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]
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]
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:
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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."
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
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:
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.
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'ta 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?
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]
...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]
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!
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.)
Freelance music journalist/graphic designer for places like Tiny Mix Tapes, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Paste Magazine, Stomp and Stammer, Athens Magazine and Atlanta Music Guide. Former resident of Athens, Ga. Reluctant restaurant employee for nearly a decade.
