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

The lovely, the talented Sharon van Etten

....whose album Tramp is still holding at my #2 for the year.



She seems to be re-enacting The Scarlet Letter?

Best faves through january

So I think I'm going to do this once a month or so, just to remind myself about what I was liking a few weeks ago and how it compares to what I'm liking now...also I'd love to hear what everyone else is into early on in 2012, if there's anyone out there anymore. Anyway, here are my favorite records through January.

Shearwater, Animal Joy (Sub Pop)...way out in front, more visceral than you'd imagine Shearwater could be, but also incredibly fragile, spiritual, delicate. I've got a PopMatters feature in the works on this (by which I mean, it's all done and god knows when they'll decide to run it...June would be about par for the course).

Sharon Van Etten, Tramp, (Jagjaguwar)...wrote about this one for Dusted, an almost ideal consolidation of her beautifully vulnerable, spare debut and her lusher, guttier Epic.

Damien Jurado, Maraqopa, (Secretly Canadian)...Jurado's second collaboration with producer Richard Smith is warmer and more immediate than Saint Bartlett, marginally more rocking, but still has a core of unknowability and mystery...the songs sort of glow in the dark. (I've got a slightly more coherent review in the pipe at Dusted on this.)

The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know (Fat Cat)...Just finished my review of this one, and kind of too exhausted to try to find another way to say that this one is chillier, dryer, more rhythmically intense than previous outings, but with a really intriguing overlay of synthesizers.

Mark Lanegan Band, Blues Funeral (4AD)...I've barely started on this, but what can you say...that voice...chills. (also, did you ever think you'd hear gated snare on a Lanegan record? Me neither.)

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

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.

More

Sharon van Etten

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

Sharon van Etten feature

I know I’ve been posting a lot about Sharon lately, but this is the last one, the feature I wrote on Monday about her and her show with Damon & Naomi in Cambridge. I thought it came out pretty well.

Here’s a bit to get you started:

She stands alone at the mic, clutching a bright red guitar that seems too big for her. Dressed in a sensible cardigan and khaki pants, she is small and sharply drawn, all cheekbones, flashing eyes and little spikes of pixie hair falling forward over her eyes. She looks like a girl you might share a cubicle with, quick, bright, young and eager to be friendly. And yet, when she looks sideways, lifts her chin and lets loose with the crystalline croon of "Much More Than This," the girl next door disappears, and Sharon Van Etten joins a long line of mournful songwriters, unearthly, tragic and cutting right to the heart of the world's saddest love stories.

The rest is here.


There’s also a new mp3 from Sharon at Weathervane Music, a nonprofit run by Brian McTear, who produces pretty much every record worth caring about in the general Philadelphia area.

It’s called “Much More”

Sharon van Etten, Damon and Naomi and Kurihara

So, I got off my winter-ized lazy ass yesterday and hied me down to Boston, mostly to see Sharon Van Etten sing finally, live and in person. She was playing a show at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, which was mostly a Damon & Naomi Show, celebrating the release of Naomi Yang's tour diary film Song To the Siren. This was a record of D&Y's eight years ago tour with Michio Kurihara, supporting the Damon & Naomi and Ghost album, so for this retrospective moment, they brought back Kurihara. Actually, the show went like this:

Tour film
Q&A with the head of the film department at Harvard tossing kind of softball questions, if you ask me.
Sharon
Damon & Naomi and Ghost

The video was okay -- it's a nice theater and a good place to see almost anything -- but the Q&A made it plain that they'd left most of the interesting parts out. Like, okay, brief footage of a silly national television show in Spain telegraphed the fact that they had canceled an actual live show with paying customers so as to make TV, and the promoter was so mad at them that he didn't pay them for the remaining week of shows in Spain. Not only that, he was calling venues ahead of time to tell them that Damon & Naomi had cancelled, so when they showed up, no one was expecting them and they had some explaining to do.

So, anyway, this may have been implied in the film, but I didn't get any of it and neither would you. But D&Y told another story about this whole incident which made me decide never, under any circumstances, to ever interview them. (Except for a little email exchange for the story I wrote about Sharon, which was already done anyway and MAY NOT BE THE SLIGHTEST BIT TRUE!!!)

The story is that to commemorate the incident of skipping a show in San Sebastian Spain in order to be on some cheesy TV show, Damon & Naomi and Kurihara came home and recorded all of their material in their home studio and called it Damon & Naomi Live at San Sebastian. As a joke. They played it for Sub Pop, their label at the time, and Sub Pop liked it and decided to release it as an actual live album, with audience noises intercut from a bootleg. And when it came time to promote the album, it was promoted as an actual live album. Damon recalled the first interview they did for the album, and the journo asked them, "What was that night like?" And they flailed around for a while, because of course, there was no night and who knows what it was actually like. But the point is, they never admitted that it wasn't a live album and apparently none of the reporters were diligent enough to check the tour dates and see that it had been cancelled.

The show afterwards was very beautiful, and Sharon is just as heartbreaking in person as she is on record, though only on stage. Off it, she seems perfectly normal and very nice and well-adjusted. So there.

Anyway, there will be a nice long piece about her in Blurt at some point.

Sharon van Etten

Sharon van Etten’s Because I Was in Love unexpectedly turned into one of my favorite records last year. It’s translucently simple, full of light and clarity and these beautiful serpentine harmonies that Sharon sings with herself…Greg Weeks produced it and boy did he do a good job shining the light on her.

Anyway, she did pretty well in Blurt’s year-end rating (#36) and she’s playing some shows with Damon & Naomi, so got to I write a little show preview on her here


There will be a longer write-up when I go to the show in Cambridge on Sunday.

Meanwhile, here she is singing “Keep”


What a pretty voice, eh?

Two new reviews

Weird. I thought I'd done this earlier, but now the post isn't there, so I assume dial-up strikes again. I'm at the library and have WIFI for the moment, so let's try again...

I had two new reviews up today.

One, really lovely stuff, is a solo debut by Sharon Van Etten, up today at Dusted.

I called Because I Was In Love "quietly riveting, translucently pure, and infused with eccentric intelligence. " Read all about it here.


She's singing "Consolation Prize" in this video:


Also, reviewed two Dukes of Stratosphear records, a mid-1980s side project of XTC in Blurt...super fun stuff, very psychadelic 1960s, though obviously about 20 years after the fact. Here's the review.

And here's a video of "Mole from the Ministry"