults - Teenage Tide by lettingup

doumbia

2011-10-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Na Hawa Doumbia
La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol. 3
(Awesome Tapes from Africa)

Na Hawa Doumbia was just beginning a four-decade long career as one of Mali's foremost female singers when she recorded the four songs on La Grande Cantatrice: Vol. 3. This particular recording was one of three made in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1982, released in vinyl and for many years unavailable. It is the first physical release from Awesome Tapes from Africa, an mp3 blog which uncovers and disseminates music from rare cassette tapes from the African continent. [Crucial stuff at that. - Afrocentric Collector Ed.]

In 1982, Doumbia was just two years past her first public performance at the 1980 Youth Week in Bamako, where she won first prize for her song "Tinye De Be Laban". She had, only recently broken free of the caste restrictions that forbid people outside the Manding tribe from becoming musicians. A young woman, by the photo hardly more than a teenager, she was just beginning to win recognition for her warm, soulful interpretation of the Wassoulou tradition.

More

This video is from much later

Shayna Zaid & the Catch

2011-10-14T03:44:00.000-07:00

Kind of a nice, jazz-into-earthy-Americana debut from Shayna Zaid, a Malaysian-born, New York-based singer. I like the quicker songs from the album's first half the best and "Lighthouse" maybe most of all. Later album ballads like "It's You" drift uncomfortably into "My Heart Will Go On" territory. Still, she's a strong singer, almost a belter, with enough taste to pull back when warranted, and her band is excellent.