I done wrote about Modern Skirts, The Selmanaires and Bon Iver

Some of my writing appeared around the internets this past week, and I thought you lovely FOA readers might be interested.

First, I reviewed the Modern Skirts' new record All Of Us In Our Night for Leila over at Atlanta Music Guide. AMG is a site I didn't know much about until Leila took the reigns, but now I see that it's got some great content! Be sure to check it out regularly!

Here be the review:



Modern Skirts - All Of Us In Our Night

Athens, Ga.’s Modern Skirts will never not make pop music, no matter how hard they try. Their sophomore full-length, entitled All Of Us In Our Night, is just that — albeit an exercise in pop with a good bit of the experimental and the weird seeped in. The piano-driven, shimmering tunes found on the band’s 2005 debut Catalogue of Generous Men have given way to bizarre harmonic choices and sudden key shifts on this self-released follow-up. The whole record — intentionally, according to the band — sounds considerably further off-kilter, deliberately moving away from the easy-to-listen-to, easy-to-hum numbers on Catalogue...[Read more]



Also for AMG, this week I talked to the illustrious Tommy Chung of ATL's The Selmanaires about the direction the band's been going of late. Here's that:



Q&A with The Selmanaires’ Tommy Chung

With two full-length records and a handful of 7-inch singles under their collective belts,The Selmanaires just keep on churning out great Atlanta music. In the wake of the release of their second LP last year, the foursome is undergoing a bit of a re-thinking before heading into more shows (the first of which is this Saturday, January 31 at The EARL with The Features and Carnivore) and new releases for the coming year. We snagged bassist Tommy Chung at work to talk about the band’s new direction, their side projects and what exactly “celestial primitive” means. ...[Read more]



And finally, my review of Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP showed up on PasteMagazine.com the other day. Have a look:



Bon Iver
Blood Bank EP
[Jagjaguwar]

Winter songwriter leaves seasonal trappings behind

"Blood Bank" is, well, electric. Meaning that the opening track of Bon Iver's EP of the same name isn't, you know, acoustic. While usually an unremarkable descriptor for rock music, here it marks a notable departure for a songwriter whose sophomore release just can't be listened to without comparison to its predecessor, For Emma, Forever Ago. The song is a narrative: it speaks in Justin Vernon's usual nostalgic language, this time of first meetings and of identity reduced to the contents of plastic bags... [Read more]

More excuses...

So Paste:Local Atlanta's looking pretty sweet, y'all. I don't seem to have much creative juice left for anything else though, and every time I approach this here FOA to write something, I seem to be without words.

This week P:L A has a live review of that Gnarls Barkley/Janelle Monae show at the Variety a little while back, a preview of the Decatur Book Festival this weekend, a review of the reMIXT opening at Mint Gallery from last weekend, a review of Y O U and the Modern Skirts at Star Bar from last Thursday, the weekly Informer:Atlanta of course (full Atlanta event listings every Tuesday - send tips and calendars to atlanta@pastemagazine.com !) and finally, a writeup of the local shorts program at last weekends Atlanta Underground Film Festival.

And that was just this week! Seriously, I can't believe how good it's all looking (regardless of how stressed-out I get), so please please go read every day and tell all your friends!

Coming up:
Catching Up With... Noot d' Noot
Live Review: The Features, The Redcoats @ The Earl 8/30/08
Reviews of the Decatur Book Festival, The Grant Park Summer Shade Festival and Dragon*Con
(yeah!)

...stay tuned!

Oh, Echo! (part II)

More Echo pictures! Here comes the good stuff...

The Spree's horn section, after transformation into full-blown cult.

Hope for Agoldensummer

AVETTS!

Seth or Scott Avett. I can't remember. They're both too attractive to be differentiated from one another.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. There. Are. No. Words.

Hands down my favorite picture of the weekend. Look how happy the guitarist in the back is....aw...

Alec Ounsworth. Sigh.




Megaphone. "Clap your hands! But I feel so lonely....Clap Your Hands! But it won't do nothing..."

Man Man! onslaught

Ye olde Skirts. I heart Jo Jo.


And that was Echo. All in all an excellent weekend, if exhausting.

This week, I saw Of Montreal (which I did get into, and I did write about, and it was fabulous...sorry for my previous whining...) on Wednesday, Pylon, the Selmanaires, and the New Sound of Numbers on Thursday. I'm tired. Just an excellent week.

September Days

September comes around again, and with it the knowledge of what was happening a year ago at this time, and a year before that. I measure my life in cycles, annual ones, monthly ones…this time it’s a second degree detachment, my remembrance of the disillusionment I experienced 350 some-odd days ago. How things change.

September of 2006 found me humming the Modern Skirts’ “September Days” with a furrowed brow. The words circulated through my head like so:
“September days are the nicest days of the year
Everything changes and green turns to brown in your eyes
Anticipating anxiety and disbelief
September days are the greatest days of the year
...I'll be painting the windows of your hotel
Aaaahhh” followed by a bouncy piano sequence reminiscent of cabaret music.
And so on.

Back then I was measuring. I was craning my neck 180 degrees to the left and seeing how I had felt the previous Fall when “all this” had begun. By “all this” of course I meant the relationship that was disintegrating around me at the time. That’s all the “this” my brain had room for. I was looking backward and remembering how wonderful it had all been when it started, the twelfth of September witnessing our first kiss in the wee hours of the morning on a dark couch in his living room, the way I seemed almost to swirl bodily in the progressively cooling air I was so swept off my feet. We giggled and stared into each other’s eyes. The leaves fell and everything was bathed in violently beautiful colors and he was violently beautiful to me, and I felt violently beautiful, too. I remember surveying my ungainly happiness with a kind of suspicion, the knowledge that something’s gotta give, that this joyful nonsense wasn’t the stuff real life was made of. The time between last September and the one before watched as we loved and grew annoyed, squabbled, laughed, made passive-aggressive comments, cooked together, traveled abroad, drank, read, watched movies, sang songs a major third apart, frowned at textbooks, frowned at friends, frowned at ourselves, rocketed toward an eventuality that seemed only to include us. Late summer was hot and we forced affection, napping in the muggy daze that had become our togetherness. His bed felt too warm all the time, the room trapping all our restless heat inside until we stewed in it. And still I clawed at him, wrapped my fingers around his arm and dug my nails in. The year has him stamped, scribbled, painted all over it. They are Siamese twins, the year and him. All the things, pieces of myself I acquired during that time, are pieces of him whether he ever knew it or not.

As September approached, the heat and the humming overpowered me, and I recognized more than anything that my feet were a little too firmly planted on the ground. I was swept away by nothing, and these did not feel like the greatest days of the year.

September melted into October. The days finally cooled slightly, but I wore short sleeves the night it ended. I got in my car and drove away, the days of wailing at him concluded, only to give way to days of wailing on my own. And that was it.

September begins tomorrow, and with it comes “anticipating anxiety and disbelief,” but not disillusionment. The song never speaks of whether the anticipation is ever fulfilled. I think not. Anticipation at such a level can never truly be lived-up to—at least not in my schema-driven universe. When I look back one year ago, I shake my head almost imperceptibly with downcast eyes. The only similarity it poses with two years ago is that yet again I felt like flying. Only this time, it was with the disappointment that flowed from me with such force I thought I might lift off from the ground and disappear forever.

Maybe this year i'll be painting the windows of my own hotel.