Here's the thing...

Review: Rat Jackson "Midnight Get Right"

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:20:00 GMT

It’s now a matter of shared faith among all of us – tweedy Chomskyites, Oprahfied eat-pray-lovers, Farm Town enthusiasts – that we can uncover vast regions of the individual psyche simply by boiling life down to a couple of choices between two related but dissimilar items.

You know the ones. Is my stepsister’s new boyfriend going to take her on a six state killing spree? Hey there, Aldo, Beatles or Stones? Do I really want to plan a surprise birthday party with my fiance’s grandmother? Would you say you’re more of a boxers or a briefs gal, Joanne?

But can all this weighty Column A’ing and Column B’ing actually take us to the heart of anything meaningful?

Rat Jackson frontman Tad Jackson faces just such a choice in the opening moments of “Sexy Waitress” when he’s asked if he’ll be having the chicken or the steak. But as anyone who’s witnessed Rat Jackson’s balls out live show over the last few years knows, Rat Jackson will never worry about food when there’s a waitress to be had instead. And that choice does, in fact, tell us all we need to know about the Rat Jackson Rock’n’Roll Band.

Whether they’re dealing with sex, love, rock, sex, booze, sex, or sex, much of what feels exciting and fresh on Rat Jackson’s new debut record, Midnight Get Right, comes from their dead-eye focus on what really matters in love and music: making the heads bob and the knees shake. True to form, there’s no foreplay here. The band kicks off the covers in mid stroke with the call and response screamer “Holler and Jump” before stepping out into the swaggering back alley braggadocio of the title track, pursued by the wild dog slide guitar of lead guitarist Steve Oliva.

Although Get Right’s best track is probably “Summer Hummer” (a staple of the live set and the perfect showcase for bassist Rusty Sutton and drummer Chester Jackson’s skillful interplay of dance party rock), it’s a newer composition “Motorcycle Horse” that really warms up with repeated listens. As a love song to an imaginary chariot of female procurement it exchanges the more comic book dimensions of White Zombie’s “Black Sunshine” for the inspired trapper keeper fever dreams of a ninth grader in biology lab. But even at the heights of their most adolescent fantasies, Rat Jackson always manages to throw out the telling detail that keeps things grounded, as here our hero lothario promises to ply his new woman with round of cider and erotic photohunt.

We’ve known from our cradles that rock is at its best when it’s loud, fast and about fucking. But we tend to get caught up in thinking the answer lies somewhere on one side of an either/or divide. While other local rock bands are busy trying to figure out a clever angle or a new way to dress up to their craft, Rat Jackson walks up wearing nothing but an ascot and a jock strap and gets on with getting it on. They’ve built an aesthetic around the ability to recognize and eliminate these false choices that sometimes blind us to what we really want. And what we really want is a half motorcycle half horse. S<

Originally posted at Secret Carrboro Ninja Patrol

Review: The Honored Guests: Into Nostalgia

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:55:00 GMT

This review originally appeared at Secret Carrboro Ninja Patrol.

One of the welcome outcomes of the recent implosion of the music industry has been the reemergence of the EP as the de facto release format for independent artists. Enter on cue the The Honored Guests'new release Into Nostalgia, a record not only designed musically for the middle distances of the EP but one that also dives headlong into thematic issues of size, proportion, scale, and measure.

While the Guests’ first two releases, iawokeinacityasleep and Tastes Change, established their bend for the reflective and the understated as well as their interest in notions of maturity, Into Nostalgia is their first fully mature record; it expresses throughout the wisdom of those who have lived a little space beyond the false bravado and certain idealisms of youth. Just a few years ago the Guests were one of the more nomadic local bands, playing shows anywhere from Florida to California; now, they’re comfortably settled down, pleased to spend the long winter making a record and emerging every so often to play a local show.

As the title of the EP suggests, the heart of these songs’ maturity rests in a wholesale understanding of nostalgia. Too often a dress-up emotion donned by young artists, nostalgia is here presented in its proper light, full of both the self-discovery and the self-deception involved in why and how we remember. While the sprightly, Brit-poppish “Jimmy’s A Cop Now” represents frontman Russ Baggett’s clearest and most sustained sojourn into specific memory, it is on the gorgeous standout track “Paper Cuts” where his keen insight into the meaning of these memories finds fullest form. “Taken one by one, paper cuts, “ Baggett sings over a breezily-strummed acoustic guitar, “funny how the world sized me up.”

It is this bittersweet recognition that the world has our measure, despite all of our efforts to the contrary, that shines through here and pervades the beautiful simplicity and space of the Guests’ arrangements. They remind us that it often isn’t the momentous and large-scale lapses that wound us most meaningfully, but the thousand little cuts that the world inflicts. With this recognition, however, comes not bitterness and resentment but a certain happy resignation and even love for the world as it is.

Nostalgia is a fiction, we’re told, an artist’s rendering of the past. Into Nostalgia expresses a devout wish to move beyond the false tones of artifice. “I want you to see through me,” Baggett announces on the EP’s concluding track, “I don’t like how words suggest when the poetry’s right.” Not that the Guests have given up on their feverish dream poetry; see, for instance, the marvelous, lulling “Chasing Some Wild Sheep Chasing the Wasp.” But there is something clear and stark here that propels the six tracks purposefully, something that’s wary of indulgence or saying too much. Something that wants to feel exactly right. --

Record Review: Big Al Hall and the Marching Rams; Onward, Soldiers; Charlie the Horse

Tue, 25 May 2010 05:54:17 GMT

Check out Seth's latest record review for the North Carolina music blog Secret Carrboro Ninja Patrol.

Photo courtesy Wilmington Star News

On Preservation Hall

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:35:00 GMT

I FIRST saw Preservation Hall on a school trip to New Orleans when I was eleven. A handful of us had been granted, as a reward for being responsible and well-behaved students, the opportunity to run wild for a weekend in the wicked city. One of our chaperones on the trip was Mr. Dials, a music teacher who, I was sure, had never in his life received a reward for being responsible or well-behaved.

Mr. Dials had spent his youth in New Orleans, knew it fiercely, and kept alive a missionary's flame for its dishabille beauty. Though we spent our days there under the drowsy supervision of a bored art teacher, our evenings were spent in the care of Mr. Dials. He paraded us for hours through the French Quarter, encouraging us to soak in all that we saw: the joy along with the ugliness.

On our last night in New Orleans, he led us up a crowded side street and stopped in front of a lurching two-story house with large wooden doors and a thin iron balcony. It seemed unremarkable except for the fury of activity and music that rattled within. I don’t recall how long we stood there listening, or what, if anything, Mr. Dials said about the place, but I remember feeling that here, away from the open squares and cafes, bright gardens and zoos, we had stumbled across an essential part of the city. It was to this place that I would return.

Originally built as a fashionable merchant's mansion in the eighteenth century, Preservation Hall has only been a music venue for fifty years. Before that, it was by turns a tavern, a butcher's shop, a clothier’s, a doctor's office, a tinsmith's, and a bohemian flophouse and art gallery. It is this mercantile and artisanal spirit that the Hall preserves more clearly than even the music that has made it famous. Its founders harbored no higher hope for the Hall than to be a room where New Orleans jazz musicians could come to do their work, continue to refine their craft.

For that reason, it is not some sentimental museum dedicated to an unrecoverable past but a living place where the hallmark elements of New Orleans jazz – creativity, originality, and community – are allowed to flourish. "The musicians don't care about preservation," the Hall's longtime director Alan Jaffe once said, "they care about keeping things alive that made the music great."

The New Orleans jazz tradition endures because the truths it expresses are not restricted to a specific place but are true for all of us anywhere at any time. Its old joys and old sorrows are those we know deeply. Yet they are also the truths, as Mr. Dials understood, that we must continually rediscover in order to reaffirm. What New Orleans jazz is, therefore, can only be named confidently at the moment of its offering. Amid peeling walls, backless benches, and buckling floorboards, Preservation Hall lays bare these lines of communion between performer and listener. Such is its genius and great appeal. There is no stage.

The above essay commissioned by the Carolina Performing Arts Series. Image courtesy of Big Easy Buffalo. S<

Rich McLaughlin and the Pneurotics

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:55:00 GMT

I was tempted to do a short write-up of the Pneurotics show I saw last week at Night Light, but I suspected that a certain wily, Southern-milltown Ninja might be stalking among the crowd, quietly gathering vital intelligence that would render irrelevant and naive any information I could provide.

I am never wrong.

Please go read the Ninja's excellent show review (he really writes some of the best show reviews I've read), but I hope he'll forgive me for quoting the lede graph:

I know that guitar playing is not a competition measured in static attributes such as top speed or most hot dogs eaten and I get that there is enough head room in this town for as much talent to fly around as have wings to do so. And, like all the watchers lying on our backs staring at the sky, I enjoy the symmetry of the flock whose diving, soaring, singing, and fluttering paint an accidental pattern demarcating our own invisible boundaries and color filling what's inside with beauty. And, with this understanding for the shimmering flashes of the larger picture it's out of context to point at a single flushing feather and say ooh look at that one, but its even more so out of my own character to with hold opinion. So, the realization I have to share moved Monday night from dancing around in the back of my mind to jumping up and down on my head and that is, Rich McLaughlin is the best guitar player among us right now.

I'm not usually one for the purpler pastures of music writing, but I am whole-heartedly, 100% behind what the Ninja's written here, even down to the style. And I'll tell you why...

You know those scenester kids who go to shows, it seems, only to stare -- cross-armed and determined -- at the band as if they're sizing up the blueprints of a Boeing engine? You know those kids with their quizzical gazes, their awkward posture, and their luke warm PBR's sweating on to the dark floors? Well I turned into one of those gaping bozos at the Pneurotics show. I don't even care. I admit it. Mock me.

Look, I don't get out to enough local shows anymore to be a trusted surveyor of the peaks and valleys of local talent. I'm settled, broke, a little jaded, and pretty much jealous that nearly every local musician I see is more talented than I am. But for a space of about 40 minutes last Monday night all those petty and personal flaws vanished. Rich McLaughlin's guitar playing unsettled me. It enriched me. It surprised me. And it filled me with nothing but warm and generous thoughts for my fellow man. Particularly a fellow man whose fluid yet effervescent style found melody in every untended corner of his Tele fretboard. The Ninja's image of shore birds in flight is appropriate here: McLaughlin's guitar rises, dips, and dives in ways that seem obvious only the moment after they seemed entirely unpredictable.

Not often, but every once in a while a live show will grab my ghost out of its dingy little cage, scrub it clean, and give it a good meal. This one did, and I'm grateful to the Pneurotics for that.

The Pneurotics will be playing a free show with Hammer No More the Fingers and Pink Flag at Players in Chapel Hill (hosted by jack Sprat) on July 8th and headlining one of those nifty house parties July 18th in Raleigh with the Knock Out Roses and Jeremy Blair from Effingham. S<

The Pneurotics, Forty (2008).

(PS: I also liked the Winter Sounds quite a lot. A tight 4-piece that does a good deal with its north country British influences.)

Reunion Show: Mayflies USA

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:35:00 GMT

The genre of music called "power pop" takes a lot of shit. Much of it unfair.

I'm beginning to think that the sour attitude many "serious" music fans and music critics have towards power pop probably correlates roughly to Tolstoy's famous opening to Anna Karenina: happy songs are all alike; every unhappy song is unhappy in its own way.

Whether the songs are actually about something happy or not, power pop sounds like happy music, and is therefore, so the thinking goes, uninteresting and hard to differentiate. But that attitude has less to do with act of listening to music, and more to do with the act of having something to say about music: a distinction that should never be collapsed.

As a genre, power pop attempts to craft seamless, streamlined hooks which will create an immediate and obvious connection between performer and audience. The best power pop lyrics tend to have a similar veneer of immediacy and polish. The problem, of course, is that the fewer the dents that appear in the songwriting, the fewer the footholds available for the music writer to start diging in. You end up with the situation Yeats described in "Adam's Curse" about writing good poetry: "A line might take us hours maybe; /But if it does not seem a moment's thought/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

In other words, the "natural" ease of a power pop song is a testament to the difficulty of crafting one. Far simpler to be the newest tobaggon'd, besweatered moper who plinks diminished chords than to write a good power pop song about love.

I've had this stuff on the brain today because I'm heading to see the Mayflies USA reunion show tonight at the Cradle (opening for the Connells). I started looking around at some old reviews of the Mayflies' albums and was suprised to find so few that knew how to approach it. My conclusion: don't trust a music critic who can't find anything interesting to say about pop music. It's not the music that's the problem.

The Mayflies' Adam Price is one of my favorite purveyors of polished pop songwriting. When he's at his best, as in the Mayflies' "Walking in a Straight Line" or "I Won't Forget," he's a natural heir to those Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths: clever, tight, with a good ear for the odd phrases people choose to convey even their most commonly-shared emotions.

I couldn't find any Mayflies song clips on YouTube, so here's Adam Price doing a solo version of "Hold on a Minute," a song from his new project Hundred Air. It was recorded at an artists' roundtable at the Love House in April. S<

Mayflies USA, Walking in a Straight Line (Yep Roc 2002)
Hundred Air, Makeout City, (Fractured Discs 2007)

Can't Seem To Make This Song Mine

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:30:00 GMT

This morning my iTunes shuffle pulled up Alex Chilton's live cover the Seeds' classic psychadelic love song "Can't Seem to Make You Mine," and it got me to thinking how poor a cover of the original that it was. Over the years, I've heard several bands attempt a more or less faithful version of "Can't Seem to Make You Mine," but I can't seem to remember any being that good or even reminding me why the original is such a cool tune. Even Sky Saxon's own subsequent live versions of the song have been pretty unappealing.

My initial guess was that the absence of Daryl Hooper's ice-cream-truck organ makes the song's signature guitar riff do too much heavy lifting in the song, particularly if the guitarist nails the riff a little too perfectly. But I'm starting to think that the real problem, at least with Chilton's version of the tune, is the rather lame driving bassline.

Listen specifically to the bassline on Chilton's version here.

Now pay attention to the original bassline ra-here.

The Seeds' original has that wonderful, jazzy missing note every measure that lurches the song forward uncertainly (which reinforces the song's lyrical concept) and tells the audience exactly how to move to it. In addition, the original bassline actually goes to the 3rd an octave above the root note before heading to the 5th below, rather than just using both the 3rd and 5th an octave below the root (as in Chilton's). I believe this adds a little playfulness to the song because it creates a tension with lead guitar's walk down.

It's a good reminder of the importance of a dynamic bassline to a great song, even if you already have something cool going on with the vocals, guitar and piano.

Aside: Did Sky Saxon actually play the original bassline in studio? Or was it a session musician? I'd be really fascinated to know. The bass jibes so well with Sky's vocals that I would think the former, but, then again, the bassline doesn't really sound like those you hear in other Seeds tracks. S<

You're Tired of Me

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:20:00 GMT

I first heard Milton Brown's music when I was a college radio DJ. I had given myself the challenge of picking a random city and putting together a 45 minute show centered around it. Late in the year I finally landed on Ft. Worth and, in the course of digging around, discovered Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies.

Like a lot of casual music fans, I knew that Bob Wills was the "king of western swing," but almost nothing about the other artists working the dirt road circuits in the twenties and thirties. For that reason, happening upon Milton Brown was a revelation -- a slick, clever and irreverent vocalist and bandleader whose arrangements of dance hall tunes are faster, freakier and just more fun than his former bandmate Wills. Because he was a natural rhythm guitarist rather than a fiddler, Brown had a better handle on dixieland and on the "crazy rhythm" that made the southern dance halls jump.

Brown and his band recorded over one hundred sides for Victrola in the mid thirties. Sadly, he died at the age 33 following an auto accident; had he lived, he might well have occupied the place in the musical mind that now belongs to Wills.

My point: Goldenlane Records has just released a new compilation of Brown's recordings, and they've done a fantastic job with the audio restoration. 40 tunes retailing for around $10 on most digital platforms. I've been listening to it on repeat for the last week and annoying everyone around me by gushing about it.

YouTube didn't have much of Brown on file, so I've uploaded Brown's arrangement of the call-and-response jazz standard "Four or Five Times" here.

Brown is often credited as introducing the electric steel guitar to the standard string band by bringing on guitarist Bob Dunn. Listening again, I'm struck by how bizarre Dunn's guitar tone and phrasing is. It's unlike anything that would follow in the western swing genre. Closer to Louis Armstrong's trumpet or Django Reinhardt's acoustic guitar than to Leon McAuliffe's long, graceful lap pedal. Dunn's trademark tune with Brown is "Taking Off," but his solo on "You're Tired of Me" is my particular favorite.

Click here for a version of "Taking Off"

And Dunn's solo on "You're Tired of Me" begins at about the 1:25 mark here.

In the course of digging up links for this post, I ran across this terrific archive at westernswing78.com. It should be bookmarked. S<

Even Butlins Get the Blues

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:50:00 GMT

CARRBORO ROCK BAND Schooner has just finished recording their third full length album, and I’m gearing myself up for another set of their powerful and artfully arranged tunes. As another reviewer has written, Schooner simply does not write bad songs, and that’s pretty remarkable for a band as ambitious as they are.

In anticipation of the new album, however, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about their last album, 2007’s Hold on Too Tight. No one who’s ever played with me will be surprised by the timeliness of this post.

I want to talk about HoTT because something that frontman and songwriter Reid Johnson said recently has offered me a new (though probably wrong) way of thinking about Schooner’s music, as well as the music that seems to influence them. He calls HoTT his “blues album.”

Now, HoTT certainly isn’t what we usually consider a blues album in the terms of its musical structure or arrangement. Schooner's major musical influence seems to be late 70s/early 80s British pop and other American bands influenced by the same (though their clear interest in surf and California R&B is too often overlooked in reviews). No, what Johnson means is that HoTT represents his attempt to map out the same lyrical terrain often associated with blues lyrics i.e., that we are all tethered to a dying flesh with foolish appetites in a capricious world.

An interesting feature of blues lyrics is how often this age-old drama is played out with respect to specific geography. Names of specific places, whether they are actually familiar or strange to the speaker, always appear with an air of familiarity. But the real power of these places is often ambiguous. For example, a character or speaker in a blues song can travel anywhere he wants – New Orleans, Memphis, California, Illinois, Paris, back home, far from home, the city, the country, the moon – he is always mastered by a force that pesters him back toward the grave (or, by extension, the jail house, the poor house, the outhouse, the church pew).

We might say that the imaginative geography of a blues lyric is such that the speaker can go anywhere, but, ultimately, the distance the speaker puts between himself and his starting point doesn’t really matter. He can’t distance himself from the fate that all flesh is heir to. In other words, Charlie Patton can imagine that leaving Clarksville, MS for Memphis will achieve a wholesale escape from whatever haunts him, but we know – and, more importantly, the genre knows – that he won’t.

It’s easy to see then how the musical structure of the blues mirrors this lyrical theme; the artistry of the genre depends on the player being as expressive, expansive, and free as he can within very strict musical boundaries.

So what does all this generalizing (criminally) about the blues have to do with Schooner’s second album? Well, as the band’s name suggests, Schooner is intensely interested in mapping out where they are and where they might go. However, the way they approach place and geography reminds us less of the typical American blues tradition and more of the way that particular tradition was adopted and modified by popular music and art in postwar Britain -- collapsing geography down to the street level and assigning power to various large, civic institutions represented by brick and mortar facades.

Think, for instance, how Waterloo Station (the southernmost major rail station in London) outlines the boundaries of new love for a young couple in the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.” Or how in Ewan MacColl’s much-covered “Dirty Old Town,” a young man conspires to meet his love “by the gas works’ wall” and succeeds in kissing her “by the factory wall.” This same sense of constraint can be found all over the literature of the period as well. Think of Philip Larkin’s poems or Margaret Drabble’s fiction in which characters seem to live life in a perpetual circuit between big, mossy civic institutions like the BBC, the National Libraries, the Transit system, National Health, "Holiday Camps," etc. It’s possible that the American blues was such a liberating and animating force for postwar British arts because it gave them a fresh way to discuss feelings of desperation, powerlessness, temporary joy with respect to a geography of place.

While Schooner’s arrangements on HoTT’s somehow give the impression of boundlessness (much of the credit for this impression, btw, should go to Katherine Johnson. Her piano and organ work operate like a second lead vocal), her brother Reid Johnson’s lyrics and overall concept for the album bear a striking resemblance to the ideas I just mentioned.

It begins with a short vocal arrangement entitled “Proem,” which we eventually discover is a snippet from the album’s final track “Ladybug,” thus folding the end of the album back into the beginning. (The ladybug, incidentally, is an uncanny choice as a totem of escape. Because we all know that when the ladybug flies away, it flies away home). Between beginning and end, we encounter Johnson suffering attacks of claustrophobia and constriction at every turn: often within a single room/bedroom (“There’s Enough to Do,” “I Would Tell You that I’m Stuck,” “Ominous Bird,” “Leaving Your Room”), but also within social arrangements (“Married”), large institutions (“Hospital Floor”), chic enclaves (“Carrboro”) and his own brain (“Pray for you to die,” “Tears in your ears”).

Interspersed among these longer tracks are short experimental buffers that seem to suggest a change in setting. In keeping with our theme of mapping, two of the three are street names (“James St.” and “Alston Ave.”). The third, “End of time,” appears in the middle of the sequence, reinforcing the notion that the album is intended to fold back on itself.

I’m not sure exactly what to expect with Schooner’s upcoming release, but I’m always interested in artists who not only write good songs, but make a real effort to sculpt their writing thematically. In the end, such artists create albums that are worth rethinking entirely rather than simply listening to again. Schooner is a band that writes this way and Hold on Too Tight is certainly an album worth both listening to and thinking about again. S<

Schooner, Hold on Too Tight (Fifty-four Forty or Fight: 2007)
available at iTunes and Amazon, but please check out Schooner's Official Site first.

Vinyl Records

Sat, 09 May 2009 09:40:00 GMT

I went to the Aminal double EP release show last night at the 506.

The event was the opening salvo of a music series presented by Vinyl Records, a start-up label/artist co-op run by undergraduates at UNC. For a town that's saturated with great music, Chapel Hill can be, weirdly, an intimidating place for undergraduate musicians to get up on their feet and playing out (particularly paying gigs). So I'm really impressed with these students -- who seem to have done everything themselves, from grantwriting to production planning to PR -- and I'm thrilled that UNC is willing to act as ex officio for this project. There have been similar attempts at this at other universities, but I'm sure the success Vinyl is having will serve as an inspiration to many ambitious undergrads.

The student band representing Vinyl on the bill was Lake Inferior, a collective that writes dreamy, anthemic pop songs, often featuring a number of melody and signature changes. Although these changes sometimes come at the expense of a properly worked out idea, the band plays with all the abandon and desperate energy that should pull even a jaded listener in to a live performance. So who the hell really cares about pacing? They've got a ton of ideas and they're dying to show you all of them at once. They'll be playing a number of shows along the east coast this month, so check out their space page for information on where and when they'll be.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing more big ideas from Vinyl Records. It's off to a terrific start. S<

Mammoth gon' drank

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:45:00 GMT

ON SATURDAY, Mammoth Records celebrated its 21st anniversary with a show at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC (not sure why it was the 21st rather than the 20th, but, hey, let's do shots). The Indy has a dutiful little write-up on Mammoth and points out a few notable releases. Mammoth blew up with the releases of Seven May Three's American Standard (1995) and Squirrel Nut Zippers' Hot (1996). While I knew about the latter, I had no idea that they actually put out 7M3's first major record until quite recently. I was vaguely aware that the band had some sort of local base, as I spent a summer many years ago chasing after a girl who worked for them as an unpaid intern in Durham, but I was unaware that the rock-anthem "Cumbersome" helped to bankroll many of the records I have come to love. (full disclosure: I associate "Cumbersome" as well as the song "Water's Edge" with a headache. I'm not being figurative; I suffered a run of vicious migraines in high school that correspond roughly to 7M3's radio popularity. I make nothing of this.) I always took a special interest in Mammoth, not just because they put out music by songwriters who have influenced my writing, but because founder Jay Faires is a fellow Sewanee alum -- one who took a keen interest in both creating and fostering a relationship with undergraduates. Each summer a Sewanee student would seem to get a position as an intern with Mammoth and a number of the artists who appeared on Mammoth would come up and perform on the mountain. Faires is now the president of the music team at Lionsgate, and his team has garnered a couple Oscar nominations under his direction and received many accolades for its work on Mad Men. The Indy article highlights a few of their favorite releases from the Mammoth catalog, but I thought I'd add a few that I like: Chainsaw Kittens Flipped Out in Singapore (1992) I ordered this in high school from some catalog simply because of the name of the band, but it more than stood up to the billing. The title of the record really is the only explanation for the lyrical melee that appears here. Dillon Fence Outside In (1993) A near perfect jangle pop album with near perfect cover art. Squirrel Nut Zippers The Inevitable (1999) I don't guess this is my favorite Zippers record, but it's the one I seem to listen to the most often. Wash Jones! (I also like saying "The Inevitable" the same way that Colin Newman does in the middle of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba"). But, really, Wash Jones! S<

Bowerbirds: Hymns for a Dark Horse

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:25:00 GMT

(image courtesy of New Raleigh)

IT TOOK ME A WHILE, but I've finally been listening intently to the Bowerbirds' (Raleigh, NC) first full length release Hymns for a Dark Horse (2008), and it's started to work it's way into that part of the mind where the deeper faculties take over: I'm pretty sure that I had a nightmare two nights ago based on "Human Hands," which begins (maybe?) as a fairy-tale like origin story of a summer thunderstorm before bending a little sinister halfway in. My mind bent everything a little more sinister.

I've read a couple of notices that throw the Bowerbirds in together with the nu-folk/freak folk bunch that seems to have Devendra Banhart at its vanguard, and while that association seems a fair one, Hymns appears to me more like a possible successor to Gastr del Sol's Crookt, Crackt, or Fly. I'd be shocked if the trio weren't at one time interested in the 90s Chicago atonal stuff. The Bowerbirds toured with both the Mountain Goats and Bon Iver over the last year, but I think -- oddly -- they'll really be better served by playing dates with Olga Bell this summer. Bell's dressed down electronica ought to complement the Bowerbirds' angular folk quite well. Both outfits write songs with elbowpatches.

But getting back to Hymns, "Dark Horse" and "Matchstick Maker" are probably the album's essential tracks, by which I mean they present everything that Bowerbirds do well. Phil Moore's acoustic guitar has a wonderful searching quality to it that always seems to hint at a recognizable melodic hook before wandering off elsewhere, usually to the chorus. And, oh my, the choruses on this album open up like a gift.

The instrumentation throughout is emphatically simple, stripped down, and built largely around percussion, but the arrangements are remarkable in bringing out so many textures within a single song. If you like lyrical narratives that proceed almost by indirection -- and yes, oh yes, I do -- then Moore's patter will impress you with it's flighty, drunken ease. Can't wait to listen to it again on my long drive this weekend. S<

Bowerbirds: Hymns for a Dark Horse (Dead Oceans, 2008)

Commissions and RPM Challenge

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:40:00 GMT

Via Robin Hilton's All Songs Considered blog, I recently discovered the RPM challenge presented by The Wire magazine. Unlike most industry events labeled "challenge," this thing is indeed a challenge, rather than just some song contest. The basic gist is that artists have to write and record 10 songs (or 35 minutes) of original material in just the 28 days of February. The RPM challenge site has uploaded all the entries onto a jukebox, and several listening parties have been planned at various regional hubs. I recommend clicking over and checking out the juke; it's well worth it. As you might expect with this kind of project, the conceptual ideas behind the music often stand out more than the music itself (although there's some terrific stuff buried in there). As Hilton notes, the song and album titles are often the best part. A few favorites: "I Wish Marvin Gaye's Father Had Shot Me Instead," "Mood Swings and Booty Calls," "Google Image Search: Sand Cat," and "I'm Finally Admitting I've Been Overcommitting to All this Knitting." Anyway, reading through the submissions made me reflect a little bit on why a challenge like this would elicit such an enthusiastic response. Certainly, increased access to top-notch home recording/mixing equipment is pivotal, as is improved storage and media streaming technologies. But I also think that the Challenge gets at the heart of what creative people love about the creative process i.e., finding the first inklings of a new concept or idea and reveling in the near limitless promise that such a concept can hold for an artist. The time constraint of the challenge, along with the rhetoric of the guidelines, really push concept and creativity over product. No one's trying to get a record deal here or make the next Pet Sounds (well, I'm sure there are a few who are); they're solidly in the play mode of composition rather than the work mode. Many of the musicians I know tend to be the kind of kids who memorized dozens of possible band names before they could play an instrument or had fifty song titles scribbled in a notebook before they even had a decent song to title. In other words, they get out ahead of themselves when it comes to concept (note: this is not necessarily a bad thing at all, though you'll often hear them catch flack for it). Another way of approaching it is to think of the RPM Challenge works along the lines of a commission. It provides a forum that actually encourages artists to take their wild-hare creative ideas seriously enough to refine them to some degree. If you've ever read any of Pete Townshend's many interviews, he often tells the story of when he first began to take the writing of a "rock opera" seriously. Their manager Kit Lambert challenged Pete to fill the final 10 minutes of album space with a single narrative piece. Townshend remarks that this challanege focused and inspired him as a craftsman because the offer came with the necessary strictures of a commission, which, as a trained artist, he understood implicitly. The result was "A Quick One." It's interesting to wonder if emerging forms of internet media lend themselves more readily to a culture of commission than have the previous mass models. Perhaps there are a hoard of messageboard Medicis out there who will demand more and more of these kind of challenges, which really are challenges in the most positive way. S<