There's never been a voice quite like Alec Ounsworth's, one part slippery like a mud wrestler sliding around on himself, one part crunchy like rusted gears grinding to a halt. When I first heard his debut LP with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, his vocal style was so idiosyncratic that part of me thought he must be kidding. Then I realized how dead serious he was about songcraft. The two full-lengths CYHSY put out were simple post-rock at its finest, two-chord-based walls of sound, moving bass lines and Ounsworth's ridiculous howling soaring and ululating above it all. Lovely. Though the band hasn't made it clear whether the Clap Your Hands project has ended permanently or is just on hiatus, Ounsworth branched out this year with two releases on his own, one with a band called Flashy Python and one under his own name.
Released in October and recorded in New Orleans, Ounsworth makes it very clear that Mo Beauty isn't CYHSY and he doesn't want it to be. Leadoff "Modern Girl (With Scissors)" has certain things in common with Ounsworth's compositions as a member of CYHSY, yes. It's lyrically oblique; the melodies build upon themselves like layer cakes, each verse getting more topically specific as his voice rises higher and the tune winds tighter. "What Fun" and "Obscene Queen Bee #2" feature vocal lines that, characteristically for Ounsworth, rock back and forth like waves on a ripply pond. But the wall of sound is missing. Instead of a wash of guitar and bright keys and that glorious, kinetic bass, all the instrumentals have been provided by venerable New Orleans musicians. It's more like classic rock, more like jazz, more traditional. It's brass-heavy and masculine like a blues band, not shiny and euphoric like CYHSY...[Read more]
Blessed with one of the best leadoff tracks in recent history, replete with driving percussion and reverberating keys, Bear In Heaven’s sophomore full-length barrels into existence from a silence that never knew what it was missing. Sounding like the love child of Tears For Fears and Yeasayer (just listen to single “Lovesick Teenagers”), Beast Rest Forth Mouth stretches out wagging fingers in all the cardinal directions its name would obliquely suggest.
Led by Georgia native and Brooklyn resident Jon Philpot, Bear In Heaven recently congealed into a full-fledged four-piece after years of lineup changes and members’ relocations. The result is an album with hips, high heels tapping at 100 bpm, a throwback that, like recent luminaries such as M83, references new wave without keeling over into it...[Read more]
Hometown: Atlanta Band Members: Tauseef Anam (drums), Philip Frobos (bass, vocals), Nathaniel Higgins (guitar, vocals), Caitlin Lang (keys, vocals) Album:All Night Dead U.S.A. For Fans Of: Abe Vigoda, Black Lips, Yeah Yeah Yeahs With a jangly guitar lick and a far-off, echoing vocal line, Carnivores stealthily prowled into their hometown’s heart this summer via local college radio station WRAS. The song getting repeated plays, “A Crime,” sounded almost familiar but also brand new, a lo-fi, noisy punk take on a sunny surf jingle that veers for a too-brief moment into a tropical groove before coming to an abrupt end. It offered a view into some manic, nostalgic world, one where everything reads in second-person and problems can be danced away at either sock hops or in mosh pits.
It seemed like Carnivores snuck up from nowhere, claws bared, and strolled right into considerable local notoriety. But for the quartet, the journey has been long and any recognition they’ve received has been hard-earned. And if their scattered, precocious debut LP, All Night Dead U.S.A. (released locally in July on Atlanta startup Double Phantom Records) proved worth listening to over and over again, it’s because the band tried over and over again to make it so. All of them former members of another local group called Chainestereo, the four Carnivores reinvented themselves into their gloriously noisy current group in 2008, after a lineup change and a philosophy adjustment. “You know how you pay your dues and play all of those awful shows, and do the stuff that nobody wants to do, and build whatever it is that you have, locally?” says bassist Philip Frobos. “We did all that with [Chainestereo], and then once things made the transition, they were a little more exciting. It was like everybody was there waiting. It was good to go.”...[Read more]
Here's my (albeit HEAVILY edited) Artist of the Day piece on Pyramiddd (formerly Starfucker) for the Paste website! Josh Hodges turned out to be much more philosophical than I had expected, having seen the band live once before. He was thoughtful and forthcoming on the phone, which, sadly, is more than you get from a lot of artists.
As the dance-pop quartet recently re-dubbed Pyramidd knows, tossing the term “fucker” into your band name isn’t always the best idea. Until this fall, the foursome had called itself Starfucker, a name slapped on back when the band was just a drumming-only solo project for multi-instrumentalist Josh Hodges. By the time Hodges had unwittingly accumulated three bandmates and started touring, the name had stuck—but had started becoming a distraction, discouraging booking agents from Oregon to Japan. There was a certain amount of attachment to the name—it was what the band had been known as when it released its self-titled debut LP in 2008 and its follow-up EP, Jupiter, earlier this year—and he band didn’t want to betray itself or the people who had made its career possible so far.
But still. They were called Starfucker.
So in September the band invited invited fans to suggest new names, and in October finally settled on Pyramiddd as its new moniker. After playing the last Starfucker show on Halloween night, the band embarked on its first European tour in November, and plan to return to the U.S. to make a fresh start with its new name. Paste spoke to frontman Hodges about the Starfucker legacy, his plans for Pyramidd, and—unexpectedly—how Eastern philosophy makes for great dance music.
Paste: What have the last couple of years been like for you guys, going from not being known to being known on a national level? Josh Hodges: I think people think we’re a lot bigger than we actually are. We still play for like ten people in Nashville and places like that, you know? I don’t feel that much different—it’s just that we tour a lot. We’ve done like three national tours in the last two years. We’ve done three or four West Coast runs. It’s really fun, and it’s really disruptive to any kind of normal life (Laughs) that I would have in Portland—that all of us used to have in Portland. But it’s worth it...[Read more]
It's my first feature for Flagpole! And it's about a band whose record I really admire. I've written about them before; I did a review of Hospice for Atlanta Music Guide back in August. And tomorrow night, they'll be in Athens to play at the 40 Watt. Can't wait!
Once in a great while, a true concept album gets made. It doesn’t preach or pander; its narrative serves not as a crutch, but as a framework through which its creators explore actual, fallible emotion and musically ambitious composition. Sometimes, even, the expression of its theme isn’t so abstract as to be unrecognizable to the uninitiated (we’re looking at you, In The Aeroplane over the Sea).
So it is with Hospice, the breakthrough album from Brooklyn, NY’s taxidermically named The Antlers, a trio that this year suddenly turned a lot of horn-free heads. The band—frontman Peter Silberman, multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and percussionist Michael Lerner—self-released Hospice this March in their impatience to have it heard and, subsequently, sold out of it. “We ended up kind of in the deep end, the good side of that, with people wanting to buy it,” Cicci says. “We didn’t really have distribution, so we didn’t have a way of getting it to the record stores in L.A. or Toronto or anything like that.” Unwilling to wait months for a label to put out the album, it was Frenchkiss Records (founded by Les Savy Fav’s Syd Butler) that ultimately secured the rights to Hospice’s August re-issue, promising speed instead of complex, lengthy production cycles.
Bolstered by this new exposure, The Antlers have finally gotten the opportunity to let Hospice speak—or rather, wail—for itself. The album comprises nine movements, all with one-word names, chronicling the death of a loved one and the emotional fallout thereafter. Silberman’s voice breaks from full-feeling tenor into strangled, wrenching falsetto as he sings of pain, verbal abuse, hallucinations, grief and the surreality of it all. The band creates a sonic spectacle composed alternately of simple folk, shimmering ambient tones and fleeting anthems, notes dazzling, wobbling and fading out like the smoke after fireworks...[Read more]
With a dirty buzz and a watery echo on every vocal, Kurt Vile, Philly's self-proclaimed "Constant Hitmaker" has released his second LP of fuzzed-out noise pop, this time via Matador. It's the follow-up to his debut, uh, Constant Hitmaker, and it's the kind of music that's got both bile (that's "bile" with a B!) and beauty behind it even through the delayed stadium sound present on every track, from leadoff "Hunchback" onward. It's as if he sings from one second in the past and one second in the future, a startlingly effective way to lend an all-encompassing feel to what is ultimately a low-fi effort.
Despite the raunchy recording, Vile's songs are anything but gross. The record's brighter numbers, "Overnite Religion," "Blackberry Song" and the so-gorgeous-it's-not-fair "Heart Attack," are all punchy acoustic guitar and tambourine and pretty keys and unadulterated joy. Vile breaks into psychotic falsetto intermittently, sounding deliberately and charmingly insane through all the songs' washing layers. "Heart Attack," for me the album's standout, is a small song, if that makes sense; that is, it's only a surprising chord progression and a slurring vocal delivery away from being unremarkable, but that distance has suddenly become acres and it seems now impossible that it ever could've been ordinary...[Read more]
This was an awesome show. I could've gone on for pages about how much I enjoyed Carnivores and Kurt Vile. Fortunately, I'm getting a chance to write more about the former, and I'm sure the latter will return soon, having recently signed to Matador. (My review of Childish Prodigy will appear in this month's Stomp and Stammer.) ATL folks, if you haven't checked out Carnivores yet, please do! You won't be sorry.
[Above: Carnivores. Below: Kurt Vile, photo by Sarah McKay]
Carnivores are my new favorite local band. After rising from the ashes of the now-defunct Chainestereo, they’ve re-formed with renewed vigor and have plenty to show for it. Tuesday at 529, the group pulled about half the set from its surprisingly awesome debut LP, All Night Dead USA (released locally this July on Double Phantom Records), but the other half was newer material the band hasn’t yet recorded (or stuff I just didn’t recognize). Of the familiar numbers, “A Crime” of course stood out; it’s the quartet’s single, and it has the potential to endear them to anyone with an ear for retro pop and a heart for psych-punk.
Bassist Philip Frobos and guitarist Nathaniel Higgins alternate lead singing duties on most of the songs, but the real treat comes when keyboardist Caitlin Lang takes the mic, as she did for the set’s final selection. While the whole band exudes palpable charm (not to mention seemingly haphazardly executed skill), Lang’s unassuming attitude and blissfully violent delivery endear her the most. When mixed with Higgins’ echoed-out, ambient guitar tones, drummer Tauseef Anam’s grooving, manic drumming and Frobos’ kinetic, winning bass lines, Carnivores’ show becomes harder to pass up each time...[Read more]
James Husband, better known as Jamey Huggins from Of Montreal (and who’s played with loads of other bands, too), makes his solo debut with A Parallax I. It was recorded in three different studios by three different techniques over five years, and it sounds like it. The cassette-recorded tracks seem appropriately fuzzy and mellow, the all-analogue third of the record sounds as blended and optimistic as it should, and the digitally recorded numbers are as crisp and precise as Huggins’ layered, intricately timed arrangements require...[Read more]
It's weird, Spring Tigers totally share a member with Boulevard, the now-relocated band of my old co-worker Benjy at Copy Services at the UGA Library....I knew something about this record sounded familiar!
Lyrically, Athens’ Spring Tigers have claws. Throughout its debut “mini-LP,” the band explores matters more deeply than its almost manic sound would suggest, delving into themes like frustration, self-loathing and disillusionment with a humorous twist. “Stripmalls in the Sun,” for example, describes a shallow world that’s pretty, but not truly beautiful, perhaps drawing a parallel to the seriousness lurking just beneath these songs’ saccharine, dance-inducing post-pop surfaces.
Justin Vernon of Bon Iver has been pretty public about his love for experimental post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees. The band’s music is largely instrumental, frequently epic and, like so much music that can’t lean on vocals as an audience-catcher, depends on building tension based on pacing, volume and orchestration. It could be said that some of their arrangements are reminiscent of Bon Iver songs, but what’s more likely is that Vernon’s instrumental compositions have taken more than a few cues from Collections of Colonies of Bees. The group, which formed in 1998, probably provided much of the inspiration for the unshackled take on traditional modes that has made Bon Iver so remarkable. But rather than limit his affection to reference points in his own work, last fall Vernon teamed up with the five members of Bees (all fellow Wisconsinites) to make something entirely new—a group named Volcano Choir and an album called Unmap (out now).
Volcano Choir sounds like Bon Iver’s glitchier, more experimental cousin, happily mixing electronic trickery with post-rock prowess and traversing considerable sonic territory. From stacked-vocal-driven pieces (“Seeplymouth,” “Youlagy”) to modern spirituals (“Mbira In The Morass”), the album works some kind of haunting magic, one that isn’t afraid of its own strangeness. The baritone a-cappella-group-style backup singing of “Cool Knowledge,” for example, certainly departs from both bands’ charted territories. But these six musicians haven’t just wandered off the map—they’ve attempted to erase songwriting boundaries altogether, and their journey will likely be a long one. Paste recently spoke with Bees guitarist Chris Rosenau about the making of Unmap, writing songs backwards and the future of the new musical project.
Paste: Tell me about the birth of Volcano Choir. You guys have all been friends for a really long time, right? Chris Rosenau: Yeah, we met Justin and the guys from his previous band, DeYarmond Edison, in 2005. We had a mutual friend—a guy that’s actually in Collections of Colonies of Bees now, Thomas Wincek, who’s our Rhodes player. They were into a record that we had done and he just put us in touch with them. They asked us to come up to Eau Claire to play a show and we did, and just kind of hit it off. We ended up touring with DeYarmond a bunch throughout the Midwest, and then just obviously ended up staying in contact with all those guys, still. We’re still all really good friends.
The whole Volcano Choir thing came about really gradually and really slowly. Basically, the whole thing started when I had recorded some solo stuff right around that same time—it was a little bit before we actually met Justin. I had just written some stuff as a total experiment with no plans of ever doing anything with it, but I was always interested in the back of my mind in finding a vocalist that could add to it. The whole idea was writing some really stark, minimal-type pieces with no overdubs or anything like that, just an idea for a vocalist to kind of use as scaffolding for something. I had never done anything like that before. So I did those things and Jim Schoenecker from Bees and I were screwing around with them, but there was no plan, so they just kind of sat forever.
And then we met Justin, and at this point DeYarmond had disbanded. I don’t even remember how it came up, but at some point we were like, “Hey, we have all these weird tracks we never did anything with. Let’s send them to Justin and see what he can do with them,” because obviously we were in love with his voice and everything. He ended up doing some vocals on those songs, and sent them back with a note like, “Here’s some really rough stuff. Just see what you think. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.” He was really just playing around with it, and two of the songs actually ended up being on the final record. “Husks and Shells” was one of them, and “Mbira in the Morass” was one of them. Then it was interesting, because all of a sudden this stuff that was just lying around with no plan and no focus ended up being really exciting to everyone involved. We just did the same thing with most of the other songs, by email, adding to them. That was actually right around the time [Justin] was screwing around with really what he wanted to do with For Emma, you know, with the new approach he was taking with the vocal stuff. The earlier stuff for Volcano Choir kind of happened in parallel with all that...[Read more]
We usually reserve words like "polarizing" for things with moral gravity like political policy or public behavior. When applied to a Portland, Ore. psych-pop band like Nurses, such terms start to seem less applicable. But the trio's debut LP, Apple's Acre, is without a doubt one of those albums for which your ability to tolerate the sonic texture alone dictates completely whether you can like it or not, all discussions of content aside. I feel like you'd either have to love this album based on your first listen, or hate it.
See, the content is good. Sure, it might be influenced heavily by current indie pop movements (and by "movements" I mean Animal Collective or piano-based bands like White Rabbits). And yes, Aaron Chapman and John Bowers have voices that are unavoidably nasal. But for those that found such eccentricities charming in bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, these things shouldn't be insurmountable when endeavoring to enjoy what's underneath...[Read more]
There's a fine line between damaging for the sake of shock value – for effect – and just plain terrible. A band can affront its audience, like so many live musicians do, to involve them, to let out some aggression that's pivotal to the understanding of its music. A band can evoke disgust as a deliberate emotion from listeners. I get it. All that's fine, understandable and frequently enjoyable. (Unless it's AIDS Wolf that's doing it. I hate AIDS Wolf.)
But just on the other side of that line is a truly awful live performance, and sadly, that's what Wavves produced Sunday at The EARL. It was spectacularly bad. I couldn't tell you almost anything they played through the excruciating, incessant feedback that seemed to be actually drilling holes into the audience's innocent eardrums. I do know that I barely recognized a lot of the material from sophomore release Wavvves (three Vs versus the debut's two), out earlier this year, and that I was really pissed because I'd been excited to hear these songs. Sunday, I didn't hear them so much as wince through them. (And yeah, I did try earplugs. No dice. The muddy mix was bad – and the performers lackluster – with or without the murdering of my hearing's high range.)
So then the real issue is what a waste it was that Wavves sucked so hard. The tragedy, for me, was twofold:...[Read more]
(What's the most negative thing you've ever published? Anyone want to share links?)
How cute is too cute? Is there such a thing as just cute enough?
Seattle's Throw Me The Statue has made a career out of staying just this side of the line between winningly sweet and disgustingly saccharine. Their sophomore release Creaturesque is by no means all bounce, though the music can definitely be crisp, and often bright. Between skipping, upbeat numbers, Secretly Canadian's pop darlings insert a trembling, mellow, sun-downing piece like "Pistols," more gravity-bound than helium-filled. Everything, whether nostalgic (with an '80s throwback slant like "Cannibal Rays") or optimistic (like the fuzzy guitars in "Hi-Fi Goon") in feel, revolves around Scott Reitherman's slow, creamy drawl, the kind of voice that goes down easy...[Read more]
Also, can we take a second to appreciate the charm of these press photos? (The top one's called "Gearamid." Ha.) Photos courtesy of Secretly Canadian, by Trae Rhee.
Atlas Sound, the perhaps topographically-named solo project of Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, will release its second full-length (though certainly not second release) Oct. 20. Getting this album early was a real treat. Though a demo version leaked a while back (to much chagrin on Cox's part), it didn't do justice to the finished product, a disparate collection of songs that's as prodigal as it is pretty. Yay for ATL.
After floating blissfully into the solo arena with 2008’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel, Deerhunter's Bradford Cox has planted both feet on the ground with his second full-length as Atlas Sound. Not only have the spiraling ideas he recorded alone returned to Earth a bit for Logos, but he’s left his bedroom confines to rejoin the world.
Combinations define Logos, of people and of genres. "Walkabout," the result of Cox's lesson in song sampling from Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, is a collaborative powerhouse. Above thumping bass, sharp treble clicks dance with happy keys and both guys’ remarkably different voices. It’s one of those summer-y songs that evokes a sort of alt-pop euphoria few can match...[Read more]
If you can stand Spencer Krug's voice long enough to get through this whole album, then man, are you in for a treat. The solo recording project that has evolved into an honest-to-god band returns post-breakthrough with Dragonslayer, the follow-up to their 2007 release Random Spirit Lover. RSL was a leap forward for the band, compositionally, and while Dragonslayer demonstrates yet again the group's abilities with intelligent instrumentals and incisive lyricism, the critics don't seem to be falling over themselves with praise because it's nothing we didn't discover they could do last time.
Which isn't to say Sunset Rubdown isn't growing or that Dragonslayer isn't a phenomenal record. Maybe it's better as an under-the-radar list-topper. All the songs contain more than they seem to at first, and expand outward from their gorgeous, melody-driven centers. Meshing imaginative synth keys and the ever-present clean guitar riff around lyrics with sentiments that range from wry to romantic (fairy tales and classical mythology pop up all over) to just startlingly descriptive, Krug (Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes) and co. create a whole world you can just stroll right into – one that rhymes frequently, too. Take for an example this line from the almost tropical "Paper Lace": "There's nothing left inside the room you filled with lion skins and laurels. Those were good ideas, but they weren't diamonds and pearls." After the verse and chorus repeat a couple of times, it launches into a B-section à la Okkervil River that ups the nostalgia and stylistic punch before returning to the original theme. Though the structure isn't unique, it puts Sunset Rubdown in good company, reserving their spot among the best working in the modern songwriting tradition...[Read more]
Freelance music journalist/regular journalist/graphic designer for places like Paste Magazine, Stomp and Stammer, Athens Magazine and Atlanta Music Guide. Former resident of Athens, Ga.
