I'm pretty sure that one member of People of the North teaches English, so it's maybe not surprising that their references are higher brow than, say, the average Japandroids album. But in any case, this particular album is named after a Louise Bogan poem that I read (first in excerpt in the press packet, later in toto on the web) and that sort of cracks open the whole enterprise.
You'll have to click through to get to the paragraph about the poem, or you can read it here:
Sub Contra
Notes on the tuned frame of strings
Plucked or silenced under the hand
Whimper lightly to the ear,
Delicate and involute,
Like the mockery in a shell.
Lest the brain forget the thunder
The roused heart once made it hear,
Rising as that clamor fell,
Let there sound from music's root
One note rage can understand,
A fine noise of riven things.
Build there some thick chord of wonder;
Then, for every passion's sake,
Beat upon it till it break.
And simultaneously listen:
Okay, that's enough right. You don't really want to read my review, do you?
Sub Contra, named for a Louise Bogan poem, layers supple volleys of abstract drumming over a wavering layer of distortion, a harsh buzz of sound that grows thicker and thinner like varying grades of sandpaper. Electronic auras fuzz to life then fade, bits of silvery space rock zoom forward then fade back into a power station hum. Signposts are few along the lonely roads these compositions travel, no words (except for a buried, indecipherable vocal in “Drama Class”), few melodic elements and not even much evidence of time signature.
This sporadic side project of Oneida's Fat Bobby and Kid Millions has a new album coming out in June, another bit of extended psychedelia that sounds very much like Oneida's recent long-form output (and also like Kid Millions' Man Forever, except with more keyboards, duh, hi Bobby!). I like it okay...not as much as Secret Wars or Anthem of the Moon, but I guess I can always pull those out when I want to hear them. They've switched from Jagjaguwar (specifically their Brah imprint) to Thrill Jockey for this one, which totally makes sense, given the more experimental vibe.
There's no audio yet for the new People of the North, but here's a video from album #2, out about three years ago.
I've got a review of Oneida's latest, A List of the Burning Mountains up at Blurt now.
I really liked it, though it's not as immediately accessible as their earlier stuff.
ONEIDA A List of the Burning Mountains
(Jagjaguwar)
Oneida's psych masters have been experimenting with long-form, unconventionally structured atmospherics lately, gradually stripping out the motorik chug of their earlier material and diving into the measureless vastness of deep space rock. A List of the Burning Mountains advances the argument considerably with two side-long experiments in altered perception.
The opening salvo sifts the sounds of rock - heavily distorted guitar, rampant tonally-varied drumming - through a chilly electronic filter, creating a meditative, wholly beautiful tranquility in noise. "Side B" waxes comparatively lyrical, its tonal washes trembling, blossoming and soothing, its space cruiser blips and vibrations shimmering, while Kid Millions, the anchor, the main color and the clear protagonist, punches and weaves in fractious, off-kilter drum fills. There's a sense of wonder here, of journey, of discovery, but not much conventional forward motion or even a recognizable time signature. A band that started with Can's hypnotic propulsion has ended up floating in Tangerine Dream's weightless free formity, but it's gorgeous stuff.
Sounds dirty, doesn't it? Actually it's a compilation put together by Brah Records, an imprint of Jagjaguwar run by the Oneida guys. They maintain that "koozies" are those foam wraps that keep beer cold, "woodies" are a kind of organ (the musical kind) and beer is...well, you know what beer is, don't you? Anyway, my review runs today at Dusted.
Various Artists Koozies, Woodies & Beers: A Brah/Ocropolis Benefit Compilation for Japan Relief Brah
Koozies, Woodies & Beers documents the restless, genre-slipping scene that grew up around NYC art rockers in Oneida, gathering 19 tracks from bands closely (and loosely) associated with Oneida. All were recorded in the now defunct Ocropolis (the second of Oneida’s home-built studios to be squeezed out by gentrification), each band getting free run of the studio for four hours of recording and four hours of mixing. Like the all-day psychedelic freak-out which closed out Oneida’s tenure at the Monster Island facility, this compilation tests listeners’ willingness to jump boundaries, their ability to consider music and noise as a continuum (or maybe the same thing) and, most of all, their endurance. But it also demonstrates the reach, the relentless inquiry and the fuck-it-all self-actualization of the community that grew up around Oneida in the mid- to late-2000s.
Man Forever is an experimental, mostly-drumming project from John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions from Oneida), whose third album Pansophical Cataract came out last month on Thrill Jockey. It is not, I think, for everyone -- you have to really like drums, for one thing -- but it is pretty visceral. My friend Bill Meyer, who is much smarter about improv than I am, said, "There's more to Man Forever than manic bashing. There’s a science to these sounds. The drum skins are tuned to ensure the presence of certain frequencies, so that tones dance and weave between the beats." Read more here.
I'm thinking about going to see Man Forever at the Flywheel next month, but I'm not sure I can get anyone to go with me.
Even long-time Oneida fans, trained over multiple albums to expect the unexpected, may balk at the radical minimalism of this album. Put it simply: Everything you think of as Oneida-ness is missing.
Particulars? Kid Millions, one of experimental rock's best and most distinctive drummers, has completely abandoned his kit. There are no audible drums in any of these tracks, and in the closing cut, no rhythm, no marking, even of the passage of time. You can hear Millions singing, faintly, discontinuously, as if through a helicopter rotor in "Horizon," the only track with vocals. Still, the whispery folksiness, so at odds with Oneida's pummeling propulsiveness, is nowhere in sight. Other core members are likewise disguised. Hanoi Jane who laid down the bass that drove Oneida's earlier material into infinite groove had disappeared into a miasma of electronic hum. Fat Bobby is, undoubtedly, still manning a stack of keyboards, but not with the kind of motoric, two-finger keyboard riffs that pushed "$50 Tea" and other songs over into manic overdrive. Instead, keyboard tones lie in limpid pools, one note lapping over another, with no sense of motion or urgency. If Rated O made you realize how many different sides Oneida had, Absolute II hints at as yet unexplored dimensions. We are a long, long way from "All-Arounder."
I seem to be off the Secretly Canadian/Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar list these days, which may have something to do with the "I'm fucked" post a few months ago...or maybe they're just super busy and don't have time to get together and want to send promos to other people for a while.
In any case, I did wangle a DL of Oneida's new one, Absolute II about which more later, but probably here and not in print, because it's already out and I haven't even gone to the WIFI to download it yet. Pitchfork kinda liked it, if you care about that.
But you know, what the hell, there's a free mp3 of the War on Drug's latest single "Baby Missiles" on Secretly Canadian's website and, holy crap, it's awesome, and, even holier crap, you don't have to be a music writer to get it or promise to interview anybody or dedicate five-six unpaid hours to trying to think of something to say about it. You can just have it. Why not go get it?
So, I’m not the only one around here who likes Oneida, am I?
If not, there’s a sort of side project you should probably know about. Soldiers of Fortune has got Kid Millions and Pat Sullivan (Oneida, but also Oakley Hall), as well as some fellow travelers from Home and other bands…and it’s really good. I’m extracting a bit from my hard-to-condense review from yesterday’s Dusted.
“Sleeping Sentinel” balances the jittery propulsion, the stark, open-chord vocal harmonies of Anthem of the Moon-era Oneida. It is the shortest, most structured, least jammy song on the disc, and also the best. “Worm,” the 17-minute track which takes up the entire second side of the LP, is the other extreme. The song is built around a four-note riff, pushing upward in a short, piston-like motion over a series of half notes, ramming the top one twice, then circling back for another approach. It’s repeated twice a measure over the whole length of the song, a machine-precise foundation over which pianos hammer and basses rumble and guitars execute free-wheeling screeches and nose-dives and someone (possibly Millions in his heavy rock “Did I Die” voice) shouts indecipherable imprecations. It’s also pretty freaking great.
It might make more sense (not promising anything, mind you) if you read the whole thing.
I can't find any audio or video for this, but the record's out on Mexican Summer.
By the way, I was out yesterday watching my son compete in the NH Div. III state championship for XC skiing. They won. Whoo-hoo. Sean threw up all over the place about half an hour before his race and was really sick the Monday before, but still placed third for his team.
Anyway, I have a review up at Dusted today of Wolf People's Tidings:
Wolf People’s Tidings sounds an awful lot like a reissue the first time through, a letter-perfect rendition of the freaky interstices between Cream and Hawkwind, with the Incredible String Band’s campfire folk songs floating through Jeff Beck’s borrowed electric blues and Jethro Tull’s panpipes tootling over Syd Barrett’s damaged faerie gardens. You might easily mistake it for a missive from the late 1960s, maybe early 1970s. Except it’s not; it’s completely contemporary, and only subsequent listens let you glimpse the post-modernist scaffolding on which this trompe d’oiel façade has been constructed.
Also, while I was over at Jagjaguwar linking the mp3 above, I noticed this live video of Oneida at Sonic Boom in Toronto…well worth checking out if you love Oneida as much as I do (but you don’t, no one does).
Anyway here’s the show
We're having a really good time in NYC. We saw Christopher Walken chew up the stage and spit it out in big chunks on Wednesday at a preview of "A Behanding in Spokane". I love Christopher Walken and he was totally, totally on, so that was good. The play was kind of implausible, though, and also relentless with the language (it would be interesting to count how many times the phrase "motherfucker" recurs -- i'm guessing high 70s, maybe 100 times). We also drank wine in the afternoon at Otto, which was fun, have seen some old friends and did a little shopping (I bought a knit dress which I am wearing right now at a Filene's BAsement which is going out of business for $12, down from $60 I think, good times.)
Tinariwen played last night and has another show tonight, but it is sold out and anyway in Brooklyn, so no go on that, though I would like to see them. Back home tomorrow, that'll be a drag.
So, I'm thinking I'd really like to go to this, but it's impossible to get a hotel in NYC around Christmas...so it would depend on finding a bit of floor or someone's couch at 4 in the morning.
Like to go to what? Oh, yeah, I've buried the lead again...Oneida's curating a one-day sort of festival, which they are calling OaF, short for Oneida Fest. It's on December 13, it costs $10 and here are the bands involved...(obvious highlights: Oneida, Oakley Hall, Dirty Faces, Parts & Labor, but these guys have excellent, serious taste, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some good surprises among the earlier bands).
Yesterday was jackpot day at blurt-online.com...with a whole bunch of miscellania, some of it pretty vintage, showing up on the site. The big thing, though, and the piece most likely to get missed by everyone, is this review of last week's Silver Jews show.
Silver Jews + Mike Flood 9-4-08 Iron Horse · Northampton, MA
By JENNIFER KELLY
Tonight's the night when traditional forms -- folk, country, protest, blues -- get truly weird. Silver Jews' David Berman says he gets nervous when he songs seem a little too straightforward and right away has to do something to twist them around a little. Opener Mike Flood probably never has that problem. His stuff starts out left of center and goes over the hills and far away from there.
Flood is onstage when I arrive, a skinny, close-shorn guy in a camo hat, looking a little like Ed Harris gone feral. He's a local fixture from back in the days when Northampton was supposed to be the next Seattle. The final track on Sebadoh's Bubble & Scrape bears his name, and when he admits that his first attempts at songwriting were mostly to "figure out what Gaff" was up to, he's talking about Erik Gaffney. He also does a fairly wicked imitation of Lou Barlow mid-set, taking his Guthrie-vintage staccato strum way up high and dissonant, so that his guitar all the sudden sounds like something off an old Shrimper cassette. Inside humor, but funny.
And a couple of short-ish reviews, also from Blurt.
Oneida Preteen Weaponry (Jagjaguwar)
www.jagjaguwar.com
Oneida's last two albums, The Wedding and Happy New Year, were unusually subdued and song structured, a far cry from the band's pummeling, mind-bending live show. Now with Preteen Weaponry, reportedly the first of three linked records, Oneida lets its krautrocking, freak flags fly with three extended meditations on rhythm, repetition and drone. "Part One" dives deep into cool tones, its rattling, clattering drums subordinate to Tortoise-y, laid back guitar. "Part Two," the only cut with vocals, is classic long-form Oneida, Kid Millions hammering out slow, ritual drums against firestorms of feedback, ghostly chants buried under undulating walls of tone. All three cuts circle relentlessly around reiterated ideas, intermittently transforming repetition into revelation.
The problem: though repetition occasionally leads to satori, there are times when you just want it to stop. As such, Preteen Weaponry is far too difficult to expand the circle of O-lovers much, but still essential for the hardcore fellow travelers.
Standout tracks: "Part Two", "Part One" JENNIFER KELLY
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh (Drag City)
www.dragcity.com
Folk music is normally shaped, even defined, by sense of place. So, what to make of this geographically indeterminant collaboration of Espers' Helena Espvall and Ghost's Masaki Batoh, which draws from traditions as distinct as Scandinavian sea songs, Japanese traditional music, American blues, Celtic laments and free-jazz improvisation? Beginning in "Polska"'s throbbing, cymbal-clashing skirl, and winding through mournful modal melodies and sorrowful baroque flourishes, these songs seem to exist outside time and place, in a misty, mythical world. Espvall presides over the Nordic melodies of her girlhood, while Masaki adds Ghost-ly experimentation and effects. The one for the mix tape, though, is "Death Letter," a Son House cover lent otherworldly sheen with wild swathes of cello and weirdly reverbed vocals.
A member of the No Neck Blues Band once insisted to me that every country, every culture has a blues, whether it follows the standard 12-bar progressions or not. This sounds like the blues of a place that maybe only existed in imagination, at least until it was laid to tape here.
Standout Tracks: "Death Letter," "Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa" JENNIFER KELLY
