Sebadoh demo-pitch

Sebadoh The Freed Man (Domino)

Notebook shreds in shed//Out July 24

(unpub. pitch 2007)

Hi. Have you heard Domino's Deluxe Edition of Sebadoh's The Freed Man?

Gaffney's reworked it again, with tracks prev not on vinyl or CD, and

some later, better versions, and the best sound yet, which really

brings out all the deft little touches, courtesy a couple of

frustrated/contrarian journeymen/pros, reverting to high-school-stoner

low-fi, but with surly skills now. Yeah, "I'm so sensitive I'm gonna

let it show for second then I'm gonna shove you outta this rubble and

start over," but they represent this familiar tood well enough, with

short tracks--too short sometimes, but even those tend to be bolstered

by for inst folded-in little TV cartoon clashes  and wizardly

come-ons, and and pissed off senile-sounding elderly female, and

little brother wants to start a garage woodstock---if it's escape from

the battles with Mascis, it's some splintery shower curtains Barlow

Jr.'s wrapping himself in, old domestic battles and

firecracker-gunpowdery whiffs around the dirtweed and b.o. and peanut

butter jelly. (Yeah, it's really Gaffney doing a lot of the Radio

Shack tailgatoring, but a lot of continuity, momentum, despite

severaltracks I could live without). Back to the tiny touches revealed

by best sound yet: I especially like the almost subliminal folkie bite

rolling and tumbling in the hampster wheel of "Fire Of July": what

could be banal if allowed conventional length is damn lyrical

here,(wooden music for summer fire loitering in the park) and

"Resistence To Flo" gets a swift floordrop to micro-dubspace depth,

just long enough to demonstrate what such resistenance might entail.

Lots of possibilties in this set, and ones that got me the first time

I listened, which is a basic requirement for PTWorthniess, in my book

(since I figure most listeners are as jaded as I am, and unlikely to

get a track a second chance). A ForceField item, and Daniel G. says we

can use anything on here.

Paul Duncan demo-pitch

Paul Duncan Above The Trees (Hometapes)

Walking through walls, woods//Out May 1

(unpub. pitch,  2007)

Above The Trees is new album by Paul Duncan, one of Daniel Gill's clients (he says we can use any track). Never heard of this guy, but his musicians' creds def figure here: from Tortoise, Brokeback, Eleventh Dream Day, Freakwater, Janet Bean's Concertina Wire, Rhys Chatham's Essentialist, Grizzly Bear, Smog, Cursive, Vandermark 5, among others, Never crowded, it's chamber Americana, the rarer kind, though mellow and somewhat familiar, yet not too limpid for brains, which have learned  from the dense lyricism of John Cale's Vintage Violence times the spacious tone poems of Weather Report's Mysterious Traveller, the sky over and through the forest, the use of strings for tension and warmth at the same time, fluid sounds that curve around as bass lines walk by, words that work with the other sounds to keep painting scenes of transition that we're moving though, yet nothing too vague, there's def an arc of implied narrative, motifs and impulses that reappear, recombine, return like the seasons, requiring decay, and the kind of destruction which might as well be in an almanac. The rhythm section and the brevity and momentum of the tracks keep me trekking along through the woods, singing, "Oh pendulum, refracting our skin, the dog eats our bones and we eat our friends," while the girls bid the Lady Of The Lake to bring them horsies, and Uncle Jim tells her to bring him another drink.(The eagerness of certain periodically recurring tempii, signifying anticipation's insatiabilty/nature's renewal, begins to seem less Forever Young than strung-out at this point, but it's all part of the flow, Joe.) Sort of postacidfolk, cos freakiness is well-contained, under Uncle Jim's hat, and whatever weather's coming (back again). And we might want to mention his 2005 album, Be Careful What You Call Home. Not quite sure which track I'd use, but like I said, we can use any.

Prints

Prints “Too Much Water”

from Prints (Temporary Residence Ltd.)

liquid acrobats as regards the bear// Out Oct. 09

(orig. pub. late Sept or earliest Oct. 2007)                

“We-u-duh wuh-duh woo-duh w-e-l-l-l, whoah! Oh, oh, ” or something like that. Shaken awake, and possibly baked, Kenseth Thibideau and Zac Nelson rise like wise commuters from the jungle womb of tongues, herded on the grapevine, and smartly dressed in syllables that now line up like the morning paper’s headlines, expansive and cautionary: “Nothing to say, and everywhere to walk, magical myst-err-ee, is right as snow, it melts, gives us spring. Is it magic, if it’s easy, if it’s easy, is it magic?” Aye lads, a lotta men tried and a lotta men died the death of credibility, trying to reach the combination of spaciness, soulfulness, and spot-on detail that Brian Wilson blew his youth and and his mind on, so that the results that once seemed to come so quickly would cost another forty years to reappear, in the guise of Brian Wilson Presents Smile, finally skimmed off the unicorn horn of an impossible ideal (in the tombs of some fans’ expectations). But Thibideau and Nelson, who have crowned themselves Prints, get it right right off, on their self-titled debut. They make it look easy, so why should we believe them, or our ears? They’re bound to slip off the surfboard in a moment. But they don’t, because they never got on it: Beach Boys references are just useful tracking devices, and (speaking of expansive and cautionary headlines, in the hands of commuters), the call and response and pull of Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime” comes to mind too, while our self-employees are rolling and tumbling through each day’s subaquatic universe (eight in thirty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds, as this boombox tracks ‘em). It’s all good: Morse code men-digits, off the train and driven home by the insistent beats of phonemes and phoned-home (but never phoned in) E.T. chirps and meaty burps, art cute and art brut, ick and motorik, like “Fun, Fun, Fun!” racing “Fahn-fahn-fahn auf de Autobahn, “ where there’s no speed limit, especially under water. Such familiar points of aspiration and hype indent the inner surface of Prints, the easily ridden but not quite simple temple of the dimple (but not vice versa, for a dimple of a temple might lead to a lobotomy, what this music could also easily resemble). Not to get caught up in the speedy stasis of shiny detail any more than that of zoned-out tonepone, these West Coast indie vets test their breakthrough with shiny detail and zoned-out tonepone, so that distorted thumb pianos ring as clearly as question marks, and drums roll and chop like waves (and the knife of the guy fixing your munchies at Subway), while vocal layers curve like comet trails, attracted to the braided rings of Saturn. (Tuvan-style throat-singing somehow gets a little Mike Love-nasal around the edges, but doesn’t disturb “Meditation.”) “All We Knead” gives the continuum a deep massage. Not that “Pretty Tick” doesn’t seem to flick furry fellow harmonists like Animal Collective, and Prints’ own twee: “There’s a pretty tick, suckin’ blood an’ shit, oo-oo-oo-oo-oo.”

Such (in-effect, whether consciously intended or not) self-inclusive doo-doo doodles are  oblique (and not too frequent) strokes across the path along which Thibideau was lured from the undercurrents of instrumental-only groups like Tarantel, who sometimes found their way into the climbing pipelines of “For Carl Sagan” and “Another Side of Myself Pt.2, “ but sometimes didn’t. On 1999’s From Bone To Satellite, “For Carl Sagan” builds from circular (in this case orbiting?) repetition of one guitar’s notes, with the other guitar  completing a phrase (like a couple who can finish each other’s sentences, but in melancholy, where resignation and steadfastness seem the same). but “For” ‘s dedication just keeps building, in resurgence of resolve and anticipation, sense of expanding space, or what’s waiting for those who venture out once more, til get to rackety apex turns into another plateau, that goes on a bit too long. But lots of feeling in there, and clarity, and ditto, more concisely, on the 2002 Ephemera  EP’s “Two Sides of Myself,” pt.s 1 and 2, with the dayside of such resolve, in Pt. 1’s ruminations in transit (commuter making notes to self on guitar), and Pt. 2’s nightside variation on that (flashing away like a BART train, through a Sonar signal’s smoke ring). Despite other excursions like “ Golden State Overnight,” from the Paper White EP, Tarentel could turn too introverted, shying from corn, but from engaging devices too. “Post-rock, “ you know? Yet overall, Tarentel was (and is) sensuous and dynamic, and the slippery surface and depths of its approach may have encouraged Thibideau to leave when the group approached a peak of popularity. Maybe it wasn’t as much a matter of frustration as graduation.  

By 2004, he found himself spending Summer In Abbadon with the group Pinback, who put private misgivings up front, plain and hazy as day: “She’s posting all the time, but the boards are down. It’s a burned-out building. He’s spending all his time on his back, staring at the ceiling. They spend themselves like that, I’m with that, I’m with them. Come on, you aren’t. You are. Alive, dammit.” You is and you ain’t, my babies. ”Crayon past the line, stay after school. Crossword filled in non-blue, now they’ll never find you.” Uh-uh, the title of that is “Photo Non Blue,” ‘cause you were caught on film or digits, caught making art and/or fudge, that’s what marks and smears the line between magic and other stuff. In this universe of stuff, about which there are several leading theories, but which sure does seem to have some kind of a sell-by date stamped on it somewhere.

Meanwhile, back in Prints, our featured track, “Too Much Water, “ seems both worried and not worried. Well-fed stomps and handclaps, like in the Beach Boys’ “Do It Again, “ at least at first, seem to not be listening to chirps at midnight (all transcriptions approximate): “Barnya-r-r-d, knight ‘n’ sword, no need the light, it’s okay, hit it to the old…”(Beats hit it back, like hamhocks as baseball bats.) “I know I’m swimmin’ out of deep black water, so many cups, too much water, evil is runnin’, jump in, float through ceilin’, too much water!” Not to swim in, that is. So, between drought and floods, in this lucky ol ’07, which gets to listen to this long-time-coming short-player all summer long, hit it back through scarecrow October, c’mon and do it again.

Time Of Orchids

Time Of Orchids “Darling Abandon”

from Namesake Caution (Cuneiform)

dreamatics vs. schematics// Out Sept. 18

(orig. pub. late Aug. or early Sept. 2008)                          

Since 1999, Time Of Orchids have specialized in both rude and beautiful sounds, fighting and travelling together. Their tracks seem like wrestling scripts in code, cracked on cue, but not too easily. These secret treaties seem to seek to critique the pageantry and plains, of public and private domains, the implications of alt-to-arena rock and prog alike. Like, when you get the girl, the gold, the God, the math, the good grief (if you’re emo), when you take the perfect hit and reach the shining peak---great, but what happens next? The next day, next night, next minute. What have you done for us lately? The meter’s always running. Et cetera. Cliches that settle in, the more you scratch that itch.

 Not that they’re complaining, at least not plainly. But looking back, over older tracks, posted across the Cyberverse, you may well catch them reaching a moment when foes have been flung clean out of the ring. The same moment when another time signature starts twitching like an irritable bowel, waiting in the wings.

 Time Of Orchids’ latest album, Namesake Caution, begins and ends, like the (possibly?) bi-planetary, bi-everything city in Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren, with a loop of perspective, carrying a caravan of seekers. Who enter via “In Color Captivating” and “Windswept Spectacle,” and are last glimpsed somewhere in the vast and pearly back orifice of “Entertainment Woes.” Wise men baring gifts: synthesizers and high voices stream like dusty light, through star-bearing trees and the window blinds of a B-movie motel. Dusty light, including that of the lyrics, is perhaps unneeded, seemingly unheeded, (yet never shaken) by bass and drums, growling and prowling and chopping and splashing through phrases burnt curt by the guitar’s low flame, which can ill and spill into fuzz and sustain.

But about 2/3s of the way through the fractal forest, the complexity collapses into complication, and rock is no longer an implied (or anyway inferred) subject, it’s a reflexive resource, tapped more times than co-founding bassist Jesse Krakow’s Chapman stick (the basic specs of Namesake Caution always include reminders of ‘70s [Yesian helium vocals, moonlit Synergyesque synths] times ‘80s [King Crimson’s knotty rhythm section of Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, the latter of whom was also in early ‘70s Yes: another loop[)(And the better moments can pass through the roller coaster solar system of John McLaughlin’s  Devotion, as well as his sojourn with Tony Williams Lifetime. Plus: afterimages of the Beach Boys, channeled via a bit less lungpower, but more collective brainpower.) The default: bash brilliant (or at least flashy) bits through  (or at least way into) the stop-start traffic jam, power through to spooky fades, pick up the ball and pitch again. No doubt it’s all good for some, but seems like you gotta be really into prog, really into Time Of Orchids, really into collecting everything on Cuneiform Records. None of which is (necessarily) bad, but ultimately this album gets stuck in the kind of specialized appeal that tends to come from sounds associated with the quest for transcendence. Quests are always risky, but the frustrations are so familiar.

More intruders in the moondust might help. Previous albums have been accosted by: Marilyn Crispell, the avant-jazz pianist; the B-52s’ wailin’ Kate Pierson; and: cosmic roadhouse chanteuse Julee Cruise, of Twin Peaks fame (She’s also sung with the B-52s, as the convergences continue to rise). Or never mind the neighbors from Neptune, just unleash whichever Orchid broke through the 2004 track, “Banquet For Back Of Neck,” currently posted on their Myspace, bellowing, “I can’t afford, I can’t avoid work!” High anxiety, misted by higher voices, in measured tones, so soothing, as they search for just the right point at which to slip a needle into the Savage’s quivering hide. Bring back that guy! Just for a moment, okay?

Yet before the 2/3 mark of this set, which is, say, track 8, out if 10, which makes the ratio, uh—well, this non- math-rockhead did find himself pulled from the grave of taste (you know, the kind marked by the conventional geezercore of review-scribbler’s epitaph: Velvets, Stooges, P-Funk, Miles, etc). For instance, our featured track,  “Darling Abandon,” throws flashlights and boots and bouquets and moonbeams at Time Of Orchids’ elusive stalker-muse, who is serenaded lovingly, addressed truthfully: “Darling Abandon, your extreme, knows no bounds, and forces you madly, through passages of ashy drudgery, to scheme, beckoning. In time, your weapon grows for you; in time, your weapon crows for you; in time, your weapon grows for you; in time, your weapon goes for you…” Yeah, after a while, it’s as plain as the nose on your mirror.

The Drift

The Drift   “Gardening, Not Architecture” (Four Tet remix)

from Ceiling Sky  (Temporary Residence Ltd.)

jazzbient excursions // Out Nov. 6

(orig. Pub. early Nov. 2007)

It would be so easy for The Drift to trail one beautiful dead end after another, the usual ambient amnesia, but they never stop delving into and illuminating the mutable emotional core of their music. For instance, on  “For Grace and Stars,” Jeff Jacobs’ trumpet and flugelhorn (multi-tracked, or with the notes of one interspersed with the other, maybe) can brush the cloudy canyon steps of Safa Shokrai’s upright bass, then hang on the twanging filaments of Danny Grody’s guitar, before curving between Rich Douthit’s cymbal and snare. You could also say the horn player brings solace, and the four brothers pass it around behind the hymnbooks, but don’t drop the coffin during the hillside ceremony, as the wind rewinds the greenery. Or something like that: there’s always an implied subtext, though these musical shapes can’t be too easily traced. (Dang, if only they had lyrics---so much easier for us quotation-minded reviewers on the poprock side.)

The Drift may have had to learn their lesson about sweet stasis, since the press sheet acknowledges that Ceiling Sky’s openers, “Streets” and “Nouzomi,” previously available only as single tracks, raised great expectations, which the debut album, Noumena, didn’t entirely fulfill. Seems like about half of it, about 28 minutes, is good to great, while the other half is too reverent about its process, too fascinated with the foreplay. (Guitarist Grody’s previous group, Tarentel, has always provided similar rewards and frustrations.) That’s the standard domestic CD version of Noumena, which would have done well to include “Noumena,” and “For Grace and Stars,” as did the vinyl edition and Japanese import disc. But they’re here, and so are two rare remixes of nuggety Noumena tracks: Sybarite’s Xian Hawkins cruises through “Invisible Cities,” and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, fresh from shuffling and dealing the flutter and flotation of Sunburned Hand Of  The Man’s Fire Escape, polishes and spins The Drift’s dubwise lens and sense of clarity beyond (or at least between) categories, on “Gardening, Not Architecture.” Staccato, pouncing sounds, usually associated with drum solos, turn out to be accompaniment, then again, they’re feeding cues and impulses (“comping,” right?) to backwards ripples of guitar, or bowed cymbals, or bowed bass, or all of the above. Who cares, it works. Everybody circles a glitch-sun for a while, but not too long, and arms are raised, with chirpy critters running up and down them, as vibrations of anticipation make a happy now.

Tera Melos

Tera Melos: “Party With Tina“

from Complex Full of Phantoms (Temporary Residence Ltd.)

math team dropout semiprog skaterboogie//Out Nov. 6

(orig. published early Nov. 2007)               

Complex Full of Phantoms is a rolling duplex, a split CD, shared by two speedy, punk-metally, secretly (but only somewhat) mellow, mostly instrumental rock bands, By the End of Tonight and Tera Melos. This crib is a little bigger inside than out, and here come the warm gulls, spilling sunlight and other things through the broken skylight, onto the night crew, working forklifts and small trucks overtime, racing around like brownies in Mom’s big mixing bowl. Gracious, it’s spacious, a veritable warehouse in here (later for your jailhouse and garage rock; how quaint). But not too much echo, just enough room for corrugated textures and gnarred shards to sound off, three, four (yes, they’re organized, but not agonized about it, or anything).

Oh, they’ve been around: on “Ghost Boat, “ the bulrushes part to reveal an actual voice, of a child apparently, asking an adult to “Tell me one.” The solid, Ward Cleaver-ish, but slightly shy guy replies, “They’re not the kind of stories you can tell.” “Too dirty?” “Well, I guess they’re dirty enough, if only incidentally. Mainly, they’re angry, sensitive, tensely felt, and that dirtiest of all dirty words…” Oh, but all that’s By The End of Tonight, sorree! Is he speaking for Tera Melos too?

Well yeah, judging by the  brooding, on the sly and the fly, of (relatively wordier, relatively proggier) Tera Melos’s “Party With Tina,” in which the rattling, “look what I can do!”  curtains occasionally allow a single, bumpkin-y pause to stick its gooseneck out, from the frustration behind the whole show here; somebody sums up, “I’ll go back, I’ll go back, I’ll go back (mention of “the backseat” flies by)…and I’ll play and I’ll play and I’ll play, but it’s not workin’ out.” Of course, the present tense slips back in at the end, and adds a reminder: “Learn to use your discretion, over time, oh, ho-ho-ho.” How adult to find humor in the time-trap, as “ I’ll play and I’ll play…” marches up yet again. But better yet, get that love-loop squished, so strumpets’ trumpets can strut through a glimpse of Penny Lane, down the hurricane drain into---what?

What goes something like this: “When Worms Learn to Fly” sure might be a wedding rehearsal gone terribly wrong, judging by the way that cellophane cellphone organ is spinning; “Melody 9” quietly absorbs birdy sounds into palmprints, while each floating touchdown results in twice as high and sensitive liftoffs: “All that was left of you, and the day had to cruise…” oooh-oooh: a tiny bit “so what” there, toward the end. Concluding “Last Smile For Jaron” keeps getting grudge tickets to pass muster, as for instance a crowning crescendo meets Mom’s beaters, and meringue appears. Oh, but for the paid-for cool of preoccupied solitude and maybe foresight, in hindsight, before life’s messy details unfold too out of hand---go back to “Tina” again, that drain’s got brain enough, ditto time! (See, because Tera Melos get a little long-winded eventually).

By the End of Tonight: Beaver. Tera Melos: Wally. Six tracks of Little Bro, five of Big: about right.

Film School

Film School “Lectric”

from Hideout (Beggar’s Banquet)

shoegaze express// Out Sept.11

( review/interview, orig. pub. early Sept. 2007)

                                  

Film School is an appropriate name for the ongoing Frisco-based independent musical study project directed by Greg Bertens (AKA Krayg Burton), whose combos, whatever their lineup, explore synesthetic traces of love in the shadows (steamy sonic emissions, mistaken for a bubble bath, by one swaying on the subway platform, et cetera). Familiar themes to many a consumer, and here they’re re-worked via the basic components of  late 80s/early 90s bands known  as shoegazers: mainly Brits, like Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine, whose Colm Ó Ciosóig appears on Hideout. Among those tagged shoegazers, MBV were among the most extremist, the most noisist, yet with no loss of atmosphere. It’s hard to push this style’s diaphanous envelope, but (while not trying to beat MBV at their own game) at least thematically, Bertens can’t let the hungry ghost of deep focus go, and good for him. Hideout’s songs are often overheard addressing a lost love that can’t remember or forget, find or lose the singer, song, or other. (How much of the blurry presence of the other is really a projection of the Film School narrator’s own haze? Not all of it: her wounds, her appetites, and her she-ness, are real enough, wherever they wander, and hover.) Voices (mostly the guy, but females brush by) are overheard reaching, trailing through lines they probably know are tapped, while bass and drums beat insistently against the curving walls of compartments, from inside or out.

Main prob is that music, like any other drug, builds up a tolerance in the listener, and those walls of safety and loss through which apprehension and other thrills must pass can get too thick. So probably this 49-minute CD could be better shorter. Yet eventually, after losing their way too successfully,  outlaw lovers reach a peak of focus and vertical activity on “Plots and Plans”, as a female voice (possibly that of bassist-singer Lorelei Plotcyzk, although Tracy Uba and Leah Piehl also guest star somewhere on this non-specifically-annotated promo) moves up front for once.  “Our confessions” even form (or at least join) “a night procession, discolor in sunlight,” but don’t disappear, because she continues to remind somebody, ”If we should follow through and fake our own deaths, I’m hoping you’ll show up, no funeral wasted.” Bertens (is it still him? Sounds so bold, so up front now) quickly responds, with the sudden thought of a funeral (a film, too?): “without a director, so satisfying,” and this anarchy sounds transcendently outlaw, masks meeting broad daylight (even if they’re discolored by it): “Our love steps ahead of plots and plans.” But that’s just a moment, plenty relapses ahead for these wild ones, of course.

 In “Lectric,” our usual male “I” peels himself far enough from the bubblewrap to go out walking alone, but he sounds happy as he croons, “Down to Mission Street, deciding where to meet. I have all night long, I’ll wait on my own.” Sound-clusters, like instant afterimages from pressed eyeballs, pins and needles from a numb foot waking up, swoop along the hilly blocks, where the singer’s little notes reappear, sure as checkers jumping across a board. He knows where he’s going. “I have all night long, I have all night long.” He sounds really proud of himself, but most of all delighted with the extended moment of anticipation. “If you can want, you can care,” like Smokey Robinson says. Life’s so fun if you care, but not too much. “Teach us to care, and not to care,” prayed T.S. Eliot, seeking balance but “Teach us to sit still” is too much of a balancing act for our boy, at least tonight. Because right now, he knows how to walk! “Look both ways before you cross or leave the street. I have all along, I will all night long.”

Film School frontman Greg Bertens on “Lectric”

Did this song seem to appear out of nowhere, or did you already have some ideas that came together because of a specific incident, or in a certain moment?

Yeah, this song did kinda appear out of nowhere. I think I was playing around with drum machine hand-claps and getting frustrated (which is what happens with drum machine hand-claps), so I just decided to soak the entire thing in a reverbed-guitar bath. Most of my favorite songs came about like that—getting frustrated with a direction and doing something completely contrary and then finding a way to make the two work together.

How much of the song was written (in your head, on paper, in demo) before you recorded this performance?

Most of this song was written and performed at the same time. Originally I was planning on demoing songs for this album in my home studio and then re-recording instruments later in a “real” studio, but many times it didn’t work out that way. I wrote and recorded most of “Lectric” in my studio when I was in the center of the song and layering different instruments. Dan Long (our engineer) and I later tried to  re-record some of the original takes I did at home, in some of the nicer studios, but…many times the new recordings would color the song differently, either screwing up the way the layers sat together, or worse, watering down the feeling of the song. What we ended up doing was re-amping my home studio recordings through better amps and recording those amps with better mics, which improved the overall tonality.  Oddly, the drums on “Lectric” were the last instruments to be recorded, and James Smith’s amazing performance really brought the whole song together and to life, as his drumming did for a lot of the songs.

Most songs about nights and streets are meant to seem spooky and/or tragically glorious, yknow like Springsteen. This actually sounds happy, what’s up with that?!

I could see how you’d think that because of the sweet, sorta innocent melody, but I don’t think you’d say that if you knew the lyrics. I like contradictions in music and I really like a dark song sung sweetly. Elliot Smith did it beautifully on “St. Ides Heaven.” “Lectric” is one big contradiction—washy, dreamy guitars and growling, driving rhythms. or, go-to-sleep-forever/do-everything-in-one-second. Lyrically the song developed that way too—the contradiction of the all-night drug runs on Mission and 16th in S.F.,  sung about in an innocent way. Vocally it’s the closest I could get to skipping.

Pedro

Pedro  “Vitamins”

from You, Me & Everyone (Mush)

beach ball expresso //Out Nov. 6

(orig. pub. late Oct. or early Nov. 2007)      

Pedro is James Rutledge and his records. He keeps playing them together ‘til they stack up right, and then fall over, and then go sailing away, curving back into and through some mighty (and) curious shapes, if you could only connect the dots. You can, actually: here, hearing is believing, but the writer has to try to transcribe--unless you want to settle for, “Ah yes, a bit like his friend Four Tet.” Ah yes, where you keep walking boldly, because even the shadows seem blue and gold, on such a day, turning corners whiter and sharper than bone, and the air is nice. But in Pedro’s case, such invigoration seems to lead to a wedding party in a low-gravity environment: oh, the guests are settling down, the festivities are mellow, but the pillows keep rising just a little, and on the title track, you might be awakened by a naked bridesmaid playing piano exercises on goosebumps exclusively. Eyelashes flutter around sleepcrusts, as a free jazz kazoo points the way to curtains flung open where windows must be, so greet skyscrapers swaying back like pitchers do to strike you out, but this time they disappear (not too soon; Pedro keeps you on your toes). But that’s the title track, basically (typically atypical in the way it conjugates and permeates the album’s shared feeling and components). Tiny interludes, dents in “Green Apples, “Red Apples,” “Lung,” and others, only add to the momentum of development, keep them rolling rolling rolling. Loops recur like call and response, and also like smashed guests wandering through the walls one more time. (Oh: they are the walls. Never mind.) On “Vitamins,” doorbell static reappears in flickering boutonnieres, zigzagging down the vibrating hills of Denver, where it’s really high and dry, so soon enough, ringing ribs of rhythm breathe in and out, in and out, expelling clouds of dandelion wine, while the moony sun says it isn’t so. (Sidewise high hat keeps clearing its throat, though.) Flippers clap smartly through voices (which are unusual on this album, though Pedro plays well with voices in the remixes posted on his Myspace page: ones of DNTEL Featuring Grizzly Bear, Longcut, even Bloc Party’s blockheaded lugubroo). Voices of kids, so you might say, ”Ugh,” but they sing with homs a little (he does like his horns, free in key, whatever that might be), and flutter their lips like shutters, like kids (no phonetically rehearsed inspirational verse). Then they shut up, and go play in traffic (vibrations trying to spit out, “Good e-e-e, Good e-e-e…”; tumbleweed strings; “Wipe Out,” etc.). Listen only on goodass headphones, bass up.

Rings

Rings: “Mom Dance”

from Black Habit (Paw Tracks)

urban folk-teen-pop//Out Jan. 15

(orig. pub. late 2007 or early 2008)  

          First Nation was populated by three women: Kate Rosko, Nina Mehta, and Melissa Livaudais. Their self-titled 2006 debut album featured mostly wordless vocals, guitar, and percussion. Now, with a different percussionist (Abby Portner, succeeding Livaudais), and a new album, Black Habits, the trio is Rings: “We thought the name First Nation would produce positive dialog, but it didn’t. It’s so loaded with identity politics, which is fine, because we actually do support other people’s ways of self-representing. But the name never opened up that space for talking about names and identity and social and political structures…and even if it did, that’s not what this new incarnation of our band is. For now, we’re like a pop band for teenage girls, and for now, Rings makes sense. It’s a name for our circular compositions, the bonds between us, our decision making processes, our mystic beliefs, the circular shapes around us, interlocking, connected, feminine whole, continuous…“

           Sure enough, they do make use of circles, cycles, with more words in the vocals now (good if you still want “positive dialog,” or to be “a pop band for teenage girls”), and of other sounds passed around: high voice and higher voice, going way, way out when necessary, but both bring (and ring) the changing sense of the words clearly enough; these are brushed by bluesy strands of guitar, like falling leaves, branches, snips of hair; jabbing or flexing or hovering keyboards; tom-toms, occasional snare, and cymbal-spills pulled into loops, in and out of the mix, along with, say, a sharp intake of breath, like the beginning of a sob or gasp, cut and spliced into a groove, not just to “normalize” it by repetition and control, but to use it as a point of departure, reference, creative friction, and sometimes plain compulsion. (As Mom would say, ”Stop picking at that! Go wash it!”)

         Seems like, as they perform live-in-the-studio, Rings are also looping samples of previous performances, improvisations, encounters, again as intermittent points of departure, reference, etc.  Loops that add to the overall invocation of “circles,” in terms of recurrence (including old feelings, problems, solutions), but which lead to/cut through cross-hatchings of narrative, of solitude and sisterhood, of struggle, of moments adding up, on a well-traveled, splattered, but almost too-legible sheet: “so loaded with identity politics” indeed, under whatever name. “You” and “I” can be friend, lover, parent, self, glimpsed in the street, the clock, the instrument, the audience, the absence, all under the skin. From all over NYC, feminine shapes and shades of time and space curve into and out of the tracks: intimations, but never imitations, of (for instance) early 60s girl groups (via harmonic convergences and consultations); paperbacks like Because They Wanted To and How To Survive In The Woods, eased into jeans while walking through subway newsstands; dub-paced  story-lines of NYC’s own E.S.G., and of pilgrims like the Slits and the Raincoats.

        Our featured track, “Mom Dance,” also suggests “a pop band for teenage girls” on ESP-DISK (home of the Holy Modal Rounders, Charles Manson and the Family, Patty Waters, MIJ, and many other campfire apparitions), circa 1965. That is, If any of those ESP outcats ‘n’ kitties showed up in time to match the release date of Sonny and Cher’s self-titled debut (speaking of the identity politics of friend, lover, parent, S& C play many roles with each other, as written and/or performed). Dig the tensions and resolutions squirming and strutting through unabashed sonic idiosyncracies, willful ways of hitting the note, and/or re-defining “hit.”  Thus the boom-boom and the jingle-jangle are passed through (back and forth), in Sonny and Cher’s give and take, and Rings’ “Mom Dance” too: no hand-me-down wisdom on this family holiday, unless you count (along) the wheel of   “Please let me you let me please let me,” and maybe you should, because the rim of it does cut a diamond hairline for the entering/escaping fresh air siren call, “You’ll find another dream, in a-nother, wor-ah-ah-orl-ld,” and here’s the fire escape to that, other sounds say! This leads certain headphonic travellers  to other questions: do the birds still speak Esperanto? Is the Pope still on the roof? Momma Bear will get back to you on that (and how).

Cassettes Won't Listen

Cassettes Won’t Listen: “Paper Float”

from Small-Time Machine (Cassettes Won’t Listen)

stubborn yesterhaze//Out March 11

(orig. pub. early March 2008)

  A foggy day, but you can tell it’s a day. Which starts with a half-minute or so of strong, buzzy keyboard notes, almost like a harpsichord—settling in, but then: “The mix is lit (or slipped), the fire’s gone, we lost her in the broken storm, how shallow can we get? When every regret costs us a thousand bets!”  That’s how Cassettes Won’t Listen’s first single, “Cutting Balloons,” begins, beyond the irony of its title-- like we’re gonna linger in the present tense awhile, in the process, oh yes, instead of blowing up in your face like that, soon as the blade’s applied. But, as you can see from the lyric, things are in fact moving right along, right through the Big Bang of creation, with practical-minded, self-aware exhortations to mop the damage and keep doin’ the aftermath. Mr. Cassettes (that is, singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-producer Jason Drake) urges his colleague to remember that “she” is the source of inspiration as well as frustration. He’s here to remind, and point out that, “She don’t understand, she’s like music, gets to you, and we knew! That it’s all the way, she wants to take a ride outta you…” or is it “take the ride”? Either way, really; he can see both sides: his buddy’s lost his ride, his momentum, his inspiration, but she wants to get out of him (out of being his “ride,” indeed--she wants to be free!) But Cassettes Won’t Listen says unto them both, “There’s so much left to do.” Says it to you too, but who’s gonna listen? For instance, you don’t exist---not the immediate “you” in the song, anyway. Cassettes Won’t Listen is talking to himself when he talks to his “colleague,” because CWL is a one-man band.

  Nevertheless, there’s a sense of expansiveness, of release in “Cutting Balloons,” which was recorded in 2004, after “not picking up a mic in years,” like it says on http://www.cassetteswontlisten.com. But Drake also says that he took the name Cassettes Won’t Listen after finding that, no matter what could be tapped and released in the writing and recording of a song, the tape was like “ a bad therapist, who only repeats your problems.” Well, cassettes can’t listen to themselves, anyway, so he mailed the track to a few friends; then it quickly turned up on blogs, even the radio, and so the first Cassettes Won’t Listen EP, Nobody’s Moving, came out in October of 2005, about a year after “Cutting Balloons” started the ball rolling. Studio-rat CWL was even lured into performing live, ricocheting from guitar to keyboards to drums to turntables; he also called on other performers to join in (as guests).

   Cassettes Won’t Listen was further fortified by what he found in some the songs he was then asked to remix; you can check a dozen of them here: http://cassetteswontlisten.com/cwlremixes The CWL method of remixing is to strip a song down to its vocal (without listening to the original version much at all). The challenge is connect , to really listen and hear the singer’s (and writer’s and remixer’s) sense of the song inside the voice, the song inside the song, and to bring it out, by making something new. It’s a way of finding more of his own voice—especially apt is Midlake’s “Young Bride,”whom the narrator sees “moving like an old woman,” strangely bringing winter.

  Which is the underlying theme in Cassettes Won’t Listen’s own EPs  See, it’s not just cassettes that won’t listen, it’s really time, time just keeps rolling along, like tape, like music on tape, preserved and contained, ‘til something goes wrong (Drake also says that a cassettes are people who “get played” because they don’t listen, don’t take warning signs to heart).   On a set of covers, One Alternative (available as a free download on the CWL site), CWL rolls and tumbles through the chutes and ladders of Pavement’s excitable, boyish “Cut Your Hair,” followed by the horny jade of Butter 08’s “Butter Of 69,” then wakes up in the boo-hoo boo-dwah of Liz Phair’s “Fuck And Run,” of all things;  he then repents of such self-pitying delusions with every slice of Sebadoh’s  “The Freed Pig”. The better to take self-pity to a self-wake: “Now you will be free, with no sick people tugging at your sleeve, your big bed has more room to move—a glory I will never know.” So what better conflicted inspirational message to end with, than a revelatory resurrection of Blind Melon’s “Change.” RIP Shannon Hoon…CWL’s voice can’t fly as high as that junkie angel’s, but his crusty-to-pillowy, tape-y sounds will surround and carry him through all eventualities, as usual, on his March 2008 EP, Small-Time Machine.

  “Wish we all, could freeze, and explode, “ he chirps, like the Beach Boys on their Christmas album; he seems nice and nasty (nicety), recalling the pragmatic popological aspect of “Cutting Balloons.” No doubt it’s occurred to him that “Freeze And Explode, “ like several of his older tracks, would probably look really cool on video. Cassettes Won’t Listen’s expertly crinkled imagery of sound and vision twine around the hoodie-wearing implication that the “control” he sometimes sings about regaining (someday), so as not to be passive like a cassette, is really based on timing, on listening carefully, and playing your part in and on that “Large Radio.”

  The same thing that keeps you in there keeps you rolling (can’t have no dead air on the radio, you know), and so our featured track “Paper Float,” doesn’t sound too freaked out about the ongoing (gradual) process of sinking: “We barely had time to set it right,” but they did, and the “they” sounds real enough,because (though they’re reedy, overdubbed harmonies) they sound steadfast enough, and warm enough, despite some shivering (”Up all night to watch the paper sink, will the captain put down his last drink”), because they  try to stay active enough: “Our arms together we try to row, singing whoah!  Oh, oh, oh, oh! Crack a smile and let each other know…you know I know…” And sometimes that’s enough, even though “I only see you smile.” Some kind of code, h’mm; better watch those folks. But it’s clear enough that the good and the bad, the glad and the sad are still together; the tape hasn’t broken yet (everything’s getting transferred) .

Foxy Shazam

Foxy Shazam: “Red Cape Diver”

from Introducing (New Weathermen/Ferret)

good gaudy miss maudy //Out Jan. 23

(orig. pub. Jan 2008)                            

The sound of Foxy Shazam is the sound of one pin rolling, back and forth across a carpet full of crackers that won’t ever go smooth, no matter how fine their dust is ground. It’s the pressure in a knife sawing through a pan full of brownies harder than Astroturf (mysteriously so: all directions on the package followed to the letter, and that’s what we get for forsaking Great-Great-Grandma’s recipe). The sound and vision of Foxy Shazam is that of a family reunion, forced (as if) at gunpoint, nevertheless somehow busting loose in a good way (on shards of thin ice which will never melt permanently, of course). The sound of Foxy Shazam is that of close calls, across the rules and other speed bumps of music, of everything, at least by battle-rattling implication (which they don’t give much time for editorializing about, when their new album, Introducing, is playing, twitching like a background shouldn’t).

The sound of Foxy Shazam takes this reviewer back to and forward from the unexpectedly hammy, glammy frontmen of the slambands featured in Penelope Spheeris’s punk squatter saga, Suburbia: greasepaint as fuel and/or lubricant and/or salad dressing, for the festive-to-reckless rituals of the antsy-to-moshing audience. Also for those (in the Spheeris movie and in Foxy live shots on YouTube) sinners who are just grinning: you don’t have to take the sound just one way or another, which goes against punk and novelty strictures alike. The sound of Foxy Shazam is more careening carnival ride than the old punk der-der-der beat—but that rolling pin is rolling, like Sky White’s piano is rollicking, back and forth, through the ages of the living flame of punk, as “Yes! Yes! Yes!”,  for instance, spins and spews shards and shades of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, riding a streamlined Mars Volta (none of which allusions should be taken too literally, but  Foxy Shazam can often  be seen in the mental moonlight, shakin’ that family tree). The screaming of throatist Eric Nally (times Loren Turner’s guitar, Joe Holberstadt’s drums, Daisy’s bass) doesn’t get in the way of musical appreciation, or even Nally’s words. (Well, maybe on “Ghost Animals,” and anything may get a little blurry anywhere, but basically the studio tracks seem to know they need to provide more and some different detail than live offerings.)

“Red Cape Diver” starts with a “Spanish” piano intro, and is reportedly “about a bullfighter who is telling his family that he loves them before he goes off to work.” Not to judge him too harshly, ‘cause you couldn’t get this pixel-pusher fighting bulls, or Red Bull, for that matter, not even for the wife and kiddies, but…if you were fixing to go do that, wouldn’t you want to soothe them? Well, maybe the best way to do that is get ‘em swinging from the balconies, burning off that excess energy, and maybe that’s the best way to get yourself warmed up for the stage (all the world’s a stage!). And maybe every performer (everybody in the world, including the bullfighter’s wife and kiddies!) should reach way down sometimes (like every day, at least once a day), and come up with, “AHHHHHH! I DON’T WANNA DIE” as a chorus, and a motto, bouncing back and forth, from face to face, until the song is over. It might make everybody feel better. And then it would be something to look forward, to, like another day. The sound of Foxy Shazam is the sound of such thoughts, ground round (and round) as a head (and a spotlight). Their worth can be figured out (ditto whether it’s worth figuring out) by the pound (and the pound and the pound).  YEAH