Rose Windows...blown out psych from Seattle

I've been catching up on some summer records from Sub Pop ... and in the process warming up to Sun Dogs, the debut release from Seattle's Rose Windows. It's heavy psych with a kind of pop melodic slant, reminds me a lot of Black Mountain though with maybe a bit more middle eastern drone woven in. (The vocals are very Geddy Lee, which I had some trouble with early on, but now have acclimated to...your mileage may vary.) Anyway, the album's out in June. See what you think.

Wolf People are really not that much like Jethro Tull

Here's my review of Fain, published in today's Dusted.

Wolf People
Fain
Jagjaguwar

Since the beginning, Wolf People has been dogged by Jethro Tull references, a comparison that was easier on the last album, Steeple, when the band still had a flute player. (Indeed “Tiny Circles,” the single from that record, sounds like Ian Anderson wandered into Yes’s “Roundabout” sessions.) It’s still not an invalid reference. There is certainly something about the wiry guitar licks, the modal, folky melodies that ties Wolf People not just to Tull, but to other Celt-drenched British rock bands – at the softer end Fairport Convention, at the louder one, Led Zeppelin.

Still, it’s interesting how these comparisons fall apart on closer inspection. Spend 10 minutes watching late 1970s Tull videos and you realize that Wolf People is a whole different endeavor, more complicated, less theatric, built on twining dual guitar lines, intricate, jazz-leaning rhythms and, yes, the half-stepped melodies of misty Britain.

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This video was the one that gave me a little bit of a Tortoise vibe...

White Fence

Fell in love with White Fence a couple years ago, was almost equally enamored with Hair (a split with Ty Segall), but Cyclops Reap had me wondering when oh when was the smoke going to clear.


White Fence
Cyclops Reap
Castle Face

It is probably apt that Cyclops Reap begins in a false start, a two-second blare of organ and drum machine that stops abruptly and gives way to Tim Presley’s signature fuzzed guitar. All White Fence albums are, to one degree or another, exercises in ignoring distractions, clearing away extraneities and brushing off the dirt and distortion. The reward, when it comes, is in fragments of melodic beauty glinting like beach glass amid sand and sea junk.

Cyclops Reap is, if anything, more loosely strung and haphazard than earlier White Fence albums, a tidal drift of floating guitar lines, Lennon-ish whimsies, minimalist drums and tape hiss. Nothing leaps out of the mess like “Sara Snow” did from the self-titled LP, nothing grabs you by the lapels like “I Can’t Get Around You” did in the Ty Segall split Hair. “Pink Gorilla” is the single almost by default. It is only fractionally more in-your-face and immediate than any of the other songs.

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William Tyler

Another one of those guys who seems like much, much more than just a guitar player (and nothing wrong with being a guitar player...far from it), William Tyler has played with most of Nashville.  he does so again in his excellent new album Impossible Truth, out now on Merge and reviewed yesterday (or the day before) at Blurt. .         

 

      

Album: Impossible Truth

Artist: William Tyler

Label: Merge

Release Date: March 19, 2013

www.mergerecords.com

 

 BY JENNIFER KELLY

 William Tyler is, maybe, the best young fingerpicker left since Jack Rose died, effortlessly balancing the feathery complexities of blur -peed picking with the trapdoor-to-the-eternal mysticism of thrumming sustained drones. Impossible Truth is his second solo album and, like the first, hardly a solo album at all. For one thing, he’s locked in an endless dialogue with himself, overlaying various kinds of guitars in a fluttering, multi-toned conversation, so that even the barest, least orchestrated tracks take on a variegated shimmer. For another, he’s enlisted Nashville veterans to fill out half the cuts, pulling in fellow Lambchop-ers like Luke Schneider and Scott Martin in for pedal steel and drums, recruiting trombone-man-about-town Roy Agee and Chris (yes, grandson of Earl) Scruggs on acoustic bass and lap steel.  

 

 Yet Tyler is capable of finding infinite permutations in a single electric guitar’s sounds, as he proves on “The Geography of Nowhere,” the album’s most haunted and lovely track. Here Tyler starts in a bent, smouldery blues mode, his guitar tones wreathed in reverb and wavering like candle flames in an imperceptible breeze. Then the while the player and instrument remain constant, the song changes completely, the guitar now turned to a bucolic, gamboling country folk sound. Before you might have pictured drifts of smoke, neon reflected in rain, late night tables ringed with whiskey glasses, and now you’re thinking bunnies and baby lambs.  It’s abrupt but somehow wholly natural when the song shifts again, back to the eerie blues glow, like sticking a landing in some sort of guitar gymnastics meet. And, in fact, most of these songs have multiple movements, distinct changes in style and mood that demonstrate how easily Tyler moves between blues, folk, jazz, baroque classical and psychedelic modes.

 

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Bobby Sutliff interview

SAME WAY TOMORROW: BOBBY SUTLIFF

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Recovering from a near-death experience, the songwriting auteur and erstwhile Windbreakers co-founder makes a triumphant return to Pop. Above, he’s pictured onstage in Atlanta this past January with his old pal Tim Lee (with band The Tim Lee 3).

 BY JENNIFER KELLY / PHOTO BY JOHN BOYDSTON

 “I was unconscious for three days. It was four days before they would tell anybody in my family, including my 21-year-old son, whether I had a chance of living,” says Bobby Sutliff, the Windbreakers veteran, recounting the damage from his near fatal car accident last summer. “I had a huge major brain injury that I still suffer from somewhat. But even down to my neck and below, I think from what I understand, I broke 16 bones, including some stuff that could have caused me permanent paralysis. I was lucky.”

 

 Lucky indeed. When I speak to Sutliff, he has just been cleared to work again at the Wal-Mart distribution center near Columbus, Ohio, where he has held a job for 15 years. He is walking again and playing the guitar. Though he still struggles for certain words, proper nouns mostly, he is functioning remarkably well for a man who almost died.

 

 Moreover, Sutliff is lucky in other ways – in the network of Paisley Pop musical legends who have lent their support to him in the months after the accident. A tribute album called Skrang: Sounds Like Bobby Sutliff compiles 18 cover versions from many different phases of Sutliff’s career, from the first Windbreakers EP to a 2002 solo album. The participating artists are good friends, but also well-known artists from the jangle-pop 1980s – among them, Peter Holsapple of The dB’s, Russ Tolman from True West and the Rain Parade’s Matt Piucci. Not to mention Sutliff’s old Windbreakers partner, Tim Lee.

 

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Kingsbury Manx

Hey, I'm in Erie, Pennsylvania right now, but about to move out, and I noticed that Blurt had put up my interview/feature on the Kingsbury Manx. 

WAITING FOR THE BACKLASH: The Kingsbury Manx

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For their new album the beloved, if perennially under-the-radar, Tarheel combo decided to throw caution to the wind and rock the fuck out…

 

BY JENNIFER KELLY

 

“We were joking about how we expected this to be the backlash record,” says songwriter Bill Taylor of the Kingsbury Manx, whose seventh full-length, #The Bronze Age# comes well into the second decade of the band’s career. And while earlier albums caught comparisons to soft-rock icons like the Beach Boys and the Byrds, this one rocks harder.

 

“We knew that on this record we were going to end up getting into some songs that were more upbeat in tempo and more straight ahead rock than people were probably used to from us – things that were a little out of our comfort zone,” Taylor continues. “I was wondering whether people would say, ‘These guys are really trying something new, that’s great.’ Or, ‘You guys should stick to what you know.’”

 

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Wake up, it's Lamps

Cruising through the WFMU heavily played records list, I ran across this and had to share...



Maybe you should have had some coffee first?

Album's called Under the Water Under the Ground and it's out on In the Red now. (Fun fact: Lamps played Clockcleaner's last ever show...how'd we all miss that one?)