Tim Cohen pulls another rabbit from hat

My review of the new-ish Magic Trick album, River of Souls is up today at the Dusted Tumblr, which just passed its 100th post.

I said, "Both in his Fresh & Onlys project and here in the solo-thing-that-grew called Magic Trick, Tim Cohen has been moving gradually towards clarity, shrugging off the iridescent fuzz of Grey Eyed Girls and the home-taped indefiniteness of his first solo album to move into focus. Here in the follow up to 2012’s Ruler of the Night, Cohen continues to make his sound more legible than ever, while retaining the easy-going, transcendental mysticism that has always made his songs so charming.

"Cohen recorded River of Souls at his own Tree House studio with Phil Manley. Manley is a master of clean, uncluttered recording. His own band, The Fucking Champs, makes albums so sharply accurate you could cut your finger on them; they’re like metal albums sterilized for the operating theater. Yet while the two of them have cleared pretty much all the fuzz, allowing you to hear and separate layers of sound, Cohen maintains a certain soft and gentle feel. River of Souls is a precise rendering of laid-back ideas, one where you can hear every background vocal, every bass line, every slap and shiver of tambourine, without losing the general sense of hippie well-being."


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This is the one that reminds me of Sam & Dave.


The snow mostly missed us this time (sorry NYC), but damn, it's cold. I got out about a quarter of a mile to the main road this morning and decided that I would get frost-bite if I did my normal run. So I headed the other way, which goes through more woods and less open fields, and actually, it was pretty stunning, bright sun, white snow, blue sky and the sound of trees shifting in the wind. I had that wind at my back all the way back, up the big hill, and it was like a physical presence pushing from behind. Anyway, beautiful run, glad I did it, no sign of lingering damage. (From the wind or the big hill, which I've been avoiding because of my hip.) Bill and I used to always call that run the "Ireland run" because it's got some very pretty, wild looking hills where cows graze and in the summer it gets very green...haven't done it in probably a year.

Also, we're seeing Damien Jurado tonight. More about that later.

Fresh and Onlys interview

Part one of my epic survey of the SF garage rock scene ran yesterday, a piece on the Fresh & Onlys up at Blurt online. (It'll also be in print, though shorter.)

OUTTA THE GARAGE AND INTO THE FIRE Fresh & Onlys
Sep 11, 2012

Or, how the beloved San Fran band evolved and learned how to love the bomb.

BY JENNIFER KELLY

"We never really did identify as a garage band," says Tim Cohen, the singer and main songwriter behind San Francisco's shambolic Fresh & Onlys, a jangly, melody-obsessed outfit whose latest album Long Slow Dance (Mexican Summer) is anything but lo-fi.

The band's fourth full-length was recorded with TransAm's Phil Manley on a mixing board once used for Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London." It is noticeably cleaner sounding than anything the band has done to date. "Part of it is maturing as a band and asking, ‘How are we going to become the band that we want to be?' says Cohen. "We came together to say, let's not put limitations on ourselves. Let's not hide behind layers of reverb and distortion. Let's let the lyrics stand out for once."

"There was really no concerted effort to make a clean sounding record," he adds, "but we did get money to record. We had time to record. We were like, ‘Let's make this sound like an actual record sounds.'"

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Opossum

I had a couple of reviews that ran last week while I was away, so I might as well start catching up with this one, Opossum's Electric Hawaii, a lo-fi pop kind of project from New Zealand.

Opossom
Electric Hawaii
(Fire)

There's a ramshackle trippiness to Opossom's home-recorded, noise-blurred, psychedelia. Borrowing from the Black Moth Super Rainbow playbook, singer/songwriter Kody Nielson pulls bright surges of primary-colored melody out of trebly, rackety, percussion-pocked production.


Opossom is the second indie pop phenomenon to emerge from New Zealand's troublegum noise rockers the Mint Chicks. Nielson, the main instigator, also plays drums in his brother's new outfit, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. This mostly solo endeavor is far dreamier, less aggressively propulsive than Mint Chicks, filtering Beach Boys harmonies and sidewinding Brian Jonestown guitar lines through a gritty, messy lens.

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In other news, I'm going down to the Flywheel tonight to see Magic Trick (Tim Cohen from Fresh & Onlys) and Sonny and the Sunsets, and also to interview Cohen about the new Fresh & Onlys. I'm not sure I'm covering the show, per se, since I'll miss some of it while talking to Tim, but I might have more to say about that tomorrow.

We went to Brattleboro yesterday to see New England Youth Theater's version of Titus Andronicus, which was quite good, especially Tamora and Aaron the Moore. You might remember that my son Sean did this play earlier in the summer (he was Titus) at St. Pauls. Weirdly his usual theater was also doing it, so it was interesting to get another take on it. I liked Sean's Titus a little better -- he was quite a bit rawer and madder and, also though this may seem paradoxical, more varied and modulated in his performance. The play, though, was much better, and of course, I'm biased about Sean, so might be wrong. We also saw some friends from NYC who were up for a music festival at Bennington, VT, so that was a really fun day.

Kind of sad about the summer being over, aren't you?

Fresh and Only's Cohen pulls a rabbit from his hat

I really like the Fresh & Onlys, and I've also been liking a good number of the offshoot groups, Tim Cohen solo, Wymond Miles solo and now Magic Trick, reviewed today at Dusted.

Magic Trick
Ruler of the Night
Hardly Art

For a guy who spent his formative years listening exclusively to hip hop, Tim Cohen has become a surprising force in pop. Magic Trick is a busman’s holiday from the meatier, guitar-driven Fresh & Onlys, an ephemeral solo project turned semi-solid with the addition of a full-time band. More private, less celebratory than his main gig, with Magic Trick, Cohen finds space for unhurried, introspective balladry and billowy girl harmonies, the yin to Fresh & Onlys’ yang.

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Flowers in their hair...

Great little comp from Secret Seven, compiling the brightest lights of SF's psychedelic garage pop scene...Vetiver, Grass Widow's Hannah Lew, Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Fresh & Onlys' Tim Cohen and Wymond Miles, Ty Seagall, the Papercuts and Paula Frazier. You can stream the whole damn thing here:

Wymond Miles' solo EP

Also, there's this...a review in Blurt of a side project from the Fresh & Onlys guitar player...quite good, quite different from the main gig.

Wymond Miles
Earth Has Doors
(Sacred Bones)

In a break from sunny, tambourine-shaking psychedelia of his main band, The Fresh & Onlys, guitar player Wymond Miles plumbs deeper, existential questions on this four-song EP. Opening salvo, "Hidden Things Are Asking You To Find Them," is a sweeping, psychotropic anthem, anchored in gently strummed folk, but blown out into grandeur in billowing tones of electric guitar, synthesizer and strings. Miles' voice drifts here through clouds and atmospheres of sound, a half-hidden thread itself in this ode to the not-easily-seen. Later, "Temples of Magick" warps a multi-toned cadence of junkyard percussion into a tilted, shuffling march, the drum-beat's stiff and martial air contradicted by Miles' fluttery, diffident vocals.

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Go see Clinic and tell me what it’s like

I once travelled to Boston for a Clinic show only to arrive and find that they had cancelled because of some sort of stomach issues. As I was getting ready to write the preview below, their website said that they had cancelled a UK tour, again because of illness. So, while I love the band, I’m only recommending the show to people who have a relatively short distance to travel and a good idea of what else to do if one of the Clinic guys feels unwell. Here’s my blurb for the Philly show over the weekend.

Clinic
9:30pm, $13-$14. Johnny Brenda’s.
On their landmark debut, Internal Wrangler, surgically masked Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley did something that very few bands ever accomplish: create a wholly original and distinctive sound. How’d they do it? They polished junk-store keyboards to a finely reverbed gloss. They cranked spasmodically funky jitter-punk to “Voodoo Wop” proportions. They caught the pathos in a world paced by rickety drum machines and rife with mournful organs, but sadly, delicately “free of distortions.” Their sixth and latest album, Bubblegum, veers slightly into a vein of 1960s psychedelia, which should make the pairing with San Francisco’s trippy garage rockers the Fresh & Onlys all the more interesting. (Jennifer Kelly)

“I’m Aware” from Bubblegum

They’re touring with Fresh & Onlys, one of my very favorite new-ish bands. I haven’t really spent much time with their newest album Play It Strange yet, because now other people want to review it. (I had them on my Pazz and Jop ballot last year, along with maybe one or two other people, but that doesn’t count for anything this year.)

“Waterfall”

They’re done with the East Coast now, but you can still catch them in Canada and out west.
11.09.10 - Montreal, QC - La Sala Rossa
11.10.10 - Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace
11.11.10 - Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
11.12.10 - Minneapolis, MN - 7th St Entry
11.15.10 - Seattle, WA - Neumos
11.16.10 - Vancouver, BC - Biltmore Cabaret
11.17.10 - Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge
11.19.10 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
11.20.10 - Los Angeles, CA – Troubadour

I might be going to see Chris Brokaw and Bob Mould tonight, then also the Morning Benders on Wednesday, all while continuing to get up at 5:30 a.m. to get Sean ready for school. Don’t expect much clarity round about Thursday, okay?

Fresh & Onlys and Panther

I’ve had a couple of new items up at Blurt lately.

My favorite new band for 2009, the Fresh & Onlys, is doing that thing where they flood the market and confuse everybody…Grey-Eyed Girls is their second album in six months, but who’s counting when it’s this much fun?

Fresh & Onlys Grey-Eyed Girls

The Fresh & Onlys' self-titled debut earlier this year established the SF garage psych outfit as one of the best new bands of 2009. This second full-length, just a couple of months later, intensifies the sound, pushes it into slightly darker, more echoey corners, and, overall, strengthens the case. The songwriting has gotten stronger, spookier, funnier (the album's first line observes, "You don't have to pray/for beautiful skin/when you live/in a black coffin") and the band has improved noticeably with practice. There's nothing radically different about Grey-Eyed Girls, as compared to the first record, just a sense that everything has been nailed down a little harder.

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“Invisible Forces”


And then there’s Panther, which used to be a one-man, boom box aided, kind performance art, but now is sort of a band (a duo with live drums and multiple instruments). This was Blurt’s “Band of the Week” last week.

Panther Entropy
In physics Entropy measures disintegration and disorder, the continual process of things falling apart. That's a fitting name for Panther's latest work, where pop forms are unceasingly put together, pulled apart and reassembled. Here rhythms, melodies and harmonies rub together in a humming friction of point, counterpoint and chaos.

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“Love Is Sold”

This is obviously Tim Cohen’s year…

In addition to releasing two full-lengths as the Fresh & Onlys, he’s also dug a very fine collection of lo-fi weirdo folkery out of the vaults, which I reviewed for Blurt. It’s a lot more like his Black Fiction stuff than Fresh & Onlys, though without so much beat-making.

Here’s my review.


You’ll probably have to check the MySpace if you want to hear it.


Hah, it’s Friday, isn’t it? Tomorrow we all get to sleep until it’s light out.

One more thing...Fresh and Onlys

I've got a review up of the new (and only) Fresh & Onlys full-length...didn't know until I started writing this that the main singer Tim Cohen was also half of Black Fiction...but there you go. Here's a bit of the review.

"The Fresh & Onlys shambles barefoot through Summer of Love-style guitar and tambourine jams, strewing lyrical oddities and flower garlands along the path that leads, if not to where Syd Barrett lives, at least to Dan Treacy’s neighborhood. Led by Tim Cohen, ex of the underrated Black Fiction, and now sometime supporter of Ty Segall, the band channels the zonked hippie overload of the 13th Floor Elevators and the lo-fi whimsies of Treacy’s Television Personalities. Shayde Sartin and Wymond Miles, both of the extended Skygreen Leopards family, join in for dense jangles of psychedelic guitar and half-tuned, echo-canyon harmonies. A plurality of band members seem to have worked with Kelley Stoltz at one point or another, and picked up a bit of his funhouse pop aesthetic."

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The MySpace