Pacific UV

I think this record is awesome, but I can't get anyone to listen to it.

Here's a short review posted yesterday in PopMatters.

PacificUV, Longplay2 (Warm)
Incandescent landscapes of drone and fuzz rise and subside, recalling the lulling, static lands of Spiritualized, the Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. Athens’ PacificUV, five years on from their debut and two years past an intermediary EP, stretches out in this second full-length, guitar tones left to float like dust motes in a sunny window, words stretched to codeine-furzed dreaminess in the cuts with vocals. Best here is “Need”, all luminous, intersecting guitar notes and whispery (Calla-ish) vocals, but “Tremolo” comes close, borrowing Carolyn Berk for slow-moving, angelic vocals a la Mazzy Star (or, more recently, Isobella). Soft, nostalgic piano, merged with wistful post-rock guitars in epic-length “Arson” make the connection to Mogwai, and the keyboards return, augmented with cello, in the limpid, lovely “Ljiv”. Still there’s not much “loud” in PacificUV’s loud-soft continuum. Instead, graceful, spacious grooves carve otherworldly spaces, cresting and falling but never blowing the walls out. They’re gorgeous spaces, though, if you’re in the mood for a daydream. [Amazon ]

Head of Femur flirts with -- no marries -- excess

Mog is fucked again, so I'm going to put my stuff up here. Here’s another entry in the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink brand of sunny day pop from Chicago’s Head of Femur, reviewed yesterday in PopMatters

Head of Femur
Great Plains
(Greyday)
US release date: 25 March 2008
UK release date: 28 March 2008
by Jennifer Kelly

Too Much? No Such Thing.

Head of Femur, the Nebraska-and-Chicago-based baroque pop outfit with three core, eight satellite and seemingly hundreds of cameo players, has never had much interest in minimalism. Its first album, the intermittently sublime Ringodom or Proctor, shoehorned three or four songs into each multi-instrumented cut. This debut CD was ushered into the world in its entirety by a band of 24 musicians on a tiny Chicago stage. And following Hysterical Stars, when Head of Femur toured with equally populous Architecture in Helsinki, they could have rented the Partridge Family bus and still jostled elbows and knocked knees. More is always more rather than less to these guys—more people, more instruments, more song ideas, and more joy. With their fourth album, Great Plains, the parts all fit together in a seamless, logical way that finally drives home, I think, what Head of Femur has been going for all along.

Essentially, this is a caffeinated, giddy melodic pop that is bristling with intelligence, but softened by whimsy. Their first album included an Eno cover, “The True Wheel” from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and this still seems like a very solid reference point for pop that is still pop no matter how convoluted it gets. You will hear bits and pieces that remind you of all the challenging pop bands—the Beatles, the Beach Boys,ELO, the Move, and the Elephant 6 contingent—but filtered through an exuberant, band-geek sort of competence. This is not the kind of band where you can get away with half-assing your instrument. Every tone rings out bright and clear and assured.

More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/55474/head-of-femur-great-plains/

I’ve been writing about Head of Femur for a long time. Here’s a link to my Splendid interview (notable because not only did we insert silly arrows into the photos pointing out interview subject, Matt Focht, we also got the wrong guy. It’s fixed now, apparently.)
http://www.splendidmagazine.com/features/head/

And here’s a live show review of Head of Femur and Hockey Night:
http://www.splendidmagazine.com/departments/liveline/headhockey/default.html

The quiet turmoil of Brown Bird

I went to see Tunng last night and they were great and as soon as I've had more than three hours of sleep and something to eat, I'm going to write about them in more detail. (My son gets up for seventh grade every morning at 6:30, whether I've gotten home from Boston at 3 a.m. or not.) The main thing to remember, meanwhile, is this: go see this band. They are way, way, way more fun than their albums would suggest, even though the albums are lovely and delicate and charming. Their live show is one huge stomping party, from one end to the other, with syncopated handclaps and mechanical birdsong and three, count 'em three, guitar players. I'd wait to tell you about all this until I get my review up at Harp, but then it'd be too late. Here are the remaining dates.

Oct 26 Portland, ME SPACE
Oct 27 Montreal, QC Main Hall
Oct 28 Toronto, ON Legendary Horseshoe Tavern
Oct 29 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle
Oct 30 Minneapolis, MN 7th Street Entry
Nov 2 Seattle, WA Nectar Lounge
Nov 3 Portland, OR Someday Lounge
Nov 5 San Francisco, CA Bottom of the Hill
Nov 6 Los Angeles, CA Echo

All you Canada, Chicago, West Coast people get on this...you will not regret a thing.

Now, here's the point. Tunng had a band called Brown Bird opening for them, a sort of local Boston/Portland threesome, whose dark, minimalist folk was truly gorgeous. They are led by mostly guitarist David Lamb (he also plays drums and tambourine and woodblock with his feet, which I found vastly entertaining), whose voice and guitar playing may remind you, a bit, of Damien Jurado, but his lyrics are weirder. Okay, Lamb's got two other people in the band, whom I'm assuming are married to each other. Jerusha Robinson plays cello, giving the band's sparse folk sound a kind of baroque lushness, along the lines of Margie Wienk's Fern Knight, if you want a reference. Her husband Jeremy Robinson is the wildcard, switching among banjo and accordion and toy piano and, at one point, grabbing Lamb's mallets and pounding a drum with his left hand. (The right was clutching an accordion.) They have very kindly shared their first album with me, the self-released Such Unrest which you obtain from iTunes or CD Baby or through their website at http://www.brownbird.net.

Meanwhile, a couple of MP3s
"Such Unrest"
http://www.brownbird.net/mp3/such_unrest.mp3

"Run the Wire"
http://www.brownbird.net/mp3/run_the_wire.mp3

A more coherent, professional write-up will follow, I hope, in a week or so.

The lo-fi splendor of the Capstan Shafts

I completely fell for Environ Maiden, a 29-song agglomeration of the last year or so of Dean Wells' lo-fi output. It sounds like he's sort of a mad genius, holed up somewhere in Northern Vermont, recording six or seven new songs a day, little hooks and shards of melody buzzing around his head like black flies. But damn, this is the good stuff. Here's my review which ran today at Dusted.
"Dean Wells, the reclusive songwriter known as the Capstan Shafts, spends his days in northern Vermont, 4-track running, headphones on, laying down sweet shards of fuzzy melody and abruptly revelatory turns of imagery. From this Northeast Kingdom stronghold, he has been sending out homemade cassettes and CD-Rs since 1999. By one count, his discography now extends to 10 EPs and seven full-lengths, each packed to the gills with one and two minute songs, the music on all of them lo-fi to the point of primitivism, the parts overdubbed in a cacophonous parfait, as Wells plays guitar, drums, bass and keyboards. Up to this year, he had never played live and never assembled a band. (He finally performed at CMJ.) The whole shebang would be sort of a freak show…except that the music is so good. Environ Maiden, which collects songs from three self-released EPs from 2007 alone, is the aughties answer to Bee Thousand. It's a pure blast of eccentric creativity and discontinuous inspiration, a rocket launch of songwriting ideas that trails clouds of distortion in its wake."
More here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3912
Here is a video of the guy playing his first ever show earlier this year (he's been recording since 1999):


You can buy the album from Rainbow Quartz (http://www.rainbowquartz.com) a fine, underrated label which bills itself as "your source for perfect guitar pop."

Siberian's big doomy guitars

This one didn't wear very well over repeat listens...it seemed to get more emo-y every time I put it on.

But anyway, here's my review. I gave it a six, but it reads higher. It ran last week in PM.

"Siberian emerged in Seattle about three years ago, on the strength of a samizdat cassette demo, four songs long, and followed early this year by a more polished six song EP, Hey Celestial. 'Paper Birds', the strongest song from With Me, the debut full-length, also appeared on the EP, but the rest is entirely new material, indicating a band that has, at a fairly early stage of their development, found a cohesive, consistent, compelling sound.

"That sound is heavily influenced by the shoe-gazers’ love of layered, pedal-altered guitars, as well as the emotional directness and dynamic variety of American emo. You can hear little bits of U2 anthemic-ness, Smiths-ish mope lyrics and post-rock-ish tempo and time signature shifts. And yet, it’s also rather distinctive, relying on chiming, shivering walls of distortion, plaintive vocals and pounding drum beats. They sound a great deal like the Scottish band the Twilight Sad, though perhaps without the scathing self-scrutiny that tempers their grandiosity. This is guitar music that aspires to large scale and—even on a small budget—mostly achieves it, without any concessions to self-doubt or irony. "

More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/48308/siberian-with-me/

There's a media player with multiple tracks at the label site:http://www.sonicboomrecordings.com

Vashti Bunyan...really has been "Here Before"

As you'll recall, Vashti Bunyan was being groomed for pop stardom when she took off for Donovan's commune in the late 1960s. She had, in fact, recorded a single with Andrew Loog Oldham before becoming disenchanted with the whole process and returning to the land. The pristine, lovely result of her turning away was, of course, Just Another Diamond Day...lately rescued from obscurity by the tireless talking-up of Devendra Banhart and a reissue on DiCristina/Stairbuilders.

But what about the early, pop star recordings? What ever happened to them? Funny you should ask. Because DiCristina/Stairbuilders is now pulling together another reissue called Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind which includes all the Oldham sessions plus 11 demos and unreleased tracks. The Oldham tracks are really sort of astonishing...encased in huge, orchestral arrangements that nearly dwarf Bunyan's fragile voice. Here's a video of that song performed live. It's sadly bereft of its Phil Spector-esque bombast, but still, it's Vashti Bunyan, one of the nicest, most appealing and deserving late-life successes of the 21st century.



I interviewed Ms. Bunyan for Neumu a couple of years ago, and she was totally charming. You can read it here if you want: http://www.neumu.net/datastream/2005/2005-00026/2005-00026_datastream.shtml

Young Marble Giants...everything they've ever done on three discs

Young Marble Giants had an instantly recognizable sound...the flicker and thwack of muted drum machine beats (no drummer), twitchy, trebly guitar, bass and the ice-pure, uninflected voice of Allison Statton. There's a fantastic reissue out now of substantially everything that the era's quietest post-punkers ever produced, their only full length Colossal Youth, twenty-six singles and b-sides and five Peel Sessions. It's been out on Domino since September 11, and it includes some really excellent liner notes by Simon Reynolds.

Here are some videos:





And the reunion show from this May