Turning the grottiest clubs into cathedrals

Hearing angels? Want to? Got a high tolerance for songs that remind you of Enya?

My review of the ethereal, atmospheric music of Julianna Barwick (which I quite liked, Enya crack aside) ran last week at Blurt.

JULIANNA BARWICK – Nepenthe
Dead Oceans

Julianna Barwick turns the grottiest clubs into cathedrals, with her weightless washes of indefinite tone, her spectrally altered choral elements, her slow moving angelic ecstasies. She fills the darkest spaces with pure white light. Nepenthe, her third full-length, she works and reworks a downward cascade of notes, in massed vocals that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. It’s a motif that first floats by during “The Harbinger,” but which repeats later the album (in “Labyrinthine”, for instance),” falling endlessly in a suspended grace.



Nepenthe, in mythological terms, is an elixir for forgetting, but Barwick’s work seems to turn more on memory, the textures she employs evoking church music, children’s choirs and the gauzy scrims of daydreams. There are recognizable elements – piano, cello and violin, for instance – but seen only through the fog of more idealized sounds. In “Look Into Your Own Mind” a sustained, clarinet-like sound pierces the silence for nearly a minute, picking up friction with the throb of low cello. There’s an aura of the celestial, not just time-less but outside of time itself, in many of these tracks, as they blossom and fade without reference to meter or melodic development.

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Grumbling Fur...possibly named after a chapter in the Pooh series

My friend Bill Meyer says that if he hates the band name, he almost always hates the band. A band that can't think of a good one or two word handle for itself is unlikely, he says, to have the intelligence and creativity to write a good song. Fair enough. But with exceptions. Grumbling Fur, for instance, is a cloying and awful band name. It is also a pretty good band (if "band" can be made to stand in for an occasional, loosely structured, two-man collaboration) with an excellent record out in Glynnaestra. I reviewed it last week for Dusted.

I said,

"Grumbling Fur is a one-off experiment that took root, a super group of unknown musicians. It started with a day-long jam in 2011 that brought together avant stalwart Alexander Tucker, epic art-rock multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan (of Guapo, Aethenor and Mothlite), Jussi Lehtisalo from Circle and Dave Smith (also of Guapo), and resulted in an LP called Furrier. There was another record in 2012, called Alice. It was also recorded live and on the fly, this time just Tucker and O’Sullivan.

Glynnaestra has much of the sweep and mystery of Furrier as well as the close, lovely minor-key harmonies of Alexander Tucker’s solo folk work. As in Tucker’s Imbodogom, ordinary noises like speech, tea kettles, hand claps are worked into surreal and dream-like patterns. Instruments, too, are both recognizable and slightly altered, the jangle of guitar and harp blossoming into otherworldly overtones, the notes of piano dissolving like food coloring into an amorphous pool of inchoate sounds. Yet it moves in a way that neither Imbogodom’s recordings nor Furrier ever did — playfully, lightly, but purposefully."

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Grumbling Fur - The Ballad of Roy Batty from Michael Lewis on Vimeo.

Dirtier than the Dirty 3

Hey, wow, I've celebrated being back home by catching an awful cold, spent much of yesterday asleep (after idiotically going for a run in the morning and making everything much worse). So, pardon the typos. There may be more than usual. I'm still in a bit of a fog. Meanwhile my Dusted review of Venom P. Stinger went up last week (and it's still up because, apparently, we are on an occasional updating schedule).

I said:

"Venom P. Stinger churned the most corrosive, skuzz-crusted kind of punk, its fervid evocations of various sorts of madness jacked up on unrelenting, speed-maddened marching band beats. It was pure punk in energy, aggression and noisiness, but the band had some unusual elements. Jim White, later of Dirty Three, was already finding eccentric, abstract ways to keep jackhammer time; his drumming is both rigidly on beat and feverishly imaginative. Mick Turner, who also went on to Dirty Three, unspooled a hallucinatory free-formness from his altered rockabilly licks and blues-rock vamps; he is an element of chaos in a boxed-in, one-two punk structure. Both White and Turner added an extra dimension to the clatter that surrounded Dugald McKenzie, and he himself was almost surreally intense, maniacal and unpremeditated."

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Swimming Pool Qs...and As

My feature on the great southern new wave band, the Swimming Pool Qs, runs today at Blurt.


SURFACING AGAIN: Swimming Pool Q’s

Jeff Calder’s got big plans again for his long running band. But first, the Atlanta new wave heroes want to show us some snapshots from their early years…

BY JENNIFER KELLY

“We came out of a very ultra-modern tendency on the periphery of pop music. All of our friends – Pylon, B-52s, all these groups — had ultra-modern ideas,” says Jeff Calder, the singer, main songwriter and one of two guitarists for the Atlanta phenomenon known as the Swimming Pool Q’s. “But at the same time, we were exploring an old world of regional concerns and southern concerns. There’s kind of a contradiction there and a tension that happens because of that. It’s one of the things that makes these records unique.”

Calder is speaking of the Q’s’ long out-of-print second and third records, The Swimming Pool Q’s and Blue Tomorrow. After a long struggle, both have been reissued in an expanded, remastered, meticulously documented compendium called 1984-1986: The A&M Years (Bar/None), available as a 2CD set or a limited edition 3CD+DVD box. He and keyboardist/singer Anne Richmond Boston talked to BLURT about the Swimming Pool Q’s’ early years in an Atlanta-and-Athens-based post punk scene, their arduous path to a major label signing with A&M and the even more obstacle-strewn effort to bring these records back out of limbo.

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Chicago and kind of a turning point

Well, okay, as I mentioned over on Facebook, we're back from Chicago. We have settled into the routine a bit, going to the YMCA early this morning and watching Breaking Bad on Netflix last night (we are a season back from everyone else, but isolated enough not to have heard much about what happens next). It's going to be a different routine though, because we left Sean in Chicago and after being the heart and soul and center of our family for 18 years, he is now starting his own life. I mean, obviously, he's still our beautiful, wonderful boy and we love him, but we aren't arranging our schedule around him anymore, and that will take some getting used to. I'm sure I will miss some aspects of it (not getting up at 5:30 a.m., not driving 13 miles to the high school to sit in the car while he goes to school board meetings) but it will also be an opportunity to do more of the things that we like -- movies, I think I mentioned, music, running races, seeing friends (making friends, I hope, I'm a little out of practice). So we are feeling our way with this, but I think it will be okay and more than okay, given that Sean has such a very good opportunity to be happy and productive and to learn to be better at the things he loves best. You can't be sad in a room with him these days, because he is floating on about six inches of air.

So, let me tell you a little about our trip. We arrived on Thursday after spending the night in Fort Wayne with my parents. (Mom made one of those amazing Indiana-type meals, nothing fancy but everything really fresh and delicious -- steak, caprese salad, corn on the cob and peach pie. Did I mention I learned how to make pie crust from my mom? She tried to teach me how to sew, too, but I never could get the knack of that.) My mom and dad are both in their eighties, but still very mobile and active. They love Sean so much, though like people who don't see kids for a while, they love him at an earlier stage than he is currently (this will undoubtedly happen to me now). Sean, who has an uncanny grip on what will make people happy, went out and sat on the swing that my dad built for him maybe a decade ago, which held despite a perhaps quadrupling in weight. I got to go running in my park with Bill that afternoon...it's maybe the only part of Fort Wayne that I really love, and it was nice. Bill said he'd forgotten how pretty my old neighborhood was, and it is.

So Thursday, we drove to Chicago. Our hotel was right next door to Roosevelt University and on the lake, which was good, since we had to move all of Sean's stuff, including a bicycle, into his dorm the following day. We got on the subway and rode out to the Lincoln Park neighborhood where we had a really great, casual-ish Italian meal at Sono Wood-Fired...salad, pizza, ice cream and, for me and BIll, a three-glass flight of white wines each. I think with tip, it cost $100. Definitely not in NYC anymore. Then we went to see "Buena Vista" one of three new plays in the Steppenwolf New Works Series. This particular one was intense and physical in a very Sam Shepard-ish way, though not as well-put-together as, say, Buried Child. One very good actor playing the crazy manipulative mother, interestingly cluttered and claustrophobic set.

Friday, we moved Sean in to his dorm, met his roommate Lance and his family (very nice people from Florida), bought Sean a few last minute dorm things (bookcase, hangars, laundry soap) and then said goodbye to Sean. We met Bill's brother Brian and his wife Maggie (up from Indianapolis) for lunch, then went to a reception for new CCPA parents. This was possibly the most reassuring part of the trip. We got to meet some parents, all nice people, one guy who was four years behind me at Dartmouth (we did a jinx outburst of "I couldn't get into Dartmouth now" in perfect simultaneity at one point, and he was also drinking Goose Island out of a bottle...) Bill and I also got to talk briefly with the head of the drama program whose name is also Sean Kelley (with an "e"), and he knew exactly who our Sean was, what he was good at and seemed to have some definite plans for him. So that made me feel like Sean had landed in the right place and the rest is up to him.

We got to have dinner with Sean one more time, this time with Brian and Maggie, too, and we had had such a good time the night before that we ended up going to Sono Wood Fired again, and it was juat as good. (Though no play this time.)

Saturday, we went to the Art Institute and decided to join so that we could skip the line (if you go twice in a year, it's cheaper to join). So we got to see all the impressionist art and the modern wing, which is my favorite stuff, and Bill had never been, so it was all new to him. They also have a really nice member's lounge in the basement with a garden and free coffee and tea and wifi, so we went there and checked Facebook and email and stuff, and felt like kings and queens. We took the train out to Welles Park, which is in the Lincoln Square area. they had Shakespeare in the Park that night, "Comedy of Errors" which was, weirdly, Sean's first Shakespeare play. He was one of the Dromios in the younger cast at NEYT the summer he was 12. So I cried a little at the end, thinking about little Sean discovering how much he loved Shakespeare, but mostly laughed, because it's a funny play where everything goes wrong until it goes right. Which is sort of what happened with Sean's college search. WE found this amazing burger place afterwards called The Bad Apple, which has literally hundreds of different craft beers on the menu, and since, for once, we weren't driving home, we each had two.

Sunday, we went running again on the Lakefront Trail, where Bill has become fascinated with the open-water triathlon swimming lane between the Oak Street Beach and the Ohio Beach. (He is, literally, ready to buy a wet suit and move to Chicago.) Later we met Bill Meyer and his wife Jess for lunch, and then Bill told us how to get to the Jazz Records Mart in River North, where you could probably kill a week or so, but we only spent an hour or so. Bill picked us up later at the hotel and took us to the Hungry Brain for some improv jazz... in Bill's words, Frode Gjerstad (boisterous Scandinavian free jazz saxophonist), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello/tenor guitar/electronics), and Michael Zerang (percussion). I do not probably know enough to write anything sensible about the music, but I enjoyed it a lot, especially the drummer, and we would never have found it on our own.

So, then on Monday, we left and drove 900-plus miles in two days and now we're home. I've had half a dozen reviews run in various places over the last few days, so I'll be posting some of that later.

White Hills turns onslaught into serenity

I liked the new White Hills So You Are...So You'll Be a lot, ending up my Dusted review like this...

he trick of So You Are… is not so much to make quiet interesting, but to turn an onslaught into serenity, to launch multi-pronged, multi-textured attacks at the senses which seem, even as they deafen, to hint at a meditation. All of what you might have liked about White Hills is here — the Hawkwind-ish guitar excesses, the free-form Kraut drones that go on and on, a la Wooden Shjips or Bardo Pond. It’s just that this time, all the cotton batting has been stripped off, the fuzz removed to reveal structure and complexity underneath.

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We are leaving early tomorrow for Chicago, so I'm not sure how much I'll be blogging this week.

Scout Niblett

Four in one week...Scout Niblett at Dusted today.

Scout Niblett has always known how to make use of negative space, whether it’s inserting long, reverberating pauses between guitar eruptions or stringing out elliptical phrases like connect-the-dots puzzles. When she’s on, she’s white hot intense, a head back in a banshee howl, a fingers slashing a Bleach-purloined guitar riff. But when she’s off, she’s dead quiet, stock still, unembellished. She’s a serial multi-tasker, not a simultaneous one. When she plays guitar, sings and drums, she takes them by turn, never picking up the vocal line until the guitar distortion has faded, not crashing into the drums until her last “oh-oh-whoa” has trailed away.

So, on It’s Up to Emma, her sixth album, songs like “My Man” and “What Can I Do” are a bit of a shock – lusher, denser, subtler, their gut-punching intensity smoothed with sustained sounds. She sounds, on these tracks, a good bit like Sinead O’Connor, which is to say, wild and unpredictable but within a sleeker context. There are bits of cello, more intricate guitar parts, rapid-fire, martial drum beats tucked within these songs, so that they sound less like the ninth round of a middle-weight boxing match, more like unusually passionate pop.

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