JHONI JACKSON's published work

Jumpstart the Soul: Jonathan Toubin Rehabilitates Himself -- and Culture

2012-12-13T14:18:00.001-05:00

Published in the Nov. 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Photo by Julie Patterson

“I’m tired of pretending I like popular music,” Jonathan Toubin admits. “I really don’t see anything good about it.”

Toubin is a DJ. If this were the infancy of his full-time foray into New York nightlife, back in 2006, clarifying exactly what type of DJ he is would be a crucial disclaimer. The assumption that Toubin is a relentless top-40 remixer, hopping around and pumping his fists in a laser-filled club, would be a fair one six years ago. Not anymore. And Toubin’s somewhat responsible for that.

The 41-year-old has cultivated a fervent following for his soul-centric dance nights, all of which operate under the giant umbrella of New York Night Train, formerly Toubin’s self-run record label, and mainly feature him as the primary jockey. Toubin hosts seven active recurring parties, among them the Soul Clap and Dance-Off, which has a monthly station in Brooklyn but goes on the road regularly. His background in underground punk affords him a route to nightlife that’s quite opposite than most full-time DJs. Toubin’s outlook has never been mainstream.

“The nightlife thing for me was through the back door,” Toubin explains. “Because I was a musician, right away I got all of the band dudes to DJ with me. Not many of us were so good but people came out. The first party I ever threw was a record release for my New York Night Train label. It was for Kid Congo Powers.”

Soon after – and several parties later – Toubin’s vinyl palette turned persnickety, and he began playing 45s exclusively. Nobody else was DJing like Toubin. It was his thing, his lucky invention, and he more than reaped the benefits of filling the void of non-electronic dance nights. Toubin found himself booking guests from indie bands both du jour and tried-and-true, like the Black Lips, King Khan, Jello Biafra and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He’s supported bills comprised of heavy-hitters like LCD Soundsystem, Jack White, Interpol, Black Keys and even Erykah Badu. In terms of his career, it’s all been quite a fairytale for Toubin.

Last winter, however, his winning streak hit a harsh hurdle, a near dead-end. While in Portland, a cab driver who was mid-diabetic shock smashed her car through Toubin’s first-floor hotel room, landing on his chest. The accident sent him into critical condition with 26 major injuries and confined him to ICU for more than a month. An avalanche of public support ensued, as major publications reported the tale and benefits were arranged in Brooklyn, L.A., San Francisco, Portland and other cities courtesy of friends and fans. Impressively, within five months, Toubin was back in action. He’s even touring again.

Photo by Brian "B-Dub" Williams

“It’s better,” Toubin says of his health. “I've still got a lot of work to do but I’m taking it pretty easy. Other than a week in Canada and another out west, I only play twice a week. Friday in NYC and Saturday soul clap where ever. So I’m working almost 1/3 as much as I used to and spending time with lots of therapists, trainers, etc.”

He requested we chat on Gmail rather than speak on the phone – a dramatic loss of hearing is one of a few lingering injuries.

“Yeah, I'm pretty deaf! But it’s fine with the type of volume in the clubs and music venues where I work. But it’s hard to say. I have some metal in me and some of the stuff, like my right hand, is really taking its time. But overall it’s nothing that I plan on feeling sorry for myself over,” he points out.

In most of the press resulting from the accident – which naturally exploded his level of fame – Toubin has been described as eternally positive.

“What do I have to bitch about? I'm a 41-year-old man that gets paid to go to parties and find out about really amazing music that I've never heard before!”

It’s not just in his story of recuperation where his cheery demeanor shines. His foray into DJing is another example of endurance, of constructive action rather than self-pitying inactivity. In the ’90s and early 2000s, Toubin played in a handful of now-defunct or idle bands like Grand Mal, the Hamicks and Noodle. He’d already graduated from college and was somewhat betting on music as a moneymaker – and, as is the case for most musicians, things didn’t pan out in the long-term.

“I came to NYC with an English degree [from the] University of Texas but, after a somewhat failed music career and some literally wasted years, 9/11 made me get my life in order and I made a list of jobs to work towards that were practical,” Toubin recalls. “And professor was the only one that sounded decent – despite the pay.”

During a successful stint in the History PHD program at the City University of New York (he’s a published academic as a result), Toubin says he grew “bored of studying,” and wanted to make a “real world” life for himself. A thesis on the uptown hip-hop scene led him to dive into the history of nightlife institutions.

“It definitely made me wonder what was going wrong with culture and if anybody could possibly do anything cool in terms of parties, unique music, public social culture, etc. in this day and age,” he says.

Around that time was the Kid Congo Powers shindig, later dubbed New York Night Train Wednesdays. And then he debuted more parties, among them the Thursday Thump at Enid’s, Boogaloo Shampoo at Beauty Bar Manhattan and Shakin’ All Over Sideways Down! at Home Sweet Home, the latter of which is still in motion every Friday and has featured guests like David Johansen of the New York Dolls and Jon Spencer. And that’s just a few on the laundry list of Toubin’s signature events.

Photo by Angela Wieland

So what’s his secret? How has Toubin managed to turn from the discouraged musician and reluctant academic into a super-booked, financially stable DJ?

The fact that Toubin plays soul and rock ‘n’ roll strictly on 45s, both familiar and extremely obscure, might have something to do with it.

“I definitely liked the sound of the 45s I was starting to acquire better than the LPs,” he notes.

Lugging around the smaller discs is significantly easier than carrying crates of albums, Toubin adds.

“Finally, I thought, it’s a cool aesthetic and sound to have, plus a challenge. Think about it. So much stuff never came out on 45. And a lot of the stuff on there is nearly impossible to find. So everything became a scavenger hunt and a puzzle – particularly since I now play only the original recordings and no reproductions.”

In some ways, Toubin’s academic past plays a role in his victory. There’s a mastery in his catalog of 45s – a sense of intelligence in choosing each single. Maybe even a bit of purpose.

“I was pretty excited when the Internet and home recording and the end of the record industry as we knew it popped up. I thought everything was gonna be more democratic, but instead the whole beast reconfigured itself and had to branch out into perfume or whatever they're peddling,” Toubin says. “I definitely think there's a lot of great underground music today – but there's always been. I guess what I'm saying is that there definitely was a period when you could turn on a radio in the United States and hear all kinds of great rock and roll, and I think that's gotta be our golden age. I don't only think it’s random. Our great musical period coincided with a more level playing field for black music and rural white music in the record industry. It also coincided with the smallest gap between rich and poor in our history and the rise in working class spending power. Very democratic and killer. Do you think a 13-year-old girl has anything to listen to today that sounds as good as the Rolling Stones?”

That fueled a rant is what powers Toubin’s weaponry in the war against masturbatory mass media. Okay, maybe it’s not that clear-cut or serious. Toubin isn’t expressly trying to reawaken culture by way of a modern Renaissance. But there’s no denying he’s had an impact. Before his accident, copycat – ahem, likeminded – DJs were popping up everywhere. Post-accident and surge in popularity, the numbers have obviously exploded.

“I'm super-stoked that this thing is blooming all over the place,” Toubin assures. “The main reason that you try so hard to find all of this great music on these huge sounding records is that you want to share it with people and you want it to grow and you want to make culture a lot more interesting…I don't want to be retro but, just as the renaissance thinkers and artists liked to look back at the classical era and find their influence there, and hence escaped the dark ages, I want to be part of that process today and be a tiny force in helping people get away from the garbage on their radios.”

No matter Toubin’s efforts, there’s little anyone can do to thwart the mainstream media’s iron fist from clobbering the hell out of worthwhile culture. But at least now old school rock ‘n’ roll enthusiasts have plenty of remix-free spots to boogie on any given night.

Heavy Baggage: The Jens Lekman Method

2012-10-26T12:03:00.000-04:00

Published in the Oct. 12 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Closure after an emotional setback is different for everybody. For Jens Lekman, it doesn’t really exist.

Unlike the rest of Lekman’s more than 10 years worth of releases, which have almost strictly been EPs or compilations of scattered recordings, I Know What Love Isn’t is his first thematically concrete album. The fallout after the failure of a citizenship-based marriage – which Lekman told Pitchfork was the “worst break-up” he’s ever endured – is what fueled the album to materialize, and it taught him a lesson in emotional baggage along the way.

“I started out writing horrible songs about breakups and heartbreak. And I felt like, this is disgusting, I don’t want to write these songs,” Lekman recalls. “I tried to write something completely different, and in that process I wrote the songs for the Argument with Myself EP. And I tried to write the other songs like that too, where I just wrote to see what would happen, with not a theme or an idea for a song in mind. But eventually those songs would just lead me back to the breakup anyway, so it was really like a circle.”

Failures and misunderstandings, social ineptness and even the giggly greatness of love are Lekman’s typical storytelling specialties. But on I Know What Love Isn’t he is, albeit inadvertently, at his most focused. The circular theme became the centerpiece of the album.

“It’s not something I had in mind when I wrote it, but I like the idea of [the album] sort of replicating the emotions that you go through [after a breakup], where you are in this horrible despair for a while,” he explains. “And then maybe late at night you go out with a friend and you forget all about it…This type of feeling like, oh, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine, I have my best friend here, we’re out driving around in the city. I feel like I get it all. I’m over it. Everything is fine now. Then you wake up the next day in the same state that you were the morning before. [The album] sort of replicates that feeling too, and I like that.”

A lone tinkering piano of “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name” opens the album, and an acoustic guitar version accompanied by Lekman singing quite subtly incredibly sullen lines about his misery closes it out. In the middle there are some distractions from his melancholy that serve the same purpose of those post-breakup outings. They’re as real as any heartbreak, but fleeting, and consistently trumped in solitude.

Sonically the album is less layered, less lustrous than Lekman’s previous work. The grandiose sounds of complete string sections, blaring horns and sweeping crescendos of 2007’s Night Falls Over Kortedala are toned down. The sound is smoothed over; it’s as spherical as the lyrical content is circular. There are ups and downs in each song, of course, but they’re usually small, little rivets of transition marked by a harder hit of the tambourine or a sly introduction of a single flute.

This scaled-down style affords the album a certain desolate moodiness, even on the more upbeat numbers, like “Become Someone Else’s.” Lekman manages to turn the seemingly fortunate dilemma of having too many suitors into something sad, despite the nod-worthy tempo. Instead of reveling in her vast selection, Lekman implies the subject, Jenny, is made lonely by in her noncommittal nature. It stands alone as the only song not dripping with Lekman’s tears, though his thinking in its creation was still likely affected.

The rest illuminates the phases of closure. Lekman wallows with regret for ever meeting his former mate in the chiming, Spanish guitar tinged “Erica America,” and expresses utter sadness in “She Just Doesn’t Want to be with You Anymore.” He reminisces on “Some Dandruff on Your Shoulder,” a poppy tune that sounds most like what we’ve come to expect from Lekman than any other, and seemingly pinpoints a moment when he should have seen his relationship’s demise coming. On the bare and quiet acoustic “I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots,” after admitting he’s been stuck in the muck of sad for two years, Lekman’s sings, “In my next dream I want a pair of cowboy boots/ The kind of that walks the straightest and the most narrow route/ Anywhere but back to you.”

“The World Moves On” is lyrically a climax for Lekman, in which he finds a turning point: “You don’t ever get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully.” The song is chipper, complete with finger-snaps. Lekman’s chin is up and out of the despair; the reflection and hindsight ready him to move forward.

“The line deals with our idea of closure…I think it’s a bit of a modern invention, this idea that all of the sudden everything will be good again,” Lekman says. “I think that it’s something we seem to expect for some reason. It’s almost like you’re not permitted to grieve after a certain amount of time…I watched this show on British TV where this famous Swedish singer from the ’80s came out and started talking about this divorce that she went through 10 years ago, and she broke into tears. And everyone started writing these angry letters to the newspaper saying how dare she be upset about something that happened 10 years ago when she’s happily married now. It’s almost like we’re not permitted to grieve after a certain amount of time, like you’re supposed to get over things. And I don’t think it works like that.”

One of the first songs Lekman wrote for I Know What Love Isn’t was “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love.” It promotes a similar sentiment as “The World Moves On;” an effort in endurance, an extension of Lekman’s brand of moving on.

“I was watching a BBC docudrama called Threads from 1984 which deals with the little...town of Sheffield in the UK being hit by a nuclear bomb,” Lekman says of the song’s origin. “It’s an extremely bleak and depressing picture of nuclear war, made in the basement when that was actually a possibility. I watched that with a friend of mine and I wasn’t at a very good point in my life, and somehow felt strangely comforted by it. I wrote to her afterward and said thank you for showing me that. I have no idea why I feel appeased by that. And she said, ‘Well, of course. The end of the world is bigger than love.’ And I thought that was a beautiful line.”

The circular motif, however, somewhat implies passivism. It does seem that Lekman is the kind to fight his feelings only briefly before giving in, though clearly his ability to cope is sturdy. But while he’s pretty soft-spoken and possesses the demeanor (and tells the life stories) of a pacifist, he’s not without gall. His guts might be a little more tender than most, but they’re not useless – even when it comes to declaring his adoration for a celebrity. When Kirsten Dunst was filming Melancholia in Lekman’s town of Gothenburg, Sweden a couple years ago, he performed a tribute of sorts about his quest to find her. (He didn’t, by the way.)

“The idea of Kirsten was more like…” he sighs. “I think when I tell the story about the song at the show I talk about reading that she likes my music in a newspaper once. And trying really hard to not get impressed by that, because I thought, you know, I’m not going to be impressed by some famous person liking my music. That doesn’t matter. And then realizing that it was creeping up on me anyways – feeling like I finally made it, I finally got the attention of someone who is something. And I guess in a way that stems from growing up in this shitty little suburb outside of the city, next to a potato chip factory looming over my head like some sort of tombstone over my future and destiny. So I don’t know too much about Kirsten Dunst, but for some reason her saying that she liked my music, for some reason it meant something for me. …It probably stems from my background and where I grew up.”

Lekman admits that he doesn’t know what he would have done if he’d really found Dunst. (He also confessed to liking her teen-targeted cheerleading flick Bring it On.)

Further evidence of Lekman’s fortitude is found in escaping the dead end of his childhood home. Instead of sticking around, he left for the city to attend art school, where he says his upbringing had him feeling a little at odds with his upper-middleclass peers. But he simply wasn’t going to work at the factory.

“It was the sentiment that the potato chip factory, which was the big industry in that suburb, it sort of gave you the promise that you will get a job – at the factory. ‘Don’t worry, you will get a job,’” he says as if mimicking his elders. “But there was also the feeling that this is the only job that you will ever get. And I know a lot of my friends who are working at that potato chip factory. There was a bit of a feeling, like because it was a very, not a very good neighborhood, people really had that feeling, like I’m never going to become anything.”

In some ways, Lekman’s idea of closure – that there really is none, and instead you pile your pain on top of the rest and trudge on – is quite depressing. It suggests pain remains under the skin permanently, and could be more often subdued than not but will still painfully break through to the surface sometime. But Lekman’s filter has always been rose-colored, so to consider his type of closure discouraging would be inaccurate. He isn’t saddled by his sorrows. Instead, he finds constructive uses for them.

He pits the supposed strangeness of his citizenship marriage against a more typical romantic behavior in “I Know What Love Isn’t,” the sunny second-to-last song of the LP: “Hey do you want to go see a band?/ No I hate bands/ It’s always packed with men spooning their girlfriends/ Clutching their hands as if they let go/ Their feet would lift from the ground and descend/ I don’t know what love is/ But I know what it isn’t.”

Lekman does close with “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name,” though, and it is definitely heart-wrenching. But that’s simply another facet of his coping – accepting everything. Making I Know What Love Isn’t did present the option to subscribe to a more traditional finale though.

“Something that was kind of funny [was that] in the beginning, people would ask me if [writing the LP] helped me,” Lekman says. “And I would just laugh and say that’s exactly what the album is not about. Then…when people started bringing these preview copies of the album to the interviews and they would put it on the table, I would look at this record and [realize] that all those feelings and all that time, it’s on this little piece of plastic between us. And I can just leave it and move on.”

Lekman adds that the process was therapeutic, but it still seems likely that this isn’t the last mention of his marriage woes. There’s every reason to believe 10 years from now, he’ll be crying about it on a British TV show.

Photos by Kristin Lidell.

Album Review: Crusaders of Love - Take it Easy...But Take it! [FDH]

2012-10-26T11:58:00.000-04:00

Published in the Oct. 12 issue of Stomp and Stammer

It’s a little weird that the leadoff track on Crusaders of Love’s second LP bears the name of their two-year-old debut Never Grow Up. To say the band embodies that phrase, however, would be an understatement. The power-pop flag these Lille-bred Frenchies wave is emblazoned with all the trappings of youth: Snotty vocals, partying, naivety and intense, short-lived love. With that in mind, maybe it’s not so strange they’ve doubly announced their commitment to adolescence.

“Never Grow Up” boasts all the genre trappings: A bouncy beat, repetitive lyrics (“No I never had a job/ Never had a job/ Because I never wanted one” is one of many examples) and rockin’ solos accenting the same three tried-and-true chords. There’s a nod of reflection in the tune when frontman Alexandre Fleuris questions, “Are my dreams all dead now?” But otherwise, it’s a straight-up ode to anti-adulthood.

To be honest, the Crusaders of Love aren’t exactly dynamic creatively. Take it Easy….but Take it! not only sounds a lot likeNever Grow Up, but also like the band’s predecessors. The first few riffs and initial drumbeat combo of “Make It” is blatantly borrowed from the Exploding Hearts’ “I’m a Pretender.” Whether intentional or not, it’s too obvious a likeness to deny. For any diehard fan of the genre, such spot-on duplication might be tiresome.

But their mastery of the homage is commendable, and it’s fair to say a lot of power-pop is an amalgam of the past. A saving grace of distinction: Fleuris’ vocals are high and nasally, a trait more typical of punk, not power-pop. Forever phlegmy with a side of bratty, the result gives some uniqueness to the sound. And it’s well-suited for lines like “Summer’s over and I know/ You’re gonna be gone forever/ I thought we could stay together,” the lead-up to the whiny lost-love tale of “Next Summer.”

While “Lonely City” thrashes a little, “A Place We’re All Going” is the album’s only real foray outside the expected rubric. The song is expansive and echoing; drawn-out, borderline psych riffs replace the staccato style employed the bulk of the other 10. It’s their particular brand of ballad, standing totally opposite of where the LP started. Let’s not be fooled, though. The Crusaders of Love don’t want to grow up, so they probably never will – and holding tight to an overwhelming idolatry is part of that.

Album Review: Allah-Las - S/T [Innovative Leisure]

2012-10-26T11:56:00.000-04:00

Published in the Oct. 12 issue of Stomp and Stammer

There are only so many Nuggets. Early in the days of discovery, finding gold’s a lot easier. After a while, however, the digging becomes a drag as the breakthroughs become fewer and less frequent. Tiresome as it may be, the most fervent of fuzz followers endure – and, every once in a while, are handsomely rewarded by bands like the Allah-Las.

The Los Angeles-bred outfit’s been toiling away since 2008, somehow unable to get it together, whether for reasons financial or fussy, until now. And thank goodness they did. Their self-titled debut is retro revivalism at its finest, a blend of psych and surf that’s audibly well-informed. As much as they can be likened to more popular members of each canon, like 13th Floor Elevators or Them, the Allah-Las put enough beach in their beat to incur an Os Mutantes toll, too. Above all else, the original LA psych scene, over which the Byrds and Captain Beefheart and the Seeds and Iron Butterfly reigned, is the specific fire they’re stoking – and in that delicate of a manner.

The Allah-Las are a featherweight version of their predecessors, offering a mood that’s at times as leisurely as a sun-drenched day, and occasionally as hazy as the lazy aftermath. They soak in an offset lagoon rather than battle the breakers. It’s quite pleasant.

Booming bass underscores the twang of surf-style riffs on “Catamaran.” Shakers illuminate the beat, a mesmerizing effect when combined with the repetitious guitar. Phrases like “I’m gonna get you girl” and later “She don’t care if I got bread” on the equally hypnotic “Don’t You Forget It” lend some historical authenticity, but there are moments – mainly lyrically – when time reveals itself, and the Allah-Las show their 2012 timestamp. The subtle freakishness of old-school psych isn’t particularly present for them; that revelatory, mind-gone-nomad aspect of the genre is sometimes out of reach for bands. (It’s not impossible to achieve, though. See neighborhood counterpart White Fence.) Most promises of expounding upon ideas along that wavelength aren’t kept. “No Voodoo,” for one, is aesthetically astute, but can’t withstand closer inspection.

“Sandy,” however, with its talk of a girl’s mind lost and her perilous proximity to the sun, plays the part just right. It’s a swaying number, a standout that subtly borrows notes from the Stones’ “Play with Fire.” Some hints of tropicalia are found in the fairly languid instrumental “Ela Navega,” which is a nice break from the brand of twang that’s persisted thus far. “Catalina” works similarly, but exists closer to that recurring melody, and aside from intro riffs, that’s the final break. A lot of psych is just as rhythmically repetitious, which for some is part of its charm.

The lyrical content surely does matter, though. But while they may not have achieved any level of third-eye mysticism, the Allah-Las are by no means near philistine-caliber contemporary. There’s something to cherish here, some gratitude owed for this gem. The Allah-Las should be greeted by the modern-day world of psych with no trepidation – but maybe someone should slip a laced joint into their welcome basket.

Album Review: JEFF the Brotherhood - Hypnotic Nights [Warner Bros.]

2012-09-26T14:26:00.003-04:00

Published in the Aug. 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Taking the major-label leap after nearly a decade cultivating an underground following can be problematic. We aren’t in the 924 Gilman days where caving into commercialism means utter banishment anymore, of course. But JEFF the Brotherhood’s long been supported by a sector of rock ‘n’ roll that can often be elitist in its resistance to the mainstream. Until recently, the Nashville brothers were exemplary members of the independent garage-rock scene. For years they’ve fronted the independent label Infinity Cat, through which they’ve released five of their own LPs, in addition to albums and singles for a slew of other garage-centric bands. The pair has never failed to slather Sonic Youth-thick distortion over riffs that bounce from dizzying to pounding to trippy. But while Hypnotic Nights, their sixth LP and Warner Bros. debut, is far from flawless, it’s certainly not grounds for exile.

In terms of pleasing their fan base this time around, the odds are against Jake and Jamin Orrall. Dan Auerbach of the arena-filling Black Keys produced Hypnotic Nights, JTB’s sixth LP and Warner Bros. debut. Credits like Jessica Lea Mayfield, Dr. John and the Ettes don’t offer much hope for Auerbach meshing well with JEFF’s trademark mix of melody and gravely guitars, although the earlier, less polished Black Keys recordings suggest otherwise. The Orralls’ role in Jack White’s first public attempt at a joke – backing ICP on a cover of a Mozart song last year – felt like too desperate a stunt to be funny. While that went down months before the July release of Hypnotic Nights, it raised some questions as to what the hell the Orralls were doing with themselves. When talk of Auerbach’s involvement arose, the unwanted aftertaste of Faygo was still lingering in many a mouth. But, save for a few peeks over the precipice of mainstream rock, JTB’s feet appear to still be planted firmly in the revved-up garage that’s become their signature.

A clean kickoff beat opens the album on “Country Life,” which employs the same sandpapered quality of guitar expected from any JTB tune. There’s some squeals and screeches here and there that sound more likely meticulously placed than naturally occurring, but they’re quickly forgotten after the subtle scrape of dissonance from the high-octave vocals in the chorus. The time-layered, supercharged strums that roll in right after the first verse of “Hypnotic Mind” sound like engines on a speedway in slow motion, while “Wood Ox” ping-pongs lightly until reaching the rush of delirium. The wild, rough choruses of Hypnotic Night’spredecessors – particularly Heavy Days and We Are the Champions – remain intact there and on a few other tunes.

Where Jake and Jamin Orrall falter is in breaking away from the blueprint they created for themselves (and have practically mastered). Like “Endless Fire” on We Are the Champions, “Region of Fire” is another slice of introspection written without regard for the Orralls’ vocal capabilities. They can get up there, sure, but stripping away the gritty guitars reveals how shaky they sounded all along. Oh yeah, there’s light keys laced throughout the album. They’re nice and wonky sounding, usually paired perfectly with riffs in a way so complementary they’d go unnoticed – if not for the closing track, “Changes.” The keys take on a church-organ tone and soulful vocals commence, but there’s no salvation for this song. It’s like a gospel rehearsal slammed against a blooper reel from the spaceship landing scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s immensely irritating.

Let’s not point fingers and pick who’s to blame for those failed stretches outside JTB’s scope. At least there are only two of them, and the righteous choruses of the album’s tried-and-true jams make those missteps easy to ignore. It was just a few rocks kicked over the ledge that overlooks big-shot canyon anyway – and the Orralls probably hated the hollow thuds at the end of the drop as much as anyone else.

Hey, Merle Haggard! Speak Up, We Can’t Hear You

2012-09-26T14:24:00.002-04:00

Published in the Aug. 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

After beating cancer in 2008 then a hospital stint serious enough to halt last January’s tour, you’d think 75-year-old Merle Haggard would start hunting for the telltale white flag. It wouldn’t be a shameful surrender, of course. There’s no glass ceiling so to speak, but he’s a Country Music Hall of Famer, a BMI Icon and a recent Kennedy Center for Performing Arts honoree, among other titles. He’s released nearly 80 albums. He’s already an American music icon of the highest caliber.

Myriam Santos

Despite health troubles, the Hag’s still truckin’ at a rate practically on par with his golden days. There’s never been too noticeable a gap in productivity, and while his sound has adapted with age, he’s never lost grip of his traditional country roots. Even Working in Tennessee, released last fall, eases comfortably into his immense catalog. In most respects, he’s still operating the same way he used to.

Except when speaking on the record. He’s nearly nailed down diplomacy. Reporters struggle to get the poet of the common man to turn on the Hag, to get snippy or, at the very least, say something new. That’s what the frequently banal stories written about him suggest, at least.

Just because Haggard isn’t so readily serving up saucy quips, however, doesn’t mean he’s turned off the commentary altogether. These days, it seems an extra second or two, a break in conversation, helps a little extra something slip out.

Consider his comments about “Under the Bridge,” a mid-album track from Working in Tennessee. The narrator’s utter positivity – “Under the bridge/ I can make believe I’m livin’ in a castle” – about homelessness, the frequency of which Haggard relates to today’s economy, is actually quite depressing.

“Well, it’s just one of those things that came along,” he says, seemingly with a shrug. “I don’t sweat something out. I’m an impulse writer.”

A little uproar in the late ‘60s when “Okie from Muskogee” was being scooped up by conservatives and thus infuriating anti-Vietnam activists, Haggard reportedly claimed the lyrics were written in jest. Really? All the jabs at hippies (“We don’t smoke marijuana….we don’t take our trips on LSD/ We don’t burn our draft cards”) and patriotic notions (“We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse”) were intended to be comical? Unlikely. But instead of using the controversial anthem to speak publicly about its implied message, he immediately released an intensified, clearer version of it through “Fightin’ Side of Me.”

Politics is still part of Haggard’s songwriting, but its hold is waning. We’ve gone from the more blatant approach of his earlier days to the standoffishness heard in the title track on I Am What I Am, Haggard’s second most recent album: “I won’t be a slave/ And I won’t be a prisoner/ I’m just a nephew/ To today’s Uncle Sam.” On Working in Tennessee, we’re given a series of complaints on “What I Hate.” There are flip-flopping politicians, chemtrails, never-ending war and the oblivious, negligent attitude of “most folks.”

Myriam Santos

Haggard aligned himself politically after the “Okie” ordeal. He earned (and returned) the favor of President Nixon and President Reagan. He later supported George W. Bush, but vaguely denounced the family’s involvement with oil. In 2007, he publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton. Shortly after Obama took office, he published an optimistic piece of prose on his website: “We got a new style with a sincere smile/ And a new song to sing along/ And we got sunshine and a new guy/ And hope’s [sic] are high.” Whether to the left or the right, Haggard put his foot down. As another election looms, he’s all but taken off his boots.

See what he did there? He proposed a potential feeling of some people who may not support Obama anymore. Qualifiers, tempering. Is Haggard too jaded to take a clear-cut stand about a single thing anymore?

“I’ve talked to politicians that I thought would have been better for the job than either one of the people that we’ve got to vote for now. But they’re smart enough to not be running for president. Colin Powell I think would have made an excellent candidate, but he doesn’t want to be president,” he laughs heartily.

Haggard’s history of political side-switching supports that statement. He doesn’t seem to restrict himself to a particular party, only the officeholder’s performance.

“I think when Obama came in office…there was a lot of people who were for him who probably aren’t for him now, that were tired of the Bush regime and wanted a change,” he notes. “And they got a change, but it didn’t go in the direction that a lot of them anticipated. Now there’s a lot of people who voted for Obama who probably won’t vote for him this time.”

“Working in Tennessee,” which features both Willie Nelson and Haggard’s son Ben, was written for the stage, he says. And that situation may never be realized.

“It’s not a good thing to do as it used to be,” Haggard says of the potential to bring special guests on tour. “It costs too much money! Nobody’s got any money. We’re in some sort of a depression here. We’re lucky to draw a thousand, let alone ten thousand.”

Like the rest of the music industry – hell, every industry – a struggling economy doesn’t accommodate much beyond the minimum. Obama’s opponent is final now, sure. But couldn’t Haggard rally to sway them both, then pressure the winner even harder? He could.

More likely: He won’t. Haggard seems content keeping politics at an arm’s length now. Maybe for him the climate’s too volatile, the storms too varied and the fight too futile.

Even his personal sobriety, a topic he’s been asked about for decades, presented too many toes to step on.

“It’s what it is. When you’re sober, you’re sober,” he says plainly. “And it seems like it was a lot more fun when we were drunk, but I don’t know what to say about it – there’d be somebody all over me if I agreed with it.”

How can Haggard plead to put “America First” when he won’t even choose between admitting he misses his off-wagon shenanigans or denouncing them totally? Maybe he’s conflicted – that’s fair. A fearful dismissal, however, breeds ambiguity. In the 2005 anti-war song he asked to “liberate these United States” and claimed “freedom is stuck in reverse.” He’s criticized Wal-Mart’s role in the increasing eradication of mom-and-pop stores, even linking his switch to his current label, the independent imprint Vanguard, to that distaste.

In a recent Dallas Observer story, he noted candidates’ timidity to touch on important issues and named the Middle East as a distraction.

“I think the number one issue is the border. And we seem to avoid that in every debate. I don’t recall it being any issue brought up in any debate. I think it’s the number-one problem,” Haggard says.

It’s not Haggard’s responsibility to absolve the country of its troubles. But as an artist who’s consistently called attention to society’s woes, he has some obligation to carry on. Age brings wisdom, right? Haggard’s up there. Through the jail and prison stints of his youth saw America’s darkest corners. He was there for – in the midst of – the sweeping Vietnam-era change. He knew the country when it was truly great, before narcissistic self-proclamations of greatness grew to be a shameful shadow over a sad reality.

A start-to-finish political speech of an album isn’t necessary. The poet of the common man should speak on their behalf not only for social awareness but also for human catharsis, whether through love songs or drinking songs or a blend of both (see the classic “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”). Songs like “Mama Tried,” too – Haggard’s deviance serves to pale and forgive others’ missteps.

It’s in Haggard to step onto shaky ground, to piss people off in the name of something. Contemporary country artists aren’t afraid to. Haggard doesn’t have much respect for most of their songwriting – he doesn’t “hear much of a storyline” and has dubbed that variety “studio bands.” His silence, unfortunately, makes way for the shellacked singers of Nashville to present their opinions as the standard.

But Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams, Jr. – they are the standard. It’s not quite fair to nudge only one old-school country icon, but Haggard’s long been a layman’s political pundit in a cowboy hat. Now’s not the time to retire.

Haggard’s rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues” is a nice touch, and second go at his own “Working Man Blues” boasts not only a bluesy beat for toe-tapping but also shows stellar collaboration between all involved. “Down on the Houseboat,” like most country songs, is named to correspond with the lyrics, but its expected beachy vibe is carried throughout the album. Haggard pays homage to his comrades and his path-clearing inspirations on “Too Much Boogie Woogie,” and the result is fun, danceable and one of the LP's highlights.

But for Haggard, the darling of Working in Tennessee is one that should provoke political discussion: “Under the Bridge."

Album Review: Timmy's Organism - "Raw Sewage Roq" [In the Red]

2012-09-26T14:24:00.001-04:00

Published in the Aug. 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Timmy Vulgar’s been ripping through the garage-punk realm with unparalleled consistency since 2004. His brand of weirdo space-punk has been easily identifiable in every project: Clone Defects, then Human Eye and Timmy’s Organism. His touch is a shining example of artistic idiosyncrasy in a genre that’s just as prone to carbon copying as the major label crud it purports to be an alternative to. Everything he does sounds true to self, and the unexpected balance of melody and brut freakishness (heavier on the latter) never fails to be simultaneously strange, intriguing, gross, enjoyable and aggressive.

A feeling of a chaotic end-of-the-world escape to outer space pulses through virtually all of his creations. His work in totality – the crude and creepy lyrics, his helium-tinged growl, the polluted quality of guitar and the irrational imagery of some of the accompanying videos – is the stuff of a punk-rock sci-fi comic book that’s yet to be written.

But it could be written, and Raw Sewage Roq would make an ideal debut. It’s the second LP filed under Timmy’s Organism in his catalog, but since Vulgar’s solo work was the basis of the first release, this full-band offering – which is, as expected, fuller in sound as a result – is an ideal beginning.

(Note: It’s not entirely silly and irrelevant to speculate about a plot shaped by Vulgar’s catalog. He was awarded a fellowship (read: $25,000 in funding) from Detroit’s Kresge Arts in 2010, and while the school’s website calls him a composer/musician, In the Red’s most recent press release for Vulgar adds his “creative vision and commitment to excellence within a wide range of artistic disciplines” was a deciding factor. So there.)

Upbeat album launcher “Cats on the Moon” spastically time travels from the era of the Vikings to prehistoric times, jumps to Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti western heyday and Saturday Night Fever and “1980s children/ Glued to the television” then back to the ‘70s porn, until finally reaching a future where cats prance on the moon and Elvis is alive and well, “eating a salad/ Singing a ballad.” At first, it appears to be an afflicted, sort of mental version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” But additional oddities are named and Vulgar shouts, “Welcome, everybody, to the U.S.A.!” And there’s the introduction to the series. (Obviously.)

The rest of this Roq is almost just as readily translated. “Unhook My Leash,” a darker tune that sears like the cracking of a fiery whip, finds Vulgar captured and treated “like a dog” in this depraved new world. He escapes quickly in the next chapter (literally the following song) and defiantly marches to “Take the Castle.” Later, he endures “Low Cut Surgery.” He kind of enjoys it.

Vulgar’s persona recalls the frequently fictionalized notion of superhuman effects from contamination by hazardous chemicals. In the title track, it’s noted that he and his comrades “were born in the sewer.” In the hypothetical Raw Sewage Roq comic book – or graphic novel, if you prefer – his secret abilities would be the centerpiece of his character’s origin.

There’s no proof that the real-life Timmy Vulgar has superpowers of any kind, of course. But there isn’t any evidence to the contrary, either.

Reefer Madness! Natural Child Learn to Drink and Party Better

2012-07-21T18:25:00.000-04:00

Published in the June 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

If you let it, the inherent energy of youth can give you a generous edge on being productive, maybe even prolific. But when you challenge that vigor with full-throttle, relentless partying, sluggishness is inevitable – for most. In the slim percentage of twenty-somethings who are unaffected by beating up their bodies with unhealthy behaviors rests Natural Child. But, of course, they’re not resting at all.

Courtesy of Natural Child

In their third year as a band, they’ve already released a handful of 7-inches and EPs, plus two full-lengths, the latest of which is April’s For the Love of the Game on Burger Records. The Nashville-based trio is as outspokenly pro-weed as Willie Nelson, but their day-to-day is likely faster-paced than Willie’s early exploits

Where Natural Child have ended up is a place that surpasses the rest of the players in the hub of Nashville buzz bands, where five-minute jams spotlight twangy old-school riffs blended with psych-style intricacy. Even the guys of guitar-driven JEFF the Brotherhood, who run Nashville’s Infinity Cat imprint – which is responsible for several Natural Child releases – get a run for their money in Natural Child’s complicated handiwork. Their lyrics often defy the content and density expected of them, too. Somehow, between the dizziness of bong rips, they've done more than just spew out mindless releases. They'e managed to elevate their sound from the commonplace amped-up garage of their early singles to a complex level that's more accurately likened to classic rock fused with country and blues.

“It’s changed some, yeah,” bassist Wes Traylor says of the band’s sound. “We’ve really just gotten better at playing. We’ve always been shooting for the same thing.”

On “White Man’s Burden,” a bluesy, psych-laced tune from an early 7-inch bearing the same name, frontman Seth Murray sings, “I don’t know what to do about the white man’s burden/ I guess I fit the skin I’m in but I just keep searching/ I try living different ways but it’s not my culture/ I just take it anyway like a soldier of fortune.” Maybe it’s not academia-level exploration of the theme, but at least there’s a hint of thoughtfulness.

For the Love of the Game boasts a choice cover, too: Country staple Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” It’s one of Hall’s best tracks, and they do it justice by altering little besides adding a second layer of vocals.

That’s not the only slow-truckin’ song they’ve got either. They’ve penned a few of their own: “No One Writes Sad Songs Anymore” (FTLOTG), the aforementioned “White Man’s Burden” and a soon-to-be-released track they say is their slowest yet.

“It’s the slowest song – the quietest, slowest song maybe ever written,” jokes Martin.

Still, a giant pot leaf is the focal point of Natural Child’s M.O. Everything seems to be an extension of or at least partly fueled by getting high. They released FTLOTG on April 20 and posted footage of their antics daily as a lead-up. One is just the guys pouring beer into the mouth of and talking to a skull. Another video involves a 40-ounce beer, a pitch and a stick. Nobody was injured, the band reports, in that shot or any others.

“All of those videos are kind of accidents,” Traylor laughs. “I don’t know if you saw the one of me puking, but that was an accident.”

“We just compiled all the footage of touring and partying that we had on our cell phones for the past year,” drummer Zach Martin explains. “We just compiled whatever we could find. We don’t document a lot of that stuff – but that’s just kind of what we do.”

“I can’t wait until we can get somebody to follow us around and film us, because then we’ll really get all the good stuff. All the really good accidents,” Traylor adds.

Courtesy of Natural Child

How these guys see through bloodshot eyes well enough to find the stage, much less slay guitar solos, is quite the mystery. Sure, the Rolling Stones – who Natural Child often channel sonically – were notorious for hard partying well into the middle of their career. (Although I don’t recall weed being their drug of choice.) For most bands known to fit the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle stereotype, however, it’s clearly noted by gaping holes in their repertoire that hangovers are halting productivity.

“We’ve learned to cope with the exhaustion,” Martin notes.

“You learn to drink and party better,” Traylor says.

“You learn that life is shit. You wake up every day feeling like shit. If you accept it, then it’s easy to accept. Once you’ve accepted it,” Martin laughs.

Because they’re so blatantly blazed, Natural Child often gets tagged as stoner rock. To be fair, that’s not the only reason. They do play the kind of rock ‘n’ roll that can loosely be deemed as such. Traditionally, the term has mainly been delegated to bands like Sleep and other heavy-on-the-sludge metal bands. But its reach in mainstream consciousness extends to Kyuss and its derivatives, too – namely Eagles of Death Metal and Queens of the Stone Age. And now Nashville’s Natural Child is in the mix, despite that they don’t really sound a lick like their alleged predecessors. So let’s not oversimplify. Natural Child isn’t a stoner rock band – they’re just stoners who play rock ‘n’ roll.

But sometimes they play reggae too. They dropped a little surprise in the latter end of FTLOTG. It’s called “Paradise Heights,” and it’s certifiably a reggae song.

“I really like it,” Traylor says. “Is there a problem with putting a reggae song on an album?”

No, not a problem, but it’s definitely a wild hair on a slick LP of like-minded songs. It’s about getting robbed, getting some codeine and a gun. (Always a good idea.)

“Did you listen to the story? That’s a true story!” Murray exclaims. “Except for going to jail on a weapons charge. That’s the only part we made up. The rest of it is a completely true story about where we live.”

“I thought everybody listened to reggae,” Traylor wonders. “It’s funny that people bring up that song like, ‘What the fuck is up with the reggae song?’ People are supposed to know we smoke a ton of weed, right?”

Silliness aside, it’s followed by “Faces of Death Blues,” which asks for life until 110 and the strength of 20 young men and ends with slow guitar solo patterned with handclaps. And then the next one picks up the pace and rips the Stones, complete with an introductory “woo!” It’s got an outlaw country vibe though – “I ain’t gonna stop/ Just because I get old/ Oh, I never been good/ At doin’ what I’m told/ I’ll be six feet deep/ Before I get cold.”

They’re not bluffing – they’re recording a third LP early this month (already dubbed Hard in Heaven), and there’s a live 7-inch slated for issue in July.

When asked approximately when in June it is that they’ll stop in Atlanta, though, the dudes get a little cloudy.

Collectively, they offer a drawn-out mutter: “Uhhhhhhhhh…”

Okay, maybe sometimes they’re a little too stoned.

Sonny Vincent’s Got a New Attitude (But Some Punk Anthologies Still Need Revising)

2012-07-21T18:16:00.004-04:00

Feature published in the May 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

When I talked to Sonny Vincent around this time last year, he seemed to have a pretty hefty chip on his shoulder. The ringleader of the often overlooked ’77 New York City punk band Testors has always been outspokenly against catering to commercialism. He nearly equated New Wave with compromise in the name of financial gain.

“We didn’t kiss ass to no record companies,” he told me tersely.

Now, after two Testors reunion shows last year, it’s more than just diehard punk musicians and fans who know who Sonny is. Followers of labels like In the Red, Burger Records, Trouble in Mind and Atlanta’s own Douchemaster Records – basically the genre’s entire new school – are doing backflips over Sonny’s entire catalog. And he’s still not groveling.

His repertoire amounts to more than 40 releases under various designations. To name a few, in no particular order: Shotgun Rationale, Sonny Vincent and His Rat Race Choir, Model Prisoners, Sonny Vincent and the Safety Pins, a slew of recordings with Moe Tucker at the forefront, Sonny Vincent and the Extreme, releases as just Sonny Vincent and, of course, Testors. (And also: Testors featuring Sonny Vincent.) He’s worked with Cheetah Chrome (Dead Boys), Captain Sensible (The Damned), Bob Stinson (Replacements), Richard Hell, Scott Asheton (Stooges) and Chris Romanelli (Plasmatics), among other notable members or former players for well-revered punk bands. If anyone’s got a right to be ticked off that he was somewhat lost in the shuffle, it’s Sonny Vincent.

Courtesy of Sonny Vincent

These days, however, he sounds more peaceful. I couldn’t have imagined the Sonny I spoke to last year calmly ordering a tall iced coffee with two shots of espresso. But he did – and then apologized for the few seconds I waited.

That’s not to say Sonny was a jerk. By no means was he rude to me. He wasn’t brazenly negative, either. He was weeks away from playing a Testors reunion show in New York with the original lineup intact. He seemed quite thrilled about it. But when I brought up new punk bands, he joked, “I think they should just give me some royalties, direct, person to person.” And I’d already read a disappointingly similar quote someplace else.

The talk this time around, though, was more positive – and original, too. It was the afternoon of the kickoff to a nearly month-long tour as Sonny Vincent and the Bad Reactions, a newly formed lineup. Who’s playing with him? Oh, just some new-school punks: onetime Beat Beat Beat members Josh Martin (now in Ex-Humans) and Punk Rock John. Luis Herrera from Sorrows is in there too. Despite recently recording an as-yet-untitled LP with Rat Scabies of The Damned, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols and Steve Mackay of the Stooges (all shown with Sonny in these photos, along with an old shot of Testors), Sonny says they’ll play mostly Testors material.

Courtesy of Sonny Vincent

“[It’s] because the guys are crazy about Testors,” he explains. “I haven’t played a lot of Testors songs since Testors. I do have a few Testors songs that are in the rotation in my set list when I’m playing live, but usually I’m not satisfied with the way people play them. And there’s a lot of the Testors songs that I never even attempted with certain musicians. It turns out that Josh and Jon and Luis can. All I can say is they can do the Testors stuff justice and we’re going to be slamming out a lot of the Testors songs on this tour.”

Is it because Sonny’s finally getting his due that his aggression has taken a back seat? It’s got to feel good to know you’re finally respected on a broader scale. He’s never really paused his music-making, but a telltale sign of interest these days is the amount of information available online, whether it be interviews or fan pages or YouTube videos. Compared to last year, the electronic database of Sonny Vincent has drastically improved.

“That is somewhat satisfying, yeah,” he admits. “But…it takes a long time for things to manifest. My intentions were to, like you know, I said it a billion times, not to sell out and to keep some integrity that’s based on the heart of the matter.”

Sonny’s always understood that his resistance to bend with the beat of the mainstream was “commercial suicide.” He never cared about that. But shouldn’t he have been better credited as being an integral part of that crucial late-’70s scene?

“It was quite depressing to be in London or Paris or New York and pick up a book that says, the absolute history of punk rock, un-fucking-known bands and everything else included! And I’d go directly to the Ts and it’d be like Television Personalities, Television, T.S.O.L., T, T, T and up your fucking ass, but no fucking Testors,” he says. “So that was disappointing, but it’s no wonder because we didn’t schmooze around in the music business. It’s not like I think it’s so cooool or something to have this sense of integrity, it’s just that the way it was. Now the Internet has spread the word around and a lot of the young people relate to the Testors vibe. It’s actually what I intended.”

What’s different this year than, say, 10 years ago, is that there’s an obvious resurgence in good punk. Bands like the Hives and the Vines and the rest of the squeaky-clean stuff is all but gone from MTV. Better bands are actually starting to register on the network – check out the MTV Iggy blog for proof. That could mean the bigwigs are plotting a takeover. It wouldn’t be as easy as it was when the Strokes suited up, I think. Anyway, there’s a ton of great independent labels pushing incredible punk and garage bands led by players who still punch clocks, most of them uninterested in mainstream, much less make appearances alongside Diddy at Fashion Week. (I’m talking to you, dudes from the Strokes.)

In the midst of such fluff, it’s impressive that Sonny never quit. He’s had side-gigs, like film and other multimedia art. (See “Mannequin World” for starters.) The “immediacy” of rock ‘n’ roll is irreplaceable for him, and that’s probably part of why he’s stuck around.

Courtesy of Sonny Vincent

Last year, Sonny released Bizarro Hymns, an LP recorded at Primitive Sounds in Belgium. It’s an entirely solo work that’s likely his least antagonistic. It’s a bit more polished than his trademark sound, though it was recorded solely on analog equipment. The new, soon-to-be-mixed album, is also credited to Primitive Sounds.

“It’s just some crazy, nutty guys who run around Europe searching through basements and attics and cobwebs and getting hold of really old equipment from the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, like box amps and a very cool board,” he says. “When they called me I thought they had more experience than they do as far as running a studio. Basically, I had to stay there for three months to get the album recorded because we had to do a lot of touch and go experimentation with the equipment and I wound up having to do a lot of it myself.”

At his age (around 60, guys), that kind of tolerance is commendable. Telling the studio to screw off when he realized how much work he’d personally have to do wouldn’t have been totally uncalled for. Sonny still has that D.I.Y. spirit in him though – and plenty of energy too, it seems.

“I look better than when you saw me before,” he laughs after I mention how well kept he looked last year. “I like to get fucked up and you know, like, do stuff, but I don’t do stuff like every day like a lifestyle for many, many years. We all know people like that who might have looked just sparkly and fresh and then suddenly they’re getting fucked up every day of their life for the next 15 years and they look like horrible. I’m kind of intermittently having fun but also I go through long periods of doing film, doing my work, doing different art projects. You can’t do that totally messed up all the time. I don’t have a lifestyle of getting fucked up, so maybe that helps me.”

In the faraway past, Sonny spent time in prison, was turned away from the Canadian border, took the insanity route when arrested (and was committed) and was banned from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (for whistling). Those types of troubles petered out in the late ’80s, and none were directly drug-induced.

Courtesy of Sonny Vincent

What’s also altogether vanished is his distaste for new punk. He made a point of expressing how great the new lineup was, how impressed he was by their dedication and how much “fun” he expects the tour will be. It’s a relieving attitude from someone who has criticized, for whatever reason, the punk scene that’s currently embracing him more than the one in ’77 ever did.

“For me it’s like I don’t separate bands from the old times or the new times. I separate them into the feeling of being desperate,” he says. “I don’t like slick, fucking well-produced, confident musicians. I like desperate fucking musicians that feel like when they’re playing it’s going to be the last show that’s ever gonna happen. A lot of the bands like the bands Josh [Martin] has been in, I like ‘em. I don’t relegate punk rock from back in the old days. I think that probably, considering the times, the best is yet to come.”

Gentleman Jesse is a Thief (But He Means Well)

2012-03-12T16:47:00.005-04:00

Feature published in the March 2012 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Cover image by Tim Song

“I wonder if anyone will ever be like, ‘Uh, you might need to give a little royalty to old Rich for this one,’” laughs Jesse Smith. “It might happen one day.”

Smith has never been one to take his influences lightly. The seasoned Atlanta musician has been instrumental in Atlanta’s punk and garage scene for years, from playing guitar for the beloved-but-defunct Carbonas to recent endeavors like the Gaye Blades, a side project with the Black Lips’ Jared Swilley. He also fronts COPS, a year-old addition to the city’s harder punk sector. But how intensely he interprets his idols is never as clear as it is with his main gig, Gentleman Jesse and His Men. The 2008 self-titled debut is rife with power-pop jams, and stands somewhat as a sonic shrine to Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool/Pure Pop for Now People.
It’s a seemingly perpetually rotating lineup – most recently, Joseph Plunket of the Weight has replaced Warren Bailey, Greg King of GG King replaced Dave Rahn and Adrian Barrera is still in – but the songwriting has always been primarily Smith’s job. So Gentleman Jesse’s sophomore LP, Leaving Atlanta, follows the mold shaped four years ago. And that includes ripping off his favorites. “Rooting for the Underdog,” a cheery tune in the same vein as any other punk-underscored pop tune Smith has shaped, is a nearly literal lift of Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy.”

“I’m not going to be heartbroken if I have to write Little Richard-slash-Jesse wrote the song,” he assures.

Sitting beside a wall of vinyl, his claim isn’t hard to accept. He adores these musicians, so for him, a rip is really an homage. Smith’s record collection is impressive; it spills from a floor-to-ceiling shelf onto the floor in stacks. Anyone who knows Smith is fully aware of how well versed he is as a collector of music. Through his various roles in Atlanta music, he encourages everyone else to be, too.

One of Smith’s closest friends is Bryan Rackley of Douchemaster Records. It’s technically Rackley’s label, but in a way, it’s a joint venture. Smith often helps recruit acts, releases much of his own music on the imprint and helps plot the Atlanta Mess-Around, the annual two-day, Douchemaster-driven punk festival. Last year, with the aid Damon Hare of Triple D’s Productions as well as Rackley, Smith snared the Testors, Oblivians and Subsonics, among other notable acts. They’ve secured New Bomb Turks, Persuaders and Zero Boys for the 2012 lineup. Along with Hare and Rackley, Smith is schooling Atlanta.

“It’s something I’ve been trying to do,” he explains. “I feel like it’s like our job, a little bit, even aside from Mess-Around. When I choose to play with a band, it’s because I think they’re cool, usually. There may have been some circumstances where there’s bands I wasn’t 100 percent behind, but that happens. For the most part, if I’m playing with an out-of-town band, it’s because I love them. And the Mess-Around is a condensed version of that.”

Pushing good is somewhat of a thankless favor. Nobody wants to admit they had to Google half the Mess-Around lineup. It’s a surprise Smith is compelled to do much to benefit the city, anyway. In September of 2008, he was mugged pretty brutally in the Little Five Points area. Nobody would have blamed him if he bolted.

After dinner with his girlfriend Karen Horn and Rackley, Smith found himself with a flat tire and a trio of teens – two guys and a girl in pajamas – asking for directions.

“We had noticed that it was a little on the flatter side when we left, so it’s not like someone systematically picked us out,” he clarifies. “But it was opportunistic – oh, here’s this couple with a flat tire.”

They provided directions, but, Smith says, “They kind of wouldn’t leave us alone.” They tried to help change the tire.“I don’t know if they were going to follow us home or what they were going to do once we were going, but they were helping us. They were young,” Jesse says. He sounds baffled. “Our spare tire didn’t fit on; it was like a bad spare tire. So we couldn’t do anything and I called Bryan.”

“I was on the phone with Bryan,” Karen interjects. “I called Bryan. I threw my purse in the front seat and called Bryan.”

One of the guys then snatched Karen’s purse, and Smith demanded he hand it over.

Tim Song

“Karen’s yelling at me, ‘Just let him go.’ And then I go, ‘Give me the motherfucking purse back.’ And the guy starts doing this weird dance thing, like this,” Smith says, crossing his arms in front of his face. “Then his buddy hands him the leg of a table that you can buy at the hardware store and hits me in the face. Then I go down and pass out. That’s all I remember. I don’t even remember that, I just remember the dancing. But the guy had handed him the leg of a table. That’s why there’s a scar on my nose – where the UPC code is stapled on, that ripped. I had to get six stitches in my face and reconstructive surgery on my nose.”

Rackley arrived soon after. So did Clay Kilbourne (GG King, Carbonas) and his coworker from a nearby pizzeria.

“They all got in the car and drove away. [The pizzeria employee] said they tried to run us over on the way out,” Karen adds. “We were both on the ground; I was sitting there with [Jesse’s] head in my lap. He was still unconscious.”

Smith came to once the paramedics arrived. “I don’t know if it was [a gang initiation] or if they wanted to go for the big prize and try to get a TV or whatever. They would have been disappointed!” he jokes. “Bunch of vintage crap, outdated records.”

Contrary to the album’s namesake, Smith never really wanted to get out of town. He owns a home with Karen, who he married last fall. For the past five years, he’s been brewing plans to open a restaurant with Rackley, Matt Christison of Brick Store Pub and Miles Macquarrie of Leon’s Full Service.

Smith describes the restaurant, dubbed Kimball Mill, simply enough: A bar that serves good food in a good atmosphere. For Smith and company, that means craft brews, and likely sausages and raw oysters, in addition to other “masculine” items. They’re still scouting locations, but the grunt work’s long been underway. The plan is to open this year, Smith says.

“Like I said, where am I going to go? I don’t want to go anywhere,” he clarifies. “I’m rooted in.” The mugging, which kept him bedridden for about a month, did lead him to consider gun ownership, though. When he heard that an East Atlanta mugger was shot and killed in the act, he was glad.

“It was crazy – I was rooting for people to kill people,” he says. “I was in a bad place. It definitely caught up with me. I think some of the negative attitudes are on [Leaving Atlanta]. They need to be on that record. If we’re just going to sit there and go, ‘Oh, it happened again. It needs to be addressed’….The only way I have to [address it] is a stupid rock ‘n’ roll record.” “Take the hard-hitting issues to power-pop!” jokes Joseph Plunket, who’s seated beside Smith.

Still, Leaving Atlanta is more than an outlet for Smith’s coming to grips with the city’s violent crime. The closest Smith comes to trashing Atlanta is “Eat Me Alive,” the album opener. But just after he warns the town’s trying to devour him, he sings: “But it’s as good a place any to try to survive/ So if you keep your head down/ You push on through/ You just might make it to the other side.”

It seems Smith has opted in, not out.

“Atlanta has been an underdog lately. Yeah, this town sucks. What I always say is I’ve been all over, I’ve been to 40 – how many states have I been to babe? 48?” he asks Karen. “I’ve never been to Alaska and I’ve never been to North Dakota. It’s not like I’ve spent time in every place but I’ve been to a lot of places. And I’ve never been to a place that’s better than Atlanta. But that doesn’t mean that Atlanta is good,” he laughs.

By Smith’s account, the music scene has improved, at least. In the ‘90s, he says, there wasn’t much besides the Rock*A*Teens.

“It was a painful, painful place,” he asserts. “The best bands we had were instrumental bands. We had the Rock*A*Teens – they were fucking amazing. But we lived in this world of…Black Crowes?”

“The second record rules,” Joey chimes in.

“Whatever, we had nothing. There was nothing except the Rock*A*Teens,” Smith insists.

Tim Song

The limited number of venues played a role, Smith believes, and the advent of Die Slaughterhaus and other house venues in the early 2000s assuaged the issue. These days, there’s not an overwhelming amount of venues in Atlanta by any means, but there are plenty of stages to go around.

Smith holds some contempt for the state of music in general, and he’s not particularly gentle when choosing his words.

“Internet sensations. Those are the only people who are going to sell tons of records ever again,” he says bitterly. “I care only on the level that I live in a world with these other people that like this fucking shit. I have to defend myself to people to explain to people that Phish sucks. Like, Phish. It’s not even relevant. I looked at the Internet today because people were talking about Sleigh Bells and Lana Del Rey. I don’t know if people like it or if it’s the same thing as watching Jersey Shore. I don’t know…if anyone is ever going to own a Gentleman Jesse record and a Lana Del Rey record at the same time, or be in the same building at the same time, I don’t know if it that’s ever going to happen. I hope to God that it doesn’t… I don’t want to pick my crowd or anything like that, but if people are that fucking stupid, then they can go get fucked. I’m sorry, it’s just gotten so bad. If that’s what people are into…Ugh, it’s just terrible.”

Admittedly, Smith has high expectations of music fans. (“Maybe more than I should,” he confesses.) But to be fair, it’s a lot easier for younger generations to better their taste in music – or, at the very least, explore sounds beyond the mainstream.

When Smith saw Predator as a kid – his favorite film, he makes clear – he became a Little Richard fan. He heard “Long Tall Sally” in a scene and sought out the 45.

“You’re into something and you do a little bit of research, it’s not fucking hard. I don’t know
what’s fucking wrong with people to not figure this shit out,” he says matter-of-factly. “The kids are lucky because they have the Interwebz and are 10 years old listening to Psychocandy.I didn’t have that luxury. I had to dig through shit. So, Ian MacKaye from Fugazi was in Minor Threat, duh. And Minor Threat listened to Wire, covered Wire songs, so I bought Wire records. I did the work for it. So very quickly it was the kind of thing, like, Nation of Ulysses guys are wild because they learned all their stage antics from watching MC5 videos, so I bought MC5 records. That’s how it happens.”

It would be inaccurate to say Smith hasn’t made mistakes, not only in the music he used to like (he still stands by Rancid’s early days), but also the bands he once played in. Take Kossabone Red, for example – a pile of the band’s LP, Smith’s first, was an elephant he didn’t want to address.

Whether those blunders dwarfed or propelled Smith or not is extraneous, however, to the fact that Leaving Atlanta is his best work to date. It’s back-to-back hits; not one song qualifies as a misstep. One-liners loosely based in clichés, like “You might sing the same song as me/ We just don’t sing the same key” (“I’m Only Lonely”), are so perfectly placed in incredibly catchy songs that trite sentiments become refreshing and resonant.

It’s Smith’s masterful understanding of what works for him and what doesn’t – something that involves an uncanny understanding of his preferences – that’s cleared such a simple path to a signature sound. The album builds on the first in the most ideal way: It’s not at all the same record, but it’s not much different.

“It’s taking influences seriously as opposed to you know, sounding like those musicians who are influenced by all kinds of different stuff, then they make this really bland music,” he explains. “That’s what’s so good about [the garage and punk] scene. We’re influenced by this music and
we take it very seriously and, you know, we sort through it in a way that’s like okay, here’s some cool moves that this band did, and some cool moves that this band did – when I say moves, I mean sonic things. Like, this part’s going to be kind of like this, and this one like this. You can give it a frame of reference and it’s cool. You don’t have to worry about the failures of all this music that’s already happened. Basically, we’re reassembling stuff in our own way.”

“It’s also like when you were talking about Atlanta in the ’90s,” Plunket says. “So many bands, their goal was just to reinvent the wheel so much to the point where it wasn’t recognizable as music. You’re just standing around watching people trying to get crazy sounds.”

“The wheel’s already perfect,” Jesse says. “Let’s just keep using it.”

But what if people just don’t get it? What if someone, maybe even a person with an above-average level of musical knowledge, actually prefers Lana Del Ray’s brand of pop to Gentleman Jesse and His Men?

“Well, they can listen to Ryan Adams or whatever they normally listen to and get fucked, again,” he laughs.

Crystal Stilts: Fringe Benefits

2012-03-12T16:38:00.001-04:00

Feature published in Blurt (online only) on Feb. 10, 2012

Are they garage? Indie-rock? Nü-new wave? Let's let the Brooklyn-based buzzband sort things out...

Is it better for a band to run with one particular music scene or, instead, take the social butterfly approach as a fringe act? Crisscrossing crowds, you'd think, would make for the kind of versatile appeal that brings a bigger fan base. In most instances though, that's not the case. Appeal stretched taut can confine a band to a popularity purgatory of sorts where growth is thwarted - or at least disadvantaged. The Brooklyn-based Crystal Stilts fit that bill.

Erika Spring

"There's all the bands like...In the Red bands, Norton bands and things like that. We can kind of fit into that scene a little bit, like maybe on the edge of it," explains guitarist JB Townsend. "Then we played this indie-pop festival a couple of months ago, and we were by far the dirtiest band there - but we could still play there, you know?"

Crystal Stilts present garage-pop under an overcast sky with its lightly layered nuances of the Pastels, Lee Hazelwood and The Damned. It's a combination that doesn't rest comfortably within any one particular scene. The four-piece can hop on a bill with Tandoori Knights, King Khan's side project with hillbilly-punk Bloodshot Bill, just as well as they can open for seasoned pioneers of alt-rock like the Vaselines. (They've done both.) Even the club world isn't entirely off limits to Crystal Stilts. Just search YouTube for "Sugarbaby," a fun, swinging slice from the 2009 7-inch Love is a Wave for some "stanky" proof.

When multiple styles are eclipsed within one sound, booking becomes a smoother process and the arms of a band's fan base extend easily into several very different groups. They aren't explicitly running on a punk and garage ticket - Crystal Stilts don't really claim any particular party. Naturally, their potential followers are a mixed group: Lovers of New Order, ardent indie-rock fans and even garage-rock revivalists can dig Crystal Stilts.

Slumberland Records' notes for Love is a Wave describe the sound as combining "post-punk gloom with classic ‘60s pop and garage, Suede-ish ‘50s buzz/twang and a dash of ‘80s jangle." Seriously? It almost seems like Townsend and company gathered the hippest trends in independent music, tossed ‘em all against the wall and were left with this hackneyed mix. But somehow, the blend isn't boring. Crystal Stilts gracefully encompass all that portrayal claims, and not only on Love is a Wave, but also throughout the band's nearly decade-long repertoire. All Slumberland failed to fully convey is frontman Brad Hargett's echoing, haunting vocals and the resulting dark, romantic fog that saturates the sound.

Townsend helped produce all of the band's releases, from 2008's Alight of Night to their last LP, In Love with Oblivion. His input started as "over the shoulder," he says, then gained a firmer grip over time. That's likely why the band's sound has remained so consistent. Despite a studio stint at Malborough Farms with Gary Olson, founder of ‘90s-born alt-pop act The Ladybug Transistor, Townsend's influence on the four-song release reigns. (And keyboardist Kyle Forester is even a member of LT now-he has been since 2005.)

"[Olson] engineered the record and...I basically kind of mixed it and edited," he clarifies.

Townsend's touch seems to tower over the frontman role, despite that Hargett writes the lyrics, which can sometimes guide mood. The band's varied nuances appear to be a direct product of Townsend's musical literacy. That's not to say other the rest of the band isn't knowledgeable, of course, or that other outfits don't also boast impressive mental music catalogs. It's the manner in which Townsend filters his insight that matters.

"It's funny because a lot of times people will misinterpret where we got something from or something like that. They'll think it's one thing when it's really another thing, which is actually kind of cool," Townsend ruminates. "But then, on the other hand, it's like if you know what every style of song is and then you're writing a song then you're going to be like, ‘That sounds too much like this or that.' I think a little bit of ignorance or a little bit of naivety is good too."

Either Townsend underestimates himself or purposely opts for modesty, because that ignorance is mostly limited to contemporary releases - and there's only one bit of evidence to support it. Radiant Door includes a cover of the Lee Hazelwood-penned "Still as the Night." It's also done on the full-length debut from Gaye Blades, a side project of Jared Swilley of the Black Lips and Jesse Smith of Gentleman Jesse and His Men, released via Norton Records a couple months prior to Radiant Door, a Crystal Stilts EP also released in 2011.

"They did the same song?! Really? I didn't know that," Townsend confesses. He calls the coincidence "bizarre."

To be fair, the covers are very different. Swilley's raspy vocals add aggression and a bit of speed to the tune, while Crystal Stilts stick to its original romantic, slow and haunting Western feel.

On "Low Profile," Radiant Door's other cover, the band takes a similar approach to interpretation. They don't do much to alter the tune's original idea of a New Wave-y soundtrack to passive triumph over adversity.

"I don't think I've listened to the original since we recorded it," Townsend says. "I haven't really compared it. I think [Blue Orchids'] is a little bit...less ambient maybe. It's a little bit more upfront sounding [than ours]."

Blue Orchids singer Martin Bramah's nearly deadpan vocals are much like Hargett's, albeit without the latter's signature echo. And though Townsend speaks more ardently about the band's penchant for "dark country" than he does post-punk, the Blue Orchids cut is quite fitting. Una Baines, Blue Orchids' original keyboardist, was reportedly dipping into the work of George Gurdjieff, a Russian spiritual teacher whose presented ways of living including a method that Bramah and Baines interpreted as living inconspicuously to get by.

"I made [Radiant Door] originally on a four-track and I thought it came out sounding a little bit like Television Personalities, but it wasn't deliberate - just kind of the style, kind of DIY, a British DIY style song," Townsend says. "But it ended up being a little more lush in the end."

Townsend adds that the EP's two original tracks are overflow from In Love with Oblivion, and even the material on that LP wasn't altogether fresh.

"The songs on the second album... [are] just as old as when we recorded the first ones, so it's really not that different," Townsend reveals.

He says their releases are a "continuation," and expects future work to "go in different directions, but the same routes."

"There's not going to be a record that sounds radically different," he confirms.

Whether sticking so specifically with that sound will help or hurt them is debatable. They've garnered press from mainstream media like NBC and frequently headline tours of mid-size venues, but Crystal Stilts certainly haven't blown up. That's where the popularity purgatory comes in - it's a pitfall of malleability. Would the band see more success concentrating on one particular group of listeners? Or should they carry on grazing the outermost corners of countless cliques with a multi-faceted sound?

There isn't really a solid answer, obviously. There's no way to calculate such a thing, especially these days. Illegal downloading practically nullifies sales numbers in quantifying a fan base. And Facebook likes can't even be considered here because Crystal Stilts don't promote through social media the way most bands do now.

"I don't think we're really a band that fits into a label image that much," Townsend says.

One of the few discernable lyrics in "Low Profile" song is "Keep a low profile." Essentially, that's what Crystal Stilts have been doing all along - and Townsend seems content with that.

Something and Nothing All at the Same Time: The Changing Folk of A.A. Bondy

2011-11-23T16:59:00.009-05:00

Feature published in the November issue of Stomp and Stammer

People turn to folk music for meaning. These days, whether the melodies are memory friendly or barely there, the genre's go-to method is metaphors that allow for individual interpretation. More than any other lyrical approach, that technique leaves every song open to individual personalization. But what if you can't break apart the words? What if you can hardly pick out a single phrase, and you're not sure if you're even getting it right? Can you still get the same satisfaction?

A.A. Bondy thinks you can.

His first two indie-folk works, 2007's American Hearts and 2009's When the Devil's Loose, took a more straightforward route. You can pick out memorable lines, like on the former's "There's a Reason": "And it's love that's tearing them down/ And it's love that turns them around." On the latter's title track, you get, "Oh, the living and dying, how easily you bruise/ Oh, Delia, don't go 'round when the devil's loose." It's that kind of potentially gut-tugging stuff that's the bedrock of folk. It's been the basis of Bondy's songwriting – until Believers.

Like the first two LPs, Believers was released on Fat Possum. But on this effort, Bondy's one-liners are scarcely understood. Instead, he's shaped a certain mood, a relentless sentiment. It's desolate, cynical and romantic, too – all without relying on lyrics.

It's his most lush record to date. There's reverb, for one, like on "The Twist," a dark and vocally-layered track that's deep with doom. For the most part, guitars ring like hopeless echoes. Bondy's made the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic world without saying much about it.

"It's like I made the record and I'm still at a loss in a lot of ways," Bondy says. "I don't really know what the songs explain entirely, to be honest."

Bondy recalls his life of late as somewhat nomadic. In the accompanying press notes for Believers, he describes the LP as "the last couple years in one long exposure."

Ted Newsome

"I just mean as a reflection of the constant travel and constant movement," he clarifies. "That starts to define everything. For a more stationary person to go to Europe or to get into the ocean, those things are kind of extraordinary. And then for me, for the past few years, they weren't. It's the longest period of touring and the most touring I've ever done. You're always either coming home from or leaving for someplace. Nothing ever settles all the way. I think that was just a way of me trying to say, maybe give an impression of, what something was like – without being able to articulate what something was like."

Even when he's not in the middle of a stint of shows, Bondy doesn't sit still for long. He's been a wanderer, to some extent, since his childhood. He was born in Louisiana, then moved to Alabama at 13 years old. He was in California to record for a while, but actually lives in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. He lived in Mississippi as recently as a year-and-a-half ago.

Maybe he's always been this way, but his demeanor also seems somewhat determined by the persistent traveling. He's doesn't readily give concrete responses and comes off introverted, like he's been alone with his thoughts so long he's forgotten how to interact with the world.

But that doesn't mean A.A. Bondy doesn't care about people. It's the opposite, really. Like most singer-songwriters, he wants listeners to have an emotional reaction to his music.

"At best, [Believers] captured whatever mood I was in at the time they were written and hopefully, [the songs] were engineered in a way that could give that impression to someone else," Bondy says. "And that those songs would find somebody, you know what I mean? That whatever it was that was going on in that piece of music or that arrangement kind of reflects something in somebody else. I guess that's the hope of it."

There are only a couple of songs on Believers with decipherable lyrics, like "Surfer King." But even on that track, which is likely the album's lightest and breeziest cut, the lyrics you do get mold a murky, morose territory: "Out on the tide/ Strangers all are drowning by/ Under eclipse, I wait for your kiss/ With the beating of all/ These idiot hearts." It's a gorgeous, red-sunset song, but let's be honest: It's damned depressing.

Bondy doesn't give the impression that he's self-deprecating, though. He wrecked his motorcycle on Memorial Day last year – he lost control when not "paying as much attention as [he] should have" as he rode through a construction site. He couldn't play music while he recovered – he says he couldn't wrap his hand around a guitar neck. That could easily cause a downturn for an emotionally delicate person, but Bondy just calls it "weird."

"It was a pain to put clothes on, or get in and out of the shower, that kind of stuff. I was missing maybe six inches of skin from my shoulder and a lot off my kneecaps...the back of my knuckles. It covered enough of me that it was annoying."

Bondy's been playing music longer than we've known him as A.A. Bondy. Back when he went by

Scott Bondy (his real name is Auguste Arthur Bondy), he fronted Verbena, a noisy alt-rock outfit, in – you guessed it – the '90s. The disparity between that era-specific sound and his current is stark, but Bondy doesn't really see it that way.

"Chuck Berry will be Chuck Berry until he goes into the ground, but some of us want to do different things," he explains. "I wanted to do something where I could be responsible for the whole entire piece of music by myself, and not have to have a Marshall guitar amp and cabinet.

You just go from a big busy machine to...a more natural wooden one."

Ted Newsome

That's simplifying it for sure, particularly for a person who ultimately transitioned into making gorgeous songs where gentle slide guitar wanes behind soft-spoken croons of "hear your haunted ocean song" and "all the hours tracing skin" ("Drmz"). Maybe the lyrics could be transferred, but the subtle, ghostly vibe is something altogether new. It's not even on American Hearts or When the Devil's Loose. And though Bondy admits Believers is a fresh output, his only real comments about it are that it's "more cohesive" and "probably a little more out there." I told him it was more abstract.

"You're right," he laughs, then pauses. "I don't know what the reason was that we wanted to do something different or wanted to have songs that were a little more open. The meaning could be a little more meaningful. I just wanted to say something and not say anything all at the same time."

King Louie and the Fire Under His Ass

2011-11-23T16:47:00.003-05:00

Feature published in the November issue of Stomp and Stammer

The last thing you'd expect a garage-rock icon like King Louie to be doing is driving his dad to Rite Aid, but that's exactly what he was doing on a Sunday night in October. He'd have to call me back, he said.

"Yeah, my dad...we work at a hardware store, and I was just trying to get him to the place to get what he needs," he told me about 30 minutes later. "I'm just tired, man. Sunday's one of those days where all week, you make plans on Sunday because it seems like an easy day, far away, to do stuff. But when you actually get there, it's like fuck. I can't believe I told everybody I'd do all this shit today. It's the only day you can recharge your batteries."

King Louie – born Louie Bankston – is the kind of guy whose productivity is mind-blowing. He kicked off in the late '80s, then a few years after founded the Royal Pendletons, then the Persuaders, then the Bad Times, which included Eric Friedl (of the Oblivians) and Jay Reatard. He was in the Exploding Hearts too, then a number of self-dubbed acts: King Louie and the Loose Diamonds, King Louie One Man Band and now, King Louie's Missing Monuments. He's worked with or shared a stage with Alex Chilton, King Khan, Paul Rotzz (of Die Rotzz) and Harlan T. Bobo, to name a few.

Sure, all that over a period of more than 20 years. Since his start, he's released something – whether an EP or LP of his own or as a guest on someone else's – every few years at minimum. He certainly didn't chisel out a cozy niche for himself overnight. Still, a resume like that is enviable, and an undeniable guidestone for any upstart punk rocker in their right mind.

Funny enough, the New Orleans born-and-raised musician works at a hardware store. His mother's shop, to be precise, and his dad works there too. Couple that with all his rock 'n' roll endeavors, and you've got 15 to 18-hour days, Louie says.

Jhoni Jackson

"I bust ass as much as I can with my family's business. They're getting older, I'm getting older. It's getting harder to just say, 'Hey, I gotta go to Europe for five weeks,'" he explains. "But as long as I kick ass and really get done what I need to get done, I can go out and do whatever I need to do musically."

He almost sounds like a teenager who needs parental permission post-homework to go out on a Friday night. But Louie's almost 40 years old. And somehow, he's doing more than just chugging along. He's relentlessly barreling around the bends of garage and punk like his ass is on fire.

"I play drums in a psychedelic band – that takes a little of my time. I'm doing the one-man band again – that's taking more time," Louie adds. "It's just: Keep on moving. If I get a half-hour of sleep before rehearsal, I turn on the air conditioning in the practice space and I sleep for half an hour, then I get up. I drink a fucking Red Bull and I keep going."

While Louie's best known for his power-pop-inclined tunes, he encountered a snag in that genre when he "lost some good friends." One can only assume he's recalling Jay Reatard's death early last year, but he did say "some," and he didn't elaborate. He'd already formed Missing Monuments sometime in August of 2009, and had written the band's entire first LP by the end of the year. The following April, Douchemaster Records dropped a 7-inch, then the full LP, Painted White, in June.

Louie hadn't taken much of a break, especially considering the Royal Pendletons covered the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me" on a Norton Records split with the Bo-Keys in 2008, and he lent help on harmonica to Guitar Lightnin' Lee's 2009 EP, Call Up the Band. But he had – and decidedly so – taken a break from crafting pop-driven jams on his own.

"It was something I had to come back and prove to myself, to me, that I could do and would still be happy doing," Louie says. "'Cause it was always in the back of my mind: Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna do it? Can you do it? And I think I did that. I came back, I'm happy with the record, I did it the way I wanted to do it. Now I'm getting beyond that and I'm working with this group and I'm glad to be a part of a group again."

For an overachiever like Louie, a couple-year lull qualifies as a hiatus. If he's calling it a comeback, then Painted White is a perfect, powerful return. It's heavy enough on guitar to earn it a certain rock 'n' roll cool, but its melodies are classically power-pop. There's not an individual track unworthy of a single release. In particular, "Girl of the Nite," "(It's Like) XTC," and the title track are stellar songs that straddle straight-forward, polished pop and the rawness of garage like all good power-pop should. So from the sounds of it, Louie's progress hasn't been held up by any stretch.

"I've always believed that I just have to keep moving forward," he says. "Sometimes it's not the healthiest thing because I should just deal with my problems right in front of me, but I had to move forward. So I kept creating music because that's what I do – create music. When the time was right, I just went up to the tree and picked the fruit, and that was it."

With his current group, King Louie is moving forward in a personal way, too. He's dropping the "King Louie." The band is now called simply Missing Monuments – Benny (bass), Aaron (drums), Julian (lead guitar) and Louie (rhythm guitar and vocals).

"I've always wanted to get in a band with a bunch of my friends. It just so happened that it kind of worked out for me in a different way, being King Louie and having a band," he says. "When we first started with the Missing Monuments, it really was just me writing songs and showing everybody how the songs go and everybody falling in line, whereas the second year we really came into all being a band."

I recalled a conversation with Mark Naumann of Atlanta's Die Slaughterhaus in which he mentioned releasing Louie's next project. It was Missing Monuments apparently, but the deal went to another Atlanta label, Douchemaster. He didn't explain why Naumann didn't land the releases, but opted for a more positive spin and detailed why he opted for Douchemaster. Before going into it, he paused to order his thoughts chronologically. It was Jesse Smith of Gentleman Jesse and His Men, a staple of both Atlanta music and Douchemaster, who lured him in.

"[Jesse] came out and just embraced this type of music that was a little more songwriting and pop sensible. I really liked his group; I saw what he was doing. When I decided to come back into the mold and do this, he was just right there," Louie recalls. "He saw us play and he called Bryan [Rackley of Douchemaster] and said 'Bryan, I just saw these guys play, Louie's new band - put out a 45.' So we did a 45 and we just started there and they liked it. Then Jesse called me one day at work and said 'Who are you doing your album with?' And I said I don't know Jesse, who am I doing my album with? And he said 'You're doing your album with us.' Pretty much, within about 30 seconds, I was like, you know what, I like what happened with the single, I liked what he was doing, I liked where we were going. And I really enjoy being part of the Douchemaster roster. I enjoy being part of that roster and although it's a rock 'n' roll label, the writing with the bands that they're doing, it seems to fall into place with us. I'm not trying to stereotype a genre or anything like that, but it seemed like the right place. I felt solidarity there with how my music will be presented to the world. I thought that they could do it right, and I have no complaints."

Louie has a tendency to be long-winded with his explanations, but it's appropriate given how long he's been a player in garage and punk. His plight is interlocked with other people's histories and it's all been so meaningful to him. It's probably hard to keep it all straight. Every move, every memory – even if recent – seems to demand a meticulous recollection.

Despite how scrupulous Louie is with his tale-telling, the origin of his nickname, King Louie, isn't well known. But it might be because there's not much reason to it.

In high school, his band released on vinyl while CDs emerged and Nirvana and grunge lorded over music. A reporter from the school paper was interested, and Joe Pestilence (he's still around too) told them who was in the band: On bass was King Louie.

"When I got the newspaper, I opened it up and it said King Louie the 69th," he laughed.

The title stuck, and quickly spread.

"It was funny because the couple years after the King Louie name stuck, I would book pretty much all my shows. When I would want to go out of town...they didn't have Facebook or all that crap in '91, '92, '93, '94...if you wanted to book a show you had to call them and wait for them to call you back. I'd get these phone calls at work like, 'King Louie, is there somebody named King Louie here?'" he says in a tough-guy voice and chuckles. "And I'd be like, 'Oh, that's for me.' I'd book the show, write it down and hang up the phone. Whoever was working the cash register would be like, 'Who the fuck's King Louie?'"

Louie never tried to shake the name. He embraced it, and latched onto a rock 'n' roll lifer persona he'd also never shake, even as he nears 40. He says he stays home a little more and has to "choose his battles" these days, but output-wise, he shows no sign of letting up. We'll be hearing from King Louie until he's six feet underground. Really, he's blatantly set on outlasting everybody.

"Where some people are trying to run away from the power-pop tag, I'm really not," he says. "Because when it comes to rock 'n' roll, I can rock 'n' roll your ass six ways to fucking Sunday. And you're gonna fucking give up and be dead by Tuesday."

Feist is in it for Herself, You Just Happen to be Listening

2011-11-02T13:55:00.002-04:00

Feature published in the November issue of Stomp and Stammer (cover story)

Feist tiptoes along a shaky tightrope. For a lot of artists haphazardly grouped as the Canadian-American's peers, plummeting from that wire into a pit of maudlin music at some point in their career is easy – and most often fatal. The pathway to sugary and sentimental seals up right behind them, and they can't go back. Some musicians start out that way, and comparisons to Feist were always blasphemous. (Don't believe me? Just listen to Feist's Pandora station. Sheesh.) But there are plenty who start out as promising – like Regina Spektor, for one – and regress into a contrived condition, misled by a mission for mainstream appeal.

On the surface, 35-year-old Leslie Feist's music has the potential to be that saccharine. Birds and cicadas and moons and even secret hearts are the stuff of Feist's music. Love songs are by no means off limits. It's not a stretch to say that, on the three albums she made before this year's Metals, it's all been one big love song for Feist. She's explored the delightful derivatives, like utter content ("Mushaboom"), to the more melancholy residues, like perpetual self-analyzing ("How My Heart Behaves") and hopelessness ("Limit to Your Love").

Her third LP, 2007's The Reminder, was especially beloved by both critics and consumers, and even earned her a Grammy nod. It's been four years since then. The need to repeat the avalanche of acclaim on Metals, released in September, felt urgent. If Feist were ever going to fall victim to an earnest want to gratify, Metals would have been it. She's always been a crowd-pleaser. But there's a catch: It's merely a happy coincidence that we like her music.

"I guess [the albums are] similar in that I approached [Metals] from the same kind of place in myself, where I wrote for myself and I wrote with the same sense of curiosity and, I guess, selfishness," she laughs, "to kind of please myself."

Feist could have squinted in the blinding achievement of The Reminder. She could have squirmed, buckled and rehashed pop standouts like "I Feel it All" and "1234." Those singles specifically were influential in amplifying her appeal.

But that's not what Feist is about. In fact, Metals is generally free of anything like those gems. It's got a charm all its own.

The album is a fist-in-the-air take on the same brand of rich folk Feist has been cultivating throughout her career. "The Bad in Each Other," which leads the album, could rest comfortably on the fringes of any Feist work if it didn't crescendo to an almost anxious clamor of horns and drums in its final 40 seconds. "How Come You Never Go There" boasts the subtle sauciness ofLet it Die's lounge-y tunes, but blunt lyrics and breathy accents take the sass to more brazen territory. Near the end of Metals, Feist tricks you into thinking she's coasting into a lullaby on "Comfort Me," then shakes you awake. The track isn't a pretty-please request, it's a renouncing of sorts: "When you comfort me/ It doesn't bring me comfort actually."

Surprisingly, Feist's newfound grit – the most integral reason why Metals is a triumph – came from looking back, not anticipating the future. "I sort of reclaimed guitar playing for myself which...it's always been something I've been engaged in, but I sort turned back up," she says. "I was just motivated by different parts of my past and different types of bands that I've played in. That's sort of where it ended up."

Even some of Feist's most fervent followers only know her group work through Broken Social Scene, the Canadian indie-rock collective of which she's still a member, albeit mostly passively now. Apparently, however, that's neglecting some vital moments in Feist's chronicle.

"Even before Broken Social Scene, I was in a band called By Divine Right where I was just a rhythm guitar player. Before that, my first band was a hardcore band from my hometown, and that was quite loud and quite different from Let it Die or The Reminder or Broken Social Scene," she explains. "At this point, there's a long and mottled past that I can draw on."

Taking from that noisier period and reintroducing herself to guitar was what made Metals "louder and brasher and bigger," she says.

Feist hasn't completely rekindled a more riotous spirit, however. She's never been categorized as a hippie by any means, of course, but she's still as nature-driven as she ever was. Metal is, after all, a natural element. Is that what inspired her?

"[The title of the album] came after [the music], for sure. I feel like sometimes this album-making can be a little bit of an invisible process. It's not that concrete," she says. "It's taking things from the air and moving them into shapes and making them into songs, then ultimately, even when you're pressing play on the album, it turns to air and is going back into to your ears. Again, it becomes something that's not concrete and tangible. They're ideas and sound, but it's not necessarily something that you hold in your hands. I've often worked in a kind of more idea way, or a more conceptual way, and I really wanted this record to have a more concrete, sort of physical basis within its title."

Considering the financial flourishing The Reminder must have provided, it's hard to imagine that Feist didn't consider the toll an album without a clear-cut hit would take on her bank account. Apple, it's fair to assume, pays well. But again, that's not the point. Feist isn't writing jingles, or even singles for DJs to remix into club jams, although that's certainly happened with a bevy of her more beat-friendly songs.

"I didn't work for that to happen the last time around," she clarifies. "It's sort of funny if anyone was ever to aim at having some type of hit. It's a pointless endeavor because you can't really guess. There's sort of a formula, if you're in R&B or something, you can imagine that there might be a formula to make a banger (laughs). I don't think in the world that I live in that there's a way that I could be sure, and I'm not really aiming at a kind of mass appeal, dancefloor type thing. It's a little more subtle."

"A Commotion" is the most likely candidate for a pop hit, but it's too wild and frantic to be welcomed by the masses. Lyrically, Metals takes a few more risks than its predecessors in terms of sentimentality. "Bittersweet Melodies" repeats its namesake, followed by "like a sweet memory." Luckily, that's one of few banalities on the album, and it's positioned as a relief between more intense and abstract tracks. Feist frequently relays unambiguous, clear-cut messages on Metals than on albums past, but she counters that simplicity with meticulous instrumentation to either exaggerate or soften the message, like on the final track, "Get it Wrong, Get it Right." It's a slower-paced song made featherweight by breathy backup vocals that match Feist's. It's almost a quiet anthem of acceptance that offers closure to the album, and maybe even the world-weary.

"I suppose it's more of an observation of just the stumbling and finding your way and recovering, and you know, when you kind of take a fall and you recover," Feist makes clear. "Basically that cycle, and how best intentions can keep you grounded. Keep the intention that you want to eventually get it right, even if you're stumbling around, and you don't feel like you are getting it right, you're still motivated by the right thing at the core."

Where Feist has made a misstep – as a solo artist, at least – must be too minute for memory. For the fourth time in a row, she's gotten it right, all while catering only to herself. And while there may not be a lot of hooks to hang onto, Metals is still very much magnetic.

Wax Idols: The Hether Fortune Show

2011-11-02T13:20:00.001-04:00

Feature published in the October issue of Stomp and Stammer

It's rare to figure a musician will be important before their first LP even comes out. To be fair, it took a full listen to Wax Idols' No Future for it to be clear. But it's probably safe to go ahead and call it: Hether Fortune is a badass, and she's going to be important.

Katie Miller

She emits the vocal oddities, those sporadic screech accents, of Karen O, but can croon even more sweetly. And Fortune's just as imposing as Karen O seemed around Fever to Tell. It's probably a comparison she'd bemoan, but no matter, Fortune's got the same too-cool but just weird enough magnetism that helped gain the Yeah Yeah Yeahs a place in the mainstream.

Even more impressive about Fortune is a sense of staying power, of a boot already planted firmly in a crevice of rock 'n' roll. Maybe we didn't know there was a vacant spot, but she's going to kick it in until it's hers – whether we like it or not.

But thankfully, we'll probably like it. On No Future, out mid-October on HoZac, Fortune showcases a wide range of already near-mastered niches. There's the proto-punk guided "Hitman," some girly Go-Go's tinged New Wave on "Gold Sneakers" and even a pair of dark, brooding retreats, "Nothing at All" and "Human Condition."

And best of all, it's all pretty thoughtful. Unlike some of her punk-rock counterparts, Fortune presents a raw but comprehensive emotional spectrum, giddiness and introspection included, with a clenched fist. Turns out, Hether Fortune's got more than solid melodies and repetitive riffs on her mind. She's smart – street smart even, as dumb as that sounds. She's self-aware, cynical and curious all at once. That petulant type of progressive attitude gives Wax Idols a bit of grit – like she's carved this plan into sheets of sandpaper with a dirty knife.

"I've never had any trouble, but I guess I'm pretty thick-skinned," Fortune says of her Oakland, Calif., neighborhood.

Some of Fortune's harshness seems to come from her past, but she appears resilient by nature, too. But she's not cold.

Earlier this year, Fortune tended to a preteen girl she found wandering around, covered in cuts and bruises, a few driveways from her house. She was barefoot and tiny, she says, and was hyperventilating.

"She had these red welts turning to bruise marks on her back," she says. "Her mouth was all puffy. She looked like she'd gotten her ass beat."

Fortune ended up taking the girl, Jessica, into her house while they waited for the police. The girl's mother had "laid into her" after her sibling, who'd she'd been watching, fell off a bed. She told Fortune she was having an asthma attack while her mother taunted her with an inhaler.

"It was just a really heartbreaking, horrifying situation," Fortune says. "She was a really sweet girl, and I eventually calmed her down enough and soaked her feet, made her tea. And we watched Pretty in Pink, which she'd never seen. I gave her some stuff of mine, a backpack and stuff like that, while we waited for the cops to come. And then they took her, and that's it."

Fortune says her own mother would "smack" her, but only when she "deserved to get smacked." it "was never a life or death situation," she says, clarifying that she never feared her mother and loves her. Even with a history like Fortune's, that's some kind of test of values: Do you help the girl or avoid getting involved?

"She was a little thing. I don't even want to think about what would have happened to her if anyone else found her," Fortune warns. "Especially out here."

At just 23 years old (she'll be 24 this month), Fortune's surprisingly brimming with an old-soul feel. She's got an unprecedented amount of depth for her age – either that, or a youthful naivety that makes her adventurous. Less than six months ago, she was an active dominatrix. Her interest was sparked from reading Marquis de Sade, and the aesthetics of S&M in general.

"I've always been into that, the way it looks. But I've never been sexually turned on to that kind of thing, so I never thought about being a dominatrix ever," she admits.

Until the cosmos aligned, that is. Various friends had suggested, almost persistently, that she could earn a good deal of money – and that she'd be good at it. While on the phone with one of those pals at her job (at a consignment and record shop), a shopper chimed in. She offered help connecting her with the right people.

"I just felt this sort of weird, sort of cosmic thing," she says. You can almost hear her eyes widen. "That's too weird – this girl happens to be in here, randomly overhearing my conversation."

Fortune was then trained by a woman she calls her Dom Mom, and together they came up with her new dominatrix alter ego: Mistress Eden. But, like a few other titles in Fortune's life, it was eventually revoked. Because she was "too good looking."

"That's literally what happened," she explains. "I intimidated the other girls. They thought that I was going to steal all their clients, then leave and go independent and ruin their business."

In tune with a lot of things about Fortune, her stint as a dominatrix is startling. (Although, Fortune assures, it's not technically sex work and anyway, in Oakland, it's common. She even knows a few rent boys.) But the fact that she's outspoken about it isn't a shock – she's not shy in the least. She's avidly vocal through various mediums, especially Tumblr and Twitter.

Her latest outlet is a zine called Orgazm Addict, which she's compiling herself but has several contributing friends helping out with. One of them is Alexis, a crossdresser who's made a sort of personality for himself in California (and probably elsewhere, for more informed readers). Another name in the mix is Jennifer Finch of L.A.'s defunct L7. And, of course, Fortune squeezed in a tale or two from her dominatrix days. What zine would be complete without that?

It makes sense, though. Fortune seems fascinated by sexuality and gender. A lot of the zine is about personal sexual experiences. A question about feminism led directly to the subject.

"I feel like it defeats the purpose of feminist to focus on the fact that you're a woman all the time," Fortune says. "That's my personal philosophy. I don't think it helps anything to constantly reiterate that you're a woman."

She then details related beliefs about the "ultimate androgynous being."

"I think men and woman are derived from one human species that, at one point in time, was both male and female. And I feel like that is the way it will be again in the end. Everything in between is just a bunch of Christian hubbub," she remarks.

Religious or godless, however, there's more than just hubbub between life and death. Fortune spoke in an obsolete, heart-like-a-bone way, but again – she's not cold. "Gold Sneakers," likely the peppiest cut on No Future, is a love song about an ex who died in January last year: Jay Reatard. She'd stayed with him in Memphis during the previous Gonerfest until he left for tour shortly after.

"I wrote him this little note thanking him for his hospitality and all the nice things he did for me, blah blah, and tucked [it] into one of his sneaks," Fortune wrote in an email.

In a follow-up response, she clarified that the lyrics state "a few SIMPLE things I should have said." She wrote that she should have "addressed...concerns, told him that I loved him and that I was there for him if he needed me. Instead of just saying, 'I had a lot of fun! Thanks for everything, you're awesome, blah blah."

Katie Miller

"Dead Like Me" is about Reatard as well – she wrote it right while coping with his loss, which for Fortune meant no sleep, "devastating dreams about him," an inability to eat and little desire to leave her house. That's about the time she was kicked out of Hunx and His Punx.

She'd met Seth Bogart, frontman for Hunx, through a roommate (Alexis, the crossdresser, to be precise). While she "felt like [she] was dead too," she explains, she was pretty unbearable.

"I never fucked up onstage or did anything wrong, but I was an emotional disaster. Offstage, I was a total bummer to be around," she says. "[Bogart] just couldn't handle it, and he kicked me out."

Though Fortune wasn't with the late singer at the time of his death (they "weren't romantically supposed to be together," she says), he was someone she knew she'd be friends with forever.

"I just felt really close to him," she says, "so when I lost him, I was fucking psychotic."

But getting fired, essentially, was the impetus to ramp up progress with Wax Idols. She'd just started Blasted Canyons, a heavier, brattier punk band, "for fun." Fortune mainly drums and sings. While that band's still going, it's Wax Idols that seems truest to who Fortune is. The LP grazes all sorts of emotional territory, slowing for contemplation on occasion but maintaining a nose-in-the-air bravado all the while - just like Fortune does.

"My friend has been telling me for years that I should write a book," she laughs.

Committing absolutely to that now would be slightly preemptive, but her friend's probably right. She should start outlining a rough draft.

Gonerfest

2011-10-09T15:46:00.004-04:00

Four-part review published in Stomp and Stammer (online), Sept. 22, 2011
All photos by Jhoni Jackson

DAY ONE
The trek from Atlanta to Memphis, where Goner Records holds its annual multi-day punk and garage festival, falls somewhere between six and seven hours by car. It was within the first 30 minutes that my buddy and I realized we'd planned poorly financially. After hotel costs, we'd have about 200 bucks total to share for four days. And that's not counting gas money.

But it's worth it, we reminded ourselves. Neither of us had been to the fest before, and it was high time for me at least – it's in its eighth round, and I've known about it for a couple years. We'll spend every last cent and come home penniless, we were sure, but we'd have some good stories to tell. After all, the lineup included well-known names like Ty Segall and Missing Monuments, a bevy of new bands we'd never seen and some rejuvenated old timers like Icky Boyfriends, Brides and the Gories.

So we rolled the windows down, blasted the bands we were most excited to see through my rattling speakers and picked up a Lil Caesars $5 Hot 'N' Ready to stave off hunger during our pilgrimage. We arrived with rumbling stomachs and wind-whipped hair to Motel 6, but wasted no time - we dropped our bags, called a cab and went to Goner Records, where the festival kicked off.

Goner Records is tiny. It's narrow, covered in posters and absolutely packed with records, most of them of the punk and garage variety. There's a nice homage to Memphis and its historical contributions to music, however, in its well-curated soul section. On the first day, you couldn't access much without inadvertently rubbing rumps with a stranger. Turns out, that was a motif we'd experience more intensely that night.

We'd made it to the store about an hour early, but I started growing restless. There was a white-columned gazebo around the corner where Gonerfest banners were hung, but nobody seemed to setting up. There was a band playing on the sidewalk a few doors down, but I knew it wasn't the Limes, the Memphis band charged with the inaugural set. It brought to mind a nearly decade-old debacle that happened in Atlanta when a friend and I went to see our first in-store at Criminal Records at its previous incarnation by Aurora. We wanted to see Lucero, but missed them completely because we weren't sure where to go. For once, I'm glad to be so far away from my teenage years.

Limes eventually played in the gazebo. The fest booklet dubbed the first two sets part of opening ceremonies, but no torch was lit, a ribbon wasn't cut and no canons were fired. The start was a bit slow, honestly, but in hindsight, it was better that way. Easing into a weekend of rowdy crowds and extra-late nights was the right choice – thumbs up, Goner dudes.

So it wasn't a nutty initial set, it was just the lo-fi Limes churning out songs that were, funny enough, like a version of Lucero that's far less whiny and better executed. Finally, I got the open-air show of gritty but lazy twang-rock I missed when I was 18.

Jack Oblivian took the stage – er, gazebo floor – next. The garage-leaning Memphis musician's band the Oblivians, defunct since the late '90s but touring sporadically, includes Eric Friedl, co-owner of Goner Records. Jack's Rat City was just released on the imprint. Notice a theme here?

The evening shows at the Hi-Tone started around 9 p.m. with Sex Cult, a newer Memphis band that's said to have members of Bake Sale and Magic Kids. They haven't recorded anything, as far as I can tell. But it's not like I can Google this troupe of noisy punks. They've got one of those unsearchable names that pulls up the most awful shit, from dirty deviance to some crappy electronic music. I'm pretty sure they don't care, though.

Hans Condor (top left) plays rubbed-raw catchy punk that's made nuttier live by a wild-haired frontman with a penchant for bum-rushing the crowd. The sea of increasingly sweaty folks parted when this guy jumped offstage. He writhed around on the floor energetically while everyone looked down, then got up and plowed through everyone, only to do it again on the opposite side of the crowd.

Mikal Cronin plays with Ty Segall and, unsurprisingly, plays like Ty Segall, too. Though Cronin's sound is a far cry from the alt-rock shift of Goodbye Bread, Segall's latest LP, the two still have a lot in common: Hushed calms between furious outbursts and a decidedly melodic approach to punk. It's the kind of stuff that, in a push-and-pull mass of people, is hard to grasp onto live if you're hearing it for the first time.

There's another stronghold at Goner besides the Memphis bands, and it's an unlikely one: Australia. Eddy Current Suppression Ring, a Goner band, is from there – but that's not where the label stopped its investigation of dingo-land. Royal Headache(above, right) proved worthy of its late-lineup slot with a performance and look completely opposite of its sound in the best way. Yeah, Royal Headache plays punk, but it's way more lightweight than the four-piece's crazy-eyed, shirtless frontman would imply. And – this is something I'm still confused by – his wide-legged pants and white running shoes really threw me off, but are probably the reason I remember the band's set so well.

I almost wish I'd ended my night with OBN IIIs (left), the Austin band that played second to last. Hands down, the best band of the day. They won me over by teetering on a fine line between fun and frantic, both in sound and show. It's teeth-clenching punk, but repetitive and bouncy. Ringleader Orville Neeley looks almost too clean-cut to front OBN IIIs –- he sports a haircut your grandma would approve of. But he actually gives a general frenetic, relentless performance, the kind where veins start popping and people start pushing.

Pushing is an understatement for what happened next. Ty Segall (bottom right) closed out the night, and came close to closing out my entire festival experience. Posted up at the front, I was smashed from the start. Not even halfway through the set, which actually centered on cuts from the slower-paced Goodbye Bread, a giant girl knocked me to the floor. When I pushed her up, an effort that came from both reflex-style rage as well as necessity, she turned around and palmed my face like a basketball. We }exchanged a few words, and I thought it was over. I turned around to see her shoving my friend, and my friend shoving back. Luckily, it didn't come to blows. But if it had, it would have been two smaller girls against a single massive and drunken one – I think we would have won.

With all the possibilities for fights and hordes of people falling on top of me, it was hard to actually hear the show. I'd seen Segall in Atlanta, but it wasn't like this. Not by a long shot. But despite my grievances – and my fully-bruised and cut legs that still haven't healed – the show was pretty stellar. I mostly heard the crowd sing, not Segall, but it's sort of an amazing spectacle to be in the midst of a sweaty mass of folks with stars in their eyes for a band that most people – outside of Goner, of course – have never heard of.

DAY TWO
Everything ramped up a bit on Friday. The afternoon shows started at 2:30 p.m. at the Buccaneer Lounge, a dark-and-smoky dive with plenty of room outside for a stage and a generous amount of Gonerfesters. There was a $5 all-you-can-drink PBR special, which created a separation between the music and socializing. To one side of the always-long line, people watched bands. On the other, they hung out – or recuperated from last night, more likely.

I woke up feeling like I'd been jumped, so needless to say, I slept in a bit. But we made it in time for Cyclops (left), a duo that featured one of the girls from Midnite Snaxxx on drums. I couldn't make out who the guy was – their caveman costumes and eyeball accents made it difficult. Anyway, it was sort of a joke band, as far as I can tell.

Sets were about 30 minutes long and back-to-back. Coasting (right), a two-woman band that shares drummer Fiona Campbell with Vivian Girls, was a highlight. Their generally sweet, delicate harmonies (except when they shout) paired with distorted guitar and pounding drums is decidedly DIY, which makes it a treat to hear live when some of that fuzz is cleaned up.

The Down Under group made another appearance with Straight Arrows, a super-fun, pop-inclined outfit that rounded out the daytime lineup. They've got a blend of punk and rock going, but most importantly, it's all head-bob inducing.

Friday night was a mixed back of solid, younger bands and somewhat obscure and highly anticipated '80s and '90s acts. Oakland, California's girly trio Midnite Snaxxxand Portland's Mean Jeans (below, left) provided the party punk. The latter, who'd played Atlanta earlier in the week, got particularly insane. They mostly write songs about partying, so naturally, the Hi-Tone was much like a lawless house show for 30 minutes, with beer cans flying and Silly String being sprayed on everyone, the band included.

Of all the reunited bands, Icky Boyfriends (below, right) was the most fun to watch. In part because the songs are off-kilter and almost absurd (see "Frank's Mom"), but mainly because singer Jonathan Swift held lyrics on a small piece of paper, maybe even a flier from the fest, throughout the set. Swift wasn't as fit, to put it nicely, as he was in the '90s, and every time he dropped his handwritten help, someone from the crowd would hand it back to him before he could bend low enough to grab it. It was certainly giggle worthy, but the band was probably similarly smirk-worthy in its heyday. Swift sings slowly enough for lyrics to be discernible – and lines like "I am rubber/ You are glue/ And when I wanna get fucked up/ I like to sniff you" from "No Duh" are entertaining enough to carry the show, even when the band trips over itself every few minutes.

The Gories (below, left) brought the blues onto the bill – with a heavy dose of garage, of course. The Detroit trio wasn't well-liked during its run throughout the '80s, or so I've read, at least. But everyone seemed to appreciate and ardently listen to them.

It was a true blessing that the crowd calmed, actually, because I was in for the latest night of the weekend. I'd been handed the same flier multiple times – Acid Baby Jesus, Cheap Time and Peach Kelli Pop for $5 at Escape Alley, starting at 2 a.m. I've spent many a night at the Star Bar, where headliners don't start until 1 a.m. sometimes, but I'd never attended a show that had opening acts slated for 2 a.m. I told the blonde girl who handed me the flier that I was going because I really wanted to see Peach Kelli Pop. She replied, "That's me!"

So we took a cab over to the venue, which was mostly empty despite the scheduled event. Some friendly guys outside offered us what seemed like a never-ending supply of 10-ounce Bud Lights. One of them was Bennett Foster of Memphis' resident weirdo-pop band, Magic Kids. I turned around to what was empty space minutes ago and a sudden horde of people was in line for the show.

Acid Baby Jesus opened, which I suppose in the case of such a wee-hours show is more like headlining. Like Mean Jeans, I'd seen Acid Baby Jesus that same week. The Athens, Greece guys play a brand of punk that's, although it sounds like a cop-out comparison, a helluva lot like the Black Lips. But that's not a bad thing – not for me, at least. I was glad to see them again, although I wondered if I gave them some sort of déjà vu by showing up at two of their American shows.

Nashville's Cheap Time (right) took the middle slot, serving up the classic kind of punk that's simple, but bratty and brash. The venue ran out of beer by the end of the set, and the thinning crowd reflected that misfortune. Apparently Escape

Alley is more of an art space and typically doesn't sell alcohol. That's what some drunk locals told me, anyway.

I realized how little Peach Kelli Pop, a cutesy kind of punk band, had to offer when they asked the dwindling crowd to stick around for 15 minutes, because that's all it would take. The band is mostly Peach's (she also goes by Kelli and Allie – who knows what her name is), and though she had enough songs for an LP, the set list wasn't a showcase of it by any means. She had a couple of the Mean Jeans guys playing too, which was confusing because she's Canadian. But considering the incestuous nature of all types of independent music, it makes a little more sense. I'd met the tambourine player the night before, but I figured she didn't remember – she was rolling around drunk on the asphalt with some New Yorkers I was talking to. Short set and that girl's (likely) hangover aside, I was glad to see them play "Do the Eggroll." It's one of those cheeky tunes you find on a random mix (a Going Gaga sampler, in this case) and end up including it in all of your own mixes for the next six months.

DAY THREE

It goes without saying that I felt like the inside of a dying liver on Saturday. I was still sore from Friday's show, and now I was bogged down by the booze, too. I didn't drink anything but water for several hours while at Murphy's, the site of the afternoon shows.

The Goner guys really pushed the limits that day. Bands played every 30 minutes, both inside and outside the venue. You had to leave each set a little early to get close enough to see, and for someone trying to take photos, that means a lot of "excuse me" coupled with a lot of stink eye. I managed to see almost every band. I hate that I missed anything, but I didn't have much of a choice – I missed one set just standing in line for the bathroom.

Inside, Outdoorsmen and Kitchen's Floor were favorites. The former hails from San Francisco, while the latter from Brisbane (more Australians!). Both played snarling, in-your-face punk that manages to come off as cool instead of cold and abrasive. Outside, King Louie's Missing Monuments (left) took the top spot. He's getting older, but the power-popper's going as strong as ever. He almost knocked my camera with his guitar at one point – it was intentional, and a nice gesture to a photographer, really.

At our final night at the Hi-Tone, my friend and I decided to try the bar's signature slime shot. It was blue and looked poisonous. In a way, it was. Downing it after a few PBRs was a terrible idea, and by the end of the night, I was visibly sloppy. Very professional of me, I know.

But that was close to the end of the night. I watched Bridesannihilate a set like they'd never called it quits before 2000, though the Chicago band's onstage banter bordered on arguing. It mostly seemed like it was all in good fun though. They joked that they were getting along better, but likely because they hadn't spent a lot of time together.

Melbourne's Deaf Wish (left) was probably the heaviest on spacey and strange, and stood out like the sore thumb of the entire festival. It was in the best of ways, however, and a break from straight-up punk was a breath of fresh air. This four-piece is like an experimental version of indie rock that dabbles in a variety of noisy genres, and ends up sounding like something altogether new. I heard a lot of folks say they liked them best. I wouldn't go that far, but they were definitely entertaining – especially the female guitarist's erratic back-bending.

Shannon and the Clams (right) are always a treat to watch. The '50s pop throwback motif never gets old, especially when the band throws a little glitter on it. Wearing matching (glittery) suspenders, the two singers – Shannon Shaw is also a Punkette in Hunx and His Punx – sang like few others did all weekend, save for the soulful afternoon set from Rev. John Wilkins (above, right) and his three daughters, which happened earlier that day. (I didn't mention it because I only sat through a couple of songs. Too many songs about Jesus caused me to make a break for it.) But there's definitely still a punk underpinning to the Oakland band, what with the hiccup-like accents and occasional growls.

A rejuvenated Human Eye (left) closed out the evening. I'd watched the video for "Chew Raw Meat" beforehand, so I knew I was in for something odd. (It's basically those chattering teeth wind-ups running amok, and looks like it's ripped from an old VHS.) Frontman Tim Vulgar calls it alien punk, which is a fair descriptor. If you thought the now defunct Clone Defects, Vulgar's former band, were weird, imagine that oddity three-fold. With a giant eyeball onstage and blue paint on his face, the show was more of a fist-to-the-face spectacle to a soundtrack of harsh guitar and sci-fi sights.

We'd met up with a friend who lives south of Atlanta, and he shacked up with us at the Motel 6 – which saved all three of us some cash. He repaid us at the show, and the two of us stupidly took our individual $20 and went straight to the merch tables. I grabbed a Brides 7-inch and two buttons, one for Shannon and the Clams and the other for Human Eye. I tried to get a slice of pizza too, but the Hi-Tone had stopped serving. (Side note: Why doesn't Atlanta have a venue that sells slices during shows?)

We heard of a Quintron and Miss Pussycat show happening in the park adjacent to the Hi-Tone, but both my friend and I were spent. My friends and I went back to Motel 6, and while they hung out a bit longer, I crashed – hard.

DAY FOUR

A couple of guys we'd met over the weekend informed us that last night's impromptu park show was shut down within minutes. Phew! I wish it'd happened for everyone else, of course, but I'm glad I didn't miss it.

After clearing out the hotel – we'd made a pretty gnarly mess since Thursday, including a buffet of Asian takeout that was starting to spoil – we headed to Goner Records for the final two shows.

We had a couple of hours to spare before the shows, so we ate lunch at Young Avenue Deli, a giant restaurant and bar that's remarkably unlike a deli. King Louie was at the other end of the bar while we chowed down on cheap (but tasty) vegetarian chili. My friend and I budgeted for the last time, and figured out a way to pick up a few more records and a light lunch. She snagged a '60s garage compilation and I got an OBN III's 7-inch. On the way to my car, a pair of guys offered us free 7-inches from their band White Crime. They said they were supposed to play with Predator (they accidentally called them Predator Visions) a few nights ago at 529, but it didn't pan out. To be honest, I haven't checked them out yet, but they promised that we would "love that shit."

We watched Two Tears, a one-woman band that made up in showmanship what it lacked in depth of sound. We stayed for most of Jam Messengers (left), a bluesy act which is fronted by a nutty, vocally woman-lovin' older guy. He climbed the gazebo, did splits and wrestled with his button-up blouse (he'd cut the sleeves off, but it was frilly enough to be dubbed a blouse) before what was the sparsest crowd of the entire weekend. It seemed everyone else was just as exhausted as we were. We dropped off someone we'd met at the Memphis airport, then headed back to Atlanta.

The money issue became an actual issue as we approached the city. With the gas tank on empty and about $10 between us, we barely made it home. Human Eye was playing the EARL – we hoped we'd make it, but we didn't. The bar had already made last call, but Timmy Vulgar saw me and offered me some of his vodka. He'd remembered me from a brief chat the night before.

Everyone took notice of my heavily bruised legs. I really looked like I'd gotten beat up. A few friends who'd been to Gonerfest before recalled how drained they were by the end. Damn right, I was drained. And broke. But it was worth it.

Lucy Dreams: Decatur's Golden Kids

2011-09-15T11:46:00.002-04:00

Feature published in the September 2011 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Lucy Dreams make pollution-pretty pop that's most closely comparable to Slowdive's English shoegaze, albeit a bit happier take. But that couldn't be what the five-piece had in mind when they crafted the intricately layered tunes on Vivian, their debut LP out this month.

Jhoni Jackson

That's probably because the five-piece is so young, and they're still in the early stages of playing music knowledge catch-up. They made a near-perfect album rich with lush harmonies and elongated synth that's supported by a pedal-loving bedrock, but did they even have a clue it'd turn out so damn good?

Not a single one of the Lucy Dreams kids is of legal drinking age. Guitarist Nick Lynds, a 19-year-old Georgia State sophomore, is the oldest. Three members are stepping foot on that college campus for the first time this semester as straight-outta-high-school freshmen. And Dani Lyman, a reserved Jane Birkin lookalike who plays keyboard and sings mostly back-up, is still a junior at Decatur High School, where the rest of them graduated from.

At such an early stage in their music careers, it would seem they have a lot to learn. But despite ranking as mere toddlers musically, they've actually figured a lot of it out - and fast. Within a year of playing, they're releasing an album on Pretty Ambitious, an up-and-coming but promising label that counts Mermaids and abby gogo on its roster. And Bon Allinson, who worked at Little Azio with bassist Graham Tavel a few years ago, has been behind them since their demo days. Allinson asked them to play their show at 529 last December.

"They put on a Sonic Youth album and analyze the whole album," Dani says laughingly of Graham and frontman Lloyd Wingard. "Then they'll put on another one."

A technical misfire at their second-ever show – and their biggest to date – is one reason to speed up the seriousness. It was an opening slot at a sold-out Black Lips and Deerhunter show that served as Eyedrum's last event at its MLK Jr. Drive location. Naturally, the crowd was sweaty-thick and there were plenty of media folks roaming around.

The trouble started as soon as the band arrived at the venue, as they watched Deerhunter – a favorite band shared by a few members – sound check.

"They were sound-checking for an hour and a half, and we thought it was because they're such a big band," Lloyd says with a shrug.

Once they were told they needed to check – Lloyd says they stood around like "really really awkward teenagers" until then – they realized there was a setup issue. The vocals didn't work at all, and the crowd was filling in.

"I sang in the mic like I was actually singing...and halfway through our set I just gave up on the mic and was just making a lot of noise, because I know people love noise," Lloyd says.

Not only were the vocals nonexistent, but they'd also had so many name changes that the Black Lips' Cole Alexander thanked them incorrectly onstage. Oops.

Lloyd recalls that "the most amazing part" of that experience, however, was Deerhunter's Bradford Cox appearing onstage to try to figure out the issue midway through their set. Drummer Jacob Armando remembers being asked to hop on the bill quite fondly.

"I had the flu and I went around in the street running barefoot, like, 'Fuck yeah!'" he says, arms waving above his head.

Clearly, they've recovered from that snafu. Considering their impressionable ages, a screw-up like that could have been a detrimental blow – the quitting kind of blow. Not for these kids. They've trudged on tirelessly since, playing shows and readying for the release of Vivian.

While the boys sit outside Suburban Lanes where a few bands are playing a show, random people shout at them to come inside. One guy, a stranger from an Alabama band that already played, even sits down with them. He asks what kind of music they play.

Atmospheric noise-rock, noise pop and shoegaze are all thrown around. Then someone says to keep the "S word" out of the interview.

"I like shoegaze, and I play my guitar with the tremolo pedal, but we're not shoegaze," Lloyd says. "There's too much of this man right here," he says, pointing to Jacob, "for it to be shoegaze."

"That's the thing I love about this band," Nick says. "Everybody has their thing. All the songs reflect that. We all work together to create the song as a whole."

Nick wasn't part of that whole from the get-go, though. He more or less weaseled his way into the band by posing a super-fan. At a coffeehouse show last winter, he was jumping up and down, wildly twirling a T-shirt above his head.

"That was him!" Dani and Jacob exclaim in unison when I describe the sight.

Nick's desire to be part of Lucy Dreams stemmed somewhat from jealousy – and that he really did like the music so much. He'd graduated from Decatur High two years ahead of the boys and didn't know them well. He was still playing with Wowser Bowser when Lucy Dreams appeared on the Black Lips/Deerhunter bill. That's when he "took notice."

"I hatched this plan in the back of my mind to pester them until somehow they asked me to join the band," he says. "I never thought it would actually happen."

The timing wasn't too bad, actually. Nick hopped on once the band was better solidified and going by a permanent name. They were Circa '90s (a reference to a "loud, Butt Face grunge pedal" they use, not their birth years) then Buffalo Buffalo (an homage to the average English nerd's favorite sentence) before finally settling on Lucy Dreams. They came to the decision by way of a shared Google document they all contributed to – something they don't realize is humorously indicative of their generation.

"We were so done, we were so done, more done than you can ever convey," Graham says of the naming process. His dog, Lucy, gave him the final push needed to finalize the name. "I saw [her] and she was fidgeting on the sofa and I was like, 'Lucy Dreams.'"

Graham called members individually to get their opinion, somewhat tricking them into agreeing on it.

So if Lucy is a dog, then who's Vivian? It's their recording engineer's baby.

"Vivian was born while we were recording our record," Graham explains.

There's little on the album that reflects how they've dubbed it. And the name Lucy Dreams – it suggests they're a psych act, but the hazy, indecipherable vocals and sluggishly cheerful melodies are only distant relatives of that sound.

They're probably some of the most together-sounding teenagers out there (both on record and live), but they've still got some ironing out to do. Questions about touring raised some issues – "we'll figure it out" was the consensus. The guys all have college schedules to work around now, and of course Dani has two more years at DHS.

Like Nick, Lyman wasn't part of the initial lineup, though she joined early on. One night when a few of the boys were "hitting the dub real hard" (clarification: drinking Evan Williams), Lloyd decided he needed a girl with "no strings attached" to harmonize with. He knew Dani from Rock and Roll Revue, an annual Decatur High School program where student musicians audition, are arranged in bands and perform cover songs.

Tim Song

"It was at like two in the morning and Jacob messaged me," Dani says.

She agreed to play with them at SkaterAid, a yearly charitable skating and music event in Decatur. They ended up practicing together every week, and Dani almost quit.

"I think I kind of did want to stay in, but we were practicing on Fridays and I wanted to hang out with my friends and shit," she says. "I just decided to stay. And then we opened for Deerhunter. And these guys are my best friends now."

Dani says once she's done with school, she wants out of Decatur. Jacob says he felt the same way until he graduated and got his own place. True, it's hard to tell what the city's really like while your parents are still hovering over you. All of their opinions of Atlanta will change once they hit 21.

It's possible they won't be together by then, but let's hope they at least keep playing, even if that means they branch off. Producing such good music at such a young age – with so short a grooming period to go on – implies something even better is on the way.

White Mystery: Rock 'n' Roll Dream Team

2011-09-15T11:37:00.002-04:00

Feature published in the September issue of Stomp and Stammer

Anybody who says rock 'n' roll is dead isn't listening. Not to White Mystery, at least.

The Chicago brother-sister duo is oozing with everything that makes the genre so cool and cathartic: intensity, grit and know-how. They've got it all, and they're prepared to punch you in the face with it.

Frontwoman Miss Alex White is a 25-year-old powerhouse on the guitar who's been shredding on a Rickenbacker since her early teens. Drummer Francis Scott Key White, 24, pounds the drums so furiously they rattle away from him constantly. And on both self-released White Mystery LPs – the eponymous 2010 debut and this year's Blood & Venom – that raw energy is more than audible. It's physical.


Diane White

Where's fuel to this fire coming from? It might be in their genes. Their flaming red genes, to be specific. Both of them sport naturally orange-red curls. Onstage, they're like runaway zoo lions wearing denim, bouncing up and down relentlessly. And though they look like a couple of badasses now, it wasn't always that way.

"I grew up feeling really ugly," Alex explains.

"I definitely felt ugly," Francis adds.

But before it turns into a sob story, Alex shifts the mood. She brings up The Who.

"They all started off with these nerdy mod haircuts. Like Roger Daltrey had this goofy, like, almost what you would call a raver girl hair cut," she laughs, "with bangs and [it was] short in the back."

It's obvious in their live show and fully reaffirmed on the phone that these two aren't whiners. They're both easy on eyes regardless of hair color (hey, some folks dig that in itself, anyway), but it seems they wouldn't have wallowed no matter what came their way. They're tough, and they can laugh at themselves too.

"My sister is a deadly machine, and no one should stand in her way because she'll just trample them to the ground," Francis says matter-of-factly.

As hard as the opening tracks on each album are ("White Widow" on the first and "White Mystery" on the second), they're a bit campy, too. Each serves as an introduction to the band – they either mention the name or announce themselves blatantly. Tracks like "Kickin' My Ball" and "Party," both on Blood & Venom, do the same. They're churning out the kind of rock 'n' roll that can be fun – it doesn't always take itself too seriously. But if you're not paying attention, it blindside you, slapping you silly with lines like "Pigs and dogs are laughing at the blockade/ Burying my hatchet in their smiling faces" ("Smoke").

They've extrapolated the core of rock 'n' roll and turned wild rage into exactly what none of their counterparts are doing, effortlessly stepping into the ogre-sized shoes of giants like The Who. It's clear: These two are smart. They know precisely what they're doing. A conversation about the differences between punk and garage turned into deciphering the meaning of garage rock.

"It's just underground. You actually have to go into a basement or garage or some weird, shady warehouse," Francis explains.

Later, Alex says, "Punk is kind of a snotty counterculture, maybe lyrically kind of a genre. I feel like what Odd Future is doing is punk in the sense that what the Sex Pistols did was, like 'God Save the Queen,' burn stuff, like anarchy, basically."

Hip-hop as punk? That's a strange alignment, but she makes a solid point. Genres are so mashed together in sound, why not go by the message and meaning instead? That hip-hop collective is not only battling expectations, but also anyone that stands in their way – even Steve Harvey. Just watch Tyler, the Creator's video for "French." It's almost frightening, similar to how jarring Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were in the '70s.

"When people ask what kind of band White Mystery is, I say rock 'n' roll," Alex says.

And somehow, there's no stereotypical interpersonal feud to be mentioned. The Whites finish each other's sentences, offer supportive "yeahs" when the other makes a point and miraculously sound like they're on the exact same page about every topic.

"My sister is pretty business oriented, and I guess I'm more of a grunt when it comes to the band, or an errand boy, maybe," Francis says.

"Francis is a big part of the band as the driver and the merch dude," Alex assures. "You need to have a dynamic between two people and designated roles. So we each know our place, just as people who have cooperated our entire lives...as brother and sister. It's really cool when you can share all the fun and coolness of being in a band with someone like your brother."

"Hell yeah," Francis says.

The shows can get wild, though. At a hometown Chicago show when they kicked off the current tour, a couple jumped onstage and started "bumping and grinding" on Alex.

"The woman was like, whispering in my ear, she was like, saying stuff," she laughs. "And when we were in Canada and that guy ran up to me and made out with me. I was like, whoa!"

Francis says even he doesn't know what the woman said to Alex. She won't repeat it. That she's not the least bit vulgar is a bit of a surprise, but it all works toward that ultimate picture of them. They're not unnecessarily brash – it's all in good fun, and they want everyone to have fun with them. They named themselves after their favorite Airheads flavor, but they play dirty, rough rock. It's a strange brand of rock 'n' roll that's as smart as it is assaulting. Who woulda thought?

"I'm kind of a nerd," Francis says. "So I take advantage of being up in front of people – let it all out at one time, then I sorta climb back into my shell, I guess."

"We're both definitely intense people, but it's a balance," Alex says. "You need peace in your life to counteract all the partying and playing punk shows in front of a crowd of enthusiastic people."

Where Alex finds a relaxing middle-ground, however, is hard to determine. They tour frequently, and both albums are self-released on the White Mystery Band label. Plus, she's still booking all of the shows. She's savvy enough to know that the work will only become more arduous as they continue, but she has no plans to hand over any responsibilities.

"It would be cool to franchise the band and get redheaded stunt doubles to go on tour for us," Francis ponders.

"It would be awesome. No one would know the difference; everyone's so racist with hair color," Alex remarks. "Seriously, I mean, I brought a friend with curly hair on tour, and someone was like, 'You were great tonight!' And it was a guy."

She's likely immune to such ignorant confusion by now. Before playing as White Mystery, Alex fronted another band – Miss Alex White and the Red Orchestra. It's been kaput for a few years now, though. She chalks up its dismantling to natural progression.

"It's funny because we were playing...the last Red Orchestra show – it [was] basically not working out anymore. I booked these two bands for their first shows, and it was the Smith Westerns and the Vivian Girls," Alex says. "It was a passing of the torch, in retrospect."

That's kind of her to say, but let's be honest. White Mystery's torch is still ablaze. With constant touring, promoting and all the D.I.Y. efforts in general, even a flicker of that flame seems unlikely. Alex says she and Francis will push until they "can't do it anymore."

Jackie Roman

"We have a new music video coming out next week where Francis threw a kick drum through a pane of glass, and that's the same kick drum he's going on tour with, Alex says. "We push ourselves really hard until shit breaks and then we replace it. I'll book until I can't book no more, then replace that with, maybe, a more competent person. Until then, we're a little unit."

Black Lips obliterated Southern Comfort homecoming

2011-09-15T10:51:00.003-04:00

Show review published on Creative Loafing's Crib Notes blog, Sept. 14
Photos by Jhoni Jackson

Atlanta is a city that does more than appreciate irony, it nurtures it. On the same night that hometown garage-punk heroes Black Lips headlined a show at Southern Comfort — that outside-the-city-limits trucker bar where twentysomething Atlantans embrace redneckery and drink alongside the truest of Southern swillers — another punk show venue was booked at an odd. This one was at a barber shop — the Cut on Stovall Street — with younger bands the Husseins and A. Grimes, who owe some thanks to Black Lips for solidifying Atlanta as a worthwhile city in punk rock land.

Black Lips

I wanted to see both shows, but poor planning left me restricted to just one, and I couldn’t turn down a raucous, sweaty throw-down at what’s arguably one of the city’s favorite places for a culture mashup, SoCo.

The crowd was a melting pot of familiar faces (I spotted Kenny Crucial before even entering), kids I’d never seen before who likely came out of love for Black Lips and, of course, Southern Comfort’s regulars. While waiting for Turf War to kick things off, the owner of the bar, an older man wearing all black (hat included) and a bolo tie, thanked my friends and I for coming to the show.

I asked if the regulars had to pay the $20 cover. In a plain, gruff he replied, “no,” but explained that they had to help move tables to make way for standing room and they’d have to help clean up, too. Them’s the breaks.

A lot of people complained about the higher beer prices. Supposedly, the bar jacked up the cost of PBR. Instead of griping, I thought of how much smarter the folks at SoCo are than most assume. They didn’t raise the price of all drinks, just the ones they knew this crowd would gobble up. What else were they to do when all hell breaking loose seemed imminent? Anyway, they were slinging sporting event-sized drafts at the bar at a better value — sometimes $4, sometimes $7, depending on the bartender.

Turf War’s set was not only good, but also self-aware. They’re a little Southern-fried to begin with, but a closing cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” was a nice touch. Through it all the band’s punk rock ‘tude remained intact as members crawled on speakers, welcomed guest singers (friends, but they climbed on and off the stage enough to alert security) and were generally pretty wild. One older, thin SoCo regular sporting a Jeff Foxworthy/Larry the Cable Guy tour T-shirt danced around, arms flailing and hooking the necks of unsolicited dance partners.

Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls took the middle spot. On stage, they said this was the coolest show they’d ever played. Take that, Brooklyn! The trio of ladies didn’t add a single Southern homage to their repertoire, but that’s OK. Their set, full of slower-paced, creepy doo-wop laced cuts from their latest LP, Share the Joy, was a necessary break before the crowd became a sea of screaming Black Lips fans. They did play some older and faster tunes, and even jumped in the crowd at one point. But it was all much calmer than what came next.

Vivian Girls

Black Lips annihilated their set, of course. Several projectiles wizzed by overhead: legs, beer, maybe even blood. A friend mentioned the following day that she’d lost a shoe, and although she later found it, “irreparable damage was done.” Black Lips are close to being too big to allow stage diving and random people on stage, but that element has become a permanent part of the show. It’s part of the group’s appeal. Toning it down to a nudity-free set is fine, but to chuck the balls-to-the-wall vibe altogether would be blasphemous.

The band was keen enough about it being a hometown show to add something extra, something Atlanta music fans would appreciate: Bradford Cox of Deerhunter hopped on stage for a cover of a cover: “Do You Wanna Dance?” Donning a black wig, leather jacket a la Joey Ramone, and everyone went nuts. Though I regret missing the barber shop show, I’m glad I devoted my night to this one instead because I sincerely doubt that it will happen again — not like this.

Heartland Rock Revival: Kurt Vile is the Answer

2011-08-17T14:37:00.002-04:00

Feature published in the August issue of Stomp and Stammer (cover story)

Few musicians are speaking for the common man these days, despite that there's arguably more to begrudge now than ever before. There's as much beauty to bask in too, of course – a natural flipside; the light that creates the gloomy shade.

Garage, punk and all sorts of electronic music prevail on today's indie radar, but nobody's really reaching to get the fists of listeners clenched for any reason beyond to pump along to a melody. There's an emotional gap to fill, and a rebirth of heartland rock could be the answer – with Kurt Vile as the right man for the job.

Raised just five miles from Philadelphia in Lansdowne, a borough birthed by a railroad stop, Vile grew up in the most blue-collar of environments. His father drove trains and his mother stayed home to raise their 10-child family. Until a few years ago, Vile worked, even for a while as a forklift operator, because he simply had to, he says.

But those aren't Vile's only qualifications for the title. He has more to offer than a very American story and an acoustic-based sound that's repeatedly (and justifiably) compared to the seminal purveyors of heartland rock. Vile embodies all imaginable characteristics of a person who could make the genre, albeit an updated variety, work-now.

Its pioneers – Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Bob Seger and the like – wouldn't prosper today in the same way they did in the '70s. More than half a decade has passed since heartland rock could flourish with freshness, plowing through the mainstream to full-blown reign. But what made that sound more than just another brand of mainstream rock – the society-reflective sentiment which fueled its importance – sure as hell still does.

Rock hasn't found such a combination of accessible sounds and plainly profound, layman-level lyrics, where a duality between bitter decay and romantic nostalgia can thrive, since the heyday of heartland rock. That's not to say societal woes and upswings haven't been interpreted by countless bands. They have and always will be, but most often, the method is aggressive, through fun-time escapism or other routes that show little regard to balance.

And it's all in the balance. Over a four-LP span, Vile's lyrics have remained consistently indicative of a very American push-and-pull. On "Puppet to the Man," one of the grittier tracks from this year's Smoke Ring for My Halo, Vile speak-sings almost like he's preaching, "Well I think by now you probably think I am a puppet to the man/ But I shout it out loud because I know that I am/ Sometimes I'm stuck in and I think I can unglue it."

"Be as little of one as you can get away with," Vile says of that label, "but you have to cooperate a little bit with that guy if you're going to keep going. I'm not going to run a revolution of resistance."

In a society that simultaneously praises and condemns rebellion against the norm – in other words, utter individuality – that outlook of that lazily defiant tune is one that's easily embraced.

Vile doesn't fully accept the heartland rock stamp, though. Maybe he's afraid of pigeonholing himself. However, his reluctance certainly isn't due to a denial of similarities between himself and the genre's motifs.

"We have other influences," he says. "But we are a very American band."

Vile's musical plight lines up, at least symbolically, to the American dream – he self-recorded tracks on CD-Rs, piecing LPs together into lo-fi collages until finally recording Smoke Ring as a proper whole with the seasoned John Angello (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and even John Mellencamp's Uh-Huh). But practically every moderately successful musician or band somewhat parallels that path.

And it's true there's a spacey, echoing touch to Vile's mildly distorted sound. In addition to the obvious roster of influences, an artist-on-artist interview with Brain Idea's Joe Wetteroth published in the Chicago Reader revealed Sonic Youth as one of his inspirations. He even said osmosis might be to blame for the lyrics to Smoke Ring's "Society," which contains a line much like a Sonic Youth song ("Society Is a Hole") that Thurston Moore, according to Vile, said originated from misinterpreting a Black Flag song.

What truly sets Vile apart is the way he's grasped the late '70s blue-collar sound and twisted it with modernity in a way that dodges the cornball tendencies of Americana entirely and sounds new, but oddly familiar. Even when it's subtle and soft, there's a hint of badass, too.

And again, it's the lyrics that seal the deal. Like Springsteen's "Born in the USA," Vile writes lines that could register as positive upon a light listen but are actually the stuff of scathing social commentary. "Society," of course, is one of those gems: "Society is my friend/ He makes me lie down/ In a cool bloodbath."

Vile says Smoke Ring was intentionally mellow. He added "Puppet to the Man" and "Society" to afford the album some "balls."

His repertoire is mostly calm sonically, but when he plays with his backing band, the Violators, there's balls aplenty. He'll play acoustic occasionally, but with his onstage counterparts the sound is most often fully plugged in and a lot more rock 'n' roll.

Shawn Brackbill via Matador Records

As Vile's prominence elevates, capitalism has become opportunity. "Baby's Arms," the romantic, slow-paced opener on Smoke Ring, found its way into corporate America through a promotion with Microsoft in which an artist was paid to make the song's video entirely on one of the company's smartphones. Surprisingly, Vile wasn't reluctant to accept the collaboration.

"You know, it's funny, I thought that was the iPhone," Vile laughs. "That's how slightly disconnected from society I am. These are also different times. [Consider] Neil Young – he was always against that kind of thing. But he was already a millionaire talking about that, don't put yourself in commercials, selling a million records people couldn't steal on the Internet. These are different times."

Vile notes he wasn't paid, although the videographer was. He readily admits accepting money for allowing HBO's Eastbound and Down to borrow "He's Alright," a lo-fi acoustic tune from his second full-length and Matador Records debut, 2009's Childish Prodigy.

"You have to use your discretion. If McDonald's called me up, I'd probably just ask to not know how much that check would be. That's obviously not something respectable," Vile laughs. "Walmart or something – it's not a respectable commercial to be on. You would totally look like a tool."

But what musician doesn't want to make a living from their work? Vile's no different. At 31, he has a wife and child to support. Vile could probably sell his work to McDonald's or other dirty corporations for near-permanent financial security, and he'd probably never forgive himself.

To be American now – at least for Vile's generation and younger – seems to necessitate an equilibrium that can be as satisfying as it is depressing. It's the fight between money-making and virtue, assimilation versus independence and – most of all – trying to be a better person, but accepting you probably never will be.

"I think it's 50/50 is what it is," Vile says. "You enjoy [life], but you curse it. That's the way I am anyway – sometimes. I try not to be that way."

Black Lodge's debut outshines Mickey's return

2011-07-13T12:47:00.001-04:00

Show review posted in Creative Loafing's Crib Notes blog, July 11

Imagine your band is playing its first show. Do you want an under-the-radar debut in a near-empty bar in the ‘burbs, just in case you screw up? Or would you rather the potential for a balls-out introduction to your local music scene, opening for a much-ballyhooed band of young punks? Black Lodge, a new Atlanta four-piece named after David Lynch’s epicenter of evil in Twin Peaks, chose the latter and got off to a rocky start Sunday, July 3 at the EARL.

Bassist Jennifer von Schlichten has faced large-scale crowds as a DJ on bills with Diplo and Spank Rock, but essentially, when paired with second bassist Karen Horn (yes, two basses, no guitar), the two are the greenest of green in terms of brandishing instruments onstage. The moral support of seasoned musician Jennie Castillo (keys) and the super, super-seasoned Adam Bruneau (drums) helped the band live up to the gloomy connotations of its name.

Ominous synth lines, deadpan vocals (mostly from Castillo and von Schlichten) and deep, minimalistic bass made for a generally Joy Division-like sound -- spooky enough to match the wild, murder-hungry grin of Twin Peaks’ mysterious antagonist BOB. Mid-paced songs were a highlight, as the slower numbers sounded empty, and dragged on.

Husseins played with the necessary energy of a super-speed punk band, but with little effort or sweat—a commodity only youth and varieties of ectodermal dyplasia can offer. (Yeah, I Googled that.) Apologies were made for sound issues, but none were easily audible. Either that or I was too busy wondering if, even mid-set, they’d outshined the headliner. On almost any given bill an upset in the Husseins’ favor could be feasible. But the feverish Mac Blackout (Mark McKenzie), frontman for Chicago foursome Mickey, wouldn’t let that happen.

Back for a second stint after April’s Mess-Around, the group’s second coming seemed highly anticipated. Unfortunately, however, the turnout was most shallow for Mickey -- even Black Lodge had more listeners, although many were friends of the band.

Regardless, Mickey played as though it was their final performance, steaming with energy and sweating from the get-go. McKenzie displayed a naturally manic intensity that’s altogether ageless. Let’s hope the fresh-faced Husseins were watching.

Mickey is a rabid throwback to ’50s rock ‘n’ roll, with a little weirdo glam here and there. One shirtless player wore a wig that, from afar, looked like a bunch of blue-grey bananas atop his head. The band ripped through their mostly fast-paced repertoire while McKenzie plowed through the audience, knocking down a guy with a cane at one point. But he picked him right back up, palmed the fellow’s head and shouted gargled lyrics right in his face.

I missed one band at this year’s Mess-Around, and it was Mickey. I thought I’d kicked myself enough over it, but after seeing McKenzie -- an irresistible, albeit dirty, crazy-eyed frontman bringing the band’s energy to a point, I deserve another punt. And for the hordes of folks who typically turn out for punk shows but bailed this time, you missed out.

A Decade of Debauchery: Die Slaughterhaus Hits the Double Digits

2011-07-13T12:27:00.001-04:00

Feature published in the July issue of Stomp and Stammer. All photos courtesy of Adam Bruneau; captions by Jeff Clark.

Mark Naumann didn't intend to run a record label. He didn't plan for his first house rental after graduating high school, a slumlord-run place off 14th Street, to play host to raucous, near-frightening but completely unforgettable shows on the regular, either. July marks 10 years of Die Slaughterhaus, the house venue-turned-label that, since its start, has been a major player in shaping Atlanta's punk-rock scene. And the whole thing -- and the community created because of it -- it all just sort of...happened.

Peel slowly and see: Bobby Ubangi goes

bananas.

Besides Naumann, the residents who left home for the Haus in 2001 were three Black Lips members (Cole Alexander, Jared Swilley and Ben Ederbaugh), Colin Mee (Deerhunter's first guitarist) and the Harris brothers, who Naumann says "don't really do anything anymore." The house itself, he says, was already a punk house. They rented it after a friend who'd knocked out walls to form a massive living room. That's where the shows happened.

More than the aforementioned bands played Die Slaughterhaus since its debut in 2001, of course, and though a lot of them are now obsolete -- like the Lids, Tabitha and the Spooks -- many of their members have regrouped as different outfits. Bands associated with the era, like the Carbonas, who were already active before Die Slaughterhaus, have also been reincarnated (in this case, as GG King). But it's not the music that made the house notorious -- it was the deliberate debauchery that ensued at every show.

"It was literally just a bunch of fuckups getting together, getting completely wasted, playing punk rock and smashing shit," Nauamann laughs. "Throwing bottles against the wall, trying to jump through walls. I saw a bathroom door get thrown out of a window. There was a bunch of kids outside throwing bottles against the house, and literally right after, Jared [Swilley] had come outside and was berating them and saying, 'This is not a trash-the-house party! Fuck you guys, what are you doing?' And literally right after he said that, a door came flying through the window."

Pillow fight!: Bradford Cox rises above.

Despite the antics, the music did matter. Within a few years, Die Slaughterhaus' two most prevalent performers, the Black Lips and Deerhunter, surpassed the scene to become indie-realm giants. Not only did the Haus provide a place for those bands and others to hone their skills (or onstage personas, in some cases), but Naumann and company also cultured a collective of punk-rock pushers and lovers -- and it stuck.
"At the time and the place, Die Slaughterhaus was the punk scene for Atlanta. Most of the bands started on their own, but we all kind of came together," Naumann recalls.

A lot of the Die Slaughterhaus clan was already together, really, before the notion even existed. Naumann's older brother played in a band with Derek Pressnall of Tilly and the Wall, as well as Jack Hines, one of several Atlanta ex-pats on the K-Holes lineup. Coyote Bones' David Matysiak and Mason Brown (then forming Jet by Day) were on the same roster -- they all attended Dunwoody High School. So did Naumann himself, who played in the Renegades with Swilley and Alexander. They all went to Dunwoody, too.

How one school bred so much solid music is beyond bewildering. That those bands were, coincidentally, so likeminded and all generally functioned under the Die Slaughterhaus motto, "Fuck shit up and die," elevates that grooming ground to mind-boggling.

"When we were 15 and in the Renegades, that was the logo and motto," Naumann says of the Die Slaughterhaus credo.

That crude one-liner was emblazoned on their jackets, he recalls, and at one point, the school deemed all Renegades paraphernalia gang-related.

Cole Alexander briefly considers steering the

Black Lips in an acoustic folk direction.

"I remember walking through the neighborhood over to my friend Julian's house and this car full of Mexicans pulled up," Naumann says. "They're like, 'Hey man, are you in the Renegades?' The kid in the front seat had a baseball bat -- I thought I was gonna get the shit kicked out of me. What happened was one of our friends wrote 'Renegades' on the wall in the stairwell [at school], and he didn't notice it was next to a swastika. So they thought we were a racist gang, and I had to explain to him -- he's the bass player."

Soon after, the Black Lips emerged from the Renegades, though without Naumann. That's when Die Slaughterhaus debuted -- with the Black Lips' first 7-inch, Ain't Comin' Back.

"It was really more of a self-release," Naumann says. "I didn't have a whole lot of involvement in that first record. So it was really more of the Black Lips started the label, and then the responsibility got passed onto me."

He and Ederbaugh decided to start releasing friends' albums. But in 2002, Ederbaugh died after his car was hit by a drunk driver. The Black Lips continued -- they'd just released their first full-length through Bomp! Records -- and Swilley and Alexander focused more on their own objectives, not the label's.

"I just kind of stuck around. I was putting all the money in," Naumann says. "[On tour, the Black Lips] were constantly pushing the label, networking with people, introducing me to people that they met in cities that I would have never met before. But as their career grew, they had more of their own responsibilities. The record label became more and more my responsibility."

Naumann mentions the label's financial side in stride. It took some prying to figure out that, in the upkeep of the label, he depleted his savings, a sum he'd been accruing since elementary school. At the time, money was just a footnote for Naumann, if that. Shows were a bigger concern.

"We didn't really stop having shows at the [house], just people starting moving out on me, one at a time," Naumann says. "I couldn't afford to stay there by myself. After that, I just couldn't ever find anything with a basement."

So Naumann increasingly orchestrated -- or at least slapped the Die Slaughterhaus name on -- shows at legitimate venues. The Neutron Bomb, Somber Reptile and Echo Lounge (all defunct) were frequent go-to spots, as well as MJQ and the EARL. The label also brought Atlanta its first punk-rock fest -- the Shutdown.

Beware all ye who enter here: Die Slaughterhaus #1.

A lot of the details are blurry for Naumann -- how many Shutdowns? Who played? When did they dub it Die Slaughterhaus Fest instead, and why? -- but he remembers the one held at the Neutron Bomb as an especially rowdy event.

"As soon as bands started playing, it was just a sea of beer cans back and forth," he laughs.

"By 2004, Naumann moved the remainder of the Die Slaughterhaus gang into a new, slightly more organized house in Grant Park for about another year's worth of mayhem. But when two new local labels, Rob's House and Douchemaster, emerged around 2005, Naumann's label was nearly ecliped -- mainly for lack of funds.

"I got kind of cut out," he says. "By the time I can afford [to put out an album], it's already been released and promoted and mastered."

Surprisingly, Naumann isn't bitter. He's thankful for Rob's House and Douchemaster, even when they've snagged releases he'd been eyeing.

This is not a trash-the-house-party:

Jared Swilley don't need no doctor.

"It bummed me out for a while," he admits. "But it's better for the scene to have someone with more money to be able to promote our friends. It's better for them; they get more exposure. I don't have the money to put behind records like they do."

At 19, Naumann says he hadn't found his footing as a one-man label -- and 10 years later, he's not finished figuring it out.

"I'm still learning what I'm supposed to be doing," he says with a shrug. "I think, had I put a lot more work into it, had I know how to promote stuff properly...things would have been more profitable, I guess. Hindsight's 20/20. There's no telling what the reasons are for why we're here today, but it is what it is."

The Spooks get silly.

Releasing 7-inches from the Frantic and Crusaders of Love, though, are high notes for Naumann. This year, he hopes a few new highlights will materialize. One is Adrian vs. Predator, which Naumann says will either be a split between Barreracudas and Predator or a mash-up of both, and a new project from King Louie of New Orleans.

And although Naumann's struggled plenty with the lineup, the 10-year celebration fest will likely be another highlight. He attributes some of those issue to dealing mainly with friends.

"A good analogy is like, way back in the day when everyone worked at the Majestic [Diner], I would go in there several times a week and just sit and hang out. So then when I was actually hungry, I'd be sitting for two or three hours waiting for someone to take my order," he laughs.

Lately, Naumann's been playing bass for Baby Dinosaurs vs. Extinction, working six to eight shifts per week (in the EARL's kitchen and at a pizza joint in Norcross) and living in a place that wouldn't work as a venue. Besides the fest, he hasn't booked many Die Slaughterhaus shows in the past few years.

"It's just the amount of headache," he explains. "There's always 100 different schedules you have to work with and the amount of bullshit you have to deal with to put a decent show together...It's fun every once in a while, but doing it full time isn't something I want to get into."

For a while now, Die Slaughterhaus releases have been cut down to two each year, tops. He's reaching for more, though.

"I'm trying to get my financial situation back to where I can put all the bands out I want and actually be able to do records on a more regular basis. Ideally, I think once a month is good," he pauses. "Between three and five a year is probably more feasible for me."

Humility is a quality not readily found in punk rock, but Naumann boasts a healthy amount of it. He hardly claims Die Slaughterhaus as his own, though now, it truly is. He's quick to note the help and support from all ends of the scene has fueled the label from the start.

But sometimes, it's okay to pat yourself on the back -- sometimes it's deserved.

"I don't think Rob's House would have started if they hadn't seen what [Die Slaughterhaus was] doing and been motivated by that. But there's no telling," he grins.

Bass Drum of Death: A couple of dudes?

2011-07-13T10:00:00.001-04:00

Feature published in the June 2011 issue of Stomp and Stammer

If a band’s not sizeable enough to overwhelm a stage, the number of players isn’t a selling point -- unless it’s a duo. There’s an involuntary shtick in performing as a pair, despite decades of famous twosomes in all genres. “It’s just two guys…” is how the go-to description typically starts. In the same way that a lady leading a troop is always the conversational centerpiece, something’s still outside-the-box about a couple of musicians presented as a full band.

Oxford, Mississippi’s Bass Drum of Death, in most circumstances, gets the same treatment. In short: They’re two dudes doing the garage-rock thing. It’s a logical description, even if vast and vague. Some of the many comparisons to duos they’re scooping up, however, don’t sync with that by a long shot. For one: The Black Keys.

“I don’t really get The Black Keys thing at all,” frontman John Barrett says. “They’re really more bluesy, you know what I mean?”

Courtesy of Fat Possum

There’s another connection between the two, though. Bass Drum’s first 7-inch and debut LP came courtesy of Barrett’s hometown imprint, Fat Possum, which earned its reputation championing for blues-rock in the ‘90s—and released two early Black Keys full-lengths. Still, most people will side with Barrett, and rightfully so. There are about two molecules of resemblance in sound between Bass Drum and the ever-present blues rockers. But Barrett also rejects references more akin to his gritty garage than that.

“There’s maybe a couple of No Age songs we might sound like, or a couple of Japandroids songs we might sound like -- but all the way around, I don’t think we sound anything like those bands,” Barrett adds.

And what about Nashville’s JEFF the Brotherhood? With searing, wailing riffs and a garage-rock bedrock, they’re easily the most accurate match among Bass Drum’s peers.

“It’s awesome being compared to them, because they’re the best two-piece going right now, I think. Then again, their songs, especially the new record, are veering in a direction that’s pretty different from how we sound,” Barrett explains.

True, We Are the Champions, JEFF’s latest, Barrett says, “sounds like the fucking blue album, Weezer or something.” Barrett notes he and drummer Colin Sneed are pals with JEFF, but he’s quick to separate himself sonically.

What makes the worst links from critics -- the blatantly lazy Black Keys comparisons, in particular -- so blasphemous is that not only do they lump Bass Drum into categories they’re unfit for, but such associations also ignore the complexities of the band. As a writer, I’m thankful for a 1000-plus word count: There’s plenty of room to break up the bullshit.

Barrett spearheaded Bass Drum of Death, and sort of found himself going for it after just messing around.

“I was living with this guy who had a drum set in one of the extra rooms at our house. I started writing songs and banging the bass drum at the same time I played guitar, just to keep a beat,” Barrett says. “I was like, ‘Well, I could probably pull this off live if I wanted to.’”

For a while, he performed alone or with anyone who didn’t mind jangling a tambourine or knocking a cymbal.

“It was just a way for me to play some shows and drink for free,” Barrett admits.

Fat Possum released Stain Stick Skin under the name John Barrett’s Bass Drum of Death in 2008, then Barrett produced GB City alone from home with USB microphones. Barrett says hailing from the same city made it easy to keep in touch with Fat Possum, but the label lost interest by the time the LP was ready.

“I just kept working on stuff and sent my record out to a bunch of different places,” he recalls. “I never wanted to be the kid from down the street, like ‘Hey, put my record out!’”

New York-based label Inflated pressed the first 500 color copies of GB City on vinyl -- then Fat Possum wanted back in. Naturally, Barrett soon realized he needed a permanent drummer. After a few didn’t work out, he found Colin Sneed.

“Colin’s been pretty on it in all phases. He loves getting out and touring. He’s really easy to be on the road with; he doesn’t require a lot,” Barrett says. “There hasn’t really been any point of contention between us at all.”

And while Bass Drum belongs primarily to Barrett, Sneed’s not just a hired hand.

“He doesn’t play everything note-for-note how I play it on the record, and I kind of like it that way,” Barrett says. “He throws his own thing on a lot of the songs and that tends to work out pretty well. It’s stuff I wouldn’t about or am not able to do. It keeps it a little different for the live show as opposed to on the record—and I kind of like that.”

The slower pace of the greater part of Oxford, combined with the college-town energy of Ole Miss nearby, is something Sneed knows firsthand as well as Barrett does -- he’s from Oxford as well. It’s fair to assume the free-for-all party vibe Bass Drum exudes -- both in its reeling rock ‘n’ roll sound and lyrically, like on down-and-dirty lines like “I talked to Elvis in my sleep/ He said I’m cracked out/ Oh yeah, I’m cracked out/ But at least I got nowhere to be” on “Velvet Itch”—was born, somewhat, in that coupling.

“There’s a big separation between the town and the college. The only effect it had on us is that we started playing in bars and stuff with different bands when we were 16, and figured out how to drink in certain bars by the time we were 17 or 18,” Barrett says. “I rolled around like I was 21 for, like, four years before I was 21.”

And local watering holes aren’t the only spots Barrett’s been pillaging for parties. He’s about to move into a mini-commune of sorts.

“It’s a five-bedroom, sort of shitty country mansion—we call it the Dude Ranch,” he says. “We’ll go to bars -- the bars close really early -- then we’ll go out there until 5, 6 in the morning sometimes.”

The 20-acre respite is headquarters for the Cats Purring Collective, and is home to enclave members like R. Cole and his spacey chill-rock project Dead Gaze, as well as Dent May, whose lite-FM, ukulele-based pop earned him an LP on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks roster a few years ago. Bass Drum is included in that amalgam of southern players, along with Barrett’s distorted, borderline goth-rock, New Wave side project, Flight.

Expectedly, the Cats Purring Dude Ranch doubles as a venue -- shows are practically nightly. Bass Drum’s video for “Get Found” was shot there, and again, not surprisingly, it depicts a raucous late-night party where Barrett wails and Sneed pounds through one of GB City’s best tunes.

The latter’s been the focus of the first promotional pushes since the album’s April unveiling, but it’s literally chock-full of singles. With “oohs” and “ahhs” and a hint of a Phil Spector-like melody, “Young Pros” is a safe bet for a follow-up, but the mid-tempo “Religious Girls,” executed in the same vein, is a risk-free option too.

But where Barrett’s done his best work -- and where he seems most at home -- are the wilder tunes that comprise the bulk of GB City. “Nerve Jamming” rips a little from the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl,” but filters it through a brand of lo-fi grit Jack White’s only heard, not made. “High School Roaches,” the aforementioned “Velvet Itch,” “Heart Attack Kid” and the title track all exude the dizzying rebellion of punk rock for a the kind of garage rock that makes people push each other while the bar sells out of Pabst.

Live, it’s even more obvious that Barrett belongs in that realm rather than the Motown-inspired end of the garage-rock spectrum. Onstage, his hair falls forward and never comes back, blocking his face almost completely. With his feet turned awkwardly inward, Barrett’s visibly clenching with determination while blissfully lost—subtly reminiscent of Kurt Cobain, who Barrett names first as an influence.

“I like pop songs that are loud,” he says. “Especially some of the songs on Bleach, [they’re] old-school pop songs. They play[ed] them loud and they sound[ed] nasty,” he says. “[Nirvana] is obviously a huge influence in songwriting.”

Still, Barrett does have a penchant for glossier pop: He covered The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” for a friend’s 7-inch that never materialized and it landed on the album as a bonus cut. Barrett opted to keep the male-targeted lyrics as-is, and he nails the falsetto, albeit with echo effects.

“We’re a pretty dude friendly band, so I thought it’d be funny,” he laughs. “We’re a couple of dudes playing loud rock music, so I thought it’d be cool to bend it a little bit.”

The cover aside, even when Barrett does lean toward pop, raw aggression is more than a suggestion on any given GB City track. What’s seemingly a coo written down is, by habit, a snarl for Barrett -- “oohs” aren’t peaceful accents but instead untamed, unruly releases that ooze blood like rare meat from every hook. So when somebody asks who the heck Bass Drum of Death is, starting with “a couple of dudes” is fair -- just don’t stop there.

Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues" [Sub Pop]

2011-05-16T15:04:00.001-04:00

Album review published in the May 2011 issue of Stomp and Stammer

Fleet Foxes are speaking for the masses, whether the Seattle band knows it or not. Pastoral folk-pop has far surpassed the indie realm to become to voice of the flannelled youth gone "green." The eco-conscious kids who find no irony in swiping clean the sale racks at Urban Outfitters are gobbling up this radio-ready granola, and in the case of Fleet Foxes, they're spot on.

Since their 2008 EP, Sun Giant, they've been growing into their critically acclaimed britches. Three years after their self-titled full-length debut, they've incorporated heavier lyrics and far more complex instrumentation. (Literally, frontman Robin Pecknold penned the info for Helplessness Blues and notes it's drizzled with a bevy of new instruments. Among them: wood flute, zither, tympani, upright bass, tambura, clarinet and even Tibetan singing bowls.) On "Bedouin Dress," there's a solo violin accenting featherweight acoustic guitar that positions the snappy number on the fringes of both folk and orchestral pop, and "The Cascades" is a dainty, instrumental showcase of a slew of new sounds. The band's trademark crescendo from quiet vocals and soft strums to rich, glory-almighty gospel choruses is still the prevalent motif, but on Helplessness Blues, there's an obvious spotlight on lyrical content. Pecknold and company have become more pensive, less concerned with hooks and sing-a-longs and more into self-awareness. The words on this outing are undeniably closer to social commentary than the woodsy metaphors of Fleet Foxes.

On the title track, nestled in the middle of LP, Pecknold makes apt points for any youth: he was raised to think he was special, but after some introspection, he'd "rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond" himself. It's a near-classic sentiment, but it's timelier now than ever, as the country's economic pendulum constantly slams hopes and the 24-hour news cycle makes Armageddon seem imminent. Pecknold doesn't deserve kickbacks from the Peace Corps, but on Helplessness Blues, he offers a heaping helping of earnestness that really resonates.

Sometimes Pecknold stretches for Donovan-style simplicity and misses, like on "Blue Spotted Tail." The minimalism – it's just Pecknold and an acoustic guitar – works sonically, but lyrically, it's a little cheesy. Pecknold pleads, "Why is life made only for to end?" and then drops an inadvertent MGMT reference: "Why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?"

Mostly gorgeous mid-tempo tunes though, like "Lorelei," "Montezuma" and even "Sim Sala Bam," make up the bulk of the album. They direct Pecknold's dreamy vocals to center stage and save Helplessness Blues from falling too deep into hippie self-questioning. Truthfully, it's hard to harp on any of Pecknold's musings when his voice is so damned pretty.

It's trite to say, but this album will probably make a few young folks feel less alone. Kids will border their notebooks with the lyrics, beg their parents to drop them off at the band's next show and, for the boys at least, they'll treasure that first chin hair in hopes one day sporting a gnarly, folksy-dude beard. And for the cynical crowd that's accepted that life never gets easier, the enchanting soundscape of Helplessness Blues serves as a respite from the discouraging droll of the day-to-day – so long as they don't mull over the lyrics.

Crib Notes catch-up

2011-05-05T16:12:00.000-04:00

Stories published on Crib Notes (Creative Loafing), March through May 3

Show previews
Q&A with JEFF the Brotherhood
Low 5 returns for another round of rooting for the underdog

News
Black Lips reveal Arabia Mountain's NSFW cover
Carnivores do Daytrotter

Album reviews
Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose
Vivian Girls, Share the Joy

Tour log
The Back Pockets, March 14-19
Day 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6