Short but gorgeous...Kurt Vile and Sore Eros

Jamaica Plain is only three tracks, but they're lovely...the wavering tones of electric amplification and feedback weaving through picked clarity, little bits of drumming and noise tossed in to friction...only one track ("Serum") with vocals, but who needs them? This is a long-buried effort from Kurt Vile and Robin Robertson, who did some time in the Violators but is mostly known as Sore Eros. They recorded in the early aughts, it well before Vile-mania, when Kurt was just a long-haired kid with a way into and past folk guitar and Robertson was, well, pretty much exactly as obscure as he is today. I like it a lot, but if you put it on and leave the room, it'll be over before you get back.

It's out next week on Care in Community Recordings.

The Whines and a bunch of other bands

My write-up of last Monday's show at the Flywheel ran over the weekend. It was five bands, but two stood out, the Whines and Sore Eros. Here's what I had to say about the Whines:

"I'm really here to see the Whines, a lo-fi garage band out of Portland, OR, that seems, at least from what I've heard, to meld the sludgy aggression of 1990s grunge to the dreamy indefinability of girl-led bands like Black Tambourine. There's a little bit of country in there, too, and a shade or two of Neil Young, though filtered through a rough, chaotic punk aesthetic. In a recent interview at Victim of Time, bassist/singer Karianne mentioned the Meat Puppets, Lee Hazleton and Nancy Sinatra and Pink Reason as influences, and somewhere in that triangle is exactly what they sound like. The Whines have been kicking up a bit of dust lately with their debut full-length Hell to Play, which was recorded with the help of lo-fi mainstays from Eat Skull and Meth Teeth and which, apparently, made Ty Segall's 2010 year-end list.



The Whines are a three-piece. Jesse, the guitar player, is skinny, flannel-shirted and intense, wandering as far as his cord will allow, back and forth, looking for a spot where he can hear the rest of the band. If there's a shred of country in this band (and there is) it comes from Jesse, who veers from garage-rock power chords into splintery, glittery bouts of rustic contemplation. Blonde-haired, waifish Karianne is bundled up in a big jacket, looking very young behind a thatch of bangs, singing coolly above the murk. And Bobby, behind the drums, is the punkish wild card, banging hard, punchy rhythms under the band's storm and swirl."

More