Short but gorgeous...Kurt Vile and Sore Eros

Jamaica Plain is only three tracks, but they're lovely...the wavering tones of electric amplification and feedback weaving through picked clarity, little bits of drumming and noise tossed in to friction...only one track ("Serum") with vocals, but who needs them? This is a long-buried effort from Kurt Vile and Robin Robertson, who did some time in the Violators but is mostly known as Sore Eros. They recorded in the early aughts, it well before Vile-mania, when Kurt was just a long-haired kid with a way into and past folk guitar and Robertson was, well, pretty much exactly as obscure as he is today. I like it a lot, but if you put it on and leave the room, it'll be over before you get back.

It's out next week on Care in Community Recordings.

Roar, sprawl, obliterate

First snow of the year falling right now, just a dusting, sticking a little to dark green pine trees but not at all to roads and brown grass....

Meanwhile, I've got a review of Bardo Pond's latest up at Blurt. I like it a lot, though I have to differ with Michael Gibbons about exactly how minimal it is...

Peace On Venus
Bardo Pond
Label: Fire

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Bardo’s Michael Gibbons is calling Peace on Venus “a less is more statement in essence,” but don’t look for minimalism here. These tracks roar, sprawl and obliterate, in a hypnotic, heavy-booted march to enlightenment. Wall-sized guitar tones fray and blister into dissonance, drums pound in monolithic, relentless forward motion, and Isobel Sollenger’s voice floats over the roil and racket like a dream you had once as a child. Even more melodic entries like “Taste” have a palpable weight and density, their own field of gravity that pulls you in and keeps you there.

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I love this band.

Digging back into Hiss Golden Messenger

I reviewed the most recent Hiss Golden Messenger album back in March, liked it a lot and concluded, "Whether Hiss Golden Messenger is whooping it up country style or slinking and slithering in a late-night approximation of Stax-ish soul, there’s a directness in its attack. These songs don’t refer to certain styles of music, they embody them, contradict them, warp them and, in the process, breathe life into them. If that’s what scares all those people with their folk guitars, I’d say bring it on."

So now I'm on the Hiss Golden Messenger list, I guess, and I recently received a reissue of the band's 2009 Bad Debt, a bit sparer, a bit more single-mindedly country folk, and also, really, quite powerful. There's an early version of "The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)" (also on Haw), and, you know, I find this stuff geekily interesting. The older one is a bit murkier, less buoyant, noticeably less clearly produced, but also maybe a little more attuned to the darkness in this song...it is, after all, about not trusting other human beings.

Not that MC Taylor is exactly Mr. Happytimes, now, but I think he's a shade more ominous on Bad Debt.

Here's a not-really-a-video of "Balthazar" from Bad Debt.


The record will be out (again) on Paradise of Bachelors January 14, 2014...making it the first record of next year yet to be mentioned here. So yes, I suppose I have signed up for another year.

I just love this song from Courtney Barnett

And in my dreams, I wrote the best song I've ever written, I can't remember how it goes...

Which means it was better than this one, which is pretty awesome. From the recent queen of CMJ, Courtney Barnett, an Aussie songwriter who draws occasional comparisons to anti-folk types like Jeffrey Lewis. (It's got a Triffids reference which has a certain semi-obscure message board go kind of nuts.



I like this song better than anything else on The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas (which combines two shorter recordings previously only available in Australia), but I like it a lot.

Pitchfork gave her the "Rising" treatment about a month ago, if you're interested in backstory.

Like ESG? Try Las Kellies

Sticking up for the Buenos Aires branch of the Kellies empire (who knew that the plural had an "i"?) here. Las Kellies is an all-girl, post-punk outfit from Argentina...where they haven't gotten the word yet about the 20-year nostalgia cycle shifting to grunge from Gang of Four and still soldier on in the stark, sparse, syncopated style of early 1980s bands like Delta 5, ESG and the Slits. Anyway, there's a new album out called Total Exposure a bit slinkier, a bit less spiky, more dub, less jitter...but quite good. It's been out since mid-September, but I haven't seen a word about it anywhere. Shame.

This one has reggae great Dennis Bovell singing (he of Matumbi and a long-running partnership with Linton Kwesi Johnston).


This one is just the girls, but still heavily borrowing from dub/reggae etc. (Sounds like the Slits, dunnit?)


And this one, from the last album, just in case you didn't get the ESG connection.

Oneohtrix Point Never interview

I was just whining about how long this one was taking a couple of days ago...and now here it is. In my very humble, probably biased opinion, this is one of the best interviews I've done all year, mostly due to him, not me.

Anyway, check it out.


The Uncanny Effect of Being Almost Real: An Interview with Oneohtrix Point Never


By Jennifer Kelly 24 October 2013


A whistle. A church organ. A choir of angels. The album R Plus Seven is full of sounds that almost jive with real life experience, but which—on closer inspection—depart from the ordinary in subtle, unsettling ways.


“That uncanny effect of being almost real is a really uncomfortable and glorious state for me. I find it disturbing,” says Daniel Lopatin, who for the last half dozen years has recorded under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. His latest OPN album is, in some ways, his most grounded and homemade, built out of brief, mostly keyboard-based sounds, recorded at home, and approaching the structures of riff and melody. Yet it is also a deeply odd, somewhat disorienting piece of work, full of staccato, agitated motifs that overlap, contradict and interrupt one another, and woven through with the sound of inhuman voices, unreal instruments and not-quite-right rhythmic underpinnings.

“I wanted to make something that has a beautiful aspect but also a dread or unease. That reaches to be real and almost sentient, but then is not,” says Lopatin. “I felt like that was there already a lot of the time, but my job was to exaggerate that and characterize it even further.”

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The Herms

I'm not going to pretend I knew about the Herms when they were tearing it up in the Bay Area about a decade ago...I didn't. But John Dwyer from the Ohsees sure did, and now he's reissuing all their recordings on the retrospective Drop Out Volume 1...and it's amazing. Really. Sort of a cross between 39 Clocks and the Dirtbombs. I was listening to it a lot in Chicago, but I still don't have anything half as good to say about as Dwyer, who writes:

No one sounds like The Herms.

No one sounds like Matthew Lutz.

The Herms are a smudged window into a neighboring dimension to ours, Berkeley. Even though it’s right next door to Oakland and San Francisco, it may as well be a million musical-miles away. Back when they were playing around town, it felt to me like not too many in my scene “got” this band. I thought people should have been going crazy for these guys. The local rag gave them accolades (a curse perhaps?), and even a cursory listen to this collection should clue you in to how great they were. This may be one of the few times that I have to concur with a music writer – this band is amazing. They are sun, heartbreak, pop and fried-static all in one master package, evolving from song to song, and I think they’re fantastic.

The Herms did have a proper release years ago, but on CD only (gasp!) and frankly I’ve always been in love with these earlier, rawer 8 track Tascam demos. They sound like the band did when you were standing in front of them. I love The Herms and have been waiting a looooong time to do a proper release for them. Sorry it took exhuming their songs from the grave before I was ready. Please listen loudly with the windows open, so maybe that music writer may pass by, hear it and think, “Finally! I told you so, you assholes”.

John Dwyer 7-10-13