The Ampeater ReviewDigital 7-inch Downloads2010-03-11T13:00:22ZWordPresshttp://ampeatermusic.com/feed/atomampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM077 The Hibernauts]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20902010-03-07T19:22:32Z2010-03-11T13:00:22Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="The Hibernauts" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/The-Hibernauts-300x194.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="194" />I’m glad I overcame my fear of fun in music. Otherwise, I might have never enjoyed <strong>The Hibernauts</strong>. I still haven’t quite figured out what it was. I came into being a consumer of music from a steady diet of “oldies 103.3″ outside philly, which is pretty much what my parents chose to have on in the car. But when I became a modern music consumer, I skewed away from musical levity. The first CD I got was Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other.” The second was Powerman 5000. Part of me feels the need to defend this, but whatever, I was like 12 years old. I was young, kinda angry, and listened to bad nu-metal, and had little interest in <em>“fun”</em> music. Even when young-me started skewing softer, it was to things like Low, Mogwai, etc., not party pop jams. I think fun seemed substance-less?</p>
<p>I’ve changed though. I’ve seen the funlight. There’s a hidden brilliance to good <em>“fun.” </em> Because of course, fun without any substance isn’t really fun at all. And yet that which is fun hides behind the countenance of, <em>“hey man, we’re just hanging out. No need to get serious in here.”</em> But in that pure visceral enjoyment is a link to something very real and potentially lasting. The music in the made-up-genre-I’m-calling-Fun lasts with us because it does something to us, like all music does, beyond just distracting us from traffic for 15 minutes. What on earth does it do?</p>
<p>Fun, of course, is not the true subject of this review. <strong>The Hibernauts</strong> are. Hailing from Saint Louis, The Hibernauts are in the release period of their new album, <strong>Velvet Suit</strong>, their full length follow up to 2007’s <strong>Periodic Fable</strong>. They’re a decidedly talented rock group who accomplish the increasingly rare feat of achieving an indie aesthetic while still exhibiting that yes, they can be precise with their writing and instrumentation.</p>
<p>Pushing play on <strong>A-side “Intermurals”</strong> drops you right into the fun zone (which I imagine is similar to a Discovery Zone). The major chords start a-rippin’ and some jovial little note bends get your head bobbing. Two seconds in, the beat kicks and this song is off to the races. We’ve got lead singer/guitar play <strong>Tom McArthur</strong> oh-oh-ohhing through the verse. We’ve got guitarist/vocalist<strong> Jack Stevens</strong> coming in from the left, Mr. <strong>Chad Rogers</strong> with a deceptively funky grove on that chorus kick, <strong>Bill Vehige</strong> on some light tinkly keys and Brett Ramsey driving the song forward with classic pop finesse.</p>
<p><em>“I’m gonna put on my velvet suit. I’m lyin’, I don’t have one, I think its fun.”</em></p>
<p>Very astute, Song Lyrics. It is fun. Jesus, its fun. The guitars wash in and out. The bass scales up and down until clannggg, the pick scrapes and it’s over. But there is a human passion to the fun being had here, most musically apparent in the continual forward march of the drums and the schwika schwika wahhh guitars.</p>
<p>“If you knew the fire…and the thunder…that I feel.”</p>
<p>Yes! Though the primary mood is fun, this song, and all successful funpop music retains its human essence. I have trouble with things like, oh, let’s say, Chromeo (why not? I need an example), because sometimes I forget that there’s people making the music. Precision is one thing, but take a Ratatat—just as precise, but much more FUN and much more HUMAN; in fact, much more of both because of the other. Much more fun-man.</p>
<p><strong>The Hibernauts</strong> never let you forget that there are five dudes playing this music. Five dudes with beating hearts and maybe beards and possibly girlfriends, and apartments and bus passes and too many dishes in the sink. This is my favorite thing about rock music—sometimes I like music because it’s reaches an inhuman place, inhumanly smooth, inhumanly vicious, inhumanly robotic, but rock music is music made by people you can instantly imagine with itchy faces and nylon stringed acoustic guitars in the corner of their tiny 4 person apartment, just like me, just like you. (Ok, I’m lying, I don’t have one. But I think it’s fun…)</p>
<p>I like this thesis because I think the <strong>B-side “Villain”</strong> supports and strengthens it even though, at face value, it should undermine this little party I’ve got going here. But follow me anyways. “Villain” is not a party title. And the song is gentle. It has an emotional edge to it. It uses a robot for beats. There’s some slow keys. Oh, and strings, strings can’t be fun, right? Strings are in orchestras, and those are very serious. But something awesome happened after I heard this song, oh, I don’t know ten times. I started having an awful lot of fun. The low organ three-note progression is deceivingly groovy. And sorry, Hibernauts, but that’s a catchy chorus! You cannot escape! It’s soft and mellow and the lyrics are you lied! But gosh darnit if that isn’t a fun lick! I feel almost guilty getting a little groove on to this song, but when you can write songs and craft melodies, that’s what happens, even when the mood is tempered.</p>
<p>Look, we love music. And when we hear humanity in it, we have a bit of fun. Listening to sad songs is, underneath the surface, kind of fun. I think a lot of the times people forget that when they just set out to <em>“rock.”</em> No one wants to hear you just <em>“rock”</em> because, geologically speaking, that sucks. You need to convince us that you’re just rocking, while actually doing more. The whole rock and roll imagery is built into this deception—the carefully arranged cover shots of everyone looking super casual, the million dollar videos of the guitar player just doing, “whatever he feels.” This is why rock and roll is difficult; this is why rock and roll is more fun than Chromeo (no hard feelings, dudes). This is why rock and roll is American and this is why rock and roll really isn’t going anywhere.</p>
<p><strong>The Hibernauts</strong> clearly understand all this, to the point that even when they aren’t rocking out, the lessons they’ve learned are still present. Being fun is serious business people. Now, doff your hats and commence the rocking.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/rick-andrews">Rick Andrews</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Villain <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM077 The Hibernauts/02 Villain.mp3">Download audio file (02 Villain.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Intermurals <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM077 The Hibernauts/01 Intermurals.mp3">Download audio file (01 Intermurals.mp3)</a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/2RVdmLZEms8" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem077ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM076 Bing and Ruth]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20812010-03-07T18:51:23Z2010-03-10T13:00:26Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Bing and Ruth" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Bing-and-Ruth-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" />I once read an essay that conjectured that the moments we feel most fully alive and present in the world are the moments in which we get closest to the impossible. For example, what if you turned around right now and Bill Murray was in your bedroom, staring at you, eating an apple? You would probably remember that moment for the rest of your life, and it would certainly put a thrill into the rest of your day, if not your week or month. Think of all the conversations you would have about it (<em>“I have no idea how he got in! And then he just climbed out the window, never said a word!”</em>), whereas if you turned around and found the pile of dirty clothes you left there yesterday, you wouldn’t even remember that moment ten minutes later. This idea has stuck with me since then (it’s not unlikely that I’ve mangled or misunderstood it in some way, but if so then it is now my idea) and it resonates with my experience of music as well as my experience of life. The music that always grips me in the most visceral and immediate way is the music that sounds impossible, that generates in me a feeling of joyful surprise. Sometimes it happens in straight-up pop music, if I hear a new three chord song that sounds so eternal and so unique I can’t believe it wasn’t already written decades ago, or an unconventional yet lovely chord progression or melody. More often it only lasts for a moment, a rhythmic hitch in the chorus of a song or one bar of sublime and strange harmony. These are the moments in pop songs I play back over and over again, but in other modes of composition, minus the familiar pop anchors, the feeling of being in wonderfully unfamiliar territory can last for far longer.</p>
<p><strong>Bing and Ruth</strong>, the compositional outlet for Brooklyn-based pianist <strong>David Moore</strong>, manages to reach and sustain this feeling of the impossible impressively well. His lovely, winding pieces manage to achieve some of the same hypnotic and otherworldly qualities as electric and electronic music despite the fact that they are built almost entirely out of acoustic textures (my first, probably simplistic, reaction to hearing Bing and Ruth was to think “acoustic Stars of the Lid”). The key to the otherworldliness in Moore’s work is the combination of disparate instruments to form singular, unified sounds that seem entirely alien to the instruments we think we know so well. For example, there is a wash of sound in <strong>B-side “go on.”</strong> which sounds to me like clarinet, cello and bowed cymbals, but part of the beauty and the fun of the music is that it’s very hard to tell just by listening what is making the strange sounds that you are hearing.</p>
<p><strong>Moore</strong> is also unafraid of allowing his music to unfold naturally and gradually, which accounts for the longer track times and the sense of luxurious pacing. Exploring for three minutes the sound of two clarinets slipping in and out of tune with one another with an aching slowness (as on the very start of <strong>“go on.”</strong>) is something that takes a bit of compositional bravery, but it more than pays off. As with much minimalism (this is, in fact, one of the points of Cage’s often mocked “4′33””, which causes the audience to listen not to silence but to the ambient and human sound in the concert hall), the simplicity and clarity of the ideas causes the audience to listen with an intense focus seldom given to music that dances and cavorts for attention. The sound of the accelerating and decelerating beats, generated by the two tones as they drift apart and then back together, is a fascinating and strange one, putting the focus not on the pitches of the two woodwinds but on the rhythms generated by their intonation differences (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29" target="_blank">Beats</a> are natural sound interference generated by two tones which are very close together but not quite in unison. They sound like a rhythmic swelling, almost like tremolo, the speed of which varies by how close the two tones are to one another). Around this locus, Moore gradually adds other instruments, culminating in the arrival of his piano, which plays a gentle, steady, three-chord pattern. Over this pattern there are fragments of lovely, melancholic piano melodies set against drones created by the intersection of bowed cymbals with bowed strings and analog synths with mellow clarinets, combining pitches and textures from different instruments into one sound that is unrecognizable and inimitable. The description may sound labored but the music is anything but. The effect is stunning, and it’s only enhanced by the moments when you hear a human voice or a cello emerge with a clarity that’s hauntingly brief. The way the song melts back into a single note at the very end (this time cello overtones and voice, I think) is a moment of delicate and perfect symmetry.</p>
<p>The <strong>A-side “Rails”</strong> drawn from the band’s forthcoming <strong>City Lake</strong> album, begins with some Reichian clapping, overlapping different claves like puzzle pieces and then matching them with a piano figure that neatly parallels their rhythms. Like the much sparser piano figure in <strong>“go on.”</strong>, this serves as an anchor for the rest of the song and a springboard for overlapping vocal, string and reed melodies, which sit just far enough back in the mix that you have to really focus to draw them out. They always seem to dance away from your ear, and just as soon as you catch on to one it disappears and you find yourself suddenly drawn to a different melody. Nothing ever seems to repeat, and the song has a lightness to it that would almost make it sound improvised if it weren’t so carefully woven together. It really ought to be said that the musicians who give life to <strong>Moore’s</strong> pieces are immensely skillful and subtle (for those keeping score, or trying to discern various instruments, the lineup is as follows: <strong>Becca Stevens</strong>, Voice; <strong>Jean Rohe</strong>, Voice; <strong>Jeremy Viner</strong>, Clarinet; <strong>Patrick Breiner</strong>, Clarinet; <strong>Greg Heffernan</strong>, Cello; <strong>Leigh Stuart</strong>, Cello; <strong>Jeff Ratner</strong>, Acoustic Bass; <strong>Chris Berry</strong>, Percussion; <strong>Myk Freedman</strong>, Lap Steel; and <strong>Mike Effenberger</strong>, Analog Synth). Everything is in its right place, and all the sounds blend effortlessly together. Without such tightly, expertly controlled performances, the pieces could never reach their deeply textured heights.</p>
<p>My favorite moment in <strong>“Rails,”</strong> one which gives the listener a thrilling weightless feeling, is right around 4:20, when the floor tom and bass that have been with us for minutes suddenly drop out and a thick, clustered chord, composed of nearly every instrument in the band, swells and swells as if to burst. It’s a fantastically tense moment, and when the bass and drum come back in it’s with the same subtle part, understated as everything else in <strong>Moore’s</strong> music, yet in context, buoying up that thick cloud of sound, it feels absolutely triumphant, like the biggest sound in the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – go on. <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM076 Bing and Ruth/02 go on.mp3">Download audio file (02 go on.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Rails <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM076 Bing and Ruth/01 Rails.mp3">Download audio file (01 Rails.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM076 Bing and Ruth.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/Xb3AoO0KxxA" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem076ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM075 Girlfriends]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20792010-03-07T18:58:13Z2010-03-09T13:00:51Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Girlfriends" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Girlfriends-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" />Once in a blue moon a movement kicks up on the scene that makes a big fuss over the way an artist’s music finds its way to the listener’s eardrums. Remember the 4-track hullabaloo in the 90s? Didn’t matter if the music was the most god awful shit ever produced–if it was churned out on one of those cheap Aiwa 4-track recorders, then it deserved a listen. Now finally the twenty-first century has its own trend: cassette rock! Fashions of this sort can be fairly hit-or-miss. If the bands’ style of delivery doesn’t mesh with the style of production, the whole approach can come off as a misfire. Do you really want to hear Dark Side of the Moon redone on four tracks? Or how about Leadbelly in a twenty million dollar studio? If the shoe doesn’t fit, you can’t wear it. Luckily for <strong>Girlfriends</strong> the shoe fits just right. There is something about the cheeky, cheapo fun of tapes that captures their approach perfectly. There is a cream to every crop, and cassette rock may have found its very first keeper in Girlfriends.</p>
<p>The band out of Boston wastes no time on stylistic curlicues in their compositions. Fuzzed-out, stomp-boxed 60s power pop melodies grab you in the first few seconds and don’t let go. The songs are short, direct, noisy- and that’s exactly how the trio of <strong>Ben Potrykus</strong> (guitar), <strong>Jen Dowty</strong> (bass) and <strong>Andy Sadoway</strong> (drums) like it. Their first EP <strong>Our Very First Cassette</strong>, released late 2009, was a quick and dirty romp that got solid reviews from critics and tastemakers. Though the band’s approach sounds simple, there’s a complexity bubbling beneath the surface that holds your attention. The jagged guitar lines and off-the-cuff vocals are tossed off like the mad strokes of an action painter in full frenzy, while remaining confined within pop art superstructures. Imagine Jackson Pollack, drunk on corn whiskey, trying to copy Warhol’s soup cans: a superlative mess that nonetheless attains a certain iterative fascination. <strong>Girlfriends</strong> took a similar tack on the EP, trading on the listener’s familiarity with certain pop forms to introduce a decidedly unfamiliar savagery into the proceedings. The song <em>“suckin rare meat off the bone white china”</em> mixes whammied guitar, megaphone vocals, and some rough Beach Boys’ harmonies into a beastly surf safari. “bites + scratches” captures Girlfriends in a more reflective, Pogues-mode, attempting to muster up a mood of good old-fashioned heartbreak. It’s a great song, but the heartbreak isn’t entirely persuasive. The riffs are just too damn fun to frown over.</p>
<p>The ease with which <strong>Girlfriends</strong> traverses the pop register is a testament to their origins out of the roiling, moiling cauldron that is the Boston music scene. Discount booze and college kids aplenty keep the clubs filled while the insane 1am closing time of the subway preserves a niche for late night DIY house parties. The give and take between public and private forums sustains an occasionally inspired dialectic within the scene. <em>“2004 was a formative year for me,”</em> as <strong>Potrykus</strong> recalls, <em>“cos I started living in the city in late 2003 and I saw and met Clickers and Night Rally and the Faux and the Mules and Dreamhouse and Neptune, and now Denial and, I think, Wildildlife (they were just ‘Wildlife’ then) and everyone was being really loud and noisy and splitting their time between basements and clubs, which I thought made things a lot more interesting.”</em> That’s quite a list of bands; but what artist can resist the louche allure of down-and-out of bohemian Boston, of Jamaica Plains, of Allston “Rock City,” of Cambridge and Somerville? Breeding grounds, one and all, for raunchy rawk and fine purveyors (according to Potrykus) of <em>“authentic south American food,”</em> <em>“organic fair trade markets,” “thrift stores”</em> and <em>“all that crap.”</em> When <strong>Potrykus</strong>, <strong>Dowty</strong> and <strong>Sadoway</strong> aren’t shopping for ethically-reared beef to mix into their picadinho de milho, the band members find time for other projects including Christians & Lions and Magma Divers- that’s a pretty full plate.</p>
<p>For their A-side, <strong>Girlfriends</strong> chose <strong>“Good To Be True”</strong> from their first EP <strong>Our Very First Cassette</strong>. It’s a straightforward Ramones-style ballad that has lived a few lives since the band recorded it late in 2009. On the first edition of the cassette, “Good To Be True” starred an as-yet-unidentified “space alien laser” solo and might have been recorded in a shoebox. In the words of <strong>Sadoway</strong>, <em>“Tapes sound like shit usually, am I right?”</em> For the Ampeater 7-inch, Girlfriends gave the song a quick spitshine: bulking up the vocals, balancing the mix, and generally bringing the track up to the strenuous standards of a self-proclaimed <em>“garbage power trio.”</em> While the <em>“space alien laser”</em> solo gets more or less dropped (you’ll have to see the live show for that, or dig up a first edition cassette somewhere) the crisper mix targets two elements that makes Girlfriends great: sing along lyrics and simple song structures. The lyrics of “Good To Be True” describe a downer narrative of teenage emotional insecurity, but the words are set to a bouncy, jangly riff that is so catchy it’s impossible to brood.</p>
<p>The good vibes continue on the B-side with a cover of the Vaselines’ <strong>“The Day I Was a Horse.”</strong> Clocking in at a trim 1:39, the cover satisfies the band’s appetite and predilection for the short form. In fact, their longest song appears to be “I Was Here But I Disappear” (3:22) from the EP. Commenting on the short form, <strong>Potrykus</strong> remarks, <em>“…so many good bands and people are into writing shorter songs again too- which I really like. Good two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute songs are hard to beat sometimes.”</em> One notable master of the short form, the recently-passed Jay Reatard, appeared to be on the verge of reintroducing the mainstream to the unique possibilities of the short, sweet and simple. Whether brevity makes a comeback will depend on bands like Girlfriends reaching back to a time before bloated Bjorkestras became the apple of every indie musician’s eye. Seriously, how much time is required to relate the absurdity of “the day I was a horse”? Even the Metamorphosis was a short story.</p>
<p>With the release of the second edition of their debut EP, <strong>Girlfriends</strong> has shown the beaten-up, old cassette format still holds some intrigue. Whether this heralds a triumphant return to the cassette in general (don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. The irony is, of course, that the Ampeater Review is releasing <strong>“Good To Be True”</strong> and <strong>“The Day I Was a Horse”</strong> as digital pantomimes of a vinyl 7-inch. The world is topsy turvy with different ways to listen to music. The appeal of one specific format appears to be the same appeal of music subgenres: a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of whatever-let’s-party.</p>
<p>There’s a slew of bands that have recently released work in the cassette format, like Quilt and Truman Peyote, and a ton more that are percolating within the same scene, including Kid Romance, Thick Shakes, Earthquake Party!, Young Adults, Maine Coons, and more. These are bands that play all different types of music- garage, electronic, folk, psychedelia- so there doesn’t seem to be any coherent movement afoot. But one trait they do share is that they’re all putting together exciting new music that merits attention: really, what more could you ask for?</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/mike-gutierrez">Mike Gutierrez</a></p>
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<td>Side B – The Day I Was a Horse <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM075 Girlfriends/02 The Day I Was a Horse.mp3">Download audio file (02 The Day I Was a Horse.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Good To Be True <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM075 Girlfriends/01 Good To Be True.mp3">Download audio file (01 Good To Be True.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM075 Girlfriends.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/LXhrxKW9gEU" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem075ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM074 Horse’s Mouth]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20582010-03-04T20:11:56Z2010-03-04T13:00:39Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px;" title="Horse's Mouth" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/horses-mouth.jpg" alt="Horse's Mouth" width="300" />Inserting moments of musical unrest into pop music without disturbing the graceful flow that makes pop songs so pleasurable is an incredibly difficult task. Even brief moments of dissonance can be distracting (occasionally one gets the feeling that they are intentional distractions from poor songwriting) or come off as forced, an insincere attempt to make a band sound more interesting or difficult than they really are. It requires a remarkably gentle touch to make dissonances and rhythmic quirks not only slip by without disrupting the song, but actually lock in and sound as if they are essential and natural, and this is, in fact, just the thing <strong>Tavo Carbone</strong> of Brooklyn’s <strong>Horse’s Mouth</strong> excels at.</p>
<p><strong>Carbone’s</strong> songs are short and restless, full of small idiosyncrasies and twitches (beats added or missing, lush vocal harmonies appearing and disappearing just as fast, tempos that lurch and accelerate). You may feel like you’ve had your fill of idiosyncratic Brooklyn rock bands (lord knows I get that feeling sometimes), but the members of <strong>Horse’s Mouth</strong> are probably not quite what you are picturing after that description. There is nothing irritatingly or safely cool about them. Horse’s Mouth is actually refreshingly and genuinely nerdy. In live videos, they are mostly clad in white t-shirts and jeans and Carbone himself sports an unassuming Monkees-style bowl cut, opening his mouth cartoonishly wide and bowing his head to hit the lowest notes. After all, the band draws as much influence from showtunes (bear with me) and classical music as they do from the staples of indie pop. Their Ampeater <strong>B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window”</strong> actually ends with a loop from a familiar-sounding orchestral piece.</p>
<p>A Brooklyn native, <strong>Carbone</strong> met his bandmates, drummer <strong>J.J. Beck</strong>, bassist <strong>Matt Scott</strong>, violinist <strong>Heather Sommerlad</strong>, and multi-instrumentalist <strong>Michael Chinworth</strong>, at Bennington College, a school in Vermont that has produced other Ampeater favorites like <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem022">Trevor Wilson (AEM022)</a> and <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem070">Will Stratton (AEM70)</a>. Carbone actually has quite a lot in common with Wilson, from his tightly coiled vibrato and theatrical delivery to his compositional and conceptual ambition. The members of <strong>Horse’s Mouth</strong> have been playing Carbone’s songs together in various forms and with various other musicians since 2005 (including, at one point, a 17 piece orchestra), though Horse’s Mouth as a band only officially dates back to 2008. You can hear the chemistry between the musicians almost immediately upon listening, and especially on watching some of the live footage shot by Connor Kammerer and <a href="http://pixelhorse.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Pixelhorse</a>. The live performances are impressively faithful to the record without losing any of the feeling of fun and spontaneity that comes from the itchy arrangements.</p>
<p><strong>A-side “In the Woods”</strong> (both songs in today’s single are drawn from the band’s new album <strong>Sophia</strong>, which will be released later this month in CD and DVD form, the latter featuring original films made by 12 videographers, one for each song) opens with a sprightly picking figure on the electric and a drumbeat that matches the guitar’s rhythmic accents precisely. The verses each close with a lovely, harmonized “not old enough to know”, on the last word of which the vocals begin in a tense minor 7<sup>th</sup> before leaping up to catch and hang on a high falsetto harmony. It’s one of those effortless little moments of dissonance that provide the tension and release in <strong>Carbone’s</strong> songs, rather than the usual gradual emotional crescendo thing, which is okay too, only significantly more expected. Also notice the way the lovely spiraling violin figure that leads us into the instrumental verse is cast into bold by the drums brief disappearance, and the way the drums are called back by a handclap (the only one in the entire song). The most unexpected moment of unease comes during the very last descending “know”, where instead of resolving to the root, Carbone’s vocal melody rolls down through perfect consonance before landing on the flat two, a half step up from the one of the final chord. It’s probably the most dissonant note you can sing over a minor chord, and it has an intensely disquieting effect as the last note of the whole song, especially the way Carbone coats it with pretty vibrato, as if it’s the most beautiful note in the world. Yet this is actually the very thing that sells it on the recording: it doesn’t sound like it’s an ugly note to him. It sounds like the note that he wanted the song to end on. On the album (which drops on March 20<sup>th</sup> and which I haven’t heard in its entirety), each song is strung into the next, so perhaps this final tension is a way of moving into the next song.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window,” </strong>after a brief organ intro, again matches the rhythmic emphases of the guitar to the drum part, giving the song a lilting, dancy feel that unifies it with <strong>“In the Woods”</strong> somewhat, though this song is much more of an exercise in constant motion. Before the first verse even starts, it careens off into a very brief sort of Deerhoof interlude, which pockmarks the song periodically, in which the tempo abruptly and completely changes and the drums play a couple of quick, skittering fills. The song rarely stays in any one meter for more than a few bars, sticking mostly, but not entirely, to 4/4 during the verses and otherwise jumping around like a madman, a feeling that is countered only by the calm and stately violin parts. After the one moment where everything coheres into what sounds as if it’s going to be an actual chorus (repeating melody and lyric, 4/4 time, descending harmony), the meter changes and the violin and guitar spin out of control, everything clashing and then somehow resolving into what sounds like a loop from a Schubert record, which finally plays itself out into three acoustic guitar arpeggios and…the sound of a bird chirping? It’s an unbelievable amount of stuff crammed into less than three minutes, and when faced with it it’s easy to overlook the loveliness of the chiming guitars and glockenspiels that underscore the verses.</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned before how music that maintains its mystery is often far more effective, and <strong>Carbone </strong>does exactly that here, giving us lyrics oblique enough to mean a great many things and music that skates through so many moods and meters and feels that it’s hard to say just what exactly makes it feel coherent, though certainly something does. Perhaps it’s the common sounds of each member’s voice (they all sing, excluding <strong>Beck</strong>, the drummer), or the distinctly personal style each has on his or her instrument. Perhaps it’s that all <strong>Horse’s Mouth</strong> songs feel odd in precisely the same way, the product of Carbone’s unique and unified vision, impossible to pin down completely but evocative and pleasurably strange, like a fairytale landscape (not one of the neutered ones where everyone is nice and boring, but the Hans Christian Andersen kind, where little girls get their feet cut off with axes).</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Thin Branches <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM074 Horses Mouth/02 Thin Branches.mp3">Download audio file (02 Thin Branches.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – In The Woods <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM074 Horses Mouth/01 In The Woods.mp3">Download audio file (01 In The Woods.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM074 Horses Mouth.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/Edt5-2R65xk" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem074ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 016]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20752010-03-07T00:43:11Z2010-03-03T15:00:58Z<div class="review">
<p><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp016.zip"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2076" title="weekly-zip16" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/weekly-zip16.png" alt="" width="700" height="342" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem070"><img title="AEM070 Will Stratton" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Will-Stratton-300x225.jpg" alt="AEM070 Will Stratton" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem071"><img title="AEM071 Peasant" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Peasant-300x142.jpg" alt="AEM071 Peasant" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem072"><img title="AEM072 The Laughing" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/The-Laughing.jpg" alt="AEM072 The Laughing" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem073"><img title="AEM073 Liturgy" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Liturgy.jpg" alt="AEM073 Liturgy" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/BcdW1YFm_1M" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp016ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM073 Liturgy]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20462010-03-03T20:47:38Z2010-03-03T13:00:51Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;" title="Liturgy" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Liturgy.jpg" alt="" width="300" />If you are a serious, disciplined listener of music, black metal might be an as-of-yet unwritten entry in your encyclopedic grasp of music and its oft notorious sub genres. You might view it as elusive or even contradictory. Perhaps you find it overly serious, dark, depressing, maybe even <a href="http://www.metalexpressradio.com/images/news/images/immortal.jpg">unintentionally funny and ridiculous</a>. But there it is, this entry, unfinished and perhaps unfairly ignored. Black metal traces its origin to thrash metal acts like Venom and Bathory but its real history begins in the early 90s in Norway where bands like Mayhem, Immortal, Emperor, and Darkthrone perfected a raw, low fidelity sound defined by trebly guitars, continuous pounding double kick drums, tortured vocals, and pagan, anti-Christian lyrical content. It was a scene that was linked to murders (most notably the murder of Mayhem’s Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth at the hands of Varg Vikernes, who still records under the moniker Burzum), the arson of dozens of historic Stave churches throughout Norway (some at the hands of <a href="http://www.mic.no/nmi.nsf/pic/burzum_01/$file/burzum_01.jpg">Varg Vikernes himself</a>), and suicide (most notably by Mayhem’s vocalist Per “Dead” Ohlin). Black metal’s “second wave” was met with a satanic panic of press in Norway and all over the globe. Its corpse-painted performers were seen less as members of a musical sub genre and more as willful participants in out and out Satanism and far-right politics, a reactionary categorization that still permeates accounts of black metal’s history and current iterations, most notably in Michael Moyinhan’s Lords of Chaos, a book which has been criticized for failing to dispel this categorization and even tacitly endorsing this (mis)understanding of the music. Varg Virkenes denied accusations of Satanism and insisted this (or maybe his) music was something more primitivist, a-Christian, and neo-pagan. Yet he aligned himself with toxically xenophobic political viewpoints, and although he (and the incredibly nascent national socialist black metal movement) operate within an extreme minority of an already obscure genre, the associations stick. Darkthrone’s Fenriz dismissed any political associations whatsoever, and his <a href="http://images.hugi.is/metall/148307.png">jovial, light-hearted demeanor</a> belies Varg’s self-seriousness and the genre’s stereotypically dismal attitude. Whatever “second wave” black metal was, it was the ultimate enactment of what extreme music always masqueraded as and never quite was, it was excess and violence and confusion. Yet, theological and semantic arguments regarding “Satanism” aside, it was absolutely misanthropic, anti-Christian, and deeply nihilistic.</p>
<p>American black metal, if anything, further internalized these themes. Though the Norse originators were bands who weren’t shy of the things bands do—who were perhaps straightforwardly debaucherous individuals behind all their cryptic pseudonyms, painted faces, and a darker-than-thou ethos—their American counterparts had become one man “hordes,” known only by their pseudonyms. Leviathan’s <a href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/242954580_5eff2a7aa2.jpg?v=0">Wrest</a> and Xasthur’s <a href="http://www.icedtears.com/musica/fotos/1036.jpg">Malefic</a> are particularly salient examples (not to mention associated acts Weakling or Lurker of Chalice), seeming ascetics who shun live performance, interview requests, and anything beyond a sustainable baseline of existence, musicians who deeply embody black metal’s extreme emotional negativity. And even among the more public, performance-based bands—from Washington’s eco-pagan Wolves in the Throne Room to Texas’s esoteric, somewhat traditionalist Absu—the commitment to nihilism and “darkness” remains. And then there is New York’s <strong>Liturgy</strong>. Perhaps such a historical introduction is unnecessary, but if it seems over-indulgent let me clarify. This musical lineage, at least its European strain, is something Liturgy, a solo project cum four-piece from Brooklyn, pays particular attention to. I think, most of all, it is something they pay particular attention to because they seek to destroy it, to create something new with the pieces, to attempt a musical evolution. Or, at least, another evolutionary strain.</p>
<p>On December 19th of last year, <strong>Liturgy’s</strong> founder and principle member <strong>Hunter Hunt-Hendrix</strong> spoke at a symposium of black metal theory in Brooklyn entitled “Hideous Gnosis”, his lecture on “Transcendental Black Metal” appears in a recently published book containing the essays presented at the symposium. In a dark bar in Brooklyn Hunter urged for a black metal of “affirmation” over “nihilism,” “hypertrophy” over “atrophy,” and “courage” over “depravity”. In a sense, he asked black metal to be black metal and also its opposite. As he tells me, this new iteration of black metal “<em>should channel and renew the spirit of liberation, and it should consume everything that’s out there and reterritorialize it on the basis of a vision of apocalyptic ecstasy</em>“. There is an inherent openness to this approach, and perhaps not a more fitting name than Liturgy—this is black metal to be played publically in sunlight, in joyous almost spiritual ecstasy. It is this in the face of black metal’s inherent dark void, perhaps even embracing it, standing above and looking inside.</p>
<p>It might all sound entirely convoluted but I swear this imagery makes sense as soon as you hear the music. At any moment <strong>Liturgy’s</strong> pieces sound like they are going to self destruct, to be sucked back down as severed arms and guitar strings and drum sticks into the eternal void its predecessors lauded. But before we get there we have <strong>Side A, a subdued untitled track</strong> (one of many interesting near-ambient pieces peppered throughout the album) that starts off Liturgy’s debut as a full fledged band, <strong>Renihilation</strong>, and serves as a prelude to its second track, <strong>Side B’s “Pagan Dawn”</strong>. Over its brief two minute span a vocal incantation slowly builds on itself and anticipates a coming storm. This storm is “Pagan Dawn”, with <strong>Greg Fox’s</strong> frantic drumming speeding up and slowing down (a masterful blend of technical ability that avoids sounding robotic or inauthentic) as the harmonies arc and <strong>Hunt-Hendrix’s</strong> vocals—still the traditional blackened howl—are somehow excited, joyous, and yearning. This is not a woeful yearning, but a yearning for some momentary “yes,” a “yes” through gritted, grinning teeth. Those harmonic moments build into a brief unaccompanied progression about a minute and half in, announcing the return of Fox’s breakneck tempo-shifting rhythms, what Hunt-Hendrix calls the “burst beat”. It is exactly that, a burst, a propulsive force, an impermanent acceleration away from black metal’s cold dark interior. Liturgy is very frank in its desire to be musically transcendent, and cognizant as well that this transcendence is “<em>an immanently generated mirage of transcendence, like a horizon or an asymptote</em>”. They structure their songs to be ever-climbing beasts, fast and loud as hell. In the hands of any other group of musicians Side B would be called “Pagan Dusk,” a lament, a complacency with darkness and nihilism, a set pounding tempo with depressive shrieks and despondent riffage that might otherwise drone on for ten minutes. But Liturgy is not any other black metal band. The latter half of “Pagan Dawn” almost recalls this monotony as it breaks down into a plodding, methodical mid-tempo march, as though walking with black metal of old for a little while, placating it, challenging it. And then Greg Fox launches into yet another ever quickening burst beat, <strong>Bernard Gann</strong> and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix build a towering harmony on guitars underwritten by bassist <strong>Tyler Dusenbury</strong>. It is elating and rich and it resolves and retreats as suddenly as it began, having only skimmed the horizon.</p>
<p>A few years ago my obsession with black metal began. I was in my dorm room in the middle of the night, forcing myself through Ulver’s seminal Nattens Madrigal. “Hynme VI: Wolf and Passion” kicked in, and its soaring opening was a revelation—it was sincere and affirmative and fleeting, and it died eventually into diametric, ominous verse. But that opening moment was a crystallization of the idea that extreme metal, and even black metal, is only extreme in its cacophony, and to some extent its postured conjuring of “darkness,” sometimes a jejune and silly “darkness” at that. It was a realization that there could be emotional nuance in the most extreme metal, that it was serious, that this was a joyful seriousness, that it was art. <strong>Liturgy</strong> is a re-affirmation of this notion. And maybe, reading all this, it still seems ridiculous to you. A symposium on black metal “theory”? A band with a dense conceptual underpinning? But again, I am addressing you: the serious, disciplined listener of music. And I’d hazard to say that you listen to music because its expression of the ineffable is deeply resonant on a wide spectrum of emotional, intellectual, and (maybe) spiritual levels. It is a medium to transmit what mere words or mere images cannot alone express. Black metal has long broadcast a very particular expression: deep sorrow and depression, an intellectual longing for a pagan pre-history (and often the “darkness” or “evil” that is intentionally conjured is conjured to show us that these emotions and concepts are only connotative in such ways in the wake of Judeo-Christian tradition). If anything, the emotions and this idea of “darkness,” silly or not, are things we typically try to tuck away and hide, and so it is in a sense a genre that is hidden and tucked away. What is exciting is to see a band attempt to forcibly remove a genre from its cave and expose it mercilessly to the light, a band who takes its lineage seriously and decides to actively do something with it, something truly experimental, American, and ultimately uplifting. Liturgy is taking the sound of black metal’s past and asking it to express something unique and new while still remaining secular, musically destructive, and chaotic. It’s alchemy, really, an almost contradictory dark positivity.</p>
<p>The following appeared recently in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/arts/music/15metal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&emc=eta1">New York Times article about the “Hideous Gnosis” symposium:</a></p>
<blockquote><p><em><span style="font-style: normal;">During a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was challenged by Scott Wilson, a professor from Lancaster University, […] Mr. Wilson wondered, skeptically, if transcendentalist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”</span><br />
</em></p>
<p>“I’m not so interested in defending anything I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s interesting or not.”</p></blockquote>
<p>So whatever your entry on black metal looks like now, it ought to include at least a sentence on <strong>Liturgy</strong>, whether you see them as standard-bearers or visionaries, noodling hipsters or serious musicians. All they ask of you is what you ought always to be giving as a serious listener—your interest.</p>
<p><strong>Liturgy’s</strong> full length album <strong>Renihilation</strong> is available <a href="http://www.phantomcityrecords.net/store/product_info.php?products_id=458&osCsid=1a0f0f6b812edba92e35cf328942efe5">here</a> from 20 buck spin. An interview with guitarist/vocalist <strong>Hunter Hunt-Hendrix</strong> appears after the jump.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/john-ganiard">John Ganiard</a></p>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Read the Ampeater exclusive interview after the jump!</h4>
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<td>Side B – Pagan Dawn <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM073 Liturgy/02 Pagan Dawn.mp3">Download audio file (02 Pagan Dawn.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Untitled <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM073 Liturgy/01 Untitled.mp3">Download audio file (01 Untitled.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM073 Liturgy.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<p><span id="more-2046"></span></p>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">Interview:</h4>
<p><strong>Liturgy started as your own personal project. Where you at all aware of the disparate incarnations of U.S. Black Metal, which are alike, if at all, in that they are one man, multi-instrumentalist “hordes” (I’m thinking of Xasthur, Leviathan, Wrath of the Weak) I think you’ve mentioned in some interviews that you were more interested in sort of the second-wave of black metal (Mayhem, Immortal, Ulver, etc), what was it that attracted you to these bands? As well, where did your musical interest lie outside of black metal, or perhaps more specifically, why was it this sort of music you gravitated towards when Liturgy first began?</strong></p>
<p>I’ve never listened to much USBM, with the exception of a few records by Xasthur or Judas Iscariot. Certainly the second wave in Scandinavia was the black metal I first got into (Darkthrone, Ildjarn, early Emperor), though gradually my interest veered towards continental Europe – France and Poland particularly, I think. Some of my favorites: Graveland, Vlad Tepes, Satanic Warmaster, Mutiilation, Blut Aus Nord, Warloghe, Haemoth. Around the same time I was also getting way into post-romantic classical music, which is in a way similarly cryptic and esoteric because no one cares about it or respects it: Scriabin, Bruckner, Nielsen, Sibelius. I think I began to kind of fuse the two traditions in my mind – both because there really are certain concrete musical similarities, but also because there is a similar nostalgic, grandiose, esoteric vibe. Sibelius is the crossover in a way. He was Norwegian, first of all, and his musical style was totally reactionary and antimodern. Even though he was aware of Schoenberg and Bartok etc. he stuck to his Romantic vibe almost desperately. Somehow to me Graveland and Sibelius have a similar aura. But I was also getting into euro-avant-garde stuff, particularly Xenakis, Ligeti, Grisey, Stockhausen, etc. etc. And for that matter, more than anything else, I was studying continental philosophy: Deleuze, Badiou, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhaur. I was in school for philosophy at the time that I was developing Liturgy, and that was actually my main concern. Anyway all of this seemed so faraway and magical, and to me black metal, post-romanticism, avant-garde contemporary classical music and continental philosophy seemed deeply connected — which maybe in reality is isn’t, at least not to the degree that it is in my imagination. I dunno, it’s hard to explain. The music on this side of the Atlantic that I was most down with was minimalism/postminimalism, like Reich, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, up to Glenn Branca, and also My Bloody Valentine, though I also listened to a ton of hardcore like Orchid, pg. 99, Coverge, City of Caterpillar. But that stuff felt very familiar. I guess Liturgy was born of a desire to inject all the European culture that seemed so auratic and faraway into the tradition that I felt more a part of, and link it all to under the umbrella of the signifier “Transcendentalism” associated with Emerson etc.</p>
<p><strong>How did Bernard, Tyler and Greg get involved with Liturgy? Was it always the plan to expand the project into a fully-formed band? Is there a common affinity for extreme metal amongst the band, or is there more of an interest in the music at hand?</strong></p>
<p>It wasn’t always the plan to turn Liturgy into a full band, or to even really end up with a rock band necessarily. I was really deep into philosophy and composition, and I bet five years ago I might have told you that Liturgy would end up being almost the negative image of what it is – that it, it would have been postminimalist composition that was inflected by black metal on the one hand and by Nietzsche and Wagner on the other hand. The “burst beat” concept was always of crucial importance. After Immortal Life, I spent a lot of time trying to take it to the next level, working on Xenakis-inspired stochastic generators to create chaotic and fluctuating electronic blast beats using Max/MSP. But I was never quite satisfied with tending in that direction. Partly because I love composing harmonies and melodies, and harmony and melody is precisely what avant-garde composition cuts out. I was in a real crisis with this and finally decided to try it in rock band format, even if it wouldn’t be so cerebral or sophisticated. Greg, Bernard and Tyler all went to school together and knew one another, though I knew Greg and Bernard independently. Bernard shares my interest in classical music and he joined the band first. We played one show together as a duo, then Greg came along and brought Tyler with him. It all came together super quickly; it was much less work that what I’d been trying to do, and I already had a million songs. I think everyone in the band likes metal more or less, but probably that’s what binds us together the least. I don’t think anyone in the band is like actively seeking out new metal to listen to. Our interests are all a little different, and they’re all elsewhere.</p>
<p><strong>Also, is Greg mimicking the tempo shifts of the drum machine from the solo Liturgy recordings? The speeding up/slowing down of the percussion throughout the album is incredible.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, exactly! On Immortal Life I’d just modulate the tempo with a knob, but that was just a sketch of the vision I had in mind. The Max/MSP experiments sounded stupid, but working with Greg was immediately very rewarding. A live drummer can’t accelerate and decelerate with the same continuity that a machine can, but he can cross thresholds from one tempo another; it’s pretty simple but very visceral and satisfying. That’s the essence of the burst beat. Basically we worked out three “tempos” or patterns really, and he switches between the three at key harmonic moments. And there are certain moments with true accelerations, though it doesn’t really work in this context to be doing that all the time.</p>
<p><strong>What role did Colin Marston [of Krallice and Behold… The Arctopus] have in the recording process for Renihilation? How did he get involved in the recording ?</strong></p>
<p>He’s recorded many of my friends’ bands, so he was an obvious go-to for this. It was nice working with him, because he knows all about how to make metal sound heavy in a traditional way, but also is aware of other kinds of aesthetics, so it was the best of both worlds.</p>
<p><strong>Though Krallice and Liturgy are sonically distinct, it is interesting to see a black metal presence in New York—do you see a sort of community developing out of this (I don’t want to suggest a “scene” since that word now carries a lot of connotations) in the same way there has always been art-influence punk and experimental music in the city? Do you have hopes for what “black metal’ can become outside of Liturgy?</strong></p>
<p>Yes, I’m very interested in the future of black metal in America. I think it should be called Transcendental Black Metal and it should channel and renew the spirit of liberation, and it should consume everything that’s out there and reterritorialize it on the basis of a vision of apocalyptic ecstasy.</p>
<p><strong>I’m fascinated by the anti-nihilist/transcendental content of the music. Do you have any literary/philosophical interests that have had an influence on composition? (Pagan Dawn, as a title, reminds me of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and the idea of the revaluation of values, for whatever reason)</strong></p>
<p>Yes, I have a very deep interest in Nietzsche. Good call. The revaluation of values, the “no” to nihilism and the Zarathustran affirmation make up the fundamental kernel from which the music of Liturgy radiates. Black metal has always been Nietzschean – often pretty explicitly, but usually it is the vulgar, fascist, racist Nazi reading of Nietzsche; I want to take what’s already there and reinscribe it on the basis of the more subtle, contemporary and profound Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche, which comes down ultimately to Affirmation. Actually I like to think of the old school of “Hyberborean Black Metal” as occupying the position of Nihilism in the Genealogy of Morals… Nihilism is a “No” to the priest, but it produces a soul that is even sicker than that of the Christian. The Renihiliation is the final “No”, the “No” to Nihilism which is Zarathustran affirmation. The last connection I’ll make to Nietzsche is: I take very seriously the idea of the experimenter who tries on different cultures and value systems like different cloaks, and then revaluates them and generates an individual culture/system-of-values for himself. That’s why it’s important to me for Liturgy to be standing in the void, at this crossroads between the “black metal kvlt”, “hipster culture”, “serious music”, etc. which there’s been some controversy over. To not accept any herd, to not live inside a cultural paradigm but to smash different paradigms together and forge something out of the fragments…. so that’s not an influence on the composition exactly, but on like the total aesthetic vision so to speak.</p>
<p><strong>There is an oscillation on Renhilation between the untitled tracks and the percussion driven, more metal-driven (for lack of a better term) tracks on the album (and the two we’ve chosen for the 7-inch). Is there a conceptual motivation for this? For instance, the first track’s two minutes of tranquil droning vocals transitions effortlessly into the sensory overload of blastbeat and guitars in “Pagan Dawn”. Is there an intellectual dichotomy being explored here above a purely musical one?</strong></p>
<p>Well, the untitled vocal track develops by adding progressively higher partials from the overtone series – the overtone series of course being a major theme in a lot of the music I’ve been talking about. Maybe starting the record off in that way was an effort to situate the black metal sounds in that schema. But really more than anything, though the concern was musical. I thought it would sound great, musically compelling on the most intuitive level, to set up pagan dawn with a progressively growing vocal drone.</p>
<p><strong>“Pagan Dawn” has a real sense of urgency to it, even in the blissful tremolo harmony about a minute and a half in. Urgency runs throughout the album but is most prevalent I think on that track particularly. I’ve thought of that urgency in terms of the yearning for transcendence and the sort of reality that you seem to be only ever approaching it as a person, as though transcendence or spiritual ecstasy is an asymptote. Do you feel that the music itself contains that transcendental power, or that it is a best representation of what that transcendence could be, that it is merely work towards that idea?</strong></p>
<p>Ha, yes the figure of the asymptote looms very large in my imagination actually. The transcendence in question is a sort of immanently generated mirage of transcendence, like a horizon or an asymptote. The “Almost…”, the eternal “not yet”, the goal that hangs in the sky etc. I think we are touching upon something very fundamental to human experience, or at least to my personal experience. Of course this is also known as the Void and as the Gap. I think that Alain Badiou has put together a very exciting universalized philosophy of the Void. One has to listen to it and remain faithful to it, and even though there’s nothing to reach, nevertheless something changes and new things are born. Something like that. So Liturgy is a transmission of an experience of fidelity to the void. I mean the vision that generates Liturgy is itself a sort of horizonal Transcendental Idea; ultimately it does not hang together, it doesn’t cohere, but with enough fidelity it takes on a life of its own…</p>
<p><strong>I’m interested in the lo-fi quality, is there a balance you try to reach with recording quality (a point when you’d say “this is too little fidelity”)? Did new ideas come across now that you have a group of musicians who perhaps bring different qualities to the table? Anything you might like to say about these tracks or in general (especially to a readership who probably listens to some noise but to whom black metal is some foreign entity)?</strong></p>
<p>I like a raw sound, but I also want everything to be pretty audible. That’s why Colin was good to work with. He understands that a raw aesthetic doesn’t “sound bad” but also was able to produce one without sacrificing actual fidelity. The one thing I’ll mention about Pagan Dawn specifically is that the bridge section with the slower beat is supposed to be a sort of blast beat in slow motion. I’m very interested in the way that the mind relates to different tempos – like how a continuous thud at a very fast speed is a whir, but if it goes slow enough your whole body begins to throb and groove with it. That was clearer on the demos, because I just toggled the tempo to make it slower. Yes, for the new record we’re doing a lot of work to focus on the ways that my ideas resonate with the other members and trying to channel that. Bernard is an incredibly virtuosic guitar player, so that’s something to work with. Greg and I have produced a live version of the burst beat that has aspects that are particular to him, that weren’t anticipated in advance, so we’re trying to flesh that out. Tyler’s been showing me a bunch of Aka Pygmy chanting which we’re going to incorporate into the new record.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/YOe4Pg-wNoc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem073ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM072 The Laughing]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=20132010-03-02T07:53:42Z2010-03-02T13:00:24Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="The Laughing" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/The-Laughing.jpg" alt="" width="300" />All digital 7-inches posted on The Ampeater Review include an A-side and a B-side, just like a classic vinyl 7-inch. Most of the bands that we work with chose an accessible A-side to hook new listeners and a more experimental B-side for the adventurous listener. But Austin-based band <strong>The Laughing</strong> has taken their selection a bit more seriously and, upping the ante, they’ve presented us with something unprecedented—a concept 7-inch. Get ready for “pop music as envisioned by The Laughing.”</p>
<p>You’re probably scratching your forehead right now and wondering just who the hell <strong>The Laughing</strong> is and what their vision of pop music could possibly entail. I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical too at first. But this isn’t the vague and far flung pile of bullshit you tried to pass off as your comp lit thesis, it’s a bold vision that The Laughing paints with remarkable clarity and confidence.</p>
<p><strong>The Laughing</strong> is a four-piece rock band but don’t be fooled by the conventional lineup. Featuring <strong>Logan Middleton</strong> on guitars and vocals, <strong>Sean Neesely</strong> on bass, <strong>Grant van Amburgh</strong> on drums, and <strong>Adam Glasseye</strong> on organ, the band likes to keep it fresh by tossing bells, dulcimers, ukuleles, synthesizers, clarinets, flutes, an array of percussion, and any other noises they can dream up into the mix. They draw inspiration from music, both popular and experimental, that spans eras. The band explains that their varied instrumentation and ornamental arrangements <em>“adorn core song structures and melodies that take cues from the likes of Harry Nilsson, Os Mutantes, Jorge Bem, Silver Apples, Love, Roxy Music, Sonic Youth, 13th Floor Elevators and more.”</em> Yet the recipe is so complicated that the ingredients become obscured. What do they do? The Laughing manage to drum up the same excitement that pop music once inspired but now lacks. How do they do it? By milking a century’s worth of music for everything its worth and fucking it up beyond recognition. The product captures the spirit of pop without seeming derivative. There are very few bands out there that can do what The Laughing is doing right now.</p>
<p>Let’s listen to <strong>A-side “Runner.”</strong> <strong>Middleton</strong> explains, <em>“we present a core melodic and chordal structure of a classic early 60’s R & B influenced American pop song, that got unknowingly dosed with some sort potent combination of psychotropic substance and amphetamines.”</em> Awesome. <em>“If someone had informed Sam Cooke ahead of time how his brilliant career was going to come to such a violent and bizarre end,”</em> Middleton continues, <em>“he might have have leaned his later compositions in this direction. Incorporating a little 80’s new wave synth on top of Hammond organ the song is considerably faster, and more unhinged than the traditional pop form on which its based. Lyrically swapping out the innocence of the 50’s with a tinge of cynicism, all the while singing the same old song: I love you… I messed up…. now I want you back!”</em></p>
<p><em>“I messed up,”</em> might be the dominant theme, but <strong>Middleton</strong> delivers it with such a cocky drunken American punch that one couldn’t exactly call it apologetic. In his deep vibrato and swooping melodies I hear traces of Presley to Pavarotti, Dr. Martin Luther King to Oscar de Leon to a laughing hyena. <strong>The Laughing’s</strong> style is bold and resonant but a little wild, accompanied well by a whiskey on the rocks. And what about Sam Cooke? My hunch is that even if he’d had the foresight to imagine what happened at the Hacienda Motel on that fateful night, he wouldn’t have created something quite so perverse as <strong>“Runner.”</strong> Yes, perverse. Why? Because it’s out of control. It’s an uncensored portrait of the inner workings of the diseased mind. And you can’t look away no matter how hard you try.</p>
<p>Sometimes when I’m listening to music I’ll zone out and without any conscious effort I’ll orchestrate an elaborate scene for which the music is the soundtrack. These scenes play out in my mind shot by shot, as if I were reading the storyboard of a film. <strong>“Runner”</strong> is the soundtrack to a chase scene. Frantic synths and guitars push the narrative along at breakneck pace. As the momentum builds, the cuts get more rapid. The screaming guitar becomes the screaming of breaks. Alternating drum and noise breaks on the bridge mark cut to after cut to! The drums break into a steady roll and the song explodes. Don’t expect to listen passively. This spirit is contagious.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Help Me”</strong> is a little less frantic. <strong>Middleton</strong> explains that <em>“it slows things up and strips things down.”</em> But please don’t get the wrong idea. “Help Me” is no ballad. It’s a dancing-on-the-kitchen-table-in-your-underwear-and shouting-into-a-broomstick kind of song. To put it more directly, “Help Me” is not a song for normal people. Though outwardly upbeat it’s deranged at the core and has a deceptively calm energy that builds steadily throughout. <em>“Bringing in the ukulele and substituting the the persistent drums with hand claps and shakers,”</em> says Middleton, <em>“we depict a more personal account of some one in a sticky situation that stubbornly wants to be left alone to sort things out for himself. The title along with the overly re-assuring lyrical content betray this idea though, instead revealing that this person, really does need help! Complete with synth arpegiators and a ghetto-blastered-out finale we wanted to give the listener something to shout along to, while their ’subs’ rattle their neighbors coffee-table collectibles.”</em></p>
<p><strong>“Help Me”</strong> lacks the force of <strong>“Runner”</strong> but more than compensates for that with catchy hooks and unconventional instrumentation. The chorus is beautiful for its simplicity. At only three words and four chords it’s easy (and nearly impossible)to forget. <em>“Don’t help me…”</em> As <strong>Middleton</strong> emphasizes, in context the lyrics appear ironic, the music suspiciously peppy. The plea is altogether unconvincing, it lacks composure.</p>
<p>Both <strong>“Runner”</strong> and <strong>“Help Me”</strong> come from <strong>The Laughing’s</strong> debut album, <strong>FEVER</strong>, which they released in 2009. Borrowing from the production tactics of genres as diverse as classic dub and noise rock, the album was collaboratively engineered by Erik Wofford (Black Angels, Voxtrot), Danny Reisch (The Lemurs), and <strong>Middleton</strong> himself. FEVER juxtaposes the <em>“warmth of analogue tape and vintage effects” with the “infinite other-worldliness of digital.”</em> Every track is memorable, interesting, and theatric… even the ones deceptively titled “(((pause)))” and “(((silence)))” Middleton explains that FEVER is named after a book he discovered as a child that discusses his grandfather Dr. John Frame’s discovery and treatment of Lassa Fever in Africa many years ago. <em>“I liked it as it thematically ties in with the topic of the diseased (mostly mentally diseased) people throughout the album, but can also equally refer to a sense of fanaticism for something,”</em> he adds.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s a disease and maybe it’s a fanaticism, where do we draw the line? Whatever the ‘fever’ is, <strong>The Laughing</strong> has it. Just listen to their wild and meticulously arranged music and I think you’ll understand what I mean. This band is a little bit crazy and a large bit brilliant. Catch them next month SXSW.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nate-greenberg">Nate Greenberg</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Help Me <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM072 The Laughing/02 Help Me.mp3">Download audio file (02 Help Me.mp3)</a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/n_zocL6Dzgc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem072ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM071 Peasant]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19992010-02-24T16:56:53Z2010-02-24T13:00:17Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Peasant" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Peasant-300x142.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="142" />There’s a certain kind of delicate music that quickly divides listeners into distinct camps; we’re either enthralled by its ethereal melodies or utterly bored by the appalling infrequency of extended drum solos and full stacks of Marshall amplifiers. I happen to love acoustic music for its simplicity, candor, and occasional brilliance. But, I can see where the other guys are coming from and usually refrain from forcing the latest Neil Halstead solo project or Sufjan Stevens solo banjo tape on my friends and colleagues that favor music with a bit more oomph. Only occasionally does an artist come along that so perfectly transcends the framework of expectations for acoustic music that I feel moved (compelled, actually) to share his full catalog with everyone I meet on the street, regardless of their musical inclinations. This happened with DIY savant <strong>Damien DeRose</strong>, known as <strong>Peasant</strong>.</p>
<p>I get the sense, listening to <strong>Peasant’s</strong> songs, that he’s experienced life more completely than I have, and that my best hope at redemption is to absorb his music so thoroughly that I vicariously benefit from the flood of emotional wisdom that pours out from every word he sings. Then again, to say that <strong>Damien DeRose</strong> took <em>“the road less traveled”</em> in this life would be a gross understatement. He began his education at an experimental school that embraced a profoundly unorthodox style of education. He and his classmates spent their days going for walks, taking care of farm animals, and fashioning their own pens from feather quills. Fortunately for us, this unconventional curriculum included enormous amounts of group singing, with a repertoire that consisted primarily of traditional folk songs (I knew I heard traces of that <em>“high lonesome sound”</em>). During his adolescent years DeRose compiled an arsenal of instruments, beginning with piano and violin, then moving to drums, guitar, bass, banjo, and harmonica. He spent his high school years, like many budding musicians of our fine generation, playing Weezer covers in shitty rock bands. Then, in what must have seemed like a crushing blow at the time, he was kicked out of school and cut loose to forge his own path. This unexpected and unsought freedom very likely served as the greatest possible boon to his development as a songwriter. The period that followed was a rough one, wrought with what in retrospect might be construed as adventure. He moved to California and bought a sailboat with a friend, but the boat sunk (was sunk, actually, by sea lions) before it ever saw open ocean. So he traveled around the US and Europe, collecting whatever inspiration the world had to offer. De Rose came out on the other side of this adventure seasoned, but also very much affected by the daily grind of forging one’s own existence at an age when the majority of his peers were most concerned with what to wear at the next college social–so much so that he gave himself the humble stage name Peasant. Having been on the receiving end of too many $7/hr day jobs, broken relationships, and chance encounters, Peasant bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, and his songs are perfect capsules of emotion, contained and conveyed by a musical impulse that’s nothing short of brilliant.</p>
<p>When we spoke on the phone, <strong>Peasant</strong> said he writes <em>“songs about feelings that produce those feelings.”</em> Songs to inspire love, to incite hatred, to send a confident man to the depths of self-loathing and then draw him back again. This is one of the greatest accomplishments of high art, and while many an artist might make this claim, Peasant undoubtedly succeeds. The songs on this 7-inch are both home-recording ventures, forged over many months in an attic in <strong>DeRose’s</strong> home town of Doyleston, PA. They’re recorded with the kind of compulsive attention that’s impossible in a formal recording studio. Every sound is meticulously captured, adjusted, re-recorded, mixed, re-mixed, and scrutinized. The soundscape’s layered without being lush; the end result is both decidedly unique and perfectly suitable to the dreamy melancholy of Peasant’s music. I’m tempted to make comparisons to Elliot Smith and Brian Wilson, but Peasant’s music isn’t so easily reduced to the sum of its influences.</p>
<p><strong>A-side “The Distance”</strong> evokes the same world of aimlessness and isolation as Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”. It’s the perfect snapshot of your long lost older brother, sitting alone on the back seat of a bus like a still frame from some unmade Wes Anderson remake of Into The Wild. It’s about losing people–not to death or depravity, but to the simple distractions and the natural dispersion of a normal life. He sings,</p>
<p><em>“I’ve been walking in the city and wandering far away.<br />
I’ve been falling through the fields and hiding every day.<br />
I’ve been holding onto everything, all that I have.<br />
I’m hoping I can come out the other side.<br />
Been sleeping in the moonlight, and running through the days.<br />
Been waiting for the troubles to go away. </em></p>
<p><em> </em><em>Where have you been my lover?<br />
Where have you gone, my friends?<br />
Fading through the distance of each other.<br />
What have we done, my brother?<br />
Have we all gone away?<br />
I’m listening to the distance of the past.” </em></p>
<p>A simple two chord progression sends the song on a steady trajectory from the onset, each change propelling listeners one step further on some gradually unfolding journey. Like <strong>DeRose</strong> said, it’s a song about distance that induces the perception of distance in anyone within earshot. What a trick. The arrangement is complex but so delicately balanced that it’s possible to listen through the song without fully hearing the dozens of overdubbed parts that DeRose weaves through the basic framework of guitar and vocals. There are multiple keyboards, layered vocal harmonies, and even some figures that sound a bit like backwards tape loops (around 1:45). It all blends into a sonic stew, with DeRose’s voice in the forefront as the most prominent ingredient. It’s delicate but not fragile, sensitive but not overly expressive. It’s earnest. This isn’t a song written by someone so overly-conscious of songwriting as to do anything to deliberately subvert the tradition. That said, he isn’t merely following in tow either; it’s a refreshing mixture of truly original composition and deeply personal expression.</p>
<p>A hollow piano and relaxed snare usher in <strong>B-side “Well Alright,”</strong> another tune based on a repeated two chord progression. It doesn’t do much to start, but just as I’d normally began to reach towards that skip button, <strong>DeRose</strong> enters with the line, <em>“You tell me that I look like I’m gone when I’m around”</em> and the song launches into an anthem for dissatisfied couples (if dissatisfied couples even have anthems…I guess it’s like having “our song” but instead of nuzzling you just sit in cold silence). Like on <strong>“The Distance,”</strong> <strong>“Well Alright”</strong>’s main hook is achieved by introducing new harmonic movement to the mix in conjunction with a higher vocal melody. To the extent that it’s a formula, it’s a formula for success. At one point DeRose sings, <em>“I’m trying to find the answers in myself, I’m trying to find the reasons in my head, I don’t wanna drift away the days.”</em> There’s a resonance here with “The Distance” in so much as Peasant is very clearly on a search. Though he’s settled down since his post-high school excursions, he’s embarked upon a new exploration–more mature perhaps, but more difficult to complete. It’s the inevitable dichotomy between living a stationary life while making creative and intellectual progress, all the while sustaining those vital personal connections forged in the preceding decades. It ain’t easy, but if the broader search for that perfect balance does indeed continue for Damien DeRose, he can rest assured that he’s created something special in the music presented on this 7-inch. If you’re looking for more Peasant, his latest LP <strong>Shady Retreat</strong> is out March 2nd on <a href="http://www.papergardenrecords.com/" target="_blank">Paper Garden Records</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-heller">Ben Heller</a></p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/84fI9oVucLM" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem071ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM070 Will Stratton]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19882010-02-23T17:48:59Z2010-02-23T17:44:37Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Will Stratton" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Will-Stratton-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /><strong>Will Stratton</strong> is poised at a moment of spiritual and artistic growth, and lucky for us he is committing it to tape (or hard drive, rather). His first two records, 2007’s <strong>What the Night Said</strong> and 2009’s <strong>No Wonder</strong>, were received warmly by fans of beautiful acoustic pop songs with spiderweb-delicate fingerpicking and hushed, intimate vocals. For them he garnered innumerable Nick Drake comparisons and honest, thoughtful praise from many corners of the media. Coke Machine Glow called No Wonder <em>“a lovely, humble, mature record from a person who seems like a lovely, humble, mature human being,”</em> and this is exactly how it feels to listen to it. Mature and humble are hardly the attributes that get the blog hormones flowing these days, but in some ways we are reaping the benefits of the fact that Stratton hasn’t completely blown up in the hyperbolic, slavering world of blog music journalism. No Wonder was a perfectly lovely album that could have been replicated for an entire career (see Damien Jurado, for example). It is dramatic enough to be moving without coming anywhere close to gaudiness, simple and understated enough to seem completely uncontrived, intelligent enough to ring true in a way that surpasses platitudes, and warm enough that you get an immediate sense of the human heart behind the songs. The drama in it comes from delicate internal moments like walking home, alone and lovestruck, after a party, the way it often does in real life, at least for the kind of people who tend to listen to melancholic acoustic pop music that is heavy on the I-IV chord progressions and literate lyrics (I can be mildly snarky because I count myself squarely in this camp). Stratton could have had a lovely career working within those straight-forward song forms, but he has the searching and self-critical personality of an artist, rather than just a craftsman.</p>
<p><strong>Stratton</strong> was very young when he recorded those two albums (he still is, really), and had he been launched into the slobbery jaws of even indie-stardom, we might not be seeing the kind of growth we can see in his new music, some of which he has kindly allowed Ampeater to convey to you, the people. The appeal of the delicate, melancholy, direct songs of his first two albums is strong, and it hasn’t been banished by any means, but here Stratton begins to mold it into something less predictable and more expansive. I’ll let him speak for himself because he is incredibly eloquent: <em>“There is a single spiritual position that exists in songs like [Nick Drake's] “Which Will” that is so strong that, when you hear it, it seems like it becomes the only thing that exists in the world(…)That kind of music, written from a place of such isolation, has the illusion of clarity. Maybe it has real clarity, it’s hard for me to say. Either way, I’m tired of being in that place. I want to forge out on my own and wind up some place I don’t recognize. I want to learn to express very specific moments of anger, flirtatiousness, joy–all things that are more or less absent in Nick Drake’s music–with the same sort of gutwrenching precision that he used to express the false sense of omniscience that accompanies deep despair.” </em></p>
<p>After all that setup, you’re probably expecting some death metal or fifteen minute guitar solos or synthy 80’s pop. Well, there’s none of that, but improvisation does play a key role these songs in a way that it never has before.<strong> A-side “Bluebells”</strong> commences with an open piano-figure that recalls the beginning of Bon Iver’s “Babys”, but which is harmonically static and probably comes instead from interest in recent minimalist classical music (our conversation was educational for me in this arena, to say the least, but I recommend checking out John Luther Adams, David Lang, Arvo Part, & Gavin Bryars for starters). Over this piano drone, <strong>Stratton</strong> lays out a few minutes of warm, tumbling guitar, all of which was improvised. He has lately taken to using first takes, saying that <em>“it keeps me thinking on my toes.”</em> This interest in spontaneity is another bold move, directly in opposition to the precise and measured craft of his previous work, yet one which serves the song to the very same extent that Stratton’s simpler pop forms served his earlier work. Here it serves as both a counterweight to the minimal and gorgeous piano/vocals outro and as a kind of mood-setter, capturing an expansive, still feeling that isn’t easily conveyable through traditional songwriting. It’s something we haven’t heard from Stratton before, a sound that seems to call to mind wide open landscapes at dawn, the sun slowly infusing the crevices of rocks with its light.</p>
<p>It’s onto this landscape that <strong>Stratton</strong> projects his melancholy song, yet there’s something strangely dusty and distant about the sadness in <strong>“Bluebells”</strong>. The effects obscure his voice just enough to render it ghostly, almost like a voice from the past (you can just barely hear it hovering behind the guitar solos), and the song is narrated in the second person, making it about the listener rather than the singer. It’s a subtly alarming shift, putting us in the position of being hopelessly lost, rather than safely empathizing with a narrator who is hopelessly lost. The clashing guitars that rise up around the four minute mark, crackling and slashing one another like contentious bolts of lightning, infuse the song with a dissonance that, though it disappears quickly, enhances this air of desperation and sadness, especially when we’re lead out into a beautiful piano and vocal section only to hear the line <em>“by now you must have been certain that it had all been a lie”</em>. When the narrator tells us that we still kept searching for our lost love, it’s hard to tell whether it’s sweet or pathetic, and this ambiguity is crushingly sad. Are we deluded or determined? Both? Also to be noted, over the middle section with it’s minimal backbeat, when Stratton is singing <em>“which way did my darling go?”</em>, is the way the bass note on the guitar gradually bends up from the four chord to the five, introducing some dissonant intermediate notes and a sense of unease and muted violence that wouldn’t be present if he’d just played the chord progression straight.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “The Hudson Line”</strong> is as close to <strong>Stratton’s</strong> earlier work as anything he sent us. His voice is stripped of the effects that mask it on <strong>“Bluebells”</strong> and left to cut clearly over the beautiful lattice of fingerpicked acoustic guitar. It is a love song, yet it’s not so much a declaration of love as an assessment of a love that has come and gone. The moments of sweetness are now tempered by the temporal distance, and the wistful mood is perfectly captured by the lines<em> “all I know all I know all I know / is all greatness is born out of sin / but somehow I saw you”.</em> The narrator’s relationship with the woman is something born out of sin, yet at the same time it seems to be the one thing that transcends this tautology. It’s a sweetness that is rendered all the sweeter by the darkness of the worldview in which it sits. The background against which these lyrics are set is appropriately lovely and delicate, yet it’s easy to miss just how amazing and skillful the rhythmic interplay is between the thumb and the rest of the hand. Stratton, though he’s no show off, is an incredibly agile and creative guitarist, with a sense of play that allows him to slip away from the expected patterns of folk and rock guitar. Aside from providing a harmonic backbone, the guitar here frequently subdivides the bar into uneven groups of threes, giving the song a rolling feeling mirrored in the lyrics about <em>“galloping along the Hudson Line.”</em></p>
<p>These exclusive tracks represent the evocative songwriting <strong>Stratton</strong> is known for, only evolved to the next step. Thankfully for us listeners, he is a person who is constantly pushing himself forward, stretching for something just beyond his reach. We have the luxury of being able to sit back and immerse ourselves in the discoveries he makes along the way, the beautiful music that composes Will Stratton’s journey through the world. Stay tuned for another digital 7” in the coming weeks, as well as greater portions of the interview.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side A – Bluebells <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM070 Will Stratton/01 Bluebells.mp3">Download audio file (01 Bluebells.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side B – The Hudson Line <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM070 Will Stratton/02 The Hudson Line.mp3">Download audio file (02 The Hudson Line.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM070 Will Stratton.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/3TkfQFUW1dw" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem070ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM069 KASHKA]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19722010-02-17T05:43:18Z2010-02-17T13:00:09Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/KASHKA.jpg" alt="" title="KASHKA" width="300" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" />Here at Ampeater, we’re not ashamed to say that we love Canada. The bustling Toronto scene has been a neverending source of marvelous music for us to present triumphantly to the open-eared public: <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem045">Evening Hymns</a>, <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem027">PS I Love You</a>, <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem066">The D’Urbervilles</a>, and now <strong>Kat Burns</strong>, aka <strong>KASHKA</strong>. Burns’ gorgeous voice and sharp songwriting skills (you try and slip the word “dendrophiliac” into a song without sounding like a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyhWwuDRoeY" target="_blank">jerk</a>) help make the wonderful <strong> Forest City Lovers</strong> what they are, but occasionally, prolific as she is, she churns out some songs that don’t quite fit into the FCL template, and so she’s taken on the KASHKA alter-ego to begin releasing those songs, which swap the Lovers’ sunny summer acoustics for a subdued, wintry electronic sound, probably more appropriate for Toronto.</p>
<p><strong>Burns</strong> describes <strong>KASHKA</strong> as <em>“the outlet that many of my songs drift into when they feel like they may float away otherwise,”</em> and you will instantly understand what she means. Rather than the roots and leaves of FCL, KASHKA songs sound like streetlights refracted through icicles. They are wintertime compositions (both were literally written during the darkest evenings of winter), sonically filled out with chiming keyboards, tinkling bells, large spaces, and Burns’ lovely, pure voice, which, aside from carrying the melodies, functions as pretty much the best synthesizer ever, whether she’s creating warm choruses of chordal oohs, fuzzy lead lines between verses, or serenely floating contrapuntal melodies à la a string section. The thing that carries over from the <strong>Lovers</strong> is Burns sense of precise and tasteful simplicity. She knows in either case that her voice and knack for melody will carry the song, and intelligently refrains from throwing any kind of half-baked, overly adorned arrangements into the mix. Her vocals are mixed to the front, so that they may lift the weight of the song, but they are not pushed as far forward as is common to most electro-pop and they don’t share the ridiculously melismatic neo-soul that tends to make you feel like someone spliced some vocals in from a recent American Idol audition. In fact, it’s easy not to notice how wonderfully skillful a singer she is until you start realizing how many of the sounds that fill out the airy space of these songs are not keyboards but rather her voice.</p>
<p>Making electro-pop (making <em>good</em> electro-pop, rather) has a couple of inherent challenges, both of which <strong>KASHKA</strong> rises to effortlessly. First, for your voice to slot nicely among all the pristine synth swells and gentle blips, it has to be as on pitch and tightly controlled as your SK-1. As you can hear in pretty much any moment of her Ampeater single, this is not a problem for <strong>Burns</strong>, whose voice is as agile as it is pretty, and somehow never cloying or tiring in the way of so many singers gifted with exceptional vocal cords (this quality probably owes a lot to her aforementioned intelligent restraint). The second major challenge is that when you’re creating a music that essentially exists only in digital space, and never as a full set of live sounds in a room, it’s really easy to succumb to the temptation to layer the hell out of it (I know this because I pretty much always do so, no matter how pure my intentions are when I set out). This is true of all recording done mostly by overdubs, but I think it’s a special difficulty with electronic music, which has no acoustic corollary, and in which it is easy to get excited about different synth sounds and just turn everything into consonant-sounding mud, which is one of my least favorite sounds (it is a term that is also applicable to jam bands). KASHKA never has this problem. Her music, with its softly muted beats and warm clouds of voices, is perfectly refined and alluring. There’s not a hair out of place, and there are no screams for your attention, and this is precisely why it holds your ears so easily.</p>
<p>Despite the refinement and unflashiness I’ve been harping on, <strong>KASHKA</strong> doesn’t come across as sparse or stark because those words imply a kind of spiritual darkness that just isn’t there. Though the songs are wintry, they are full of the warmth of huddling up by the fire after a long walk in the snowy evening, full of hope in the face of adversity. The first lyric on <strong>A-side “Hands In”</strong> is, in fact, <em>“put your hands in my heart tonight / just warm them there,”</em> which is all about love as a balm for cold weather, cold weather being of course a shorthand for the larger cruelties of the world. The song begins with a quick but relaxed three note keyboard pattern that manages to provide the entire harmony of the verse without ever playing a single chord. The harmony is so simple that we don’t need any more for our ears to understand exactly where we are, and what’s brilliant about it is that we barely get any more: another, far quieter, single-note line, some muted percussion. Eventually some single-note guitar appears, along with some distant jangling bells, a light keyboard melody, and some tom fills that always seem to signal the arrival of hugeness, yet which always lead to nothing, not even a crash on the downbeat. All these elements slowly and gradually coalesce to create the filled out song, and just at the moment when you hear this, it slips away, leaving only the echo of the bells (which are brilliantly buried in the mix so that you may not have even noticed them until this precise moment). The only response is to listen to it again.</p>
<p><strong>“Lonely Creatures”</strong> begins with an absence as well, withholding all the low end through the first verse to achieve that untethered, airy sound before eventually culminating in the busiest, thickest sound on the whole single, which is of course still rather delicate. My absolute favorite moment in the song only comes once (of course), and it’s right at 2:15, in the middle of the chorus, where <strong>Burns</strong> comes in with an ethereal ooh which is broken up into sixteenth notes in a way that echoes the rolling beats of the chorus and calls to mind images of rippling water. But it’s hard to even pick a favorite moment in <strong>“Lonely Creatures.”</strong> All of the background vocal work is unbelievably beautiful, and so is the third repetition of the chorus line, when it slides up with the ease of warm breath rising into cold air. The call for all the lonely city-dwellers to come together and create a spark of heat together is a perfect call-to-arms for someone concerned primarily with spreading love and warmth, and though it makes for a stark contrast with the <em>“icy breasts of morning”</em> and catalogues of inhibitions in the lyrics, what stays with you after listening is not the icy expanse of the backing track but the humanity and warmth of Burns’ voice, reminding us that, when faced with the harsh winters of the world, our greatest asset is the heat radiating from our bodies and the love radiating from our hearts.</p>
<p>P.S. If you were wondering how <strong>“Lonely Creatures”</strong> would sound if you accidentally played Gyorgy Ligeti’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0P1NnUFxc" target="_blank">“Atmospheres”</a> over it, the answer is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Lonely Creatures <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM069 KASHKA/02 Lonely Creatures.mp3">Download audio file (02 Lonely Creatures.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Hands In <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM069 KASHKA/01 Hands In.mp3">Download audio file (01 Hands In.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM069 KASHKA.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/RMRCos-waz4" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem069ampeatermusic<![CDATA[Ampeater Selects Bands to Play Hype Machine Show at Housing Works]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19662010-02-15T17:38:06Z2010-02-15T17:38:06Z<div class="review">Hey everybody! A while back our friends at the <a href="http://hypem.com" target="_blank">Hype Machine</a> asked us to help curate a special show at <a href="http://www.housingworks.org/social-enterprise/bookstore-cafe/" target="_blank">Housing Works in Soho, NYC</a>. They had an idea for an event that would be part show and part CD swap (with all proceeds going to support Housing Works), and thought we might have good recommendations as to some under-hyped bands. We settled on <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem018">Shark?</a> and <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem021">Cuddle Magic</a>, and Hypem brought The Morning Benders in to close–it’s gonna be a great, great show. Come on out, support Housing Works, support some local bands, and have a good time!</p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/9K22umFlXls" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/hypemshowampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 015]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19612010-02-13T18:05:52Z2010-02-13T18:05:04Z<div class="review">
<p><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp015.zip"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1962" title="weekly-zip15" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/weekly-zip15.png" alt="" width="700" height="342" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem066"><img title="AEM066 The D’Urbervilles" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The-DUrbervilles.jpg" alt="AEM066 The D’Urbervilles" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem067"><img title="AEM067 SAADI" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SAADI.jpg" alt="AEM067 SAADI" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem068"><img title="AEM068 Day Sleeper" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Day-Sleeper-300x199.jpg" alt="AEM068 Day Sleeper" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/UrAGI9s3SNM" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem-compilation-015ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM068 Day Sleeper]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19472010-02-11T19:24:26Z2010-02-11T13:00:05Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Day Sleeper" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Day-Sleeper-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /><strong>Day Sleeper</strong> is a band comprised primarily of college sophomores but they have a remarkably long history. <strong>Cas Kaplan</strong> (guitar, vocals) has been gigging since age eleven and began writing songs under the moniker Day Sleeper at age twelve. Kaplan finds it important to clarify that Day Sleeper is not a nod to the REM hit of the same name. Actually it is a reference to <strong>Insomnia</strong>, Kaplan’s former punk band, whose rejected material became Day Sleeper’s early repertoire. Eventually Day Sleeper grew into a band with the addition of guitarist <strong>Justin </strong><strong>Danforth</strong>, bassist <strong>Dan Ferm</strong>, and drummer <strong>Luke Pyenson</strong>. They recorded their first album <strong>Drop Your Sword</strong> in 2008, while attending high school in Newton, MA and released it the following year through Cooling Pie Records, home to <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem047">KC Quilty</a> among others. Kaplan jokes that, <em>“the album was well received, especially internationally, where oddly enough more Chinese websites have written about it than ones from any other country.”</em> At any rate, I think it’s due time that Day Sleeper got a little love from the press back home and although I’m currently writing from a cafe in Seoul—really it’s just a minor technicality—I hope that this review will at long last introduce them to an American audience.</p>
<p><strong>Kaplan</strong> explains that <strong>A-side “Windows Left Open”</strong> was originally called “Summertime” and <em>“in one sense is meant to evoke the breeziness of that time of year.”</em> Perhaps it does, although I cant help but wonder what that breeze carries. Kaplan asserts that there’s something <em>“cynical and sinister”</em> about it and I agree that the song is altogether unsettling. A distant rumble of thunder and the faint of rain are swept through that open window and pollute the summer afternoon with a foreboding dreariness. Actually, “Windows Left Open” is a fitting single for a band called <strong>Day Sleeper</strong>. A lumbering 6/8 pulse and lack of harmonic resolution create a dreamy vibe. It’s a little like the feeling you get when you accidentally drift off in the mid afternoon and wake up drenched in a cool sweat, only to find that hours have passed and its already dark out. It always takes a few minutes to figure out what happened, to remember where you are and even who you are. Actually, it reminds me of a passage from <em>Swann’s Way</em> in which Proust describes the sensation he felt as a child upon waking up. This return to reality <em>“did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit… I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing with out cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark.”</em></p>
<p>I realize that I’m treading on thin ice with that reference. <strong>Day Sleeper</strong> is not a pretentious hipster band and I don’t think the comparison to Proust is one that they themselves would draw. But whether or not they’d acknowledge it, their music evokes some of the same sensations. It takes me to a special place where the boundaries between dream, memory, and reality are blurred. A drugged-out lo-fi aesthetic reminiscent of Pavement is interspersed with brief moments of clarity. In this case, the passage <em>“what have I left to say…”</em> in which the band breaks into a conventional three chord pattern feels like a chorus even though it only happens once and interrupts the disconcerting monotony of the groove. <strong>Kaplan</strong> explains that <strong>“Windows Left Open”</strong> is indicative of Day Sleeper’s current artistic direction. <em>“The guitars are tangled, the bass is leading, the drums are groovy and combative, and the vocals are melodic.”</em> He also cites an emphasis on concision, which as a break from the bands <em>“shoegazing”</em> past. “Windows Left Open” retains the washed out guitars and emotional restraint characteristic of shoegaze, but Kaplan’s melodic vocal line is too distinct and the song’s form far too compact to fit the archetypal shoegaze blueprint.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Hiding Place”</strong> is similarly dreamy. I’d attribute that mostly to the vocals which sound suspiciously as if they were recorded under water. Good luck making out a word the band is saying. Here the human voice is used for its melodic qualities rather than as an instrument for speech. And yet the garbled words give the song a sort of haunting quality, as if there is some important message to be conveyed but it’s lost in transmission. I should clarify that this recording is only a demo and that it was recorded in a dormitory. Although it’s hard to imagine now, in later incarnations the song will feature a prominent drum part. <strong>Kaplan</strong> explains, <em>“I wish there was a version that had Luke’s playing on it, because he really steals the show on this one live.”</em> But even without drums, a strong pulse can be felt. <strong>Ferm</strong>’s propulsive bass vamp strongly marks the downbeat and gives the song a sense of forward momentum. <strong>Day Sleeper</strong> isn’t exactly the kind of band to make me get up and dance but they insist that they really love it when people get into their music at shows. In effort to get the crowd moving, <em>“I tried to give this one a little bounce and snap,”</em> explains <strong>Kaplan</strong>. Nevertheless, the predominant <em>“guitar philosophy” </em>remains the same as in other Day Sleeper songs. Principally, the guitars <em>“weave and dovetail around one another”</em> and move separately from section to section, paying little regard to the whole <em>“verse-chorus-verse thing.”</em> And so, “Hiding Place” strikes an interesting balance. It’s more groove oriented than most of Day Sleeper’s material but it’s so locked in that it becomes predictable.</p>
<p>What’s next for <strong>Day Sleeper</strong>? They’ve got some major plans. They hope to undertake the recording of a new album in the near future and to follow it up with a national tour. In the mean time they’re releasing a stopgap EP called <strong>Wonderland Kid</strong> featuring songs recorded at WERS at Emerson College in Boston, including <strong>A-side “Windows Left Open”</strong>. Day Sleeper has always been an active live band, playing at venues ranging in size from the cramped 75-person basement of the Knitting Factory in NYC to Boston music stronghold TT The Bear’s Place. If you check out their MySpace page you’ll notice that they pitch themselves as a BOS/NYC/CT/MTL band. Most high school bands fall apart after their members are scattered across the country by the college admission gods but Day Sleeper has managed to make the transition from a single-city high school band to a quad-city college band with remarkable grace. They’ve been gigging across the full extent of their geographic range and intend to continue performing as frequently as their schedules will allow. Coming soon to a venue near you…mark your calendars!</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nate-greenberg">Nate Greenberg</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Hiding Place <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM068 Day Sleeper/02 Hiding Place.mp3">Download audio file (02 Hiding Place.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Windows Left Open <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM068 Day Sleeper/01 Windows Left Open.mp3">Download audio file (01 Windows Left Open.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM068 Day Sleeper.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/1mm7ITVAnHc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem068ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM067 SAADI]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19332010-02-10T17:58:21Z2010-02-10T13:00:55Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SAADI.jpg" alt="" title="SAADI" width="300" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" />It’s one thing to be experimental, quite another to perform a successful experiment. The first is a compulsion, a personality quirk like generosity or reckless driving. The second is something people other than your mother should pay attention to. <strong>Boshra al Saadi</strong>, a songwriter with visionary aesthetics and a voice in the birthing stages of becoming legendary, from Damascus, Pittsburgh and currently the Lower East Side, is something everybody—even, maybe, your mother—should be paying attention to. For every shitheaded musical algorithm you could throw this artist’s way, like if Cornelius had a sex change and re-recorded Tusk, or if, you know, Regina Spektor had ousted Aaliyah at the Timbaland audition, there is really only one accurate way of encompassing the emotional kick these tracks deliver. Maybe it’s a thing about eponymous musicians, Prince, Madonna, whatever. But here’s the catch: I don’t want to just listen to <strong>SAADI</strong> songs or go to SAADI shows; I want to be SAADI. After you hear the A and B sides, you’ll probably feel similarly, and we can start a creepy support group for one another where we dress up and write borderline fan fiction.</p>
<p>Let’s start with <strong>“Pollen Seeking Bees,”</strong> available in physical format this March on the <strong>Bad City 12”</strong> released by our buddies at Serious Business. What’s cool here is how potentially terrible that opening piano bang could have become. Think about it. No one really needs more fey, post-post-post K Records kiddy-ness on his or her iPod even if 10th grade was terrible and you never got to build that treehouse with your best friend before he moved to Utah. But here, from the four-second mark on, we know we’re in the hands of a master technician, a performer who knows not only how to excoriate a cliche but how to twist one into all kinds of cool new balloon animals. That expertly syncopated scratch, those eternal Glaswegian <em>“aaahs”</em>…it’s the kind of mix-up that allows you to accept that this song, like a particularly charming drunk or a Higgs boson, will probably do whatever the fuck it wants.</p>
<p>A promo page on Serious Business says that <strong>SAADI</strong>, <em>“draws from sources as diverse as Bob Dylan, classic 80’s synth pop, traditional Arabic music, punk rock, Nigerian music and Brian Eno.”</em> That’s all well and good, and she probably does. But the point here is less the specificity of these taste-wise impulses—did you hear that Chief Ebenezer Obey sample?, and so on—than the sense of sonic transience and mutability their even-illusory presence inspires. We are getting to the point in popular music—thanks Internet!—where genre has become an essentially empty category, and all that really matters is posturing and shout-outs. Record digging, for most of us, is a dead art, and Google is the new back of the CD store. It’s no big deal that one band can sound like Dinosaur Jr. meets Cybotron, or The Byrds meets John Cage. On the other hand, it is a big deal when influences stop being predictable, where the historical fabric of layered tracks and takes slides off the sewing machine. <strong>“Pollen Seeking Bees”</strong> sounds like a bunch of things: rainy-day pop music, club rap, musique concrete. But the fusion is fluid, not forced. The songs set their own terms, and the classification scrambles to catch up.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “3 am (Black Lodge)”</strong> is similarly, um, different; an acoustic guitar figure, an electric wash that sounds like dividing cells look like under a microscope, <strong>SAADI’s</strong> centered voice the constant that holds it all together. It’s not hard to imagine this as some late-career live recording by an artist you’ve been told a million times to listen to but never have. There’s an effortless confidence at play here, a sort of fan service for fan-base that’s still being created. It catches you up like an American at a European soccer match, shows you slides of an imagined community that you suddenly feel and will forever feel a part of.</p>
<p><strong>SAADI</strong>, in the vein of other transcendently forward-thinking female artists like Bridgitte Fontaine or Lizzie Mercier Descloux, doesn’t have a hypothesis of what might sound amazing if interlaced at the right ratios. The experiment is concluded. Here are the results.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-lasman">Ben Lasman</a></p>
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<td>Side B – 3 am (Black Lodge) <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM067 SAADI/02 3am Black Lodge.mp3">Download audio file (02 3am Black Lodge.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Pollen Seeking Bees <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM067 SAADI/01 Pollen Seeking Bees.mp3">Download audio file (01 Pollen Seeking Bees.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM067 SAADI.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/Q8XyQn36D0U" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem067ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM066 The D’Urbervilles]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19222010-02-09T04:00:56Z2010-02-09T13:00:06Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The-DUrbervilles.jpg" alt="" title="The DUrbervilles" width="300" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" />Their awkward to pronounce name – it’s “The Do-U – r – b – e – r – villes” – from Thomas Hardy’s novel <em>Tess of the D’Urbervilles</em> presents a beguiling front for this Canadian band. By naming themselves after the poor English family featured in the novel, are they asserting their own poverty? Or, hailing from Oshawa, Ontario, do they consider themselves second-bests to their more sophisticated <em>Québécois</em>? Or is the band – which attained its complete form in college –using such a literate reference ironically, a self-conscious acknowledgment of their middle class privilege? The questions swirl in the background as<strong> The D’Urbervilles</strong> don’t so much lament their poverty –real or imagined – but rather use it a defiant rallying cry on <strong>“We Are the Hunters.”</strong></p>
<p>The first thing you think when listening to this A-side, though, isn’t whether these guys are poor or not: it’s whether – with the slap bass, manic energy and onslaught of guitar hits – it’s going to be “War Pigs” done for the pacifist set. But then it melds into a punk sing along that suggests they aren’t some limp-dicked indie band: <em>“We are the Hunters, it’s time for killing!” </em>Exhausted? We haven’t yet arrived at the infectious, Depeche Mode-esque bridge, built on a bubbling base line that makes it pretty much impossible not to do one of those bobbing 80s shakes. <em> “At night we own the city skyline / By day we hide our selves from sight</em><em>,”</em> <strong>John O’Regan</strong> sings; <em>“Making ends meet/Burned up like a fire in the street / you can strike our hearts anywhere you like.”</em> O’Regan, who moonlights as Diamond Rings – Side A on the PS I Love You split 7-inch that caught our attention last fall – manages through his robust, beautiful voice to convey both the weariness and defiance of the lyrics. (His voice is even more incredible in person: I saw O’Regan perform as <strong>Diamond Rings</strong> back in the fall in New York and was blown away.) The band only enters the 21<sup>st</sup> century at the triumphant chorus, sounding like the Killers without the bourgeois melodrama, synthesizer and all. </p>
<p>So yeah, <strong>The D’Urbervilles</strong> are kaleidoscopic. Their chutzpah itself is worthy of praise: though plenty of bands experiment with different sounds, it’s actually somewhat incredible how <em>few</em> rock songs these days change tempo or rhythm, let alone style. I’ve always been drawn to this kind of virtuosity, built for the easily bored (or less generously, those with short attention spans). Of course there are endless great songs that build to a climax with shifting-tempos, and plenty of showy music-for-musicians (e.g. Zappa). But rarely do we see this collage-minded freely-borrowing approach, the best (and most famous) example of which has to be the circus of freak-doo-wop “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”</p>
<p>But <strong>The D’Urbervilles</strong> are no Beatles, and upon first listen this rapid juxtaposition, this drive-by of the last forty years of rock can be appear jarring if not downright crude. They sound like a band that is either completely aware of what they’re doing or totally clueless. But upon repeat listens it becomes clear though the D’Urbervilles try on many different musical outfits, they are so tight that they pull it off. </p>
<p>But the other reason, the reason they have incredible potential to be <em>successful</em> and great, is that they root themselves in the trendy post-punk sound but use that as a point of departure. Like the rest of their album of the same name, on <strong> “We Are the Hunters” The D’Urbervilles</strong> have all the elements of that sound: pile-driving bass, generally minimalist arrangements, and quickly shifting forms. While <strong>Tim Bruton</strong> does a fine job on guitar and synth, it is the bass of <strong>Kyle Donnelly</strong> that dominates here, giving the band their appealingly Pixies-like meaty sound. But instead of sticking to the formula, The D’Urbervilles add some hard rock guitar here, sprinkle some synthesizer there until it comes out just right. <em>Bon appét-indié. </em></p>
<p><strong>B-side “Worst Case Ontario” feat. New Slang</strong> sounds completely different than anything else <strong>The D’Urbervilles</strong> have recorded. It is, frankly, unrepresentative of their work – but it sure shows that these guys have a sense of humor. A self-mocking shout out to their home state, the track starts out with a clip from perhaps the funniest – and trashiest – piece of pop culture to emerge from our neighbors up north: the Trailer Park Boys. Built around an old-school hip-hop (read: funk) beat with similarly loose, simple vocals, the track contains such zingers as: <em>“I ain’t no moron/so I swim in Lake Huron,”</em> such sophisticated smack-downs of other states like <em>“What the heck, Quebec?”</em> and the classic taunt: <em>“Do you have the balls to swim Niagara falls!?”</em> They are more <em>“wiggidy-wiggidy-wiggidy-wacks” </em> here than a Kriss-Kross single and they seem to be in that twelve year old state of mind as well. Which is to say: they don’t take themselves too seriously. Thank god. </p>
<p>The <strong>D’Urbervilles </strong> are smart. They sing with sincerity, but always with a nod and a wink; they address real issues with verve but aren’t afraid to be completely silly. They inhabit the hot sound of the moment but twist it in original and exciting ways. And they prove that even in an age when rock is becoming more and more orchestrated, a hard bass and beautiful vocals are all you really need to make a great song.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nick-kelly">Nick Kelly</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Worst Case Ontario <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM066 The DUrbervilles/02 Worst Case Ontario.mp3">Download audio file (02 Worst Case Ontario.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – We are the Hunters <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM066 The DUrbervilles/01 We are the Hunters.mp3">Download audio file (01 We are the Hunters.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM066 The DUrbervilles.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/rkkNoIcIpg0" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem066ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM065 Lisa Germano]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19112010-02-08T04:41:55Z2010-02-08T13:00:45Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Lisa-Germano-300x199.jpg" alt="" title="Lisa Germano" width="300" height="199" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; " />When you cast a look over her resume, it’s astonishing that Indiana-born songwriter <strong>Lisa Germano</strong> isn’t more well known: Session work with Bob Dylan and The Indigo Girls (?!); albums released on Capitol and 4AD to accolades in Rolling Stone and Spin; collaborations involving Johnny Marr, Phil Selway, Giant Sand, Calexico, among others; oceans of praise from Swan/Angel of Light Michael Gira, who has released her last few albums on his Young God imprint; stints accompanying pop legends like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Sheryl Crow. She’s worked with more rock superstars than most people have had jobs, yet she still remains appealingly enigmatic and (this is a dangerous word to throw around in talking about artists, but still) childlike. There’s something about her music that manages to be completely open and simple and yet at the same time elusive and mysterious, much in the way of the wisdom of little children. Her music is not, thankfully, cloyingly cute like most of the other artists who happen to strike, intentionally or not, the childlike aesthetic.</p>
<p> Take, for example, her Ampeater <strong>B-side “The Prince of Plati,”</strong> drawn from her latest Young God release <strong>Magic Neighbor</strong>. The chord progressions are fairly simple, the vocals strong and at the fore in a style that calls to mind PJ Harvey and other un-wispy female singers, the lyrics direct and unambiguous in their plea to a lover for a little comfort and escape and play. The song is appealing in part because it doesn’t shy away from directness in search of some kind of untouchably cool ambiguity, something that is irritatingly common in younger songwriters. In fact, it’s so direct and intimate, it almost feels voyeuristic to listen to it, something that’s enhanced by lyrics like <em>“oh, nobody lookin/oh nobody see.”</em> The whole song stands, lyrically, as an attack on the narrator’s own jadedness and an embrace of transient joys. She wants to <em>“do the things we did before we thought we knew,”</em> to return to a time before her assumptions about what life is or isn’t robbed her of the freedom to step outside her tired routines. The mentions of storytelling and play, simplistic and well-worn metaphors (sadness = blue), really draw out the childlike core of the song, making it easy to understand why Gira has said that her music reminds him of <em>“early Disney songs.”</em> </p>
<p> The unadorned and subtle arrangement enhances the simplicity and innocence of the song perfectly. The chiming, upper register piano definitely brings the Disney thing back to mind, especially in the slightly off-kilter lydian melody that closes out the song. As any modern jazz musician knows, the sharp 11 is the magic note that makes everything sound floaty and ethereal. Like all the other arrangements on <strong>Magic Neighbor</strong>, it was mostly worked out on the spot, and you can hear this in listening. The bass and pedal steel parts are simple and they never step on the vocals, which remain right up front, inches from your ears, instead choosing to fill out the backdrop of the song with airy clouds of sound. <strong>Germano’s</strong> voice walks a fine line between the breathy vulnerability inherent to the lyrics and necessary to a song so intimate, and the strength that is obviously there to be tapped. Rather than giving us everything she has, she draws us in by holding back. </p>
<p> <strong>A-side “Reptile”</strong> works a similar magic, working a very familiar I IV V chord progression and bare bones rock beat into something that somehow sounds strange. This simplicity is contrasted by the totally bizarre lyrics about light freaking out dying, God being a soul masturbator, and extraterrestrials handing out pamphlets of light to singers. I have no idea, but it certainly puts some images in your head. “Reptile” was originally recorded for 7 Worlds Collide, an Oxfam-benefiting charity CD curated by<strong> Liam Finn</strong> (of <strong>Split Enz</strong> and <strong>Crowded House</strong> fame), and it features Finn and Wilco drummer/improvising musician Glenn Kotche collaborating (I think) on one the most awesomely asymmetrical drum parts I’ve ever heard in my life. It kind of sounds like they brought them into the studio, and had them play along with the song the first time they’d ever heard it. It’s a kind of spontaneity that is so seldom heard in recorded music in a day and age when people tend to favor rigidly orchestrated parts over the conversational style of several musicians playing together, playing off one another (one could easily make the argument that this is a self-perpetuating cycle caused by a simultaneous rise of overdubbing and decline in technical skill among rock musicians, but that argument is probably best reserved for another forum). The song itself is so easy to follow, and the main bass and snare pattern so constant, that the percussion track is able to slip into part after part on instrument after instrument (congas, woodblock, rhumba-infused rim clicks, big cymbal splashes, laconic hi-hat, atonal marimba, thundering toms, metallic shakers) and never risk losing the listener. The fact that chorus of women’s voices that kicks in on the chorus sounds like a group of untrained singers in a room (you can hear them laughing sporadically clapping during the song) only adds to the feeling of looseness and lightness that makes “Reptile” so lovely and lively. </p>
<p> <strong>Germano’s</strong> music these days is <em>“about trying to be happy with all the sad shit in the world, dealing with your own fights and being the mighty one who rises above it,”</em> and that is as straight-forward and noble a mission statement as I’ve heard from a musician in a long while. It’s plain as day when you listen to her songs that this is the truth, and, for those of us who’d rather explore than be inscrutably hip, it’s as refreshing as a spray mister full of cold water on a summer afternoon in the park.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – The Prince of Plati <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM065 Lisa Germano/02 The Prince of Plati.mp3">Download audio file (02 The Prince of Plati.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Reptile <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM065 Lisa Germano/01 Reptile.mp3">Download audio file (01 Reptile.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM065 Lisa Germano.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/N_Y77MEuz9U" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem065ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 014]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19552010-02-11T19:43:37Z2010-02-05T19:29:35Z<div class="review">
<p><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp014.zip"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/weekly-zip14.png" alt="" title="weekly-zip14" width="700" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1956" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem062"><img title="AEM062 Lingering Last Drops" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Lingering-Last-Drop-300x210.jpg" alt="AEM062 Lingering Last Drops" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem063"><img title="AEM063 The Paparazzi" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The-Paparazzi1.jpg" alt="AEM063 The Paparazzi" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem064"><img title="AEM064 Susu" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Susu-300x300.jpg" alt="AEM064 Susu" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/e31BXlZzbNo" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp014ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM064 Susu]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=19032010-02-04T17:15:52Z2010-02-04T13:00:18Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Susu-300x300.jpg" alt="Susu" title="Susu" width="300" height="300" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; "/><strong>Susu</strong> is an aggressive artcore machine out of Brooklyn with one setting (loud) and no off switch. Their full-throttle sound is a welcome holdover from their beginnings as a larger hardcore/postpunk outift called <strong>Surgery Sunday</strong>. The rock-n-roll laws of attrition whittled down this original group to <strong>Andrea Havis</strong> (guitar, vocals), <strong>Mike Gabry</strong> (bass, vocals), and former-drummer <strong>Justin Bilicki</strong>, prompting a namechange to the shorter Susu. The leaner, meaner unit hooked up with engineer Martin Bisi to record their self-titled debut in 2006. Bisi, whose credits include John Zorn, Sonic Youth, and Bootsy Collins, helped Susu find their signature hard-driving, paint-peeling sound. <em>“I think his influence was mostly present in the actual mixing and capturing of the song and sound,”</em> as Havis recalls, <em>“His drum sound is amazing. He really brings the instruments to life.”</em> </p>
<p>One lineup shuffle later (<strong>Bilicki</strong> out, <strong>Oliver Riviera-Drew</strong> in) <strong>Susu</strong> found the loud and proud trio that has made a name for itself with three subsequent releases of pure sonic onslaught: <strong>Win</strong>, <strong>S/T</strong>, and their latest full-length <strong>R and R and R</strong>. The common denominator on all three releases has been a taste for defying conventional song structure. Experimentation, as <strong>Havis</strong> describes, <em>“…is about going over the line of what would be traditionally done in a “song”, or doing it in a way that is outside the normal expectation. It’s not necessarily reliant on how it will be received/perceived, but chosen because collectively we (Susu) all enjoy it, or it moves us to build upon it.”</em></p>
<p>Eschewing standard verse-chorus-verse formats, <strong>R and R and R</strong> is a provocative musical statement that will command you to attention with all the authority of a drill sergeant on acid. Most of the sonic vocabulary, the raw guitars and the howling vocals, are reminiscent of the textures of the No Wave scene of the 80s. Intense, raw, a little bit dangerous. Much of the avant-garde music that came out of New York during the 80s proved tremendously influential. But when you go back and listen to the recordings of early Sonic Youth, Theoretical Girl, and so forth, you can’t help but feel the dingy audio doesn’t do justice to the music. Even the <em>“high art”</em> symphonies of underground legend Glenn Branca sound pretty shoddy (Wharton Tiers didn’t quite have his “A” game going yet). <strong>Susu</strong> rescues some of the musical possibilities that are only hinted at in those old recordings and reconfigures the elements in Rauschenbergian, No Wave assemblages. The sonic collages are sometimes punky, sometimes proggy, and don’t balk at trying something new. Drummer <strong>Riviera-Drew</strong> remarks, <em>“We tend to flutter around a few ideas, then hover over one that seems to be of good quality. Much like honey bees pollinating flowers.”</em></p>
<p>The A-side of the 7”, <strong>“M.B.T.”</strong>, comes off the <strong>R and R and R</strong> album, on which <strong>Susu</strong> teamed up with producers Keith Souza and Seth Manchester. “M.B.T” takes a few elements, acerbic guitar licks, Kim Gordon-howls, frenetic bass lines, and the spitfire drums of <strong>Oliver Riviera-Drew</strong>, and weaves the minimalist, iterative designs into a bracing artrock tableau. In a time when independent music seems overrun by synth textures and somewhat foggy composition, the unrelenting precision and musicianship of Susu’s analog sound is genuinely shocking. Susu is tighter than a guido’s abs. The band flexes in a single unified motion, hurtling songs forward at breakneck speed and changing tempos at the drop of a dime. “M.B.T.” is not the sort of song that could be written alone in your bedroom on Garageband. The material on R and R and R was written in a collaborative procedure. As <strong>Havis</strong> describes it, <em>“…Everything is worked out real time. We get together and improvise, jam, what-have-you, until someone has this part sticking out that everyone is feeling. And then we tuck it away into our memories. And so on. Eventually we have these 5-25 parts that we name arbitrarily (but all understand), and someone will hear something that goes together. [For example] the ‘chicken part’ would sound great with the ‘cheerleader part’. And eventually we put them together and move the pieces around and we have a song.”</em> The result is a level of organic unity and cohesion that holds their music together even as the compositional forms push the structural boundaries of what we expect to hear out of a pop song. The result is, in short, art.</p>
<p>But don’t let the loud noises and artcore machismo fool you. <strong>Susu</strong> can be goofballs when they want to be. The track “Las Sirenas” off their latest album will have you searching for your Spanish-English dictionary, and they’ve been know to bust out absurdist lyrics like <em>“I’ve got a roof/With a view/For when I wake up/And don’t know where I am”</em> on “Clean vs. Dirty.” Naturally!</p>
<p>For their B-side, <strong>Susu</strong> brings it all the way back to 1983 with a cover of the Gloved One’s epic single <strong>“Billie Jean.”</strong> On the selection of the B-side, <strong>Havis</strong> remarks, <em>“It’s just a killer song. Mike just started whipping out the bass line constantly so we decided to cover it since it was so fun to hear. That whole album is truly incredible (obviously!). And then he died. And we happened to be going into the studio.. It’s sort of a de-stresser song for us so we did it after we had tracked the record.. Just a quick take.”</em> <strong>Riviera-Drew</strong> and <strong>Gabry</strong> hold down the rhythm section while Havis floats the dark, brooding melody over the top. The result is haunting yet danceable, as if all those zombies from the Thriller video picked up instruments and started jamming. The King of Pop would have approved.</p>
<p>It’s the combination of artcore firepower and absurdist flair that makes<strong> Susu</strong> special, and this 7” is a nice little introduction to their musical, Susu-ical vision. For the full experience of the brash trio out of Brooklyn, go check out an album or live show. The faint of heart (and short of humor) need not apply.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/mike-gutierrez">Mike Gutierrez</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Billie Jean <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM064 Susu/02 Billie Jean.mp3">Download audio file (02 Billie Jean.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – M.B.T <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM064 Susu/01 MBT.mp3">Download audio file (01 MBT.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM064 Susu.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/3l6GHlsblGc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem064ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM063 The Paparazzi]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18932010-02-03T03:01:51Z2010-02-03T13:00:35Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/The-Paparazzi1.jpg" alt="" title="The Paparazzi" width="300" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" /> The word <em>‘rococo’</em> has made a couple of surprising appearances in hip rock music lately. First as half of the title of a song from Bill Callahan’s fantastic(ally named) 2009 album <strong>Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle</strong>, and now as the title of an album by <strong>The Paparazzi</strong>, the solo project of <strong>Erik Paparazzi</strong>, who you may know as <strong>Cat Power’s</strong> current bassist. It refers to an ornamentation-heavy style of 18th century art, originating in France, which is usually referred to in dictionary definitions as <em>“fanciful”</em> or <em>“gay”</em> (no, really). At first it seems like a strange word to apply to a rock album, but the more I listen to <strong>Rococo</strong>, the more it makes sense. The songs are so lighthearted on the surface that it’s easy to miss out on the endless series of carefully crafted hooks, guitar lines and arrangements that manage to sound as unlabored as if the band just made them up on the spot. The addition of lots of little bits of studio chatter (the reverby speech in the middle of <strong>“The Rococo Tape”</strong> is instantly recognizable the band talking about the take they just played) is a clever device that helps keep this looseness present and dominant throughout even the most complex songs, though Paparazzi’s yeah-I-can-sing-but-I’m-not-going-to-exert-myself delivery does a lot of the work as well. </p>
<p> In addition to the looseness, <strong>The Paparazzi’s</strong> songs are packed with a humor that comes out in all kinds of unexpected ways. <strong>Paparazzi</strong> combines a love for puns and wordplay that hearkens back to John Lennon’s early songs with a kind of free-associative nonsensical style that calls to mind Stephen Malkmus and gives us bizarre lyrics like “staring down a praying mantis” which are more about the sound of words than their meanings. For an example of the former style, think of the two possible readings of the titular phrase from Lennon’s “Please Please Me” and then check out the Paparazzi line from album-closer <strong>“Fall (Into It)”</strong> that hinges on the homophones of ‘eye’ and ‘I’: <em>“Hey you with the lazy eye don’t care.”</em> It’s wordplay for the sake of wordplay, but it’s appealingly easygoing. It sounds like Paparazzi is having a lot of fun here, which means that it’s easy to crack a smile at these little embellishments. For another example, check out Ampeater <strong>B-side “Epic Proportions,”</strong> which features lines like <em>“you’ve got too much class for detention.”</em> The puns go beyond lyrics as well, extending into the titles and arrangements, as on the song <strong>“Up, Up and Away (Major Scale),”</strong> which features, you guessed it, a keyboard part that consists solely of the major scale. But if this all sounds like too much, it’s balanced by the fact that the songs that carry these lyrical games are rock solid, built with an old-school craftsmanship and instrumental skill that it’s easy to overlook given how sweetly catchy and summery everything sounds. There are a lot of brilliant little nods to great pop music of yore: hard-panned guitars, natural alternating meters (<strong>“The Rococo Tape”</strong> slips effortlessly back and forth between 4/4 and 6/4 in a way that reminds me in its unobtrusiveness of the “sun sun sun here it comes” section of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” which actually dips into 5/4 though you’d never notice), four on the floor cowbell (more bands could stand to bring that back, it sounds great).</p>
<p> <strong>A-side “The Rococo Tape”</strong> (home of the aforementioned cowbell) is a perfect representative of the lazy, summery sound of the record. It struts forward for the first half, with <strong>Paparazzi’s</strong> sassy extra syllables extending all the words, and then, after a precisely deployed harmonica comes out of nowhere and slips right back into that nowhere, disintegrates into some reverb-soaked studio chatter that gives way to a descending guitar riff that brings the song right back, only a little faster. It’s a total pop jam with a surprisingly weird and constantly shifting structure. The talking in the middle almost serves as a kind of chorus, breaking up the similar first and second halves. This bizarreness of form, which doesn’t derail the song at all, actually turns out to be a blessing, as it lets the song maintain a feeling of surprise, which is almost impossible in recorded music. No matter how many times you listen to “The Rococo Tape”, it always sounds like maybe something different is going to happen this time. </p>
<p> <strong>“Epic Proportions”</strong> is a self-referentially titled slow burner that starts with the sound of a match and some sparse piano chords before busting out another perfect guitar riff, one that manages to hit that unexpected flat six on the last chord and keep you from getting complacent. It pairs perfectly with the ghostly female oohs that accompany it starting in the latter half of the song. Despite its title, “Epic Proportions” is a song that refuses to get dramatic or lose its cool. The song goes through a series of builds, but always pulls back into that acoustic guitar riff and loses the drums just at the moment you think it’s going to let loose. Take, for example, the moment, just before the 3 minute mark, where everything drops out under a crescendoing keyboard sound, and then, instead of the crash we’re expecting, we get a return to the steady 4/4 time, and an incredibly sparse, chiming guitar. I’ve said before that delayed gratification is the key to great pop music, and this is no exception. Even <strong>Paparazzi’s</strong> final leap into falsetto and the mob of overdubbed <em>“oh no”</em>s at the end of the song never really sound like they’ve lost control. </p>
<p> All of <strong>The Paparazzi’s</strong> music strikes a perfect balance between the kind of loose, flowing rock music people usually refer to as <em>“shambling,”</em> and really excellent pop craftsmanship, resulting in some perfect jams to tide you over until the warm weather kicks in. The two sides fit perfectly together to form songs that are simultaneously heavy and light, full on the one hand of lyrical puns and lighthearted touches like the little dissonant piano figure that pops up after the closing chords of <strong>“Epic Proportions,”</strong> and on the other of varied and extended harmonies, guitar riffs that sound classic without sounding old, and rhythmic and metric shifts that keep you on your toes. More bands would do well to remember that although sometimes songs with three chords are nice; most of the time things get a little more interesting with four.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Epic Proportions <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM063 The Paparazzi/02 Epic Proportions.mp3">Download audio file (02 Epic Proportions.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – The Rococo Tape <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM063 The Paparazzi/01 The Rococo Tape.mp3">Download audio file (01 The Rococo Tape.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM063 The Paparazzi.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/qW_P7b_Jfik" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem063ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM062 Lingering Last Drops]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18832010-01-28T14:50:45Z2010-01-28T14:50:45Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Lingering-Last-Drop-300x210.jpg" alt="" title="Lingering Last Drop" width="300" height="210" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" />There’s this wonderful moment in the British hipster-psychopath comedy The Mighty Boosh where the two protagonists Howard, an overweight, balding Jazz nerd, and Vince, a stringy vapid self-styled rave Jesus, are practicing for an upcoming gig at a local music club called The Velvet Onion. Howard has a microKorg running through a wall of effects pedals, several test-tubes bubbling with green liquid, and a dead crab in a vat of grease. Vince is banging on a cymbal and improvising a tuneless shaman warble while waving his hands around like a octopus who has just been exposed to a deadly dose of scopolamine. The sound is ungodly, a near-platonic interpretation of the worst music in the world. Eventually, the pair grind the track to a close. Vince looks at Howard, smiling like a super-shy, zit-covered twelve-year-old who has just masturbated for the first time. <em>“Howard,”</em> he says, barely able to contain his excitement, <em>“We’ve invented a new genre!”</em></p>
<p>I bring this up because anyone who’s ever played music in a somewhat self-serious way has had this exact same epiphany at least fifteen times. The point isn’t that Howard and Vince, or you or I, or that terrible ska band at the cross-campus barbecue are hopeless romantics ass-deep in their own personal mysticism. It’s that inventing a genre isn’t the same as making a sound no one has heard before. I could fart into an echoplex and call it sniff-core and hope to God someone finds it interesting or hilarious. No, a new genre is about making a sound that everyone has heard before, just not in real life. Imagined musical futures, invented archetypes…that’s more like it. That’s what <strong>Lingering Last Drops</strong>, a crazy fucking good band from Sao Paulo, are conjuring up in this particular bottle-tornado of cyclical history. </p>
<p>We’ve seen some of the elementary particles of this music before: krautrock, freak folk, ambient dub, Throbbing Gristle, Bob Dylan, Flying Saucer Attack, Diamanda Galas. But, through some sort of Nobel-worthy experimentation, a new kind of microscope maybe, or an even larger Hadron Collider, <strong>Lingering Last Drops</strong> has produced prophetic and ingenious records of how those particles fit together, collide, mark quark babies. Imagine if Neu! were the bar band in Twin Peaks, or if the Basement Tapes were made in the cargo hold of Solaris with the oxygen levels hovering just above zero. The evil in these tracks isn’t a sneer or a leather jacket but a death virus, a mummification ritual burned in .0000001 font on the back of a silicon chip. Reverbed-out guitars, synths that sound like resonating teeth, drums delayed out until infinity, voices that sound like Satan’s out-of-the-office voicemail…you get the idea.</p>
<p>But not really until you listen to the songs. <strong>A-side “Love Shadow Syndrome”</strong> hovers weirdly on the edge of being pretty, like a girl-next-door type porn actress recovering from harelip surgery. Bendy demon surf guitars weave in and out of suffocating waves of synth pads, some syncopated tambourine motif hovering like scavenger gulls. The voice here is interesting too, somewhere between a Slint-ian breakdown whisper and a Nocturno Culto-esque frog burb. Eventually the whole thing disintegrates into hissing chaos, a CD skipping over the same patch of white noise forever, with, what else, a mellotron solo over it. I have to say, the audacity of that gesture is mad ballsy. </p>
<p> <strong>“Light,”</strong> the B-side, is both shorter and sparser, propulsive like a bad cough or a Serge Gainsberg track recorded from inside Melody Nelson’s skull. There’s a groove somewhere in here, climbing up joint by joint out of a snow-covered grave, but it’s so scattered, itchy-uncomfortable that it doesn’t make you bob your head as much as squirm in your seat. When the circuitry babble outro comes in at 4:20 like a million bot fly babies suddenly exploding out of your forearm, it’s hard not to seek out the nearest shower or bottle of Xanax. This might be the opposite of chill music, the kind of thing you might begin to hear if you broke out in a rash three minutes into a fifteen-year-long, cold-storage trip to the outer regions of space. </p>
<p> There still isn’t really a name for the music <strong>Lingering Last Drops</strong> is making. There is, however, a sensation associated with it at once so specific you wonder how to get rid of it, and so universal you wonder why you’ve never noticed it before. This band makes sounds so uncomfortable they should come with a prescription. I can’t wait for the remix album. </p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-lasman">Ben Lasman</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Light <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM062 Lingering Last Drops/02 Light.mp3">Download audio file (02 Light.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Love Shadow Syndrome <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM062 Lingering Last Drops/01 Love Shadow Syndrome.mp3">Download audio file (01 Love Shadow Syndrome.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM062 Lingering Last Drops.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/yFN-hbiFj-o" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem062ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM061 True Womanhood]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18672010-01-28T01:03:36Z2010-01-27T13:00:03Z<div class="review">
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<p>True Womanhood have been around for about 9 months and their debut album, <strong>Basement Membranes</strong>, was released only a few days ago. Nevertheless, the band has made a name for itself, particularly locally, through regular gigs at some of DC’s most renown venues. With an impressive knowledge and appreciation of local indie/experimental music, they’ve managed to integrate themselves into the scene remarkably quickly. Moreover, although all 3 members of True Womanhood are only 23 years old, they’ve known each other since middle school and it shows in the comfort with which they blend influences and support each others’ crazy ideas. The chemistry is all there.</p>
<p>Of <strong>A-Side “The Monk”,</strong> percussionist <strong>Noam Elsner</strong> remarks, <em>“this is a song we originally recorded for our demo and re-recorded for this release. It’s an interesting song for us because both times we recorded it it ended up changing drastically during the process. So you could say it’s been a really long song writing process, even though the main structure of the song hasn’t been touched since we first started playing.”</em> The latest version was recorded at Death By Audio in DC and mixed with the help of J. Robbins. <em>“When we got into J’s studio we realized he had all this amazing equipment like an awesome Charter Oak mike and some sweet plate reverbs that we put all over the song so we redid the vocals and put reverb and tape echo on a bunch of the sounds, we play this song with a timpani that has a piece of metal sitting on it, you could call it prepared timpani if you’re into Cage and that sort of thing, but it made the timpani sound all sorts of fucked up which was awesome and we tried to bring those sorts of weirder sounds out with the reverb plate.”</em> Texturally, it’s fascinating. Although the skeleton of the song is fairly conventional, it’s fleshed out provocatively. The “weirder sounds” that Elsner speaks of give the song an ethereal quality which is haunting in places. Lush reverb on innumerable guitars is offset by violent crashes on the “prepared timpani.”</p>
<p>The band reasons, <em>“this is kind of a funny song because it’s one of our most straightforward poppy songs which was why we wanted to temper some of that with some stranger sounds, so like the Phil Spector breakdowns in the chorus got that treatment and hopefully we reached a happy medium between pop and experimental.” </em> That they certainly do. <strong>“The Monk”</strong> exhibits traces of pop, particularly in its structure and in the pre-chorus, where a catchy rising chord progression builds beneath falsetto laced vocals. <em>“I’ll meet you halfway…” </em> But pop isn’t a word that would come to the minds to most listeners. <strong>“The Monk”</strong> is a lot more accessible than, to draw on the John Cage reference, 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, but honestly I’m quite thankful for that. It’s about as conventional as the kind of ‘pop’ put out by the likes of Radiohead or Bjork.</p>
<p>Actually, <strong>True Womanhood</strong> gets a lot of comparisons to Radiohead and also to Sonic Youth. While the basis for such comparisons is fairly obvious, the band is a little uncomfortable whenever they’re drawn. During an interview with DCist, guitarist/vocalist <strong>Thomas Redmond</strong> explained, <em>“I feel that is just convenience. That’s all it is. What those two bands do is they mix crazy avant garde stuff with pop stuff. And let’s be honest, that’s what we’re trying to do… But I think what’s really important to us is the new music that’s coming out now. We’d be more comfortable with a No Age and Beach House comparison. Or HEALTH and Beach House. Or No Age and Slow Dive…” </em>It’s in moments like these that True Womanhood’s knowledge and appreciation of music really becomes obvious. Actually, they make it clear that they’re influenced by just about everything under the sun. Bassist <strong>Melissa Beattie</strong> points out, <em>“we’ve listened to a lot of hip hop lately.”</em>And sure enough, the band’s MySpace page ironically (or not?) states, <em>“True Womanhood is the best rapper alive.”</em> A full text of that interview can be found at <a href="http://dcist.com/2009/01/three_stars_true_womanhood.php" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p>With regard to <strong>“The Monk,”</strong> <strong>Elsner </strong>concludes, <em>“It’s also probably our happiest song, we don’t really do too much in happy moods so even when we do it still ends with the line ‘we tried and failed.’ make of that what you will.”</em> Well, to me it’s not the ultimate but the penultimate line that haunts the most, <em>“we eat our young.”</em> Cheerful indeed.</p>
<p><strong>Elsner</strong> describes <strong>B-Side “Shadow People”</strong> as an enigma. <em>“It’s probably the oldest song that we still play and since day one it’s been a fan favourite. It’s been around since way before we even had a demo but it wasn’t on the demo, and we got all these people asking where it was.”</em> But he modestly asserts that the only “solid parts” are the guitar riff and drum track. Beattie typically plays the drum track on the Vox Percussion King, a vintage drum machine that the band tells me has only ever been used on one other recording, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. So <strong>True Womanhood</strong> has a lot to live up to. After all, Autobahn shattered barriers as one of the first commercially successful electronic music recordings. But Beattie’s use of the Vox Percussion King is actually a lot more interesting than Kraftwerk’s. A heavy guitar riff holds the song together, leaving the drums free to wander outside the lines. Thunderous crashes and hits free to fall at moments when they might not be expected. Also, as Elsner is quick to point out, <em>“It’s got amazing sounds but it’s really old skool, you have to play all the sounds by hand with these weird paddle things.”</em> Basically, it’s a spectacle.</p>
<p>The band explains that <em>“for such a simple song, we’ve gone through a million ways of playing the song live, including the use of an electric guitar bowed with an acoustic, and also an installation we set up with a ton of organ pipes with mics fit inside which all ran into a mixer and some crazy effects.. So when we wanted to record there were so many options we sort of did not know the best way to fit them all together, and we went through many different variations before settling on this version. The recording features Thomas singing into some of the organ pipes and also I believe includes the use of every single Death by Audio pedal.”</em> That’s right. <strong>“Shadow People”</strong> might be a simple song but texturally, it’s thick as fuck. This becomes especially apparent at the end of the song when the primary guitar riff and vocals dissolve, leaving a number of previously background sounds exposed. “Wait, what was I just listening to?” And live, the possibilities are basically endless. <strong>Elsner</strong> reflects, <em>“the last time we played this song live it was an encore to some show we played in DC, and it turned into a crazy drum circle on stage with like half the audience and members of other bands all playing all the drums along with us, one of the coolest moments the band has been lucky enough to witness.”</em></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nate-greenberg">Nate Greenberg</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Shadow People <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM061 True Womanhood/02 Shadow People.mp3">Download audio file (02 Shadow People.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – The Monk <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM061 True Womanhood/01 The Monk.mp3">Download audio file (01 The Monk.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM061 True Womanhood.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/BPOWzbLOT0I" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem061ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 013]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18632010-01-23T19:12:53Z2010-01-23T16:47:55Z<div class="review"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp013.zip"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1864" title="weekly-zip13" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/weekly-zip13.png" alt="" width="700" /></a><br />
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem058"><img title="AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Cabinet-of-Natural-Curiosities.jpg" alt="AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem059"><img title="AEM059 Jerome Ellis" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Jerome-Ellis.jpg" alt="AEM059 Jerome Ellis" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem060"><img title="AEM060 Ivana XL" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Ivana-XL-300x200.jpg" alt="AEM060 Ivana XL" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/7nM6mP8w3U0" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp013ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM060 Ivana XL]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18552010-01-21T13:08:27Z2010-01-21T13:00:52Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Ivana XL" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Ivana-XL-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /><strong>Ivana XL</strong> is the latest subversion of one of the more familiar rock ‘n roll personas: That Weird Girl. Look at her press photo: What crazy hair! Why is she dressed like a Google employee? Is that shit under her eye? That Weird Girl isn’t the girl who stuffed rolls into her sweatpants at lunch in middle school. That Weird Girl isn’t the lady who walks around your neighborhood with a block of wood tied to her arm that she checks periodically like a watch. Those are just weird girls.</p>
<p>That Weird Girl, on the other hand, is beautiful but damaged (but not in any way that would leave her dysfunctionally insane), neurotic but relatable (just like you!), a hard drinker (no pussy drinks), plays the guitar (or OK, the piano). Of course, the fact that That Weird Girl scans like a grocery list of every rock nerd’s masturbation scenarios is definitely some kind of dead giveaway.</p>
<p>Still, the question is less one of authenticity than it is one of attachment. Why do we always, for lack of a better word, believe, in That Weird Girl? No one questions if the guys in Bon Jovi walk around Walgreens in leather pants and cowboy shirts (I mean, they probably do). But embedded within the iconography of That Weird Girl is a presupposition of truthfulness, a pact between listener and artist that says <em>“Don’t lie to me.”</em> From then on out, every affectation—from smoking in bed to rolling your r’s to dressing like an lumberjack—becomes an example of individual quirkiness. From Grace Slick to Betty Davis to Bikini Kill to Courtney Love to Missy Elliot to Regina Spector to Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga…these weird girls bank their careers not just on their music, but on a carefully crafted larger-than-true-to-life-ness that both exceeds our expectations and matches them perfectly.</p>
<p>I know I haven’t talked much about music yet, but that’s about to change. I mentioned at the beginning of this review that <strong>Ivana XL</strong> is a subversion of the That Weird Girl, something she accomplishes both on the level of pose and product. Take the name, the Donald Trump-ian opposite of slacker wet-dreaminess, to account for the latter. Sounding like a cross between some kind of Soviet super-secret agent and a Powerpoint presentation, Ivana XL recognizes the simultaneous irony and sexiness in what amounts to overselling oneself.</p>
<p>On the other hand, consider the record: These arrangements, consisting mostly of piano, acoustic guitars, <strong>Ivana’s</strong> voice and a fuck-ton of reverb, sound like they were laid down in a zero-gravity chamber with all the instruments floating around, banging into one another, bunching up in the corners. The effect strikes an odd balance between intimacy and coldness, like someone telling you about her childhood over hot cocoa spiked with poison. If That Weird Girls are all about trust, then Ivana XL is about only letting you get so close before stepping back into the infinite spaciousness of her music, substituting one of her overdubbed voices for another, coolly multiplying personalities behind a beat-up saloon-style keyboard.</p>
<p>The first track <strong>“Happy Birthday”</strong> might be a human transcription of a music box melody, stop-starting sweet verses in order to let some terrifying overtones carry over the bar-line. It’s like the hallucinated soundtrack to a film version of Alice in Wonderland animated entirely in crayon and cutouts from strangers wedding photographs. I can’t get a handle on the creepiness here, but it’s definitely there, lurking inside the arpeggios like the older-gentleman next-door-neighbor who’s always inviting kids over to earn a couple extra bucks doing yard work or polishing his car or whatever. Suburban mythology, danger in the land of circle driveways and gazebos: this is the toxic subtext of the tune, a birthday salutation hissed by a bag lady through the tracheotomy hole in her throat.</p>
<p><strong>“Ex Oh,”</strong> has a similarly shaky relationship to fact, fiction and nightmare, fitting chamber-pop hookiness, folksy guitar pulls and a big drumkit crescendo into a three-minute super-8 home movie, the film crackling, the lens flare obscuring your own face in all the family shots. The sound is intensely personal in the vaguest way possible, somehow culling up everyone and no one’s half-remembered childhood summers, kids you kind of knew drowning in creeks, years and years of life condensed into a drunken bathroom stall remembrance some twenty years down the line. How these songs were written I don’t know, but these are some of the chanciest, scariest slow jams I know.</p>
<p><strong>Ivana XL</strong>, like a scholar of weird girls everywhere, has pulled the camera back on the singer-songwriter fakebook, the real that is somehow less real than the fakes it helped produce.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-lasman">Ben Lasman</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Ex Oh <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM060 Ivana XL/02 Ex Oh.mp3">Download audio file (02 Ex Oh.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Happy Birthday <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM060 Ivana XL/01 Happy Birthday.mp3">Download audio file (01 Happy Birthday.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM060 Ivana XL.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/HpTTl3kseOc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem060ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM059 Jerome Ellis]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18402010-01-20T20:06:01Z2010-01-20T19:58:10Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Jerome Ellis" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Jerome-Ellis.jpg" alt="Jerome Ellis" width="300" />Picture yourself in a garden. There are some bushes, some trees, and clusters of flowers scattered about. Several defined paths wind through this garden, but there’s plenty of space to forge ahead through the rough. You can enter the garden at any place, but from the entrance it’s impossible to see out the other side. The garden is seasonal, and its creations grow, evolve, and die over time. No, this isn’t one of those “Who killed Sean in the garden?” puzzles; this is an introduction to the mind of <strong>Jerome Ellis</strong>.</p>
<p>When <strong>Ellis</strong> sits down at the piano, or his samplers, or his saxophone, he enters this garden. The creation that then emerges is a musical interpretation of his trajectory through the garden. Each entity that he encounters triggers a motif, complete with suggestions as to tempo, dynamic, and harmonic movement. The path he takes governs the transitions and interactions between these motifs. Sometimes we hear a clean break, sometimes a slow blend of ideas and an eventual distillation to a single dominant figure. As he visits and revisits certain of the garden’s residents, we see them grow, blossom, and wither as Ellis’s concept of them changes. Some are perennial favorites, and others sprout but once, only to return to dust shortly thereafter. This isn’t some quaint metaphor that I’ve constructed. This is how Jerome Ellis actually makes music. He conceives of it spatially, and while the garden is but one space that he tends to inhabit, it’s important to understand this process if we’re to preserve a hope of unraveling his unique genius.</p>
<p><strong>Ellis</strong> once thought he would grow up to be a great jazz saxophonist, and while he’s still got some time before he’s considered fully “grown,” it looks like he’s headed down a much different path. This is the story of how he got set on that path, and where he’s going now that he’s on it, as spread across a series of digital 7-inch reviews to come in 2010. Those of us who have been trained on a single instrument (particularly in the idioms of classical music or jazz) and chose at one point or another to embark upon an odyssey with a second or third instrument, sometimes feel like we’re cheating on a loved one. Why experiment with compositions on piano when I could be engaging in regimented practice on the saxophone? And so it was with Jerome Ellis. Piano was an alluring temptation, but he kept it relegated to second chair, playing only late at night when the sound of his tenor would have woken the household. But these precious hours would prove instrumental to Ellis’s musical and intellectual development.</p>
<p>When he reached college, <strong>Ellis</strong> began having second thoughts about jazz as a vocation. He wanted to escape the pitfalls of bebop that so often leave an indelible mark on nascent jazzmen. The brass and bravado of New York jam sessions failed to excite Ellis. Having achieved remarkable technical proficiency at an astoundingly young age, he wasn’t moved by solos strung together from bits of Charlie Parker solos, and more importantly, he didn’t feel like this is how he was destined to move other people. He began a series of musical experiments with drummer James Monaco, featuring Ellis on keyboards. He suddenly felt as though he were making music of substance, music with the potential to move people on a visceral, and not just intellectual level. James’s background was in pop and rock music, a world to which Ellis had significant exposure, but that had never been his focus of study. He began to draw upon his own disparate influences (gospel, blues, classical) and to discover new ones–music from Java, Bali, and Zimbabwe. Ellis remembers thinking, <em>“I didn’t know this was possible, I didn’t know sounds could do this, I need this, I need to listen to this, I need to make this part of my life.”</em> And so it became.</p>
<p>Amidst these stirring shifts in musical direction, <strong>Ellis </strong>began performing with the Trudy Silver Group at the 5C on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Silver mentored Ellis, encouraging him to synthesize his experiences both in and outside the jazz idiom and to integrate his previous training rather than to abandon it. The result was an intensely personal manifestation of what could loosely be called free jazz, and Ellis began using this semi-regular gig as a venue for testing his new direction, taking tentative walks through the garden of his muse. It didn’t take long before he began sharing the group lead with Silver, and not long after that it seemed as though each performance belonged just as much to Ellis’s musical vision as Silver’s. I was lucky enough to attend several of these sessions, and as I sat on the subway heading back uptown, with the sounds of the evening echoing through my head, on each occasion I knew I had just witnessed something truly special.</p>
<p>And so, we here at Ampeater are honored to present <strong>Jerome Ellis’s</strong> first digital 7-inch, entitled <strong>“Hymnal” / “Untitled 1″</strong>. In 2008 I spoke with Ellis at length regarding this piece, and gained some keen insight on how it came to be. It’s not so much a song or a piece or a composition; the best term I can devise to describe it is a “vessel.” There are certain fixed elements, but every performance sees these elements reconfigured to address Ellis’s increasingly complex musical perspective. <strong>“Hymnal”</strong> is always performed in three sections, the first uptempo and rhythmic, the second slow and ambient, and the third ushering a return to the first while echoing the central themes of the piece at large. It’s the same cyclical structure that gives closure to the classical sonata form, appropriated here by an orchestra of samples, brought together under Ellis’s masterful direction. But <strong>“Hymnal” </strong>was and will always be performed live in a single take–there are no overdubs in this recording, and that makes improvisation an essential component in its creation. The saxophone is recorded live atop prepared samples, and while Ellis would seem to be the sole architect of this marvelous and complex construction, the samples that he triggers are also active participants in the piece, tugging it in all directions. Ellis is thus rendered both musician and conductor, positioned at an invisible podium to provide requisite guidance to a dozen or so samples that understand but a handful of basic instructions. The departure in this piece for Ellis is its remarkable accessibility. Very early on in its conception he imposed strict limitations: first, it would have the aforementioned three movement structure; second, all the samples used in the piece would be sacred, and not limited to Western religion or music; third, the melodic contours would be simple, singable, likable. Your average listener typically assumes that artists like Ellis and pieces (OK, vessels) like <strong>“Hymnal” </strong>are typically thought to exist for some sort of nonexistent hyper-cerebral music theorist as the sonic equivalent of <strong>Finnegans Wake</strong> or some similarly impenetrable artistic creation. <strong>“Hymnal”</strong> is the antidote to this assumption. While its complexities are numerous, they’re not expressed as dissonance. This means that listeners are able to relax into the piece and fully grasp its genius without being assailed by tone clusters. When I listen to <strong>“Hymnal”</strong> I hear equal parts Mozart, Javanese gamelan, African thumb piano, Ray Charles, and Panda Bear; I hear something completely unique, something that I couldn’t have even fathomed to exist before actually hearing it. But most of all, I hear something that moves me, deeply.</p>
<p>B-side, <strong>“Untitled 1″ </strong>(I know it’s ridiculous to call these “sides” on a 7-inch. Even “digital” 7-inches can’t be 30 minutes long, but to hell with it) represents Ellis’s departure into piano music as a serious vehicle for creative expression. This particular path through <strong>Ellis’s</strong> garden is the one labeled <em>“to Brian Eno’s house.”</em> With nothing but a piano, Ellis reminds me how I felt, what I thought, and what I thought music could be, in the moment I first heard <strong>Music for Airports</strong>. It’s as though Ellis took a snapshot of time, space, thought, and emotion and upon holding this snapshot up to the light saw tiny holes scattered throughout the picture and then decided to fill them in with sound. One hears this piece and thinks, <em>“It’s exactly what’s missing from ______.”</em> The key is then to fill in that blank, and to recreate as a listener the situation that spawned the creation, in all its minute complexities. If one successfully reunites the two in whatever mental space is reserved for idle thoughts while listening to music, something just clicks and the world ceases to exist as something distinct from the sounds flowing into your ears. Ever tried listening to <strong>Music for Airports</strong> in an actual airport? Go try it, you’ll know what I mean.</p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, this is but an introduction to <strong>Jerome Ellis</strong>–we’ll be featuring his music on several 7-inches in the months to come, and while it’s tempting to squeeze all my thoughts on his music into a single review, I’ll cut it short here in an attempt to create some dramatic suspense. Can you feel it? Good. In the meantime, if <strong>“Hymnal”</strong> sent you on as much of a journey as I hope it did (if it didn’t, keep listening until it does), you can read the attached interview with Ellis, conducted immediately following the piece’s first ever public performance at <a href="http://www.wkcr.org">WKCR 89.9 FM</a> in New York.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-heller">Ben Heller</a></p>
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<a href="mailto:jje2105@gmail.com" target="_blank">Email Jerome Ellis</a><br />
<a href="http://www.myspace.com/jeromejohnellis">Visit Jerome Ellis on MySpace</a></p>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Read the Ampeater exclusive interview after the jump!</h4>
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<td>Side B – Untitled 1 <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM059 Jerome Ellis/02 Untitled 1.mp3">Download audio file (02 Untitled 1.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Hymnal <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM059 Jerome Ellis/01 Hymnal.mp3">Download audio file (01 Hymnal.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM059 Jerome Ellis.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">Interview:</h4>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> So we’re here to discuss your latest piece Hymnal, just performed live in the studio today, October 20th, 2008, for the very first time. I thought we’d just get down some preliminary thoughts as to your experience with the piece, your history with it, how it came to be, your experience in New York and elsewhere as a musician that led to this most recent evolution, and how you conceive of it as a whole in terms of the general progress of your artistic development. I know that’s a lot to lay on you, but, for starters, what is it? Describe it to people in your own terms.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Um, well it’s funny calling it a piece, cause it’s not written down or anything and it’s really loose. I can play it 40 minutes long, 20 minutes long, half an hour. There’s a lot of sections, but they’re of various lengths, so the piece…I call it a piece because I can’t call it anything else. It’s not a song or an extended song or something, but I don’t conceive of it as a concert piece of music that you sit down and just hear for as long as it happens. It’s more about filling the room than about being a set length. But it does have 3 movements, so there is a classic structure to it with the first and third being rhythmic and dancey and the second being ambient and slower. That’s the way I usually think about it. But the jazz background is in it in different ways. There’s nothing really jazzy about it but the looseness and the structure of it comes from that, in that I have melodies that I can throw around and play at various times and I can play off of those however I want to. As opposed to a jazz group where you’ll have everybody interacting with each other, I’m interacting with the samples and the loops. Not like a one man band, but like a band comprised of singers from the late 1500s and singers from South American in this big jumbled pot.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> Do you feel like you’re improvising when you’re performing the piece?</p>
<p><strong>JE: </strong>When I’m moving through it, no. Each section is planned out, but within the sections I’m improvising. As a whole it’s very structured, which is different from what I’ve done in the past, especially on saxophone.</p>
<p><strong>BH: </strong>So you conceive of yourself primarily as a saxophonist. What has it been like to branch out from saxophone to other instruments, to then moving past other instruments and just focusing on the nature of the sound itself? Are you thinking of yourself less and less and less as a saxophonist, or are you thinking of yourself as a tenor sax player on vacation.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Less of a saxophonist, definitely going in that direction. When I started playing with my friend James Monaco, my dearest friend in the world, last summer, it was him on drums and me on saxophone for a little bit. We tried something like that and it didn’t work out. I’ve always been toying around with keyboards and pianos, so I had brought my keyboard over to his house and started to play a little bit. That fit. So I began immediately to think of things in terms away from saxophone. When I was playing saxophone a lot and I wanted to be a jazz saxophonist, that was the path I wanted to go on and I would listen to lots and lots of saxophonists. It would hinder my piano playing. When I would play piano I would feel bad that I wasn’t practicing saxophone, so it would usually happen late at night or something. I kinda stifled that a little bit, but when I started playing with James I opened up a lot more and realized that I could branch out. It’s been like that since I came to college; less of a saxophone player, more of a composer, I guess you could say–it’s a weird word for me. Just, exploring. Exploring lots of different things, because I realized that there are certain people whose voice rests solely inside the saxophone, and that’s all they need to do. Just as there are people who sing and play piano, and that’s all that they do. But I realized that’s not what I need. I feel much more of an affinity to the piano, actually, which is strange since I’ve never had any training on it. So there’s a lots of things that I used to try to stifle that now I’m welcoming.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> So as you added these instruments, it seems like it took you further and further away from jazz. Now this might be a little bit of a difficult question so feel free to blow me off if you need to, but do you feel like jazz is anachronistic? Did it feel in some ways old fashioned, like you were playing in an idiom that wasn’t really going anywhere, like you were playing things past, and that playing Coltrane was somehow not moving forward.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Yeah, I think I had that feeling. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but I think there’s value in people…I don’t think jazz is dead or will die or that people who focus on jazz are somehow not moving forward. That has crossed my mind, and I think a lot of people feel that way, but I don’t feel that way. I played in an ensemble in the fall, and I didn’t feel that I was really saying what I wanted to say. I realized that jazz was a dialect, the same way that rock is a dialect and folk is a dialect, and I realized that I wasn’t really speaking in that dialect. I would bring a lot of these little things into my improvisation that wouldn’t fit into this straight-ahead bop tradition and I would get scolded for it. I began to realize that maybe that’s not how I should play, that maybe it’s not the truest way for me. So I don’t think jazz is dead and I don’t think people who play it are following a dead dialect. It’s possible to be really stale in jazz with lots of hard bop, but it’s also possible to keep it fresh and vital.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> Is the bridge between Hymnal and the more traditional bop that you were playing your work with the Trudy Silver group? Do you see that moving in conjunction with the more progressive direction that you’re taking, or is that your remaining anchor to the jazz tradition? Because you are doing composition in that, and you’ve mentioned that you’re taking more and more of a lead role in terms of the creative direction of that group, has that facilitated in this, has it served as a stepping stone to where you are now? Are you still feeling very much part of that or have you now moved beyond it?</p>
<p><strong>JE: </strong>No, I do certainly feel part of it. I don’t think I’ll move on for quite a while. I’ve learned a lot playing with Trudy, because when I’m doing free jazz I can bring in these little things that I do that aren’t in this bop tradition. I can do these saxophone river lines all up and down the instrument and all on a five note pattern. I hardly ever swing when I’m playing in that group, and she doesn’t either. When you have free jazz in that domain there’s a lot more room to venture out into other places, and yeah, I have been trying out many different compositional ideas there, both on piano and on saxophone, which has been really good, because she’s very open to all that. It’s helped me with Hymnal, especially when you begin to manage all these different elements. When we played in that 5-piece with bass and tuba and drums, it would often fall to me to manage everything that was going on. So when I mention that I have this band of samples, I’ve learned a lot from playing with her about the way you control them. I guess it’s both, it’s a stepping stone but I’m also very much in it. I don’t see it as just a thing I’ll leap off of and then leave.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> For folks who aren’t quite as familiar with the logistics of working with samples, my understanding of it is that in a sense you have complete control over them, but in another sense you’re very much working with them and constantly struggling against them to get them to do what you want. The relationship between working with samples as a band and actually working with real band members is a closer connection than you might assume.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Yeah, it’s really strange. James and I learned a lot about sampling from Dilla, the late Dilla, who is just so good at the art of sampling. We’ve torn apart the album “Donuts” and there’s lots of different things like, well it’s just him, he doesn’t have any people on the record rapping or anything, so he treats samples as humans, he’ll interact with them, he’ll leave space where you hear the person breathing. It’s a lot of fine work on a sample to get it right, because on a hardware sampler it’s important to get it to where when you press a pad and it sounds just the way you want it, so there’s a lot of chopping up a sample, getting it to stop and start in the right spots, volume issues, balance issues, so it’s like being the leader of a group, handling the way people are playing with each other. You might have one person play quieter, or have one person fulfill a set role. There’s 10 samples in Hymnal, so for example there’s three in the 1st movement. There’s the bottom loop, with the singers [sings] so you have that, and their role is to be the rhythmic ground on top of which everything else will build, so they have a very set role. Then there are the two other ones. There’s one of a men’s chorus singing and one of just a lady, and those will come in and out. Their role is more surface level, and you have different roles. In the 2nd movement there’s a sample from a spiritual, the way the man ends the song and then the clapping afterwards. So that’s more of an ambient side thing, and then you have this organ sample from the 1600s. That’s a loop that goes over and over again and that’s also rhythmic in its way. You have to assign different roles to various samples as you would in a jazz group. Where the bass may in one part be a walking baseline, and in another part may be freer.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> As someone who was working with a single instrument, a saxophone, how did you build your arsenal, how did you select what instruments were absolutely necessary to creating the sound that you have, and what sound do you think you’ve achieved with the samples and instruments that you’ve picked?</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Well the thing that’s interesting about sampling, is that once you have a sampler the entire world of sound is suddenly available to you. It’s awesome and also crazy, how much you can grab and tweak. So it comes pretty necessary early on to limit things, to put boundaries all over the place. There are several boundaries in this. One was that all the samples would be sacred music. A focus in Hymnal is sacred music, and how people from all over the place get into this state of worship or praise or even just losing it. In the 1st movement, the loop that goes over the whole thing, that lays the foundation is from South America. It’s praise music for their gods, and the same thing with the loop in the 3rd movement. The two other ones in the 1st movement are from Java. There’s one of a men’s chorus from Java and the other of a lady and that’s also sacred music. If you hear the word Hymnal you automatically think of something rooted in a religion from the West, because the Hymnal I have that my Mom gave me is staunchly hymns from the Baptist line, so I was interested in using not just that religion but going further. So in the second movement you get these samples from the Renaissance and then one from a modern hymn being sung. In the third movement we return to the ones from South America and we have these different pieces of sacred music from all over the world. It’s helpful to have these limits, because if I wanted to sample something and it wasn’t sacred then I would just be like no, I can’t use that. So it begins to focus the piece. It’s the same way if you have a band made up of similarly minded people, then you’ll have a certain sound. I think maybe that was also what I was going for, putting my saxophone and pitting it with and against people (a lot of the samples are of voices), pitting them against each other but all kinda directed towards the same place. The saxophone is used in a different way; there are two different ways that it’s used, both very far away from how it’s usually used in jazz. One is for chords and for drones that I have throughout. Actually, I have a little name for them, I call them clouds. The process is just looping the saxophone, but I fade or ease into the notes so it sounds like one long drone. That’s one role of the loops that I use with microphones. So you can get a saxophone chord, some sound dreamy, some sound brutal, some throbbing, but that presence of many different saxophones in layers runs throughout. Then there’s also the process of the saxophone as a rhythmic instrument, which maybe fulfills the role of a bass, as in the first and third movements when you have these pounding saxophone notes throughout and then you have these chords stacked on top there. I actually realized after I began the piece that I was listening to a lot of R&B from the 60s and 50s–Ray Charles, The Cardinals, Joe Turner, and I listened a lot to the way the saxophone’s used in R&B. It’s very different. You take a saxophone player from a 1960 R&B group and then you take one in a jazz group and they’re so far apart. The saxophone player in the R&B group acts just as another voice, the lines he plays are simple, they’re singable, bluesy, but you don’t really get a R&B saxophonist playing quickly, his parts are more shouts. So I began to be interested in how the saxophone was working in that context. All the saxophone melodies in the piece are closer to that than they are to a line from bop.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> In that sense, as soon as you started playing, it immediately reminded me of something that Don Cherry or Albert Ayler would do, taking melodies from childrens songs and turning them into very freeform jazz, and Don Cherry taking influences from the orient, those were very simple melodic figures that they turned into these great epic opuses, and that seems to be what you’re doing here. Is it also a comment that you seemed to have moved beyond technique? As we’re talking about you moving beyond jazz, really at the core of bebop, (and it’s not really an arguable point) that part of bebop is the display of virtuosity. Are you trying to show, instead of virtuosity, a sense of spirituality? You were talking about using only sacred samples, well in a sense if you’re using all sacred samples and yourself as one of those samples, repeated and dubbed, is this your Love Supreme? Is this a display of your own spirituality, drawing back from the pompousness and the show of bebop virtuosity and just simplifying everything.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> That’s exactly right. Especially last year when I would go to jazz clubs and jam, I would get really frustrated and tired of saxophone players. There would be a line of six of ‘em and they would all go up and just play really quickly and really loudly. It can be very moving if you’re very good at that, but I’ve since changed my goals. I’ve done that, I’ve moved people by technique. Saxophone players don’t like to admit this, but it’s really easy to play quickly and loudly. It’s the nature of the instrument. I wanted to shift the focus away from moving people from saying “Wow he’s really good at saxophone” to a different kind of appreciation. I’ve done that, I get really bored really easily. I got this sampler nine months ago, and it’s already central to what I’m doing. I work really slowly and I move quickly in a sense and I drop things really easily, which is sometimes a bad habit. I began to get frustrated with simply having people be like “Wow, you’re really good at saxophone” or “Wow you play really quickly” so yeah, I wanted to pare down the technique. It’s not a hard saxophone part to play. The melody’s all quarter notes and half notes, and I think that’s important. I think there’s kinda a thing with pop melodies in there, and how pop music’s focus isn’t on technique. The value lies somewhere else. When a person can sing something, that’s valuable, and you don’t really hear people singing bebop lines. I mean, some people. Not many. I think that’s what I was going for as well. And that was part of the R&B thing, like I can sing the Fathead Newman solos from Ray Charles songs because it’s just as if he’s another voice in the band. Part of it came out of the fact that I simply don’t have the technique that I used to. I don’t really want to. I don’t practice saxophone as much as I did, I write more and I write with different sounds more. So I don’t really have that technique anymore, and I’m fine with that. My focus has moved on from there. That’s not saying that technique isn’t important, obviously. I’ll never be a saxophone guy, and I don’t want to. I used to, but that changed.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> Why did that change, and when?</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> James had a big influence in this. When I started listening more widely, I started listening to a lot of music from Java and Bali and Africa, Zimbabwe and a lot more pop music. I realized a lot of it was closer to how I wanted to move people. I think people get tired of having to appreciate something for its technique or showiness. I think a lot of people do dig that, which is why a lot of people still like bebop. People like solos, seeing a guy who can solo really well on guitar, but when I listen to people like Deerhunter, nobody ever solos. They move me through different means. It’s like finding a different way to impress people, and impress in the sense not of to “wow” them, but impress in the sense of to make a mark on them. So they’ll move me through the way they layer things and not through the way they solo. I think that’s valuable and often can be harder to do. I think I like to take on challenges a lot and maybe because I get bored. So I made that a challenge for myself, how would I approach making something meaningful and not make the focus the saxophone and the way I’m playing saxophone.</p>
<p><strong>BH: </strong>I mentioned briefly the issue of spirituality as involved in the piece. What does this personally mean to you, having moved past technique, and trying to reach audiences with a pop sensibility, you were talking around the issue of really hitting at this interior of a person, trying to touch them on a level that’s not relying on some sort of intellectual processing and really hitting at some emotional core. Yes, it has something to do with being able to hum a tune, and yes it has something to do with the overall simplicity and catchiness of the music–it has beat, it has rhythm, it’s not overly complex–but do you think that using spiritual samples and having a sense of spirituality yourself, that this is the primary message you’re trying to convey and maybe the primary way in which you’re trying to impact your audience directly?</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> I think that all music’s purpose is to take one higher, and depending on the person and the music is very variable, and I think that we all like to leave for a while. Why it’s weird to think of Hymnal as a composition is that I get really frustrated with a lot of modern classical composition that only connects with the mind. It’s almost like someone telling you “sit there and take this”. It’s supposed to be good for you even though your mind won’t grasp it, or maybe it’s only your mind that grasps it. You can come away with a great feeling, or you can come away feeling empty. I didn’t want that, I wanted to hit on various levels. The interior is important, the spiritual aspect about going higher to someplace. Music can take you away to many places, but the specific direction of up is what I want. Loops have an interesting part in that, because there’s always this element of trance in the way Hymnal is built, because trance is another way that people around the world go higher. That’s where I wanted to take off from. I listen to tons of music from Java and Bali and the Javanese especially, there’s such a sense of circularity. I played with that in Hymnal–the way it ends is very similar to the way it begins. And of course loops are little circles in and of themselves. The whole way it moves within a set place but finding rest inside of that, the second movement hits at that the most. The second movement is the loosest. Every time I play it it’s a little bit different, and I wanted that, I wanted to react to the various things I’m playing. So you have these two saxophone notes going in and out of each other. You have this man singing in the background this same note, going over and over again, and you start to get into this place. When you see people in a church service and they’re taken back by the spirit, all they’ll do is sway and hum. I love seeing that and I love being there. You can only focus on so much in a piece of music, both as the performance and as the audience. There’s like 4 chords in the entire thing, there’s not an emphasis on harmony at all, there’s not an emphasis on harmonic movement. The first movement eventually has two chords and for most of it it’s just one with drone. The second movement has maybe one. The third movement has two as well. When you take the focus away from the harmony, away from the technique, you start to be able to focus on other things like the melody and the way you get swept up. It’s very much about the room, very much about things ringing and swirling about. I think that in having this so open, because I need a lot of space when I’m making things happen in the air, when you have something that doesn’t have a certain genre with it, you can’t say oh that’s jazz or, because it’s kind of electronic but not really, when you have this open feel to it you can start to focus on what you’re saying about the spirit. But I didn’t want it to be heavy-handed, which is why rhythm is there. I could just make the whole thing the second movement for half an hour, and that would be fine with someone maybe, but the rhythm and the dance helps to raise that up and lighten it a little bit. It’s really about the listener. I think that’s another thing I was frustrated with about classical music and often with jazz, people seem to forget the listener. The performers and the composers will treat the listener like someone who has to sit there and take it. Going back to pop music, pop music can’t survive without the listener, the audience, and what the person wants. So I began to care a lot about what the person wants, and of course not everyone gets really excited about drones or loops, but I think having things like clear melodies makes it more welcoming to people. That’s what I think about gospel. You don’t go to church for a concert (well, some people will), but gospel music from the beginning wasn’t about the concert or the musical object. It’s all about people, singing. It’s not about the stage or the person on the stage high above the audience. I wanted it to be welcoming to people, for people to feel free to sway and not have it be this cold thing. It’s called Hymnal, but I purposely didn’t put any hymns in it. I wanted to approach the way gospel music affects people through means that aren’t hymns or songs.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> Are you telling a story, do you see a plot, do you see a greater structure? Are you trying to convey something in an arch across the entire piece? Are you taking people from point A and dropping them off at point B, or are you doing that in a smaller form, within each movement?</p>
<p><strong>JE: </strong>Well there are two different strands here that I’m playing with, The first is the classical structure, because the classical structure of fast slow fast mirrors the classical structure of 1-5-1, and the whole concept of home-away-home. And that’s how classical music has told its stories for a long time. The sense of being home, being in a place, going somewhere and coming back, is the most basic story of a journey. Because a journey really isn’t a journey until you somehow arrive back home or in a state that is stable. So you have this strand going in there, but then what I was talking about with this music from Java. It’s interesting hearing this music with my ears, because they’re Western, and they’re used to this. I don’t know how people in Java hear, maybe they hear stories in their music, but I don’t hear stories in Javanese music. I hear big circles. I hear just one state of rest. A key thing of classical structure is the notion of tension and being resolved. There’s not a whole lot of tension in Hymnal. The saxophone clouds are pretty consonant, but sometimes I’ll insert half steps above or below to give them a different sound. But the second movement was pretty overall serene. Some people may hear the clapping noises as some tension there, but what I was playing with was trying to reconcile this circular feeling which I don’t feel has much of a story, and I’m fine with that. I really value the notion of rest in music. From what I’ve noticed in learning so much about classical music is that a key difference between German and French classical music is that German classical music is much more linear–Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. But French classical music–Ravel, Faure–is much more circular much more surrounding. When you listen to Mozart you hear section then cadence then a new section then cadence. It moves very logically, which is why so many studies say that Mozart can help your brain, because it’s a logic that you’re following. Whereas in French music it’s more static in a sense, but so many new things can happen when something is static, like modal jazz is a parallel. When you have a song like So What that only uses two modes, you can go places you can’t go when you have chords every other beat. So story telling in modal jazz is a lot different than storytelling in bebop. As far as Hymnal having an overall story, I don’t really think it does. I think the melodies that we’ve heard throughout culminate in the third movement, so in a sense it’s a journey to that point. But I didn’t really conceive it in a linear fashion like that and not even within the movements. Especially the second movement, I wanted it like a bath where things wash over you. You’re not necessarily saying, “here’s the third section of the second movement,” but rather “here’s where the story rests.” I really value rest in music and peace, because I don’t have enough of it outside the music. I often see music as a refuge. I love finding nap records, things I’ll put on only to surround me and help me sleep. It’s kinda the ambient conception, how Brian Eno sees music. People will often devalue ambient music, they’ll say it has no direction. But I think there’s a lot of value in that.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> When someone learns how to read, it becomes very difficult if not impossible to unread. You look at a sign, you understand immediately what it says. When someone has a certain level of musical training either as a performer or as a listener, it becomes very difficult to not grapple with music on the level in which you were trained. If someone has perfect pitch, it’s difficult to not hear a C, if someone has relative pitch it’s difficult to turn that off. Is part of what you’re doing with this idea of a sonic wash, trying to take people who have an innate sense of musical structure and a set of expectation for it, and trying to teach us how to unread, or unlisten, to allow the music to flow over us in a way that isn’t possible in a lot of musical settings.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> That’s absolutely right. When I stumbled upon this music from Java, this is for me what I’m most obsessed with. I listen to it every day. I didn’t know how to interpret it. The music is put together in a different way than it is in the West, it’s viewed a different way than it is in the West. I became interested in taking these sounds and the way these things would react with me and trying to mimic those, but not trying to sound like I was making music in that tradition. That’s futile, I didn’t grow up with a Javanese background. When people are exposed to things like that, it’s really valuable, because some people need it. The first saxophone player I ever fell in love with was Dexter Gordon. At that time I needed Dexter Gordon, and everything that he did, that room filling tone, his simplicity…some people need certain things at certain points. When I found this music from Java, I realized that it was what I needed. It’s interesting when you find out that you need something, post finding it. I think that some people like lots of music and then they stumble on something and think “I didn’t know this was possible, I didn’t know sounds could do this, I need this, I need to listen to this, I need to make this part of my life.” That’s happened to me with music from Java and then thumb piano music from Zimbabwe. The same thing, absolutely magical and like nothing else made in the West. It is in a sense a process of unlearning because you have to get used to this thing you’ve never heard, but it can be healthy. Exposing people to that is another goal of mine.</p>
<p><strong>BH:</strong> Do you have a sense of where you need to go from here, or are you living in the moment, everything’s perfect, this is the furthest point of your mental musical development and you’re just gonna see where it goes from here, or do you already have an idea of things that need to change, things that need to grow, things that need to expand, are you going to move more towards drone or more towards use of keyboards in this whole project? Where do you see yourself going and are you already thinking ahead?</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> I’m always thinking ahead. It’s very exhausting doing that, I get really tired thinking about it. That’s another reason why I can’t really call it a piece. It’s never gonna be finished and it’s never gonna be static. In a month, Hymnal’s gonna be different. It’s more of a vessel to pour things into. It’s not like it’s sealed up or set aside. Which is why I’ll never be able to be a composer and publish things. I can never put periods on things and say “OK, that’s the way Hymnal is.” Although the structure will remain, when I learn things I put them into it. A piano piece I wrote last October is now much different. I think eventually I’ll find the state I need to be in and live in that for a long time. This is not it. It’s a good step and it’s a hard step that I’ve taken, but I’m definitely thinking ahead. I have to do a composition for a class I’m in, and I have to write this down for chamber ensemble, which will be the first time I’ve written anything down. I have tons of little sheets of paper that I’ve tried to write piano pieces down. I get to measure 6 and just stop. What if I want to play measure 4 three times? This is another step.</p>
<p><strong>JE:</strong> Something I was thinking about a lot during the summertime, when I wasn’t doing free jazz, when I was improvising with James–We were working with specific songs, composing and structuring, and I realized that with jazz and not just free jazz there’s what I call a ceiling. It depends on the players, it depends on the interaction, it depends on how people know each other, but there’s kinda a ceiling and it’s very hard to go past it. You can get really intense and really emotional and you can take people places, but eventually it has to hit the ceiling because…composition has many benefits. When something is composed like a novel or a short story is, the way these more concrete forms move people, you can do in a composition but you can’t necessary do in jazz. Motifs that come back in and out, and structure itself, these can be moving. I was interested in composing this and having a lot of structure to where I could extend the ceiling. When you’re improvising with people there’s only so much you can say because a lot of it’s not predetermined, which applies more to free jazz. When you play standards you have a common ground, so when you play Misty there’s the entire history of how that entire song has been performed and depending on how much you know about it you can take part in all that’s happened before you, so the ceiling goes away there. But with free jazz you can go to really great places but there are some places you can’t go to because of the lack of compositional structure. I’m not saying it’s impossible to structure free jazz, as Braxton will show you….There are so many details that I’ve never had to deal with, with the electronics now, there’s so much weight on me when I play with this setup because there’s so much that could go wrong, but there’s so much more that could happen. The more you have going on the more you’re capable of doing and the more you’re prone to fail. Fail’s not really applicable in music. The more it can fall off. But when everything works together in conjunction it hits. It’s not like hitting your mind, it’s not like you grasping this, it hits you, emotionally, physically, and that’s what the rhythm is for, that’s what the dreaminess is for. When all that works in conjunction it hits. It’s hard to make it hit, but that’s what makes it all the more exciting, when something is achieved that’s really hard. I never got nervous when I was playing jazz, because there’s such a focus in the moment that there’s not much pre-moment work. You’ll have a setlist, you’ll rehearse things, but it really is all about the interaction. With this it’s both, there’s so much pre-work and then you have to do it, and that’s really taxing. It’s interesting, because composers when they write for ensembles, I’m sure they feel nervous in the audience listening, but they can’t really do anything, and even if they’re conducting their compositions there’s only so much they can do. But when you are the only one who this depends on and the people, the samples, the samples ARE people, but the people aren’t gonna do anything. You have to press a button and have them come to life. When it’s all on you, you’re the only one who can make it hit. Of course there’s the importance of people in the room, people taking part, but it’s just that that weight makes it harder to hit and makes it more exciting when it happens. It’s a weird composer-performer role that I’m exploring, and happy with.</p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/XD2TLYOqhrw" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem059ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18322010-01-19T04:47:02Z2010-01-19T13:00:54Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" alt="Cabinet of Natural Curiosities" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Cabinet-of-Natural-Curiosities.jpg" width="300" />There’s something to be said for sounds and the people who love them. All musical artists worth a salt love music, they love songs, of course, duh. But I have a particular fascination for singers, songwriters, bands, orchestral three pieces, xylophone collectives, what have you, that are clearly fascinated with sound itself, as a medium. And when someone loves sound <em>and </em>songs? Oh boy. A songwriter who loves sounds is a potentially powerful musical force—a person who’s love for the communication extends to the mode of communication. The greatest artists are always like this: the best painters have a love for the color and texture beyond the paintings; the best writers, a love for words beyond the story.</p>
<p> <strong>Jasmine Wagner</strong> of Brooklyn/Montana’s <strong>Cabinet of Natural Curiosities</strong> is exactly this kind of musician. Quite frankly, she’s this kind of writer and artist, too. Wagner, together with fellow sound-conspirator <strong>Alex Wilson</strong> are the items belonging to this curious natural cabinet. Together their folky tendencies and love of sound create a most serene concoction: 1 part soundscape, 2 parts folk song, all parts lovely.</p>
<p> You might be quick to call <strong>Cabinet of Natural Curiosities</strong> <em>“experimental folk,”</em> and you wouldn’t be the first one. The modifier “experimental” has quickly become a signifier of the “sound lover” state I described above, and in that way it is telling. However, in an imaginary world where genres weren’t predominantly used as some kind of socio-musical categorization, and merely used as description, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities might just as much be considered experimental electronica. For even though the foreground sounds are often the acoustic guitar and voice (the folk) I would argue that it’s what is in the background that actually makes Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, well, a curiosity.</p>
<p> Many of the songs on the full length <strong>Searchlight Needles</strong> (from which our two Ampeater tracks originate) are very frequently centered inside some kind of noise or atmosphere. When this is at its peak, on tracks such as <strong>“Little Ice Age,”</strong> <strong>“Sun,”</strong> or <strong>“Glass,”</strong> it feels like the songs are simply sung inside some great weather event or cave—the tracks become oddly geographical for me. I’ve been reading “The Ice Palace,” by Tarjei Vesaas recently, and I can’t help but picture “Little Ice Age” (available on their <a href="http://www.myspace.com/jasminedreamewagner" target="_blank">myspace</a>) as taking place inside a frozen waterfall.</p>
<p> The point being, the electronics and noise used by <strong>Cabinet</strong> (Can I call them Cabinet for short? I can’t help but feel like when pitchfork gives their next LP (tentatively titled “Buttermilk Channel”) an 8.5 and all the Greenwich Village hipsters start listening to them, this is what I’ll overhear the kids standing outside Tisch smoking cigarettes refer to them as…) are simultaneously apart from, and integral to, the songs. This is a wonderful effect and sounds more like Leonard Cohen playing next to Faust inside a subway station than anything else. It’s quite splendid.</p>
<p> Turning to the digital single we have on display here, the story is perhaps even more curious. More so than any of the other tracks on <strong>Searchlight Needles,</strong> I think, <strong>Side-A “For Sparrow”/Side-B “Owllullaby”</strong> are songs, not sounds. Flip to any track on the LP and you’ll know that <strong>Cabinet of Natural Curiosities</strong> loves sounds; but it’s not perhaps until you hear these two songs back to back that you realize just how much love Cabinet of Natural Curiosities has for The Song as well.</p>
<p> Take <strong>A-side “For Sparrow”</strong> for instance. The song centers around <strong>Wagner’s</strong> voice and strums, filled out by lush sine-wave drips and an insecurely steady organ hum that complete the atmosphere of the track. But it’s Wagner’s multi-layered vocals here that lift the song, pushing and pulling it along, finding slow beautiful hooks within this soundscape. Heck, drop the drips and the organ, and this is simply a folk song with a little bit of bass.</p>
<p> The last two minutes of <strong>“For Sparrow”</strong> give the game up, though, as the song fades away into an ambient sonic collage that maintains and extends the mood of the song like some strange held note. This <em>“discursion”</em> is nothing new in music, but what is slightly novel is the length of the track devoted to the sounds. What many bands might limit to 15 or 30 seconds as a “cool outro, bro,” <strong>Cabinet of Natural Curiosities</strong> let extend into a musical motion with more levity, owning almost a full quarter of the track’s running time. I love how the two sections of this track play off each other—at first listen, the ending is a bit of a surprise. However, it arises so organically that now I can’t picture the track without it. This, truly, is a song from lovers of sound, and they integrate the two elements in a way that would make it unruly to separate them.</p>
<p> <strong>B-side “Owllullaby”</strong> is, if I’m continuing with this sound/song contrast (thanks for bearing with me, by the way), is all song, baby. “Owllullaby” also not-so-coincidentally functions as the final track on <strong>Searchlight Needles</strong>. In the movie in my head of this album, this is when the musicians, who have until this point been battling through storms and ice caves and noise monsters, finally emerge into an open field to simply play, only voice, guitar, and some cheerful bells to accompany. The song is hypnotic, seductive, and really is a lullaby that I will consider singing to my kids, even though they will not be owls. The acoustic guitar sounds off in never-faltering 1-2-3-1-2-3 while the tiny high bells chirp in to accentuate the dream.</p>
<p> The transition from <strong>“For Sparrow”</strong> to <strong>“Owllullaby”</strong> actually mimics quite well the effect that the album has on how we perceive “Owllullaby” with the swirling last quarter of “For Sparrow”’s sonic glory resolving itself into the pleasant and satisfying plucking. <em>Some of the branches lost their leaves / to show off the owls in the trees. / Some of those owls would agree / you should close your eyes and fall asleep.</em> Yes, yes you should. This is music I want to fall asleep and dream to, and any good lover of ambient music (or music with some ambiance) knows that is far from an insult.</p>
<p> <strong>Wagner</strong> remarks that these two tracks fit together as an A-side/B-side because, <em>“one is a winter song and one is a summer song. They oppose each other the way the seasons do. Both songs were written and recorded during a cold Montana winter, though <strong>‘For Sparrow’</strong> references a hot a smoky summer when the pine forests were burning and the skies of the Missoula valley were yellow and gray, the moon red at night.”</em> I have three things to add/note on this.</p>
<p> First, I think this is good evidence that beautiful sentences simply tumble out of <strong>Wagner</strong>, potentially without her even meaning it. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a better sentence given to me in the body of an email.</p>
<p> Second, this dichotomy mimics the dichotomy of sounds I’ve been discussing that’s present in <strong>Cabinet of Natural Curiosity’s</strong> music, the hot of the human voice and guitar and cold, sterile electronics, or reversed, the hot highs of electronic warblings and the low steady hum of voice and string. Whichever way Cabinet of Natural Curiosity decides to play it, this contrast is always present in the songs. To me, that’s what’s in the cabinet. Something summer, and something winter.</p>
<p> Third, I shall add only that both of these songs are about birds. And when one travels to <strong>Wagner’s</strong> <a href="http://www.songsaboutghosts.com/">art site</a>, one finds another bird to greet them. It makes a great deal of sense. Both of these songs are birds. Stunning, striking birds.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/rick-andrews">Rick Andrews</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Owllullaby <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities/02 Owllullaby.mp3">Download audio file (02 Owllullaby.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – For Sparrow <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities/01 For Sparrow.mp3">Download audio file (01 For Sparrow.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM058 Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/tTFMj1Z3Jno" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem058ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM057 White Suns]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18252010-01-18T04:26:45Z2010-01-18T13:00:38Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/White-Suns-300x200.jpg" alt="" title="White Suns" width="300" height="200" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" /> Angela Sawyer, owner of the incomparable Weirdo Records and someone who has been quoted as far and wide as Billboard Magazine in regards to noise music, once called Brooklyn band Sightings<em> “the most dangerous band in America.”</em> Obviously we have long overcome our bizarre American belief that violent music will bring on the end of the world, but if there’s one band that could have split the earth open and brought Satan out (riding a bubbling, spitting river of fire, of course), it would have been Sightings. Their music combines an all-out assault on the listener (something that feels a bit like foundering in a choppy, dark sea, which entails not just disorientation and terror at your sudden apparent smallness in the face of the huge ocean but also a kind of life-or-death exhilaration) with a really appealing lack of bells and whistles and an abundance of craft that only someone who has tried to make music like this could easily discern. Sightings, unlike most bands that thrive on extremes of volume and intensity, didn’t remake the same album over and over again, but instead expanded their sound in all sorts of unpredictable directions, making music that is both powerful and interesting. Fellow Brooklynites <strong>White Suns</strong>, a trio composed of <strong>Kevin Barry</strong>, <strong>Rick Visser</strong>, and <strong>Dana Matthiessen</strong>, remind me quite a bit of Sightings, and let me assure you that is a terrific thing.</p>
<p> <strong>White Suns</strong> certainly have the volatility of other bands that explore the spaces between rock and noise, combining, as <strong>Matthiessen</strong> told me, the volume and and speed of other heavy rock genres with a dissonance usually more associated with pure art noise. It’s not often I hear a band that actually induces a physical reaction, but here I find myself coiling forward in a springy mass of tension and bad posture, my leg jerking arhythmically. The music the trio makes is so loaded with anti-resolution that it takes a bodily response to dispose of all the tense energy it embeds in my body, especially when it’s played loud, and it should be played LOUD. White Suns, as brutal and blisteringly fiery as their name indicates, play music that has roots, in addition to Sightings, in bands like Hair Police and Japanese conceptual artist The Gerogerigegege who walk the line between straight up art noise and noisy psych rock. There seem to be a lot of astronomy-related names in this area of music (C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core, for example, or <strong>Visser’s</strong> solo project <strong>Open Star Cluster</strong>), perhaps the only way of conjuring up something large and powerful enough to reflect not just the music but the physical presence it seems to have in the room. When it stops, especially at a live show, you can feel the vacuum that it leaves in its absence before ambient sound gradually filters back into the room.</p>
<p> <strong>“Flying Dutchman,”</strong> the A-side, starts with a perfect example of the more aggressive side of <strong>White Suns,</strong> emitting a squall of feedback and then, after a drumstick count in, bursting into a powerful, propulsive storm of unrelenting, fractured guitars that feel like they’re tremolo picking right into your brain. The fast, punk-derived drums halt at three intervals to let a rising, five note melody come through before crashing back into time. The shouted vocals (also not without a debt to punk rock) ride the crest of the wave of guitar noise until 1:12, when the meter actually breaks down, and the song, without changing tonally, turns into a dirge-metal stagger that manages to be even heavier than the initial onslaught. This is where the guitars, which never let up until after that final, sudden acceleration, really feel as if they are smothering you, which evokes that combined terror/exhilaration I mentioned earlier. </p>
<p> They can clearly do the power-noise thing, yet <strong>White Suns</strong> aren’t a one note act, and they manage to keep a level of formal interest in their music that eludes a lot of acts who only want the visceral reaction and are content to pound into dust the one method they’ve discovered of evoking it. This is particularly evident on the B-side of their Ampeater single, the track <strong>“Growth,”</strong> which achieves its intensity through a more open sound, with the snare and bass drums sliding in and out of phase, growling electronics that sound like processed wind, and the right panned electric guitar reiterating some minor key clusters in a tone that almost sounds like it should be playing some jangly surf melodies. The way the drums slip in and out of a blastbeat for just a moment emphasizes the off-kilter methods of producing tension here. Whereas on <strong>“Flying Dutchman”</strong> the tension comes from straight up volume and speed, here it results from the asymmetry of each element of the song. We expect the drum pulse at the very least to stay constant, and when it slips out of sync with itself it is severely disorienting. There is a similar effect in the jangly guitar, which stays very close to that initial chord for almost the entire song, breaking out of repetition and into violent distortion only for very short bursts and only after the halfway point of the track. This delay gives us the feeling that something is coming, something enormous and terrifying, given the pounding footsteps of the drums, and thus the song is powerful in that it never explodes into catharsis. The Something never arrives, though, and this is the brilliance of the song. It’s far more unsettling than any cathartic climax when you hear the drum footsteps fall back into rim clicks that sound like nothing so much as the amphetamine-hurried ticking of an old alarm clock, and this compositional thinking is what sets the band apart from so many of their peers.</p>
<p> The diversity and fierce energy expressed in these two tracks alone make <strong>White Suns</strong> worthy of your ears, especially if they’ve been worn thin by anemic rock bands that get compared to the Arcade Fire. Allow yourself to be submerged in the sound of a band that actually might make you fear for your life (and enjoy every second of it).</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Growth <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM057 White Suns/02 Growth.mp3">Download audio file (02 Growth.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Flying Dutchman <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM057 White Suns/01 Flying Dutchman.mp3">Download audio file (01 Flying Dutchman.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM057 White Suns.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/qkScA6qUO6E" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem057ampeatermusic<![CDATA[Ampeater Review: Seeking Writers]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=18032010-01-18T01:22:24Z2010-01-18T01:13:37Z<div class="review">
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1804" title="writerswanted" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/writerswanted.jpg" alt="" width="400" />Hey there, readers, writers, and music lovers (particularly writers and music lovers). As you know, Ampeater strives to post fresh new music and top-notch reviews 5 days a week. We’d love to make that 7, or 10, or 100, but we’re dudes with jobs and can only do so much. So, in an attempt to take Ampeater to the next level, <strong>we’re posting an open call to music writers everywhere who are willing to donate their time and talents to The Ampeater Review</strong>. That’s right, we’ve inviting you to our party. Bring whiskey.</p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/2h7E0CiQWeU" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/seekingwritersampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 012]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17972010-01-15T04:08:13Z2010-01-15T04:08:13Z<div class="review">
<p><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp012.zip"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1798" title="weekly-zip12" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/weekly-zip12.png" alt="" width="700" height="342" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem054"><img title="AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Tony-the-Bookie-300x198.jpg" alt="AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem055"><img title="AEM055 Megafaun" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Megafaun-300x226.jpg" alt="AEM055 Megafaun" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem056"><img title="AEM056 Best Hits" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Best-Hits-300x200.jpg" alt="AEM056 Best Hits" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/ta-J7h1r-BM" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp012ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM056 Best Hits]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17832010-01-14T04:43:44Z2010-01-14T13:00:19Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="Best Hits" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Best-Hits-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />It’s hard to tell when exactly this happened, but at some point over the past ten years, electronic music started sounding, I don’t know, more <em>alive</em> than rock or country or folk or jazz or other kinds of real-life noise-making. Whereas plenty of revivalists seemed perfectly content to disinter long-dead dinosaur jams and repackage them in tight pants, man-machine hybrids everywhere were evolving, reproducing, absorbing influences and creating new ones out of silicone chips and synthesizers. It wasn’t the end of music, but it was the end of a certain idea of music, that it should be played on instruments that needed to be tuned, that the frontman needed pipes like a Basilica organ, that the drummer…hell, even that there <em>be</em> a drummer. Texture was the new guitar solo, attack sustain decay release the new “Never Mind the Bollocks.” It smelled like…nothing. And sweat and sex and liquor. </p>
<p> That’s why bands like <strong>Best Hits</strong> are so exciting. Whatever they’re indebted to stylistically they sound basically influence-less. Even if that’s an impossible assumption, they at least are trying to sound like nothing ever heard before. Ambient onamonapoeiatic hip-hop? Electro-twee? Whatever, no. I wouldn’t call this music experimental, not because it’s not, but because listening to these tracks doesn’t entail a particularly severe learning curve. They’re short and great. It’s like eating something that looks like a green cube that tastes exactly like bacon and candy. A twosome based out of Brooklyn (<strong>Matt Weiner</strong> on dials and knobs and <strong>Claire Elise Tippins</strong> on more dials and knobs), these guys have a lot of projects going on: the <a href="http://peace-age.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Peace Age label</a>, a whole host of awesome artwork, and bands called Ger, Shrur and Twins. Apart from sounding like the programming lineup of a British children’s television network, they all are awesome and well worth checking out. </p>
<p> Onto the 7-inch, we start off with the alternate-dimension club anthem <strong>“Fantastic Lands,”</strong> which reminds me of some kind of electrified world-music from a country that doesn’t exist. It’s the kind of track that makes Diplo-style globetrotting seem positively boring. While MIA is all about universal mash-up bassquaking, these guys pose a compelling counterpoint: like kids hiding under a blanket and calling it the homeworld, <strong>Best Hits</strong> are imagining what it means to be indigenous beat-makers from imaginary places, coining MC-ing languages and extra-geographic rhythm figures for a crossover market. If Mad Decent-style cool-onialism happens to rub you the wrong way, Best Hits throws it down guilt free. </p>
<p> <strong>B-side “Heartbeats,”</strong> on the other hand, sounds slightly more local, almost perversely so, like overhearing a next door neighbor masturbating to exercise videos and pretending to talk to his dead mother on speakerphone. It’s an interesting channeling of Mr. Roboto-esque autism into awkward dancefloor anthem, almost as if David Byrne’s onstage persona got programmed into a revolting late-80s era Macintosh, or 2001’s HAL ended up living inside your beer fridge. Imagine if Grease with a soundtrack by Suicide and you’re half-way there. </p>
<p> I can’t really tell which of these tunes I like better, a feeling that I hope will be exacerbated by the <strong>Best Hits</strong> full-length, out sometime this Winter. Until then, I can just put the two songs on repeat, put on warpaint in my bedroom, and terrify my girlfriend every time she comes home from class. If your New Year’s resolution is lose your fucking mind, I suggest you do the same. </p>
<p> But back, briefly, to the idea that I started with, that electronic music breathes in a way almost no other genre can these days. If faced with a decision between the Greatest Hits of Cream and the cream of the <strong>Best Hits</strong> crop, I urge you to relax and let Darwin take control. Put on your headphones, and evolve. </p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-lasman">Ben Lasman</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Heartbeat <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM056 Best Hits/02 Heartbeat.mp3">Download audio file (02 Heartbeat.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Fantastic Lands <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM056 Best Hits/01 Fantastic Lands.mp3">Download audio file (01 Fantastic Lands.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM056 Best Hits.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/XGApyEXDmfc" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem056ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM055 Megafaun]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17722010-01-13T14:28:25Z2010-01-13T13:00:52Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Megafaun-300x226.jpg" alt="" title="Megafaun" width="300" height="226" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; "/>We often speak of separating the artist from the work. There’s always a small contingent of people who ignore Ezra Pound’s poetry on the grounds that he was a fascist and anti-semite. Many more people, however, approach those poems with an appreciation for their quality despite controversial origins. In this day and age, nobody really fears the artist as a threat to moral codes. Media is exchanged quicker than stolen tourist notes in Barcelona; do you have the energy (or the stupidity) to read into G.G. Allin’s background, only to stop listening to his music once you discover he smeared himself and audience members with his own feces? Fuck that, I say. Let’s celebrate the fearless freaks and worry about their alleged danger to civil society after the party’s been busted up.</p>
<p> Putting our music history caps on for a minute, John Cage more or less had this same covert program of artistic demoralization (or a totalizing spiritual economy of the good which made such judgments pointless in their propping up of exclusionary categories) all hidden behind a cool screen of Zen and downtown philosophical art happenings. John Cage was a mentor to so many great artists of a variety of media (as well as the partner of the recently deceased choreographer Merce Cunningham) that he singlehandedly made a place for avant-garde American music alongside Cold War prop movements like Abstract Expressionist painting, even going so far as to hock experimental piano techniques on a stupid and short-lived game show. In saying too much, he revolutionized the medium and broke down the flimsy distinctions between pleasant and unpleasant sound, leaving a world of striving experimenters in his wake.</p>
<p>Speaking of the world of striving experimenters, I recently posed a deceptively simple question on Facebook to see how people would respond. The question was basically this: We speak of musical laws, but who really enforces them? It’s not hard to eliminate the actual legal mumbo jumbo and see that we’re talking about unspoken laws, almost what Larry David would call “the unwritten rules” such as tip-toeing around at night. So where do these so called laws of sound claim their authority? As my good buddy Daniel Fishkin (Dandelion Fiction) had the insight to say: </p>
<p><em style="font-size:9pt;">“Sound is fundamentally a physical phenomenon, and its characteristics inform what we do with it. These aren’t laws so to speak, but patterns which throughout history music makers and music listeners have found interesting, significant, exciting, holy, sexy, beautiful, or worth fighting for. Unfortunately the academy isn’t the only place you’ll find people drawing boxes in which to put you. Take Cage, Reich, Eno, Merzbow, and Partch to an uninformed crowd and they’ll just call it ‘modern music’. Before the rules are taught, they exist merely as practice—internal structures, obeyed with discipline, love, and devotion by their composers. [Addressing me:] You use Schoenberg as an example [of a modern music rulemaker]. Setting aside his Nationalist streak, all Schoenberg did was devise a system and follow it to its creative consequences. Let the music historians judge the merits of this system, or, let the public decide how listenable its results are. There is never one way; even the most critical and structured musical laws will be found irrelevant in other systems. Serialism and techno are both out of tune by Carnatic standards. In the middle ages, everyone shunned the ‘diabolus in musica’, but centuries later composers delighted in its capacity to change keys—and Black Sabbath loved it so much, they didn’t even bother modulating. Musical laws are made moot by other laws. Who says parallel fifths sound crude? Who cares if Bach swings?”</em> </p>
<p>Well, certainly not me. Besides pointing out the obvious cultural specificity of musical laws, Daniel’s essay shows us the most important thing of all: That these rules were made to be broken.</p>
<p>You might think all this hocus pocus is a lot of bullshit for an intro to <em>“some folk band.”</em> But I can assure you that, just because these guys have beards and occasionally tour as members of Akron/Family, just because they grew up friends and collaborators of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) in Wisconsin, they have the game-changing hybridizing ability of any composer or band currently making music. What’s more, they completely demolish the notion of the neatly separated artist and song. With <strong>Megafaun</strong>, the whole spirit of the performance is inextricably bound to the “musical content”. The first time I saw Megafaun play in 2007, they ended their set by leading a sort of evangelical conga-line into the audience. The most jaded of depressed hipsters stopped what they were doing and joined the party. That night, we hung out after the show, getting drunk and singing songs like the National Anthem and Auld Lang Syne. When you hang, you understand. People this warm do what they do as a labor of love, not to be cool media mysteriosos. If you have never before heard their music, I suggest you stop what you’re doing immediately and listen.</p>
<p><strong>A-side “Darkest Hour”</strong> from 2009’s <strong>Gather, Form & Fly</strong> gives flesh to many of the issues (er…) fleshed out in this article’s introductory passages. The song starts out with a concrete collage of water, vehicles, and wind chimes. Suddenly a faucet is dripping. And, um, there’s a drum circle. It sounds like Gang Gang Dance soundtracking a watersports porno, and it’s fucking brilliant. More concrete sounds fill the soundscape. Hark, through the rain, human voices! Is this O Brother Where Art Thou? Or some shit? <em>“I have been wallowing inside the darkest hour,”</em> they intone with solemn joy. Now the futuristic sonic adventure can begin. Ring modulator on vocals, metallic percussion, a vibrating snare band, in-the-red drums…I mean, these guys make the Fiery Furnaces sound like spokespeople for anti-psychotic medication. And why not, let’s end it with a saloon song.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Gather, Form & Fly”</strong> reveals the other crucial side of <strong>Megafaun</strong> (well, they really do have an infinite number of sides, but heyhey!…). Pure, slow, heartfelt strings n’ harmonies. There’s no mistaking it: These are American boys bred on a slower, more conscientious way of life. You can literally hear the music breathe. The spaces are so pregnant as to render time a meaningless backdrop against which things move and fall in and out of love. When the vocals drop, it is, quite simply, game over. You see why Megafaun are such an underrated dagblasted American band? You see how you’ve been wronged for never hearing their sleepy notes grace your face? Well, reader friend, it gets worse. If you’ve never met them as people, you’re just not as happy as you could be in life. These motherfuckers bomb sorrow like sucker MCs all day. They have literally lifted me out of deep biological depression on more than one occasion. They are literally the nicest people in the world. They are literally some of the best musicians. I have literally said literally seven times in this review. I am writing 1200 words on this band because I believe in them like no other band. Megafaun are the backing band that Will Oldham never had, the Band of the future except…well…now. </p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/jake-brunner">Jake Brunner</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Gather, Form and Fly <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM055 Megafaun/02 Gather Form and Fly.mp3">Download audio file (02 Gather Form and Fly.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Darkest Hour <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM055 Megafaun/01 Darkest Hour.mp3">Download audio file (01 Darkest Hour.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM055 Megafaun.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/GK-spvmvZOg" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem055ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17652010-01-12T02:05:53Z2010-01-12T13:00:54Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Tony-the-Bookie-300x198.jpg" alt="" title="Tony the Bookie" width="300" height="198" class="alignright pressphoto" style="float:right; margin-left:10px;" />The story goes that <strong>Anthony Confalone</strong> (AKA “<strong>Tony the Bookie</strong>”, a moniker acquired in his long residency as the booking agent for Somerville, MA club PA’s Lounge, but one which nicely doubles as an indication of the kind of seedy, beer-soaked, mortality-heavy, miserable bastard country music Confalone writes), before each take of every song on his debut full-length <strong>Tony the Bookie presents…The Tony the Bookie Orchestra!</strong>, lifted a glass of Dewars to his mouth and took a swig. I probably should have swapped the glass out for a bottle, and the Dewars for some kind of bourbon, but hey, this is a music blog with some journalistic standards. There’s something to the classiness of the scotch, though, for despite the roughshod misery of a bunch of dudes howling <em>“on the day that you left me/I knew my life would never ever be the saaaaaaaaame”</em> in a unison so wild there’s actually about a major second span between the various notes, Confalone’s songs are incredibly well-written and well-crafted. He may be drunk, but he knows what he’s doing.<br />
<strong><br />
Confalone</strong> describes the band as <em>a bunch of weirdos trying to play country music,</em> and that’s about as accurate and concise a description as you’re going to get from me. The genre touchstones are all there: lyrics about sin and church bells, twangy lead guitars, ever-present death, plaintive pedal steel, that high lonesome voice-cracking sound (altered here a bit by the fact that Confalone actually has quite a low voice), those sinking melismas at the end of each line, but <strong>the Bookie Orchestra</strong> never sinks into pastiche or self-parody. The musical template may be country, but the content of the songs (mostly pain, like in any good country song) resonates beyond the framework in which they’re delivered, and most importantly, Confalone never steps over the line into weird authenticity gaming by, say, singing in a put-on southern accent. This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I noticed that about half of American rock bands today sing with fake British accents. Don’t get me wrong, I like Gang of Four too, guys, and there is always an extent to which influence is unconsciously absorbed, which is fine. Someone writing country inspired music is likely to pick up a little bit of twang just like an aspiring suburban MC is probably going to pick up and throw around some slang he didn’t learn on his neatly landscaped streets. However, it can quickly get out of hand and turn into something that is at best distracting and at worst offensive. What makes Confalone’s music so good is that it sounds not like an old country record, but like new music made by people who listen to a lot of great old country records. When his voice rises to a quaver on the bridge of <strong>A-side “True Love”</strong> (titled sardonically of course) and he belts <em>“well it hurts so bad / just won’t go away,”</em> it shares a common method with country music (simple, somewhat generic lyrics delivered with a force that renders them mysteriously powerful), but it doesn’t really sound like country music.</p>
<p>The cast of characters on <strong>Tony the Bookie presents…</strong> is a veritable who’s who of Boston rock, featuring members and former members of <strong>Drug Rug, Faces on Film, Hallelujah the Hills, Keys to the Streets of Fear, Broken River Prophet</strong>, and <strong>Bane</strong> (yes, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMuMhuHrgvQ&feature=related" target="_blank"> that Bane</a>, but a long time ago), all of them lending their instrumental expertise and raw voices to a wonderfully warm, analog recording done at a Medford studio called The Soul Shop, and resulting in a record that nods back to the expertise of studio musicians in bygone days. The musicianship on these tracks isn’t flashy, but the band, composed mainly of <strong>Elio Deluca, Patrick Grenham, Nick Branigan</strong>, and <strong>Eric Provonsil</strong>, with plenty of special guests, hits every song with the looseness of musicians who are completely as home on their instruments and the tightness required to keep everything propulsive and fiery.</p>
<p><strong>“True Love”</strong> is a clear single, the poppiest and hookiest of all the songs on the album (which is incidentally available for free at the Bookie <a href="http://www.tonythebookie.com/therecord.html" target="_blank">website</a>). The song takes its time to expand over a simple acoustic guitar progression. Gradually adding coiled drum fills and dreamy slide guitar, yet still making space for <strong>Confalone’s</strong> low croon, which always seems to stand on end with secret tensions. The first line is perfectly devastating mood-setter: <em>I woke up all alone in the third year of our love</em>. The ratcheting up of intensity on the aforementioned bridge, after two minutes of verses, is just perfect, with the vocals pouring right out of the keening, dissonant <em>hurts so bad</em> line and right into a high, consonant oooh that leads the song back into the more even keeled melancholy of the verses. Also check out that high pitched yelp in the background of the end of the first ooh, right around 2:43. This is a band of human beings playing their music in a room together, not a sequence of people adding tracks to a disembodied cloud of sound.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Rain Check”</strong> is a nasty, slow-burning 6/8 ‘fuck you’ jam, landing on the more angry side of miserable. It starts with lyrics about blocking out the light coming through the windows and pretty much just gets more pissed off from there. The lyrics on the rising verse lines pour out on top of the time in a way that reminds me strangely of Harry Nilsson, and the recurring <em>“I’ll take a rain check baby”</em> is a perfectly dry put down. The whole song makes a perfect soundtrack for that point in a break up where heartbreak starts to curdle into anger, and I anticipate, the next time I find myself in that situation, getting drunk and howling along with the choruses. The sound of the whole band wailing on those high climaxes on the bridge is enough to send shivers down your spine.</p>
<p><strong>Tony the Bookie</strong> and company have put together an album that carries on the booze-soaked misery of the best old country music while filling out that archetypal sound with their own inventions and idiosyncrasies. It’s the way any music that takes inspiration from older genres (and who doesn’t?) should be made, full of respect and love for the old sounds without any boring attempts at emulation. It’s people like this who understand that the best homage to the great music of the past is to keep building on it, to make it your own like all those great musicians did themselves.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Rain Check <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra/02 Rain Check.mp3">Download audio file (02 Rain Check.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – True Love <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra/01 True Love.mp3">Download audio file (01 True Love.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM054 Tony the Bookie Orchestra.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/39l4hRVr-TE" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem054ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM053 My Dearest Darling]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17602010-01-11T05:57:32Z2010-01-11T13:00:49Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float: right;" title="My Dearest Darling" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/My-Dearest-Darling-300x263.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="263" />When I heard <strong>My Dearest Darling </strong>for the first time my initial reaction was, <em>“wait, what just happened?”</em> My second thought, after suppressing the acid flashbacks was, <em>“that’s some trippy shit.”</em> And my third impulse was to contact them about doing a feature in The Ampeater Review.</p>
<p><strong>My Dearest Darling </strong> certainly is some trippy shit, but not in a clichéd <em>“oh my god I just swallowed so many magic mushrooms”</em> way… insofar as it’s reasonable to believe that any band hailing from Burlington Vermont could not have been inspired, at least to some extent, by tripping balls. This band is surprisingly articulate and I cant shake the sensation that some deep seeded truth lies at the core of the cacophony. For someone who generally prefers a subtlety in music, I find myself unusually taken by My Dearest Darling, whose over-saturated sound mirrors so beautifully the chaotic bustle of the human mind.</p>
<p><strong>My Dearest Darling</strong> began a few years back when keyboardist/vocalist <strong>D. Munzing</strong> wrote a ‘suite’ of experimental pop songs on a beat up piano deep within the Vermont Woods. Eventually Munzing emerged from the woods to share his music with guitarist<strong> M. Hagan</strong> and bassist <strong>T. Gevry</strong>, both former members of the Burlington-based Lendaway, and drummer <strong>C. Mathieu</strong>, with whom Munzing had previously played alongside in the band Tell No One. Within a few months Munzing’s songs had been transformed into space age psychedelic pop hits and the group had coalesced into My Dearest Darling. A slew of shows in Vermont and NYC opening for bands such as White Rabbits and The Fiery Furnaces earned My Dearest Darling a small following and before long they were hard at work on their first album. The LP, self titled, was recorded over the span of several months in basements, multiple studios, and ultimately in Munzing’s bedroom. Munzing explains that <em>“even though finishing the record myself took longer than I anticipated, recording on my own allowed me to experiment without any time or financial restrictions and I was able to get closer to the sound I was looking for.”</em> The product of these sessions was finally released in December of 2009 and can be downloaded at <a href="http://www.mydearestdarling.com/" target="_blank">www.mydearestdarling.com</a>. Keyboardist Z. Gunderson has joined the band to <em>“take over synth duties for live shows”</em> and My Dearest Darling is plotting to take the North East by storm in the Spring of 2010.</p>
<p><strong>My Dearest Darling</strong> is theatrical in a way reminiscent of Radiohead or Muse. <strong>A-Side “The Perfect Vice”</strong> is a dizzying vortex of a song. An 88-key piano roll grabs your attention from the get-go and pulls you into a haze of warbling synths and frenzied drums. A relentlessly fast 6/8 feel pulses throughout the song from start to finish, meshing astonishingly well with <strong>Munzing’s</strong> slow but determined vocals which float stoically over the chaos. His voice is appropriately breathy on the lows but on the high notes takes on a sense of apocalyptic urgency. The song’s got enough hooks within its verse/chorus structure to keep the listener captivated for its longevity. Nevertheless, the breakdown at about 2:45 provides refreshing respite from the unkempt chaos and gives each instrument a little time to shine. First the drums get their moment, blasting their way through a few residual piano notes with a tribal tom-tom beat. One by one, the band jumps back in. <strong>Gevry’s</strong> ascending bass line, which anchors the song down, floats to the front of the mix before a syncopated piano riff is layered on top of it. Synths and guitars follow en suite and, at last, the chorus.</p>
<p><strong>B-Side “Decay”</strong> is more ethereal, lacking the in-your-face frenzy of <strong>“The Perfect Vice.”</strong> As <strong>Munzing</strong> comically phrases it, <em>“its a slow burner but rewarding assuming the listener has the patience to not hit ‘next’ even after the song is interrupted on their iPhone by their mom asking, ‘do you have enough sweaters for winter this year?’” </em> Actually, my first listen was interrupted not by my mother but by my computer, beeping to warn me that my battery level was critically low. Obediently, I powered down, but as soon as I found an outlet, I was ready for another listen. In a strange way “Decay” was already stuck in my head and yet I couldn’t even me remember how it went. All I knew as that I had to hear the rest of the song. I returned to it with an an acute sense of of <em>déjà vu</em> or, better yet, <em>déjà écouté</em>, but with no conscious memory of what I was hearing. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that “Decay” is not a catchy song by any stretch of the imagination but it’s completely immersive. Arpeggiating synthesizers cascade through each ear evoking vintage Pink Floyd. A tension pervades throughout the song, even in the softest sections.. Sure it’s chill but that’s is not due to a lack of energy but stems from a suppressed energy t hat is constantly on the verge of bursting free. And in the guitar solo, it finally does. “Decay” ends on the high note of the guitar solo and fizzles away, like an exploding supernova dissipating into space.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nate-greenberg">Nate Greenberg</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Decay <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM053 My Dearest Darling/02 Decay.mp3">Download audio file (02 Decay.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – The Perfect Vice <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM053 My Dearest Darling/01 The Perfect Vice.mp3">Download audio file (01 The Perfect Vice.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear: both; padding-top: 20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM053 My Dearest Darling.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/JxzNBTkacPg" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem053ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 011]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17912010-01-15T04:08:52Z2010-01-09T05:01:35Z<div class="review">
<p><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp011.zip"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1792" title="weekly-zip11" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/weekly-zip11.png" alt="" width="700" height="342" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem050"><img title="AEM050 WALLcreeper" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/WALLcreeper-300x199.jpg" alt="AEM050 WALLcreeper" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/AOmTC6gxN3E" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp011ampeatermusic<![CDATA[Remember Me? AEM001 Strawberry Hands]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17462010-01-08T05:48:05Z2010-01-08T13:00:34Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; " title="Strawberry Hands" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/strawberryhandsre.jpg" alt="Strawberry Hands" width="300" />Hey there, remember our very first review? Well, way way back in 2009 we started this whole thing off with <strong>Strawberry Hands</strong>. You can read the review and listen to Side B from the 7-inch at <a href="http://www.ampeatermusic.com/aem001">ampeatermusic.com/aem001</a>. We’re sad to say that Side A is no longer with us, having suffered a tragic demise at the hands of its own creator. That said, we’re not about to cut our catalog one song short without doing something cool to compensate. After all, these songs are like family to us. So, we present you with a new 7-inch from Strawberry Hands, sans review, as a bit of a teaser. These tracks are both from the magnificent album <strong>Palaces Upon Palaces</strong>, which can be had via our <a href="http://www.ampeatermusic.com/catalog">catalog page</a> for ten bucks. Oh hell, I’ll make it easy:</p>
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<h2 class="prodtitles"><span>Palaces Upon Palaces</span></h2>
<div class="wpsc_description"><p>Rhythm, songs, stasis.</p>
<p><strong>Format: [160kbps MP3 Download]</strong></p>
<p>01. Visions of Excess<br />
02. Enormix<br />
03. Holly<br />
04. Apalling Wilderness<br />
05. Blushing<br />
06. Big Ghost<br />
07. Palaces Upon Palaces<br />
08. Paranormal Rave Culture<br />
09. Goth Hotel<br />
10. Satial Thirst For Bats </p>
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<td>Side B – Big Ghost <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM001re Strawberry Hands/02 Big Ghost.mp3">Download audio file (02 Big Ghost.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Visions of Excess <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM001re Strawberry Hands/01 Visions of Excess.mp3">Download audio file (01 Visions of Excess.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM001re Strawberry Hands.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/j-1VW4tCK7E" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem001reampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM052 Redbird Fever]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17252010-01-18T00:15:16Z2010-01-07T13:00:56Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; " title="Redbird Fever (credit: Kahuku Photography)" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Redbird-Fever-300x187.jpg" alt="(credit: Kahuku Photography)" width="300" height="187" />People form bands for all sorts of reasons. Some bands begin with a concept or gimmick, others are driven by a thirst for self expression, while others still are born from egotism, curiosity, political motive, chance, or even boredom. <strong>Redbird Fever</strong>, a three-piece indie rock band based out of western Washington state, was born from a challenge. In February of 2009 <strong>Ralph Hogaboom</strong> (guitar, vocals, glockenspiel) decided to participate in the February Album Writing Month challenge at <a href="http://www.fawm.org/">www.fawm.org</a> by writing fourteen new songs. It can’t be easy to write fourteen songs in twenty-eight days—I’ve never been able to write more than a couple in a month—but Hogaboom managed to pull it off and after the month was up, he took his songs to <strong>Jay Wainman</strong> (violin, vocals, melodyhorn) with whom he’d been jamming for several months. The pair entered the studio in May and spent two full days pumping out as much as they could. First Hogaboom recorded drums, guitars, and vocals and then Wainman layered on violin, additional vocals, and a collection of instruments she had brought with her. Conrad Uno (Presidents of The United States America, Fresh Young Fellows) mixed it on the spot and, as Hogaboom reflects, <em>“we took it home dazed and confused and not really knowing if we even liked it yet.”</em> The product of these sessions was the six-track EP <strong>Come Away From Your Home </strong>(available for download on this site). Perhaps Hogaboom and Wainman couldn’t see it because they were stuck in the thick of it, but it only took me one listen to tell that they had created something special.</p>
<p>In July, <strong>Hogaboom</strong> and <strong>Wainman</strong> recruited drummer <strong>Michael White</strong> to flush out their sound and enable them to perform live. White’s jazz and metal influence made for an interesting addition, completing <strong>Redbird Fever </strong>lineup. But as I mentioned previously, Redbird Fever was born from a challenge. That’s not only a comment on Hogaboom’s decision to write an album’s worth of material in the shortest month of the year, but also a comment on the makeup of the band. <em>“It’s pretty easy to be in a band with three sweaty guys, yelling your way through power chords. When we decided not to have a bass player, much of that was driven by the challenge that presents. You have to work your way through a song idea differently when you can’t count on that thick bassline to bring it back in from a drum break, for example. So you wind up structuring things in less common ways, and we’re finding that much more interesting and satisfying right now. The same is true of melody, with our violin. We use the violin as a melody, on top of the music, which challenges the vocal melodies to try to rival it if they’re going to get the attention in your ear. It’s a tension in the music, I think, and there’s a certain appeal in that tension.”</em></p>
<p><strong>Redbird Fever</strong> combines quirky pop sensibilities with a healthy experimental vibe. Their songs are short and snappy (the longest track on their EP is only 2:47) and remarkably unpretentious. As they explain it, <em>“spiraling violin and vocal melodies offset looped, angular guitar riffs and dynamic lyrics about loss, heartache, and alienation.” </em>That’s all true enough, but there’s a charm to Redbird Fever that extends beyond that, something that one can’t put a finger on so easily. It might have something to do with the intimacy of the lyrics, which seem more like fragments of a bedside conversation or a stream of consciousness than something premeditated. Or maybe, as <strong>Hogaboom</strong> suggests, it has something to do with the interplay between violin and vocals. Or maybe it’s the subtle tension between <strong>Wainman</strong><strong>’s</strong> and Hogaboom’s vocal melodies, usually in unison but diverging at key moments. Or perhaps I’ve missed it entirely. I’ll let you be the judge of that. It’s time to press play on <strong>A-side “It’s a Metaphor, Dear!”</strong></p>
<p><em>7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…!!!</em> Lately, <strong>Redbird Fever</strong> has been opening their shows with this song and having the crowd help them count down. <strong>Hogaboom</strong> explains, <em>“when we hit one and start the song, there’s a really nice sharing that happens with us and everyone who was counting.”</em> <strong>“</strong><strong>It’s a Metaphor, Dear!”</strong> is the perfect opener. A percussive guitar riff and peppy violin melody kick things off with gusto while the refrain takes on a more pensive air. A heavier riff-based outro gives the band a chance to build. As advertised, “It’s a Metaphor, Dear!” is an extended metaphor. <em>“I think that I would like to live in her heart it may sound stupid but i’d have to bring both my cats. Maybe it’d be better if I were a red blood cell, flow through her aorta and down through her left ventricle.”</em> But the mere act of declaring the song a metaphor adds a sarcastic twist, as if to say it’s a metaphor for a metaphor. Certainly, it’s not to be taken at face value. Hogaboom explains, <em>“it’s about love, but it’s got this insincerity wrapping it up”</em></p>
<p>As I keep asserting, <strong>Redbird Fever</strong> is a band that likes to push itself, and nowhere is this more evident than in <strong>B-side “Sometimes Things Get Broken</strong>.” The band explains that <em>“[it] started out as an experiment, trying to challenge ourselves to do a song with no musically separate chorus, and try to make it apparent using mostly vocals.” </em> It’s a test they pass with flying colors. The beautiful vocal harmonies on the title line, <em>“sometimes things get broken,”</em> help it to rise above the mix but when <strong>Hogaboom’s</strong> and <strong>Wainman’s</strong> voices diverge on the word <em>broken</em>, with Hogaboom cutting it short and Wainman continuing on, the sense of togetherness literally gets broken. In another instance, Wainman sings <em>“don’t tell me 1 and 1 make 1 again”</em> while Hogaboom shouts bitterly over her, <em>“it’s subtraction, it’s addition,”</em> evoking a conflict between lovers. Although “Sometimes Things Get Broken” lacks a distinct verse/chorus structure it’s musically quite progressive. Unusual textures like handclaps and whispers help keep things interesting on this track.</p>
<p><strong>Redbird Fever</strong> plans to enter the studio again in early 2010 to record a full length album. In the mean time, they will be performing, the next show scheduled at 4th Ave Tav in Olympia, WA on January 23<sup>rd</sup>. And February is right around the corner. Would it be too much to hope for fourteen new songs?</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/nate-greenberg">Nate Greenberg</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Sometimes Things Get Broken <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM052 Redbird Fever/02 Sometimes Things Get Broken.mp3">Download audio file (02 Sometimes Things Get Broken.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – It’s a Metaphor, Dear! <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM052 Redbird Fever/01 Its a Metaphor Dear.mp3">Download audio file (01 Its a Metaphor Dear.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM052 Redbird Fever.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/PdQenjm9m44" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem052ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM051 Lohio]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17172010-01-06T16:03:06Z2010-01-06T15:46:30Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; " title="Lohio" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/lohio.jpg" alt="Lohio" width="300" />As a freshman in high school, I managed to select an almost impossibly horrible schedule of classes that led me on an epic walk across the full length of our sprawling campus not once but twice each day. I was 14, and September and October were shitty and cold, as they usually are at New England boarding schools. Then, in late November a wonderful thing happened–Apple invented the iPod. In a split second this little white box with its massive 4gb (HA!) hard drive turned those 15 minute walks into the most highly anticipated stretches of my daily routine. I’d spend the better part of the previous evening selecting the perfect combination of songs for each walk, thinking that I could somehow transform this wholly banal ritual into some kind of cinematic experience. The idea was to crank the tunes as loud as my little earbuds would go, and to imagine seeing myself walking through the snow as though it were a dramatically framed cut scene from The Graduate or some equally introspective indie art film. Unfortunately, my music library was at the time limited to about 20 classic rock albums that I’d appropriated via Napster. Needless to say, the movie playing in my head probably looked a lot more like Easy Rider than I would have hoped. Anyways, Spring rolled around, I got a bike, and my once cherished iPod mega-walk went the way of the dinosaurs–that is, until <strong>Lohio</strong> landed in the Ampeater submissions box.</p>
<p>Whether it’s the delicate, almost fractured vocals on <strong>“Grandpa’s Chaise” </strong>or the boisterous synths on <strong>“End of Summertime,”</strong> this 7-inch from <strong>Lohio </strong>is the perfect soundtrack to, well, life. The arrangements are instrumentally sparse but constitutionally strong, striking a fine balance between irresistible catchiness and harmonic indecision, the combination of which keeps listeners stumbling along, eager to dive into the next groove but cautious of what might be around the corner. I get the impression that Lohio wears many musical hats, and that what we have on this here 7-inch are but two of a multitude, from a band that draws inspiration from more genres, sub-genres, and faux-genres than the now infamous <a href="http://cache0.bigcartel.com/product_images/8963711/DSC00004-1.jpg" target="_blank">“genre shirt”</a>. It all boils down to something called “indie pop/rock,” whatever that means, but goddamn it’s good. I suppose that’s why Lohio seems to be poised for greatness, and why (more than most bands featured on Ampeater) they’re being acknowledged as rising stars on the scene.</p>
<p><strong>Greg Dutton</strong> (vocals, guitar), <strong>Erik Cirelli</strong> (guitar, effects), <strong>Liz Adams</strong> (bass, vocals), and <strong>Sven Stens</strong> (drums) took their home town of Pittsburgh by storm, and have been voted amongst the city’s best bands in numerous local polls. This early success earned them opening slots for indie giants Vampire Weekend, Ra Ra Riot, and Grizzly bear. Thus thrust into the national spotlight, Lohio found themselves featured on MTV, KEXP and the legendary KCRW. The <strong>Lohio EP’s</strong> critical success was almost inevitable–the cogs were in place. Musically, it’s an incredibly sophisticated album that sits confidently in the healthy middleground between shameless pop and introspective shoegaze. It’s the record I wish Mojave 3 had made after Spoon and Rafter, and it accomplishes with taste and grace what Puzzles Like You struggled rather awkwardly to achieve–unpredictable yet melodic pop music that simultaneously engages and dodges its audience. If I could turn the world down and Lohio up, I’d do so in a second.</p>
<p><strong>Lohio</strong> made an interesting decision for this 7-inch–to use the first two songs from their <strong>Lohio EP</strong>, but to reverse the order. What we end up with is an A-side that hits right out of the gate, and a slow build B-side that leaves listeners emotionally and (if you play it loud enough) physically drained. <strong>Side A “End of Summertime”</strong> could be the theme to a TV show on Nickelodeon, but for a single harmonic decision that sends the song in a wholly new direction. On a single held note, the song deviates from its open-armed pop sensibilities and delivers a descending vocal harmony that casts the shadow of Fall over an otherwise endless musical summertime. It’s a brilliant move, as though Lohio were pushing that imaginary carrot a couple more inches away from the horse’s mouth, just when it seemed most likely that the poor creature could sneak a bite. As a result, this is one of those perpetually looped songs on my iTunes playlist–I start it again as soon as it ends, hoping that one of these days it’ll give up and deliver the hook that I so badly want it to hand over. But, somewhere deep down I know it never will, and that’s the beauty of the song. If it gave us an obvious and gratifying harmonic resolution, it wouldn’t be worth 10, 50, or even 100 listens–we’d have our way with it and move along. In so depriving its listeners of this cheap thrill, it gains a deeper and more enduring strength. Good luck making it to the B-side.</p>
<p><a href="http://fivetunes.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Five Tunes</a> described <strong>Lohio</strong> with such perfect accuracy that I have to appropriate a line. They wrote, <em>“It’s like the song is saying ‘Oh God, I feel so much that I can only express my emotions through this awesome guitar solo.’ Bam. Great band.”</em> <strong>B-Side “Grandpa’s Chaise”</strong> lets the band’s delicate emotional character shine through a bit, and if it were the only track I’d ever heard by Lohio, it would still make my personal favorites list. <strong>Dutton’s</strong> voice is far from perfect, but it’s the technical flaws that make it something truly special. It sounds fragile, like it could just break at any moment, and to some extent, it does. The song opens with a struggling verse so wrought with introspection that the vocals just dissolve. Dutton and <strong>Adams</strong> sing in subtle harmony: “<em>The shade couldn’t fight off the sun, it cross the room, it woke us up in bed at the start of the day, as I laid in your arms on grandfather’s chaise.”</em> The song then departs on a guitar solo to end all guitar solos. I haven’t heard something this crushing since the break on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. When the vocals re-enter, they do so with deliberate confidence, shouting <em>“and the walls that we built up, they came down to the ground they were trampled like dust, and the thought of giving up, it made no sense at all it was so obvious. In short, it was love.”</em> It’s such a human song–most of us have at one point or another been in that room and thought those thoughts. Lohio calls us into their world, pulls us onto the chaise, invites us to create or recreate that scenario in our heads, and does so with a sincerity and complexity that makes this song truly memorable. Hell, I should start carrying around a guitar, just in case I have to explain something and words won’t quite do the trick.</p>
<p><strong>Lohio’s</strong> one to keep an eye on–they’re out on a quest to promote the new EP, and I would put my money on these guys becoming an indie rock staple when their next full length drops. In the meantime, if you need to find me I’ll be the guy standing by the fountain in Central Park with giant headphones on, blasting the solo from “Grandpa’s Chaise” on repeat.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-heller">Ben Heller</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Grandpa’s Chaise <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM051 Lohio/02 Grandpas Chaise.mp3">Download audio file (02 Grandpas Chaise.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – End of Summertime <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM051 Lohio/01 End of Summertime.mp3">Download audio file (01 End of Summertime.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM051 Lohio.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/-sSOc--A6Bs" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem051ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM050 WALLcreeper]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17102010-01-05T04:41:00Z2010-01-05T13:00:26Z<div class="review"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/WALLcreeper-300x199.jpg" alt="WALLcreeper" title="WALLcreeper" width="300" height="199" class="alignright pressphoto" style="margin-left: 10px; float:right; "/>Rock n’ roll is a bit like my turtle, in the sense that every time I think it’s going to die, it manages somehow to plug along for another ten years. It’s a new decade everyone, and even if the oughts gave birth to more micro-revivals and quantum genres than anyone could care to keep track of, I think it’s safe to say that rock came out sounding not only alright, but perhaps even more rigorously defined than at any other point in its now officially geriatric lifespan. Remember the opening seconds of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief back in 2005, that buzzy sound of a guitar getting plugged in and the nasty hiss of speakers. After Kid A and Amnesiac, it was like, oh, amplifiers! That was rock in the 2000s. What’s that crappy sound? Oh, rock! After a decade’s worth of electro-shock therapy and drainpipes posturing, the dirty, scuzzy nature of the beast still persisted like a bad personality trait.</p>
<p> That’s why, I think, <strong>WALLcreeper</strong>, a four-piece from Boston, sound so fucking on. This is some gristly, pretty music, the kind of thing that makes you want to grow a beard, start a garden, and learn how to do some real motorcycle maintenance. It’s not Zen, necessarily, and certainly not Nirvana. But, listened to on the right pair of headphones or shit-tastic car stereo, it’s not that far from either. If you planted these songs in the ground, they would sprout into really great-looking carnivorous plants.</p>
<p> Check out the <strong>A-side “Should Have Known Better,”</strong> the longest three-minute rock song of the year. These guys play at a dinosaur pace, slow, hungry, casually devastating, evolving the track like a time-lapse photo of a tundra or some past-its-prime mill town. It sounds natural, like dirt migrating cross-country or stones eroding into weird shapes. Tremolo-picking, half-buried vocals, gastrointestinal bass rumblings…the whole thing accumulates like sediment sitting at the bottom of a river filled with liquor.</p>
<p> People mention shoegaze when talking about this band, and while there’s all kinds of Ride-ish echoes in the project, I think the tag is a bit reductive, and not that accurate. Shoegaze was, from the Madchester groups through My Bloody Valentine, and even today with look-backs like A Place To Bury Strangers, never really about distortion and reverb and huge textural washes, but about being a kind of club music for antisocial white people who couldn’t dance. <strong>WALLcreeper</strong> grooves, for sure, but the mission of this music is different, closer, in my opinion, to groups like The Drones, or, hell, even The Dead Weather, in that it belongs in beer-reeking bars rather than actual parties, not as a tool for meeting fellow damaged and agoraphobic people, but an excuse to get into a brawl. There’s a bestial swagger to this style, interlocking guitar harmonies and feedback duels and woolly-mammoth drums dealing damage rather than hooks.</p>
<p> Nowhere is this more apparent than on the B-side, the justifiably 8-minute <strong>“Empty in the Eyes.”</strong> It’s rare that you want bands to work on this kind of scale, but <strong>WALLcreeper</strong> pulls off the epic so well that you wonder if the mp3-induced extinction of the album track really was a tragedy worth reversing. It’s not so much that the ideas of the band need this much space to breathe, but that the sound itself, like aurora borealis or the Grand Canyon, is best observed in the open. Rising, falling, tension, release are the important compositional components here, so much so that I would argue “Empty in the Eyes” is less a song than a workout in the best possible sense, a deep-play exercise in atmospheric rock measured on a geologic scale. The thing buries you.</p>
<p> The 2000s, I think, did a lot to tame the rock monster. Riffs got compressed, drums got sequenced, vocals got autotuned. Consider <strong>WALLcreeper</strong> the glorious antithesis to all that, a band that’s down to throw mud and shit all over it’s platonically gorgeous songs. Fuck Spike Jonze. This is where the wild things are. </p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/ben-lasman">Ben Lasman</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Empty in the Eyes <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM050 WALLcreeper/02 Empty in the Eyes.mp3">Download audio file (02 Empty in the Eyes.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Should Have Known Better <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM050 WALLcreeper/01 Should Have Known Better.mp3">Download audio file (01 Should Have Known Better.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM050 WALLcreeper.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/lE01mP_qO9Q" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem050ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM049 You and Your Pointy Ears]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=17022010-01-04T05:17:29Z2010-01-04T13:00:17Z<div class="review"><img class="alignright pressphoto" style="float:right; margin-left:10px;" title="You and Your Pointy Ears" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/You-and-Your-Pointy-Ears-300x225.jpg" alt="You and Your Pointy Ears" width="300" height="225" /> In the last few years, the ease of home recording has increased exponentially to the point where every 17 year old with an acoustic guitar and a laptop is now a “band” (I will make fun of these kids forever, but I am happy that they exist. I wonder if their children will unearth their MySpace pages in 30 years). Anyway, as we have gotten more and more used to hearing home recordings by people who don’t have much experience in the realm of…well, recording, we’ve gotten more and more used to low fidelity, to everything clipping. Lo-fi wasn’t invented by the internet generation, of course, it’s always been a marker of authenticity and anti-top 40 pop music (think of Daniel Johnston bleating his immensely effective songs of pain into a tape recorder), but we may be the first group of consumers to send some kid straight from making blown out tapes in his basement to having public drug meltdowns at European festivals within, what, six months? Low fidelity recording is acceptable to a wider swathe of audience than ever before. Those of us who have grown up listening to streaming MySpace mp3s have learned to listen past the blurry audio when necessary and to appreciate it as an aesthetic of both intention and necessity. It could even be considered a backlash against the unnatural cleanness and dryness of digital production, which removes the warmth of occasional tape saturation of most of our beloved analog recordings and makes it sound like listening to a rock band suspended in a vacuum. Cambridge, MA, band <strong>You and Your Pointy Ears</strong>, the brainchild of <strong>Spenser Gralla</strong> (when he’s not busy being in all his other bands) fits neatly into the lo-fi pop category, but instead of the angsty numbness of bands like Wavves, You and Your Pointy Ears channels the badass, dance party stomp of old school garage weirdos like The Monks and country rockers like CCR.</p>
<p>When I first heard <strong>You and Your Pointy Ears</strong>, it was late on a Monday night at Zuzu, a tiny, red-walled club in Cambridge, frequented by the ex members of every great Boston band that we could have sworn was going to blow up but never quite did. These people all have the authoritative and tragic weight of deposed royalty as they down bottle after golden bottle of high life. I was sitting at the bar shooting the shit with someone or other when You and Your Pointy Ears started playing, and though I hadn’t come to watch the bands, soon I was standing in the crush around <strong>Spenser Gralla</strong> and his drummer for the night (presumably <strong>Noah Bond</strong>, Gralla’s bandmate from one of his main projects, the rumbling psych-pop group <strong>Doomstar</strong>), first nodding my head and grinning, and soon joining everyone else in hopping around with beer in hand. Let me tell you, it was a party. High lifes were held up high in every hand, foaming over their rims and soaking coat sleeves, and no one seemed to care. Everyone just kept dancing.</p>
<p>The thing that makes <strong>You and Your Pointy Ears</strong> great is this mix of old and new. You could probably lump them in with the unfortunately named “shitgaze” bands without anyone rolling their eyes at your naiveté, but really what You and Your Pointy Ears does is play pop songs that you can dance to but that don’t make you feel like you’re in a jeans commercial aimed at hip, suburban youth. This is more difficult than it sounds. Pretty much every single indie rock band aimed at making dance music sounds either neutered or hideously dated. Good rock music has to have roots and wings. Throwbacky bands can catch on for about a year, but they’re always the butt of jokes for the next ten afterwards (Brian Setzer Orchestra anyone?), and bands that are too focused on innovation largely go unlistened to, which, when you’re trying to make pop music, is sort of a problem. Gralla’s songs are pretty simple, rooted in a lot of sixties pop song writing in the same way that, believe it or not, the best Nirvana songs are. Consider the drum break during the chorus of <strong>A-side “Under Your Feet”</strong>, in which the drums suddenly drop into that old saw girl group drum beat (as in the first verse of “Leader of the Pack”), or the surf rock double backbeat on <strong>B-side “Night at the Movies”</strong> that follows the wicked drum fills out of the static verse sections and into the choruses, underscoring that last Brian Wilsonian ooh that hangs out above the crashing waves of drums and guitar like ocean mist.</p>
<p><strong>“Under Your Feet”</strong> is a loose stomping rock and roll song with no wasted moments, exactly the kind of thing <strong>You and Your Pointy Ears</strong> excels at. It’s got a slightly bizarre verse chord progression, following those descending barre chords out of the key and then back in, and that madly catchy, repetitive chorus that hits the upbeats so hard it feels like it should go tumbling along forever. Catch the way the bass drum mirrors the rhythm of the vocals there, creating that tension that makes you want to move. Also, “I love to see you go / but I hate to watch you leave” is an great inversion of the old cliché used cleverly to invoke the kind of mixed feelings in relationships where you let someone walk all over you.</p>
<p><strong>B-side “Night at the Movies” </strong>kicks in with a little more electricity, going straight into some Walkmen-style all-downstroke strumming on the electric, rolling 16<sup>th</sup> notes on the rack tom, sleigh bells on the downbeats. It’s a perfect tension-release set up for the choruses when the song explodes into that double backbeat mentioned above. It’s something so simple, but so powerful. The whole verse long you can’t help but wait for it, and then when it finally comes, after that terrifically savage drum fill by <strong>Bond</strong>, it’s so satisfying. It is, like all great pop songs, a tiny exercise in delayed gratification, and that final falsetto melody is just sublime.</p>
<p><strong>You and Your Pointy Ears</strong> has the knack for making great independent pop music: pop songs that are just weird enough to be interesting and weird songs that are just poppy enough to get stuck in your head. This would be enough to make them worthwhile on its own, but add to it enough rock n roll blood to make a club full of drunken Boston rock royalty get up and shake their asses and a lo-fi aesthetic that actually mirrors the feeling of being in a tiny dark room and getting pulverized by the enormous sound of a rock band playing ten feet away and you have a band worth spilling your beer to. I am eagerly awaiting their 2010 full length, but for now at least we have this handy Ampeater 7-inch.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/tag/gabe-birnbaum">Gabe Birnbaum</a></p>
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<td>Side B – Night at the Movies <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM049 You and Your Pointy Ears/02 Night at the Movies.mp3">Download audio file (02 Night at the Movies.mp3)</a></td>
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<td>Side A – Under Your Feet <a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEM049 You and Your Pointy Ears/01 Under Your Feet.mp3">Download audio file (01 Under Your Feet.mp3)</a></td>
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<h4 style="clear:both; padding-top:20px; text-align: center;"><a href="/audio/AEM049 You and Your Pointy Ears.zip">[[[Download the 7-inch]]]</a></h4>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/IOkEWMrVBW4" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aem049ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Annual Compilation 01: AEM001 through AEM048]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=16842010-01-02T04:54:43Z2010-01-02T13:00:07Z<div class="review"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMannual01.zip"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/annual-zip.png" alt="annual-zip" title="annual-zip" width="700" height="342" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1685" /></a></p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/NhW5je6h5uo" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemannual01ampeatermusic<![CDATA[AEM Compilation 010]]>http://ampeatermusic.com/?p=16812010-01-02T04:54:30Z2010-01-02T03:04:55Z<div class="review"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/audio/AEMcomp010.zip"><img src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/weekly-zip10.png" alt="weekly-zip10" title="weekly-zip10" width="700" height="342" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1682" /></a></p>
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<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem046"><img title="AEM046 Life Partners" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Life-Partners-300x266.jpg" alt="AEM046 Life Partners" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem047"><img title="AEM047 KC Quilty" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/KC-Quilty.jpg" alt="AEM047 KC Quilty" height="75px" /></a></td>
<td align="center"><a href="http://ampeatermusic.com/aem048"><img title="AEM048 Dinowalrus" src="http://ampeatermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Dinowalrus-300x199.jpg" alt="AEM048 Dinowalrus" height="75px" /></a></td>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ampeater/~4/z4MOhrtd4m0" height="1" width="1"/>0http://ampeatermusic.com/aemcomp010