Most Likely To: snag a few new fans.

It’s been five years since Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, better known as experimental duo The Books, released their last record, but The Way Out, the band’s fourth full-length is finally here. In a world where commercial music is dominated by vacuous performers like Ke$ha and Katy Perry, it would be absurd to accuse The Books of selling out, but The Way Out is undeniably more accessible than its predecessors. Certainly this will be cause for disappointment among longtime fans of the band, many of whom prefer to wade their way through the band’s earlier, anchorless oeuvre.

The Way Out maps out directions (showing us the way out, perhaps?) instead of using samples to create an audio labyrinth of lightly layered sounds that forced the listener navigate through a thought stream of their own making, as they did on their two earliest releases, Thought For Food (2002) and The Lemon of Pink (2003). Because it is more of a guided tour of The Books’ landscape, The Way Out is likely to appeal to those who found the band’s earlier work, which was so beloved by critics, to be a bit too remote. The Way Out is The Books for the concrete thinkers among us, who prefer “The Story of Hip-Hop” to the subtler meandering of The Lemon of Pink.

“Group Autogenics I” employs samples from old self-help records, setting the tone for the record. Spoken word samples are nothing new for The Books, but the contrast between the squeaky clean tone of the voice and what it says ramp up the absurdity. An audio trick splices “Your body is now a glass container / You can smell the orange-colored liquid.” The tautological advice “I am calm and calm / I am relaxed and relaxed” creates a spoof of traditional relaxation training.

On The Way Out, perhaps more than on any other record, The Books strive to create a groove. The vocals on “I Didn’t Know That” are chopped into percussive units that compliment the song’s bass line, while drum interludes punctuate the repetitive spoken word phrases on “A Cold Freezin’ Night.” “I Am Who I Am” is almost dance floor ready while “Beautiful People” and “Thirty Incoming” create rhythm from large choral sections of song. These obvious rhythmic passages give the casual listener an entry into The Books’ work that was not previously available, and mark new territory for the band.

The Books deserve credit for not taking themselves too seriously on The Way Out. The LP version comes with pages of stickers, so you can decorate your own record cover. Dismiss it as cutesy, or consider it the personification of “zakka,” the Japanese concept of playfully improving everyday life through colorful, whimsical, well-designed items. It’s easy to argue against the necessity of The Way Out, just as it’s easy to dismiss ordering a Shinzi Katoh bento box directly from Japan, but to survive the human journey, you really need both.

Most Likely To: be the soundtrack of a collapsing new ministry building.

The early 1990s were lousy with industrial bands. You couldn’t swing a dead goth without hitting a bunch of pissed off faux-Teutons shrieking apocalyptic rants through vocal processors atop electronic beats and shredding guitars. The style was so ubiquitous that the first few Lollapalooza tours had to have a designated industrial slot, to scratch the itch of those kids in the alternative nation for whom even grunge wasn’t outlandishly glum enough for.

In these days of a vanished global economy, a tar pit between New Orleans and Cancun, and a sizable chunk of the populace seriously considering electing a moose-hunting MILF to run the whole shebang, it’s kind of hard to remember what exactly everyone was so pissed off about in the Lollapalooza age. But there was enough rage in the air to give industrial music a pretty decent run in the public consciousness until the end of the ‘90s, when the machine ran out of steam and was sold off for parts. The processed vocals, bad attitude, and metallic guitars ended up the property of the crybabies in the nu-metal movement while the electronic beats and synthesizers returned to their roots with the neo-new wave/synth-pop revival of the last decade.

Canada’s Front Line Assembly were big dogs in the bygone industrial era. Not as big as Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, to be sure, but if you consider the fact that most people never realized that Front Line Assembly wasn’t the same band as Front 242, they probably seemed twice as popular as they really were. And they had some heavy-duty bona fides in the fact that frontman and sole permanent member Bill Leeb was an alumnus of genre pioneers Skinny Puppy, while on-again/off-again (currently off) member Rhys Fulber had a name that really sounded like a name a guy in an industrial band should have.

Unlike most of their industrial brethren who pretty much shuttered the factories for the past decade, FLA have tried to stick it out, not that anyone has paid much attention. Leeb’s side-project Delirium, which paired up a variety of ethereal songbirds with electronic beats, has had a much higher profile thus far in the 21st century. But Leeb is back with a new FLA album, and who knows? Perhaps the world is fucked enough right at the moment that glumsters worldwide will take notice again.

If they do take a listen to Improvised. Electronic. Device., they’ll hear an album that’s not a whole different than any given industrial album from 1992. This isn’t a particularly bad thing, given the genre. Industrial has always been one of the more hidebound styles, with the only real variables being whether the guitars grind louder than the synths burble. Songs like “Angriff,” “Shifting Through the Lens,” and the Al Jourgensen featuring “Stupidity” don’t rewrite the rules of industrial music in any way, but they work just fine within the established boundaries. The tempos race, the synthesizers pulse like the veins of very angry Germans, the guitars snarl like hellhounds of the apocalypse, and the vocals sound like the voice of Satan filtered through an electric fan.

In a nutshell, if you’ve ever liked an industrial album, chances are good you’ll like this one okay. If you’ve never liked an industrial album, why have you bothered reading this in the first place? Nothing on this album is going to make you a fan if you never have been before, but its devotion to a genre whose time has come and gone is almost sweet.

Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, is dead.

The world hurries on in spite of this fact.

Annie Dillard wrote the following in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“People say that a good seat in the backyard affords as accurate and inspiring a vantage point on the planet earth as any observation tower on Alpha Centauri. They are wrong. We see through a glass darkly. We find ourselves in the middle of a movie, or, God help us, a take for a movie, and we don’t know what’s on the rest of the film.

Say you could look through John Dee’s mirror whizzing through space; say you could heave our relief globe into motion like a giant top and breathe life on its surface; say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: What would you see? Transparent images moving through light, ‘an infinite storm of beauty.’

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and dissappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up – mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale – the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then spreads red again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth that no root can suck, and wither in an hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched, shadowless figure of ghosts. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys like slag, and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.”

Jack Horkheimer is dead.

He passed quietly amidst the rising din of the ground zero mosque debate, as oil wicked its way further into the mangrove swamps of the Gulf Coast, as Pakistan drowned and Afghanistan hardened, and as the Perseid meteor belt moved away from Earth’s atmosphere, having given us its yearly display. This is sad news, indeed. The world has lost another true educator, one who was filled with simple awe at the cosmos and sought to share his wonderment.

Some days feel hopeless, like for every teacher we lose, ten red-faced pundits spring up like hydra in their stead. Any more it feels like there are less and less people asking questions and more and more people simply trying to assert their version of the answers. It is evident everywhere. In theology, in politics, in the ongoing culture wars that have set journalism against commentary, literature against celebrity gossip, high art against everything else, theories against hunches, and language against itself.

I like to think that Jack Horkheimer and others like him (Bill Nye, Annie Dillard, Mr. Rogers, Mary Oliver, Jim Henson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, et al), work to show us another way. Where the spittle flies among the deciders, who trade in linguistic baubles on the battlefields of the rhetoricians, the science educators and the poets and the imagineers forgo the lockjawed face-offs and instead look up to the stars or to the soil at their feet, tap us on our shoulders, point and say “wow, check that out.”

We would do well to not only listen more often, but set aside our opinions and our determinations and take it all in for a little perspective.

Jack Horkheimer is dead, and passed quickly through the scope of our epoch, flashing brightly, wearing too much eyeliner, filling his televised lectures with groan inducing puns and humor and warmth and pathos and pointing us always skyward, where everything seems to be spinning on majestically whether or not we take the time to shut up and recognize it.

Aerial

Rolla Olak

Sun Kil Moon

Sun Ra

John Coltrane

Pink Floyd

The Orb

The B-52’s

Sonic Youth

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• Jack Horkheimer, 1938 – 2010 (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Jack Horkheimer, host of ‘Star Gazer,’ dies at 72 (ctv.ca)
• Jack Horkheimer, ‘The Star Hustler,’ Dies At 72 (news.slashdot.org)
• Jack Horkheimer: Beloved Stargazer Passes from This World (themoderatevoice.com)
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Most Likely To: create an armchair dreamscape to rival, but not best, Cocteau Twins.

School of Seven Bells had all of the right ingredients for a successful Brooklyn-based band. A nifty abbreviation: SVIIB. Its members already possessed indie cred thanks to stints in other bands. Guitarist Benjamin Curtis of Secret Machines joined with identical twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Dejeza, ex-on!air!library!, who both sing and play bass and keyboards respectively. The band’s name came from watching a PBS documentary (the subject was a mythical school for pickpockets).

Yet pretty much everything I love about SVIIB can be traced to one source: Cocteau Twins. I doubt the band is in the dark about this connection since they recruited former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie to remix their debut single, “My Cabal,” from 2008’s Alpinism. There’s no question that School of Seven Bells could do a lot worse than aping the Cocteau Twins, a band so celebrated in Donnybrook Manor, that our own Benny St. Maur honored them and a fellow reviewer saw fit, and rightly so, to review a recent Elizabeth Fraser EP that was really just a glorified maxi-single. It’s worth noting that School of Seven Bells needs two genetically identical people to even approximate Fraser’s spectacular pipes.

But since a Cocteau Twins reunion is about as bloody likely as a Morrissey/Marr reconciliation, I’m going to set my feelings aside, and review Disconnect From Desire on its own merits, while trying to ignore the distractingly pleasant feeling of déjà vu listening to it brings me.

School of Seven Bells makes music for the Superego. An ad hoc survey of the band’s fan base would likely find IQ scores skewed to the right of the mean, as well as an overrepresentation of erudite but useless graduate degrees and, of course, hipster glasses. Rather than being defined by a hooky riff or memorable lyric, their songs are holistic and engrossing. Disconnect From Desire takes the listener on an audio journey that rivals a good documentary film. For the album’s duration, one is elsewhere; in musical world whose offerings would be gaudy were they any less fluid.

Disconnect From Desire’s cerebrum-filling melodies are so all encompassing that the songs don’t as much sever desire as wash it away in a flood of intricately layered song.

Watch the video for “Windstorm” by School of Seven Bells:

Like in this article, lovelies. Now, from this article, I’m sure some things are becoming abundantly clear- one of these things is that Ivyy Goldberg needs to stop reading the lifestyle and relationships section of MSN. Another thing that is becoming clear, however, is that most people in our society see being a Single Woman as being on the same level of difficulty as being Sarah Palin Retarded. Furthermore, being a Single Woman is clearly YOUR FAULT, and something that needs to be addressed immediately as a personality flaw on par with being a Creationist Republican, or an Evangelical Christian. This article has nine tips for what To Do and Not To Do in order to snag the perfect man. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Rule number one: DON’T complain about your day. Nothing says “not sexy” like having a completely normal life wherein sometimes you have a shitty day at work, amiright?

Rule number two: DON’T be too needy. “Don’t Ask About His Five Year Plan Too Soon.” “Talking about at what age you’d like to get married and have kids too early on in the conversation changes the whole tone of trying to get to know someone,” says Jessi Bockting, from Louisville, Kentucky.” See, men are like gazelles- if you look at them wrong they will flee into the forest, for they are delicate, easily-scared animals. Sure. (Side note- who the fuck is Jessi Bockting from Louisville, Kentucky?)

Rule number three: DON’T be too picky. “Don’t Over-Romanticize Your Perfect “Type” ”There was a period of time I wanted to date only tortured artists — I just love the idea of being someone’s muse,” says Erica DelGrosso, from Queens, New York. “But I realized that they are tortured because they are selfish and make things hard for themselves. Only when I finally let that go did I meet my husband, who constantly inspires me.”

Seriously, according to this article you need a binder and notebook when going on a date- I would never be able to remember all I’m supposed To Do and Not Do. Ok ok, I got this, though. Don’t complain, don’t be picky, don’t be needy. Check, check, and check.

But then, THEN, here’s the kicker. One of the rules in this brilliant article is this: “Don’t See Being Single as a Problem.” “This kind of thinking can lead women to believe they’re being “too picky” or “too needy,” says Karin Anderson, Ph.D., the author of It Just Hasn’t Happened Yet, and it can cause them to create a fake personality.”

WAIT A GODDAMN MINUTE. You JUST told women in the same article to specifically NOT be too eager or too picky. You assholes. DON’T YOU EDIT?!?!?!

Oh, oh, so maybe you really want to help all the Single Women out there. Because they really need a man, right? You just want to help them find one of the Quality Single Men out there in the world, right? And then, THEN, once these Single Women have found the Quality Single Men, then their relationship is totally safe and fool-proof, right? Because Quality Single Men love women who are fully-formed human beings who do more with their lives than just search out men, right? Oh shit. You know what, internet? Fuck you.

Related articles:

• Donnybrook Symposium: The Worst Person Ever (godonnybrook.com)
• It just hasn’t happened! (thedutchfiles.com)
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• It Just Hasn’t Happened Yet? (psychologytoday.com)
• Primary losses dull Palin’s “mama grizzly” claws (salon.com)
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With that in mind, I began compiling a list of these characters. And while the title implies indie shows, the fact of the matter is these stereotypes are at every show. Perhaps you’ve seen them, and never realized it. Perhaps you are one of them and didn’t know it. Perhaps I am using the word ‘perhaps’ too much. Perhaps.

What follows is a quick list of such characters. Surely it’s not complete, but my appointment with the Swedish massage girl awaits, and we all know how that ends.

The Crazy Hat Guy

Telltale Signs: um, the crazy hat.

Behavior: Crazy Hat Guy comes to be seen. The hat is usually some variation of the typical Stetson/10 gallon hat. Maybe it’s because he thinks since the band is from the West, by wearing a cowboy hat he will somehow establish some sort of quiet camaraderie with the band. Even though the band is from Seattle. Crazy hats can also include the lighter, straw variation; great for outdoor shows. Note; sideways caps and mandanas do NOT count.

CHG will worm his way to the front of the stage in order to get someone in the band to wear his crazy hat. The band will usually oblige. Little does CHG realize that traveling musicians have notoriously bad hygiene. Along with the hat back, he will also get lice and ringworm. He will never learn.

The Coterie

Telltale sign: The coterie is made up of a pack of older women. Most are typically spotted at the shows of bands that had one mainstream hit ten years ago, and have still managed to put out a respectable body of work since then. The number in the coterie varies. They typically ‘dress to impress’, as this is their big night out with ‘the girls from college’. What better way to drink top shelf drinks and reminisce about ‘the old days’? There is usually one large woman (as is the rule in packs such as this), although the rest typically have bingo arms.

Behavior: The coterie is looking to recapture the magic of their college years when the band played their school ‘like every two months’. Sure, while they are hanging with all the girls from Hammond dorms, they try to dress a grade better. And by that I mean ten pounds of monkey crap in five pound bags. These outfits may have looked hot ten years ago, but the only thing screaming more than the singer is their seems. They often take pictures of themselves by the side of the stage as the band is playing. When the band gets to their one hit, they dance like tipsy monkeys. While the Coterie is happy to be at the show, the only ones happier are their husbands getting a fucking quiet night at home.

The Diehard

Telltale signs: The Diehard wears a shirt that says Northwest Tour 2007; though the band clearly didn’t hit the Northwest till 2009. You can tell he wears the shirt all the time, even though this show is the only “cool” place to wear it. Think about it; do Insane Clown Posse shirts look cool anywhere outside of an ICP show? No, they don’t. It’s not like you need Vanity Fair to tell you that. Chances are his email address and handle on message boards is an obscure song title.

Behavior: Diehards know all the words to ALL the songs, even the obscure ones. The Diehard typically further reveals his devotion in the following exchange. The singer will say something to the effect of, “Well, you guys have been such a great crowd tonight, we’re gonna play a song we never play. In fact, we only played it once; 9 years ago at Artie Feinstein’s bar mitzvah.” The Diehard will raise his hands and yell, “YYEEAHHH!!” And somehow, the Diehard will know all the words and makes sure everyone near him is aware he knows the words.

The Ben Folds Guy

Telltale signs: He looks like Ben Folds (duh), his head is too big for his hair, and his glasses tightly cling to his face. Usually dresses like Ben. However, during the summer, acceptable clothing is a ringer T and the ugliest plaid cargos you could ever imagine.

Behavior: The BFG is more noteworthy for observational purposes rather than outright behavior. He will typically be off in a dark corner. But he is at EVERY show. Gangster rap, blues, Russian throat singing, Donnybrook karaoke night. I have personally seen this guy at everything from Ozzfest to a blues concert in Borders. Not much is known about the Ben Folds Guy outside of this.

The Broskis

Telltale signs: Much like the coterie, the Broskis travel in packs. They are easily discerned by their caps, collar shirts and obnoxious behavior. Often seen raising shots at random moments.

Behavior: Obnoxious. I often wonder why they go to shows, just to drink overpriced shots and get in people’s way? Like BFG, they seem to be at every damn show; unsubstantiated reports have even placed them at Lilith Fair. Their MO seems to be as simple as wandering into a club and getting trashed. They often demonstrate little to no familiarity with the band playing. Tend to give manhugs and high fives as the evening wears on.

The Old Guy

Telltale signs: Grey hair (if any), glasses, cold, wrinkled, expressionless face.

Behavior: Generally harmless, if a bit creepy. He seems to be there for the music but appears out of place. Maybe he’s just checking in on his daughter. In which case, she said she was 18, OK?

The Handsies

Telltale signs: Their hands are always in the air, responding to the vocals. For example, if the singer is singing “goodbye” the Handsies will wave goodbye. If the singer is singing about the sun, the Handsies will raise their hands up in the air. Their interpretations of other actions are both astounding and worrisome. They will also try to grab any band member if they dare loom too close to the edge of the stage.

Behavior:  It’s like a twisted call and response. Their arms will shoot up in the air at the slightest provocation. You don’t want to stand near the Handsies as they will spill your drinks without remorse. While this looks cool from the stage, it’s as annoying as fuck if you’re next to them. Avoid them, as their actions border on attention whoring.  Let the Old Guy deal with their shit.

The Yellers

Telltale signs: Um, all their yelling.

Behavior: They have what scientists have recently termed ‘concert Tourettes’. All the yellers do is yell requests. From the first song to the last, there is always another song they want to hear. Yellers can be anywhere; front row to last row on the balcony. Yellers have a bit of the Diehard in them, as they feel the more obscure their requests, the better of a fan they are. Yellers are annoying and often yell for a song the band just played while they were in the bathroom. Yellers are the bane of bands’ existence. Like the Handsies, the Yellers are to be avoided.

The Drunk Girl

Telltale signs: You really need me to spell this out for you?

Behavior: As in life, Drunk Girls come in two varieties; benign and annoying as fuck. Benign Girls are generally well contained, not sloppy and not obnoxious. They are just there for a show, some Miller Lites and to have a good time. AAF Girls, on the other hand, are a whole ‘nother ballgame. They get polluted on girly mixed drinks and proceed to make asses of themselves and detract from the show. They stumble. They dance and careen into other people. They sing made up lyrics and yell out during slow songs. Their overloaded purses swing as they text their BFF Ashley what song she just heard. OMFG! AAFGs feel compelled to try and dance on stage. The AAFs will be the ones covered in their own vomit by the time the lights come up. At least I hope that’s their own vomit.

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Most Likely To: be displaced in time.

Swervedriver were always the odd men out in the original wave of shoegaze. While they definitely shared the feedback and roar of the other bands in the genre, they never really went in for the dizzying wooziness of bands like My Bloody Valentine or Ride. If other shoegazer bands imparted the feeling of riding an out of control merry-go-round at the county fair, the car-obsessed Swervedriver felt more like a round in the same fair’s demolition derby: you still ended up shaky on your feet, but not for the same reasons.

On I Could Sleep For a Thousand Years, former Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin comes probably the closest he ever has to the prototypical shoegazer sound. Hushed vocals sing forlorn minor key melodies atop backing tracks where all the guitar parts seem to be slightly out of phase while sheets of noise and feedback drop in out of nowhere before disappearing again. It all conjures up that early 1990s vibe of being half asleep on a boat sailing in circles on rough seas.

I Could Sleep pretty evenly splits the difference between Swervedriver and Franklin’s later outfit, Toshack Highway. The hardest rocking tracks like “I’ll Be Yr Mechanic” and “Sinking Ships” don’t wallop with the same brute force that Swervedriver usually punched their listeners in the face with, but by the same token the quiet numbers are still more electric than the more pastoral dream-pop of Toshack Highway. Meanwhile, things like the tuneful mosquito buzz of “Spent Bullets” or the gently propulsive keyboard pulse running through “The Road is Long” don’t sound much like either band.

Overall, Franklin & Bolts of Melody have delivered an album of exemplary shoegazing pop music. Twenty years on, he’s finally made an album that actually sounds like it fits with the movement he was originally considered part of, but that’s cool. What he recorded in the early ’90s sounded great then and still does now, just as this album sounds as good now as it would’ve then.

Watch a live performance of “Big Sur” by Adam Franklin & Bolts of Melody:

Most Likely To: make a completist’s job slightly more difficult.

We’re three decades on, and another year still brings another album from post-punk legends The Fall. Oddly enough, at twenty-eight albums their output has made the band’s catalog size a bigger obstacle to for would-be-fans than Mark E. Smith’s tuneless, abrasive vocals. Of course, the abrasive and tuneless vocals are part of what keeps me coming back. And then there are the good tunes, which this year’s entry into the catalog, Your Future Our Clutter, has its share of.

At a lean nine tracks, the record benefits from extra focus. The last few Fall albums I’ve bought have had their hits and misses, and YFOC does them better not with more hits, but with fewer misses. In general, it hearkens back to the style of Fall masterpieces This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985) and The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall (1984), paying more mind to the groove-driven side of the band than the pop-driven side. The melodic “Funnel of Love”, with melodies supplied by guitar rather than vocals, is our only taste of The Fall’s brand of awkward pop music.

Oh, but there are songs like “O.F.Y.C. Showcase”, which kicks the record off in classic Fall style: with a mutter and a beat. The song’s surf-tinged, steady groove is the strongest reminder of the band’s ’80s golden age. It’s a welcome return, and the chanted refrain (“your future our clutterrrr”) is infectious. After the song finished, I couldn’t help repeating it to myself, over and over–a good sign.

From there, the pace only lets up occasionally for some more conceptual numbers, most notably the closer, “Weather Report 2″. The track begins as a semi-sweet appreciation. Over a pretty guitar line, Smith croons “you gave me the best years of my life,” giving his best approximation of a real professional singer (which is to say he still sounds like he’s mocking the idea of singing).

By the end of the track, the melody falls away, replaced by electronic and ambient noise. The singing has turned back into muttering, and the sweetness has become menacing. It all sort of falls apart, and the album ends after Smith whispers “you don’t deserve rock and roll.” An excellent way to end an album, but I suspect in a year’s time, he’ll relent and give us a bit more.

Watch the video for “Bury! PTS 2 + 4″ below:

“Cyclical Cyclical (Atlantis) Mystic Bummer Yacht Club Mix” by Pictureplane vs “The Walk [Everything Mix]” by The Cure

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

One of the few Denver artists that’s actually more famous outside of our bubbling scene (worldwide, even). While enjoying a glamorous (and free) brunch on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel at the SESAC party during SXSW 2010, we were privy to a darkwave, deep house and noise-y DJ set by Pictureplane, and I remember Prof. Honeydew was surprised to learn that the Pitchfork and Stereogum approved synth-popper calls Denver home. For more on this hilarious story, click here. Judging from what Travis wrote on his blog, he’s extremely happy with Mystic Bummer’s take on this song from Pictureplane’s sophomore album, Dark Rift. Obviously we at Dbrook enjoy it b/c it has Yacht in the title. We do enjoy yachts!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]]

The Cure are iconic for blending New Wave and dark synths to basically create Goth rock. Goth and darkwave are not much different in style. Dark wave takes the basics of New Wave and adds sorrowful, introspective lyrics, while goth rock takes the basics of post-punk and adds, “foreboding, sorrowful, often epic soundscapes“. Both genres tend to incorporate keyboards but only goth can be defined as much by it’s audiences style as by the music. “The Walk [Everything Mix]” comes from The Cure’s 1990 remix project, Mixed Up, which Robert Smith describes on the Trilogy DVD as being something “fun after the doom and gloom of Disintegration.” The original version, released in 1983, was the band’s first single to hit the UK Top 20 chart, peaking at #12.

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• Pictureplane – Fusion of the Masculine and Feminine Energy Mix (xlr8r.com)

As a proper Donnybrookite, I keep my eye out for castles on sale in the greater Denver Metro area, and I’ve had my eye on Richthofen Castle in the historic Montclair neighborhood for a while now, ever since Donnybrook correspondent Timmy T drove us there one eerie autumn night almost a year ago. Lo and behold, in the midst of a pretty typical neighborhood, a castle emerges, taking up several blocks, shrouded by mystery and lots of creepy trees. Like the Little Sisters of the Poor, a nunnery with foreboding high fences and a groundskeeper’s house, where it’s rare to see anyone come or go, this was one of my secret creepy fascinations in Denver. For the longest time, this web site was all I could find on the place; then this Denver Post article recently mentioned it being for sale, and now all of a sudden EVERYONE is writing about it! There are pages and pages of web sites about it, almost overnight.

But I feel like this is old news. My trusty old stand-by web site mentioned it being on the market for quite a while now. It’s also the site of a gruesome murder that occurred when Gertrude Patterson shot her rich broker husband in the back, saying that he had been abusive – this old timey article from the New York Times linked to below refers to such matters as “matrimonial troubles.” Other highlights include the phrasing “alienation of his wife’s affections” and “entered a sanitarium for consumptives:”

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Gertrude Patterson goes to jail

OK, I’m just going to put this out there: I think Jerry and Esther should give us their castle. I know it’s *kind of* a lot to ask, but here’s the thing: we don’t mind ghosts. In fact, we will take good care of them. Like a bad thriller plot, we will have a ton of seances and allow ourselves to be haunted until the real truth of the murders emerges, and all of the ghosts can lay to rest.

And we will take really good care of the place. We’ll water all the crazy plants, and make sure the trees continue to obscure the walls, and keep that fountain running, and we swear we won’t try and “modernize” the place like that bastard Edwin Hendrie.

Jerry and Esther, I know you said you didn’t want to burden your children with the castle, but we will take on that burden. We’re just a bunch of young people who need a castle. To complete our dream! You would be contributing to the arts, since we’d be using it for Donnybrook Manor – a touring musician’s hostel – and you could probably write the whole dang thing off!

And lastly, just look at us.

Photo by Nina de Zayas

We belong in a castle. It is meant to be! So Jerry and Esther, just think about it and let us know. Mm kay?