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."


More

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.

Magic Trick, C. Spencer Yeh and Snowbird

First the obligatory post-Thanksgiving thanks for having a roof over my head, a nice family, reasonable health and really excellent food at hand...plus, as an added bonus, $600 to pay the first heating oil bill of the year!

Thanks!

Now, onto what I've been listening to lately, in the free-ranging, nearly-assignment-less interval of December, when I slap on whatever people send me...

Magic Trick, River of Souls (Empty Cellar) Kind of a headphones record, though I can't figure out why. It is not especially complicated or overstuffed or even hard to parse -- in fact, it is exceptionally, almost surreally clear sonically. But the fact remains that I listened to this once in the kitchen on speakers and thought it was dull, then twice on a run with earphones and thought it was remarkable.

What do you think?


C. Spencer Yeh / Okkyung Lee / Lasse Marhaug, Wake Up Awesome (Mexican Summer) Extended technique (i.e. banging, squeaking, scratching and, in general, playing your instrument in ways that would drive your orchestra teacher batty) and electronics make this an odd, twitchy, discontinuous listen...and weirdly, the breaks from abrasion make it all the more difficult to get situated. There's a hovering, half-focused loveliness buried in scratch and hiss on "Ophelia Gimme Shelter," a baroque throb of cello(?) in "Mission: Nothing" and even some kind of German music-box-y sentimental song in "Anise Tongue and Durian Wet Dream" in jarring conflict with the harsher elements of this album. Actually the soft pretty bits are just as jarring and the noisy ones. It's the constant back and forth that unsettles. Like when you're in Paris with your English-speaking friends and you'd be picking up a lot more French if you weren't always switching between languages. But it's interesting, and if you listen to it a few times (like three or more) it starts to make sense as a whole.



Snowbird, Moon (Bella Union) This is Simon Raymonde from the Cocteau Twins and Stephanie Dosen and it's very pretty, maybe too pretty, too soft? IDK. Guest shots from members of Radiohead, Midlake and Lanterns on the Lake, lots of gauzy, dreamy textures, but no spine, do you know what I mean?

Lawrence Arabia

Still catching up on stuff that ran last week, which was weirdly overweighted with New Zealand baroque pop...anyway here's my review of Lawrence Arabia's Sparrow from Blurt.


Lawrence Arabia
The Sparrow
(Bella Union)

James Milne, a.k.a. Lawrence Arabia, is the pale sophisticate at New Zealand's robust, outdoorsy pop camp-out, setting fey, ironically distanced lyrics amid swooning strings and syncopated tango beats. The Sparrow, his third album as Lawrence Arabia, employs an entire string quartet, as well as occasional trombone, saxophone, clarinet and piano, to back him. His warbly, often-falsetto'd voice swoops over uneasily pretty arrangements, a slicked-back vaudevillian making sharp, unexpected observations.


More




Also, I did go see Magic Trick (Tim Cohen's new thing) and Sonny Smith last night, and would highly highly recommend this to anyone living in these cities:

08.14.12 - Somerville, MA - Johnny D's #
08.15.12 - Hoboken, NJ - Maxwells #
08.16.12 - New York, NY - Mercury Lounge #
08.17.12 - Philadelphia, PA - PhilaMOCA #
08.18.12 - Brooklyn, NY - Glasslands #

Sonny, in particular, was a crazy man, removing his pants (it was hot) during "Teenage Thugs" and hurdling over metal folding chairs. He also did a bunch (okay maybe three) of the country songs from his latest albums and required the audience to pair off and country dance, so be warned...



Magic Trick was really good, too, a lot more rhythm-driven and hard-edged (I wrote down "Green Onions" somewhere in my notes, not sure which song it refers to, but there was a lot of great bass-and-drum action) than I remembered the record being. They struggled with the Flywheel's sound system a bit at first, but towards the end sounded about as tight as anything I've heard there. Good band, shares a drummer with Fresh & Onlys and a bass player with Sonny and the Sunsets, part of that crazy SF psychedelic pop scene. I was really there to interview Tim Cohen about Fresh & Onlys.




The opening band was Baby Barnyard, a local artist named Amanda Freeman, performing last night for the first time with a trio (herself, a stand-up bass player and drummer) and really very, very striking. Freeman has a soft, ethereal kind of Mazzy Star/Sunday-ish voice, but she plays guitar like Kurt Cobain...I'd say Scout Niblett for starters, maybe Circuit Des Yeux, except for a couple of very torchy, smouldery, almost trip-hoppy pieces, where the acoustic bass was just wonderful with her voice.

Anyway, she gave me a burner of songs without the band (I don't think they've recorded anything yet together) and there's some stuff on Soundcloud which is pretty good,too, in its own way, but not that close to what she was playing live.

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.

More





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.

More