Cowbell Magazine, April 2011

the kills

Hot and Dangerous

indie rock with a slice of green

cowbellmagazine.com

Steve Earle

On fellow Texans George W. Bush and Cormac McCarthy— and how no one gets out alive

plus Low the Strokes Kurt Vile

Explosions in the Sky Boris | Ponytail Panda Bear tUnE-yArDs Thao & Mirah Daniel Clowes $4.95 | ISSUE no. 11

Times New Viking Lo-fi heroes transcend the squall

What’s your record store?

Coachella artists Duran Duran, Cee-Lo, OFF!, Jimmy Eat World and more weigh in introducing “Two Minutes of Hate” with

the Dead Milkmen’s Rodney Anonymous

Check out www.recordstoreday.com and friend us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@recordstoreday) to find out the very latest on what’s going down on April 16!!!

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Steve Earle, March 8, 2011, in New York City.

Photographed by Gene Smirnov.

> music 04 tUnE-yArDs Merrill Garbus rounds up a posse 06 Overlord will break you 07 Hunx and His Punx Now with more Punx!

08 Ponytail Art rock, ya don’t stop 10 Jason Isbell keeps up the fight 12 The Kills Insufferably cool, impossibly good 14 Thao & Mirah team up for serious fun 16 G et mellow with Panda Bear

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Morbid Fascination

Steve Earle stares death in the eye in I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. cover photo by gene smirnov

> more

18 Times New Viking Font of lo-fi goodness

42 Green Mind Sierra Club head Michael Brune on the state of environmental activism

28 Working Holiday Coachella artists weigh in on their favorite record stores, first records for Record Store Day

45 Books Daniel Clowes’ sympathy for the comics nerd

> movies 46 Love Your Work Broadcast News’ bizarre love triangle 48 Fear and Loathing A batty stop on Gilliam’s long, strange trip 50 Tindersticks and Claire Denis’ uneasy alliance 52 DVD reviews Black Swan, Taxi Driver, Tron, I Love You Phillip Morris, Little Fockers and more

31 Lead Review On Smoke Ring for My Halo, Philly freak folkie Kurt Vile cools out 32 CD Reviews About Group, An Horse, Baby Dee, Boris, Bill Callahan, Crystal Stilts, Frederik, Hatchback, If by Yes, Low, Roy Orbison, the Strokes, Sin Fang, Timber Timbre, Mike Watt and more

> dispatch 64 Rodney Anonymous Kill your phonograph

> from the editor

I just flew in from Austin…

publisher

Alex Mulcahy alex@cowbellmagazine.com editor-in-chief

Cowbell just returned from its maiden voyage to South by Southwest, and it isn’t just my arms that are tired. Four straight days of up-’til-5 a.m. concert- and party-going—all in a haze of Shiner Bock, hipster sweat and sun-baked Texas dust—followed by lugging a stack of yr favorite (or soon to be favorite) indie music mag to the Austin Convention Center at the crack of noon, has left your humble correspondent drained and loopy.

For those who’ve never been, the music portion of SXSW (we missed the film and burgeoning interactive segments of the festival, which took place earlier in the week) has ballooned into a Thursday-to-Sunday street festival with, oh yeah, bands in every conceivable—and inconceivable—venue. You’ve got your nighttime, festival-sanctioned showcases (badge holders, then wristband wearers get first dibs at these); then you’ve got your unofficial daytime and wee-hours parties that anyone is welcome to crash. Imagine a giant music festival dropped on top of Mardi Gras.

It is all, quite honestly, everything at once.

You’ll find a more complete report of Cowbell’s time at the festival at cowbellmagazine.com (the festival ended just as this issue was going to print), and you can relive it through the mag’s Twitter (@cowbellmagazine), but let us take a second to share some highlights: The band we were most stoked to see was Wild Flag, the supergroup of guitarists Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney, Portlandia) and Mary Timony (Helium, Autoclave), drummer Janet Weiss (S-K, Quasi) and organist Rebecca Cole (the Minders). Brownstein and Timony put on a guitar clinic, capping things off with a closing set at the Merge Records showcase Friday at the Parish. The wiry, woundtight Brownstein and the long, lithe Timony took turns showing off their rock moves— Brownstein jackknifing, windmilling and leaping off Weiss’ kick drum, Timony bending strings and necks, playing over and behind her head, both rocking solos from the floor.

The Mess With Texas (MWTX) Saturday show (not part of the SXSW schedule) featured Ted Leo, !!!, Odd Future and reunited Philly punk legends Dead Milkmen. Cowbell was not prepared for just how into the Milkmen the crowd was. (We’re Philadelphians and therefore love the Milkmen, but we weren’t sure how far their influence spread.) From the opening strains of their set, the crowd went into full-on, old-school mosh mode. A cloud of dust kicked up from the dirt parking lot, and punks donned their T-shirts as bandanas, jumped up onstage, dove off of it, chucked half-full tallboy cans into the air (one of which clocked yours truly right in the Phillies hat) and shouted along with classics like “Bitchin’ Camaro” and “Punk Rock Girl.” Singer/keyboardist Rodney Anonymous led the band through some new numbers, and everyone was roundly pleased, and pleasantly grimy.

Which makes now as good a time as any to introduce Cowbell’s new back-page columnist: Dead Milkman Rodney Anonymous. Anonymous, an opinionated firebrand who writes an acerbic world music column for the Philadelphia City Paper called “Aid or Invade,” will be contributing barbed essays on music and pop culture under the rubric of Two Minutes of Hate. Check out the first installment on p. 64.

All joking aside,

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photo by patrick rapa

Brian Howard brian.howard@ cowbellmagazine.com 215.625.9850 ext. 115 managing editor

Andrew Bonazelli art director

Jamie Leary jamie@cowbellmagazine.com designer/illustrator

Melissa McFeeters production artist

Lucas Hardison

customer service

Kevin Juliff kevin@cowbellmagazine.com 215.625.9850 ext. 105 writers

Sam Adams Rodney Anonymous Julia Askenase Brian Baker Andrew Bonazelli Shaun Brady Raymond Cummings Jeanne Fury Adam Gold Nick Green Joe Gross Justin Hampton K. Ross Hoffman Sean L. Maloney Michaelangelo Matos Shane Mehling Michael Pelusi Patrick Rapa Rod Smith Lee Stabert Matt Sullivan John Vettese photographer

Gene Smirnov illustrator

Jim Tierney published by

Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850

Introducing

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FRANK KOZIK

Debuting in all its blind box glory on Record Store Day 2011 in a limited edition of 5000

COWBELL

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Space Jams

Sorta-one-woman-show tUnE-yArDs moves in for the k i l l / by Julia Askenase

M

errill Garbus has a lot on her mind.

When I reach her on the phone, it’s barely 8 a.m. in Oakland, Calif., where the New England whokill native better known as April 19 tUnE-yArDs now re[ 4AD ] sides. She’s been awake, though, journaling the details of a whirlwind European promo trip, from which she’s still shaking off the jet lag.

“I tend to get up and try to clear my head of whatever’s in my brain from the night before,” she says. It must be a hefty load these days. In our brief conversation, the keenly self-aware musician reveals a wide range of topics she’s been wrestling with, from cultural appropriation to creative autonomy. tUnE-yArDs debuted with 2009’s BiRd BrAiNs, a raw, lo-fi affair whose sounds Garbus captured on a handheld voice recorder, then layered to patchy (im)perfection. It landed her an opening spot on tour with the Dirty Projectors, where she enamored audiences with a dynamic live show, looping her alternately bellowing and whispery vocals, ukulele strums and drum-rim clitter-clatter to big-band proportions.

Her unexpected success—not to mention a tasteful little spot in a BlackBerry Torch ad— allowed Garbus to pay off all her debt with room to spare toward her self-produced follow-up w h o k i l l. Ultimately, she reconciled the qualms over her newfound funds by reaching out to local musicians, whom she couldn’t have hired before.

More money also meant more studio polish, which made Garbus uneasy. “It’s that idea

that things are more pure under maybe harsher conditions or when they’re made out of struggle or some-

thing,” she says. But w h o k i l l is by no means overproduced. Rather, it provides greater clarity to her DIY genre exploration—across hip-hop, folk, punk, African music and more—for a surprisingly cohesive, more accessible whole.

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photo by anna m campbell

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5

What a Countryman G

George Pasles gets lost in the dark side of love in Overlord / by Jeanne Fury

eorge Pasles, aka Overlord, would never make

In Soviet Russia, My Heart Breaks You April 1 [ Storm Tower ]

it as a supreme ruler. The dude is much too selfdeprecating, and he second-guesses his own second guesses. He stammers through his interview with Cowbell, but that’s likely because Cowbell told him the lyrics to Overlord’s new album, In Soviet Russia, My Heart Breaks You, make him sound like a creep.

“Oh, cool,” he says. Long pause. “Yikes. Really?”

Well, kinda. The album is, in Pasles’ words, “a definite break-up nightmare album” full of paradoxically upbeat, lo-fi celebratory music. Songs offer glimpses of a doomed relationship, a singles’ bar in hell, and the pathetic internal dialog of a man or woman in denial. Potential mates are described as “prey,” and guilt (or any sense of objectivism, really) is the enemy. “Bragging rights always trump moral wrongs,” Pasles sings. Such jaunty ditties, such sad little humans.

“Sometimes when you’re sizing up a situation, your first reaction isn’t the most defensible one,” he says. Pasles is worried that a listener will assume that he is singing 6

cowbell

about himself. “It can make a very self-indulgent musical. I guess it sort of is, but it’s certainly a twoperson musical,” he contends. “It’s not all a one-badguy sort of thing.”

Coincidentally, this album marks the first time in Overlord’s history where it takes two or more to tango. Since 1997, Pasles has been recording all by himself, but the live shows were getting to be so consistently good that he invited his band into the studio.

That said, Pasles is not relinquishing his Overlord status. Just look at the title: In Soviet Russia, My Heart Breaks You. “It’s [based on] the fine comedic stylings of Yakov Smirnoff,” he says. The so-called Russian reversal joke “was just sardonic enough to work.”

Does he worry people are going to misinterpret it?

“I hope so,” he replies, “because it probably makes me much more interesting than I really am.”

Hunky Dory S

Oakland garage-poppers Hunx and His Punx get weepy

eth Bogart is the mild-mannered alter ego

to Hunx, the outrageous campy presence that first rattled stages in electro-party group Gravy Train!!!! Decked out in masks, spandex, leather or much less, Hunx and His Punx have seduced practically every audience they’ve exposed themselves to.

But on his way to open for Best Coast and Wavves at L.A.’s Music Box, Hunx is incredibly laid back discussing the history of the band’s debut LP, Too Young to Be in Love.

“We wrote it on and off for a year, but most of it came together in the last month,” he says of the follow-up to Gay Singles, the compilation of the lustedafter songs that Hunx has released sporadically over the last few years. “Some we’ve been playing for over a year, but we did a lot of touring, so it took awhile.

But they were written all with the same vision.”

That vision may surprise some of the band’s fans.

While there’s still the usual retro-pop slathered in campy punk, Bogart solidified a dream team of “punkettes” who filled out his sound and helped him to write an album of emotional lo-fi garage. The songs, like opener “Lover’s Lane,” are melancholy tales photo by Kristin cofer

/ by Shane Mehling

filled with harmonizing female vocals that would make any sock hop a teary affair. And Bogart’s nasally tribute to ’60s girl groups is open-hearted and heartbreaking. “At first I’d pick whoever I wanted in the band,” he says, “but then I got all girls, and it’s been working out really well. With them the songs are pretty much instantly catchy.”

Hunx and His Punx will be going international to promote Too Young to Be in Love in the U.S. and Europe, and delight what promises to be even larger crowds of salivating fans. And though it’s hard to imagine these new sad tunes going over well at sweaty, titillating live shows, Bogart claims it’s all about location, location, location.

Too Young to Be in Love

Available Now [ Hardly Art ]

“The music is real serious, but live it’s still crazy and fun.” he says. “We just play the sad songs in the middle. We can’t play those songs last. Then it would be really depressing.”

COWBELL

7

Now or Whatever

R Do Whatever You Want All the Time

April 12 [ We Are Free ]

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cowbell

Step right up for Baltimore envelope-pushing Ponytail’s new art-rock thrill ride / by Raymond Cummings

umors of Ponytail’s demise have been greatly

exaggerated. “I think there was a misperception about us breaking up,” guitarist Ken Seeno explains during a late February telephone interview. “We wanted to take a break. We had over two years of new material. We knew we wanted to make another album.”

That album, the J. Robbins-produced Do Whatever You Want All the Time (We Are Free), arrives less than a year after guitarist Dustin Wong’s enigmatic declaration that the band’s Whartscape 2010 set would be their “last show in a while.” From 2006’s no-fi Kamehameha through 2008’s trippier Ice Cream Spiritual, the Baltimore band’s sound has been amorphous and open-ended, as playfully precise as it is jam-band loose, Seeno and Wong’s gofor-broke leads running inventive, mashed-pedal circles around one another, with Jeremy Hyman’s rabid stickwork acting as an adherent. Ponytail rock like a rollercoaster ride hurtling along Möbius strip rails; hyperbolic vocalist Molly Siegel’s ululations are more impressionistic ejaculation than coherent expression, the yelps and hollers of a thrill junkie who’s got a season pass for that ride.

During their hiatus, Hyman kept time for Japan’s Boredoms, Wong cut Infinite Love and Seeno juggled multiple musical projects. Now, though, Ponytail is

back, and loaded for bear. Think the band can’t top the hallucinatory convulsions of Ice Cream’s “Late for School”? Think again. For Whatever, Ponytail set about deepening and thickening their sound; as a result, this third album is their most florid, tropical, chaotically playful adventure yet.

“We knew that we wanted to have a more expanded sound in general, especially with electronics,” Seeno says. “Molly recorded her voice and tweaked it and chopped it up; she was really into that Eric Copeland record, Alien in a Garbage Dump. Jeremy got really interested in electronics, I went in for synths. We had some bass parts; we used every single input.” From the madrigal sugar surge of “Easy Peasy” to the Morse-coded, mouthof-madness vortex that marks “Tush” to irradiatedplectrum playground “Flabbermouse,” Whatever is Ponytail in gorgeous Avatar-esque 3-D. But it’s “Beyondersville/Flight of Fancy”—a beat-oriented cyborg jam that begins unraveled, but collects itself as it proceeds—which represents the daring embodiment of the band’s emboldened aesthetic. “That one was a straight unedited live recording,” Seeno giddily recalls. “I didn’t actually play guitar—I played synth. I knew we were recording, J. Robbins knew, no one else did. You’re hearing it as it is: That’s the raw Ponytail.”

A few of the

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The Battle Rages O

Drive-By Truckers expat Jason Isbell further deconstructs the hells of war / by Lee Stabert

ne of a Southern singer’s secret skills is the

Here We Rest

April 12 [ Lightning Rod]

ability to say the name of a city or town and have it sound like a story. On “Stopping By,” as Jason Isbell purrs “Atlanta, Georgia” before mentioning a “teenage girl in Chattanooooga,” his emotive, understated delivery has never sounded more convincing. A former member of Drive-By Truckers, Isbell is set to release Here We Rest, his third solo album and second that includes billing for his band, the 400 Unit. With a heavier country influence and more than one unforgettable moment, the record is a true songwriting showcase.

Speaking of, Isbell continues to write about soldiers with more subtlety and aplomb than just about anyone else going. “It’s at the forefront of my everyday life,” he explains. “I’m always thinking

about the fact that we’re still in the middle of a war. And I think a lot of people have just kinda forgotten that.”

of homecoming as a result of “bombs in the sand,” and on his eponymous 2009 album’s “Soldiers Get Strange,” he plumbed the dark side of a post-war psyche. This record’s closer, “Tour of Duty,” is a different animal. Boasting a lovely shuffle and bright mandolin, it takes a few listens to understand that the veneer—like that of the song’s protagonist—is a gloss for some heavy stuff. Between talk of “oysters by the pail” and making up for lost time, the returning soldier tells his people back home, “I promise not to bore you with my stories / and I promise not to scare you with my tears.”

“With [‘Tour of Duty’], I was trying to do something that felt a bit more positive,” he says. “But, at the same time, there is a lot under there. I know a lot of guys, when they get back, try to make it look like everything’s OK, when it’s actually not.”

On the devastating “Dress Blues,” off 2007’s Sirens of the Ditch, he detailed the grimmest form 10

cowbell

photo by joshua black wilkins

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11

Deceiving Looks Substance and style tag up on The Kills’ breakout Blood Pressures

T

he insufferable cool that precedes the Kills is

damn near lethal. Such roguishly good-looking and successful rock stars, Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince are grotesque in their perceived ennui.

The London-based duo first emerged in the early 2000s, touting the nasty garage-rock blooze fuckery of Pussy Galore and Royal Trux proportions. Their first two albums, Keep on Your Mean Side and No Wow, sucked your tongue, took your money, did your drugs and kicked you out of a moving vehicle before you managed to get your zipper back up.

But their allure was undeniable: Hince was the older, swaggering Brit who went by the name Hotel and won the heart of supermodel Kate Moss; Mosshart was the younger, loosecannon American who played in Flor-

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ida punk band Discount at age 14 and was later reborn as VV. When 2008’s Midnight Boom dropped, the Kills drew blood on the mainstream, thanks largely in part to the snide and sharp singles “U.R.A. Fever” and “Cheap and

/ by Jeanne Fury

Cheerful.” A year later, Mosshart became an even bigger force to be reckoned with when she joined Jack White in the Dead Weather. Yeah, the Kills are that cool.

Got the stereotype in place? Good.

Now get over it. Do like the Kills do: Put their music ahead of their hype.

“That exposure is reserved for one thing, and the interest in the music is reserved for another,” says Hince of the differing reasons why people become Kills fans. “It doesn’t cross over as easily as people think, thank fucking God. We started off playing squat parties. After Midnight Boom, a lot of people came to see us, and when you discover a band, you think they were in the wilderness before you discovered them, but it’s not true at all. We’ve

photo by shawn brackbill

been building up pretty gradually.” all those things on this record. Alison “I don’t think that much has changed got so much confidence; she became that people think has changed,” says a much stronger performer in Dead Mosshart, sounding like she just woke Weather and, in her own right, in this up (it’s 12:30 p.m.). “Maybe there’s a duo. The things I liked about her voice bigger public perception of us, more in the Kills is this kind of deadpan vulpeople know about us—but I think, renerability. It made me realize that a ally, shit’s the same.” bit more. It made me realize what the And if you believe that, Cowbell has Kills was, I suppose.” a bridge to sell you. One doesn’t go When asked what the Kills gives her from playing squats to gaining interthat the Dead Weather cannot, Mossnational acclaim over the course of aphart doesn’t waste a second. “I mean, proximately eight years and have shit Jamie,” she says. “It’s a massive differbe the same. The dynamic between ence. That and all the technical stuff, Hince and Mosshart might indeed be which is pretty boring to list out, but… as comfortable and reliable as an old Jay-mee.” She sweetly sing-songs his shoe at this point, but the Kills are putname, and that is the extent of her anting more into their music than ever swer. He softly laughs “Mmmm,” and before. Their latest, Blood Pressures, yours truly is caught suddenly and unis their greatest offering, literally and comfortably in their tender moment. figuratively.

“There’s always been a sense of, ‘Well we’re two people, we should [write songs] like we’re two people,’” says Hince. “But we’ve been experimenting inside those parameters for eight years, and it’s just a natural progression… We had five or six songs [written for Blood Pressures] before I really struck on a way to do it and had this idea for a sound.”

Credit the first Roxy Music album for the breakthrough. Hince became fascinated by the way different instruments on that album—Mellotron, clarinet, saxophone—exuded various emotions and yanked on different heart Mosshart’s cutesy reply is inconclustrings. When he incorporated a new sive, but the music says what she can’t. mix of instruments into the tracks he Of the Kills’ catalog, Blood Pressures is was working on, the rhythms gained most indicative of what she and Hince richer textures. are capable of creating together—and But beyond Bryan Ferry, an even it goes far beyond coolness. greater tip of the hat is owed to Jack “We started writing about pretty obvious things on our first record White. Because Mosshart impresbecause we wanted to make a statesively pushed her limits with the Dead Weather, Hince felt ment and an impact,” says the need to raise his own Hince. On new tracks like game.

“Satellite,” “Heart Is a “Jack is an amazing muBeating Drum,” and “Baby sician and producer and Says,” there’s still a trace musical phenomenon,” he of privileged distance, but says. “I’m competitive in without all the austerity. music. It made me see the The shock treatments of Kills much more focused, their early days have been how different we were, wrangled and molded into Blood Pressures will be available and I wanted to enhance songs with palpable grace, April 4 from

“

and Mosshart cements her place as one of modern rock’s best singers— one who can reach inside and cut deep.

The Kills’ effortlessness that was so fabulously irksome has dissolved somewhat. Call it maturity. Maybe.

“Maturity…” sighs Hince, “I don’t know about maturity. I suppose you just get better at writing songs when you’re doing it longer; you get to explore themes and emotions that are more vulnerable than before.”

“I think to do this you have to have a real innocent, naïve, childlike spirit; otherwise you become really cynical,” he continues. “And this record is definitely not a cynical record. For me, it’s full of all those childish love stories and despair and bleakness, and all those things we’ve always written about.”

Jack [White] is an amazing producer And musical phenomenon. I’m competitive in music.

[Alison’s stint in Dead Weather] made me see the Kills much more focused, how different we were, and I wanted to enhance all those things on this record.” —Jamie Hince Arguably the album’s centerpiece, the heartbreak waltz “The Last Goodbye” knocks out the preconceived notions of the Kills’ can’t-touch-this bullshit. “I learned to cry for someone else,” sings Mosshart, depleted yet with her resolve intact. “I can’t get by on an odds and ends love that don’t ever match up.”

Ironically, that’s the song that best illustrates the complementary union that is the Kills. Hince calls the track “a victory.” “It was an example of me and Allison working perfectly together.

Musically and thematically, we were coming from different places,” he says.

“And I think it is a beautiful coming together of both of those sides.”

Domino Records.

COWBELL

13

Are They Having Fun Yet? Thao and Mirah’s unlikely union yields righteous dividends

M

irah Yom Tov Zeitlyn is no fun. Or at least, she’s wor-

ried she’s not. In a backstage interview conducted during last summer’s tour with Thao Nguyen that’s floating around the Internet, she seems almost sheepish about the prospect of letting down Thao’s fans during her half of their shared set. So, when it came time for them to record an album, appropriately titled Thao & Mirah, Zeitlyn decided to let her lighter side show.

“I have consciously tried to explore other aspects of myself musically,” she says from her home in San Francisco, a city to which she and Nguyen are both recent transplants. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna put down my guitar and sing a disco song, because… because it’s fun.’”

Even when she’s talking about letting her hair down, Zeitlyn can’t suppress a few deep thoughts—not surprising given that she famously appeared on the goofy Nickelodeon game show Double Dare as a

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child, then spent her prize money attending an anti-nuke march.

“I think there is such a thing as serious fun and fun seriousness,” she says. “Seriousness can be defined as if you really, fully mean it. You mean what you’re saying and mean what you’re doing. It can be the goofiest, weirdest performance, with the most bizarre costumes and sounds you’ve ever heard, but if those people are not fully present and connected to what they’re doing, you don’t take them seriously, even

/ by Sam Adams

though what they’re doing may be silly. I don’t always mean ‘seriously’ and ‘fun’ as their common definitions. I think of a sort of a nonlinear way of looking at those things where my fun has tended to be the fun seriousness, and maybe Thao’s songs tend to be the serious fun. Does that make sense?”

It does, and yet I can’t help observing that it may be the most serious definition of fun I’ve ever come across.

Whether you call it serious fun or fun seriousness, Thao & Mirah is seriously great. Splitting the songwriting evenly, with an assist from producer Merrill Garbus, better known as tUnE-YaRdS (see profile on p. 4), the album’s 11 songs mix and match styles freely, from the sprightly acoustic guitar and shuffling snare of “Folks” to the synth drones and reverb-drowned harmonies of “Spaced Out Orbit.” It’s an inspired pairing, especially considering that before their joint

I understand it’s kind of hysterical that this little Jewish girl from Bala Cynwyd, Pa., has this weird, Afro-funk-sounding song, but it’s really fun.”

— Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn on “Rubies and Rocks”

set at the 2010 Noise Pop festival, all Zeitlyn knew of Nguyen was her name.

“I wasn’t that familiar with her music,” Zeitlyn admits. “But as soon as we clicked on a personal level, then I was immediately drawn to, OK, what does this person do when they work? What does it sound like?

I think she’s a great songwriter, and I see a lot of similarities between us.”

Nguyen, for her part, was something of a Mirah superfan. (Both women release music using only their first names.) So when Noise Pop asked if she’d like to collaborate with someone, she knew just who to call.

After years as solo artists—six for Nguyen, 14 for Zeitlyn—both women were happy to share the heavy lifting. “It takes the pressure off if, for half the set, half the record, you don’t have to lead the charge as much,” Nguyen says. “I think that allowed for this freewheeling spirit and energy to surface.

“You could fuck around a little more,” she laughs.

Although Thao & Mirah has its dark moments, that shared sense of liberation and playful experimentation is palpable. On “How Dare You,” the two trade vocals in a she-said/she-said duet, Nguyen’s sleepy sensuality rubbing up against Zeitlyn’s brassy warble. When they played it live, the song was built on their intertwined acoustic guitar lines, but in the studio they stripped it down to thumping drums and echoing handclaps, inspired by a YouTube clip of Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss.” “We wanted it to be kind of a booty jam,” Nguyen says, “or as close as we could comfortably get to one.”

The exuberant “Rubies and Rocks,”

which Zeitlyn initially conceived as a “’50s self-involved industry norms,” she says. girl-group song,” gained a distorted, over- “We sing about our feelings, and everycranked bass line, a restless New Orleans body’s always asking what we feel. That’s beat and a massed horn line that could very unrealistic and unhealthy.” have been swiped from Fela Kuti.

As a successful woman in an industry “At first I thought, This is like ‘Sympathy still dominated by men, Nguyen feels a for the Devil’,” Zeitlyn recalls. “I definitely profound responsibility to encourage heard hand drums on it, and that horn others to follow in her footsteps; she once line sounds kind of like Afro-funk. And called teaching at the Bay Area’s Rock then I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s hys- Camp for Girls “the highlight of my life.” terical [that] that came out of me!’ But I So, while she has nothing but praise for like to be hysterical, and I like to be experithe men who make up her usual backing mental. I think that… one of the beautiful band, the Get Down Stay Down, she says things about music is that it shares itself. a studio collaboration with other women You don’t have to stay strictly within the was long overdue. bounds of one kind of music or another. It’s “I think it was imperative,” she says, a joy to be able to share in music no mat- “and I think it’s something that I’ve been ter where you’re from, where the music craving since I’ve become someone who is from. Hopefully that’s a shared senti- writes music for a living. I love my band, ment. I understand it’s kind of hysterical and I love the people I’ve worked with. But that Mirah from Bala Cynwyd (Pa.), little there is something to be said for a certain Jewish girl, has this weird, Afro-funkkind of pride and camaraderie and unity sounding song, but it’s really fun.” that you feel as women in this country. It In addition to their musical kinship, the was important to come together and make two share a passion for political engage- something and be fully in charge of it.” ment, which is why their summer tour is To that end, the band for their upcoming being staged in conjunction with Air Traftour, as well as the traveling crew, will be fic Control, an organization that helps mucomprised exclusively of women, an idea sicians agitate for social justice. (The local inspired by Beyoncé’s all-female backing organizations they’ll be workband, Suga Mama. ing with at each stop are still “I’ve never met anyone that had a bad thing to say about being selected, but they’ll be focused on those dealing with Beyoncé, so we’re just going to domestic and sexual abuse.) copy her,” Nguyen says, “but Nguyen, who was studying with less of a light show. We’re to be a social worker before not even trying to touch her her career in music took over, spear. But we do appreciate that is happy—even eager—to share she has an all-woman band. We Thao & Mirah will be the spotlight. “It’s really easy to want to be the indie-folk-rock available April 26 get caught up in really stupid, version of that. from Kill Rock Stars.

COWBELL

15

Masculine Intuition Noah Lennox’s latest Panda Bear effort aims for the heart and throat

by Raymond Cummings

16

cowbell

I

t’s almost unnerving how unassuming Noah Lennox is

in conversation. The artist better known as Panda Bear is easygoing, almost preternaturally relaxed. His chuckles are sincere, unforced. He refers to “this band I’m in, Animal Collective” so nonchalantly, you’d thing Animal Collective weren’t the perennial toast and sometime bane of the indie-rock blogosphere.

It’s a late February evening, Lennox is

unwinding at his mother’s house in Baltimore, and it’s no big deal if an interviewer litters the exchange with shorthandscrawling pauses or pushes the bounds of the 20-minute window allotted by his publicist. “I’m just reheating some pizza here,” he says. “It’s mellow.”

“Mellow” is an apt—if reductive—description of Lennox’s solo discography.

While 2004’s Young Prayer marshaled somber, funereal tones, 2007’s Person Pitch was a soft-serve, pastel-pop merry-go-round, forgoing some of the outré freak-folk idiosyncrasies Animal Collective fans had become accustomed to in favor of recognizable samples and the sort of translucent, intoxicating crêpe-light fare that readily invites Brian Wilson and Phil Spector comparisons.

Four years later, Lennox is back with a new batch of flavored abstractions. A few similarities can be drawn between Tomboy and its predecessor: Like Pitch, Tomboy was written and recorded in the artist’s adopted home of Lisbon, Portugal—where he resides with his wife, fashion designer Fernanda Pereira, and their two children— and was preceded by a series of limitededition singles featuring alternate versions of album cuts, seeing release on the Paw Tracks label. But where Pitch flaunted flamingo plumage, Tomboy demonstrates a heretofore absent finesse and edge. Fugues like “Carrots” and “Bros” delighted, but there was a ghostly, faded feel to them; the new songs are sharper, clearer, sticking in memory like burrs on headbands. “[Tomboy] cuts deeper than the last one—the last one was more surface-level,” he acknowledges. “It hits harder. That was intentional. I was hoping it would pack more punch. I had this idea, this triangle of sound I wanted to set up: I wanted the vocals to be more prominent, the top part of the triangle, with the guitar and the drums as the feet.”

Though there’s something to his notion, a different shape dominates this album: the circle. “Slow Motion” and “Last Night at the Jetty” owe a great deal of their impact to the illusion of barely perceptible, Lazy Susan-like rotation. “Slow Motion” proceeds at a drugged, slouching shuffle, sloshing through watery, burbling effects that Saran-Wrap its vocals as looped-ona-click-track soul claps hit with bomb Photo by johan bergmark

Tomboy cuts deeper than the last one.

It hits harder. That was intentional. I was hoping it would pack more punch. —Noah Lennox force. “Last Night at the Jetty”—a mashnote to bygone bonhomie—literally cycles and recycles through memory and its own exhausted gossamer melancholy, trying to isolate the particulars of a shared experience. “[‘Last Night at the Jetty’] was the only song where I set out with a really clear idea of the mood I wanted to set, that you had an experience that you’d never have again,” Lennox remembers. “I made this story: that all these people used to party on a jetty, and they were partying there for the last time, and they knew it. The song is also kind of a mask for what writing music meant to me versus what it means to me now.”

Elsewhere, there’s the choppy, rubberband jolt of “Alsatian Darn,” reminiscent of pre-Before Today Ariel Pink, and “Surfer’s Hymn” trades on jittery, glittery adrenaline and sounds nothing like one would expect from an actual surfer’s hymn—it’s more prolonged wipe-out than chill postsurf hang—proffering a meth-rush of rippling rainbow synths. On the title track, a wainscoting of gnashing, manipulated guitars buzzes and jangles at the bottom of the mix. With its massed chords slurring from key to key and drone-like Lion King vocals, “Afterburner” would’ve fit nicely on Pitch—if it weren’t for the tectonic-shift scrapings beneath the verdant, heartthumping tribalist savannahs.

“You Can Count on Me” is the track most likely to draw comparisons to Down There— the recent solo debut of fellow Animal Collectivist Dave “Avey Tare” Portner. It’s a freak-folk lullaby, a heavy-lidded strum fest where Lennox’s vocals are treated with an effect that makes it sound as though he’s singing from a mile away through an addled forest; meanwhile, in the sonic margins, gossipy, demonic mutterings and chatter erupt that would seem to contradict the song’s central theme.

Tomboy’s exacting nature is in part the result of the circumstances of its creation.

While Person Pitch was composed “anytime, haphazardly, whenever,” in fits and starts, Tomboy was the end result of an extended stretch where Lennox essentially approached songwriting like day-shift work.

“It took me a relatively long time, but I found a practice space in this building called the Interpress—it’s right in my neighborhood, downtown,” Lennox says.

“I basically started treating it like going to the office every day. Because of the logistics of my life, it was totally different than the Person Pitch process. I’d go into the studio in the morning, go home for lunch with my wife, go back to work, go to pick up my daughter. I’d just go to the studio and do something, even if it was just learning a lot about an instrument or practicing the guitar: As long as I was doing something, the ball was rolling. I would get a little melody, develop it.”

Tomboy will Lennox has no plans be available to tour Tomboy upon April 12 from Paw Tracks. its release—“I may do some brief touring here and there, but nothing big”—insisting that Animal Collective will dominate his road travel for 2011.

“There’s no record as of yet, but we’re definitely working on a live set and a group of new songs. We’ll tour for a while, then think about hunkering down and recording. It’s still kind of in the early stages. I can’t say too much,” he chuckles. “Can’t spill the beans. I’ve gotten in trouble for that before.”

17

LudditeFallacy

18

Times New Viking take baby steps toward higher fidelity by Sam Adams

I

f you’ve ever read a word about Times New Viking, you’ve

seen the adjective “lo-fi” applied to them—and not without reason. The title track to 2009’s Born Again Revisited is an ominous miasma of shrieking keyboards, overcranked guitars and drums that sound like metal garbage cans, with Beth Murphy’s voice struggling to make its way through the pea-soup mix.

So, while it wouldn’t be a major event for most bands to set foot in a studio, the fact that Times New Viking’s fifth album, Dancer Equired, was recorded outside of their living rooms represents something of a watershed. This is, after all, a band whose biggest previous leap in terms of sound quality was turning in the master for Born Again Revisited on VHS tape rather than a cassette.

Drummer Adam Elliott, who trades and often shares vocal duties with Murphy, says the shift was more a matter of practicality than a statement of purpose.

“The reason we went into the studio,” he says, “was we came home from tour ready to record a record, and all of our mics were broken, and we didn’t have a 4-track. It was a pretty logical step.”

The band didn’t stray far from home; Dancer Equired was recorded at Musicol Studios in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio. But the difference in their sound is immediately apparent. From the stinging guitar chords played by Jared Phillips that open “It’s a Culture” on down, the album feels almost spacious compared to the distorted claustrophobia of past efforts, revealing sinuous melodies and newly discernible lyrics that could open them up to an entirely new, and substantially broader, audience.

Fans got their first taste of the album to come last fall, when Times New Viking brought a 7-inch containing the album’s “No Room to Live” along on tour with Guided by Voices. The song, which reveals a Flying Nun influence previously buried under layers of static, is built around a descending organ riff and a single snare drum, as well as another sound that threw some people for a loop. “People were like,

Photo by jo mccaughey

‘Still has that fuzz,’” Elliott recalls. “And it’s like, ‘That’s not fuzz. That’s acoustic guitar.’”

Dancer Equired is a transitional record, or rather a record concerned with transitions. There’s a sense of the band reckoning with a world moving faster than anyone can keep track, and deciding

The reason we went into the studio was we came home from tour ready to record a record, and all of our mics were broken, and we didn’t have a 4-track. It was a pretty logical step.”

—adam elliott

to evolve at their own pace. “The lyrics come out of a little bit of complacency, and wanting more to happen,” Elliott says. “I think a lot of the songs are about how the world’s sort of changing, but never in the right way. It’s this idea that a lot of people in our generation kind of agree with, but don’t understand—being happy with nihilism and being loved. We’re all screwed and the world’s crazy and information is going by us so fast, but there’s still stuff to love and care about.”

Although the band exploits technology when it suits them—“No Good,” which features Murphy’s voice and a wobbly acoustic guitar, was recorded onto her laptop—they’re devoted to the sound of analog technology, using the tools of an earlier era to comment on the present.

Elliott admiringly notes that the tape machine on which they recorded Dancer Equired was “the same one Fleetwood Mac used on Rumours—not the same machine, but the same kind.” When Elliott said earlier this year that he’d like to work with Lindsay Buckingham “because he would make us sound pristine,” it sounded like he was mocking the glossy perfection of ’70s album rock, but it turns out he was sincere. “I would love to record something like Lindsay Buckingham,” he says.

“I know he uses all Pro Tools. We’re not against the idea of recording something on a computer some day. We just don’t know anything about it, so we don’t think it’s our business to be messing with that.”

Elliott, Murphy and Phillips met in art school, and the band members retain their collective affection for the handmade, evident not just in their do-it-yourself approach to recording, but their album artwork, which is chockablock with cutand-paste text fragments crammed into every available corner. Just as their lyrics reveal themselves piece by piece, as different fragments float to the surface on each successive listen, so are textual asides and in-jokes there for the finding.

“We did printmaking,” Elliott explains, “these archaic, antiquated methods. We’ve always just made art on our kitchen table rather than putting it into our computers.

Us doing analog isn’t a statement against the digital age as much as a comment on where we come from and how we like to build stuff.”

In fact, “building stuff” is as much a part of the band’s existence as making music. “We pretty much started Dancer a band to get out of Equired will class,” Elliott says, “but be available April 25 from also so we could make Merge album art, fliers and stuff like that. I think over time if you look at all of our art and our songs and our lyrics, I think they all work together.”

19

Morbid

Fascination For former hard-living troubadour Steve Earle, the road to recovery involves accepting that it ends / story by Sam Adams • photos by gene smirnov

S

teve Earle is going to die. He’s been closer to death than

he is now. In the early 1990s, when he was in the grip of a fierce addiction to heroin, the smart money would have been on him not living to see the new millennium, let alone its second decade. He’s since cleaned up and slimmed down, but even so, it’s only a matter of time.

We all run out of road sooner or later. But on his new album, and in his first novel, both called I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the 56-year-old singer-songwriter wrestles powerfully with his own mortal nature, before reaching the conclusion that he’s pretty much OK with it.

“They’re about mortality,” he says from the New York apartment he shares with wife Allison Moorer and their infant son, “but not in a morbid sense. Death as a part of life. It’s probably the one thing we do all have in common, like it or not.”

The album and the novel weren’t planned as companion pieces. Earle started the book not long after Doghouse Roses, his collection of short stories, was published in 2002, while the songs were composed in the years after 2007’s Washington Square Serenade. Even after all the songs were recorded and producer T-Bone Burnett took them off

to be mixed, the album was still untitled. It wasn’t until Earle sat down to sequence the tracks that he realized “the album was about the same thing that the book was about.”

In a literal sense, there’s not much common ground. The songs on I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive tackle subjects ranging from the seafaring life of fathers and sons (“The Gulf of Mexico”) to the resilience of post-Katrina New Orleans (“This City,” a carryover from the Treme soundtrack). The novel, on the other hand, concerns a dope-addicted doctor bottoming out in 1960s San Antonio, reckoning with the ghost of Hank Williams and a young Mexican woman who may or may not be a living saint. But despite their differences, the album and the novel are grown in the same soil, nurtured by the hand of a man who has looked death in the eye more than once.

21

I

t’s a natural time for Earle to think about endpoints. His father died in 2007, and last April, he became a father for the third time. As he talks, 10-month-old John Henry thumps on a toy piano, suggesting he may already have music in his blood. Even now that the album’s completed and the novel written, death won’t leave Earle alone; the day before we talked in late February, the uncle who handed Earle his first guitar passed away in a nursing home, his body depleted by substance abuse.

As Earle tells it, he’s cleaner than ever. He’s been sober since 1994, when he finished a prison term for drug and firearms charges, and the hardcore troubadour now works out regularly.

“I want to live to see John Henry go to college, so I’m going to have to go to the gym every day and not eat white stuff,” Earle says. “I quit smoking five years ago, so I’ve got a shot at sticking around for awhile. Doesn’t mean I will, but I actually think about that stuff, and trust me, he’s a big part of that.”

Earle is careful to draw a distinction between exploring mortality and fixating on it, a tendency for which he has little patience. The new album, he says, “is not about mortality as in shoegazer slityour-wrist music. It’s the opposite of that. I’m not one of those guys who has a copy of White Light/ White Heat in the front of my record collection so everybody can see it when I have a party.”

He quit reading Cormac McCarthy—a heretical act for a literary-minded Texan—after The Road, his pitch-black chronicle of a father and son struggling to survive in a brutal post-apocalyptic wasteland. He’d rather read Shakespeare, or Ernest Hemingway, or the Harry Potter books.

“I think he writes his ass off,” Earle says of McCarthy. “He’s probably a thousand times the writer I’ll ever be. But I think what you write about and what your intentions are matters, and I’m not sure he means well. I don’t see any use in the way that book made me feel.”

These days, Earle writes from a position of relative stability, but it wasn’t always so. On 1990’s The Hard Way, the last album he made before losing several years to drugs and jail, he sounds as if he’s singing through bolts of cloth; on “This Highway’s Mine (Roadmaster),” he can hardly be bothered to keep in time. The album, which Earle co-produced, sounds thick and claustrophobic, almost oppressive. “The darkest record I ever made was The Hard Way,” he says, “and the reason it was that dark was because I was dying. I was barely able to, but I made art about what was going on around me.

It was pretty glum.”

By contrast, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive sounds positively light, with the notable exception of “Meet Me in the Alleyway,” where Earle’s slurred, 22

Assuming that you’re smart enough to know whether there’s a power greater than you in the universe? That just seems out there to me. That seems really radical and really arrogant.

That’s fine for them. But a lack of humility would kill me. It would kill me dead.

– Steve Earle

distorted voice reckons with the ghosts of his past.

The album’s linchpin is “God Is God,” a song that first saw light on Joan Baez’s album The Day After Tomorrow, which Earle produced.

Over shimmering guitar and a tribal beat, Earle lays out an open-ended spiritual manifesto, a vision of a world in which God is both real and unknowable. “Every day that passes, I’m sure about a little bit less,” he sings. “I believe in God, and God ain’t us.”

The song’s combination of faith and uncertainty dovetails with Earle’s 16 years in 12-step programs, a central tenet of which is the act of submission to a higher power. He warned Baez before recording the song that it might make people think she was in the program, and so it has. “People have walked up to her and told her where meetings are and shit,” Earle says. “Joan’s just someone who has never had any problems with any substances whatsoever. It was happening all around her and it didn’t even dent her.” He laughs wryly as he adds, “People like that piss me off.”

The ambiguity of “God Is God,” the belief that whatever God is, he, she or it is more complex than we can fathom, is straight out of the 12-step playbook. Although fear of being force-fed Christianity keeps some addicts away from meetings, the language counsels them to turn their lives over to “God as we understand him.”

“I’m not a Christian,” he says. “I’m not even close to a Christian. What I’ve come to believe—and this is some stuff I didn’t even think about until I got sober—in my experience, 16 years of sobriety is only possible through spirituality. Twelve-step programs are kind of cool, because it’s spirituality with training wheels. All of us get sober because we’re desperate. We’re so spiritually damaged by the time we get to the program that we need something that works no matter what. And that means no turn-offs.”

The flip side of “God Is God” is “Little Emperor,” an undisguised attack on Earle’s fellow Texan, and fellow addict, George W. Bush. “No more pomp and circumstance, no more shock and awe,” he sings over a piercing mandolin line. “What if you find out God don’t look like you at all?”

“It’s an old-fashioned finger-pointing song, as Bob Dylan used to call them,” Earle says, grinning.

“It’s arguably a less mature form of songwriting, but I’m okay with it.”

In addition to his pronounced opposition to the war in Iraq and his longstanding campaign to abolish the death penalty—a punishment Bush meted out with indiscriminate relish during his gubernatorial term—Earle’s anger stems from the destruction of New Orleans, which weathered a natural disaster, but was decimated by the inadequate federal response. When he sings that the

forces moving Bush out of Washington, D.C., are “blowing like a hurricane,” there’s no doubt which one he means.

Holding onto anger is something addicts are supposed to avoid, particularly when it comes to judging others who’ve walked the same road. But Earle isn’t ready to let bygones be bygones. “I’m perfectly proud of ‘Little Emperor’ as an artist, but maybe not quite as proud of it as a recovering person,” he admits. “I’m okay with ‘Fuck George Bush.’ I would like to forgive him for all the people that died and all the permanent damage that was done to this democracy, but I haven’t yet.”

It’s not Bush’s born-again faith that Earle faults so much as his cocksure certainty. As far as he’s concerned, religious fundamentalists and militant atheists are mirror images. “Assuming that you’re smart enough to know whether there’s a power greater than you in the universe? That just seems out there to me,” he says. “That seems really radical and really arrogant. That’s fine for them.

But a lack of humility would kill me. It would kill me dead.”

H

umility notwithstanding, Earle has been trying his hand at all manner of art forms in recent years. Part of the reason the novel took eight years to complete is that he started it at the same time as his first play.

The central character is Doc Ebersole, a defrocked physician laid low by his addiction to morphine. No longer able to procure pharmaceutical-grade narcotics, he supports his habit by toiling as a back-alley abortionist, patching up the occasional gunshot wound on the side.

At first, Graciela is just another Mexican girl in need of an abortion, seeking to dodge the shame of an illegitimate child. But as she recovers from her operation, and the nation reels from the shock of JFK’s assassination, strange things begin to happen. Addicts who come to visit Doc’s rooming house, where Graciela has taken on the role of untrained nurse, find themselves no longer craving drugs; whores walk out the door filled with a desire to start their lives anew in some less seedy corner of the world. And there’s that wound on Graciela’s wrist, the one she got straining through a chainlink fence for a glimpse of Jackie O., that quickly heals but won’t stop bleeding.

Before he got to San Antonio, Doc spent some time on the road with Hank Williams, filling him with shots and pills until his body finally gave out.

Hank’s ghost, however, is still going strong, coaxing Doc to keep using until he, too, uses himself up.

“I’d always heard that there was a doctor traveling with Hank, that he left Knoxville with him, and was not there when the car pulled over to the 23

The album I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive will be available April 26 from New West.

24

side of the road and they found him dead in West Virginia,” Earle says. “Marty Stuart, who’s a real Hank Williams collector, told me the real doctor was a quack with no medical license who claimed he could cure alcoholics by treating them with chloral hydrate, which is barbiturates. But by then the fictitious character I was creating was more interesting to me than the real guy.”

Earle’s greatest challenge in writing the novel was pacing himself, resetting his internal clock after decades of compacting stories to fit the structure of a song. “I’ve had friends of mine who write longer-form stuff for a living, and it blows their mind, the whole idea of writing something shorter,” he says, “especially something like a song—the whole idea of trying to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and an end in three or four minutes, which I do pretty regularly.” Considering that the book is half over before Graciela’s gifts begin to make themselves known, it’s safe to say he’s acquired the knack.

You could say Earle is pacing himself in life as well, if not slowing down at least fixing his eyes on the horizon. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy,” he says. “I am. I started having children over again at age 55, so I’m obviously an optimist.” He doesn’t know what the future will hold, except that he’s more likely to have one than he would have been two decades ago.

Whatever comes, he wants to face it with his eyes open, collecting The novel I’ll notes until the last.

Never Get Out “It’s like recovery,” he says. of this World Alive will “Accepting the fact that you’re be available gonna die one day doesn’t mean May 12 from Houghton that your last words aren’t gonna Mifflin be, ‘Oh, shit.’”

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Working

Holiday H

Make Every Day Record Store Day

ere at Cowbell, we can’t help but love us some Record Store Day (April 16, recordstoreday.

com), that holiday of sorts where music fans like you and me are reminded of what’s really important in life: namely a kick-ass local record store. More than just hubs of commerce, a good indie record store is a gathering spot, a place of discovery, a magnet for those seeking something beyond the easily digested pabulum of the mainstream. Sure, downloading may be convenient, but do you really want recommendations from an algorithm?

Cowbell’s managing editor, Andrew Bonazelli, got his fix at Northeast Ohio’s Quonset Hut (qhut. The Black com): “It doubled as a dart place/head shop. They Angels playing at had Midnight Madness nights where you could Rainbow line up outside Monday night for Tuesday new re- Records in Newark, DE leases. It was ideal for keeping up with P-Jam and Soundgarden, while simultaneously avoiding the opposite sex.”

For publisher Alex Mulcahy, it was Gallery of Sound (galleryofsound.com): “An oasis of coolness right in my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. I remember how excited I was when the clerk unlocked the byzantine security system that protected cassettes from shoplifters. I bought the Rolling Stones’ Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) and played it countless times on the possession I loved more than any other, my Sanyo boom box.”

Art director Jamie Leary has fond memories of Rainbow Records (rainbow-online.com). “It was the anchor of the cool retail strip of the cool street of Newark, Del., the college town where I grew up. I remember riding my bike there as a kid, buying (ahem) Billy Joel cassettes that my ‘cool’ friend Tim convinced me were the cutting edge of rock. Later, as a college student, I would stumble in and blaze my own musical path, often through the voluminous used CDs section, from classic rock to jam bands to alt-country and indie rock and back. It is, after all, still rock ‘n’ roll to me.”

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interviews by

Andrew Bonazelli and Brian Howard

And me, I don’t know where I’d be today were it not for Bethlehem’s Play It Again Records (piarecords.com), which introduced me to the likes of the Descendents, Fugazi, Throwing Muses and Beat Happening when I needed them most.

Cowbell caught up with 10 artists playing this year’s Coachella festival (where a pop-up record store will commemorate the joyous event) and asked them about the record stores of their youth.

—Brian Howard

photo by dain simons

What was your

favorite record store?

DAVE KING

FLOGGING MOLLY

There used to be—there still is, actually—a basement shop in Dublin just off Grafton Street, Tommy’s [Sound Cellar, owned by Tommy Tighe]. I used to go there as a kid all the time. That remains one of my favorites. It was in a little cellar, you know? We’re very fortunate when we do in-stores; we always do indie record stores. They’re always a lot of fun.

We just love collecting vinyl, it’s great to get some deals on some good old vinyl.

ALISON MOSSHART THE KILLS

Off the Record in Royal Oak, Mich. I used to go there in the summertime. It had a photo booth and a cat. It had records and it was a real record store. In the town in Florida where I grew up, the closest thing to a record store was a tiny cassette tape store in the mall. So, going to Michigan and Off the Record was a huge big deal to me.

KEITH MORRIS OFF!

Reckless Records in Chicago, Wax Trax Records in Denver, Vacation in Silver Lake, Origami in Echo Park and Fingerprints in Long Beach. In my formative years, we had a record store on Hermosa Avenue in Hermosa Beach called the Record Hole, and that’s where I heard David Bowie, the Move, Mott the Hoople, Genesis, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Captain Beyond, Trapeze Trapeze, Mainhorse, America and a small army of others for the first time.

records and posters everywhere. What makes Amoeba special to me is I can walk through the store and people tell you about different music you haven’t heard before, different bands, like, “You might want to check this out.” There’s music from all over the world. It’s not just the “in” groups; it’s people and things you need to hear that you probably won’t get a chance to hear that people enlighten you to just by walking into the store all the time.

still open in the whole wide world. If they haven’t got it, you are really going to have to search hard to find it elsewhere. Great staff, cool vibe and may it never close its doors to the public.

SONNY MOORE SKRILLEX

I’d say my favorite indie record store is Amoeba. It’s just so big and has so much to choose from, from CDs and vinyl to DVDs. And not to mention they really go out of their way to categorize their music genres well.

They’ve got just about every genre of EDM separated, so you can easily find what you are looking for, or perhaps something you weren’t.

NICK RHODES DURAN DURAN

Swordfish in Birmingham, which was formerly called Rockers in the 1980s.

Pure old-school, still stocks loads of vinyl and is run by real music lovers who are knowledgeable and passionate about what they do. In America, I love Amoeba in L.A., probably the greatest record store

JOHNATHAN RICE JENNY AND JOHNNY

I liked the Kemp Mill Music Store in Annandale, Va. I come from strip mall country, and I could walk to it from my house. I bought Use Your Illusion I and II there, on cassette.

JENNY LEWIS

JENNY AND JOHNNY

Music Plus on Ventura Boulevard when I was a kid. The late great Sea Level (where a car crashed through the front window after they announced they were closing shop).

RAPHAEL SAADIQ

There was a store back in the day called the Record Factory in Oakland. It used to be on Telegraph [Ave.]. And then there was another one called Leopold’s, and then there was Rasputin in Berkeley.

Amoeba is the one I live at now. As a kid, as a musician starting out, there were

photo by meghan day

Mastodon at Schoolkids in Raleigh, NC.

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Do you remember the

JIM ADKINS

JIMMY EAT WORLD

There were a couple really good ones in the Phoenix area. One was based out of Tempe, called Eastside Records. As a kid, before you could get into bars, but after you were old enough to stay out a little bit later, that was kind of like a hangout. Another favorite is called Stinkweeds. They had a lot of bands play there, and I saw Trans Am and Low and Elliott Smith play there. Both stores were pretty involved with the music scene, very supportive. Those were the first stores that would sell our stuff; they took it on consignment.

CEE-LO GREEN

I used to go to Super Sounds in Atlanta. It was right across the street from the Greenbriar Mall, our neighborhood mall on the south side of Atlanta. My mother at the time owned a store inside the mall, so I spent an awful lot of time up there. I got one of my first jobs up there and, you know, I remember very fondly getting one of my first checks—I walked across the street and I bought MC Shan’s album, and I bought Public Enemy’s 12-inch for “Rebel Without a Pause.”

RYE RYE Waiting in line at the Sound Garden in Baltimore.

I’ve been to the Sound Garden, which is in Fells Point in Baltimore; it was pretty cool and dope! I did a photo shoot there, actually, and the inside of the store was creativelooking: great designs.

First album you bought?

NICK RHODES DURAN DURAN

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie. It was a truly exciting moment; I remember taking it home, removing it from its sleeve and carefully lowering the needle, then turning it up as loud as my stereo would go… It sounded extraordinary, still does today.

JENNY LEWIS

JENNY AND JOHNNY

“Pass the Dutchie” by Musical Youth

JOHNATHAN RICE JENNY AND JOHNNY “Bad” by Michael Jackson

JIM ADKINS JIMMY EAT WORLD

It was probably Quiet Riot’s Metal Health. I bought it on cassette.

RAPHAEL SAADIQ

First record I ever bought was “Bustin’ Out (On Funk)” by Rick James. I got it on 45.

KEITH MORRIS, OFF!

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bought it [in] Del Amo with a $50 bill my friend Chuck found in the bottom of the fruit bowl that Saturday on the counter in his dad’s apartment.

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The sound garden photo by j mac

new music reviewed and graded for your aural pleasure

Disgustingly

Good On his fourth record in as many years, Philly folkie Kurt Vile busts a chill

I

Kurt Vile

Smoke Ring for My Halo matador

photo by shawn brackbill

don’t wanna change, but I don’t

wanna stay the same,” sings Kurt Vile on “Peeping Tomboy.” With Smoke Ring for My Halo, the Philadelphia freak-folkie does both.

On this, his fourth full-length, Vile opts to shoot from the hip, jettisoning the lo-fi, hypnotic haze of distortion and dissonance that marked his first three records in favor of a more tempered tone, more streamlined songs and a glossy studio sheen.

While this approach puts the focus squarely on the strengths—of which there are many—of his songs, it does so at the expense of the tense atmosphere and frenzied psychedelic cacophony that made previous efforts, like his stellar 2009 Matador debut, Childish Prodigy, such a thrilling and haunting listen. Still, Smoke Ring is Vile’s most fully realized release—and what he realizes is that he wants to chill out.

Vile, again with backing band the Violators, takes no time making his intentions known. If album opener “Baby’s Arms” doesn’t seduce you in its first 14 bars, you might as well just skip to the next disc; but if it does, you’ll definitely wanna load the bong, fill up the tub and light a candle or two. The track’s sonics set the tone for the record’s following 47 minutes—which brim with distant flourishes, finger-picked 31

THE

reviews

arpeggios, a percussive symphony of shakers, strummed acoustic guitars and looping ostinatos; it’s all set to Vile’s wry, conversational ruminations on love, laziness and other slacker frustrations, and delivered in his sleepy-headed stoner-speak drawl (i.e., “If it ain’t workin’, take a whiz on the world”).

“Jesus Fever”—the record’s second track and perhaps Vile’s poppiest song to date—picks up the pace with its backwards, four-on-the-floor backbeat, warped chord-progression and smart-alecky, lethargic delivery, sounding like Dinosaur Jr. without the thump of overdriven guitars. Its follow-up cut, the Stones-y romp “Puppet to the Man,” sees the affair kick into full (albeit short-lived) electric, rock ’n’ roll swagger, only to simmer back down with “On Tour” and settle into a sequence of placid, mid-tempo meditations that stack up through the record’s mid-section and continue into its homestretch—highlighted by cuts like the Thurston Moore-fronts-R.E.M. gem “Society Is My Friend, ” the gorgeous “Peeping Tomboy” and the bluesy title track.

While Vile seems and sounds more than comfortable to ponder his place in the world amid the calm, Smoke Ring is a record that requires some patience, despite the singer’s obvious attempt to make his songs more immediate and accessible. With their attention-grabbing lyrics, memorable melodies and sheer beauty, it’s the strength of the songs that keep the record’s perpetually relaxed aesthetic from sounding too same-y. —Adam Gold

About Group

Start and Complete Domino

Hot Chip chap and chums’ hip chops Start and Complete was recorded in a single day and mixed in three, with compositions that the players—a Brit alt/out panoply whose credits include This Heat, Spiritualized and Derek Bailey— had minimal time to learn. So, listeners may be surprised to find that, far from a free improv excursion (à la the group’s first, eponymous outing for the Treader label), this is an album of heartfelt, blue-eyed bedsit soul.

The extemporaneous working method absolutely translates into a wonderfully congenial looseness and immediacy, but notwithstanding the undeniably masterful ensemble-based musicianship on display, what it’s really about this time is the inimitable singing and songwriting of Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. Continuing in the tender, comforting vein of his band’s triumphant One Life Stand, Taylor sets his croon on swoon and unleashes a dozen new heart-melters and bad-love ballads (plus one roiling, 11-minute funk-workout cover) doused in warm Wurlitzers and organs (plus some stray electronic squiggles), till resistance is just about hopeless. —K. Ross Hoffman

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War of the Gargantuans Japanese axmen Boris attain inharmonic convergence

W

e’re not gonna lie: We get redonku-

lously stoked every time a new record drops from kaiju-rock titans Boris. OK, maybe not every time—there are only so many hours in a day and so many clams in our bank account. Seriously, they’ve released roughly eight gajillion records in the nearly 20 years they’ve been an amplifier-worshipping rock ensemble—it’s tough Boris to keep up. So, let’s just say that any time the Japanese trio Heavy Rocks releases a record stateside, we get super stoked, and the simultaneous release of Heavy Rocks and Attention Please is Attention Please a reminder that we really don’t need that spleen.

Taken as a pair, which we highly suggest, these could Sargent House easily be pegged as Boris’ Zen Arcade—the point where guitar music goes into the great beyond, pop hooks become heavier than hell and noise experiments become acutely accessible. These albums are a masterwork of feedback and fuzz, an epic symphony of sludge and speed, a blueprint for the future of heavy music. Taken separately, Heavy Rocks—not to be confused with the import-only album or the 7-inch series of the same name—and Attention Please represent two sides of a band that knows no bounds. Rocks is quite possibly the most danceable heavy music since Al Jourgensen wandered out of the land of rape and honey. Attention Please—the first album to feature guitarist/vocalist Wata’s singing throughout—is psychedelic, sleek and menacing, channeling King Buzzo, Kevin Shields and Donna Summer. And both are totally worth swapping a kidney for. —Sean L. Maloney

photo by Miki Matsushima

Architecture in Helsinki

An Horse

Walls

Mom+Pop Music

They’re closing in all right We hate it when our computers become self-aware, but we could use it a bit more in our songwriters. Let Kate Cooper be a model for the sapient indie pop lyricist, never on autopilot, resistant to all but the most useful clichés. See An Horse’s second album, Walls, wherein the singer-guitarist acknowledges her dark tendencies—among them predicting her own death while waiting for her flight to board, contemplating her “convict blood” (as all sentient Aussies might) and obsessive counting (eyelashes, planes, windows) during long silences—and then dismisses them with a sharp flick of the tongue, i.e. lines like “that’s enough Twin Peaks for one night.”

But all of that wouldn’t matter if this album didn’t rock you right, which it does, with big choruses, danceable beats (by An Horse’s other half, drummer Damon Cox) and righteously catchy delivery throughout. Walls will sit nicely next to Mates of State, Rainer Maria and vintage Rilo Kiley in the Pandora of your mind. —Patrick Rapa

Baby Dee

Regifted Light

Moment Bends Modular

From start to Finnish It’s likely more than happenstance that the early popularity of mash-ups coincided with the early 2000s proliferation of kitchen-sink indie-pop bands like Australian ensemble Architecture in Helsinki. Akin to Broken Social Scene or the Fiery Furnaces, the Aussies trade and weave disparate genre conventions, while the group subscribes to the notion that there’s no such thing as too many instruments crammed into a sonic space.

Where Architecture in Helsinki lack the Fiery Furnaces’ pretension and the Social Scene’s scope, they trump them both in pure giddiness. But on Moment Bends, the troupe withholds a bit of the pop sugar, if only a teaspoon. Restraint goes a long way for Architecture; otherwise one might risk diabetic coma. The new one doesn’t sport the transitional type of suites found on In Case We Die, but there’s still variety. “Contact High” channels Prince, while closer “B4 3D” even sounds a little sad. Still, it helps if you come into this with a sweet tooth. —Matt Sullivan

Drag City

Shining on Baby Dee is one of the most enchanting figures in modern music. Even if her (quite inimitable) literal voice appears relatively little here, her personality—a blend of sentimentality, humor, quirky theatricality and a big-hearted sense of wonder—shines marvelously throughout.

Staking out largely new territory from the frequently dark, confessional cabaret of her past work, Regifted Light presents a series of brief, thematically linked chamber pieces oddly reminiscent of Aaron Copland at his most populist, variously incorporating strings, horn, glockenspiel, bassoon, temple blocks and more, but always featuring Dee’s deliciously crisp piano playing (on Andrew W.K.’s old Steinway, no less.) The four interspersed vocal numbers—particularly the magnificently silly “Pie Song”—are among the highlights, but the album plays as a cohesive suite, and despite (or maybe because of) its brevity and resounding lightheartedness, it’s as powerful and affecting, in its way, as anything she’s done. And probably all the more readily enjoyable. —K. Ross Hoffman

Putting the Dour in Troubadour When the going gets dark, Bill Callahan goes darker

T

he Grateful Dead’s got nothing on the long,

strange trip of Bill Callahan. The charming incompetence of his early DIY instrumental recordings, perhaps Bill Callahan steered by his affection for notorious experimentalist Jandek, ultiApocalypse mately gave way to his dusty roots reinvention as Smog, as well as his evolutionary shift toward utilizing both his astonishing lyrical drag city gifts and his sonorous baritone—a rumbling vocal instrument so rapturously deep it makes Leonard Cohen sound like Bryan Ferry—to their greatest artistic effect. After 15 years and 11 albums, Callahan shelved the Smog concept and began releasing music under his own name, retaining his often bleak outlook with occasional rays of ironically placed and executed sunshine.

photo by goya skye

Considering Callahan’s glass-half-fullof-piss perspective, titling his third selfbannered album Apocalypse is a sure sign of a dark horizon, and he doesn’t disappoint. But the album is not an end-of-times concept epic—just a set of noirish short stories from a master of the melancholy form. “Drover” cold-opens the album with Callahan intoning somberly, “The real people went away,” his sparse roots ensemble coming in as he details the difficult trail of a cattle herder; “Baby’s Breath” plays like an Irish love-gone-wrong ballad translated with Nick Drake austerity and Sonic Youth chaos. “America!” is a Tom Waits-frontsthe-Electric Prunes freakout that jazzily details the ills and thrills of the home of the brave, and “One Fine Morning” closes the album like a nine-minute gospel sermon in a dusty prairie church with acoustic reverence and electric brimstone. Perhaps Callahan’s most substantial accomplishment on Apocalypse is recording live in the studio without overdubs, making the swirling textures, tempos and moods even more impressive. —Brian Baker

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reviews

Inward Bound Bell X1

Low returns from its longest hiatus with a personal epic

Bloodless Coup Yep Roc

Taking command, slowly To most Americans, Bell X1 are a complete cipher—even after they scored songs from earlier albums on Grey’s Anatomy and The O.C. (“Eve, the Apple of My Eye” was the soundtrack to the latter’s much-hyped lesbian kiss scene)—so they’d likely be astonished that the Irish band routinely fills stadiums at home, a feat accomplished by racking up multi-platinum sales figures that broke records previously held by U2 and the Pope, not necessarily in that order.

On Bloodless Coup, Bell X1’s fifth album and second without founding member Brian Crosby, the band retains its Coldplay-channels-David Byrne warmth, with a slightly greater reliance on an electronic pulse. “Safer Than Love” could have been produced by Gary Numan, “Sugar High” blips and bops with bedroom laptop intensity, and “Hey Anna Lena” opens with a chilly Radiohead minimalism, eventually giving way to the majestic orchestral dynamism that has defined Bell X1 from the outset. But “Nightwatchmen” and “The Trailing Skirts of God” soar and swoon with the best of the band’s estimable and emotional pop catalog.

—Brian Baker Natalie Beridze/TBA

Forgetfulness

Monika Enterprise

Who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows?

As a member of the Goslab art collective in Georgia (the Asia one), electronic artist Natalie Beridze (aka TBA) has been cranking out a catalog of work that’s attracted worldwide admirers. In 2008 she was the subject of a Forward Poetry Prize-winning poem, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious such prizes. The tongue-in-cheek verses in “Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze” were written by Don Patterson, who at the time was a 44-year-old Scottish poet who’d never met the 25-year-old musician.

On Forgetfulness, it’s easy to understand how Patterson could become so smitten. There are atmospheric forays which collide with beat-driven minimalism that in turn get gnarled into brief, chaotic disruptions. Throughout it all Beridze’s voice appears and disappears, often in a whisper-y, barely there sort of way. “What About Things Like Bullets” squeezes the last breath of life out of its drum loop, but it’s one of a handful of tracks that wouldn’t be out of place in the dance club.

The rest of the album runs the gamut of ambient music, post-industrial, minimal techno, noise and a million points in between—all of it stunning.

—Matt Sullivan

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A

fter Drums & Guns and The Great Destroyer,

you might assume the title of Low’s ninth album represents the band lowering its sights, C’Mon setting aside universals for a simple, colloquial invitation.

After a four-year break between recordings, the longest capitol in their nearly two decades as a band, and a couple, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker turn their attentions inward, searching—sometimes painfully—for a way to co-exist with the world, and with each other.

Recorded in the same Duluth, Minn., church as 2002’s Trust, C’mon manages to feel both intimate and epic, pushing through private emotions towards larger truths. Enhanced by banjo, strings and lap steel (the latter courtesy of Wilco’s Nels Cline), the songs expand the band’s sound without violating the fragile simplicity at its core. The chiming glockenspiel on “Try to Sleep” lends it the air of a lullaby, although it also reminds us there are some rests you don’t wake up from. Until then, Sparhawk advises, “Don’t look at the camera.”

On “Witches,” Sparhawk makes clear his disdain for those who put image before honesty: “All you guys out there trying to act like Al Green: You’re all weak,” he sings, the only time he veers close to the anger of the previous two albums. Being a tough guy is easy; it’s laying yourself bare that hurts. On “Nothing but Heart,” Sparhawk matches himself to the title phrase for more than six minutes, incanting it over and over as the band swells behind him (even the church’s organ gets into the act). Parker chimes in with a countermelody, trying to guide Sparhawk through the storm. There’s a sense of a journey completed, a dark night of the soul weathered and a glint of sun breaking through the clouds.

If Low has lowered its sights, it’s only to look in the mirror. —Sam Adams Low

photo by Sara Kiesling

Blueprint

Adventures in Counter-Culture Rhymesayers

Back to the drawing board Columbus, Ohio, MC Blueprint used to work with RJD2 as Soul Position, and on his own he’s a little rickety—an at-times agile rhymer (“You want a deeper meaning inside of the sentences / To play the rhyme backwards for messages”—“Go Hard or Go Home”; “I do the impossible / But I make it look easy”—“Radio-Inactive”) who hasn’t quite yet figured out how to shape that skill into definitive songs.

It doesn’t help that, rather than the lush sonics RJ used to provide, Blueprint’s own pretty basic beats drive Adventures in Counter-Culture, his first album in six years. The music has some ideas—the robotic snap of “Go Hard,” the eerily tense early parts of “My Culture”—but it’s often pedestrian, which becomes especially clear when he moves into straighter, more rock-like terrain, as on “RadioInactive,” or dabbles with dubstep beats (though not spatiality) on “Stole Our Yesterday.” —Michaelangelo Matos Cold Cave

Cherish the Light Years Matador

Sneaking strychnine-laced blow into the Hacienda In their infancy, NYC outfit Cold Cave stalked the jagged line between dance-pop and industrial grit, with a bit more deference to the latter than the former. But Cherish the Light Years doubles as frontman Wes Eisold’s Factory Records fellatio party, a smashed stained glass gauntlet of pealing LowLife axework, pouty Bernard Sumner-esque growls, and synthesized BPMs, moving the group further into pop’s no-man’s-land without quite coughing up “Life Magazine II.” New New Romantic powder kegs like “Pacing Around the Church” and “Underworld USA” are as compositionally intricate are they are sonically sordid, their multitudes of moving parts criss-

crossing hungrily, lending depth to what appear at first blush to be rudimentary New Order homages that salute and condemn the prismatic admixture of exhilaration, narcissistic vacuity and mystery through which Eisold views the city he calls home.

The dour “Burning Sage” seethes and hisses like a vagrant-strewn steam grate; “Icons of Summer” sics blackjack synths on disembodied car-alarm wails. —Raymond Cummings

Crystal Stilts

In Love With Oblivion Slumberland

Seedy plantings If the Misfits crashed Wanda Jackson’s party and smoked some of Joy Division’s primo hash with ? and the Mysterians, everyone’s hallucinations would be scored by Crystal Stilts’ latest album, In Love With Oblivion. The title is precisely indicative of what the mood is like on the Brooklyn-based band’s second full-length.

Tunes like “Half a Moon,” “Precarious Stair” and “Silver Sun” swoon hard and low, and are galaxies away from reality television and iPads. Deep, echoing vocals, twangy surf-punk grooves, catatonic snaps of the snare and a zombified playfulness create one delicious space oddity. But as with Crystal Stilts’ highly regarded 2008 debut, Alight of Night, darkness beckons. At first, In Love With Oblivion doesn’t feel too dangerous or seedy; but as the album progresses, so do the nefarious undertones. Oblivion sure sounds like a good time, but watch your back, lest it swallow you whole.

—Jeanne Fury Dag för Dag

Boo

Ceremony

Least metal umlaut ever After drifting from Montana to Wisconsin to Hawaii, and eventually to Stockholm, the brother-and-sister duo of Jacob and Sarah Snavely weave the style of ungrounded, gypsy threads one would expect from that sort of wanderlust. Layering loose and understated guitar

lines with ghostly vocals, their band, Dag för Dag (Swedish for “day by day”) issued their debut EP on Saddle Creek back in 2009. Now the two make their full-length debut with Boo. Dag för Dag wander into interesting sonic territory from time to time, with guitars alternating between Morricone-style plucks and post-punk slicing. Comparing them to other duos, there’s an ethereal wash akin to High Places and an assertive side more on par with the Kills. Lyrically and vocally is where they stumble. The first verse on the album goes, “You wanna comfort me? / I ain’t no cat in a tree / I’m fancy free.” Get it? Like Cat Fancy. Then there’s “Boxed Up in Pine,” which leans so heavily on its refrain that it’s too aggravating to ever sound catchy. —Matt Sullivan

Beth Ditto

Beth Ditto EP Deconstruction

Solo effort isn’t a cheap knockoff After the success of Gossip’s major label Music for Men, Beth Ditto seemed primed to replicate the popularity she enjoys in Europe here in the States.

But her first solo release shows that the dancehall is far more important to her than the radio.

This EP, written with analog electro producers Simian Mobile Disco, offers great songs for the club and not much else. Sure, leadoff “Open Heart Surgery” shows Ditto at her most diva, crooning deft metaphors about heartache. But the protracted song lengths of three of the four tracks don’t fit in well with an indie rock party mix, and the only single-appropriate track, “I Wrote the Book,” is the weakest, coming and going with a barely hummable chorus. Ditto seems happy where she is, writing balmy dance numbers instead of pop hits, and if she continues to shrug off the mainstream, it’s the mainstream’s loss. —Shane Mehling Explosions in the Sky

Take Care, Take Care, Take Care Temporary Residence

HOOP DREAMY Explosions in the Sky aim high

photo by seamus murphy

Atmosphere for more than just Friday night A dozen years ago, Explosions in the Sky began concocting wordless epics, blending prog’s swelling bombast with post-rock’s edgy energy in a true approximation of soundtracks with no movies. It’s an apt description, as the Texas quartet spent their first practice discussing films and their second actually rehearsing. With that mindset, EITS have created swirling cinematic suites on their four studio albums, the big surprise coming in 2004 when the band provided the soundtrack to Friday Night Lights.

Since doing actual score work, EITS have become even more enamored of atmosphere, beginning with 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and continuing with their latest, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. TC3’s half-dozen tracks—the shortest at three and a half minutes, the longest just breaking the 10-minute mark—are marvels of aggressive ambience, as concerned with texture and mood

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as tempo and melody. To that end, EITS employ a variety of unusual instrumentation on Take Care, including Japanese singing bowls, classical guitar and percussive vocals, sculpting sound like it was a physical medium and crafting a gallery of powerfully emotive compositions. —Brian Baker

Foo Fighters

Wasted Light RCA

Another casualty in the war on foo In the roughly 17 years since Nirvana exited stage left, Dave Grohl has remained a hitmaking force on radio—even if sometimes that seemed counter to his better judgment. The Grohl-led Foo Fighters have maintained mainstream relevance on an FM dial that’s devolved into a wasteland of Nickelbackery, and in doing so, have spent their past three records peering over the precipice of buttrock.

They’ve yet to jump that cliff, but it’s sometimes a little too close for comfort.

None of that’s changed on Wasted Light. It’s a slick and polished set, built for blasting through the airwaves. Like the rest of the band’s post-millennial output, three or four songs are badass enough to keep from dismissing it outright. “White Limo” harkens back to the dirty scuzz that made their first album accessible but dangerous, while riff-heavy tracks like lead single “Rope” comprise the rest of the highlights. But most of this is by-the-book: Compact verses open up to arena-sized choruses with a couple ballads. Nothing surprising, but it’ll sound fresh between the latest Daughtry cuts.

—Matt Sullivan Fredrik

Flora

The Kora

A bittersweet harvest One has to pause before pairing the term “electro-folk” with the Swedish trio Fredrik. True, there’s plenty of wintry choral interludes, bells and violins atop the crystalline electronic textures within the production, but that hardly means you’ll hear selections from Flora performed at a coffeehouse open mic any time soon.

Rather, this LP shows the trio moving towards a sort of 21st century chamber music, particularly on gentle free verse ballads like “Naruto and the End of the Broken Ear.” At times, they evoke a vintage 4AD gothic haze, such as the haunting standout “Rites of Spring.” But Fredrik never sink into despair; the lyrics, when they’re decipherable amidst layers of keyboards and vocalist Fredrik Hultin’s wispy tenor, are playfully absurd and dreamlike (“The pigs will fly away / From their holy sty / Here I dream about the perfect hurricane”), witness titles like the instrumental/lame excuse “I’m Pretty Sure He Said Killdren.” Riiiight, Fredrik. We believe you. —Justin Hampton

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Reverb, Renown and Rote Where has Rick Froberg’s mojo gone?

Obits

Moody, Standard and Poor

V

iewed in the context of his previous work,

each of Rick Froberg’s bands has initially come across as a disappointment. Drive Like Jehu took the angular attack of San Diego scene granddadies Pitchfork Sub Pop and imbued it with better hooks. But Hot Snakes—Froberg’s second pairing with collaborator John Reis—really shined a light on the unique attributes of DLJ’s Yank Crime by placing an even greater premium on melody.

As with 2009’s I Blame You, the latest full-length from Obits may leave Froberg fanatics high and dry: Moody, Standard and Poor lacks both the bluster and the sinister peaks of Pitchfork, Jehu and Hot Snakes. But Froberg’s magnificent guitar tone is still front and center with Obits, as well as his flair for rockabilly: Even the least Froberg-y of his efforts to date still bears this unmistakable imprint.

It’s worth noting that I Blame You elicited multiple comparisons to the excellent ’60s era surf-rock band the Ventures upon its release. The warped surf-meetsgarage sound that Froberg first teased on Yank Crime (particularly “Luau”) takes even more dramatic shape on tracks like “Everything Looks Better in the Sun” and “Spot the Pikey” (which features an overt vocal nod to the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out”).

Moody, Standard and Poor even closes with an instrumental, “I Blame Myself,” that nearly encapsulates the Ventures, Link Wray and John Barry’s surf-themed James Bond soundtracks. The competent, assured manner in which Obits present itself here is refreshing, and the pair of tracks on which guitarist/vocalist Sohrab Habibion takes lead fare much better this time around. But Froberg’s driving, hair-raising chant on “I Want Results” spotlights what’s missing from Moody, Standard and Poor: a challenge. —Nick Green

photo by eliot shephard

Hatchback

Zeus & Apollo Lo Recordings

Gods and monsters From this vantage point, the scintillating, Kraut-induced cosmic disco of Sam Grawe’s debut feels like a hedged bet. On his second opus as Hatchback, the San Franciscan synthaesthete (and Dwell magazine editor) stretches luxuriously beyond commonly perceived boundaries of taste, proudly proclaiming the emergence of “the new age of New Age.” That canny, if charged, catchphrase—hip-tobe-square provocations notwithstanding—seems intended to grant him, and us, greater freedom to indulge in this sumptuous music (which could also be comfortably, less contentiously labeled ambient electronica) on the level of pure, experiential beauty. And Zeus & Apollo is an exceptionally, unabashedly beautiful work, if—per its classically inflected title, and Grawe’s design inclinations— more focused on forms than feelings.

But its formalism is far from minimalist or reductive. These six tracks—averaging over 12 minutes apiece—are serenely slow-moving, but constantly evolving, never static. Indeed, it’s a marvel how much color and character Grawe can introduce without disrupting his music’s fundamental clarity and calm.—K. Ross Hoffman Holy Ghost!

Holy Ghost!

DFA

Frightful ’n’ (largely) delightful Even if your sonic proclivities tend toward the more sterile ends of ’80s pop and rock, the songs

by Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser—a.k.a. New York’s Holy Ghost!—have enough tsss-bip synth sheen to them that it might give pause to even a staunch fan of the approach.

Getting Mr. Yacht Rock himself, Michael McDonald, to harmonize on the album’s finale, “Some Children,” is the kind of touch that’s a couple notches too cute. Their tremolo-guitar-led grooves may not be particularly original, but more often than not, they move and leave something in the memory bank. “Hold On” glides by on Space Invaders-age synth arpeggios, and the catchiest chorus on the album; “Static on the Wire” is led by a funky clavinet and conga accents, washed clean on the chorus by perky, plastic chords. Unfortunately, the largely characterless singing does its own kind of washing away as well.—Michaelangelo Matos Hyro Da Hero

Birth, School, Work, Death

Stereo Bang Media

Another rock-rap drive-by Throughout the ’90s, rock-rap GMOs were generally engineered by the dirty white boys of alt-rock, since mainstream hip-hop of that era had enough innovation and legendary drama to contend with.

Fast-forward to the 20-teens, and the malaise has

apparently settled in so thick within the bloated urban industry that you’ve got Jay-Z giving Grizzly Bear props and B.o.B. insisting himself a rock star.

Enter Houston “gangsta rock” rapper Hyro Da Hero, who came up rapping over Weezer and Refused, and received the time-honored L.A. mainstream makeover that spawned his debut LP. On practically every song, Hyro inveighs against the “recycled songs [and] recycled dreams” of modern hip-hop, poising himself as the genre’s maverick savior. The musical backup, however, is cookiecutter radio-friendly alt-rock, and his perspective and wordplay fail to ignite. Sounds like he’s got some catching up to do. —Justin Hampton

If by Yes

Salt on Sea Glass Chimera

Electronic project with a quietly powerful heart All things old are new again in the music industry, so it’s inevitable that strains of Kate Bush, ambient pop, mechanized tropicalia, Middle Eastern warbles and languorous dreamwave would eventually shimmer back into soft focus. All of that and more are blown into beautifully elaborate bubbles by the sonic artisans of If by Yes on their gauzy debut, Salt on Sea Glass.

Given the quartet’s impressively arty pedigree—Petra Haden (That Dog), Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto), Hirotaka Shimizu and Yuko Araki (Cornelius)—perhaps Salt on Sea Glass’s big surprise is that IbY doesn’t pursue avant for garde’s sake, as the long distance contributors congregate at an organic crossroads. In process since 2002, IbY’s songs drift along on ambient currents with jazzy insistence that can be passively soothing or aggressively powerful. Like all good subversive electronic music, If by Yes are best in the quiet moments, which require repeated and focused listening to fully appreciate. Guests include David Byrne, Nels Cline and Keigo “Cornelius” Oyamada, but their appearances don’t overwhelm Sea Glass’ passionate subtlety. —Brian Baker Jonny

Jonny

Merge

Try to look the other way From “Everything Flows” to “Baby Lee,” Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub has written his share of brilliant guitar pop. But with his new duo, Jonny, the Scotsman cedes the spotlight to Euros Childs, former frontman of the Welsh group Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. In sound and spirit, their self-titled debut is not too dissimilar from Childs’ solo albums, with Blake mainly busying himself with vocal harmonies. Gorky’s were also responsible for some winsome gems, but the bulk of Jonny wants for real inspiration.

Occasionally, Childs and Blake happen upon an effortless folk-pop melody, specifically tracks like “Candyfloss” and “Circling the Sun,” the only song where Blake really asserts himself. But the album is dominated by brief, sparsely arranged pleasantries

that fail to make a lasting impression. And when Jonny shoots for whimsy, the results are even worse, namely the irritatingly baroque “Bread” and the interminable, 10-minute “Cave Dance.”

—Michael Pelusi

Cass McCombs

Wit’s End Domino

The troubadour’s noirhearted masterpiece Cass McCombs is one of those bleakly gorgeous singer-songwriters who converts musical peers and esoteric critics in a single exposure, making rabid loyalists of a certain segment of music fan. A moodily evocative melodicist and poetically literary storyteller with a darkly mad streak, McCombs goes deeper and darker—even for him—on Wit’s End, his fifth studio album.

McCombs blends John Lennon’s sympathetic cynicism (“Buried Alive”), Jimmy Webb’s epic pop sensibilities (“County Line”) and Al Stewart’s earliest psych-folk inclinations (“The Lonely Doll”), flavored with Serge Gainsbourg’s scuffed romanticism and Tom Waits’ dusty beer-hall ruminations, tacked together with the iron gripped gossamer web that McCombs weaves so singularly well. All of McCombs’ melancholy talents are brought on the laconic nine-minute closer, “A Knock Upon the Door,” as he creates a Dylan-esque looped melody, holds it up to Grant-Lee Phillips’ mirror, then breaks the glass for use in his commemorative Kurt Weill kaleidoscope. McCombs’ catalog aches with beauty and truth, and Wit’s End may be the album that hurts the best. —Brian Baker Meat Puppets

Lollipop

Megaforce

Some things will never change? Like hell.

When the Meat Puppets roared out of Arizona over a quarter-century ago, their tumultuous desert punk found eagerly receptive ears among the likes of Kurt Cobain, J. Mascis and Stephen Malk­ mus; but the Puppets’ most profound influence may have resulted from their almost pathological creative restlessness. Psychedelicized country rock, dusty punk, melodic pop/rock and every permutation between and beyond has emanated from the Puppets during their long tenure and infamous turmoil.

The Puppets’ track record of reliable unpredictability has been their greatest asset, from their earliest experimentation to their 1994 commercial breakthrough Too High to Die to the comprehensive backward glance of 2009’s Sewn Together. Lollipop, the Puppets’ 13th studio album, is largely an extension of Sewn Together’s sonic quilt, from the psych punk sway of “Hour of the Idiot” to the acid hootenanny of “Baby Don’t” to the roots-pop pulse of “Damn Thing” and the desert glam of “Way That It Are.” Lollipop is neither startlingly groundbreaking or disappointingly familiar; it’s just the Meat Puppets doing what they do, which is everything they do. —Brian Baker

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THE

reviews

Mysteres du Serpent

Mondo Neptune Baked Tapes

Spooky N’awlins noise While there’s no denying the vacuum-sealed occult synth hiss Telecult Powers serve up, the NYC duo’s vamps are conspicuously light in terms of percussion or rhythm. Gratifyingly, Mysteres du Serpent—a new project featuring Telecult member Witchbeam!, who moved to NOLA last fall—pairs that ominous thrumming with intricate

drumbeats that vacillate between voodoo stomp and marching-band thump.

At moments on debut cassette Mondo Neptune, this fusion fosters the illusion of tribes battering bongos in haunted, monsoon-lashed jungles. At other junctures, a different dynamic is at work, pitting a kooky, looped beat pattern against masticated samples, intermittent bird-call flutes, bleating could-be organs and what sounds like a cross between wanton distortion, an armada of master drummers laying into an oversize piece of sheet metal and OSHA-violation noise pollution. File this under “spine-tingling.” —Raymond Cummings

Was This It? The Strokes are back!

F

ive years after an archetypically

difficult third album that yielded middling reviews and a surprising degree of indifference (even though, from this distance, its purported “experiThe Strokes Blessed ments” sound like nothing more or less than energetic, inventively crafted rock songs), the five men once hailed rca as rock ’n’ roll’s sainted saviors have both a lot to live up to and, somehow, strangely little to lose. Angles, outwardly, reverts to the tightly streamlined form of the first two Strokes LPs—10 tracks, 34 minutes, minimal margin for excess. But the way they pack that dense half-hour betrays hardly a hint of backpedaling.

Full of stylistic curveballs, compositional left turns, screwy sonics, skewed ’80s pop pastiche and fantastically scrawly soloing, this is easily the wildest and weirdest they’ve ever sounded; if not exactly sloppy, then certainly gleefully uncalculated. True, slap-happy loss leader “Under Cover of Darkness” overtly evokes their era-defining early singles (albeit with the menace re-

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Roy Orbison

The Monument Singles Collection Sony/Legacy

What’s a Beatle anyway?

There’s hip, in the feather ’n’ headband fashion victim sense, and then there’s hip in the Roy Orbison sense—that sort of uncanny coolness that exists outside of time and space, the kind that never gets old, never gets stale, that trumps something as picayune as death. Orbison, with his all-black attire and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, was the arch-hipster, and

placed by vaguely Footloose-ish forced mirth), but nothing else sounds remotely like the output of a formula. Hence, while the sneaky syncopations and power-pop goodies of “Machu Picchu” and “Taken for a Fool” feel very nearly irresistible, it’s likely most listeners’ mileage will vary track by track, particularly in the slippery second half.

The Strokes haven’t entirely lost the trademark tenseness (and tinniness) of their younger days—witness the jagged, tightly wound “You’re So Right” and “Metabolism”—but Angles also manifests a newfound looseness, most palpably on “Gratisfaction,” a breezy, Stones-y good-times shuffle. That freewheeling spirit, alongside all the kitchen-sink tinkering and the brightly trashy, plastic-pop aural aesthetic, sometimes comes at the expense of the band’s habitual melodic elegance (both vocal and instrumental), but more often than not it translates into a whole lot of inspired, bristly rock ’n’ roll fun. —K. Ross Hoffman

the mold from which all other hepcats were cast.

The Monument Singles Collection—which brings together all of the sides he cut for the Nashville independent label Monument between 1959 and 1965, recorded in glorious motherfucking mono— is proof positive that his reverb-drenched warble is as relevant today as it’s ever been.

“Working for the Man” is the definition of punk attitude, even if it came out a decade and change before punk was punk; “Distant Drums” tugs the heartstrings more than any self-medicating beardo ever could; and “Only the Lonely” is one of the greatest songs in the rock pantheon. If you don’t agree, you are obviously un-hip. Also includes a nine-song DVD from the classic Monument Concert 1965. —Sean L. Maloney

The Rural Alberta Advantage

Departing

Saddle Creek

Canadian rockers work best loose Nils Edenloff evidently has a thing about embracing his suitors. Quite frankly, it’s a bit creepy. “If I ever hold you again / I’ll hold you tight enough to crush your veins,” the Rural Alberta Advantage guitarist sings on “Two Lovers.” An obsessive note to open one’s sophomore album, and it recurs throughout.

If Edenloff’s lyrical persona could stand to loosen up, so could RAA’s music. The Canadian threepiece moves in the propulsive Great Plains rickrack mode of contemporaries like Dead Confederate and Deer Tick, except it sounds like the caravan crashed and we’re sorting through a pile-up. “Muscle Relaxants” has an overdone, rumbly backing that detracts from harmonies with bassist Amy Cole.

On “Stamp,” layers of refined strings, keyboard and xylophone are pulverized by Paul Banwatt’s raucous drums. The most affecting moments on Departing make the best use of space: A large stretch of “The Breakup” is simply a snappy beat and solemn organ, and “Good Night” is built around chilling, roomy a cappella singing. —John Vettese

Sin Fang

Summer Echoes Morr Music

Growth spurts Seabear founder Sindri Már Sigfússon folds glorious surprises into his second solo album at the rate of one per couple minutes— at least. The singer and multi-instrumentalist’s montage-intensive approach takes a little getting used to—if only for the allure of its components— and he wastes no time before providing opportunities to do so.

Just as the voluptuous, mostly acoustic opening section of “Choir” earns a place in our collective libido, he slams us into a new reality with fractured breakbeats and a gently driving backwards

THIS MORTAL DOILY Sin Fang’s Sigfússon is our kind of beardo

electric guitar loop before piling on more novel juxtapositions. (Speaking of guitar, whoever makes Sigfússon’s amps should be tapping him for endorsements: He’s both a consummate player and a master of tone.)

Even with all the transitions, Summer Echoes smacks less of the progressive rock tradition than of a genteel, post-Animal Collective surreality that makes being a grown-up seem downright attractive. —Rod Smith

Tied & Tickled Trio with Billy Hart

La Place Demon Morr Music

Somewhat satisfied ’n’ tickled, too Give a crew 20 years, and it will explore just about every musical style on offer; give a jazz drummer 50, and he’ll explore even more. So, this particular project—a collaboration between Markus and Micha Acher (the Notwist, 13 & God) and the venerable drummer Billy Hart— could have theoretically pulled anything out of their wheelhouses. But this time around, everyone plays it straight and subdued.

Hart certainly makes his idiosyncratic presence felt throughout—even with a full ensemble of horns and woodwinds swooning away, everything sounds draped atop his work. And he’s not above locking into a groove, either, as the mid-tempo “The Three Doors Part 3” proves. Nevertheless, there’s a palpable lack of energy here, and it all sounds a bit stodgy. The Achers have chops from indie rock, metal and electronica to potentially bear, but they limit themselves too much. With Hart onboard, it’s a missed opportunity. —Justin Hampton Timber Timbre

Creep On Creepin’ On Arts & Crafts

Just keep it on the downlow Taylor Kirk is one suave fuck.

Nobody can touch Timber Timbre’s founder, frontman and principal songwriter at crooning about murder, madness, lowlife supernature and mixed feelings about all the above. And he does it all with

a degree of heartfelt detachment uncommon even among genuinely psychotic persons and CIA operatives.

Though he keeps the haunted mansion sonics and bandmates introduced on 2009’s Timber Timbre, Kirk uses the country and blues traditions that informed it (and two preceding albums) strictly as distant points of reference for the Toronto-based trio’s fast-evolving, splatter-punk cabaret rock. Fellow multi-instrumentalists Mika Posen and Simon Trottier carry their weight and then some, often helping Kirk nudge the band into modern classical territory, as on icy instrumental “Obelisk.” Timber Timbre’s knack for nipping everybody from Nico Muhly to (on the title track) Fats Domino lends the end result a depth and resonance that render Kirk’s hauntological explorations all the more disturbing.

—Rod Smith

Various Artists

Midlake: Late Night Tales EMI

Slumber party Usually, when rock bands put together one of the many DJ-mix and/or compilation series that have proliferated over the past decade, they take the opportunity to show what diverse ears they have. Denton, Texas, quintet Midlake do the exact opposite on their edition of the Late Night Tales series (compilation, not a DJ mix), taking from a broad geographic-historical swath to present a cohesive showcase of what you might call narcotic folk-rock.

Tracks from Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Vashti Bunyan, the Band (the still unearthly “Whispering Pines”) and the obscure Bread Love & Dreams ground it—not to mention Midlake’s own mush-mouthed acoustic version of Black Sabbath’s “Am I Going Insane,” which sounds calculated to get a few high-larious spins on an NPR knockoff near you. But the better moments are the saltier ones: Scott Walker’s theatrical-orchestral “Copenhagen,” the country-rock ramble of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Christine’s Tune”—but not Rodriguez’s self-righteous hippie-era relic “Crucify Your Mind.” —Michaelangelo Matos

39

THE

reviews

Various Artists

SMM: Context

Ghostly International

Oh so quiet Kompakt Records, the German techno leader, has been issuing annual volumes of the Pop Ambient series, exploring quieter electronic areas from drones to languid laptop folk to more classically inclined works, since 2001. It’s surprising more labels haven’t followed suit, but the Ann Arbor-rooted Ghostly International, which occupies a similar status among American dance labels, has issued an answer.

SMM: Context is the first of a promised yearly series, and like Kompakt’s recent Pop Ambient 2011, it’s a darker plunge than has typically been the case with this type of comp. Though nothing here is as deeply sinister as PA2011’s black metal-leaning “30.6.1881,” by Crato, we get deliciously deeppurple deep space from Svarte Greiner’s “Halves”; Jacaszek’s lovely, restrained “Elegia”; Manual’s “Three Parts,” which is like the crest taunting you as it dangles over the horizon; and Rafael Anton Irisarri, who usually rehashes shoegaze for the label under the name the Sight Below, switching to piano. Not a bad start. —Michaelangelo Matos

Osborne’s jones for stolid, meditative repetition.

For the most part, Grid boils Zomes’ Zen DNA down to just the barest essentials, then marinates them in codeine cough syrup: staggered, blaring bass riffs; denatured organ or synthesizer chords in hypnotic gaggles; suspended-animation “We Will Rock You” bass-drum thumps so hollow that they seem to be happening, live, at some outdoor concert venue three miles distant.

Notes and levels of intensity vary, but what Osborne does, over and over again—offering minor

variations on a theme, conjuring a lysergic ebb and flow that dominates the entire album—is demonstrate the undeniable resilience of metronomic percussive boom and bloodshot keyboard pow. Wrestle against the Xanax undercurrent, and Earth Grid’s finer points leap out at you: similarities between “Spiraling” and the closing theme to Ocean’s Eleven, the uncharacteristically daring guitar distortion that opens “Step Anew,” and the album’s subtle, late-inning shift into bone-rattling, heavy-treble sound saturation. —Raymond Cummings

Mike Watt

Hyphenated-Man Clenched Wrench

Gracefully-Aging-Punk-Man Mike Watt is billing his latest album as a “rock opera,” albeit one without a traditional narrative or libretto. The 30 short songs on Hyphenated-Man directly reference characters in the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, while Watt’s typically abstruse lyrics reflect fragments of his own personality. That’s a long wind-up for something presented in such a loose and lo-fi manner, but anyone who approaches HyphenatedMan without a cursory awareness of Watt’s odd career trajectory might be left dumbfounded.

It’s probably the closest he has come to recapturing the sound of the Minutemen’s classic Double Nickels on the Dime, but with Watt’s trademark slap-bass and stern vocals filtered through the lens of jazz, funk and the more melodic aspects of the SST catalogue. It’s something Watt provides a handy metaphor for on “Confused-Parts-Man,” and like all great puzzles, it just takes a little time and effort to put those “mangled-up parts” in order.

—Nick Green Zomes

Earth Grid Thrill Jockey

The song remains the (ass-kicking) same Unlike 2008’s Zomes, Earth Grid’s not-quitegeometric black and white art scheme befits Asa

40

One Step Forward…

Are Vivian Girls regressing?

W

hen Vivian Girls made their splash

a couple years ago, the knock against the Brooklyn indie-fuzz-pop trio was that it Vivian Girls wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Guitarist Cassie RaShare the Joy mone and bassist Kickball Katy (still among the funniest names in rock), the group’s two constants, wrote breezy girlPolyvinyl group knockoffs and sprayed them out from cheap-sounding amps—just like a dozen or a thousand bands before them. The deliberate lack of muscle on the band’s self-titled album and hesitant live shows turned off as many as it turned on. Road work toughed them up, as 2009’s Everything Goes Wrong demonstrated, but Share the Joy sounds like a retreat. Some of it is the drumming: Fiona Campbell, the Girls’ third stickswoman, brings a lot less propulsion than Ali Koehler did on Wrong (Frankie Rose played on the debut). The middle section of “Lake House” sounds like it’s getting ready to rev into higher gear, but then stays resolutely in first.

Rave-ups aren’t really Vivian Girls’ real strength anyway. Share the Joy is best when its songs hark back to surf-rock that lurches between brooding verses and crashing choruses, as on the snarling “Trying to Pretend” and the tenser “Sixteen Ways.” But even when Vivian Girls aim for charm, as on “Take It as It Comes,” an old-fashioned, tongue-in-cheek girl-group advice song (“Think with your head, girl, not with your heart / If you want a love so true”), most of this album sounds worn down rather than winsome. —Michaelangelo Matos

photo by nolan conway

ROLLING STONES 7”

SINGLE

THE ROLLING STONES SINGLES (1971-2006) Not enough Rolling Stones singles for you? On April 19 get this amazing box set, 173 tracks over 45 CDs, recreating the original 7” single releases in miniature picture sleeves.

BROWN SUGAR a special limited 7” release for Record Store Day with “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch” and “Let It Rock” a hard to find song from the Sticky Fingers sessions 41

Standing Tall Michael Brune, head of advocacy powerhouse the Sierra Club, talks about the state of environmental activism / interview by Shaun Brady

S

ierra Club executive director Michael Brune celebrat-

ed his one-year anniversary on the job the way any selfrespecting environmental agitator would: picking a fight with Republicans. In February, Brune announced that the Club was launching a new campaign to battle GOP efforts to block Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air pollution rules. Brune stopped to assess his first year at the helm in preparation for a lecture at his alma mater, West Chester University. Our chat with him covered coal, clean air and water, toxic messes and New Jersey.

So March marks one year for you as the Sierra Club’s executive director.

What is the state of the Club’s union?

We just celebrated the defeat of the 150th proposed coal plant in the United States, which is significant because coal is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, the largest source of mercury poisoning in the country, and [the source of ] thousands of tons of toxic wastes in our air and water and atmosphere every year.

So, by stopping the construction of new coal plants, we’re also allowing for clean energy development to accelerate around the country. That’s probably the biggest victory that we’ve had.

Your most recent initiative has been to fight Republican attempts to weaken the EPA’s authority. Where does that stand now?

We’re faced with some significant threats to the EPA’s authority coming from Congress, and that’s our top priority moving forward. The bill [H.R. 1] passed the House, but we don’t think it has any chance of getting through the Senate and certainly not 42

past the President’s desk. So, we see it as just another example of our opponents being out of touch with the majority of the American public, who actually want the EPA to do its job, and want to protect public health and make sure that we have clean air and water. We have been mobilizing Sierra Club members in every state around the country to pressure their legislators not just to defend the EPA’s authority, but to make sure that the standards that the EPA is enforcing are updated and are relevant for the 21st century.

Why is this legislation in particular such a top priority for the Club?

Because we have the EPA to thank for preventing literally thousands of deaths every year from air pollution and water pollution. The pollution that comes from oil refineries or coal-fired power plants or industrial facilities across the country are significantly reduced because of the work that the EPA does to make sure that companies are following the law. I think the thing that most people don’t know about the EPA is that when it issues these rules,

it does so in a way where not only are we preventing more deaths or preventing more people from getting sick, but we’re doing it in a cost-effective way. We’re literally saving money at the same time that we’re saving lives. The reason there are so many attacks on the EPA is because oil and gas and coal companies are threatened by what they do, and so they’re fighting hard to maintain the status quo.

photo by loir eanes

“

The reason there are so many attacks on the EPA is because oil and gas and coal companies are threatened by what they do, so they’re fighting hard to maintain the status quo.”

—michael brune How do you deliver this message beyond the ears of Sierra Club members so that you’re preaching to more than just the choir?

Just by making [it] very clear that the solutions that the Sierra Club is proposing will make a very positive impact on the lives of everybody in our country. If you care about clean air and clean water, then the Sierra Club’s your friend. If you care about parks and wilderness areas and preserving healthy forests, then you should be standing with the Sierra Club, because we stand for those values, too. A lot of times, our opponents will attempt to vilify us as being anti-American or anti-business, when we’re anything but. The Sierra Club is made up of Republicans and Democrats, people from rural and urban areas, and we have a very broad purpose of trying to make our country and our planet a better place to live.

With so many threats to our environmental well-being, how do you set priorities for the Club?

The top priority for the organization is to fight climate change and, in doing so, to move our country beyond coal. As I mentioned before, coal is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, it is the dirtiest form of energy that we have, and it also is holding us back from creating more jobs by developing clean and renewable sources of energy like solar and wind.

So that is in fact the biggest priority for the Sierra Club in our history—we’ve got more staff and volunteers devoted to movphoto courtesy of sierra club

43

ing America beyond coal than we’ve ever had. The other thing that we’re working to do is utilize technology to connect with individual members and supporters as effectively as we can. The Sierra Club is the largest grassroots environmental group in the country, and so we want to make sure that all of our volunteers and supporters have the tools they need to organize in their own communities.

Where does your personal interest in environmental activism stem from?

I grew up in New Jersey, which is both a beautiful place to live and also the scene of probably some of the most toxic places in the country. So I had both the benefit and burden of seeing the consequences of good organizing that helped protect some beautiful places, and also bad industrial behavior that helped to destroy other beautiful places. My wife and I have two young children now, so I think every day about the world that they’re growing up in and there’s no shortage of motivation to try to make it a little safer, a little healthier and just as beautiful a place as it was when I was growing up.

Brune with his son.

You’re about to return to speak at your alma mater. What did you learn at West Chester that has benefited your work with the Sierra Club?

Well, I studied economics, finance and accounting at West Chester, so what I credit my time there with is helping me to understand how the business community thinks and works so that the solutions we’re proposing here at the Club help to respond to the economic needs that we have as a country. It’s been very important for me being in the environmental movement to have a grounding in economics so that we can think about what a more just and sustainable economy would look like.

As an environmental figure, do you have any guilty pleasures?

I do have a weakness for ice cream, but I don’t think that has a bad environmental footprint. I will confess that I do have a deep longing for a larger television screen, and I’m waiting for an energy-efficient one to come on board. I travel a lot, so my wife says that I have to stay at home enough to get a big screen, but I’ve been thinking that once the baseball season starts it would be nice to have a bigger screen to watch it on.

If you care about clean air and clean water, then the Sierra Club’s your friend.

If you care about parks and wilderness areas and preserving healthy forests, then you should be standing with the Sierra Club, because we stand for those values, too. ”

Do any stories come to mind that illustrate the work of the Sierra Club on a more human, less abstract level?

The thing that I think many folks don’t know about the Club that really makes it unique is that we’re volunteer-led. There are more than 10,000 volunteers at the Sierra Club who have titles. There are more than 70,000 volunteers who are spending at least 15 hours a week with the Sierra Club.

So, last year when the oil spill happened I found myself down in the Gulf several times throughout the spring and summer, and it was fascinating to meet with some of those Sierra Club volunteers. One person had worked on an oil rig for 35 years, but he loved the Gulf and knew what it would take to hold oil companies accountable; he knew where the shortcuts were. Another volunteer in the same group was a marine biologist and had been studying the effects of smaller oil spills on marine mammals in the area. Another volunteer used to run a commercial fishing operation and took me out on his boat. So, I think the great thing about the Sierra Club is you have people who don’t get paid, who don’t get their names in the newspaper or their faces on TV, they have their day jobs, and on weekends or nights or vacation hours, they’re taking whatever time they can to learn about their environment and about their community and to figure out how to make as much of a difference as they can. I find the fact that people have such a pure sense of ideals and are working selflessly to try to advance them really inspiring.

When we look back on your 10th anniversary in the position, what do you want to be telling us?

I’d like to say in 10 years that we are getting more of our power from clean energy sources than dirty. In 10 years, we should be getting more power from solar and wind than we are from coal and oil and nuclear power. If we can do that in 10 years, then maybe I will go off and write my memoirs and have a vacation on a beach.

For more on the Sierra Club or to join, visit sierraclub.org.

—michael brune

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photo by lori eanes

/books

Clowes Captioned

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The Ghost World creator shows empathy for the comics nerd / by Sam Adams

aniel Clowes began his career satirizing losers like the

ful lays out the events of the night and the morning that follows, a painful parade of vituperative comics nerd Dan Pussey, but over the years, unfortunate encounters and misjudged he’s grown more sympathetic to their plight—or perhaps reactions that unfolds like a slow-motion more willing to admit that he was one all along. ¶ To car wreck. anyone who’s spent time browsing through the pages of Clowes’ precise linework opens up to Clowes’ comic book series Eightball, where the stories that admit swaths of color, the blocks of empty became Ghost World and Art School Confidential first appeared, it’s space conveying both solitude and possiobvious that the title of his latest collection, Mister Wonderful, is bility. It’s a brief tale, but it’s powerfully and sympathetically told, with just enough meant to be taken ironically. of a lift at the end to prevent you from slitBut even Clowes newbies—or those who the six-year drought that ended when he ting your wrists. Head back to the beginfirst encountered the story in the pages of slept with an “unstable, crank-snorting soning, and you’ll find the story deepens with New York Times Magazine, where a shorter ciopath.” The blocks of text that represent each rereading, like a seemingly minor life version was serialized in 2008—will get the the voice in Marshall’s head blot out faces event whose significance becomes apparpicture from the opening panel, where baldand voice balloons, obscurent only in retrospect. ing, bespectacled Marshall sits slumped at ing the world around him Mister Wonderful isn’t as a coffee shop table anxiously awaiting, and and trapping us in his rawvirtuosic as Clowes’ previplainly dreading, a blind date. nerve POV. ous collection, Ice Haven, or Clowes stretches out Marshall’s agony Marshall’s date finally as far-reaching as The Death for 12 of Mister Wonderful’s terse 70 pages, shows, and she’s a looker, but Ray, due later this year. But giving us plenty of time to get acquainted she’s also a mess, still reeling it’s perfectly formed and elwith his self-loathing interior monologue. from the end of a 15-year reegantly gauged to say just as Mister Wonderful: A lationship that fizzled when He runs through nightmare scenarios in much as it needs to and leave Love Story will be available April 12 from his head, thinks back to the ex-wife who she started mentioning kids. the rest up to us.

Pantheon. slept with all of his friends and muses on The rest of Mister Wonder-

excerpt courtesy of daniel clowes

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Love Your Work* Albert Brooks bleeds and leads as Aaron Altman in Broadcast News / by Joe Gross

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o look at his often pants-wettingly funny output

as writer/director/star, it’s tough to remember that Albert Brooks trained first as a mere actor. Yup, the man who gave the world the visionary proto-realityshow comedy Real Life, the brilliantly cringe-inducing relationship tour de force Modern Romance and the midlife crisis ode Lost in America was at one point perfectly content to * Directors often get hit the boards. A few early breaks and all the credit when it he might have been, I dunno, Alan comes to great films, and great TV shows Thicke? (OK, probably not.) are often seen as ensemble pieces. But what about the actors who help elevate a flick to classic status, or the unsung stars who take a show to the next level? Each month, Love Your Work looks at the actors who rescued a project from failure or added that extra layer of awesomeness.

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In between changing the world of comedy and hanging out with showbiz pals, Brooks had memorable small roles in movies here and there. He was the good guy campaign worker who palled with Cybil Shepard in Taxi Driver. He died on his honeymoon in Private Benjamin. And every single one of his Simpsons appearances has been bulletproof, from Cowboy Bob the RV salesman to Jacques the bowling instructor to fake Bond villain Hank Scorpio.

But Aaron Altman was something different, the first time a role had been written for Brooks in mind (by his good pal, and no relation, James L. Brooks). It helps that Broadcast News is built on a perfectly balanced acting tripod. William Hurt, a rising star and mark of quality, played Tom Grunick, a handsome anchor who is better looking than he is a journalist. Holly Hunter, making only her second movie (!) and cast two days before the

start of shooting (!!), plays impossibly high-strung producer Jane Craig (based on increasingly legendary CBS producer Susan Zirinsky). Brooks plays Aaron Altman, the reporter who quietly adores Jane, who also happens to be his best friend and producer. Jane is attracted to Tom, who for her embodies the lowering of journalistic standards. Tom and Aaron alternate between loathing each other and having a strange, entirely unspoken alliance— that they are both in love with the same woman does not make it easy.

Brooks sketches out Aaron’s character quickly.

We see him doing an Ah-nuld impression on the phone with Jane—she goes to him for laughs and because he’s a smart guy, but he’s very much in the friend zone. Later, we see Aaron and Jane editing a story on a mercenary who has returned from Africa.

She’s looking at the screen; he makes a comment and looks at her adoringly. It’s a very quick moment, but it tells you everything about both of them.

James Brooks gives his lead absolute moneyshot lines throughout (“I can’t believe I just risked my life for a network that tests my face with focus groups”), but it’s not just his exceptional gifts as a comedian that make it work, it’s his gifts as an actor. He and Hunt play off each other with a subtle crackle. At a party, Aaron and Tom find themselves on a balcony together. Tom is amazed to be in Washington: “What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?” Aaron, contempt barely concealed, smiling with teeth: “Keep it to yourself.” Later in the conversation, Aaron asks Tom if he knows all the members of the Cabinet.

Tom refuses to take a test for him: “Yes, Aaron, I do.”

Aaron: “All 12?”

Tom: “Yes” Aaron, voice rising slightly, like a mean child: “There’s only 10...”

Tom: “You’re feeling good, aren’t you?”

Aaron: “I’m starting to, yeah.”

What’s key here is the knowledge that not even Aaron probably knows why he’s being so hard on Tom. Is it because Tom is a bad journalist or is it simple, petty jealousy—either about Tom’s career or the romantic competition? Brooks never entirely tips his hand. And he goes to Tom for anchoring tips when he gets a chance to anchor the evening news, which goes exceptionally poorly when he gets the greatest case of flop sweat ever captured on film.

Brooks also gets a tour-de-force comedy scene.

Shut out of reporting a big story, he goes home, turns on some music and starts to get hammered. (“I can sing / while I read / I am singing / and reading, BOTH!!!!!”)

But he gets to show off his dramatic chops in the movie’s pivotal scene. After his anchoring disaster, Jane visits Aaron late at night, then tells him she has to meet Tom. “I think... I might be in love with him,” Jane says, her voice cracking.

Aaron’s face plummets. “I knew it,” he all but mumbles. His voice rises. “Get out of here. Go on, get out of here.”

Jane retreats.

“YOU GO TO HELL!” Aaron screams, knowing full well Jane is easily startled and hates being yelled at.

She screams back, “THIS IS IMPORTANT TO ME!” Aaron is now as serious as we’ve seen him. This is not an expression audiences see all that often on Albert Brooks. “Siddown,” he says to Jane, about to deliver what he is beginning to suspect is the speech of his life. “Don’t get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the Devil.”

Jane is pissed and stalking around Aaron’s apartment: “This isn’t friendship.”

“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?” Aaron says. “I’m semi-serious here... he’ll get a job where he influences a great Godfearing nation... he will just bit by little bit lower

our standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit.” He is full of disdain and rage and frustration. “And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen.”

She does not care. Almost as an aside, he says, “And he’ll get all the great women.”

It’s a laugh line, but she screams at him, “I think you’re the Devil.”

“You know I’m not,” Aaron retorts. “I think we have the kind of friendship where if I were the Devil, you’d be the only one I’d tell.”

He’s not wrong, but Jane is still furious: “You were awfully quick to run after Tom’s help...”

“Yes,” Aaron yells again. She’s startled. “I grant you everything! But give me this: He personifies everything you’ve been fighting against. And I’m in love with you.”

She did not see this coming. “How do you like that?” Aaron says. “I buried the lead.”

He almost staggers over to the couch and sits down. It’s all out in the open. “I’ve got to not say that out loud—it takes too much out of me.” He is completely vulnerable and she has no idea what to do. Brooks has knocked the scene out of the park— rarely has a monologue that dips between drama and comedy been delivered so strongly and with such tight turns.

As the movie goes on, it’s clear that this is where Aaron starts to stop loving Jane. There are stellar moments to come in the film (Aaron and Jane at the cafe is another exercise in humor, frustration, sadness and spite), but it did take too much out of him. And almost us.

above left: Albert Brooks as Aaron Altman and Holly Hunter as Jane Craig right: William Hurt as Tom Grunick

Broadcast News is available now from the Criterion Collection.

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Bats Entertainment

T

erry Gilliam is not a director for whom the word

Reynolds concert bleed into each other, the Silent Majority’s ultimate victory over the spent promise of the counterculture.

Fear and Loathing’s wild-eyed, wide-angle intensity is very nearly too much. But just before your senses shut down in protest, Gilliam breaks the tension with a flashback to mid-’60s San Francisco, what Thompson lyrically called “the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally crested and then fell back.” The scene, in which Depp for a moment stands face-to-face with the real Thompson, recasts the movie as a tragedy masquerading as farce. Duke and Gonzo retreat into their fantasies because they have nowhere left to go.

Like 1985’s Brazil, Fear and Loathing is a cautionary tale about the power, and the dangers, of escapism. (I shudder to think what the friends who thought it Like Thompson, whose (bad) trip bewas a bright idea to get high before seeing gan with an assignment to cover a masit must have endured.) It’s a lesson Gilsive off-road race, Duke spends a day liam himself often forgets nowadays, as Fear and Loathing lost in the dust clouds churned up by witnessed in the pop-eyed monotony of in Las Vegas is available April motorcycles and four-wheelers before Tideland. Although he’s finally extricat26 on Blu-ray retreating to the synthetic splendor of ed himself from the mire of his aborted from the Criterion Collection.

Don Quixote movie—see the devastating Vegas itself, a horror show of carefully documentary Lost in La Mancha for the controlled debauchery that turns his stomach and preys on his mind. The patrons of a tragic story—he’s permanently settled into a bunker revolving cocktail lounge, one of whom exults, “I’m mentality that prevents him from hearing even conreally starting to feel that drink,” transform into structive criticisms. (For someone who so loathes giant, scaly lizards, and the whorls of a patterned the corporate mentality, he does love his yes-men.) carpet become pulsing tendrils, ready to pull Duke In retrospect, Fear and Loathing might be Gilliam’s and Gonzo into the depths. The horror of the war own high-water mark, although with luck the tides in Vietnam and the unseen spectacle of a Debbie will be going in and out for years to come.

“enough” holds much meaning, which made him a dangerously apt fit for Hunter S. Thompson’s supremely excessive journey into America’s neon-lit heart of darkness. Like Thompson’s book, which kicks in the door with the opening line, “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold,” Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins in mid-scream, with Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp), and his drug buddy, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro), ripping down the road as they ingest massive quantities of controlled substances.

Their convertible careens wildly as they dodge hallucinatory bats, the first of many phantoms to prey on their addled consciousnesses.

Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is but a pit stop on Terry Gilliam’s long, strange trip / by Sam Adams

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DURAN DURAN

JOE BONAMASSA

MOTHER MOTHER

PROTEST THE HERO

ALL YOU NEED IS NOW

DUST BOWL

EUREKA

SCURRILOUS

IN STORES

4/19

ALEXANDER

PETE YORN

ALEXANDER

MUSICFORTHE MORNINGAFTER

*Alexander is Alex Ebert from Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

*10th Anniversary Edition

DENGUE FEVER CANNIBAL COURTSHIP *( Also check out their special Record Store Day release!

IN STORES

4/12

TRON: LEGACY RECONFIGURED

THE STROKES

ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION

VARIOUS ARTISTS

ANGLES

PAPER AIRPLANE

BOB DYLAN BOB DYLAN IN CONCERT: BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY 1963

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/movies

all the time in the world Claire Denis Film Scores spotlights Tindersticks’ unique relationship with the difficult and iconic French director / by Shaun Brady

T

he films of Claire Denis do not reveal themselves easily.

Mood is foregrounded over narrative; detail over explication; glances over confessions. Her work is primarily sensual, bypassing the brain, making the heart quicken or the gut coil long before the viewer has consciously analyzed what they’ve seen. ¶ In Tindersticks, Denis has found the ideal musical analogue for her visual approach.

While it would be easy for music to overwhelm the director’s delicately maintained atmospheres, especially for six guys used to wielding electric guitars and drums, the British band’s own romantic, lushly orchestrated approach to rock songs proved a perfect match for her oblique vision.

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“I think that’s how we feel about making music,” says Tindersticks vocalist Stuart A. Staples from his home studio in central France. “When you write a song or any piece of music, you need to leave space for people to step into and figure things out for themselves. To not know everything in front, to not make everything obvious, that’s what creates mystery and makes you prick your ears up. So, that’s something I’ve never really had to think about in working with Claire; that part of it has been very natural.”

Tindersticks or its members have scored more than half of Denis’ 10 feaphoto by Richard Dumas

tures, nearly every one she’s made since 1996’s Nénette et Boni. The sole exception is Beau Travail (1999), her French Foreign Legion rewrite of Melville’s Billy Budd, in which she utilized pieces of Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of the same story. All six soundtracks are now being released, four of them for the first time, in a new box set, Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 (Constellation). Tindersticks will also be making a series of live appearances performing the music with accompanying visuals in the spring.

“The best thing about working with Claire, and maybe the most difficult thing, is that she wants our input right from the script,” Staples says. “There’s never been a situation where she says, ‘I want something that says this, here.’ Once she gives us a rough edit, it’s almost like a blank canvas, and that’s when the conversation starts. That’s also how she likes to work with her actors, her cinematographer, her editor. She gives them space to express themselves, and I think that only comes with a sureness of vision.”

All agree that the relationship officially began after a 1995 Tindersticks concert in Paris, though Staples admits to being a bit hazy on the details. “In those days my nerves always got the better of me,” he says, “and I often got maybe too drunk before and after shows, so it’s a bit vague to me.”

Denis had been listening to the band’s second self-titled album while writing the script for Nénette et Boni, and found some resonance between their songs and her work-in-progress. In particular, she was drawn to the darkly comic song “My Sister,” in which she found some strange echoes of her own story about two siblings. While they’d long been fans of soundtrack music, strains of which are evident throughout their richly cinematic songs, none of Tindersticks’ members had ever attempted to score a film, which proved a challenge.

“Our first three albums go off in so many different directions,” Staples says of the band’s eccentric songwriting. “Working on Nénette et Boni was the first time we had to make something that was concentrated and concise, that had a beginning, a middle and an end, and for it to make sense. I think it had a big effect on us.”

Their approach, inspired by Miles Davis’ soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur

wrote for Vendredi Soir (2002) while Staples composed L’intrus (2004)—coinciding with a period of uncertainty for Tindersticks. Hinchliffe finally left the band to concentrate on film scoring full time; his credits include the Dustin Hoffman/Emma Thompson romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey, Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls and last year’s Oscarnominated Winter’s Bone. He’s currently working on director Michael Mann’s new HBO series about the underbelly of horse racing, Luck.

Staples’ music for L’intrus reflects the dark times the band was going through (during which he unwisely, and unsuccessfully, also attempted to quit smoking). “The band were in a kind of a turmoil,” he says, “not knowing if this thing that we’d been living and nurturing for 13 years was going to carry on. I think we all kind of felt very alone at that time. I needed to make something almost antimusic, I suppose.”

Tindersticks reformed in 2008 with original members Staples, David Boulter and Neil Fraser, along with a new rhythm section, and has since scored Denis’ two most recent films: 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and White Material (2009). The latter, an exploration of post-colonial Africa inspired by the director’s childhood, is one of her most difficult works, and was —Dickon Hinchliffe apparently no easier to create. on Trouble Every Day. “White Material was difficult because it’s very ambitious,” Staples says. “We got to a point where we turned the images off and went on our journey with the started, because that’s what our music film for a while, and then came back and was all about. So, it wasn’t like all of a sudmet it. I think that maybe what we gave den someone asked us to score Rambo.”

Claire helped her find the final shape of Still, their next collaboration was a the film.” drastic departure for Denis. The bleak, viThe relationship between filmmaker olent Trouble Every Day made the idea of and composers has evolved over the all-consuming passion very literal, with course of 15 years, to the point where sex culminating in cannibalistic acts. The score wound up being built around the each undeniably influences the other.

“If we hadn’t found this relatitle track, a desolate torch song tionship with Claire, we might with the feel of a velvet noose. not still be here,” Staples says, “Claire said the whole film was “still be excited and frustrated about the moment where a kiss about making music. It’s creatbecomes a bite,” recalls Hinched points along the way where liffe. “She wanted the music to we’ve had to get out of our own feel very sensual, but also have a little world, our own journey, touch of violence about it, so that Claire Denis and get involved in something at any moment it could swing one Film Scores 1996-2009 will else. Then when we finish that, way or the other.” be available we come back to our stuff and The next two films ended up April 26 from we’re changed.” being solo efforts—Hinchliffe Constellation. pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), was to simply watch the film as a band and react to it musically, using an agreed instrumental palette focused on the light, airy feel of vibes and glockenspiel.

“How Claire works is unusual because it’s not plot-driven,” says co-founder/violinist Dickon Hinchliffe over the phone from Bristol, England. “It’s very much about entering a more sensual world, one in which the psychological aspects of what she’s doing outweigh the obvious storytelling elements. But in some ways that made it easier for us when we first

claire said the whole film was about the moment where a kiss becomes a bite.”

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Celluloid Corral

This month’s best, worst, weirdest and wildest in home video entertainment by andrew bonazelli

Black Swan Deceptive trailer. Fans of the great—well, great for like three films—Nicolas Roeg were likely anticipating an overwrought, delirious, psychosexual clusterfuck with a hint of the supernatural. And, don’t get us wrong, they got that—just in a very linear form that was almost uncomfortably similar to director Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Ironically, it was Aronofsky’s confounding, auto-cult fave The Fountain

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that was more gleefully unhinged (bordering on incoherent) than Swan. And its underwhelming commercial and critical reaction is probably why he suppressed his wackier instincts to make these last two films. If a studio won’t let you slowly kill yourself for your perception of art, you might as well write about people who do. That, we respect. But the fact that Natalie Portman swept awards season? Man… girlfriend had a baby at the right time. Fox Searchlight

photo by niko tavernise

Taxi Driver (Blu-ray) At the end of a later Martin Scorsese classic, Casino, Robert De Niro’s voice-over laments, “[Las Vegas] will never be the same… today it looks like Disneyland.” The same rueful objection can be levied today at New York, specifically the Times Square that De Niro’s restless Travis Bickle prowled in this 1976 masterpiece. Scorsese has long been adept at preserving the singular grime, avarice and degeneracy of a bygone era, and Taxi Driver’s macabre Manhattan must be extremely hard to grasp for anyone on the island who didn’t live through it. That’s just one of many reasons this is such an important, seminal, breathtaking document—not to mention drop-dead brilliant performances from De Niro as the increasingly unhinged protagonist, Jodie Foster as a pre-teen streetwalker and Harvey Keitel as her creepily gregarious pimp. Plenty of bonuses make the leap from the single-disc ’99 edition, but the nowspeared white whale is an original 1986 Criterion commentary with Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader. Sony

Tron: Legacy Tron: The Original Classic “The Original Classic” is surely too generous a term for the 1982 original, a stunning technological achievement that forgot to bring a story along for the ride. Not sure why exactly the way-overdue sequel enjoyed so much buzz over the last year or so, but director Joseph Kosinski did an admirable job overseeing the techno-landscape’s evolution from “kitschy” to “OMG cool as hell, bro.” Sadly, Legacy will go down as the same near-miss as its now-ancient predecessor, a pastiche of cutting-edge eye candy with way too much impenetrable lore for what should have been a relatively simple thriller (Jeff Bridges’ son dusts off the old arcade game, is transported into the Grid, encounters evil and good Bridges, Frisbee-throwing ensues). Walt Disney Pictures

The Rules of Attraction (Blu-ray) Released in 2002 to the delight of the same 10 Bret Easton Ellis fans who geek out every first weekend a filmmaker ruins their hero’s sordid novel, The Rules of Attraction is actually the most accurate BEE adaptation.

That doesn’t mean it’s the most thoughtful (American Psycho), most of-its-time (Less Than Zero) or most unapologetically WTF (Glamorama). But Rules does boast an impressively ugly turn by James Van Der Beek as Patrick Bateman’s only slightly less psychotic brother, Sean (presupposing his awesome meme repository, jamesvandermemes.com), eye-rollingly ambiguous sexpottery from Lost’s Ian Somerhalder, and a tightiewhitied Fred Savage abusing a clarinet, lodging a lit cigarette in his bellybutton and moaning “I can feel my dick” after shooting heroin between his toes. If you can get past the opening credits with a nasty smile intact, pursue. Lions Gate

I Love You Phillip Morris If only Jim Carrey had signed on for ILYPM before his recent string of brutally diminishing returns (Fun With Dick and Jane, The Number 23, Yes Man), he might’ve had the clout to demand the theatrical run this strange, original film merited. Unfortunately, despite glowing near-universal critical praise, Phillip Morris was relegated to a weak December rollout and too-subsequent Viking funeral on DVD. The first thing the uninitiated should know is that the title character is not a reference to the tobacco company (that’s one “l”). In fact, the film focuses on Carrey’s once-straight police officer, who finds the courage to admit that he’s gay after a car crash; he also finds the courage to lead a ludicrously fabulous existence, necessitating con work to pay the bills. When he’s eventually sent to the pokey, he meets Morris (Ewan McGregor) and develops a consuming obsession.

Offbeat love story, factually based, certainly as good as Catch Me if You Can. Worth a look. Miramax

Little Fockers It turned a profit—somehow—so expect more of this shit. Who knows: perhaps Mother Fockers next time, or perhaps Focker, I Did? Surely this series will go down as the nadir in Robert De Niro’s 15-year-plus slo-mo shark jump, although he was technically much worse in The Fan and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. With no dramatic history short of Permanent Midnight, Ben Stiller would seem to have less of an excuse, but this is just time wasted when he could have been sequelizing Tropic Thunder or Zoolander. Perhaps most sadly, now 71-year-old Harvey Keitel jumps on the cameo train, his first credited non-National Treasure theatrical release since, dear god, Be Cool? This whole endeavor is such a bummer that even your mom and dad aren’t chuckling anymore. Universal

Country Strong Nobody saw this, we know. Maybe they would have if it were a hard R, with all sorts of groupie nastiness. No such luck. Gwyneth Paltrow is a veteran country starlet eff-up who’s throwing it (“it” also meaning her unborn child) all away on booze. She’s part of a love quadrangle that also includes cuckolded controlling hubbie Tim McGraw, hot young songwriter beau Garrett Hedlund and threatening new It Girl Leighton Meester. We didn’t see this, but are 99 percent sure a threesome doesn’t ensue at any point, so it’s up to you to determine if the merits of said characters are worth the price of admission. Well, that or the merits of hearing Paltrow Actually Sing, which she went on to do with Cee-Lo at the Grammys, which she’ll be doing on a major label via her own record contract ( just announced at press time), which she’ll be doing probably on the next Coldplay album, i.e. when the world finally, mercifully blows up. Sony cowbell

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APRIL 5

19th Wife 4 Square Best of After the Storm Alex and Leo Alien 2 on Earth American Jihadist Arabesque Araya Arctic Blast Arkansas National Parks Atrevete a Sonar Ayn Rand: In Her Own Words Babylon 5: The Complete Series With Movies Bachelor Father Bachelor in Paradise Backwoods Butchers Backyardigans: Join the Adventures Club Bakugan: New Vestroia Season 2 Vol. 3 Beauty and the Beast Beauty and the Beast/ Puss in Boots Behemoth Best of Ask This Old House: 44 Common Household Projects Done Right Best of Soul Train: Dance! Dance! Dance!

Bill Moyers: The Language of Life Bride by Mistake Burt the Conqueror: Season 1 Captain Newman, M.D. Casino Jack Cat in the hat Knows a Lot About That: Tales About Tails Chihuahua: The Movie Chuggington: Chuggers to the Rescue Cinderella: Birmingham Royal Ballet Coach Tyranny: Tough Love Cold Turkey Come Undone Commando X Confianza Total-Confidence Time Productions Connie the Cow Coronation St. 1960s Collection David Garrett: Rock Symphonies Dead on Site Deadrise Design for Scandal Diana Dors Comedy Double Feature: An Alligator Named Daisy/Value for Money Dinosaurs Collection Disney History Connections: Colonial America Elvis Collection (From Beginning to End) Essential Collection Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance Final Baton Flashpoint Berlin 1957-63 Florida’s National Parks Fly Boys Friday Night Lights: The Complete Fifth Season Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 4 Gap Georgia Peaches/Smokey Bites the Dust/The Great Texas Dynamite Chase

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Geronimo Stilton Vol. 2 Hero Tales Part 1 Hero Tales Part 2 Heroes of Telemark Horrid Hurricanes I Done a Album Icarly: Season 2 Vol. 3 Indochine: Putain de Stade Indy in the ‘50s Insight of Evil Invasion of the Body Snatchers/ Scarecrow/From Beyond Johnny Reid: Place Called Love Tour: Live in Concert Katie Melua With the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra Kid Approved Collector’s Set Kill With the Dance Kiss: Lick It Up KJB: The Book That Changed the World Kubrick’s Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick L’Appat Laila Land That Time Forgot/The People That Time Forgot/Panic in Year Zero/The Last Man on Earth Lark Rise to Candleford: The Complete Fourth Season Leaving Life Unexpected: The Complete Series Lisa Lampanelli: Tough Love Little Fockers Mais Alem Ao Vivo Malibu Shark Attack Masterpiece Classic: Any Human Heart Metallica: Full Metal Package Midway to Heaven Minder: Season 4 Minder: Season 5 Mirage Modern English: Mesh & Lace Morons From Outer Space/Alien From L.A./The Man From Planet X/The Angry Red Planet Mountain Mr. Nice My Love Came Back National Geographic: Big Cats Collection Naturally Indiana Negura Bunget: Focul Viu Night of the Generals Nova: Deadliest Earthquakes Pennsylvania’s Greatest Sports Heroes Phantom From 10,000 Leagues/ Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes/ War-Gods of the Deep/At the Earth’s Core RAF: Command Activities of the Early 1960s Real Cannibal Holocaust Rock N Roll Circus Tour Final: 7 Days Roger Waters: The Wall – Live in Berlin 20th Anniversary Rope of Sand Sarah Palin’s Alaska Sesame Street: Wild Words and Outdoor Adventures Sex and Black magic Sexy Pirates Sid the Science Kid: Going, Going, Green!

Silkwood Sister Wives Sleeping Beauty/Hansel and Gretel Snow White/Red Riding Hood Special A: Complete Collection Spectacular Arkansas Stand Up for Family Straightman Strange Invaders/Invaders From Mars/Invisible Invaders/

APRIL 12

April 19 The King’s Speech

Directed by Tom Hooper What’s this—a Best Picture winner that actually deserved it? Be still our elitist hearts.

Although we would have been perfectly fine with The Social Network dominating the Oscars as well, Colin Firth utterly inhabited the role of Prince Albert, and was backed up more than ably by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush. [The Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay Entertainment]

Journey to the Seventh Planet Strike Witches: The Complete First Season Summer of the Colt Sunday in New York Swamp thing/Return of Living Dead/Squirm Taqwacores TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan Vol. 1 TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan Vol. 2 TCM Greatest Classic Legends Collection: Bette Davis TCM Greatest Classic Legends Collection: Marlon Brando Thomas & Friends: Play Date 3-Pack Tom and Jerry Double Feature: Greatest Chases Vols. 2 & 3 Tom and Jerry Double Feature: The Magic Ring/The Movie Too Many Crooks: Make Mine Mink Transgression Tron Tron: Legacy Tyler Perry’s House of Payne Volume 7 UFC: The Ultimate Fighter: Season 12 Unknown Comic/Urban Legend/Art of Nude Bowling Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story Wedding Video Wild African Cats Wild Florida Wild Kratts: Creature Adventures Women in Charge Collection World in His Arms WWE: D-Generation X: One Last Stand XX: Where the Heart Should Be Year of the Carnivore Your Love Never Fails

2033 25 Kilates According to Greta Aleutians: Cradle of the Storms – After the Classic Fur Aleutians: Cradle of the Storms – World War II Andrew Antarctic Mission Antique Bakery BBC Tudors Collection Becoming Jame Behind the Burly Q Belladonna Best of Fantastic Movie Trailers Big Bang Theory: 1st – 3rd Season Biggest Mysteries Bikershaw Festival Vol. 2 Blood Junkie Blood Oath Blunted House Movie Bob Hope Collection Vol. 2 Bob Saget on America Car 54, Where Are You? The Complete First Season Cars Censorship and the New World Order Chance at Heaven Chicago Chicos Malos Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice Children of the Corn Triple Feature Chosen one Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Country Strong Crime D Amour Cross Country Pimping Part 4 Crow: City of Angels Crow: Wicked Prayer Dallas: The Movie Collection David Bowie: Birthday Celebration Live NYC 1997 Dead Man Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry/ Race With the Devil Disappearance of Alice Creed Doctor Who: Kinda Doctor Who: Snakedance Dolph Lundgren Triple Threat Don’t Be a Menace…

Dracula 2000 Dracula II: Ascension/Dracula III: LegacyDragnet: Season 4 Duplex DVD Guides: Bali La Lumiere Des Dieux DVD Guides: Paris Retro Paris Roule Faculty Fantastic Movie Trailers 7: Drive-In Frenzy Fantastic Movie Trailers 8: VHS Rewind Tape 2 Female Convict Scorpion Finishing School Flipping Out Season 3 Forensics: You Decide Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – 1st – 6th Seasons From Dusk Till Dawn Ga-Rei Zero: The Complete Series Garfield Show: The Private-Eye Ventures Genova Glass: Kepler Go Diego Go; Diego Saves the World Golden Key Goodnight for Justice Goodway to Die Gordy Gulliver’s Travels Guy Martin: Portrait of a Grand Chef H.R. Pufnstuff: The Complete Series Hanna-Barbera Classic Collection: Jabberjaw – The Complete Series

April 19 Somewhere

Directed by Sofia Coppola Michaelangelo Antonioni frequently commented on the vacuity of the bourgeoisie.

Sofia Coppola clearly admires the Italian director’s mastery of arresting still imagery to underscore the monotony of empty lives; much like in Marie Antoinette, she emulates him here, observing a scumbag actor’s tenuous relationship with his daughter.

[Focus Features]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I Harry Potter Years 1-7 Part 1 Gift Set Haunting at the Beacon Heartless Hellraiser Triple Feature Highwater Hijacking the Holy Land; Palestine, Propaganda and Peace Human Stain I’m Dangerous With Love Inheritance Into the West Jack Goes Boating Jersey Girl Jimi Hendrix: Band of Gypsies Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List – Season 3 Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List – Season 4 Keeper of the Flame L’autre Monde La Nostra Vida Laila Lassie (1994) Last Breath Last Continent Last Continent/Antarctic Mission Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1988 & 1989 Last Place on Earth Law Abiding Citizen Let’s Talk About Sex Life & Crimes of William Palmer Lisa Balash: Kettelbell Bombshell Lucky Partners LXD: Seasons 1 & 2 Majority Rules Season One Man vs. Wild: Season 5 Marillion: Live From Cadogan Hall Marwencol Mask Maker Max & Ruby: Rainy Day play

Men Who Stare at Goats Molly Pickens and the Rainy Day Castle Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit Part 2 Most Tragic Victims Muay Thai Chaiya My Boss’s Daughter National Geographic Classics: World’s Deadliest Nature: Broken Tail – A Tiger’s Last Journey Needless: Collection 2 New Daughter Now That’s Weird: UFOs? Odyssey of the Tiny Pirate Orquesta de Guitarras de Barcelona: Concert Al Palau Other People’s Children Paranoids Paulie PBS Explorer Collection: Oceans Vol. 1 PBS Explorer Collection: Wild West Vol. 1 Plastic Planet Plebe Chakaloso Pokemon: Heroes – The Movie Polo Kid Primrose Path Prince and Me Prophecy/The Prophecy 2: God’s Army Rachel Zoe Project: Season 1 Rachel Zoe Project: Season 2 Ramdam: Les Meilleurs Episodes de la Saison 4 Redwall: The Next Adventure Reste Avec Moi Ricky Road to Coronation Street Robert Sherman: The Pillars of Power Rory Gallagher: Irish Tour 1974 Royal Romance: William and Kate Rugrats Go Wild Sea of Grass Secret of Dorian Gray (1970) Secret of the urn Secretos De La Mafia Sockville: A New Pair of Socks Solitary Man Speed of Thought Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm Suicide Fleet Sunshine Cleaning Suze Orman’s Money Class Sweeney Complete Collection Taking the Oath: America’s History From the Oval Office Texas Rangers Tracy and Hepburn: The Definitive Collection Transpersonal Awakening: Enlightenment and the Kundalini Turbo Dogs Vol. 2 Two & A Half Men: 1st- 7th Seasons Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, Volume 7 Ultimate 3x30 Unearthed Upper World Victor Victoria: The Broadway Musical Waltons: The 1st – 9th Movie Collection Warbirds of WW2: The Carrier War in the Pacific White Material Wild Soccer Bunch Wycliffe Complete Collection Yards

APRIL 19

23rd Psalm 40 Days and 40 Nights 54 A Year to Remember: The 1960s About Adam Adventure Inc: The Complete Series Adventureland Aliens From Outer Space: UFO Landings, Crashes and Retrievals Almost Invisible Ambush Amelie American Dad, Vol. 6 Aquarian Age: Juvenile Orion Bad Santa Bambi Ben Hur (2011) Best of World Cruises Bill Collector Bionicle 2: Legends of Metru Nui Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies Bob Douglas: Sequatchie Valley Fiddlin’ ‘98 Bob Dylan: The Never Ending narrative Bongos World Percussion 3 Bonnano: A Godfather’s Story Born to Raise Hell Bounce Boy in the Striped Pajamas Boys Are back Bridget Jones’s Diary Brothers Grimm Call Me Salome Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Season One Charlie Acuff: East Tennessee Fiddler Cherie Chicago Chicago Overcoat Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice/Children of the Corn 3: Urban Harvest Chocolat Cider House Rules City of God City of Men Clannad: After Story – C omplete Collection Claymore: The Complete Series Clyde Davenport: Shades of Clyde CMT Crossroads: Train and Martina McBride Coal Miner’s Daugher Coeur Animal Craig McDonald/David Sebring: Pistol Packing papa Crow 2: City of Angels/The Crow: Wicked Prayer Darker Than Black: The Complete First Season Darkness/Lost Souls Dead Man/Texas Rangers Deception/People I Know Destination Murder Down to You Dracula 2000/Cursed Duplex/Fifty Pills Earth From Above Earth From Above: Amazing Lands Earth From Above: Life Earth From Above: Stunning Water Ernie Kovacs Collection European Tour With a Difference Experiment Alcatraz Falco: The Rise and Fall of an ‘80s Pop Icon Farewell Footsteps Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The Complete Sixth Season From Dusk Till Dawn/ Full-Tilt Boogie Fubar II

Gashole Gatling Gun/Django Shoots First Gaumont Treasures Vol. 2: 1908-1916 Glee: Encore Glen Washington: Live Goemon Growing the Big one Gucci Mane/DJ Fletch: Gucci Gone Bonkers Guitar Artistry of Eric Bibb Guitar Artistry of Stefan Grossman Gulliver’s Travels (2010) He Histories of the Holocaust: Dachau – State Within a State Houston, We Have a Problem Howe & Howe tech Hyenas I Want What I Want Idol of Evil If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise Ingrid Bergman: Swedish Film Collection Ip Man 2: Collector’s Edition Jerry Lee Lewis & Friends: Inside Out Jews and Baseball: An American Love story JM Barrie & Kenneth Grahame: Creation of Neverland Joe Carr: Complete Country Guitar John Leguizamo’s Freak Jorge Morel: Latin American Guitar Solos Justin Bieber: A Rise to Fame Kes King’s Speech Koerner, Ray and Glover: Live L’Amiral Ladies of Countrie Last New Yorker Le Tango Des Rashveski Let Him Be Little Man Lone Ranger Compilation Lone Ranger Double Feature Lorna Doone Love Me or Leave Me Metal Fest Vol. 1: Live From Germany 1986 Mind to Kill: Series 3 Miramax From Dusk Till Dawn Series Miramax Hellraiser Series Miramax Psycho Killer Series Miramax Romantic Comedy Series More Than Famous Mountain: Canadian Festival Exxpress 1970 My Destiny Place: Imagine This/Believe in You My Destiny Place: Let us Entertain You/ Never Give Up Neverending Story 3: Escape From Fantasia/ A Wrinkle in Time One Piece: Season 3 – Fifth Voyage Outriders Pelican Blood Phantoms/The Faculty Pippi Longstocking: Pippi and the Balloon Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Pokemon 4ever/Plkemon Heroes Princess Blade Prophecy Triple Feature Rabbit Hole Railways of Italy Real Jesus: Legacy of Deception Re-Cut Red Wilson: Sweeter Than Red Laurel

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/movies/new_releases Renaissance/Equilibrium Ride, Vaquero Ringo Starr and His All Star Band Rockpalast: Miller Anderson band Rockpalast: Steve Gibbons Band Rockpalast: Terry and the Pirates Rose Tattoo: Nice Boys Safety Smart Science With Bill Nye the Science Guy: Germs and Your Health Second Coming Sextette Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure Shaun the Sheep: The Big Chase Simon and Laura Somewhere Sound of Mumbai Sound of Velvet Square Grouper Stars in My Crown Street Kings 2: Motor City Stripperland Sweet Southern Melodies: String Band Music Tattooed Stranger Tennessee’s Partner Thin Lizzy: Thunder & Lightning Tour Three Musketeers of the West/ The Man From Oklahoma Tim Holt Western Classics Collection Vol. 1 Time for Romance TNA Wrestling: Mick Foley – Hardcore Legend To Paris With Love To Sir, With Love Tom Arnold: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to it Tosca UFC 125 UFC 126: Silva vs. Belfort Unearthed Unfinished Life Upstairs and Downstairs Vision Way Back White Lion: When the Children Cry Wholphin: Issue 13 Wild Rovers Wishful Thinking Worst Horror Movie Ever Made Zen Sun Yoga APRIL 26

200 MPH 20th Century With Mike Wallace: America at war 3 Idiots 5 Centimeters per second Afraid of the Dark After Armageddon Alamo Alamo Tech Allman Brothers Band: Live in Germany 1991 American Avant-Garde: The Lawrence Jordan Album/The Films of James Broughton American Experience: Stonewall Uprising American Experience: The Greely Expedition Andrew Jackson Apocalypse Island Armin Van Buuren: Armin Only: Mirage Asylum session Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Vol. 1 Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Vol. 2 Below the Beltway Blood Out Blow Out Brave

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Brigands: Chapter VII/Chico Bucket List Bunny and the Bull Chawz Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering Civil War Combat Counting Backwards Cursed Custer’s Last Stand Darkness Date With the Angels David Byrne: Ride, Rise, Roar Death Masks Death Will Have Your Eyes Deception Deep Red: The Hatchet Murders Demob Desert Son Dinoshark Dirt Don Knotts: Tied Up With Laughter Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: The Complete Season 4 Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: The Complete Season 5 Dracula II: Ascension Dracula III: Legacy Dragonball Z: Dragonbox Vol. 5 Eden of the East Movie I: The King of Eden Elle: A Modern Cinderella Tale Equilibrium Escape From Colditz Exploitation Cinema: Supervan/Jailbait Babysitter Flic Foreigner: Rockin’ at the Ryman Forgiveness From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter Frontline: Daugher’s death Frontline: Post Mortem Full-Tilt Boogie Gallery of the Masters: Leonardo Da Vinci – The Universal Genius Gallery of the Masters: Michelangelo – Captured in Stone Gangland Girl Who Leapt Through Space Vol. 1 Good Food, Bad Food Growing Pains: The Complete Second Season Hairspray (2007) Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers Halloween H2O Halloween: Resurrection He’s Just Not That Into You Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth/ Hellraiser 4: Bloodline Hellraiser: Hellseeker Hellraiser: Inferno Hidden Assassin Hindenburg Hiroshima History Channel Presents: Mega Disasters – The San Francisco Earthquake Honeymoon With Mom Horatio Hornblower: The Original Adventures How Life Began Human Planet: The Complete Series I Love You Phillip Morris In Search of Holy Treasures In the Night Garden All Clean Now John Cage: Works for Percussion, Vol. 1 John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers: Live in Germany 1988

April 26 South Park: The Complete Fourteenth Season

Even though this show is currently arranged to air ASAP if needed, the pop culture obliterations felt a little more rote this season (Jersey Shore, social networking).

That said, the three-episode Mysterion arc was one of the more inspired, ludicrous and gleefully offensive SP exercises yet. [Comedy Central]

Kan Door Huid Heen Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl: Vocal Collection Kennedys Knockout K-On! Vol. 1 Larry Sanders Show: Season Three Last Days of the Civil war Line in the Sand Looking for Fidel Lost Evidence: Pearl Harbor Lucky Lucy Show: Four Season Pack Lucy Show: The Official Fourth Season Men of War Midnight Chronicles Modern Marvels: Eggs Modern Marvels: Mega Meals Modern Marvels: Winter Tech Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood Mom, Dad and Her Mongolian Death Worm More Sex & The Single Mom Most Extreme Airports Mother’s Boys Muay Thai giant Naruto: Shippuden Box Set 6 Neverending Story 3: Escape From Fantasia Nights in Rodanthe No Reservations Notebook Nova: Making Stuff One Way to Valhalla Opa! P.S. I Love You People I Know Perpetual Peace

Phantoms Placido Domingo: My Greatest Roles Vol. 4: Verismo Opera Playing House Potato President’s Book of Secrets Prophecy Prophecy 2: Ashtown Prophecy 3: The Ascent Renaissance Revenge of the Bridesmaids Ricky Dillard and New G: Keep Living Romeo and Juliet Royal Collection Russell Peters Presents Sacrifice Samurai!

Scent of Green Papaya Selling God Seven of Daran Sex and the City: The Movie Sex and the Single Mom Sgt. Frog: Season Two Shootout! Iwo Jima – Fight to the Death Short Stay in Switzerland Siper: Inside the Crosshairs Sisters of War Sites of the World’s Cultures: Machu Picchu and the Legacy of the Incas Sites of the World’s Cultures: Stonehenge and Megalithic Cultures Sniper: Reloaded Socalled Movie South Park: The Complete Fourteenth Season Spot’s Birthday Party Stan Lee’s Superhumans Starhunter: The Complete Series Straight and Butch Student Services Stuhr It Up: Three From Actor-Director jerzy Stuhr Summer Eleven Sveener and the Shmiel Symmetry of Love Testees: The Complete Series Tikki Tikki Tembo… and More Stories to Celebrate Asian Heritage Towncraft Underwater Universe Universe: The Complete Series Unsung Heroes of Pearl Harbor Upstairs Downstairs US Open 2010: Men’s Semifinal – Federer vs. Djokovic Who Really Discovered America?

Who’s In Control?

Wrinkle in Time Yanni: A Living Legacy Year in Provence: Complete Set

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APRIL 5

Bull of the Woods Visions Behind the Expressions Ambrose Akinmusire When the Heart Emerges Glisten Armageddon Dildos Untergrund ASCII.DISKO Black Orchid Asking Alexandria Reckless and Relentless Assassin Breaking the Silence Avantasia The Metal Opera Part I & II The Band Music From Big Pink/The Band The Beach Boys Today!/Summer Days Pat Benatar Best Shots/Wide Awake in Dreamland Beto Vazquez Infinity Existence Justin Bieber X-Posed Bizzy Bone & Layzie... Bone Brothers IV Blondie Parallel Lines/Plastic Letters Blood Freak Mindscraper Blueprint Adventures in CounterCulture Bobina In Trance We Trust 017 Justin Vivian Bond Dendrophile Burzum Fallen The Buzzcocks Another Music in…/Love Bites Joe Cocker Civilized Man/Cocker Cold Cave Cherish the Light Years Crack the Sky Cut Crack the Sky Ghost Creepersin Faster Creepersin Adam Cruz Milestone Matt Cusson One of Those Nights Wolfgang Dauner Tribute to the Past A Diane & Wild Divine Alala Diane & Wild Divine DJ Screw 3’n the Mornin’ Part Two DJ Screw All Screwed Up Dodheimsgard 666 International D Douglas & United... Brass Ecstasy at Newport Kit Downes Quiet Tiger Glen Drover Metalusion Richard Durand Wide Awake Bill Emerson Eclipse Engrained Deep Rooted Phil Everly Phil Everly Fen Epoch The Fleshtones Roman Gods/Up-Front…

Plus FM Static My Brain Says Stop, But My Heart Says go E Furman & Harpoons Mysterious Power Greylevel Hypostatic Union Trilok Gurtu Massical Ha Ha Tonka Death of a Decade Bobby Harrison Anthology Hellfighter Damnation’s Wing Hi-Power Ent Presents Latin Rap and videos Hi-Power Ent Presents Neighborhood Music 2 Hot Tuna Steady as She Goes Abdullah & E Ibrahim Sotho Blue Billy Idol Billy Idol/Rebel yell Etta James Essential Modern Records Collection Jefferson Airplane Flight Log (1966-1976) Jethro Tull Heavy Horses/Songs From the Wood Diana Jones High Atmosphere George Jones Radio Lover 1980-1989: A Critical Anthology Jim Jones Capo Kampfar Mare The Kills Blood Pressures Andy Kim Happen Again Kingdom Come Rendered Waters Komor Kommando Oil, Steel & Rhythm

13th Floor Elevators George Acosta

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5/Are You Gonna Go My Way? Lantlos Lantlos Gee Hye Lee Geenius Monday Lucky Luciano Money Bags Curtis MacDonald Community Immunity Malakwa Street Preacher Henry Mancini The Complete Peter Gunn Manhattan Brothers The Very Best of the Manhattan Brothers George Michael The Lowdown Midlake Late night tales Mignon Kiss of Death Dan Milner Civil War Navy Songs Ronnie Milsap 20-20 Vision/Night Things Mint Condition 7 Mountain Nantucket Sleighride Movits Out of My Head My Inner Burning Eleven Scars Negura Bunget Focul Viu Gretchen Parlato The Lost and Found Pastor Troy H.N.I.C. Peter and Gordon Lady Godiva/Knight in Rusty Armour/In London for Tea Placebo Black Market Music/ Placebo Power Quest Blood Alliance Billy Preston I Wrote a Simple Song/ Music Is My Life Psy’aviah feat. Ayria Into the Game Putumayo Presents Rumba, Mambo, Cha Cha Cha Quintessence Rebirth: Live at Glastonbury 2010 Gerry Rafferty City to City/Night Owl Rasputina Great American Gingerbread Red Hot Chili Peppers RHCP/Uplift Mofo Party Plan Residents Meet the Residents Brian Robertson Diamonds and Dirt Leon Russell The Best of Leon Russell Sharks The Joys of Living 20082010 Shiva’s Quintessence Only Love Can Save us Sinister Altered Since Birth Dallas Smith & Boys... Dallas Smith & The Boys From Shilo The Smithereens 2011 Sons of Seasons Magnisphyricon Terell Stafford This Side of Strayhorn The Submarines Love Notes/Letter Bombs Ya Tafari Utopia Thorms vs. Emperor Thorns vs. Emperor Timber Timbre Creep On Creepin’ On U.D.O. Mastercutor U.D.O. Mission No. X Vains of Jenna Reverse Tripped Thijs Van Leer Introspection 3 Various Artists Angel Air Rocks: War Horses Various Artists Authenticite: the Syliphone Years Various Artists Decline of Western Civilization: Metal Years Various Artists Motor City Hits Various Artists Music for a Royal Wedding Various Artists Music to Die For: Death Discs Various Artists The Bristol Sessions 19271928 Vicious Rumors Razorback Killers Vigilante The New Resistance Vintersorg Jardpuls Wildcookie Cookie Dough Mitch Winehouse Rush of Love Jonathan Winters Final Approach Lenny Kravitz

Queens of the Stone Age Apr 19

Queens of the Stone Age The raunchiest rock cover short of Black Crowes’ Amorica houses a ton of incredible songs. Not quite as essential as Rated R, but this is QOTSA at their peak. The reissue offers a remaster, as well as three bonus tracks on CD and double vinyl (the latter coming with a download card, natch).

Yung Ro John Zorn Z-Ro & Agonylife

Go Hard Texas 2 Nova Express Street Legends

APRIL 12

African Head Charge Voodoo of the Godsent Azam Ali From Night to the Edge of Day Atmosphere The Family Sign Autechre EPs 1991-2002 Ian Axel This Is the New Year Bearsuit The Phantom Forest Bell X1 Bloodless Coup George Benson Beyond the Blue Horizon T Burton/D Elfman 25th Anniversary The Byrds The Essential Byrds 3.0 The Church Starfish Brett Dennen Loverboy Bob Dylan Bob Dylan in Concert: Brandeis University Matthias Eick Skala The Feelies Here Before Figurines Figurines Rory Gallagher Irish Tour ‘74 Howe Gelb & A Band... Alegrias Goldberg Sisters Goldberg Sisters G. Goodwin Big Phat... That’s How We Roll Gypsyblood Cold in the Guestway Iro Haarla Quintet Vespers Hate Forest To Twilight Thickets Hauschka Salon des Amateurs Jimi Hendrix South Saturn Delta Lisa Howard Songs of Innocence & Experience Freddie Hubbard First Light Gregory Isaacs Lonely Lover Jamaica No Problem Jeniferever Silesia Joan as Police Woman Deep Field Jonny Jonny Carole King The Essential Carole King A Krauss & Union... Paper Airplane Lake Giving & Receiving James Leg Solitary Pleasure Letlive Fake history Little Scream The Golden Record Low C’mon A Lull Confetti Mack & Malone Money Music Dave Matthews Band Live at Wrigley Field D Maxwell & O Spann Conversations in Blue Mazes A Thousands Heys The Milkshakes 107 Tapes

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Pacific Coast Highway Mississippi Mile Philharmonics Borrow a Horse Heaven is Attached by a Slender Thread Roy Orbison Monument A-Sides Roy Orbison Monument Singles Panda Bear Tomboy Phish Live Phish 10/30/2010 Boardwalk Hall Phish Live Phish: 10.26/10 Verizon Wireless Arena Ponytail Do Whatever You Want All the Time Prema Hara Tears of Love The Pretty Reckless Light me up Don Sebesky Giant Box Paul Simon Graceland Paul Simon Paul Simon Paul Simon Paul Simon in Concert Paul Simon So Beautiful or So What PaulSimon Still Crazy After All These Years Paul Simon There Goes Rhymin’ Simon Soundtrack Frankie & Alice Soundtrack Lemonade Mouth D. C. Speer & Helix Leaving the Commonwealth Nikki Sudden Playing With Fire D Suomi & Minor...

Go, and Sell All Your Things Thee Spivs Taped Up Thursday No Devolucion Trampled Under Foot Wrong Side of the Blues Alexander Tucker Dorwytch Stanley Turrentine Salt Song TV on the Radio Nine Types of Light Various Artists Words for you Vivian Girls Share the Joy Marc Wasilewski Trio Faithful Young Widows In and Out of Youth and Lightness Monsta John Oates Agnes Obel Old Calf One AM Radio

APRIL 19

2tone Cali Rollercoaster TheBad Plus Never Stop (Deluxe Edition) Badlands Badlands Badlands Voodoo highway Hank Ballard Tore Up Over You Mike Birbiglia Sleepwalk With Me Live Blu Her Favorite Colo(u)r Blut Aus Nord 777 Bombino Agadez Breaking Laces When You Find Out Burzum Belus Burzum Burzum/Aske Burzum Daudi Baldrs Burzum Det som Engang Var Burzum Filosofem Burzum Hlidskjalf Burzum Hvis Lyset Tar Oss KimberlyCaldwell Without Regret Cam’ron & Vado Gunz N’ Butta Circus of Power Vices Rosemary Clooney Sophisticated Lady Crauchan Blood on the Black Robe Cynthesis DeEvolution Darkthrone The Cult Is Alive Del the Funky Homo... Golden Era Triple Pack Dixon Bros/Callahan... The Dixon Brothers Fats Domino I Found My Thrill Eliza Doolittle Eliza Doolittle Dorrough Music Dorrough Music Gangsta Grillz Pee Wee Ellis Tenoration Roger Eno Anatomy Evoken Quietus Faithsedge Faithsedge Eddie Fisher Song of the Dreamer

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When the Smoke Clears Live at the Perthshire Amber Gorillaz The Fall Graveyard Hisingen Blues Haeresiarchs of Dis In Obsecration of the Seven Darks Sammy Hagar Street Machine Bill Haley Hook, Line and Sinker Harriet Tubman Band Ascension Helix Walkin’ the Razor’s Edge Steve Hillage Live in Germany 1977 Hi-Power Ent Presents Chicano Rap Connection Hugh Hopper The Stolen Hour I’m From Barcelona Forever Today Illmind Behind the Curtain Ilo Exit 110 Miles Jaye Attenergy Jack Jezzro Jazz Tastings: Light Jazz Lacrimosa Sehnsucht Lanu Her 12 Faces GB Leighton Hope 1 Mile Les Nubians Nu Revolution Sam Levine Smooth Sax Romance Jerry Lee Lewis Breathless ALife Divided Passenger Lil C H-Town Chronic 5 Lower Than Atlantis World Record Max B Domain Diego Vol. 2 Montrose Montrose Buddy Morrow The Essential Collection Zoe Muth & Lost...

Starlight Hotel Rick Nelson Million Sellers/Rick Is 21 The New Black II: Better in Black Shaman Origins Pantha du Prince XI Versions of Black Noise Walter Parks Walter Parks Pearson Sound...

Fabriclive 56: Pearson Sound Pendragon Passion Periphery The Icarus EP Lucky Peterson Every Second a Fool Is Born The Pilot in You First Born Queens/Stone Age Queens of the Stone Age Quiet Riot Quiet Riot Rainbow Live: Dusseldorf Philipshalle 09.27.76 Johnnie Ray The Atomic Ray Marty Robbins Mr. Teardrop Sabaton Attero Dominatus (ReArmed) Sabaton Metalizer (Re-Armed) Sabaton The Art of War (Re-Armed) Sky Saxon The King of Garage Rock Klaus Schulze Big in Japan: American Edition Pete Seeger The Complete Bowdoin College Concert Septicflesh The Great Mass Brian Setzer Orchestra Setzer Goes Instru-MENTAL Slim Thug: Boss Hogg Serve & Collect 3 Solar Fragment In Our Hands Ralph Stanley A Mother’s Prayer Tommy Steele The Real Steele Becca Stevens Band Weightless Strontium Police Academy Sylosis Edge of the Earth Taletellers Radicalizer Terry & The Pirates Doubtful handshake Trae 48 Hours MikeTramp/Circuz Stand Your Ground Tune-Yards Whokill Unholy From the Shadows Unholy Gracefallen The Unthanks Last Various Artists Covered Like a Hurricane Various Artists Eric Clapton’s Jukebox Various Artists Houston Might Be Heaven Various Artists Rough Guide to Klezmer Various Artists Rough Guide to Paris Foundation Julie Fowlis

Lady Gaga Apr 19

Born This Way If you’re one of those people whining that the title track sounds too much like Madge’s “Express Yourself,” please do yourself a favor and never listen to pop music again. Duh, it does. On purpose. It’s also one of the most inclusive, gay-friendly songs to ever infiltrate the mainstream. Gaga—who rips of Kylie way more—gets a pass here.

Josh White Daphne Willis Jim Wilson Winds of Plague G Young & Other...

Lounge Blood Red River Because I Can Sanctuary by the Sea Against the World We’re All in This Together

APRIL 26

Start and Complete Don’t Follow the Crowd The Black Harvest In Flight (The Deluxe Edition) BT These Humble Machines Matthew Cooper Some Days Are Better Than Others Dirty Vegas Electric Love The Donkeys Born With Stripes The Echocentrics Sunshadows Ephryme Dopestylevsky Explosions in the Sky Take Care, Take Care, Take Care Joe Fiedler Trio Sacred Chrome Orb Fresh & Onlys Secret Walls Tom Glazer A Treasury of Civil War Songs Etta Jones & H Person The Way We Were Jookabox The Eyes of the Fly Pat Jordache Future Songs Prem Joshua & Band Luminous Secrets SteveKhan Parting Shot David Kilgour/Heavy... Left by Soft Lions!Tigers!Bears! Shallow Waters, Endless Depth CassMcCombs Wit’s End Memphis May Fire The Hollow Nine 11 Thesaurus Ground Zero Generals Of Montreal The Controllersphere Rachel Platen Be Here Bonnie Raitt Nine Lives Religious Knives Smokescreen Silverstein Rescue Emilie Simon The Big Machine Texas in July One reality Times New Viking Dancer Equired Tindersticks Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 Various Artists Take Action Vol. 10 J Webb & Webb Bros Cottonwood Farm The Wombats The Wombats Proudly Present… This Modern Glitch About Group Eric Alexander Armor for the Broken George Benson

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SEASONS 1 — 6 ON SALE

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SEASONS 1 — 9 ON SALE

GRE Y ’S ANATOMY SEASONS 1 — 6 ON SALE

Snoop Dogg Doggumentary

Gucci Mane The Return of Mr. Zone 6

RIGHT NOW. YOUR FAVORITE TV. ON DVD. A SPECIAL RELEASE

FROM A MAN RECORD STORES LOVE:

AND MUSIC LOVED BY MILLIONS. ON SALE NOW AT YOUR LOCAL INDIE RECORD STORE.

PINK FLOYD

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

PINK FLOYD

PINK FLOYD

MEDDLE

WISH YOU WERE HERE

PINK FLOYD

PINK FLOYD

exclusive RECORD STORE DAY release

SYD BARRETT

AN INTRODUCTION TO...

A double vinyl primer on Syd Barrett, limited to 1000

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PINK FLOYD

UMMAGUMMA

ANIMALS

WORKS

DEREK& THE DOMINOS “GOT TO GET BETTER IN A LITTLE WHILE”/”LAYLA” an exclusive Record Store Day 7” of an unreleased track recorded for the Layla sessions. Limited to 2500 copies

LAYLA AND OTHER ASSORTED LOVE SONGS One of Eric Clapton’s defining albums marks its 40th Anniversary.

Four different special formats showcase classic music, new and long-unavailable music and never-seen photos. CD and Double LP out now, Deluxe Edition and Super Deluxe (4 CD, 2 LP, DVD) editions out 4/26 COWBELL

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dispatch

Two Minutes of Hate

by Rodney

Anonymous

The Phonograph Needle and the Damage Done Disclaimer: The opinions expressed below are solely mine and do not neces-

sarily represent the opinions of the other members of the Dead Milkmen, other members of One Hit Wonder bands, other future cast members of Celebrity Rehab, nor the Catholic Church (which, in typical patriarchal fashion, has remained mum on this subject for far too long. What a bunch of pussies.)

O

n a sticky summer’s night in 1977, I was treated to a

glimpse of the future. For it was on that night, in the fourteenth year of my life, while attending the first teenage party of my life, and after drinking roughly half of the first beer of my life, I backed into a record player, causing the needle to travel the entire radius of Yes’ magnum opus “Tourmato” as the crowd erupted into shouts of “Flagged!” and “Asshole!”

And that’s when Fate intervened as I was taken aside by one of the older kids who said, “Dude, don’t worry about it. One day records will be smaller, like, more compact. And instead of a needle, record players will use… what are those things called? The things they use for ‘Laser Floyd’ at the planetarium?”

“Um, lasers?”

“Yeah, they’ll use lasers. Whoa! You could, like, turn the music into numbers—like ones and zeros—and put the songs on those big-ass computers. Only I guess you’d have to make the computers smaller. Like, personal-sized. Then people could, like, share songs. Dude, I just blew my own mind.”

That young man was, of course, William “Buzzy” Kissel who, as the whole world knows, would go on to invent and patent not only a Billy Carter-shaped bong (elegantly christened “The Billy Bong”), but also “The Gripper”: a butt plug fashioned in the likeness of Ronald Reagan.

Fortunately, around the same time that Buzzy was having the first of many visions, a much less wasted group of people was working to make his dream—that of highly portable, nearly indestructible music (and not the dream he would later describe during a competency hearing)—a reality. Tragically, today an alarmingly multiplying group of Luddite vinyl enthusiasts are intent on crushing Buzzy’s dream and dragging mankind back to the Dark Ages of sun-warped discs and unintentional scratching.

Oh, we’ve all heard their arguments; “Vinyl just plain sounds better” is always the one they tend to lead off with. Really? Well, if you possess such outstanding auditory ability, then maybe you should be using your super hearing for something useful, like fighting crime, rather than bitching about the disappointing 2K range on a Yo La Tengo CD. From where I’m sitting, I can see CDs

by CombiChrist, AngelSpit and RazzorBladeKisses; I’ve listened to them all a dozen times each and they sound just fine to me. The day when Itzhak Perlman drops some violin on a Suicide Commando track is the day I’ll start worrying about subtle differences in recording media.

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Anyone who creates a piece of music that can only truly be enjoyed when played on a $5,000 stereo is clearly not your friend.

“What about older recordings? The ones that were originally mastered to be heard on vinyl?” Fuck you; buy some new music.

And while you’re shopping for fresh tunes, consider this: “The Basement Tapes” were recorded using the peak of audio technology that the ’60s had to offer. In other words, the songs were recorded in a basement and on tape.

Look people, you wouldn’t just stand by and watch as people began to replace their refrigerators with butter churns, would you?

Do you seriously believe that Showgirls can only be appreciated viewed through a Zoetrope? So, why should the vinyl crowd get a pass? Won’t someone stand up and say, “Not only is the emperor naked, but he appears to be fucking retarded as well.”

In conclusion, I’d just like to point out that when records came along, there were probably some nostalgic assholes who pined for the days of Victrola cylinders. Just as, in the coming years, as advances in technology will allow Lady Gaga to beam her music directly into our heads, the masses will be begging for the return of MP3 players… and death’s sweet release.

Rodney Anonymous is the singer for Philadelphia punk rock

legends the Dead Milkmen (though not the guy singing on “Punk Rock Girl”), the hurdy-gurdyist for 25 Cromwell Street and the guy behind the Philadelphia City Paper’s world music column, “Aid or Invade.” He tells you how to live at rodneyanonymous.com. illustration by jim tierney

ON SALE IN

APRIL

SOUNDGARDEN THE YEAR 2010 SAW SOUNDGARDEN - CHRIS CORNELL, KIM THAYIL, BEN SHEPHERD AND MATT CAMERON REUNITING AFTER A 13-YEAR ABSENCE TO A THUNDEROUS ROAR. AS PROMISED, THE BAND HAVE NOW ANNOUNCED THAT THEY’LL BE RELEASING THEIR FIRST-EVER COLLECTION OF LIVE TRACKS WITH LIVE ON I-5.

LIVE ON I-5

– a reference to the Interstate 5 which runs up and down the West Coast- compiles live tracks from a 1996 run by the band and captures the band at the height of their recording and touring career. This carefully selected compilation includes fan favorites like “Spoonman”, “Rusty Cage”, “Burden In My Hand,” and “Black Hole Sun” (performed by Chris Cornell solo), as well what insiders are calling the definitive live performance of “Jesus Christ Pose.” As a bonus, the disc includes two brilliantly inspired covers: The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and The Stooges’ anarchic proto-punk classic, “Search & Destroy.” The band took out recording engineer, Adam Kasper with them on the West Coast leg of this tour- the first time they ever recorded any live shows. They rented a mobile 24 track machine/truck and recorded the gigs on 2” tape. Soundgarden had always intended to release it as a live record soon after the tour, but alas, they disbanded and the tapes were left in the closet of Studio X in Seattle (now called Bad Animals) to gather dust until now.

With LIVE ON I-5, we catch the now-legendary rock titans at the top of their game. The collection captures the rawness, spontaneity and magic that happens at live gigs between Soundgarden and their audiences. It cements the band’s place in rock history and shows why their appeal is as strong and as timeless as ever.

TELEPHANTASM

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indie record stores in your own backyard

Here’s where to find a local retailer that carries the MonitorThis!

Sampler and even more treats!

Silver Platters Seattl e

BK Music

Gallery of Sound

r i c h m ond, va

Pennsylvania

Sunrise Records

Bull Moose

Graywhale

Toronto, On tario

Maine, N e w H a mpsh ire

Salt Lak e City

CD Warehouse Ot tawa , O n tar io

Independent Records Col orado

The Sound Garden Syracuse & baltimore

Dimple Records

Monster Music & Video

Sac r amento

Ch arl eston , SC

The Exclusive Company

Rasputin Music

Zia Record Exchange

San F rancisco & berk el ey

Ariz ona & Las Vegas, NV

wi s c o nsin

Vintage Vinyl fords, nj

For a complete locations list, special offers and more, visit www.monitorthis.com 4

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