Fear of Arthropods

Record Review: Bon Iver - Bon Iver

2011-07-06T15:28:00.003-04:00

This is the most I've had to say about anything music-related in a long while. My crisis of rock critic faith may still be ongoing, but on this topic at least, I certainly know what I think. Many thanks to Stomp and Stammer, as always, for letting me say whatever the hell I want to.

(This album is good but absolutely doesn't deserve a 9.5, Pitchfork. Sigh. Chill out, already.)

Bon Iver
Bon Iver
[Jagjaguwar]

...What becomes apparent, though, when I put on my critical hat about it, is this: more than ever before, bands, the massive music PR engine that promotes their work and the critics that cover it are not separate, independent entities. They're symbiotic, and the very time-and-place-centric story that surrounded For Emma's release may have sunk in for Vernon and co. They can't create in a vacuum, and they don't....[Read more]

Thought: It's a strange thing to really care about--and be in some suspense about--the release of an album. Outside of Harry Potter, I've rarely been so curious about the forthcoming part of a serial of any kind. But musicians and their fans have different goals and different expectations. Who's to say if they'll ever see eye-to-eye?

Check out all the Bon Iver and Bon Iver-related gushing I've done over the years here.

Record Review: Royal Bangs - Flux Outside

2011-06-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer:

Royal Bangs
Flux Outside
[Glassnote]

Though perhaps no other moment on the record can equal the frenetic, harried energy of the leadoff track, Flux Outside, the third LP from Knoxville's Royal Bangs, barrels relentlessly straight through to its finish. "Grass Helmet," the aforementioned leadoff, peaks the record early with its stuttering percussion, screeching sound effects and emphatic vocals. It's a slap in the face of all navel-gazing, nonchalant delivery, and it's one the trio performs without faltering. We'll be spent before they are....[Read more]

Record Review: Eksi Ekso - Brown Shark Red Lion

2011-06-13T15:07:00.003-04:00

For Flagpole:

Eksi Ekso
Brown Shark Red Lion
The Mylene Sheath

The storm is coming. Boston’s Eksi Ekso tells us so. Via backing brass and all manner of accompanying strings, the keys, guitar, bass and drums of this orchestral pop trio turn their individual songs into lush, suspenseful compositions. This wide scope, both stylistically and instrumentally, only adds to Brown Shark Red Lion’s foreboding. When voices foretell en masse of impending danger, they’ve likely got more credibility than a single harbinger alone...[Read more]

Flagpole Feature: Ocha la Rocha

2011-06-13T14:52:00.002-04:00

For Flagpole:

Ocha la Rocha
30-Plus Members and Just as Many TV Spots

It’s a far cry from working and playing at Atlanta’s Star Community Bar to having songs appear on Hollywood television shows like ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money” and MTV’s “The Hills.” Somehow, however, Johnny la Rocha and his band Ocha la Rocha seem to be at home doing both...[Read more]

Record Review: Secret Cities - Strange Hearts

2011-06-13T14:16:00.005-04:00

In which I for some reason lead with more talk of chicken fillets. For Creative Loafing Atlanta:

Secret Cities - Strange Hearts

Sometimes a mallet can do more than beat chicken fillets into submission. Occasionally, it's the essential ingredient in an already-virtuosic experimental psych-pop band's rhythmic impact. Fargo, N.D.'s Secret Cities uses mallets to complement the dual lead-vocal duties deftly executed by Charlie Gokey and MJ Parker...[Read more]

As I've previously mentioned, Secret Cities is one of my absolute favorite bands. This sophomore record they put out a couple months ago is one of my favorites of the year, even if it bears some striking differences from the debut. What's more, their live performance when they passed through Atlanta a few months back was spectacular. They're so immensely talented, and also extremely sweet people.

Shorty after I heard the band play live, I was able to conduct an interview and write this feature for Paste, which I just realized I never posted here. This one does them much better justice, too:

Best of What's Next: Secret Cities

North Dakota’s Secret Cities will combat their home’s blustery weather this month with a sophomore record as warm as it is wry. Born of a chance band camp meeting, the two bewitching lead vocalists and drummer have already morphed many times in their young careers.

“We’re a bunch of dorks that found each other in very dorky ways and started making music in very dorky ways,” jokes singer/multi-instrumentalist Charlie Gokey, who started the band with singer/keyboardist Marie Parker when they were just 15. “Now we’re not dorky anymore. We can pretend easier now.”...[Read more]

Happy listening!!

Record Review: Peter Bjorn and John - Gimme Some

2011-04-18T15:20:00.003-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Peter Bjorn and John
Gimme Some
Almost Gold

Gimme Some is perhaps one of the sunniest records of the year, but Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John took a strange, twisty road to get here. This, the band’s sixth LP, is a far cry from the weird hollowness and intimately narrative lyrics found on their 2006 U.S. breakthrough Writer’s Block. That set of songs still resonates in XM Radio annals and every comfy coffee shop – especially the whistling, ubiquitous single “Young Folks” featuring The Concretes’ Victoria Bergsman. The band’s intervening two albums (2008’s Seaside Rock and 2009’s Living Thing) reveal something of its stylistic journey over the past five years as Peter Morén, BjörnYttling and John Eriksson traversed various inroads of pop experimentalism. With Gimme Some, however, it’s obvious they’ve emerged in the bright light after their creative tunnel...[Read more]

Record Review: Akron/Family - S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT

2011-04-13T13:52:00.001-04:00

For Flagpole:

Akron/Family
S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT
Dead Oceans

At what point does lack of identity become an identity in and of itself? Akron/Family, the now-trio sometimes called the only hipster-friendly jam band, has undergone multiple personality changes, each record revealing a new layer in their fragrant musical onion...[Read more]

Previously, on FOA: Akron/Family @ The Earl, 8/13/09

Flagpole Feature: Pride Parade

2011-04-12T13:47:00.003-04:00

For Flagpole:

Pride Parade
Growing Without Growing Up

Even big kids need room to grow. After five years as a band—scrapping predecessor Brown Frown, releasing an EP and two LPs with Kyle Spence of Harvey Milk and playing to Athens audiences large and small—Pride Parade needed to stretch out.

To record the band’s third full-length with the hope of reproducing the effect of its widely adored live show, the quintet retreated to Watkinsville’s Full Moon Studio and, with the help of Jay Rodgers, simultaneously tracked all instruments in the expansive room there. “We wanted [the recording] to be something we didn't have to go in and piecemeal,” says guitarist Allen Owens. “We just rehearsed our asses off and made sure we went in there and played the stuff like we play it live.”...[Read more]

Record Review: Lia Ices - Grown Unknown

2011-04-11T17:03:00.003-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer a couple months back:

Lia Ices
Grown Unknown
Jagjaguwar

I never thought I'd actively think about Paula Cole again. When she stopped wondering where all the cowboys had gone – when I grew out of my teenage obsession with a certain Mr. Dawson Leery – I thought Paula and I were through. And though, admittedly, I'm not one to seek out the female singer-songwriter over other musician types, I heard my fill of others like her in the intervening dozen or so years, and barring Natalie Merchant, no one drove me to recall her.

But whenever the double-tracked vocals on sections of Lia Ices' Grown Unknown kick in, I'm back in my bedroom, wishing a Dawson would climb a ladder into my window...[Read more]

Record Review: Tapes 'n Tapes - Outside

2011-01-11T21:44:00.007-05:00

"In which I write a record review while obviously hungry" or "Tapes n tapes n tapes n tapes...."

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Tapes 'n Tapes
Outside
Ibid

I like bar food. I like veggie burgers and fries and the occasional (okay, extremely frequent) plate of nachos. I like feeling that when I go somewhere for such food, I can show up looking however I please, that no visual or behavioral state of being (barring unruly and destructive) will be frowned upon.

In 2005, Minneapolis’ Tapes ’n Tapes released a record I consumed like bar food — ravenously, insatiably, uninhibited...[Read more]

Tiny Mix Tapes' 50 Favorite Albums of 2010

2011-01-11T21:44:00.003-05:00

I feel so privileged to have contributed to Tiny Mix Tapes for the duration of 2010, and weighing in on their best albums of the year was just the icing on the cake. Some of the top 25 albums I voted for made their cut, some didn't, but by asking me to write about TMT's #14 choice, the editors gave me a second stab at a review I thought I could've done better.

Read the whole 50-item feature here.

See the page with selections 20-11 to read my blurb about #14, Women's Public Strain:

"...Public Strain, like their self-titled debut, was a tactile album, one to be felt like someone unseeing recognizes a face, complete with all the relief found in that face's familiarity."

That full review can be found here.

For the record, here's the stuff I voted for, though I gotta say I lack conviction on a lot of it:

25. Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
24. Beach House - Teen Dream
23. Phosphorescent - Here's To Taking It Easy
22. Owen Pallet - Heartland
21.Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be
20. Future Islands - In Evening Air
19. Mount Eerie - Song Islands vol. 2
18. Megafaun - Heretofore
17. The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
16. Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band - Where The Messengers Meet
15. Kurt Vile - Square Shells EP
14. Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts
13. Abe Vigoda - Crush
12. Friendo - Cold Toads
11. Wolf People - Tidings
10. The Harvey Girls - I've Been Watching A Lot of Horror Movies Lately
9. Carnivores - If I'm Ancient
8. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
6. Yeasayer - Odd Blood
5. No Age - Everything In Between
4. The National - High Violet
3. Secret Cities - Pink Graffiti
2. The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt
1. Women - Public Strain

Big Boi shoulda totally been on there....

FOAVOD: Sam Prekop - The Silhouettes

2010-12-20T17:06:00.003-05:00

Today's FOA Video of the Day comes from Thrill Jockey artist Sam Prekop. This killer video (cute anthropomorphized blobs having adventures to celestial electro music) was directed by Jordan Kim of Yo Gabba Gabba fame. Tearfully adorable and annoyingly uplifting:

Sam Prekop - The Silhouettes from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Bazookaluca Podcast: Best of 2010

2010-12-20T16:16:00.002-05:00

Want to hear two people chatter excitedly (jadedly, ruefully, hopefully, gloriously) about the year in music? FOR AN HOUR?! That's what I thought you said!

My dear friend Luca invited me to be his guest for the second installment of the Bazookaluca Podcast! We discuss our respective best-of-the-year recommendations in music and go on plenty of tangents. He even did a great job cutting in the tracks we talked about! It's amazing.

CLICK HERE to listen to it streaming on the website.
CLICK HERE to listen to it free via iTunes. (Subscribe...you know you want to.)

Also, see Luca's staggering Best of 2010 Megalist for GIFs of Christina Hendricks' boobies and corgis. Oh! And a TON of music, film, TV, etc. He's the hardest-working man in showbiz, folks.

Metal/Flute!

2010-12-15T10:00:00.002-05:00

So my dear boys in Lazer/Wulf asked me to recreate the brief guest spot I did with them on the song "Who Were The Mound Builders?" when they recorded their spectacular The Void That Isn't a couple years back. For their great return-to-playing-live-in-Athens show at Caledonia December 4, I brought my flute and waited beside the stage until the last song. I wondered why my mouth had gone so dry and I wished my beer wasn't gone. Then it was time. And I played. And then it was over.

The thing about the internet, though, is that even the most fleeting, out-of-body-type experiences don't necessarily have to stay that way. Someone could very likely be there to capture the moment and preserve it for all eternity. Someone like Sloan Simpson and Mike White, of Southern Shelter and Deadly Designs, respectively.

At Southern Shelter, you can listen to (and download for free) an MP3 of my flirtation with metal glory (It's track 4). You can also watch a video/audio synch of the Wulves' newest performable creation, "There Was A Hole Here (It's Gone Now)," which has been stuck in my head for three days. Matter of fact, here that is:

As always, I've written about L/W here on FOA before. Here it go.

But I'm not the only one. Flagpole's done a great job of plugging the deserving, and they ran a feature the week before the show, for which I had the honor of taking this picture, as well as several others (which I hope will soon, ridiculously, see the light of day):

Now, that was fun. I do worry about the poor recycling worker who had to clean raw ground beef off of all those cardboard boxes...sorry man, my mistake...

Of course, Flagpole's talked about Lazer/Wulf plenty of times, as well. How could you not?

Lazer/Wulf on the Facebook!

Flagpole Calendar Pick: Bridges and Powerlines

2010-12-14T13:39:00.002-05:00

This is a little out of date, but here's the mini-feature I wrote on Bridges and Powerlines for Flagpole Magazine:

Bridges and Powerlines

New York’s Bridges and Powerlines share more aesthetically with composer John Philip Sousa than anyone would have expected—especially them. After producing a debut LP driven by shiny keyboard melodies, the quartet has blossomed into a band that makes near-marches. The tunes feature sweeping arrangements that, though still pop-driven and lyrically balladeering, explore frontlines unlike any the band has approached before...[Read more]

Record Review: Wolf People - Steeple

2010-12-14T13:21:00.003-05:00

One of the now-rare pieces I've written for TMT of late. Hopefully more will follow.

I wrote about Wolf People's singles compilation release Tidings earlier release this year here.)

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Wolf People
Steeple
Jagjaguwar

...Completely devoid of the ADHD that made Tidings so charming, Steeple instead errs on the side of monotony, the whole thing sticking firmly to its take on authentic psychedelia. Without declaring the record totally unvarying, though, I’d instead assert that it feels more complete but less passionately (naïvely?) hopeful than Tidings did. Like a bright-eyed recent graduate, Tidings went in every direction at once, envisioning endless possibilities. Wolf People, as the freshly diploma'd will do, picked a direction and went with it. They selected an eventuality from the infinite potentials they hinted at on Tidings and worked on it, honed it into a whole, fully-realized work of art. Steeple is competent and very obviously displays hard-earned skill, but it’s a little sad to think about all the directions they didn’t go, all the roads they didn’t take....[Read more]

Record Review: Carnivores - If I'm Ancient

2010-11-15T22:59:00.003-05:00

Love me some Carnivores, as we well know! I think this is my fourth time formally writing about them? No matter! They have a new record out, and it's brilliant. Still officially my favorite Atlanta band. ATL represent!

For Flagpole:

Carnivores
If I'm Ancient
Double Phantom

The name If I’m Ancient deliberately misleads. The grammatically conditional title of this sophomore record from Atlanta’s Carnivores, who, incidentally, are far from aged themselves, communicates a tentativeness the band seems wholly without. Appropriate, perhaps, that a group so committed to pop disguised deftly beneath layers of psych-punk anarchy fools us yet again. Pleasant deception is what it's best at...[Read more]

(As a side note, hearing some of these songs pre-mastering and then in their finished form really gives an extra level of admiration to the whole thing. THUMBS UP.)

Record Review: Women - Public Strain

2010-10-22T18:21:00.004-04:00

One of the best of 2010!! Women rules, for sure. Or is it "Women rule"...? For sure.

Women
Public Strain
Jagjaguwar

Women’s 2008 self-titled debut is one of my favorite records. As with many loves, however, it's difficult to tell you why, exactly. When I first laid ears on it, I thought it was the prettiest ugly thing, interlocking detuned guitar riffs and swaths of wide-lens noise and all. The music was as warm through all its tearing and wrinkling as I imaged the band’s Canadian home was chilly. It felt three-dimensional, like fingers on a relief map — then like the map had rolled up and was trying to asphyxiate me. I always ended the album’s journey slack-jawed and a little out of breath...[Read more]

[MP3] Women - "Eyesore" (via Jagjaguwar)

Record Review: Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed

2010-10-22T18:05:00.003-04:00

Joining the ranks of bands I've written about too many times but can't help myself is Brooklyn's Bear In Heaven. I was able to talk up their re-release of 2009's Beast Rest Forth Mouth (with a remix record) for Tiny Mix Tapes' Delorean blog.

Here it goes:

2009: Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed

Although I recognize the necessity of re-releasing previously self-released records when artists get signed or get big, as someone who’s job it is to give a crap about when exactly an album came out, it can be a little annoying to deal with these discrepancies. Bear In Heaven’s move to re-release their breakthrough record Beast Rest Forth Mouth (like the cardinal directions “East West North South,” geddit?) a little under a year after its original road to acclaim, is an understandable one; the Hometapes label can rake in more cash while the Brooklyn-via-Georgia-and-Alabama band gets to up the quality of the LP they’re selling at merch tables and record stores across the world...[Read more]

Read up on all the other FOA Bear In Heaven content here!

Flagpole Feature: Frightened Rabbit

2010-10-22T14:38:00.003-04:00

In which I get to call Scotland from my cell phone in my car on my first day at a new job!

Flagpole feature:

Frightened Rabbit's Winter of Mixed Drinks
Are They Half Empty or Half Full?

Scott Hutchison is probably an optimist. Listening to The Winter of Mixed Drinks, however, his band Frightened Rabbit’s third studio album, sometimes it’s hard to tell...[Read more]

Record Review: Abe Vigoda - Crush

2010-09-28T08:51:00.002-04:00

A record review almost entirely inspired by that '90s theme party we threw a while back...

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Abe Vigoda
Crush
PPM

As 80s nostalgia has melted into 90s nostalgia with the concluding aughts, some parts of pop music (especially indie pop) have perhaps unsurprisingly slid what’s retro forward, dwelling no longer on the 60s and 70s (revisited psychedelia, disco), but on the 80s, an era that now concluded nearly 20 years ago. Granted, there’ve always been synthesizers. In some circles, the indispensability of the artificial, of the 4/4 dance beat, was never called into question — night clubs and dance pop have always needed the non-acoustic to survive. But even as theme-party attendees have abandoned their sweatbands and side-ponytails for flannel and combat boots, the center-of-the-road alt-pop band has looked to those fads’ temporal predecessors for inspiration. (See: Yeasayer’s Odd Blood, Bear In Heaven’s Beast Rest Forth Mouth, M83’s Saturdays=Youth, etc.)

Enter Abe Vigoda, a Los Angeles quartet up to this point declared by itself and others a “tropical punk” band (and one possessed of perhaps my favorite ridiculous name)...[Read more]

Live Review: Jimmy Eat World @ Center Stage, September 21

2010-09-28T08:39:00.004-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

(Photo courtesy of Luca)

Live Review: Jimmy Eat World at Center Stage, September 21

As unseasonably hot inside the venue as the month of September has been outside, Jimmy Eat World frontman Jim Adkins took the stage and within a song had soaked through more than half of his shirt. Before long, the sweat started flying off the tips of his hair, and coupled with epic smoke-machine-meets-stage-lights effects, it felt like the pure essence of rock ‘n’ roll...[Read more]

Flagpole Calendar Pick: Agent Ribbons

2010-09-24T11:25:00.004-04:00

This is a very cool record from a very cool band. Highly recommended! Playing tonight at Caledonia in Athens.

For Flagpole:

Calendar Pick: Agent Ribbons
w/ Cars Can Be Blue, Dusty Lightswitch, Laminated Cat
Friday, Sept. 24 @ Caledonia Lounge

With a frilly cowgirl dress for sale on Modcloth.com inspired by their music, and a whole country’s worth of road under their belts, the three women of Agent Ribbons prove both more feminine and more forceful than your average group.

Their sophomore record Chateau Crone will be released via Antenna Farm Records on Oct. 12, and it covers a lot of road—from American doo-wop- or surf-influenced ditties to Eastern European-emulating ballads...[Read more]

Record Review: Megafaun - Heretofore

2010-09-17T10:02:00.003-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Megafaun
Heretofore
Hometapes

When I interviewed Megafaun’s Phil Cook in April, the band had just written and recorded Heretofore within the space of six weeks. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an unmastered version of the short LP, and even in that raw-ish form, their grounding in “roots music” — the one that somehow incorporated their high school jazz band beginnings with a love of folk and bluegrass — mixed as obviously as ever with a commitment to pushing boundaries. Cook spoke about the balance between tradition and experimentation, the trust between the band’s members, and winning people over by not taking themselves too seriously...[Read more]

I've written about Megafaun before!

Live Review: Crystal Castles @ The Masquerade, September 8

2010-09-17T09:57:00.004-04:00

One of the sweatiest shows I've ever attended...

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Live Review: Crystal Castles @ The Masquerade, September 8

As the floor shook steadily underfoot 50 feet back from the stage upstairs at the Masquerade, the crowd got restless. The room was filled with a seething mass of older teens and younger 20-somethings; a full hour had elapsed since Bear In Heaven’s abnormally early set concluded (much to my disappointment) and people were beginning to get antsy...[Read more]

(Photo by Ben Grad via AMG.)

Record Review: Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

2010-09-13T11:10:00.004-04:00

For Flagpole:

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse
Dark Night of the Soul
Capitol

Dark Night of the Soul almost never saw the light of day. The release of the collaborative record between late Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous and former Athens resident Danger Mouse (AKA Brian Burton) was delayed more than a year by Burton’s legal battle with EMI and Linkous’ untimely death. In 2009, the extensive David Lynch-furnished accompanying picture book was put out along with a blank CD, but July 14 marked the first time the record itself saw proper release...[Read more]

Record Review: Efren - Always Been A Bleeder

2010-09-13T11:04:00.002-04:00

For Flagpole:

Efren
Always Been A Bleeder
Slo Pro

In a quiet eddy where gothic Americana, psychedelia and straight-up country swirl together, Scott Leon-O’Day of local band Efren sits holding a guitar. Armed with only his breathy voice, he sings of the hand he’s been dealt (“Check It Down”) and watches the brackish waters, at times assisted by a trio of instrumentalists...[Read more]

Record Review: Oryx & Crake - Oryx & Crake

2010-08-24T10:47:00.003-04:00

Oryx & Crake is an nine-person Atlanta music collective made up of SCAD grads and English teachers, parents and friends. They celebrate their record release this Saturday at The Earl with Venice Is Sinking and Book of Colors.

For Stomp and Stammer:

Oryx & Crake
Oryx & Crake
Self-released

Is there such a thing as quietly epic? Caught somewhere in the twilight in-between that isn't quite post-rock and isn't quite folk and isn't quite pop, Oryx & Crake's self-titled debut album at times revisits the waves of tinny sound that populated the years of '90s alternative while paddling its feet in the wading pools of orchestral rock and experimental electronica...[Read more]

Visit their website for songs.

Also, check this out.

Record Review: Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band - Where The Messengers Meet

2010-08-10T20:48:00.003-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band
Where The Messengers Meet
Dead Oceans

We all know the saying about what happens when you assume. And we also know that a band’s name usually has little to do with its sound or its genre (see: Conifer). But Ben Verdoes and his Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band seemed to uninitiated ears to promise something either ramshackle or violent or both, a troupe of minstrels preaching peace and protest or waging nothing less than sonic war.

Neither is true....[Read more]

[MP3] Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band - "Hurrah" (via Dead Oceans)

Record Review: The Harvey Girls - I've Been Watching a Lot of Horror Movies Lately

2010-08-03T23:18:00.002-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

The Harvey Girls
I've Been Watching a Lot of Horror Movies Lately
Circle Into Square

I’ve Been Watching a Lot of Horror Movies Lately needs to see a psychiatrist. Rarely does a record possess such clearly split personalities, and even less often does one do it so successfully. In fact, never mind. Let’s leave it unmedicated.

The Harvey Girls, a Portland husband-and-wife duo that shares its name with a 1946 Judy Garland film based on a book by Samuel Hopkins Adams, do so much more than two people reasonably should. Melissa Rodenbeek and Hiram Lucke infuse each of the album’s nine songs with their own personality, one that may or may not make any sense whatsoever in the album's context.

Fortunately, all of Horror’s songs play well with others...[Read more]

Record Review: Wovenhand - The Threshingfloor

2010-07-24T16:28:00.002-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Wovenhand
The Threshingfloor
Sounds Familyre

Gimmickry of any kind will only go so far. Colorado resident and ex-16 Horsepower front man David Eugene Edwards’ Wovenhand returns for its seventh (!) record, the follow-up to 2008’s widely-lauded Ten Stones, with an exploration of a different ethnomusical palette, and it’s one that paints an ambivalent picture. Whereas Ten Stones explored the sounds of middle America — one of mile-high mountains and masculine morality — with an admirable clarity, The Threshingfloor takes up the instruments of Europe and the Middle East, and in the process muddles itself a little...[Read more]

Record Review: Secret Cities - Pink Graffiti

2010-07-14T19:37:00.003-04:00

Guys. This album is magnificent. Go pick it up.

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Secret Cities
Pink Graffiti
Western Vinyl

Dear Secret Cities,

I know you're all comfortable returning to your Fargo, North Dakota home and stuff, but let me ask you an urgent question real quick. Can you please, PLEASE pull an about-face and come back to Atlanta, Georgia? See, today I discovered Pink Graffiti, your debut album (as Secret Cities, that is, not as Parker and Gokay or as The White Foliage). I mean, it only came out like a month ago, right? I'm not that far behind. And when I heard it, when I realized how magnificent I thought it was, I went and looked you up. That's when I learned you were here in Atlanta two weeks ago, and I didn't know. Goddamnit...[Read more]

Record Review: Horse Feathers - Thistled Spring

2010-06-24T14:24:00.004-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Horse Feathers
Thistled Spring
Kill Rock Stars

Horses don’t have feathers. Duh. The name is a deliberate contradiction, much like a string quartet that plays rock music. But unlike the characters in the Marx Brothers movie that shares its name, the band called Horse Feathers doesn’t fumble around; their performance isn’t a comedy of errors.

Unfortunately, it’s the very fact that every action is so studied — that it’s so beautifully orchestrated and meticulously performed — that robs Thistled Spring, the third full-length from the Portland, Oregon four-piece (their second for Kill Rock Stars), of its hook. No smash-and-grab antics or dramatic football finales for Justin Ringle’s Horse Feathers. It’s stark and gorgeous, yes, a mashup of romantic string arrangements and melodic keys and emotive guitar and gloomy vocals. But entire swathes of the album run together; though it’s very pleasantly atmospheric, each song has trouble standing out from the blended timbre of the record as a whole...[Read more]

Flagpole Feature: Venice Is Sinking

2010-06-16T15:31:00.004-04:00

Flagpole Feature:

Venice Is Sinking's Sand & Lines
Featuring Special Guest, The Georgia Theatre

When smoke rose above the Georgia Theatre on June 19, 2009, Venice Is Sinking didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t just that they stood to lose a favorite place, somewhere they’d performed dozens of times and whose owner, Wilmot Greene, had always welcomed them warmly. It was that only the week before, the band had begun a Kickstarter.com campaign to raise the money for the pressing of Sand & Lines, the group's third LP, recorded over the course of four days in that very building (out June 15 via One Percent Press).

“We all felt really close to the Theatre because we had spent so much time there,” says vocalist and viola player Karolyn Troupe. “It was a loss for the town, but it was also a personal loss for us.”...[Read more]

I was lucky to be able to run the remnants of the interview on Creative Loafing Atlanta's Crib Notes Blog:

Venice Is Sinking talk Sand & Lines and rising above

Today, a year to the week after the Georgia Theatre in Athens was gutted by fire, the town’s native dream pop quintet Venice Is Sinking release Sand & Lines, the album they recorded in it. Produced by Athens’ prolific David Barbe, it’s an LP recorded wholly live on two microphones suspended above the theatre’s stage, and in light of the building’s fate, has become a de-facto historical document of what it once sounded like. Beyond that, it’s a watershed moment for VIS, whose previous studio recordings were painstakingly scalpeled into place over the course of many months. Sand & Lines, conversely, was recorded and wrapped in a week, features three covers and demonstrates the group’s ability, with the help of a slew of local friends, to cut loose.

I joined them at guitarist and vocalist Daniel Lawson’s home on the last day of May to talk about the album, the Theatre and their musical town over a table of tacos. Then we went and shot a BB gun in the backyard....[Read more]

Record Review: Here We Go Magic - Pigeons

2010-06-14T15:41:00.003-04:00

Last year, I interviewed Luke Temple for Stomp and Stammer about his self-titled Here We Go Magic debut. It never made it to the web (it ran in print only), but we talked a lot about his commitment to analog recording and what it means to suddenly have four talented bandmates when he'd been a solo musician for so long. He was thoughtful and serious, and seemed more than anything to believe in music itself, in the way that's so thorough that it sounds almost casual. I loved Here We Go Magic, so when I got a promo of sophomore release Pigeons in my mailbox, I was thrilled. In the end, though, I was left feeling ambivalent. (I decided on a 3 1/2 out of 5 rating because it's still better than a lot of what gets released, I guess. I don't know what to think.)

Here's like 800 words I wrote about it for Tiny Mix Tapes:

Here We Go Magic
Pigeons
Secretly Canadian

Remember those Claritin commercials? You know the ones. There’s some spokeswoman in the middle of a green, green field holding a tennis racket or other athletic device and rubbing her allergic eyeballs. Then they pull a layer of something saran-wrap-like up from one corner of the screen and suddenly everything’s the kind of vivid bright you didn’t know to expect, because until they removed the film, the slightly hazier version looked pretty normal. Nice, even, because once the gauze has been removed, you seem to need sunglasses — everything’s a little too blinding.

After adoring, worshiping, wanting to physically hug Luke Temple’s first, nearly-solo 2009 release as Here We Go Magic (self-titled, via Western Vinyl), listening to this sophomore, full-band effort feels much the same as blinking in the suddenly too-crisp glare of a Claritin commercial...[Read more]

[MP3] Here We Go Magic - "Collector" (via Secretly Canadian)

Flagpole Feature: Broken Bells

2010-06-09T16:46:00.004-04:00

In which I talk on the phone with Danger Mouse from the inside of a hot car:

For Flagpole:

Broken Bells
An Unlikely Pairing Breeds Unlimited Creativity

In 1995 world-famous producer Danger Mouse wasn’t yet called Danger Mouse. He hadn’t collaborated with the likes of MF DOOM (to form DANGERDOOM), Gorillaz, Beck, Cee-Lo Green (to form Gnarls Barkley) and many more. He hadn’t moved to London to explore his craft, and it would be years before he was on every musician’s A-list. Back then, Danger Mouse went by his given name, Brian Burton, and was a freshman studying film at UGA and living in Athens. Though he considered himself an artist, he had never made music any substantial way...[Read more]

Record Review: Friendo - Cold Toads

2010-06-05T18:47:00.004-04:00

Friendo is coming! One of my favorite offbeat records of the year, Cold Toads is small but brilliant, all atonal and warped and infectious (out on St. Ives, a subsidiary of Secretly Canadian). Friendo is the side project of Michael Wallace of my favorite favorite favorite Canadian band Women. (Here's the review I wrote of their self-titled debut.) Friendo is a trio, and all three members are playing different instruments in this band than they have in previous groups. Wallace is usually a drummer...

Come see them with me when they come to the Drunken Unicorn this Tuesday, June 8!

For Creative Loafing Atlanta:

Friendo
Cold Toads
St. Ives

If charming, deliberately detuned guitars make a first case for Cold Toads — the debut LP from Canadian trio Friendo — the moving instrumental parts deftly intertwined with buried vocals second them loudly....[Read more]

Listen to Friendo's "Callers" via HypeM.

Record Review: Kurt Vile - Square Shells EP

2010-06-01T10:40:00.004-04:00

For those of us who await every Kurt Vile release with baited breath...

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Kurt Vile
Square Shells [EP]
Matador

With a collection of seven songs, Philadelphia's Kurt Vile reemerges after his triumphant 2009 Matador debut Childish Prodigy. The EP serves as a stopgap between full-length releases, and while it’s an apt rehashing of maybe three of the four styles of songcraft Vile has incontrovertibly mastered, it doesn’t boast the variety and punch of either of his previous two LPs, Childish Prodigy and 2008’s Woodsist/Gulcher Records release Constant Hitmaker.

The Vile style missing from Square Shells seems to be the one best explored with his backing band The Violators, as in the rollicking, testosterone-laden rompers like Childish Prodigy’s “Freak Train.”...[Read more]

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate the sousaphone cover art?

Listen to "Invisibility: Nonexistent" (via HypeM)

Hey, check out the other FOA Kurt Vile coverage:

Record Review: Kurt Vile - Childish Prodigy

Live Review: Kurt Vile and the Violators, Lovvers, Carnivores @ 529 11/3/09

Record Review: Night Driving In Small Towns - Serial Killer

2010-05-20T09:33:00.004-04:00

For Flagpole:

Night Driving In Small Towns
Serial Killer
Lower 40

Nodding to every seminal and referential pop band from Headlights and Architecture in Helsinki to Mazzy Star and even Belle and Sebastian, Serial Killer, the debut LP from Atlanta group Night Driving in Small Towns, capitalizes on the mild-mannered example put forward by artists like Azure Ray and Eux Autres...[Read more]

Record Review: Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts

2010-05-16T14:10:00.004-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Male Bonding
Nothing Hurts
Sub Pop

...Maybe it’s Male Bonding’s very embrace of the bands that surround them that gives them whatever unique character they have. The record’s echoing final track, “Worst to Come,” even features beautiful, sweeping backing vocals from Vivian Girls; they’ve created a family of noisy little bands that have joined together in their commitment to the best and the brightest short songs — they’re miniatures as part of a greater mural.

And Nothing Hurts doubtless paints a vivid picture, full of Technicolor, which I suppose is why I’m such a sucker for bands that sound like Male Bonding. From bright, interlocking guitar riffs, to kinetic bass, to the kind of drumming that’s almost giggle-worthy for all its slanted attempts at toughness (just listen to the intentionally silly cowbell in “TUFF”), its fuzz flurries together so happily!...[Read more]

[MP3] Male Bonding - "Franklin" (via Sub Pop)

Record Review: Phosphorescent - Here's To Taking It Easy

2010-05-15T16:17:00.004-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Phosphorescent
Here's To Taking It Easy
Dead Oceans

I guess it’s ironic that the first song on Here’s To Taking It Easy filled me with dread. It wasn’t that it’s not a good song — “It’s Hard To Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)” actually packs quite a punch — it was that Matthew Houck seemed so thoroughly to have abandoned that woozy, otherworldly echo that characterized his most recent record of original material, 2007’s immaculate Pride. That album meant so much to me — the thundering cadence of “At Death, A Proclamation” seemed literally taken from my own experience (it features a field recording done of my own college marching band’s drumline) — that the idea of an artist, even one I loved so much, moving on from that compositional place was a scary one, however relaxed the album’s name might be...[Read more]

[MP3] Phosphorescent - "It's Hard To Be Humble (When You're From Alabama)" (via Dead Oceans)

Read other FOA posts about Phosphorescent here.

Record Review: The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt

2010-05-04T14:52:00.004-04:00

Ah, he was wonderful live...

For Stomp and Stammer:

The Tallest Man On Earth
The Wild Hunt
Dead Oceans

...And that's the moment, too, when Matsson's Swedishness becomes really surprising; because in his singing about "salvation" and "white knuckles on a wheel," in his detailing of how the highway makes him think about God, he sounds so quintessentially American – or at least the kind of American dudes with guitars have always told us exists but that we've never quite seen – that it's unbelievable to learn he grew up a whole ocean away from our endless roads and rolling fields....[Read more]

[Mp3] The Tallest Man On Earth - "King Of Spain"

This has been a fascinating one for reading other writers' opinions:
Pitchfork (Stephen M. Deusner)
Tiny Mix Tapes (Gabe Vodicka)

Everyone seems to agree how great it is, though. Unexpectedly, one of my best of the year, so far!

Record Review: Frog Eyes - Paul's Tomb: A Triumph

2010-04-29T11:59:00.003-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Frog Eyes
Paul's Tomb: A Triumph
Dead Oceans

If we were to take Carey Mercer and his cohorts — members of Frog Eyes, Swan Lake, Wolf Parade, etc. — as a sampling of what Canadian musicians are like, we’d assume everyone who ever picked up an accordion or pan flute north of the border was prolific, virtuosic, impassioned, and a little unhinged. But I guess that wouldn’t be quite statistically sound. Though Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph is Frog Eyes’ Dead Oceans debut, as far as I can tell it’s their sixth full-length overall, the previous LPs having been put out by small Canadian and Californian indies Global Symphonic, Animal World, and Absolutely Kosher.

And if you liked those, you’ll love this. Much of the same Frog Eyes material is here: the frenetic guitar refrains, the slithering keys (even without Spencer Krug performing them anymore), the manic drumming, and Mercer’s voice howling and gurgling around it all. This release feels freer, though — not easier, necessarily, but delivered with a clarity of purpose not quite as muddled, consumption-wise, by sheer weirdness as was their previous LP, Tears Of The Valedictorian, for instance...[Read more]

A Flower in a Glove - Frog Eye...

CL Show Preview: Megafaun wants to earn your trust

2010-04-29T11:29:00.003-04:00

For Creative Loafing Atlanta:

Megafaun wants to earn your trust
The rootsy band returns to Atlanta with tricks and treats

If Durham, N.C.'s Megafaun plays what typically is categorized as bluegrass or Americana, then its take on roots music certainly has sprouted gorgeous branches. The trio, which formed after the collapse of its previous band DeYarmond Edison (with Justin Vernon, currently of Bon Iver) in 2006, employs a brand of experimentalism that turns what would otherwise be a competent rehashing of traditional folk styles into something riskier. After two full-length albums (2008's Bury the Square and 2009's Gather, Form and Fly), Megafaun will release a six-song EP this summer titled Heretofore, a project they wrote, recorded and wrapped up, all within the space of about six weeks. "We just worked fast and had to make decisions from our gut," says multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook. "I think in retrospect that we did a really honest record."...[Read more]

Impressions of the Past - Mega...

Record Review: Medications - CompletelyRemoved

2010-04-22T12:08:00.003-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Medications
CompletelyRemoved
Dischord

Medications’ sophomore full-length is remarkably easy to consume. For something so covertly metrically ambitious, CompletelyRemoved goes down smooth, and before you know it, you’ve taken it all. Mary Poppins would be proud.

Maybe the D.C. band’s subtlety — or, rather, slyness — shouldn’t come so unexpected. Devin Ocampo and Chad Molter have been in bands together for almost two decades, most notably co-leading Medications’ much-lauded direct ancestor Faraquet, and it’s hard not to notice the level of performance chemistry birthed by such a lengthy collaboration...[Read more]

Record Review: Broken Bells - Broken Bells

2010-04-15T10:05:00.002-04:00

Writing about a James Mercer project is a little nostalgic for me. Not quite in the his-music-is-SOOOO-important-to-me kind of way you might expect, though. I mean, there was a time when The Shins were my favorite band (and I'm happy to report it didn't coincide with the release of Garden State, thank you very much). I think that time concluded when I saw them play live at the Atlanta Civic Center (which, to be fair, is a TERRIBLE venue for live music) and it was as if I'd put in the album and pressed play. Boring. The whole thing was so stilted that I never quite returned to them.

What I'm remembering is that I read a review of the last Shins record, Wincing The Night Away (Jan. 2007) in some magazine...I'm thinking The Big Takeover...a few months after its release. That summer, I was a recent grad and an aimless intern at Athens Magazine, and I read the review over my lunch one day. I had bought the album a few months previous and it was one of my current faves, in heavy rotation almost every day, and when I read the review (which I can't find online despite my best efforts) it just...made sense to me. The writer's descriptions of songs on the album, and the overall way they tied it together--I seem to remember them describing "Australia" as a "gentle rockabilly" or something to that effect--I thought was something to admire. I also thought, "I could never write about music like that."

And I never wrote about The Shins. Not for a publication, at least. Wincing The Night Away was their final release, at least for now. The band has suffered lineup losses after domestic violence drama and infighting, and the members now seem to be off deliberately working on other things.

Enter Broken Bells. It's a very different beast, to be sure, but it's still a Mercer project and it's still something that back at that lunch table, I thought I'd never do.

For Flagpole:

Broken Bells
Broken Bells
Columbia

If the collaboration between sensitive songwriter James Mercer of The Shins and provocative producer Danger Mouse (former Athens musician and WUOG DJ Brian Burton) of Gnarls Barkley fame seems an unlikely one, the natural feel of Broken Bells’ self-titled record proves even more improbable. After working with the likes of Gorillaz, MF DOOM and Beck as well as on a myriad of other projects, Burton’s contribution to Broken Bells brings the sneaking suspense of Demon Days and the maximalist multiculturalism of St. Elsewhere to meet Mercer’s acute lyricism and lilting melodic skill...[Read more]

Mongrel Heart - Broken Bells

Record Review: Freelance Whales - Weathervanes

2010-04-15T10:01:00.003-04:00

Wrote this one in a plane on my way to New York last month. Can you tell?

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

Freelance Whales
Weathervanes
Frenchkiss

At 35,000 feet, a first real listen of Freelance Whales’ debut LP seems scarily appropriate. The tops of clouds and glimpses of the coastline below act as visual echoes of Judah Dadone’s gentle vocal style, of the intricate orchestration and laptop rhythms the multi-instrumental quintet has to offer throughout Weathervanes. Prevailing winds even affect an airplane as much as they power the device after which Freelance Whales named the album. Sensually, the only reason the experience of the record doesn’t fit the journey of an hour-and-a-half flight is that, for someone afraid of flying like I am, Weathervanes lacks the adrenaline edge felt at takeoff and landing. It’s beautiful but a little impotent, kinetic but decidedly de-clawed...[Read more]

Hannah - Freelance Whales

Record Review: Christy & Emily - No Rest

2010-04-06T11:22:00.003-04:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

(My favorite paragraph):

Christy & Emily
No Rest
Klangband

...In fact, every instrumental decision the duo makes is something I’d stand up and applaud; Irmler’s deft production is nothing to sneeze at, either. No Rest, in that way, mixes the perfect amount of seriousness and detachment with the adamant and the white-knuckled, both committed and reserved. The problem enters — and it’s a big problem — when the lyrics begin. It’s not that they’re un-poetic (though they do come off a little obvious at times); it’s that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the lyrical phrasing. It’s like threadbare fabric stretched futilely over something lumpy, or like trying to wrap up a plate of leftovers with too little aluminum foil: what was once neat and self-contained rips, and suddenly there’s chicken all over the floor...[Read more]

Record Review: Tahiti Boy & The Palmtree Family - Good Children Go To Heaven

2010-04-01T10:27:00.004-04:00

A damn treatise I wrote on Tahiti Boy & The Palmtree Family for Tiny Mix Tapes:

Tahiti Boy & The Palmtree Family
Good Children Go To Heaven
[Third Side; 2010]

Full disclosure: I’ve played the flute for 13 years, and despite the existence of mainstream rock acts like Jethro Tull (stop with the Jethro Tull jokes, already!), I’ve always felt that in my favorite musical genres — punk, art pop, lo-fi — it’s been a seriously underrepresented instrument. It’s just not cool enough, maybe. So when I heard that the first notes of Good Children Go To Heaven, the debut LP from French group Tahiti Boy & The Palmtree Family (a group that, it should be noted, has no tropical tendencies of any kind), were part of a well-performed flute cadenza, I was more than a little excited. Once a band nerd, always a band nerd, I guess. Sorry...[Read more]

1973 - Tahiti Boy and the Palm...

Record Review: La Chansons - King and Queen of the Dance Floor

2010-03-31T16:06:00.004-04:00

For Flagpole:

La Chansons
The King and Queen of the Dance Floor
Stickfigure

Atlanta's La Chansons never meant The King and Queen of the Dance Floor to be anything more than fun, and it isn't. Husband-and-wife duo Greg and Carson Keller released their sophomore album Jan. 26 via local label Stickfigure Recordings; it's 10 songs of frivolous, synth-driven dance pop that break no ground compositionally and showcase often awkward and occasionally even embarrassing first-person lyrics...[Read more]

Beauty Queen - La Chansons

Live Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars, Bear In Heaven @ The Earl, 3/11/10

2010-03-26T00:36:00.003-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer's Tales From The Moshpit:

Cymbals Eat Guitars, Bear In Heaven @ The Earl 3/11/10

At first, I thought Joseph D'Agostino might be crying. The Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman is recently famous for his profuse sweating, but during the New Jersey band's second song, the first drop of water running down his cheek seemed to drip sorrowfully from the corner of his eye. By the end of the next number, though, it became clear that it wasn't so much misery he exuded as it was sheer force of will – perspiration from concentration and leaving it all on the stage. Nothing to grieve about there...[Read more]

...And The Hazy Sea - Cymbals ...

Record Review: The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night

2010-03-11T13:03:00.004-05:00

For Tiny Mix Tapes:

The Besnard Lakes
The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
Jagjaguwar

It’s an epic quest — one with teeth bared, vocal cords strained, and eyelids drooped. One with seven-minute opuses, blown-out walls of sound, and evenly harmonized boy-girl vocals, where stage lights appear behind eyelids even with the doors closed and headphones on.

And it’s a quest through time and compositional prowess as much as through the night about which The Besnard Lakes opine so vehemently. Perhaps a little less stratospheric than their sophomore (and breakthrough) release The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse, ...Are The Roaring Night brings the Montreal group’s potential down to earth, expanding what were sweeping, almost classical compositions into gut-wrenching, prog-y panoramas. A lot of the same cerebral, chamber-music-meets-guitar-wash elements are still there; they’re just a bit beefier this time....[Read more]

Chicago Train - The Besnard La...

Q&A with Cymbals Eat Guitars' Joseph D'Agostino

2010-03-05T17:15:00.004-05:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Q&A with Cymbals Eat Guitars' Joseph D'Agostino; Playing The EARL March 11

What do you do when your debut record gets more attention than you ever thought it would? When it’s the blogosphere that drives your success, and your nascent band suddenly has the weight of the critical community behind it? You go on tour!

March 11, Cymbals Eat Guitars will stop at The EARL on the sixth date of their first national headlining run. They’ll be performing selections from Why There Are Mountains, the much-lauded, muscular LP the band released this past September via Sister’s Den Records. Supported by recent indie luminaries Bear In Heaven and Freelance Whales, it stands to be a night to remember. Atlanta Music Guide talked with frontman Joseph D’Agostino about the snowball of success and what it’s like to live with your ears burning.

I really enjoyed your record. Can you talk to me about what it’s been like on your end? It got the mythical Pitchfork Best New Music tag, and people have been noticing it in a pretty big way.

We didn’t have an audience or a career or anything that you might consider serious before we received that review. Really, receiving the Best New Music and the amount of play that we were starting to get from WOXY radio in Cincinnati, those were the two big things that sort of helped elevate our band to the point where we had to be viable — like we had to be a good live act, because we hadn’t been playing any shows before March of 2008, really. At the same time, there’s definitely a disconnect between internet hype and actually attending shows and things. But I get the feeling that we are enjoying a pretty unique situation, because it also seems that the spread of our record has been very much a word of mouth kind of thing, rather than one huge crush, and then suddenly we’re just ubiquitous...[Read more]

Record Review: The Young Sinclairs - The Songs of the Young Sinclairs

2010-03-05T16:57:00.003-05:00

For Flagpole:

The Young Sinclairs
The Songs of the Young Sinclairs
Kindercore

Gathered together from highlights of their CD-R and tape releases as well as featuring tidbits of new material, The Songs of the Young Sinclairs is the Roanoke, VA quintet’s long-awaited and first proper LP. After producing it in their enigmatically named studio, The Mystic Fortress, The Young Sinclairs joined up with Kindercore to release the 18-song vinyl-only collection that will street Mar. 30. The record, for better or worse, explores every facet of that blended, baroque, ‘60s-and-‘70s rock soundscape made famous by bands like The Byrds, The Zombies and Peter, Paul and Mary...[Read more]

Record Review: Wolf People - Tidings

2010-03-04T15:24:00.002-05:00

Another for Tiny Mix Tapes:

Wolf People
Tidings
[Jagjaguwar]

One of my favorite things about tape — be it cassette or reel-to-reel — has always been the way the players seem to suggest faces. The spindles look like eyes, and when they turn, they recall the expressions of crazy cartoon characters.

Maybe that’s just me.

But UK’s Wolf People certainly make no secret of their love for tape and the insanity it can communicate — the cover of their debut album Tidings shows miniatures of all manner of analog recording devices. Fans can even cut out replicas of them from Wolf People website to reproduce on their own. Accordingly, the quartet has riddled the album throughout with audible tape hiss that punctuates its mythic, winding course...[Read more]

Black Water - Wolf People

CL Feature: Bear In Heaven comes to fruition outside the South

2010-03-03T11:51:00.004-05:00

Hey! It's my first music feature for Atlanta's Creative Loafing!

Bear In Heaven comes to fruition outside the South
The Brooklyn band experiences a homecoming of sorts in Atlanta

When the four members who would eventually form Bear in Heaven individually left the Southeast for Brooklyn nearly a decade ago, not one of them did it for music.

"I moved up here in 2001 for no real reason other than it wasn't Atlanta where I grew up," says bassist Adam Wills. "I'd never been outside of Marietta, Ga., really." One by one, his future bandmates – who had all been in other musical projects in Atlanta or Savannah – coincidentally relocated with the intention of putting music on the backburner...[Read more]

Beast In Peace - Bear In Heave...

Bear In Heaven will be at The Earl March 11 with Cymbals Eat Guitars and Freelance Whales. Can't wait!

Record Review: Mathis Hunter - Soft Opening

2010-03-01T14:40:00.005-05:00

An album by one of my favorite Atlanta musicians and Aurora baristas! Mathis will celebrate his album's release this Friday, March 5 at the Earl with Noot d' Noot and The Selmanaires.

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Mathis Hunter
Soft Opening
Shakedown Records

Mathis Hunter, longtime mainstay of the Atlanta music community, former member of The Selmanaires and one of the founders of psych-funk collective Noot d’Noot, puts forth his first solo effort with Soft Opening. The LP spans 10 tracks and makes good on all of Hunter’s already demonstrated predispositions: creative percussion, saxophone, psychedelic soundscapes and haunting guitar melodies. It’s a masterful continuation of the train of thought that makes up his career, not a departure from it...[Read more]

Record Review: Local Natives - Gorilla Manor

2010-02-17T13:56:00.003-05:00

My second review for Tiny Mix Tapes!

Local Natives
Gorilla Manor
[Frenchkiss]

Like that hot guy who works in the wood shop around the corner, Local Natives’ debut LP Gorilla Manor is most attractive at its messiest. Replete with sweet piano, duetting guitars, and insistent drumming, the California quintet paints a mostly pretty picture. But it’s when they veer away from pretty that things get adorably hairy...[Read more]

Wide Eyes - Local Natives

Hey this also marks the first time my review has been at odds with P4K. They gave Gorilla Manor an 8.4 and their "Best New Music" stamp. I thought it was good, but not that good.

Oh, well there was that one other time. Remember when Pitchfork's Marc Hogan saw Black Kids at Athens Pop Fest in 2007 and said they had "a communal urgency not unlike the Arcade Fire's"? Then he gave their EP an 8.2 and unleashed the full fury of the blogosphere's buzz machine? How about a few months later, when I wrote this (in retrospect very green, unresearched) review for Paste's website of Black Kids' full-length Partie Traumatic? Back then, I thought it was my job to skew things more positively than I do now, I guess. Live and learn. In contrast, Pitchfork's review of the album was this:

Ha. So I guess we've disagreed in print before, huh PF? I bet this time won't be the last...

Record Review: Surfer Bood - Astro Coast

2010-02-16T15:09:00.003-05:00

My second little thing for Creative Loafing Atlanta:

Surfer Blood: Astro Coast

With echoing vocals and plenty of reverb layered over the sunshiniest pop melodies, West Palm Beach, Fla., quartet Surfer Blood released its debut record Jan. 19 and unleashed a tidal wave of buzz. But the album itself proves the band’s ability to ride easily atop that wave...[Read more]

Be sure to hit up their show at the Drunken Unicorn this Friday, Feb. 19 with Carnivores, Turbo Fruits and Holiday Shores.

Record Review: Field Music - Field Music (Measure)

2010-02-15T16:36:00.003-05:00

It's my first review for Tiny Mix Tapes! Yay!

Field Music
Field Music (Measure)
[Memphis Industries]

Sorry Mr. President, but for a moment, let’s forget The Audacity of Hope. I want to talk about the audacity of longwindedness. It takes a lot for a band to stand up and say, “Hey guys. I know you’re used to an album usually lasting between 40 and 50 minutes, but we’ve got an hour and 12 minutes of material here, and we’re gonna make y’all listen to all of it.” To me, that’s pretty audacious, and I’ll tip my hat to it. That is, if it’s got something real to offer...[Read more]

The National talks to P4K about forthcoming album

2010-02-04T14:53:00.002-05:00

I'ma go ahead and declare the as-yet-unnamed record The National is finishing up right now my most anticipated release of the year (if, indeed, it releases in 2010). It's weird, I think The National's music is a bit of an outlier in my music love spectrum, at least lately. But I adore their compositions so much--and their seriousness, honestly--that the idea of a fresh album to adore...well, it's almost too much.

Ever the over-achievers, Pitchfork got enigmatic frontman Matt Berninger to sit down and talk about it. He says the record's about 75 percent finished.

The most exciting excerpt:

"I don't think it sounds anything like Alligator, but it's less restrained than Boxer, that's for sure. I don't quite scream my head off in the way I did with "Mr. November", but I do think it's cathartic. Boxer was all tension without a whole lot of release. This builds a lot of those same kinds of tensions, but I think there's at least a little bit of bloodletting in this one. I'm trying to sing out and higher a little more, and the melodies move around a little more. When we started this record, I worked on melodies before I worked on lyrics. A lot of my melodies are sort of in a limited chanting, murmuring range, which has always worked for me. But I was trying to work on melodies this time much harder than I ever have in the past, and I think that alone has made the songs feel like they release more."

Can't wait.

Hey, remember when I interviewed Aaron Dessner at Langerado?

How about when I blogged about their set there for PasteMagazine.com?

How about when I reviewed their show at The Tabernacle last year?

Yeah, me too.

Record Review: Yeasayer - Odd Blood

2010-02-03T09:54:00.003-05:00

Remember when this band played at The Earl two years ago? I do. (Gosh, I was a fangirl back then...) How about when they shared a bill at Lenny's with Man Man? Yeah, that was good too.

For Flagpole:

Yeasayer
Odd Blood
Secretly Canadian

Odd Blood, the eagerly awaited sophomore release from Brooklyn avant-pop prodigies Yeasayer, finds the band expanding adamantly in both more and less traditional directions. The band's 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals was a blissed-out romp through psychedelic dance territory, all bass and Chris Keating's charismatic whining. This follow-up shows us a more experimental Yeasayer, sort of; it’s more electronic, stranger effects have been applied to even the simplest melodies and the layers upon layers of groans and blips build to a fever pitch. Leadoff “The Children,” for example, features Keating's vocals sheathed in an unnerving effect that skews it simultaneously an octave lower and an octave higher...[Read more]

Ambling Alp - Yeasayer

Record Review: Owen Pallett - Heartland

2010-02-03T09:44:00.002-05:00

It's a weird place, that intersection between classical composition and pop. Here's my attempt to navigate it via someone who's well-versed at both.

For Flagpole:

Owen Pallett
Heartland
Domino

Toronto omni-musician Owen Pallett is probably someone whose work you’ve heard before, though you may not know it. For years doing orchestral arrangements for other artists like Beirut, Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire, he’s helped shape fellow musicians’ catalogs, becoming an indispensable but behind-the-scenes staple. For Heartland, Pallett abandoned his solo moniker Final Fantasy (which he used for two previous full-lengths), again mixing classical beauty with electronic skill, but this time unveiled.

Pallett's buttery tenor melts over pizzicato strings, round brass and reedy woodwinds. Clarinet and baritone and cello poke through the blended textures as Heartland’s tracks slide from one to another like a stage musical’s. But beautiful and benign aren’t the same thing...[Read more]

Lewis Takes Action - Owen Pall...

Night of the Living Dead: Atlanta's Carnivores Rise From the Grave

2010-01-20T18:34:00.005-05:00

Of Music and the Macabre, (or, "In Which I Try and Fail at Extending a Death Metaphor the Length of a Feature Article"):

Night of the Living Dead
Atlanta’s Carnivores Rise From the Grave
By Julia Reidy

The first time I saw Carnivores play, they were members of a band that is now dead. In early 2008, the four were still playing around Atlanta as Chainestereo, and I had low expectations. But when they opened for The Ruby Suns and Throw Me The Statue (two much more pop-inflected groups) at the Drunken Unicorn, from the first few damaged chords, I was hooked. Keyboardist Caitlin Lang started singing and whipping her hair around – one of my photos from the night shows it frozen in a great cloud around her head, blurred because she was moving too fast in the low light – and suddenly it was one of those rare moments when, having prepared yourself to be unimpressed, you think, “Wow. This band is actually good.”

Almost two years later, they’ve killed that identity and re-birthed themselves as Carnivores. “No one could remember the name, spell the name or say the name,” says guitarist Nathaniel Higgins of Chainestereo. “We felt like a name change would help people remember us better.” After a lineup shuffle, the group decided to scrap the old model and begin again, and this new band in a short period of time has already proved itself memorable. Though they perform in basically the same style, new material and a renewed commitment to songwriting have given Carnivores a fresh lease on life.

But the members of Carnivores were always committed. “I kind of did all the bitch work with Chainestereo in town, and then once Carnivores came about, it was all gravy,” bassist Philip Frobos recalls. He remembers years of playing on bills with terrible bands and paying some serious dues. The thing about dues, though, is that they pay off. Over the summer, Georgia State’s radio station WRAS put Carnivores’ undeniably winning single “A Crime” into regular rotation. It played frequently on car stereos and in coffee shops, working itself subtly into the local consciousness. “I’ve only heard it on once” recalls Higgins. “I was ordering a sub at Sensational Subs, and I was like, ‘I know this song. Wait a second. That’s me!’ It freaked me out.” But Higgins wasn’t freaked out enough to take a post-sandwich victory lap; the band’s work in this world is far from done.

Carnivores borrow widely – from tropicalia, doo-wop, pop and punk – and no one I’ve heard sounds just like them. The four don’t let their referencing bury them; weighed-down, derivative slop can stay six feet under, for all they care.

To that end, I think their inclusive tendencies save them from that particular pitfall. The quartet’s debut full-length, All Night Dead USA, which released locally on Atlanta’s quickly-rising imprint Double Phantom in July and which will release nationally Jan. 26, runs the gamut from absolutely adorable, distorted pop to moaning ambient swaths, to angry riffage. Some numbers are raunchy, complete with atonal vocals, while some seem so perfectly and ecstatically orchestrated that each layer over Frobos’ dynamic, moving bass falls exactly where it should. Tracks devolve intermittently into multicolored grooves as the members take turns singing lead or all holler together. For all its sweetness, Carnivores’ compositions wield a sharp edge; Lang’s vocal delivery on “Organ Trail” comes across as completely demented – she switches from comely to psychotic with no warning and the transition is so smooth you can’t help but smile. Likewise, the band’s locally frequent live shows are almost wholly anarchic, which gives listeners of All Night Dead the sense that Carnivores’ sound is being funneled into a 2-liter bottle, shaken up, and sprayed. It bubbles.

Carnivores obviously nurse an obsessive crush on the macabre, as well. The record’s leadoff “For Griffin” mixes mellow surf guitar with ghoulish group vocals, topped off nicely with speaking samples about death that transition the track into the following psychedelic jam “Neon Bone Groove.” All Night Dead avoids heavy-handedness though, probably thanks to the band’s group songwriting efforts. Most numbers are co-written, and performances seem determinedly communal. At their 529 show Nov. 3, Lang ran repeatedly across the stage to shove her mic in front of drummer Tauseef Anam so that he could sing too.

Sitting across a rickety table from me outside Aurora Coffee in Little Five Points in late October, Higgins indicates Frobos. “Usually it starts out with me or Philip having a guitar part or a bass part or a melody or both,” Higgins says. “Then we usually take it to each other and build from it. And then drums and keyboards get added in and we all talk together about how the song should sound. And he writes all the lyrics.”

“He has some lyrics on the new material,” Frobos retorts, pointing at Higgins.

I ask how they decide who gets to sing what.

“Just what feels right, I guess,” Higgins says. “I feel like me and him and Caitlin all have very different voices. It’s just what’s right for the song.”

“Also, we all have very different vocal ranges and whatnot,” Frobos adds. “So if I write a song that I physically can’t sing…”

Higgins explains that Frobos often brings material to the table that has to have another singer because it’s outside his range.

“The demos are pretty awful,” Frobos admits, smiling.

Speaking of demos, the band has gone back into the studio, this time with producer Mike Wright, who’s worked with the likes of the The Black Lips and The Selmanaires, among others. Over beers in December, Frobos anticipates completing recording in late January, around the same time the group heads out on a Northeast tour and re-releases All Night Dead. This new, as-yet-unnamed full-length stands to evolve Carnivores’ sound and push this growing band into maturity. “I always personally envisioned All Night Dead USA to be a bit of a darker album, originally,” Frobos reflects. “But it came out and it’s not at all a dark album. It’s totally fun and whimsical, kind of. I don’t know. Whatever it is. Tropical. I legitimately think that this new record is a little bit darker and it’s got a little more edge to it. It’s a little lonelier, but it’s more confident.”

The same artists who have worked with Wright in the past, Higgins and Frobos say, have helped them gain that confidence. The Selmanaires, in particular, have been some of their role models in a town that, overall, has proved challenging. “They’ve helped us out a lot,” says Higgins. “They’ve given us a shot, helped us kind of bridge that gap into a scene that was a little bit before us.”

“I think that Atlanta is a really tough town,” Frobos adds. “And that’s what I really like about it, because when you’re from the South, you always have more to prove than anybody else. Everybody thinks that you’re a dumb hick.” Knowing they’ve had to fight for their place in the scene gives the band extra confidence as they go out on the road. “Proving yourself to be worth a damn down here is really hard,” he continues. “It used to be at least. And getting the promoter contacts three years ago, when Deerhunter and The Black Lips were getting huge and still doing big local shows and dominating, it was kind of hard to get on anything cool.

“I definitely feel proud about the grit, and going through all of it to get to where we are here,” says Frobos.

“If we didn’t really like to play shows and music,” Higgins concludes, “we probably would’ve quit a long time ago.”

Equipped with sellable singles like the split 7-inch they shared with fellow Double Phantom artists Abby Go Go, as well as loads of new live material, Carnivores are ready to ride the vinyl grooves of All Night Dead USA into hearts that don’t call Atlanta home. “I kind of take the old coach mindset when it comes to things like success,” says Frobos. “It’s like ‘Alright, you won your first game, but you fucked up a lot. This is what you need to do better. You got a lot of work to do to get to the next level.’ We might’ve gotten a couple of things written about us, and I think that that’s awesome. But I think that there’s a lot of things we can do better, and we need to do better and we need to keep delivering.”

For Carnivores, it’s not time to lay down and die. This music has a lot of living to do.

(A modified version of this article appeared in the January issue of Stomp and Stammer. Reproduced with permission.)

Linkage Wednesday: Surfer Blood, Yeasayer

2010-01-20T17:21:00.003-05:00

Time to revive an old FOA feature: Linkage Wednesday!

1. Surfer Blood - "Take It Easy"

Take It Easy - Surfer Blood

I know everybody's tired of stuff that sounds like the '80s...or calypso...or the Beach Boys...but this song sounds like all of that and it's awesome. Surfer Blood will be visiting the Drunken Unicorn Feb. 19 with Turbo Fruits, Carnivores and Holiday Shores.

2. Being that I spent all of last week trying to say what I think about the forthcoming Yeasayer album Odd Blood (difficult because I'm still not quite sure what I think), stumbling across Stereogum's Premature Evaluation of the record today was kind of illuminating:

The toe-tapping "Rome" rattles forward, but in a less interesting way than the earlier tracks: It has rhythm and propulsion, but feels a bit empty. Yeasayer got folks hooked early on with "2080," a song that started floating around long before we even knew what the band looked like, so when those sort of harmonies disappear in favor of pure texture, a bit of the appeal drops-out, too.

Whew! I thought I was the only one that kept picturing this emoticon when I listened to certain parts of Odd Blood: :/

I mean, other parts of it completely rule. I'm sorta obsessed with "Madder Red." But there are bits that, to me, sound like a letdown. I feel like they're capable of more than that record. Dunno.

3. The A.V. Club posted a blurb about Vampire Weekend's Contra topping the Billboard 200 this week. Sure, we could actually discuss the ramifications of their popularity. But I'd rather point out that the article's writer Kyle Ryan captioned some scary video game illustration (which I should probably know about) with the line, "No, THIS guy would look psychotic in a balaclava." Hahahahaha, cheers Kyle.

FOA's Favorite Music of 2009

2010-01-04T15:12:00.006-05:00

I know it's 2010. But what better way to reflect on the year past than to wait until it's really over to look back? It seemed like 2009 offered more releases than I could wrap my head around, but what better problem to have? Though there were loads of albums and songs that enhanced our sonic landscape, these are the ones I'll remember for years to come.

FOA's Favorite Albums of 2009:

(These are ranked because I think it's more fun to read that way, not because I think rankings are anything but arbitrary and subjective and silly, by the way.)

10. Wavves - Wavvves
Read: Record Review: Wavves - Wavvves
Live Review: Wavves @ The EARL 10/4/09

9. Kurt Vile - Childish Prodigy
Read: Record Review: Kurt Vile - Childish Prodigy
Live Review: Kurt Vile and the Violators, Lovvers, Carnivores @ 529, November 3

8. Volcano Choir - Unmap
Read: Paste: Getting to Know... Volcano Choir

7. Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Read: Record Review: Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth

6. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There Are Mountains
Go to: CymbalsEatGuitars.com

5. The Antlers - Hospice
Read: Record Review: The Antlers - Hospice
Flagpole Feature: The Antlers: Finding the Hope in Hospice

4. Akron/Family - Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
Read: Live Review: Akron/Family @ The EARL 8/13/09

3. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
Read: Flagpole: Record Reviews: Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion

2. Here We Go Magic - Here We Go Magic
You'd have to pick up the physical copy of September's Stomp and Stammer, but I got to interview Luke Temple. Instead, go here: MySpace.com/herewegomagic

....and the FOA album of the year is:

1. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

Read: Record Review: Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

Honorable Mention:

Slaraffenland - We're On Your Side (Record Review)
Atlas Sound - Logos (Record Review, Live Review)
Circulatory System - Signal Morning (Record Review)
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca (Live Review)
Nurses - Apple's Acre (Record Review, Live Review)
Bowerbirds - Upper Air (Record Review, Live Review)
Megafaun - Gather, Form and Fly (Record Review, Live Review)

FOA's Favorite Songs of 2009:

I posted an earlier version of this as a playlist back in September, but here's my updated list. Most of these are tracks from the year's best albums, but some are stand-alone songs from albums that were otherwise disappointing, and deserve to be recognized anyway. Really. This is some amazing music.

Volcano Choir - "Youlagy": Truly a modern spiritual.

Youlogy - Volcano Choir

Carnivores - "A Crime": About the most infectious thing I've ever heard. Ever. And it's from a local band, which makes me glow with pride. These guys are going somewhere, trust me.

A Crime - Carnivores

Atlas Sound - "Walkabout (w/ Noah Lennox)": The perfect summer jam, and the promising product of a collaboration between a couple of the most influential people in indie rock right now.

Walkabout [w/ Noah Lennox] - A...

Here We Go Magic - "Fangela": Gauzy and woozy, holding some kind of mystical power I can't explain. Live, it was actually the least impressive of Here We Go Magic's selections, but on the record it envelops you whole.

Fangela - Here We Go Magic

Akron/Family - "River": Makes you feel like your stomach is soaring, like if you're going over hte top of a hill on a rollercoaster. The line "You are not glassy bay to me" is frequently misunderstood by my friends and me as "You are not classy babe..." which I like a lot. We're not classy babes.

River - Akron/Family

Pontiak - "Wild Knife Night Fight": One of my rare forays into stoner-sludge. The good kind.
(Can't post, sorry.)

Pontiak - "Seminal Shining": The softest thing on Maker, "Seminal Shining" still proves appropriately dark and mysterious for Pontiak, the happiest sludge band I know.
(Can't post, sorry.)

Slaraffenland - "Away": Awesome all-male a cappella stuff with a great, brassy ending.

Away - Slaraffenland

The Antlers - "Bear": Turns from a lament to an upbeat dance on a dime. It was beautiful from inside the packed 40 Watt. It's the saddest hopeful song I know.

Bear - The Antlers

Wavves - "To The Dregs": Kinetic and barreling and angry and joyful and noisy and pretty.

To The Dregs - Wavves

Bowerbirds - "Crooked Lust": Fun with syncopation meets the Bowerbirds' usual lyrical poignancy and beautifully naturalistic instrumentation.

Crooked Lust - Bowerbirds

The Fiery Furnaces - "Charmaine Champagne": Eleanor Friedberger's vocal delivery on this is as smoky as always, meeting Matt's this time more traditional instrumentals. Live, they played this twice as fast. I giggled through it.
(Can't post.)

Kurt Vile - "Blackberry Song": Achingly beautiful. Aching. BEAUTIFUL.

Blackberry Song - Kurt Vile

Kurt Vile - "Heart Attack": I love how his voice echos. My heart wants to explode when I crank this song all the way up. Vile didn't play this when we saw him live, despite our yelling for it. He heard us. He acknowledged it. Then decided not to play it anyway. At least we didn't yell "FREEBIRD!"

Heart Attack - Kurt Vile

White Rabbits - "Percussion Gun": They made a really cool video to go with this song, which is all percussion and saloon piano. I was otherwise underwhelmed by this album, but "Percussion Gun" always makes me smile.

Percussion Gun - White Rabbits

Lord Cut-Glass - "Holy Fuck!": So freakin' cute. Listen to it for the Scottish accent, if nothing else.

Holy Fuck! - Lord Cut-Glass

Harlem Shakes - "Strictly Game": The video for this also makes me giggle aloud. "Strictly Game" reminds me of something I can't put my finger on...help?

Strictly Game - Harlem Shakes

Megafaun - "Kaufman's Ballad": Megafaun is soooo much more than initially meats the ears. "Kaufman's Ballad" demonstrates the framework in which they operate, but it's really hearing the whole album that makes you understand what they're capable of.

Kaufman's Ballad - Megafaun

The National - "So Far Around The Bend": In my opinion the best track off this year's Red Hot compilation Dark Was The Night, "So Far Around The Bend" is another gorgeous nostalgic nugget from these kings of sweet sorrow.

So Far Around The Bend - The N...

Deleted Scenes - "Get Your Shit Together For The Holidays": This song sounds like Third Eye Blind to me, and I mean that in the best way possible. Off Blue. I don't know if these guys ever listened to that, but they must at least have a common influence, because the phrases is, like, exactly the same. The end of the song is key!

Get Your Sh*t Together for the...

Animal Collective - "My Girls": Overexposure to this song early in the year made me almost hate it by the middle, but after a few months' respite, I've come back around again. The perfect dance anthem from an often inaccessible band, "My Girls" marks AC's transition, once and for all, to a group dedicated to pop structure without sacrificing creativity. Listen to it loud and try not to dance.

My Girls - Animal Collective

Animal Collective - "Brother Sport": Telescopic and layered, I love the almost incongruous layers this song uses. There's always something new to hear.

Brother Sport - Animal Collect...

Circulatory System - "Signal Morning": The final track to an album that's as varied as it is unified, this song sounds the most like '90s rock, and optimistically ends an art piece that's also sometimes topically dark. I could listen to it again and again.

Signal Morning - Circulatory S...

Nurses - "Caterpillar Playground": WHISTLING! Like a mini-Animal Collective, these guys use tribal percussion and thundering beats to drive their compositions. But unlike AC, Nurses rely on winning keys and irresistible hooks to catch their audience. And knitted doilies. I love this song.

Caterpillar Playground - Nurse...

Bon Iver - "Brackett, WI": After the Blood Bank EP, I worried about the direction Bon Iver might take. It's a full band now, after all, and the next full-length won't be a bedroom record like For Emma, Forever Ago. It's not that I didn't like Blood Bank. It's just that it didn't speak to me like For Emma did. It did hold the same emotional impact, the same ocean of sound, of voices. For Dark Was The Night, though, the band recorded this. And it's perfect, and exactly where I want them to go. Though to be fair, I'll follow them anywhere.

Brackett, WI - Bon Iver

Dirty Projectors - "No Intention": Absolutely my favorite song off the staggering Bitte Orca, Dave Longstreth's vocal line gives me chills every time.

No Intention - Dirty Projector...

Grizzly Bear - "While You Wait For The Others": Just the most beautiful second half of a song I can think of.
(Can't post.)

Grizzly Bear - "Two Weeks": Posting this MP3 is why my FileDen account got suspended earlier this year. Needless to say, it's a popular song. Grizzly Bear's version of this at Bonnaroo, even without Victoria LeGrand, was absolutely incredible. Drummer Chris Bear just went to TOWN, playing double-time, putting in superfluous grooves, letting himself go crazy.
(Can't post.)

Bear In Heaven - "Ultimate Satisfaction": Retro and dark and barreling and glorious!

Ultimate Satisfaction - Bear I...

Bear In Heaven - "Beast In Peace": One of the two best opening tracks of an album I've heard in a long time, with a long B-section of nothing but percussion!

Beast In Peace - Bear In Heave...

Cymbals Eat Guitars - "...And The Hazy Sea": The other best opening track of the year, it begins with a scream! This band is still constantly impressing me with its '90s rock throwback aesthetic combined with pop sensibility. There's another layer to hear each time. It just keeps delivering.

...And The Hazy Sea - Cymbals ...

So that's it! 2009 was a great year. What did I miss? What did I get wrong? What did I get right?

Flagpole: 25 of Our Favorite National Releases of 2009

2009-12-23T18:15:00.004-05:00

I had the privilege of contributing to Flagpole's best-of list this year! Other fantastic writers (who also happen to be friends of mine) weighed in, so check it out!

One of my blurbs:

ATLAS SOUND
Logos

Deerhunter's Bradford Cox took a break from all his Internet micro-releases to record his second full-length for solo project Atlas Sound. Logos, according to Cox, was made up significantly of first-takes, a fact that only proves how fantastic he is at retro song structure; for him, it has become almost effortless. Joined by other indie luminaries like Animal Collective's Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Stereolab's Leititia Sadier, Cox explores all his facets as a songwriter and puts forward an almost stream-of-consciousness statement on his place in the musical world. [JR]

I also wrote short summaries about the awesomeness of albums by Here We Go Magic, Animal Collective, Bear In Heaven and Grizzly Bear. Read the whole thing here.

All of Flagpole's best-of coverage is definitely worth a read. They touch on content from just this year and the whole decade, and they do it on both a local and national scale.

Flagpole: The Five Local Bands of the Decade

Flagpole: Cream of the Local Crop (2009)

Flagpole: The Decade You Listened To Too Much Music: The Rise of Digital Distribution in the '00s

Flagpole: Decade Trends: Ups and Downs in the Local Music Scene

Oh, and that last one uses this picture of Lazer/Wulf at the Morton Theatre, which is awesome....

Record Review: Alec Ounsworth - Mo Beauty

2009-12-13T21:14:00.004-05:00

For Stomp and Stammer:

Alec Ounsworth
Mo Beauty
[Anti-]

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]

Modern Girl (...with scissors)...

Record Review: Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth

2009-12-09T15:53:00.003-05:00

Beast Rest Forth Mouth is one of the best records of the year! Do yourself a favor and give it a listen.

For Flagpole:

Bear In Heaven
Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Hometapes

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]

Beast In Peace - Bear In Heave...

Lovesick Teenagers - Bear In H...

Paste Best of What's Next: Carnivores

2009-12-09T15:45:00.003-05:00

These ATLiens certainly deserve to be Artist of the Day!

Paste Artist of the Day:
Best of What's Next: Carnivores

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]

Organ Trail - Carnivores

Paste Best of What's Next: Pyramiddd (Starfucker)

2009-11-24T12:25:00.004-05:00

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.

Artist of the Day:
Best of What's Next: Pyramiddd

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]

Rawnald Gregory Erickson the S...

Flagpole Feature: The Antlers: Finding the Hope in Hospice

2009-11-11T15:34:00.003-05:00

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!

The Antlers
Finding the Hope in Hospice

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]

Bear - The Antlers

Record Review: Kurt Vile - Childish Prodigy

2009-11-11T15:17:00.003-05:00

Two Kurt Vile posts back-to-back?! Geez, this guy must be good.

For Stomp and Stammer:

Kurt Vile
Childish Prodigy
[Matador]

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]

Freak Train - Kurt Vile

Live Review: Kurt Vile and the Violators, Lovvers, Carnivores @ 529, November 3

2009-11-05T11:49:00.006-05:00

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]

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Live Review: Kurt Vile and the Violators, Lovvers, Carnivores @ 529, November 3

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]

Blackberry Song - Kurt Vile

A Crime - Carnivores

James Husband - A Parallax I

2009-10-28T11:54:00.003-04:00

For Flagpole:

James Husband
A Parallax I
Polyvinyl

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]

Record Review: Spring Tigers - Spring Tigers

2009-10-20T09:09:00.002-04:00

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!

For Flagpole:

Spring Tigers
Spring Tigers
Bright Antenna

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.

But that’s where the edginess ends...[Read more]

Paste: Getting to Know... Volcano Choir

2009-10-16T08:57:00.006-04:00

My interview with Chris Rosenau of Volcano Choir is up on PasteMagazine.com today!

Getting To Know... Volcano Choir

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]

Island, IS - Volcano Choir

Record Review: Nurses - Apple's Acre

2009-10-15T10:58:00.004-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer:

Nurses
Apple's Acre
[Dead Oceans]

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]

Caterpillar Playground - Nurse...

Also, check out my live review of Nurses, Throw Me The Statue and The Brunettes when they past through Atlanta last month!

Live Review: Wavves @ The Earl 10/4/09

2009-10-12T16:19:00.003-04:00

FOA proudly presents:

The Most Overtly Negative Thing I've Ever Written For Publication!

or

Wavves @ The EARL 10/4/09!

For Stomp and Stammer's Tales From The Moshpit section:

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?)

Record Review: Throw Me The Statue - Creaturesque

2009-10-07T14:54:00.003-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer:

Throw Me The Statue
Creaturesque
[Secretly Canadian]

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.

Hi-Fi Goon - Throw Me The Stat...

So adorable....

Record Review: Atlas Sound - Logos

2009-09-29T11:27:00.003-04:00

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.

I got to review Logos for Flagpole:

Atlas Sound
Logos
Kranky

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]

(The Fader has the "Walkabout" MP3)

Record Review: Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer

2009-09-17T18:20:00.005-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer:

Sunset Rubdown
Dragonslayer
[Jagjaguwar]

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]

Idiot Heart - Sunset Rubdown

Live Review: The Brunettes, Throw Me The Statue, Nurses @ The Drunken Unicorn 9/7/09

2009-09-14T11:12:00.005-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Live Review: The Brunettes, Throw Me The Statue, Nurses @ The Drunken Unicorn, September 7

I’ve come to really dig the homemade decorations bands have taken to draping across their equipment for the sake of... what, beauty? Hipster kitsch? Either way, it’s pretty charming. (I mean, have you ever seen These Are Powers live?) For Portland,Ore.’s Nurses (pictured above), the knitted doilies tied to their tables and tables of sampling boards and other electronic gadgetry might be more geared toward aesthetic continuity, as many of their press photos have to do with yarn and paper cut-out triangles.

But that’s not the point. The point is that Nurses treated the Unicorn to a dynamic live show on Labor Day, replete with faithful re-imaginings of songs from their August Dead Oceans debut, Apple’s Acre. They led with “Technicolor,” the album’s first track, frontmen Aaron Chapman and John Bowers bouncing the band’s characteristically nasal vocals off each other as they twiddled their multitude of knobs and strummed guitar strings. But James Mitchell, the band’s percussionist, played perhaps even more pivotal of a role, providing the almost tribal beats that set the band apart (or group them into the same sonic category as, say, Animal Collective), all mallet work, bass and rim tapping.

When Seattle’s Throw Me The Statue followed, the show became a very different beast. Instead of three cutoff-sporting beardy fellows, TMTS had four fresh-faced people on stage, led by the band’s brains Scott Reitherman. They spliced together songs from their sophomore LP Creaturesque, released in August via Secretly Canadian, and from their early 2008 debut Moonbeams. Just as Creaturesque was recorded with a full band instead of Reitherman solo like Moonbeams, the group’s sound has grown, too. Since the last time I saw them live, they’ve evolved to play louder, faster, and with more energy, without forsaking the melodic skill, glockenspiel (!) and drum machine vs. actual drums interplay that works so well for them. Standouts from Moonbeams like “Lolita” and “About To Walk” rose to the level of more raucous numbers from Creaturesque like “Ancestors” and “Hi-Fi Goon.”...[Read more]

Playlist: Favorite Songs of 2009 (So Far)

2009-09-09T13:32:00.003-04:00

So this year, I'm not procrastinating. I've been adding my favorite songs to a playlist as I go all year. When I stumble across a good one, it goes in, and now I've got something to show for it. It'll grow, of course, before list season this December. But for now, I thought I'd share so that everyone can listen to some awesome tunes. I know it's the playlist I turn to by default.

(BTW, despite its drawbacks, Lala.com has by far the best playlist embedding site going on right now.)

Songs of 2009

Record Review: The Matt Kurz One - Debt Sounds

2009-09-09T12:41:00.002-04:00

For Flagpole:

The Matt Kurz One
Debt Sounds
Quote Unquote

Matt Kurz’s left foot is a decent bassist. His right foot plays pretty good snare and bass drum. His right hand is a respectable guitarist. His left hand plays keys and high hat well enough. But the sum of all these limbs (or rather his band The Matt Kurz One, of which he is the sole member) excels. See, Kurz plays everything simultaneously, and sings determinedly over it all. It makes his debut Debt Sounds, which would otherwise be a perfectly enjoyable rock and roll album, into something truly impressive—something to which you can’t help but tap and sing along. That is, as long as you’ve accepted you’ll never be as coordinated as he is...[Read more]

Visit Athens local Matt Kurz at his MySpace.

Record Review: Circulatory System - Signal Morning

2009-09-09T12:25:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure if it comes across in the review--sometimes I try to avoid exaggeration or over-excitement in published pieces--but this record is brilliant. Really. It deserves a listen.

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Circulatory System
Signal Morning
Cloud Recordings

Circulatory System’s Signal Morning embodies everything that’s great about Athens’ famed Elephant 6 collective — the experimental streak, the grumbling soundscapes, the ‘60s pop throwback vocals and guitar work (complete with backwards records), the psychedelia — without everything it risks. Will Cullen Hart (formerly of The Olivia Tremor Control), the band’s heart and head, never lets the album get overblown or long-winded. Thoughts never continue longer than the amount of time for which they’re interesting. The songs never get precious or twee (I’m lookin’ at you, early Of Montreal), even at its most adorable moments (“News From The Heavenly Loom”).

Nothing — nothing! — remains static, whether it be an under-a-minute-long interlude (of which the album’s got plenty) or rambling electronic number. The only-48-second “Electronic Diversion,” for instance, is a pentatonic rave that busts unexpectedly but somehow necessarily into a low, House-y dance growl. And the record’s longest track, “Round Again,” at a full 5:36 minutes, is a fully-developed electro-pop statement. With a melody reminiscent of George Harrison at his most Ravi Shankar-obsessed, the song’s lyrics speak of mortality and the changeability of life while the music itself rounds corner after corner, satisfyingly returning to its original home in the end. The album turns on a dime from nostalgic (“Tiny Concerts”) to emotional (“Overjoyed”) to transcendent (“The Frozen Lake/The Symmetry,” “Signal Morning”)...[Read more]

Signal Morning released yesterday via Cloud Recordings. It's the band's first album in eight years, and features guest performances by Julian Koster (The Music Tapes, Neutral Milk Hotel) and even Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), as well as everyone from Olivia Tremor Control. It's an E6 reunion, and it sounds wonderful for it.

[MP3] Circulatory System - "Overjoyed" (via Team Clermont)

Record Review: Slaraffenland - We're On Your Side

2009-09-03T22:18:00.003-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Slaraffenland
We’re On Your Side
Hometapes

It’s a rare find, but Denmark’s Slaraffenland truly sounds unlike anyone else. The all-male vocal harmonies on the band’s second U.S.-released LP bring to mind a men’s choir or barbershop quartet, bass-heavy, on-pitch and gorgeous. But see, then they mix that skill with rock n’ roll sensibilities; We’re On Your Side’s throbbing percussion (“Hunting,” “Postcard”) is as important as how they sing. And Slaraffenland has brought creative instrumentation (horns, flute, clarinet, sax) and a strong ear for tension, pace and volume, too. Their compositions are more like classical arrangements than populist ditties, but pull along the same energy as the simplest power ballad...[Read more]

This song is one of my very favorite of the year:
[MP3] Slaraffenland - "Away"

Live Review: Bowerbirds, Megafaun @ The Earl 8/17/09

2009-08-26T15:45:00.004-04:00

[Phil Moore of Bowerbirds]

Wow, I really need to either get a better camera or stop taking show photography. This is verging on blasphemous.

For Atlanta Music Guide:

[Mark Paulson of Bowerbirds]

Live Review: Bowerbirds, Megafaun @ The Earl, August 17

If there had been wires running from the instruments Megafaun and Bowerbirds played onstage, from their faces and hands to the eyes and ears of everyone in the crowd, you would’ve seen bursts of green light, energy snapping and crackling along the lines all night. That’s how electric the show was. Both acts couldn’t have given more.

[Beth Tacular of Bowerbirds]

Megafaun, up first, just didn’t want to stay plugged in. Rather than pulling his banjo’s cord out gently, Phil Cook would rip free of his restraint and bound in one stride to the front of the stage or out into the audience. All three — Phil, his brother Brad, and drummer Joe Westerlund — walked around singing joyously among the crowd members. Standouts included “Kaufman’s Ballad,” “Columns” and “The Fade” as they meshed Americana with noisy electronic feedback and experimental sound collages. The last song of Megafaun’s all-too-short set was an unplugged number where they perched at the very front of the stage and sang straight to the audience, who watched them with awe-struck, upturned faces...[Read more]

[Megafaun]

The Fiery Furnaces burn down the sound barrier

2009-08-20T16:21:00.004-04:00

My first piece for Atlanta's Creative Loafing went up on their website today! Check it out:

The Fiery Furnaces burn down the sound barrier
Sibling duo transcends old-fashioned "with-audio" album-making

“They’ve been saying the album is dead for a long time,” says the Fiery Furnaces’ Matt Friedberger. “I don’t know why they want to kill the album.”

To the New York brother/sister duo, it seems alive and well. Famous for spectacular, keyboard-heavy live performances and eccentric, virtuosic recordings, Fiery Furnaces released their eighth record I’m Going Away July 21 via Thrill Jockey Records. But they didn’t stop there. In reaction to the supposed demise, Matt and his sister Eleanor are putting together a “silent album” — a songbook that will be made up of sheet music, instructions and other visual representations of songs that fans (or non-fans, Friedberger makes sure to point out) can use to recreate musically on their own...[Read more]

FOAVOD: The Music Tapes - "For The Planet Pluto"

2009-08-19T15:48:00.002-04:00

Today's FOA Video of the Day is simply adorable. Trust me. Guest appearances by lots of the Elephant 6, incl. Kevin Barnes.

The Music Tapes - For the Planet Pluto from Merge Records on Vimeo.

Record Review: Julian Plenti - Julian Plenti is...Skyscraper

2009-08-19T12:33:00.004-04:00

It's my first record review for Flagpole Magzine!! I read Flagpole straight through college--their reviews and features were probably what planted the idea of writing for music magazines in my head in the first place...though at the time I never thought I'd be capable of it. (Look at me now!) Super excited to do more for them. Check it:

Julian Plenti
Julian Plenti is...Skyscraper
Matador

With Julian Plenti is…Skyscraper, Interpol frontman Paul Banks has joined the likes of Garth Brooks and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James in creating an arguably unnecessary—not to mention transparent—musical alter-ego. What purpose is served by even Julian Plenti band biographies neglecting to mention that Plenti is Banks or that his performing “sabbatical” coincides with years of success as a member of Interpol is a mystery. Regardless, Banks’ outing as Plenti offers a modest departure from Interpol releases. He’s approached it with a sense of humor (the press photos “accidentally” feature a banner that reads “Julian Plenti is…crap”), and seized the opportunity to side-step the watering-down of creative ideas by compositional collaboration...[Read more]

Live Review: Akron/Family @ The Earl 8/13/09

2009-08-18T13:48:00.003-04:00

For Stomp and Stammer's Tales From The Moshpit:

Akron/Family @ The EARL, 8/13/09

I wish Akron/Family were my family. I wish my family screamed and wailed, but also crooned and hushed and harmonized. I wish they played guitar, bass and drums but also chains of bells around their necks and egg-shaped shakers and sampling boards and recorders and penny whistles. I wish they drew a crowd that filled the room at The EARL, half of whom were rapt with attention and danced with flailing arms, and the other half of whom chatted obnoxiously and spilled drinks on people's (my) feet, requiring their noisiness to be addressed from stage. Wait, I don't actually wish that last one.

Well, it's official. Akron/Family is cooler than my family, unnecessary tie-dyed American flag backdrop and all. And they put on one of the most stunning shows I've ever seen, using just three members — Seth Olinsky, Miles Seaton and Dana Janssen — to perform what on their recordings sounds like it required small armies to produce.

Consisting probably 80 percent of material from their May release Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, the band rocketed through the set, rarely letting the audience have one of those certain breaks after songs in which to applaud. Sometimes, between loud jam-outs, the band would get so quiet that some dude in the back would start clapping erroneously. For that matter, the audience was a bit more of a character in this play that I would have liked — and bassist Seaton seemed to share that opinion. He repeatedly talked to the crowd, toward the beginning wryly remarking "We've got stompers," (people have no rhythm!) and during the encore goading us to dance and singling out one poor sap in front of me who flatly refused...[Read more]

[MP3] Akron/Family - "River"

Record Review: The Antlers - Hospice

2009-08-18T13:32:00.002-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide:

The Antlers
Hospice
Frenchkiss Records

Pete Silberman’s warbling voice exposes a beautiful but deep-rooted anger throughout Hospice, the breakthrough full-length from Brooklyn’s The Antlers. After a wildly successful self-release earlier in the year, the record is getting a proper reissue August 18 via Frenchkiss Records, home of other heavyweights like Les Savy Fav, Passion Pit, The Hold Steady and The Dodos.

It’ll give a wider audience the chance to experience the band’s exploration of the idea of having an abusive loved one in hospice care — of having to be kind at the end of their life, but being beaten down emotionally by them all the same. Silberman speaks of screaming and cursing and apologizing, of fictions, of pushing someone to wake them up, very literally of hospitals (“Epilogue”). His voice cracks with intensity from whispering in a lower register into tortured, strained falsetto at various points; instrumentation ranges from simple four-chord acoustic guitar to huge, piano-driven anthems to electronic ambient swaths that shimmer against each other, all dissonant and pretty...[Read more]

Here We Go Magic - "Fangela"

2009-08-13T13:32:00.001-04:00

This may be the best song I've heard all year. Thoughts?

FOAVOD: Fiery Furnaces - promo video for I'm Going Away

2009-08-07T12:02:00.002-04:00

These guys are so freakin' charming. It makes me wish I had a brother to bicker with about song composition and album titling. The Fiery Furnaces released I'm Going Away July 21 on Thrill Jockey Records.

The Fiery Furnaces - promo video 1 from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

The Furnaces will be at the Variety Playhouse Aug. 20 with White Rabbits.

2009-07-31T23:20:00.000-04:00

Urgh, new banner not look so good. Will fix when have time.

Live Review: Dirty Projectors, Atlas Sound @ The Earl 7/17/09

2009-07-24T14:21:00.006-04:00

For Atlanta Music Guide (and please pardon my terrible show photography):

Live Review: Dirty Projectors, Atlas Sound @ The EARL, July 17

Dirty Projectors arrived late, during Atlas Sound’s set on The EARL’s welcoming stage. They’d driven straight to Atlanta from Louisiana, they told us, and more than one band member was sick. In a gesture of goodwill, the audience agreed to put out cigarettes for their benefit.

Fortunately, the smokes were the only things extinguished. Bradford Cox’s set as Atlas Sound had been a glowing one. Backed by Herb Harris, Jason Harris and Tommy Chung of The Selmanaires, he gigglingly played a handful of tracks from the forthcoming Logos for his hometown crowd. It was the first Atlas Sound show I’ve seen where he had a backing band — one that learned the songs in two days, no less — rather than just a microphone and a sampling board at his fingertips. Cox will take The Selmanaires on tour with him when he hits the road this October.

[Atlas Sound: Bradford Cox and Tommy Chung]

The headliners’ set was no less luminescent. Consisting of almost the entirety of this year’s Bitte Orca, it opened with “Two Doves,” just vocalist Angel Deradoorian singing and band leader Dave Longstreth on guitar. It was a sweet, captivating way to start, and ensured the audience’s undivided attention. The set was peppered with moments that would make us stare equally as rapturously.

[Dirty Projectors: Angel Deradoorian, Dave Longstreth, Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle]

Standout moments included the rocking unison “bitte orca” refrain in “Useful Chamber” and the guitar riff and handclap backing in “No Intention.” Longstreth almost never strums his guitar, always finger picking these frantic, stuttering melodies and looking ecstatic the whole time. Deradoorian, Haley Dekle and Amber Coffman’s voices ping-pong-ed off each other’s in such a way that it was seamless, and difficult to believe it was human anatomy and not an electronic device producing the sound (most startlingly in “Remade Horizon”)...[Read more]

Record Review: Megafaun - Gather, Form and Fly

2009-07-21T10:16:00.004-04:00

Yay timeliness! Gather, Form and Fly releases today via FOA Crushworthy Record Label Hometapes. ("Home is where the tapes is.")

For Atlanta Music Guide:

Megafaun
Gather, Form and Fly
Hometapes

Megafaun’s albums feel like a flocking of musical ideas rather than a linear expression of them. Good thing for the Durham, N.C. trio, then, that the migration it has made compositionally takes it in all kinds of fascinating directions; ones that perhaps aren’t visible without binoculars. From the ashes of former band DeYarmond Edison (minus member Justin Vernon, now of Bon Iver), Megafaun took flight, releasing Bury The Square in 2007. The album won over a national audience with its pretty soundscapes, lush vocals and backwoods instrumentation.

But sophomore release Gather, Form and Fly cashes in that capital and compounds the interest, utilizing more techniques than a goose has feathers. At first glance, it’s just a record full of finger picking and pretty stacked vocals. It fiddles like Appalachian folk, rambles like Americana and strums like acoustic rock. But beyond all that, a strong instinct for experimentation and sound variety permeates Gather, Form and Fly; no two songs can be said to be the exact same style and no one song remains the same style throughout its entire length...[Read more]

Apology

2009-07-20T14:33:00.002-04:00

I've had my file hosting account suspended for some reason (I suspect it has to do with the bandwidth usage surrounding me posting Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks"). Sorry if you've tried to listen to some older stuff and it's not there anymore. If there's anything specific that I once posted that you'd really like, shoot me an email. Thx!

FOA OMG!!1!: Pontiak

2009-07-17T15:28:00.004-04:00

I'm not usually one for stoner-sludge-type guitar rock, but man, is Virginia's Pontiak an exception. I missed them when they did an in-store at Criminal Records during Bonnaroo (exasperated sigh), but I've been spinning their April Thrill Jockey release Maker since then anyway. I caught wind of the band when they passed through Atlanta last year after releasing Sun on Sun (these guys record quickly). The three Carney brothers hail from the Blue Ridge, and can perhaps thank their familial relationship for the seamlessness with which they perform and record. Live, they were a positive force, dark and menacing but somehow buoyant and bright, too. Recorded, listening to Pontiak feels like walking into a cave on a hot, sunny day. You're a little blinded, but it's cool in here, and somehow the sheer depth of it relaxes.

Maker is almost minimalist. Though vocals do play an important role in the album, they're few and far between. That's because for Pontiak, less is more. Lead-off "Laywayed" stops abruptly after the intro and inspires that kind of everyone-inhales-at-once tension bands sometimes employ live. Some tracks, like "Wax Worship," begin or end with lengthy sound collages--they drone--and concentrate more on waves and textures than any pop sensibilities. "Wax Worship"'s final minutes feature vocals reminiscent of Gregorian chants or some type of cult choir situation. You can almost hear the creepy ceremonial hooded robes.

"Seminal Shining," one of Maker's shortest track, departs from all of this. It's wholly and hypnotically different, utilizing Spanish-style guitar and low vocals throughout the length of the song. Maybe a technique of drone and ambient music comes through here; it's another example of the effectiveness yielded by lulling an audience into a certain repetitive framework before startlingly changing style or key. I like it.

Give 'em a listen:

[MP3] Pontiak - "Wax Worship"