Doug Keith with a famous shredder guest, other recent listening

I've been catching up on promos the last few days, trying to listen to everything I put on mid-December a few times before it falls off the new list> I'm really liking Doug Keith's Pony, which will be out February 11th on Keith's own Village Label. Keith has been playing bass for Sharon van Etten lately...and he's apparently made some connections with the W. Mass indie mafia. There is a guitar solo of unmistakeable provenance* on this song "Pure Gold in the 70s," also one or two others. Keith has a thoughtful, interesting blog, too, whose most recent post connects him to Northampton's other famous guitar player,** so I don't know, maybe he's a neighbor? He never calls, never visits...how would I know?



That's the giveaway track, but the one that I keep playing over and over is "Black Metal Black." It reminds me a lot of Luna.

I have also been listening a good bit to:

ILLLs (with the extra L), which reminds me a lot of Blank Dogs and is what I would consider a near miss.



And also Mirror Travel, an Austin-based, two-third-girls threesome in the psych-drone-garage vein, which I like a little better than ILLLs, but not as much as Keith.


I am not into Gardens & Villa at all, so you'll have to find your own soundcloud if the falsetto-and-synthesizer, neo-disco thing is your deal.

Merry Christmas or [insert your own preferred holiday greeting here]!

*J.
**Thurston

Kurt Vile

Kurt Vile's been doing some shows with J. Mascis lately, one of them in Brattleboro, which is close, but I didn't go. From what I hear, it was mostly acoustic, but J. got off the stool a couple of times to do some Dinosaur tunes...and also, from what I hear, Kurt Vile was in quiet, jangly mode, but still pretty riveting.

Anyway, there's a new folky, acoustic KV album out now on Matador called Smoke Ring For My Halo, which I have been enjoying (but I like the full-band stuff better). Here's "Jesus Fever".

And here are the two of them doing "Make It Right" in Philly, which is Vile's hometown.

And you thought nothing ever happened in Brattleboro.

Brattleboro is an old hippie town in Southern Vermont. It’s full of coffee shops and independent bookstores and places where you can buy hand-made whatever…We buy groceries, almost every Sunday, at its co-op, surely one of the best of its kind, and in the summer, the Farmer’s market is pretty ace as well. There’s a brew pub called McNeils which, despite only intermittently having a working bathroom, is one of my favorite places in the whole world. We go there after the groceries usually. It takes the sting out of the weekend’s end.

But Brattleboro is not exactly a world capital of music, so it’s sort of cool that Sweet Apple – a collaboration between Cobra Verde’s John Petkovic, J. Mascis and Dave Sweetapple (from Witch) – got started there. My review of their new album “Love & Desperation” ran early in the week on Blurt.

Sweet Apple, the new project from J. Mascis and John Petkovic, sounds a lot more like Cobra Verde (Petkovic’s band) than Dinosaur Jr. There are occasional, inflammatory surges of Mascis’ inimitable guitar, mostly on “I’ve Got a Feeling (That Won’t Change),” and in a sidewinding break in “Crawling Over Bodies”. Still for the most part, Mascis stays in the background and seems mostly to be playing drums (as he does in Witch). Petkovic has even brought along Tim Parnin, his guitarist from Cobra Verde. Dave Sweetapple, who is also in Witch, plays bass, but you won’t hear a lot of that band’s sprawling, sludgy metal here. Instead, the tunes are mostly of the glam-leaning, power-chord studded, 1970s-referencing ilk of Cobra Verde. Not that that’s a bad thing. In fact, after an extended break and a rough personal stretch, it looks like Petkovic has got his mojo back. If Love & Desperation were a Cobra Verde album, it would be the best one since Easy Listening, far more consistent and hard-hitting than 2009’s Haven’t Slept All Year.

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“Do You Remember”