Magnet #81

Wild Flag

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Das Racist

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Tommy Keene

r e a l m u s i c a lt e r n a t i v e s

Jeff Tweedy And Co. Are No Longer

Trying To Break Your Heart

Beirut

The Sound Of Settling

Spank Rock

Yawn Of A New Era Plus Mac McCaughan, Neon Indian, Wooden Shjips,

Thundercat, My Brightest Diamond and more ‌

$4.99 | ISSUE no. 81

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N o. 81 cover story

Wilco

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on the cover Wilco photographed September 9 in Chicago for MAGNET

by Drew Reynolds

With its well-documented inter-band problems now a thing of the distant past and a lineup that finally seems in it for the long haul, Wilco returns with eighth studio album The Whole Love, possibly the group’s most diverse collection of songs in its 17 years. Jeff Tweedy and Co. discuss dad-rock, the Black Eyed Peas, socialist kittens and more.

Departments

feature

7 Letters 10 Static

36 Beirut

Chillaxing to the max with Neon Indian; Mac McCaughan doesn’t shoot, still scores; Das Racist delivers The Difficult Interview Of The Month; Beauty Pill likes it when you watch; bass is the place for Thundercat; Tommy Keene is the new Mr. Bombastic; and Spank Rock actually does give a fuck.

26 On The Record Debbie Harry

30 Magnified

My Brightest Diamond, Wooden Shjips, We Are Augustines, Meg Baird

51 Reviews

New releases from Wild Flag, Feist, Wilco, Lindsey Buckingham, Fruit Bats, Grandaddy, Hella, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Jay-Z + Kanye West, Matthew Herbert, Toro Y Moi, Craig Wedren, CANT, Kid Creole And The Coconuts, A.A. Bondy, Jonny Corndawg and more.

64 The Back Page Party Like It’s 1995

Zach Condon photo by Gordon Ball

Zach Condon  —the freshfaced drifter who burst on the scene in 2006 plying old-soul Balkan folk pop—finds his home, and his true voice, on The Rip Tide.

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editor’s note real m u sic alternatives # 8 1 www.magnetmagazine.com

MAGNET is back.

Publisher

Alex Mulcahy

After editing and publishing the magazine from 1993 to 2008, then spending almost three years solely working on magnetmagazine.com, I’m as surprised to write those words as you probably are to read them.

In the months leading up to our 80th issue, which came out in December 2008, it became apparent that we needed to make some changes, as the declining music and magazine industries—along with an everworsening economy—were going to finally catch up to us. And probably sooner than we cared to admit. We had an opportunity to relaunch our website for very little cost thanks to a friend of the magazine, so we decided that would be the next order of business. We took an indefinite break from the print mag and worked on growing magnetmagazine.com.

Around this time, MAGNET’s longtime art director (and my wife) became injured and not able to work. We thought it was a temporary thing, but, unfortunately, she still hasn’t gotten any better. As a result, I dove in full-time to working on the website, with the part-time assistance of members of the extended MAGNET family both old and new. I always secretly hoped we might again do a another print issue, but as each day passed, the odds of that happening became more and more unlikely. For me, the website was a way to keep MAGNET alive. Doing the magazine was the only real job I’ve ever had, and I had devoted my entire adult life to it, so I didn’t just want it to end.

Completely out of the blue a couple months ago, I reconnected with Alex Mulcahy, owner of the Philly-based Red Flag Media. Alex and I used to attend the occasional Phillies game together and talk shop.

His company publishes Decibel, a magazine I always have liked to think of as the metal version of MAGNET. After only a handful of exchanges, we decided we’d bring MAGNET back as a print magazine, with Red Flag publishing it and me editing it.

So, there you go: issue #81, almost three years later than it was supposed to be, but in your hands, nonetheless. There’s a couple differences with the “new” MAGNET. It will come out monthly instead of quarterly. The staff is a mixture of workers both old and new. I’m no longer the publisher.

But that’s about it. And our website, which has really grown considerably over the past three years, will keep on operating as it has been.

Subscribers will receive all the issues they are owed from their existing subscriptions. They also get my sincere thanks for hanging in there and sending countless emails with encouraging words over the past three years. Our subscribers are the reason we have always done this magazine, and we don’t want to ever let them down.

I also want to thank everybody who has worked for MAGNET over the years—especially Kimberly Merritt and Matthew Fritch, who are two of the best employees and people I have ever known—and those who continue to do so now. It’s because of them that I’ve been able to have my dream job for more than 18 years. I also owe a huge debt to Brian Howard, who was instrumental in getting this issue published. You will be seeing Brian’s fingerprints on the next couple issues as well and, hopefully, his byline in the magazine after that.

And if you allow me the opportunity to get personal: The only reason I am in the position to take advantage of the chance to relaunch MAGNET is because of the physical, emotional and financial support given to my wife and me over the last three years by our families. We will never be able to repay them for everything they have done for us.

But enough with the sappy stuff. You have more important things to read, like this month’s issue of MAGNET. And next month’s. And the following month’s ...

It’s really nice to be back.

Eric T. Miller, Editor-In-Chief

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“In an era of ironic coolness, his music is shamelessly honest and poignantly sentimental. He doesn’t mock his musical deities; rather, he truly lets them possess him, fight for their turf within his music and whatever happens, happens. And the result is quite beautiful.”

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static s tat i c

Human After All Neon Indian “glo” for it on dance-floor love-in Era Extraña While the ’80s continue to be an overfarmed touchstone for scores of emerging indie-pop bands, Alan Palomo has been reaching further back in the annals of history for Neon Indian. The music falls into the chillwave genre—low-budget shoegaze and electronica full of blips and bloops, also referred to as “glo-fi”—yet there’s something incredibly ’60s peace-and-love about the tunes this 22-yearold has created, first on 2009’s critically acclaimed Psychic Chasms and again with his latest, laid-back, kaleidoscopic dance party Era Extraña (Static Tongues).

This guy is more hippie than hipster. His songs reek of a love-your-brothers-andsisters vibe that might have resulted earlier had laptops been around for artists like Joan Baez and Buffalo Springfield to diddle with. Intertwined with the computer and video-game noises is an embraceable humanity that only enhances Neon Indian’s allure.

“The longer I do this, the less I’m able to contextualize the novelty in those (electronic) sounds,” says Palomo. “The impulse to even make sounds like that always comes from a certain playfulness. Even if it’s removed from a medium of wires and electrical currents and knobs and lights, at the end of the day, there’s a person manipulating those sounds. I just try to generate these weird little effects or tones or create a palette that is somewhat representative of that.”

Let the major-label electro-daddies in Daft Punk present themselves as alien robots manning the Death Star; Palomo would rather push his blood, sweat and tears to the front of the mix. And he’s getting better at this gig. On tracks like “Polish Girl,” “Blindside Kiss” and “Hex Girlfriend,” he whispers, lightly croons, then adjusts the timbre of his voice to seamlessly blend with the soft pulsations and swells of the music. The complete package is a curious, utterly relatable confluence of distance and intimacy, like the sound of a hopeless romantic attempting to compose

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the ultimate online-dating profile.

Getting out there and making connections was, in fact, a major factor that contributed to Palomo’s creative process for the new songs.

Prior to Neon Indian, he had never done any extensive touring. But the success of Psychic Chasms sent him on a yearlong adventure around the world, forcing him to figure out how he would present his music in a live setting.

“When I was still in the conceptual phase, the questions that would get thrown around a lot were, ‘Well, if I was to see Neon Indian live, what kind of weird, crazy shit would I want to see onstage, and how can I actualize that?’” he says. “My only criteria for the live band was I wanted people who could breathe a different life into these songs. I just got incredibly excited at the prospect of completely reinventing these songs for a live atmosphere.”

The results proved winning enough to land Neon Indian on bills with the likes of Phoenix and Massive Attack, as well as spotlight gigs at U.S. festivals. Now, armed with the foresight that his songs will more or less become incarnate, Palomo found himself pandering to future Neon Indian performances while writing Era Extraña, but the new tunes had to feel different from their predecessors.

“I lived under the philosophy that I never want to willfully write the same record twice, because, at least to me, if you’ve already created a concept, why would you reiterate it and dilute it or convolute it or something?” says Palomo. “It took a while experimenting with a couple of new instruments to find the sound and be able to evolve from just doing another lo-fi record and to be able to do it in a way that would make me excited.”

You would think that as a former resident of music-centric Austin who currently lives in artist-saturated Brooklyn, Palomo would have no trouble finding inspiration. Wrong. So he hightailed it to Helsinki, Finland, of all places, to make Era Extraña.

“It was pretty non-sequitur,” he admits. “I

had been there once or twice on tour, and I don’t know—the whole city has this picturesque, kind of whimsical quality to it.” But more than an excuse to mine the aesthetic of the Arctic Circle, Palomo chose Helsinki because he “felt [it] was a good place to silence the chatter … Putting yourself in this room in somewhere that you’ve never really spent time before and is as alien to you as anything could be—at the end of the day, you revert back to the conversations that you’re always having with yourself. I find that’s where the most interesting creative ideas come from.”

As far as lyrical influences go, Era Extraña doesn’t stray too far from what’s on a lot of young people’s minds: namely, love and relationships. “I can’t really write any abstraction,” says Palomo. “I can never really write a song about a tree or a hummingbird; I’m sort of forced to shoot from the head and write from experience.” It’s another unconscious strategy that keeps Neon Indian from sounding like the Star Trek house band and more like real life.

“To me, the act of making music should always be immersive and celebratory,” says Palomo. “And the way that I learned how to make music—it kinda does feel like a game inherently. It’s really trial and error, and that there’s no real template for it is kind of the exciting thing. It’s not like you learn a scale; it doesn’t come from that same school of thought. It embraces happy accidents in the same way that, as a kid, you can generate those impulses sort of limitlessly.”

Lo-fi, glo-fi, chillwave, whatever—the music is meant to be an antidote to the megabucks budgets that run rampant on the Top 40; it’s sort of the punk-rock equivalent of those flashy idols. But Neon Indian has no grandiose political agenda. The music’s ease and youthfulness translates to an intentional naïveté that resonates with listeners who just want something to dance to. Groovy, man.

—Jeanne Fury

photo by ben rayner

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Keene to Succeed Tommy Keene cranks up his classic jangle for Behind The Parade Tommy Keene has suffered so much be-

nign neglect over the past three decades, he should hire a custody lawyer and sue the music industry for non-support. Although the L.A.-based singer/songwriter has recorded one crackling guitar-pop masterpiece after another, the frustration of being a 30-year cult phenomenon takes a toll.

In 1998, Keene threatened to quit if his second Matador release, Isolation Party, didn’t sell; it didn’t, but he persevered. He offers a similar proviso for his third Second Motion LP, the patently amazing Behind The Parade.

“I wanted to put everything I had into this,” says Keene. “I could have put out the retrospective (2010’s You Hear Me—A Retrospective: 1983-2009) and said, ‘That’s the best of

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what I’ve done,’ but I had some more to give.

I don’t know where to go from here. It’s sort of a test, trying to get to the next level in this thing I call a career. It’s a dare to myself.”

Keene’s spartan goal of 10 songs for Parade forced him to drastically self-edit, but the brisk 40-minute album ranks among his best work. It’s an overworked phrase that applies to a fair percentage of Keene’s catalog.

“I was pickier with choices of songs,” says Keene. “In the past, I would have gotten lazy and said, ‘That’s enough for a record.’ I kept throwing out songs.”

Behind The Parade shimmers with Keene’s hallmark elements: chiming guitars, thunderous rhythm section, introspective lyrics. He has little interest in anything else.

“I like things really jukebox-y,” he says, laughing. “People have complained that I should make sparse records, but they’re not as exciting as Phil Spector-ish productions. I tend to get bombastic, but I like bombasity, if that’s a word.”

Many would posit that Keene’s lack of sonic compromise has hindered him, but it’s a short-sighted argument that doesn’t account for his crystalline musical vision.

“I have this musician friend in a big sort of band, very successful, and he says, ‘Why do you have all these things going on? Why don’t you just have drums, one guitar and your voice?’” says Keene. “I say, ‘That would be boring—like your music.’ I want it all.”

—Brian Baker

photo by chris rady

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Game Changer

A provocatively titled sophomore LP belies Spank Rock’s newfound positivity

There used to be a time when you could find Naeem Juwan—Spank Rock to you— dancing from his South Philly neighborhood to a dozen different parties in his adopted city. The Baltimore native was a fan of internationally famous poetry and rap nights such as the feral/fertile/literary Black Lily open mic and Cosmo Baker’s untamed Monday hip-hop jam, events that fueled Spank Rock’s vexing brand of party rap.

It was a spastic, nasty set of wilding sounds and lyrics—equal parts Dolemite and Diplo—that went into 2005’s now-legendary Yoyoyoyoyo. “There was nothing like it,” says Juwan, on a bus speeding through Connecticut. “I know that.” Confident without trying to seem boastful, he quietly asks about remembering the first time I’d heard it. “It was something, right?”

Six years later, things have changed a bit.

Juwan still has a house in South Philly, though he doesn’t get a chance to go to many local parties. “When I’m home, I hide,” he says.

Traveling is as much a part of his life as anything else—hanging at Bounce parties in New Orleans, recording in Berlin, running with the Ke$ha/LMFAO “Get Sleazy” tour. “I’m not really a big fan of theirs,” laughs Juwan. “Then again, I feel like we’re friends, and I think the shows are going to be hot.”

Yet, the same things that influenced Spank Rock out of the gate (the need to feel something different, to be something unique) is what inspired his new album, Everything Is Boring And Everyone Is A Fucking Liar (Bad Blood). The CD’s title came from a conversation with a friend who wanted to know how Spank came to such a strange conclusion as Yoyoyoyoyo. “When I first got to Philly, the music scene—not just here, but everywhere— was like beating a dead horse,” he says.

“Boring. With the exception of the few things I really loved, nothing was progressive or progressing. I wanted to change hip hop.”

That’s what the title of the new recording comes from: an old conversation. It does not come, as rumored on the web, from the hold-up of this second album and his time with Downtown Records, the hipster haven that signed Spank Rock along with fellow odd-

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hop Philadelphians such as Santigold (who produces and appears on the new album) and Amanda Blank.

It’s Downtown that Spank Rock had been happily aligned with for the last several years, doing one-off projects like the 2 Live Crewinspired Bangers & Cash and recording his sophomore album with the sort of hype that the label did—and still does—well. “I had an awesome deal with Downtown and a really awesome time there, no doubt,” says Juwan.

“But the music industry is in a pretty ridiculous place right now. A lot of companies are just not making money through record sales alone and are asking artists to put themselves in pretty tough situations.”

Juwan claims that Downtown asked him to renegotiate his deal and turn a “cool indie deal into a 360 deal where not only does the label get to own and/or take percentages from sales and songwriting, they do so from touring and merchandising as well. I just didn’t want to do that.” It took a minute or three for Spank to get out of the Downtown deal, as well as cobble together the music that had been slowed or stopped during that time. After the smoke cleared and the beats slowed, Spank figured out something crucial: “I had truly become a different person with different ways of saying things.” So, he scrapped much of what was recorded for the Downtown album and started fresh—a new career in a new town with producer Boys Noize in Berlin.

In some ways, Juwan was alone, rudderless, for the first time since his start when he and XXXchange (Alex Epton) made Yoyoyoyoyo throughout 2004 and 2005. “I can remember getting off work early so that I could record with Alex,” says Juwan. “We worked together extremely well and had a lot of fun.” Epton is currently a part of Win Win and not the new Spank project. With big money and big industry getting involved, the clichéd story of two young kids getting their values turned around certainly rang true for Juwan and Epton. “There was a year where we didn’t talk or work together, but everything is cool between us now,” says Juwan, who also collaborated on a Euro-club solo effort with Blu Jemz, a Prince Paul-like concept album

and a Fabric live mix tape before settling in to record Boring.

Being apart from Epton and Downtown pushed Juwan into an optimism about music that was akin to how he started in the first place. “I was trying not to be bitter,” he says.

“Business is business.” In the same way that Yoyoyoyoyo came from a desire to do something unlike anything he’d ever heard, Boring would go further still. “All of our best impulses and worst—use it for something new and exciting,” he says. “Challenge myself to do more than rap, do more than reference my favorite musicians.” And make new friends. Spank met Alexander Ridha, the German producer and DJ known by stage name Boys Noize, at the 2007 Winter Music Conference, then again two years later with an armful of record-industry horror stories and some music recorded in Philly through GarageBand. Says Juwan, “He offered to help—I showed him mine, he showed me theirs—and off it went. I didn’t have any support at the time, so to hear someone offer any glimmer of hope was cool.”

Juwan was determined to make this work.

He’s a fighter. Plus, he learned to like being out of his comfort zone. “It was cool to be in Berlin with someone you barely know,” he says. There are still some familiars within the Boring aesthetic. “Car Song” features old pal Santigold (“my favorite songwriter”), and while tunes like “Nasty” and “Hot Potato” are more future-forward than anything on Yoyoyoyoyo, they still have the feel of Spank’s Baltimore-club-meets-Philly-hip-hop sound, with a lot of New Orleans parish Bounce in the beat. “It’s souped-up Transformers stuff,” laughs Juwan.

It’s a song like “Energy,” though, where the tables turn for the stranger, a no-wave-y, Talking Heads-like cut with a haunted, hollow R&B vibe that would scare Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Oddly enough, the track didn’t quite grab Juwan immediately. But like everything else he’s had to endure in the last several years, he turned it to his advantage. “I still don’t always get it,” says Juwan. “But then again, I think it redefines the Spank Rock experience. And redefining the experience is what this is all about.” —A.D. Amorosi

photo by chrissy piper

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An Ideal Beauty

Public recording sessions, breakthroughs on MySpace and near-death experiences: the story of Beauty Pill

ednesday, July 20, 2011: The violinist stands in the theater. Long, sonorous notes fill the room. “Just so you know, I’m probably going to do four or five tracks of the same thing,” Jean Cook announces to someone sitting behind recording equipment.

She is surrounded by musical equipment: grand and electric pianos; numerous guitars, basses, amps and pedals; two drum kits; several microphones; a table filled with small synths and other electronic devices. Like many recording studios, a certain amount of comfort has been integrated in the form of vintagelooking lamps, rugs and couches. Unlike many recording studios, a large, white, empty picture frame (a metaphorical installation) separates the musicians’ area from the producer/engi-

neer station. A photographer discreetly moves around the room, taking pictures.

This isn’t a play about a band making an album. This is a band—Beauty Pill, from Washington, D.C.—making an album in a theater its members converted into a recording studio. The theater is just one room of Artisphere, an art gallery and performance venue in Arlington, Va. On the third floor, a window looks down into the proceedings. Usually, the window is covered by curtains, but the band opened them and set up a bench and two small speakers. Between July 16 and August 2, anyone can stop by the window and eavesdrop as Beauty Pill makes its new album. The project has been dubbed Immersive Ideal. Sometime this coming winter, prob-

ably December or January, the band will take over the theater again, this time to present a surround-sound mix of the completed album, along with photography and filmed footage of the summer sessions.

The next day, bandleader Chad Clark points out that when he first told people about Immersive Ideal, “A lot of my friends who are artists and musicians said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’”

But now that the sessions are underway, “My sense is, socially, the energy is very sweet and warm, and you can feel people wishing us well.” He will often invite visitors at the window to come into the theater.

Clark enters the room on a Wednesday and sits behind the recording desk. It’s a familiar spot for him; for years, he’s served as a

Jean Cook of Beauty Pill

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photo by PJ Sykes

Right: Drew Doucette Below: Chad Clark

and Basla Andolsun

producer and/or engineer for D.C. bands like Fugazi, the Dismemberment Plan, Burning Airlines and others. But never quite like this.

Eventually, the group begins recording several violin parts from Cook, who shares vocal duties with Clark. The very last note feels especially intense.

“That note just gives me chills,” says Clark.

“That note is profound to me. I feel like that note is the Mona Lisa smile. There are so many interpretations.” Then he laughs.

“Our band talks differently than other bands.”

It’s true. Beauty Pill is not like other bands.

Despite forming in 2001, the outfit has only released two EPs (2001’s The Cigarette Girl From The Future and 2003’s You Are Right To Be Afraid) and a full-length (2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle). There’s been some turnover in the lineup. But there’s something else almost indescribable about this band— an ethnically mixed group that’s recorded for Dischord while making music that veers far beyond the punk-based sound the D.C. label is most famous for. Beauty Pill’s songs embrace both seductive, groove-oriented melodies and darkly witty lyrics.

“Chad brought to [Dischord]—and all of his projects—a different approach to the recording process,” says Ryan Holladay, half of electronic duo Bluebrain and the new media curator at Artisphere. (He and Clark conceived the Immersive Ideal project.) “He was one of the first in that wave to really experiment with the studio, with instruments, the same way someone like Brian Eno would.”

In 2006, Clark posted the demo of a new song, “Ann The Word,” on MySpace. The band’s relationship with traditional indie rock grew ever more distant. Yet Clark received a great deal of positive response to the track, giving him confidence in the new direction.

As of this writing, it’s been streamed on MySpace more than 50,000 times. “Ann The Word” was seemingly built equally from Japanese folk instruments and eerie laptop sounds. Cook delivered arguably Clark’s finest lyric yet: “In the dream, the car fills up with water/And you and I are kissing just the same … /And you turn to me and whisper/‘You and me, we’re fucked, we’re free.’”

In 2007, Clark got sick. Real sick. In a MySpace blog post dated Feb. 22, 2008, he revealed that in four hours, he would undergo open-heart surgery. He had been diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy. The valves of his heart were not connecting properly, causing the organ to grow increasingly larger. He almost died.

photos by morgan klein

Meanwhile, back at Artisphere,

the whole band is here now: Clark, Cook, Drew Doucette, Basla Andolsun, Devin Ocampo and Abram Goodrich. They begin working on a new song. Clark plays a demo over the sound system. The other band members—they are all multi-instrumentalists; most of them have other bands and projects—play along, trying different ideas, switching instruments from one person to another. It starts with Ocampo on drums and percussion and Goodrich on bass, while Clark provides a wordless vocal melody. Then Doucette takes over on bass, and Goodrich moves to percussion. Cook starts trying out different motifs on piano. Andolsun begins playing guitar.

“This makes me so happy,” Clark exclaims at one point. “I couldn’t do it on my own.”

“The song’s called ‘Near Miss Stories,’” he later explains. “I started to put it together when I was in the hospital and couldn’t really play any instruments.” During open-heart surgery, doctors must break a patient’s ribs to get to the heart, so in the aftermath, Clark’s ribs were held together with metal rings in order to heal. The surgery was a success, but his movement was severely limited for several months. Playing guitar was not an option. “I was experimenting with my laptop on a hospital bed and experimenting with samples,” he says. It’s the only song Clark has written about his illness.

“You ever see in movies where people are in the bottom of a cave, and there’s a cave-in, or they’re out at sea and they’re shipwrecked?,” he says. “The thing that they hold onto in that moment—and I can tell you this is true—is the idea that someday, it will be a story. You turn to someone and go, ‘We’re gonna make it, and I’m gonna see you at a table, and we’re gonna clink glasses, and this is just gonna be a story.’ I remember at a really uncertain point— every heartbeat could be my last—thinking, someday I’m just gonna tell this story to a bunch of friends, and it’s gonna be, ‘Wow, 2008 was crazy.’ I found myself fantasizing about that a lot.”

Clark has a real way with words, in lyrics and conversation and on Twitter (@beautypill). “Having worked with Chad for a number of years now, he has a gift of talking about music or pretty much everything,” says Ocampo, who also played with Clark and Goodrich in the band Smart Went Crazy in the ’90s.

“And a lot of the time, on the other side, it’s

frustrating,” he continues, as Clark laughs in acknowledgement. “We’ve had to really work on that, because a lot of times we do have the same image in our heads. But when we vocalize it, it ruins it. That’s why I’m always saying, ‘Well, let’s just speak some other way, because the language sometimes gets in the way of the thought.’”

“Meaning is important to me,” says Clark.

“It’s one of the things I loathe about indie rock. I really can’t stand the combination of supercilious, aloof elitism, at the same time as not having content. I don’t want to suggest that, oh, everything needs to be this clear narrative and linear idea before I care about it. It’s more that the person feels something inside and they’re trying to get that across. I can tell when that’s not the case.”

A few weeks after Immersive Ideal’s first

phase wraps up, Clark takes time from his vacation to talk about the project so far. He still needs to finish recording vocals and mix the album at his home studio. A lot of musical ideas were recorded for each song at Artisphere, and it’s not entirely clear yet what the finished album will sound like, how many songs it will have or even what label it will be on. Elements of Clark’s electronicsbased demos will likely be utilized. And, he says, “Ann The Word” will definitely make the track listing. (Although “it would be a hilarious mindfuck if we didn’t put that on the record,” he laughs.)

For Beauty Pill, the experience of recording an album in public wound up being overwhelmingly positive. “If you were to ask any member of the band, everyone would say it was very successful,” says Clark. “It brought us closer together in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Immediately after, we were saying, ‘We have to do this again.’” ­—Michael Pelusi

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Here’s Where the Strings Come In Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan expands his film-scoring acumen to the abstract According to Mac McCaughan, one major differ-

ence between writing pop songs and scoring films is the luxury of time.

“If you’re 30 seconds into a three-minute rock song and awesome stuff hasn’t happened yet, you’re losing people,” he explains. “But if someone’s sitting down to watch an hour of film with your music, you can ease into it and develop things over time. That’s what’s both a challenge and what’s great about it.”

Over the past decade, McCaughan has supplemented his duties as Superchunk frontman with a number of film scores and live accompaniments to classic silent cinema. His latest endeavor, a live soundtrack to four shorts by experimental film pioneer Maya Deren, premiered last month to open Augusta, Ga.’s Westobou Festival.

“These films are well-known works of art on their own,” says McCaughan. “They don’t need my music. But since they’re getting my music, I guess I’m trying to write stuff that is a little bit unexpected, that’s basically going to augment the experience of watching the films.”

For Transfigured Time: Music For The Films Of Maya Deren, McCaughan gathered a quintet of musician friends from his native Chapel Hill, N.C., along with a pair of Augusta-based string players. The appeal of these early underground films, all created 50 to 60 years ago, was in their poetic, dreamlike abstraction.

“There’s something a little constricting about following a tight dramatic storyline,” he says. “Not that you have to follow the narrative, necessarily, but if there’s a train coming and someone’s tied to the tracks, you kinda have to have dramatic music. I was interested in getting away from that.”

McCaughan hasn’t always avoided narrative, even in his scores for silent films. He most recently premiered new music at the Seattle International Film Festival for Dracula director Tod Browning’s 1927 silent horror flick The Unknown, starring Lon Chaney as an armless knife thrower and criminal who falls for his assistant, a young Joan Crawford. And in 2002, Superchunk performed a score for rarely seen Japanese silent film A Page Of Madness at the San Francisco Film Festival.

That movie, a hallucinogenic nightmare set inside an insane asylum, proved a particular challenge to McCaughan and Co. “There are moments that are so frenzied and chaotic that we wanted the music to be just as propulsive and to have that momentum, but at the same time you can’t keep up with that film,” he says. “So, at times you have to go the opposite way and have the

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music doing something that’s almost static while the film is going crazy, but that goes against the nature of Superchunk as a group.”

The soundtracks McCaughan has penned under the rubric of his long-running Portastatic project are much more open-ended. His first venture into writing for film was 2002 indie feature Looking For Leonard. “I’d maybe done some music for TV commercials that never aired” prior to that experience, he says. “Friends of mine who were directing ads would ask me to send them 30 seconds of music, and then they’d say the ad agency thinks it’s too sad to advertise donuts.”

Fans of his work with Portastatic, Looking For Leonard filmmakers Matt Bissonnette and Steven Clark gave McCaughan room to experiment within comfortable parameters. “It was cool of them to give me free rein and allow me to do it within instrumentation that I was fairly familiar with,” he says. “It was guitars, keyboards, drums, maybe some violin, but it was within my wheelhouse.”

He reteamed with Bissonnette on the director’s follow-up feature, Who Loves The Sun, and served as musical advisor for his next film, Passenger Side. He has also scored installation artist Andrea Zittel’s short film House After Ten Years, which was included in the 20 Years Of Merge boxed set celebrating the label that McCaughan co-founded.

While he cites influences ranging from Ry Cooder to Claus Ogerman to Miles Davis’ score for Louis Malle’s Elevator To The Gallows, McCaughan insists that few of his soundtrack-composing peers can offer much in the way of direct influence.

“Most of the film score music that I like, Michael Nyman’s soundtracks for old Peter Greenaway movies or Philip Glass’ music for film, is so far out of my league that I don’t know how much I could really take from it other than a sensibility,” he says. “It’s not within my capabilities to do that.”

What McCaughan has managed to do over the last decade is to create moody, high-tension scores from the sparse palette of the slightly augmented rock band.

“This may make me sound lazy,” he says, “but writing music with a starting point, like an image or a film, is awesome because you’re not starting with a blank page.

It gives you something to react to. I love writing music and melodies, and when you don’t have to sit down and come up with lyrics that you then have to sing, it’s even better. —Shaun Brady

photo by Andrew Paynter

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Mixed Messengers Das Racist may lack clarity, but it makes up for it in raw spirit

If nothing else, Das Racist must take the

business of music seriously. The logo of its management company/record label, Greedhead, sports a male pictogram in lotus position, with a dollar sign for a head. And the band has managed to rebound quite impressively from 2008 novelty techno-slacker march “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell.” The group’s resident alienated provocateur Himanshu “Heems” Suri has published his views on race and politics in the Village Voice. And last year’s two mixtapes, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man, roped in collaborators such as Diplo, Jay-Z and former Definitive Jux kingpin El-P. Much of it stems from the ability of the band’s concepts to look good on paper. But when I call, Heems sounds like he’s stoned out of his gourd: On the cover of your new LP, Relax, you’re burning the couch you’ve sat on for the first two mixtapes. Will you move on to loveseats for the follow-up?

I don’t know. On the first two mix tapes, the couch was kind of symbolic of how our music was similar to hanging out with us. In the second mixtape, the couch got kinda nicer.

This one is more beautiful. The one before it was more wise, and the one before it was more powerful.

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Dipset pops up a lot in your tracks: “Free Max B,” the Juelz Santana sample on “You Oughta Know” and the name-checking of French Montana. What’s the fixation on them?

Juelz ghostwrote most of my shit, so he was just getting a headnod when we went on the beat, you know what I’m saying?

You get the picture. The kids occasionally take this seriously, though. The group’s Tumblr page, Nehru Jackets, finds Heems responding to an incessant line of questioning from Internet trolls and adoring fans. Yet for every South Asian kid inspired by DR’s example, there’s a deeply troubled youth with a racial identity crisis or a white kid who readily acknowledges DR’s points and wants to do the right thing by others, both looking for guidance.

Is Das Racist a way of dealing with racial resentment?

It’s an effective way to alienate people that might not normally be alienated. Rap music is historically an art form where there were confrontational rappers [who would] make white people uncomfortable with their art. And

I just don’t see that happening [now] in music.

We’re in a position where I’m a middle-class educated Indian. I can always go to law school in a year or two. So, why should I not call attention to these discrepancies and economic distributions according to race? You look at the prison system. It’s a resentment that’s held in fact and numbers.

I’m thinking about your cover of the Strokes’ “New York City Cops.” What has brought the anger toward police brutality into the music?

Um, I don’t know. I’m not sure.

All right. So what are you reading these days?

I’m illiterate. I’ve never read anything ever.

But you went to college.

I know. It’s amazing, right? But I pulled it off.

Wow. Now I can tell the world the truth.

That’s right.

—Justin Hampton

photo by bek anderson

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Apocalypse Meow It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Thundercat feels fine Not just a week back from touring in Australia,

and Stephen Bruner has a lot of adjusting to do.

For the past two weeks, he’s been playing bass for Suicidal Tendencies, and for most of his life, he’s been making music for other people: George Duke, John MacLaughlin, Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg and whoever else cares to pay him for his versatile fretboard sprints. But now he’s got a debut album, The Golden Age Of Apocalypse, out on his pal, producer/laptop musician Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label, and with it, an entire reconsideration of who he is. As his girlfriend drives him and his four-year-old daughter to the neighborhood Chickfil-A, he considers that maybe his father had it right all along.

“My dad had to tell me I was an artist,” says Bruner.

“That’s not something that I knew I was doing. [For me], it was like, I would do music, and I’d be this character.

And he was like, ‘Stephen, you have to look at yourself a little differently, understand that this is what you’re doing.’ Now it’s turned into that, finally. Even for me, it still feels weird.”

Bruner understands how unfair the game can be for outliers such as himself. As we are talking, the hype surrounding Tyler, The Creator and his Odd Future collective has reached a fever pitch, and Bruner sees much to be admired in Tyler’s success. Yet Tyler is a skate kid and hip-hop artist who can count on a vast youth-culture industry to back him up. Thundercat is at heart a jazz bassist named after an old ’80s cartoon series. Not so much a demand for that, but when Bruner describes his origins, you immediately see that that’s not the point.

Bruner grew up here in Los Angeles, his aforementioned father a session drummer for Gladys Knight, the Temptations and many other R&B groups known and forgotten. His brother Ronald followed directly in his dad’s steps as a drummer for Stanley Clarke, and he also developed a willful temperament toward jazzmusic orthodoxy.

“He was at a club in NYC once,” chuckles Bruner. “He gets up onstage right in the middle of somebody’s solo, and he goes, ‘Ladies and gentleman, John Coltrane is

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dead. Stop this.’”

His mother was a jeweler and born-again Christian with a mohawk. In this environment, Bruner had the freedom to explore himself more fully than most, and above all, he embraced the fantastical panoramas of anime—a lifelong love that still consumes him—alongside jazz music. The two are still intertwined for him.

“I become very attached to things emotionally,” he says. “Naturally, when you’re a kid, you wanna be Superman or something like that. I connected to it like that.

But as I was getting older and artistically developing, it was something that I held onto as to identify with because I enjoyed it so much. And not just that; creatively, I felt like it was inspirational.”

Bruner’s introduction to Flying Lotus (as it turns out, the great-nephew of John Coltrane’s wife Alice) at SXSW began his metamorphosis, first with their collaboration “Mmmhmm” and finally with The Golden Age Of Apocalypse. Already tweeted by the BBC’s Gilles Peterson as perhaps the most essential bass player’s LP since Jaco Pastorius’ Jaco, the album carries a sunny, positive vibe missing from the post-Lex Luger gladiator dystopias of hip hop and the overblown pomp of modern R&B. FlyLo’s production accounts for some familiar sonic tics and clicks on “Fleer Ultra,” but there’s time out for more accessible moments, like R&B track “Walkin’,” as well as the cover of “For Love I Come” by George Duke, one of Thundercat’s mentors.

Many of Bruner’s family and friends—his brother Ronald, Erykah Badu and Shafiq Husayn from Sa-Ra, to name a few—show up, but it’s easy to miss them.

Thundercat’s bright musical palette is the star here. “It’s such a melting pot of stuff, you don’t know where stuff is coming from,” he says of his work.

In the current musical milieu, Bruner admits, “Jazz is a scary word for most people.” Yet the potential reward for articulating a unique vision, Bruner knows, is much greater. “The first time I heard ‘Portrait Of Tracy’ by Jaco, I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. It was like, ‘Dude, that’s possible?’ And that’s what I want this album to do for people. I want them to hear it and go, ‘Ahhh. I didn’t know that this was possible.’” —Justin Hampton

photo by theo jemison

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a conversation with

debbie harry “Die young, stay pretty,” Blondie proclaimed in 1979. But singer Debbie Harry flipped the bird to the first part of that sentiment long ago.

At 66, she’s still sex on wheels with a voice that makes loins seize and buckle. The New York City band never needed to reinvent itself in order to stay relevant. Panic Of Girls (Five Seven), its ninth studio album, is a terrific reminder that songwriting and fearlessness are what sustains Blondie’s iconic coolness. It’s a band that can cover Beirut’s “Sunday Smile” without sounding like a novelty act, while continuing to mine its chic new-wave roots. Core members Harry, guitarist Chris Stein and drummer Clem Burke have zero desire to flounder in the glory of their past; that’s called “die young, get old.” MAGNET spoke to Harry about mothering the club kids, what it means to be too “girlie girlie” and the benefits of long-term lovers.

Let’s start by talking about your video for the new song “Mother.” The band is performing in a dark, freaky club, presumably an homage to the old Club Mother in New York City (which closed in 2000), but then zombies show up and eat everybody. Hilarious.

Like you said, it’s about the club, the nightlife and tapping into the huge cult interest in the zombie business. That new movie ... is it Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp that is gonna do that new zombie movie? I’m terrible about names. [Pitt is set to star in next year’s post-apocalyptic horror film World War Z, based on the book by Max Brooks.] But anyway, we’ve always sort of paid attention to all the cult things; I guess because we come from that background to some degree, it seems very relevant. And the whole idea that that particular club scene is sort of ... The people that were there were potentially or theoretically zombified, you know, so it’s sort of like tongue in cheek.

You’re still very influential to a lot of artists, and Blondie’s sound is heard in plenty of indie-pop and dance acts of today. Do you feel like a mother figure to the younger generations?

Uh, yeah, I guess in some ways, not really precisely. I always get inspired by a lot of the things that younger bands are doing. It’s sort of circular in a way, what goes around comes around, that kind of shit. As difficult as it is, I always want to be encouraging to people.

In that respect, I think it’s maternal to some degree because I’m a woman, but I feel like, you know, I feel like I’ve always had a bi-kind of sexuality to some people, because I’m not sort of overtly girlie girlie nor overtly butch, but somewhere in-between. And I feel comfortable about that.

Lots of bands try to ride trends, and they flop. But Panic Of Girls sounds very fresh and very Blondie-ish. How do you stay true to your sound, but still be contemporary?

I think primarily it has to do with the style of Chris’ guitar playing and the sound of my voice. Clem has a specific style of drumming.

We’re recognizable. Those are core elements that are there. I think that we’ve always had an experimental edge, so that gave us a lot of freedom for styles and for experimentation for bringing in modern sounds. I think we were one of the first bands to bring in synthesizers and more technical, materialized, theoretical sounds, so this has given us an edge; it has given us an identity for doing that. We can reach out; that’s what we’re interested in. I don’t think we ever wanted to make another “Dreaming” or another “Heart Of Glass.” We wanted to keep on doing what we did and still do. That’s what keeps us interested. I never wanted to just go out and do oldies. That was one of the constraints—I said I didn’t want to be in an oldies band. I was only interested in recording new material before we went out again (on tour), and that’s what we did.

Even the most seasoned bands encounter roadblocks. What were some of the biggest challenges with this album?

I think two things. We were trying to get a label interested initially, and that just didn’t happen.

So, we ended up doing it ourselves, which was kind of expensive. Then the other thing was getting some kind of distribution and getting some kind of release going. We actually finished the record at the beginning of the early part of 2010, and we haven’t been able to get it out for a year, so it’s been difficult. With the changes in the industry and the power of the

Internet, the industry practically doesn’t exist.

So, we had to contend with that and be creative. We have management that is capable of doing that forward thinking and [coming up with] new ways of marketing, so we lucked out in that respect.

Regarding the song “Love Doesn’t Frighten Me,” how do you get to a place where love isn’t so intimidating?

I sort of feel like that lyric was a bit tongue in cheek. But I think with experience and maybe desperation, you just sort of say, “Well, I’ve got to throw my hat in the ring. I’ve gotta give it a try, and the worst thing that can happen is that I’m gonna get rejected and feel shitty for a while.” You risk nothing, gain nothing; that’s what they say. That song was actually written by our keyboard player Matt KatzBohen and his wife Laurel. So, I guess it just rings true. That’s what makes a song really happen: It just rings true, and everybody can relate to it.

Where did the song “Girlie Girlie” come from? At first I thought it was about a very effeminate gay man, then I realized it was about a globetrotting gigolo.

Ha! We liked it because of that aspect; it could be both, you know? It could be a girlie-girlie guy or a guy who’s a lothario. That was one of the attractions to the song. That was an old British hit way back when.

Oh, really? Who sang it?

Don’t ask me that. I should know, but if it’s not in front of me, I don’t know. [It was a hit for Sophia George in 1986.]

What about the song “The End The End”?

It’s a very sweet tune, that whole “take my hand and help me stand” part.

That song was written … Did I have a hand in that one? I may have had a little bit of hand in the lyric in that … But that was written with this guy Ben (Phillips) who is actually in Taylor Momsen’s band (the Pretty Reckless). The idea was about couples who have been together a long time. People that are in couples relationships aren’t really as celebrated as much as perhaps they were at one time. Back in the ’50s or ’40s, people stayed together.

That was the standard. Nowadays’ standard, you stay with a person for five years, you’re doing good. This was about appreciating a longtime relationship, a friendship even, that you’re willing to look at this person, at this relationship, and treasure it.

Sort of like Blondie?

Yeah, I guess so!

—Jeanne Fury

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Spring Forward All the elements are accounted for on Meg Baird’s Seasons On Earth The stage is empty except for a microphone and the stool Meg Baird is sitting on.

She’s playing to a club crowd a few blocks from her Philadelphia apartment in characteristic stance: right leg sharply crossing left, guitar resting on her knee, waist-length hair brushing the instrument, eyes closed, thoughts focused on nimbly fingerpicking the song at hand.

It’s a cover of “Friends” by ’70s folk duo Mark-Almond, a tune that Baird appropriately enough discovered when a friend (Jeff Conklin of East Village Radio) put it on a mix a few years back.

“I’m drawn to songs that come my way in that fashion,” she says. “From people I know, people who are passionate about music.”

For Baird—one-half the songwriting team behind Drag City mystics Espers—music can be an introverted, solitary pursuit. But good friends and collaborators are vital.

Her first album, 2007’s Dear Companion, was a lot of Baird unadorned, tackling traditional numbers (“The Cruelty Of Barbary Ellen”) and ’60s folk nuggets (New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Fraser & DeBolt) with a handful of originals mixed in.

Seasons On Earth (Drag City), her second solo outing, is the opposite. It offers eight exploratory originals and only two covers (the aforementioned “Friends” and “Beatles And The Stones” by the House Of Love). The ad-

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venturous songs unfold in expansive layers, her guitar blending with harpist Mary Lattimore, guitarist Steve Gunn and Marc Orleans of Sunburned Hand Of The Man on dobro and pedal steel.

Baird didn’t even know there was going to be a second solo album; she simply began to accumulate songs, written very much like she often performs: herself, her guitar, alone.

Some date back to 2007 and evolved over years, though not drastically.

“The songs have pretty strong bones to them,” says Baird. “They’ve changed a lot, but they stayed close to the original core idea.”

The record calls to mind past Baird collaborations: the ghostly pedal-steel Americana of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s 2010 offering The Wonder Show Of The World, the traditional Appalachian music done with her sister Laura (as the Baird Sisters). Playing alone is absorbing and highly personal, Baird says, but working with an ensemble brings out elements that are otherwise lost. Seasons takes her solo work into that realm, a band-oriented album from a solo folk performer.

“That’s one thing that makes playing with other people fun,” says Baird. “You can surprise each other with your phrasing, with your interpretation of melodies and parts.

Everybody I picked to play gave me lots of pleasant surprises. It’s part of the process.”

—John Vettese

photo by Aaron igler

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Fire Sail

Brevity becomes Wooden Shjips on their best album yet

Wooden Shjips don’t know when to stop—in the

very best way imaginable. Newly out on Thrill Jockey, West provides a fresh perspective on (alien) terrain once broached by the likes of Chrome and Spacemen 3.

But the San Francisco-based (still, kinda) psychedelic quartet pursues its mission with a restless inventiveness that makes seven minutes seem too short and seven songs, too few.

“When it came time to record the album, we really didn’t talk about how long we wanted songs to be,” organist Nash Whalen explains by phone as he prepares for a string of tours that’ll last into late fall. “We just played them in the studio, and then later on, we were like, ‘Wow! That was only four minutes?’”

Granted, they were working in unfamiliar surroundings. Recorded and mixed in six days by Phil Manley (Trans Am, Oneida, Fucking Champs) and mastered by psych/experimental legend Sonic Boom, the band’s third album (not counting two singles collections) is the first its recorded away from its practice space.

The added clarity brings West’s constituent parts into sharper relief without sacrificing anything in the way of immediacy.

As always, Whalen, bassist Dusty Jermier and drummer Omar Ahsanuddin mostly contribute momentum

photo by paul carlin

and texture—though Whalen occasionally steps to the fore. Singer/guitarist Ripley Johnson’s spectral croon sounds more disembodied than ever, a perfect foil for solos that unfold like some cosmic rupture the Hubble might capture a glimpse of.

With the likes of Animal Collective introducing the indie-rock masses to psychedelia and events like Austin’s annual Psych Fest enhancing its visibility, it’s no wonder that demand for the band is rising.

“It’s one of those kinds of music that’s always going to have hardcore fans,” says Whalen. “But when more good bands come along, the genre expands and more people are able to get excited about it. It seems like right now a lot of bands are tapping into it, and I think it’s a good thing. Everyone’s coming at it from a different place. It’s not a one-trick pony, not a one-dimensional genre at all.”

—­Rod Smith

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Just Drive A move to the Motor City helped polish My Brightest Diamond’s latest effort The new album from My Brightest Diamond (a.k.a. vocalist,

composer and instrumentalist Shara Worden) opens with the simple strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s a deceptive—and charming—start to All Things Will Unwind, a record that is intricate, dynamic and often very pretty. It is also challenging and even beguiling, offering up tricky, elusive songs that ask a lot of the ears.

Worden recently moved back to her hometown of Detroit, and the change of scenery has been very fruitful creatively.

“I had made three albums in New York, and just felt that I needed to be around something that was very raw and visceral,” she says. “As international as New York is, it can also be very isolating from the rest of the world. And there is so much poverty and joblessness and racism in Detroit. And there’s something in me that wanted to confront that—I needed that reality check. So, I did get space and a community that’s doing urban farming and being artists at the same time. It’s a very complex place.”

A former member of Sufjan Stevens’ band (Unwind is her second album on his Asthmatic Kitty label), Worden is a classically trained vocalist with an expert’s ear for how voices and instruments interact.

In its best moments, Unwind’s songs sound like a conversation between players. Helping her create that vibrant tapestry is the yMusic chamber sextet.

“They approached me and asked if I would write some music for them,” says Worden. “I am just blown away by their musicianship. I wanted to seize the moment. How could I use each of their gifts?”

The result, recorded completely acoustically, is alternately delicate and lush. Tracks like “Be Brave” swell and recede, with Worden’s vocals exhibiting tremendous dexterity and range. “In The Beginning” is another standout (the all-acoustic palette imparts an almost magical quality reminiscent of Stevens’ Illinois), while “High Low Middle” examines disparity through a jaunty, clever melody.

“For this record, I decided to give up electricity,” says Worden. “I surrendered to the acoustic process.” —Lee Stabert

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photo by garrett maclean

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Waves of Mutilation

Billy McCarthy and We Are Augustines get up off the canvas The true-life story of We Are Augustines

guitarist/vocalist Billy McCarthy is absolutely horrific. The cumulative tale driving the emotional content of his band’s debut album, Rise Ye Sunken Ships (Oxcart), starts from his earliest days as a foster child of an addict mother and nonexistent father. It continues like the plot of an epic Hollywood tear-jerker, involving his mother overdosing, his schizophrenic younger brother committing suicide and McCarthy having to deal with obstructive authorities and heavy emotions while enduring a hand-to-mouth existence in his previous band, Pela. All the tragedy and turmoil is achingly detailed on the band’s website, which we highly advise checking out to get an under-

photo by aliya naumoff

standing of just how much McCarthy, bassist Eric Sanderson and drummer Rob Allen have gone through individually and collectively in creating Rise Ye Sunken Ships.

“I was doing an interview the other day, and there’s still a lot of emotion in answering these questions,” says McCarthy, taking a break from rehearsal. “This is real; it really happened, we’re still healing, and it’s been very therapeutic. The blunt impact of what happened offered a couple of choices: either wither away or go about repairing myself and continuing to make music.

In older songs like ‘Philadelphia,’ which is actually about my family, I noticed I camouflaged the lyrics. You can tell the difference because as the whole situation wore on, I started be-

coming more literal.”

From a listener’s standpoint, there’s little more disappointing than a band putting every ounce of itself into an album—or at least claiming to—that turns out inferior at best.

Luckily, Rise Ye Sunken Ships not only drips with emotion, but it’s comprised of 12 deeply layered, life-affirming compositions and is a top-to-bottom, excellent recording.

“I’m acutely aware this isn’t a confessional or a therapist’s couch,” says McCarthy, referring to how everything has been put into these songs. “But in that, I have no choice, man. This is who I am, this record is what it is, and it’s referencing something very dear to me.”

—Kevin Stewart-Panko

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Wilco

Wild Flag Wild Flag

On his new album, The Rip Tide, Zach Condon, BEIRUT’s one-time prodigy, grows up and finds a home—and himself—in the process

by Jakob Dorof photos by gordon ball

t’s a sunny afternoon at the end of June in London,

and Zach Condon is stepping onstage at the legendary Hyde Park with his bandmates. Most of the 60,000 people there to see Mumford & Sons and Arcade Fire have already filtered in, and even those latecomers stranded a couple football fields from the front can see and hear every detail, aided in part by the high-def JumboTrons flanking the stage. As Beirut begins its set and the cameras fix their gaze, it’s clear that the frontman can feel the myriad eyes upon him.

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Zach Condon in his Brooklyn home with Cousteau, his beagle.

“I’m not afraid to admit I spent the first couple songs visibly shaking,” Condon later sighs from a phone in Slovakia. Of course, it didn’t help that he hadn’t seen his friends in the band—let alone rehearsed with them—in more than two weeks, thanks to a particularly itinerant slate of interviews he’d begun for Beirut’s new record, The Rip Tide.

Those in the crowd watching Condon and Co. work through a tentative take on fan favorite “Nantes” might be quick to think of the guy they’d read about in various features and news flashes. The 20-year-old kid whose fleet fame outran him in 2006; the one who had to cut out on his first international tour because he couldn’t handle the panic attacks mounting by the day.

But the casual fans and skeptics in attendance—the type of folks who remember Condon mostly for the Balkan brass and Slavic sonorities that shaped his take on pop music back then—are in for a big surprise. For one thing, Condon’s famously populous and ragtag orchestra of yore has been stripped down to a tight and economic backing band of five fluent multi-instrumentalists. And the setlist of tuneful landmarks mapping the breadth of Beirut’s career rings clear with an identity and provenance all its own, including all the old love letters written to Condon’s favorite cultures and genres over the years. But more than

to admit I spent the first —Zach Condon couple songs visibly shaking. anything, the jitters that haunt the opening moments of the set fade fast, and Beirut turns in a relentlessly passionate set that surely wins over a thick chunk of the massive throng on the green. Even the biggest fans there see a Condon they likely never have before.

In conversation, he’s pretty different from what I’d been led to expect, too. Formerly a notoriously tight-lipped and cheeky interview (“He had a habit of making things up,” says manager Ben Goldberg), Condon now reveals himself to be charmingly personable, generously talkative and deeply thoughtful.

Chatting while prowling the streets of Madrid for some tapas with his buddies in the band, he speaks with the calm confidence of a Hollywood star on holiday between blockbusters, hardly showing any wear or tear from what is his most ambitious world tour and promotional regimen to date. He reflects contentedly on his “healthier relationship” with live performance, his familial base in Brooklyn (wife, cats, dog) and the long year spent on his new album in an upstate New York cabin, a homely pro studio

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and his parents’ crib back on the New Mexican soil he has finally come to love. Zach Condon has settled down and grown up, and his music is all the better for it.

f course, Condon’s life—and his approach to music—used to be fraught and restless, and for that he has his wandering youth to thank. Born in Santa Fe, N.M., he moved to live by the ocean in Virginia at age three when his parents opted for a change in scenery. Taking up residence in Newport News, the long-landlocked family found itself marooned between the mouths of the James River, the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic.

“Literally, for recess, me and my classmates would go down to the beach and fling dead jellyfish at each other like Frisbees,” says Condon.

“We’d drop crab traps down at the pier at the end of the schoolyard, and at the end of the day, we’d bring home our dinner.”

The Condons never managed to feel at home

in Virginia, but they tried to stick it out for the good job Zach’s mother had found there. She was a city planner, while his father kept his gig as a mapmaker for the state of New Mexico—an intersection of interests that perhaps inspired in young Zach the fascination for distant lands that would later be a muse for much of his travel and songwriting.

After six years by the water, the family moved back to Santa Fe, but Condon never found a way to reconnect with his birthplace. As he hit adolescence, he developed a crippling case of insomnia, a hatred for all things school and an uneasy sense of always being on the outside.

“My opinion on this has changed drastically, but back then, Santa Fe was two things to me: a tourist town, meaning it was on display for someone else, and a home for lots of Hispanics and Native Americans, of which I am clearly neither,” says Condon. “I was living in a city where I felt nothing belonged to me, and I could claim no ownership over any part of the local livelihood or culture. Adding in all the sleepless nights, I started to take on the role of a recluse.”

Condon’s vagrant spirit expressed itself in a few major ways, the most immediate being a streak of teenage delinquency. As the middle child of three boys, Condon recalls that his older brother Ryan had “all the rules crushed

down on him” before his parents realized that wasn’t a healthy approach, leaving Condon free to play hooky and stay out all night without as much recourse as a single allowance cut.

Pretty soon, he was skipping months of school at a time, rarely turning in homework and often plagiarizing the little he did. Once, in the fall of his junior year, he even got caught—on an analysis of The Jungle he had hired a girl he knew to write, whom he suspects simply grifted a readymade from the web.

“It was a horrible experience, but not because I was embarrassed,” says Condon. “I thought I was right, that every minute in school was a waste of time and that I should be out in the world trying to be someone. The bad part was how earnest this social-history teacher of mine was. It hurt him, and that’s what felt bad, what felt wrong. How can you do that to someone who takes what he does so seriously, who expresses a real concern for you?” Still, Condon was not long for Santa Fe High School. He dropped out later that year.

Throughout these troubled times, Condon sought solace in music and culture; though again, living in Santa Fe only further alienated him. Elder brother Ryan was not always supportive of his musical pursuits; both fondly recall the day back in Virginia when Ryan smashed to bits Zach’s first and favorite cassette, a Beach Boys greatest-hits tape, because he was sick of hearing his younger brother sing along. But in taking him to his first shows, Ryan helped to shape Zach’s formative sense of aesthetics, even if only to help him figure out what he didn’t like.

“By age 15, he had already decided he couldn’t stand the punk-rock/indie scene,” says Ryan in a slow, gentle drawl. “He didn’t like loud guitars or screaming, which went against the grain in Santa Fe, because every band was a hardcore band. People were into that or metal music.

But he quickly decided that that was not what he liked, which I thought was pretty unique for someone so young.”

If Condon couldn’t find salvation (or, at least, some kind of home) in local rock halls like Warehouse 21, then he sought it in himself. Holed up in a nook of the house where only his little brother could hear him, Condon began making his first recordings—dancey, IDM-influenced beats and synth pop under the guise of Realpeople—at a prodigious rate of, by Ryan’s count, a completed song per day. Condon hadn’t been playing much of his primary instrument, the trumpet, since he had already stopped going to school frequently enough to have a real presence in the marching band, though he began incorporating it into his electronic recordings when he heard glitchy Iceland group Múm use some acoustic instruments on its 2000 debut, Yesterday Was Dramatic—Today Is OK. Condon insulated himself for countless

hours in that sequestered room of his, grasping for something solid.

Another place he went searching was the nearby cinema, Plan B (now the Center For Contemporary Arts). Working there from age 15 and onward as a popcorn popper, the young aesthete happily paid his hot-butter dues in return for unlimited access to the foreign films they screened there. Having exhausted his hopes of identifying something he could claim as his own in the local culture, he began to scour all the distant ones he could find.

“There was this French film-noir festival every year that I loved to death,” says Condon.

“I’d just spend six hours a day in the theater, not moving. And then there was this Italian film (by Gianni Amelio) called The Way We Laughed.

It’s about two brothers, and it kinda hit close to home in an interesting way.”

“That was my contribution: I showed Zach a lot of records and movies,” says Ryan. Among the deepest impressions were Neutral Milk Hotel and Yugoslavian flicks such as Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Black Cat, White Cat, which both marked, quite significantly, Condon’s first exposure to Balkan scenes, scores and scales.

Unsurprisingly, none of these things quite amounted to a home or peace of mind. After he dropped out of school, his parents—whose quiet, unyielding support remains something of a mystery for Condon—permitted him to indulge in a quick trip to New York City and a longer, four-month stay in Paris, both accompanied by Ryan, who was then taking a year off college and reconsidering his direction as an English major.

“I took trains here and there around Europe, but always got the heebie-jeebies from all the transit and constant confusion of being lost and not speaking the language,” says Condon. The way Ryan remembers it, his younger brother’s attentions in Paris were focused far more on booze and girls than anything musicrelated, though Condon did hang with the hip Parisian kids long enough to pick up on their taste for Balkan acts like the Ko ani Orkestar and Šaban Bajramovi .

“I just heard that brass, and my fucking jaw hit the floor,” he says. “I couldn’t believe anyone was using brass like that, so bittersweet and epic.” As an American trumpeter, he says the only reference points he had until then were jazzman Clifford Brown, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Godfather soundtrack.

Yet upon his return to the U.S., Condon felt no less lost. For the most part, he stayed stationed in his room, recording new and primarily acoustic material inspired by what he had heard abroad, layering dozens of takes of himself playing different horns on top of each other in an insomniac haze. A stint at Santa Fe Community College was dismissed after a swift dropout, and another at the University of New

Mexico would soon meet the same fate.

If nothing else, though, it was at UNM that Condon met Jeremy Barnes, the Albuquerquebased musician formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel. One night, Condon wound up opening the CD-release show of Barnes’ current band, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, and the nervous teen’s simple laptop/trumpet set encouraged Barnes to send a trusted friend the rough mix of Condon’s first bedroom opus, the Balkan-inspired Gulag Orkestar.

“When I first told him I wanted to put out his album, he was just kind of like, ‘Eh, all right,’” says Ben Goldberg, reflecting on the call that signed Beirut to his label, Ba Da Bing! Records.

“He was very laid back about it, kind of nonplussed. ‘Yeah, great. Glad you liked it.’ Afterward, I was like, ‘I guess he’s interested?’” The musicians Condon was meeting around then likewise noticed a strange distance about him, as though he was always looking toward some faraway goal or place.

“He was playing a back-to-school costume party at this bar called the Half Rack one night, and I could tell right off the bat he was a really serious, thoughtful kid,” says drummer Nick Petree, who had been eager to meet Condon ever since hearing his demo for “Postcards From Italy.”

“I don’t think he was too impressed with me that night, ’cause I was dressed in a football jersey and slamming Milwaukee’s Best.”

ranted, everything certainly worked out well enough. Condon recruited Petree and a few other local young guns to join him in New York, where the amassing band blew up after Goldberg, disheartened by the lack of response Gulag was getting from his press contacts, submitted an mp3 of “Italy” to the Catbirdseat blog late one night a month before the record’s May ’06 release. The track garnered an exceptional 1,000 downloads in its first day, and it spread like wildfire from there, culminating in a glowing feature on Pitchfork and another on NPR for “Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).”

But, of course, all this attention didn’t do much to help Condon get rooted anywhere. A European tour with Calexico that November shorted abruptly when Condon was hospitalized after falling unconscious from a series of panic attacks (at the time, he feared he had a brain tumor), and in the following weeks, his bandmates wondered if it all might have ended as fast as it had begun. As if to convince them, his fans and himself otherwise, Condon began working at a furious pace: The following year saw the release of a full-band EP inspired by Long Island (via F. Scott Fitzgerald), a couple of singles and The Flying Club Cup, a full-length of mostly solo recordings (ornamented occasion-

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ally by band members and producer Owen Pallett, a.k.a. Final Fantasy) in the period clothes of French chanson music.

Condon signed an international deal with the legendary 4AD label, did plenty more globetrotting and wrote plenty more tunes. 2009 began with the release of March Of The Zapotec, an EP influenced by Mexican funeral bands and even backed by one Condon had met in Oaxaca. He simply loved to experiment with different genres and styles of music, no doubt, but there’s certainly something poetic about the way Condon continued to spend most of his life as a tourist: of cultural musics, of travels, of actual touring. Explaining his assimilation of multiple styles not commonly played (let alone so popularly) by a white American, Condon asserts that he is “just an admirer, not an ambassador.”

But for the bulk of his career, that may well have been truer than even he himself realized. After all, how can you be an ambassador when you don’t even know where to call home?

o, for those wondering where the prolific songsmith has been these past couple of years, there’s your answer: He’s been building a place of his own. He started with the basics and bought a house in Brooklyn, where he’s been living for almost two years. And then he found himself a lucky woman to help fill all that space, getting hitched in the summer of 2010. Goldberg first realized that his young prodigy had become a man that Thanksgiving when he visited Condon to find not the familiar old Bushwick loft littered with withered socks and crumpled long cans, but rather a cozy abode filled with friends, family and freshly cooked food.

That said, Condon is a musician at heart, and he had some unfinished business to resolve in Beirut before he could truly feel settled.

“I knew that when I was doing the Mexican brass music or releasing my old electronic pop music that I wasn’t trying to go in either of those directions,” he says. “They were just meant to be playful experiments, a way to hear my voice on far-ranging palettes. But I knew this new one was going to be much more true to myself. It was like I woke up one day and was like, ‘Well, yeah, I may have been trying to sound like someone else for all these years, but in the meantime, I’ve created what’s mine.’” He set out making The Rip Tide to prove it.

Though a solid blueprint for “East Harlem” has been floating in the band’s set since 2009, Condon was mostly working with a blank slate when he checked himself into a log cabin in Bethel Woods, two hours north of NYC, to write the album by his lonesome late last summer.

Less the trip down to Brooklyn to see his wife and another familiar face or two every couple of weekends, he stayed there for six months.

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As the weather grew colder and the snow piled high, Condon wisely promised himself one thing: not to write a wintry-cabin album.

“I ended up getting a beagle, actually, to keep me company,” he says, speaking of Cousteau, the proud pup he named after the French explorer. “Being there was amazing and horrible at the same time; I don’t consider myself a nature person, so it’s quite a shock to be in it on your own all the time. There was nothing there but woods. You could walk for miles without hitting anything but creeks you couldn’t cross.”

After getting his fair share of the Walden experience—Condon admits, with a smile, that the “almost cliché romanticism” of the sojourn suited him well—he returned to Brooklyn to show his bandmates his fresh demos, which they scrapped shortly before going into “submarine mode” at Old Soul Studios (recent recording home of Ratatat and the New Pornographers) early this year in Catskill, N.Y. After years of obsessively micromanaging his bandmates’ already limited contributions to his recordings, Condon wanted Beirut to make its most collaborative record yet.

role of lyrics in his music to the extent that he’s often wished he could do nothing but wordless vocals, it’s no surprise that this particular muscle was a bit difficult to stretch. Condon loved the new recordings so much that he was afraid to besmirch them with unworthy words. After a brief spell of writer’s block, producer Griffin Rodriguez flew down to New Mexico for the express purpose of “knocking some sense” into Condon, who wound up taking the plunge by penning his most direct and honest lyrics yet.

With the record in the can, Condon still had a lot of work left to do in order for The Rip Tide to be a pressed-and-printed reality; the album is the inaugural LP from his new label, Pompeii Records, and with a small staff of trusted friends, he’s taking on the brunt of distributing and promoting what should be one of indie rock’s biggest releases this year. It’s true that starting a vanity imprint is something most established bands do once their contracts run out, but for Condon, taking a stab at total independence is something a bit more meaningful.

“There’s this element to my personality that, whenever the pressure comes from outside,

,

and my fucking jaw hit the floor. I couldn’t believe anyone was using brass like that, so bittersweet and epic. —Zach Condon “We all had more of a say in the arrangements this time around,” says Kelly Pratt, who, like the rest of the five members currently backing Condon, has been in the group since the first New York show. “The Rip Tide is certainly more of a ‘band’ record, even to the extent that several of the songs were done live with the rhythm section, which is definitely a first for Beirut.” Drummer Petree recounts that a couple of the songs, “Payne’s Bay” and “Port Of Call,” were arranged by having the band jam around nothing more than a ukulele and vocal melody from Condon.

After a couple weeks of living communally and tackling a song a day, Beirut disbanded for the moment to allow Condon to fly back to Santa Fe and finish lyrics. As always, the melodies came first, and the words were saved for last.

“I was trying to be much more personal and much more open to lyric-writing in general, while still keeping a lot of fun little moments of musical intuition,” he says. “Like at the end of ‘East Harlem,’ where it’s all about the random twists in syllables of the vocal as an instrument in its own right.”

Given that Condon has since minimized the

from some kind of authority, I immediately get all huffy-puffy and just run the fuck out,” says Condon with a laugh, thinking about his track record with academic institutions as much as with the music industry. “I was on 4AD for a few years, and they were great, I loved them; but the more pressure I felt to perform for them, the more it came back to the fact that I just can’t deal with that.”

But as Goldberg stresses, 4AD has a rich history of success with musicians far more difficult than Condon, and the label never asked him to do anything more than what was well within his comfort zone. For the most part, Condon is taking full responsibility for The Rip Tide simply because he believes in it more than anything he’s ever made.

o matter what fate befalls Condon’s financial investment, his artistic one has already paid dividends. When Petree says the album’s nine tracks sound, for once, like “straight-up Zach songs,” it’s the truth. After years of incorporating blatantly ethnic and for-

eign aesthetics “just ’cause it sounded catchy,” Condon has indeed made a record that is unmistakably his own.

Goldberg, for his part, marvels at how spontaneous and vital the album sounds, despite being Condon’s most measured and labored record by a great distance, and he’s on point as well. From the opening fanfare of “A Candle’s Fire” and the bounty of hooks on “East Harlem” to the elegiac tones of “Goshen” and “The Peacock,” these songs drip with life in the words and performances both. It is Beirut’s best work, and though fans of any great band will always favor different moments in its discography, early reports on the leak from the fan forums and shoutboxes of the digital world have been overwhelmingly ecstatic.

Even Condon’s joke about not wanting to make a wintry-cabin album resonates with meaning upon hearing the finished product: Despite having had trouble avoiding the clichés of his various muses in the past, this time Condon managed to write a record that feels like those lovely breezes and sunsets that happen just as summer breaks into fall, despite all the snow mounting just outside his window. There’s a new mastery and self-restraint shown toward Condon’s influences on The Rip Tide, and it benefits the music immensely.

So, it makes sense that Condon’s suddenly got the confidence to kill it in front of 60,000 people who may or may not have heard his music before.

He has a tight band, a fantastic new record and a happy home to back him up. Pratt claims he’s got “way more self-assurance now,” Petree remarks on how much more social Condon is as a musician these days (now a true fiend for being both in front of and in the crowd at concerts, there was once a time when he only liked to stay at home and make or listen to records), but it’s Goldberg who’s got the most to say about the change he sees in his close friend and collaborator.

“Well, now I know an adult,” he says. “He’s a completely different person in that way. Ever since meeting him, I’ve noticed a wisdom in him beyond his years, but he’s applying it more than ever now across the board.”

Something funny happens, though, when I ask Condon about the title of the record. “It’s not too subtle when you think about it, is it?” he asks with a wry grin. These nine new songs are, for Condon, a reflection on all that’s happened in the five years since he finished his first record.

The Rip Tide, then, refers to getting caught up in a force bigger than yourself, finding yourself at its mercy.

“I’m almost embarrassed by how not subtle it is,” he admits, sighing again for a moment. “But it’s another one of those things where, once again, I just said, ‘Fuck it. It sounds catchy to me. I’m gonna use it.’”

What do you know? Some things never change. M

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Dad-rock isn’t a dirty word for Black Eyed Peas’ number-one fan, WILCO frontman Jeff Tweedy

by Althea Legaspi / photo by drew reynolds

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w i l c o

ucked away on a side street by an industrial area in Chicago is the Hideout, where a capacity crowd turns up for Dan Sinker and some surprise guests.

The man behind Punk Planet and the fake @MayorEmanuel Twitter account—which parodied real events surrounding Rahm Emanuel’s race for Chicago’s mayorship—is holding a release party for the book housing the tweets that became an Internet phenomenon.

Sinker is among many excellent writers and poets reading their work. The real Mayor Emanuel shows up, does a quick handshake lap around the bar and disappears. But it’s another surprise guest who steals the show, thanks to a single tweet from eight months prior.

At the time, Wilco was performing a fundraising concert for the real Rahm Emanuel, during which the fake @MayorEmanuel tweeted, “Tweedy’s being pissy because he doesn’t want to play any Black Eyed Peas songs. What the fuck?

People love that shit.” With some prodding from wife Sue Miller, the tweet inspired Jeff Tweedy’s surprise acoustic appearance at the Hideout. He takes the stage and irreverently performs “I Gotta Feeling,” “Rock That Body” and a spoken-word version of “My Humps” that is comedy gold.

(Video from the show rightly makes the Internet rounds.)

Over the years, Wilco, primarily the vehicle for Tweedy’s songwriting, has been described as many things—from sincere, philanthropic and ever-evolving to seemingly less flattering descriptors like “hipster dad-rock” and “music for white people.” Goofy and comedic, however, are not the first words that spring to mind when describing Wilco and/or Tweedy.

“That’s something I think that’s frequently missed in people’s assessment of what the Wilco environment is like,” says Tweedy. “I think we have a lot of fun. Even the bad times that people talk about and are so well-documented, I guess, in the minds of our fans—I don’t have many memories of anything being really harrowing at all. I really think that one of the reasons we’ve been able to stick around

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so long and do what we do is there’s a real enjoyment—a true enjoyment—of it, and we’ve been fortunate to not have too many things interfere with that. Certainly in the last five years or so, things have been much easier. So, yeah, I don’t know; even recording really sort of melancholy-sounding songs, there’s been an overwhelming atmosphere of levity in the way we work together.”

The band has just issued its eighth studio LP, The Whole Love. It’s the first album Wilco has released on its own label, dBpm Records. After 17 years and several lineup incarnations, the current formation—Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Nels Cline, Patrick Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen—is unique for the Wilco camp.

“Well, it’s certainly longer than any one

(l-r): Jeff Tweedy, Mikael Jorgensen, Nels Cline, Patrick Sansone, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt

lineup, and I think it’s probably getting closer to longer than any of the other lineups combined,” says Tweedy. “Previous to (2009’s) Wilco (The Album), no other lineup had made two consecutive albums, and I guess, counting the live album (2005’s Kicking Television: Live In Chicago), we’ve made four now.”

Wilco’s storied past has been thoroughly documented in print and the 2002 film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, where the relationship between Jay Bennett (who passed away in 2009) and Tweedy dissolved during the making of breakthrough album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But there’s a certain chemistry now that hasn’t been present before. “I guess you just have to spend less time talking about things and be just more able to go directly to something and intuitively

photo by zoran orlic

know what each others’ strengths are,” says Tweedy. “And as far as what has contributed to the longevity and the chemistry, I don’t know; that’s a pretty intangible thing, chemistry is, but I could say I think that it’s a band full of people who are primarily appreciative and grateful, doing something that they love to do and having it support them and keep them alive. And I guess being a little bit older and not taking anything for granted, that helps everybody keep things in perspective … The petty squabbles that might plague a younger band don’t tend to enter into our politics.”

Bassist Stirratt has been with Wilco from the beginning, and counting his time spent in Uncle Tupelo, he and Tweedy have worked together for almost two decades. “I think there

are relationships he had early on where he had a little bit … there was probably a little bit more [passion] or something,” says Stirratt. “You know, I’m not saying there’s been a coolness between us at all, but it’s been a little bit more tempered.”

Stirratt and guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Sansone also have their own band, the Autumn Defense. For Stirratt, it helped to have outside creative outlets in the early Wilco years. “It maybe took away this idea, that songwriter agenda that you might have with Wilco, you know?” he says. “I mean, I think it made for a really organic sort of collaboration ... I’ve always sort of brought in my tunes for Wilco in the hope that things would be used, and, you know, parts of the tunes have been used and I’ve

The last time we had this many songs that sounded that different, I think, was Being There.

John Stirratt magnet

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w i l c o had a little songwriting here and there, but it has been a way for me to sort of relax in terms of creativity with the band and maybe overcompensate in that regard.”

In fact, all the band members maintain outside creative projects when they aren’t Wilcoing, which could contribute to the group’s relatively lasting current synergy. Sansone, who co-produced The Whole Love along with Tweedy and Tom Schick, has produced, co-composed and/or played on multiple artists’ albums, among them Jamie Lidell and Josh Rouse.

Drummer Kotche has released solo albums and played on numerous records, including recent turns with Andrew Bird and the Autumn Defense. Guitarist Cline’s credits list seemingly goes on for miles, including his own solo work and recent appearances on Tinariwen and Low albums. Keyboardist Jorgensen has many projects, as well as his band Pronto. Tweedy’s outside contributions are also numerous, and just prior to making The Whole Love, he wrote songs for and produced Mavis Staples’ You Are Not Alone, on which Sansone also played.

A couple days after the Hideout bash, Wilco is preparing to leave for tour, and the six members are in “go” mode. Inside its North Side Chicago loft, where seemingly every inch of space is taken up by instruments and gear, the band is recording songs for a Sirius radio show and a Daytrotter session, while its management/publicity team discusses songs for an upcoming Letterman performance.

Unlike Wilco (The Album) or 2007 predecessor Sky Blue Sky, The Whole Love feels more studio-based right off the bat. Opener “Art Of Almost” hits like a statement. This is definitely not Wilco (The Album): Part Two. “It creates a great atmosphere of possibility, I think, to have that song first on the record,” says Tweedy. “It kind of opens the door the widest to whatever’s gonna happen on the rest of the record. And maybe, for some people, they’ll be expecting that song to happen again repeatedly, but that’s not the way we work. That’s not how Wilco approaches record-making.”

That’s evident in how the album unfurls.

Sandwiched between the experimental foray of “Art Of Almost” and the pretty, sprawling finale of “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” lies a pop record that touches on garage, country and folk. While on paper this might appear disjointed, it ultimately plays like a natural progression, which was part of the point. “I think what we all were hoping for was that ‘Art Of Almost’ would sort of set a tone and kind of give you a feeling that you’re being brought into something, that you’re about to take a little journey, you know?” says Sansone.

“And then ‘One Sunday Morning’ at the end of

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it kind of, sort of easing you back.”

Sansone says there was discussion of possibly making two albums, “one that was more the pop songs, like the shorter, more traditionallength pop songs, and then another record a few months later or later in the year that would be the more sprawling, acoustic, moody songs.

But as we got further in, it just kind of felt like all this stuff could work together, you know?

That it could just be an eclectic record. And why not?”

This time, the seeming disparity won out, whereas in albums past there was more of a linear quality. “Sky Blue Sky’s very much like that,” says Stirratt. “There was, you know, the sort of

I kept imagining a string section in “Black Moon,” which I know is a bit of a cliché, you know, for the rock guy to be like, “It needs strings” ... But it just worked, and everybody really liked it.

Patrick Sansone … it’s just like the folky kind of softer stuff just won out over time. But I think there’s just so much challenge in making a sprawling single disc. The last time we had this many songs that sounded that different, I think, was (1996’s) Being There.”

For the record, The Whole Love is a double LP on vinyl, with a little different sequencing than the single-disc CD. There’s a certain audacity that’s prevalent on The Whole Love, too. “‘I Might’ is just so much of Jeff ’s musical personality to me,’ says Stirratt. “I mean, it really captures that. That was one of the early songs, so I knew the thread was really right there, you

know? A little less humor, a little more snotty.

I mean, you know, that’s Jeff.”

That was intentional and is indicative of where Tweedy feels most comfortable. “I think the pop record rears its head in some pretty obnoxious, incongruous ways here and there,” he says. “And I think that any time you have a lyric like, you know, ‘The Magna Carta’s on a Slim Jim blood, brutha’ (from ‘I Might’), it doesn’t really bode very well for, I don’t know, if someone’s looking for some sort of confession.

I just think that that’s just a little obnoxious. I don’t mean it in a pejorative way at all; I mean, I love the obnoxious music. I guess to be more clear, what I mean by obnoxious is some ’60s garage music. And I think there is a lot of that that comes through on this record.

“It feels the most like home to me,” he continues. “Early, I think punk rock led me to the original punk rock, which is like ’60s garage bands, Pebbles, Nuggets-type stuff, and I still feel a deep connection with that type of music.

And I guess that’s what I mean by obnoxious, ’cause that music is easily described as obnoxious. The Chocolate Watchband, the Seeds, the Kingsmen, the Sonics, Question Mark And The Mysterians—stuff like that has a snotty irreverence to it, at least instrument-wise and occasionally lyric-wise. I felt like that was an element on this record.”

Along with Tweedy’s emerging love for garage, the group dynamic was more prevalent on The Whole Love. Tweedy typically brings songs to the band, and they work on them together.

While the songwriting process has not necessarily changed, Tweedy contends that the band sounds more assured.

“All of the songs originated with me on this record,” he says. “It’s mostly the case, and from that point, once we start working on them, once everybody learns the songs, it’s a real intuitive, collaborative process that I only think has gotten better with each record. And in this case, I think everybody now feels more and more comfortable to play to their strengths with each song, and I think that’s what this record sounds like to me. It’s like more assured individual parts, and as a whole, I think it sounds more confident.

“It’s a tough process to explain, but I know that everybody at some point on each song has a really open opportunity to steer the ship and get their lick in and have their say, and I think as a band, that might be kind of unique,” he continues. “I don’t know if a lot of bands work that way. It’s really generous and sympathetic, I think, the way everybody is in regards to how each person is able to contribute and accept other people’s contributions.”

Sansone agrees. “Once we decided that we were gonna let it be a studio-based record and

PJ

20

Cameron Crowe turns the camera on his favorite band, and comes up with an insider’s view of twenty years of Pearl Jam

dvd In stores

10/24

w i l c o we were gonna sort of use the studio as an instrument again, it gave everybody some freedom to stretch out,” he says. “And, you know, it was the kind of thing where if someone had an idea, then do it and we weren’t worried about making it sound like we were playing it live necessarily. We weren’t trying to make it sound like it didn’t have to sound completely organic. So, it just gave us some freedom for everybody to try stuff; I think that was beneficial, and yeah, everybody kinda did the things that they like to do. And then we found a way to make all that work.”

That sense of freedom for the rhythm section was articulated on songs such as “Art Of Almost,” which has a prominent bass line. “I think with the rhythm section, sometimes you worry with a six-piece band about taking up too much space,” says Stirratt. “You know, this idea that, I think me and Glenn were sort of like, ‘Well, let’s scratch out a lot of sonic space for the rhythm section and see what these guys do around it.’ And ‘Art Of Almost’ had that kind of going on—it’s like big bass sounds, fuzz bass, and it’s fun to work that way, that pastiche sort of way, because it’s sort of like a game of chess.

People play off of what you do and it just sort of—everything gets stacked in a way that each person’s move kinda dictates the next move in this weird way, the grasping of space.”

Sansone says he feels close to every minute of the record because he was so involved in the editing, producing and mixing, though his coproduction was not pre-planned. “We started recording, tracking as we always do, and then sort of the process and then the material led us toward the method,” he says. “And the method was a little more experimental, a little bit more, um, sort of manipulating the takes that we did, doing a lot of editing between takes, doing a lot of experimenting with different overdubs and things like that. So, that’s where I kind of got really involved.”

That said, there are two songs’ arrangements (“Black Moon” and “Rising Red Lung”) that he is particularly proud of. “The versions of those songs that exist are basically built on first takes, I think; if not first takes, then maybe second takes,” he says. “But I think they were both first takes of Jeff just basically playing us the song for maybe the first or second time, and us sitting around and recording that first example and us kinda responding to him. But then, after the fact, us embellishing and adding.”

The lush sound of “Black Moon” was a result of Sansone’s creativity. “I kept imagining a string section, which I know is a bit of a cliché, you know, for the rock guy to be like, ‘It needs strings,’” he laughs. “So, kinda at the last minute—it might’ve been during the last overdub we did on the record—I just said, ‘Jeff,

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I really want to try this. I’ve written a string arrangement.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, well, if you can get the players in, go ahead and try it, and we’ll see.’ I think he might’ve been a little skeptical at first, but I did the string arrangement and got a couple players who I know that are really great, and it just worked, and everybody really liked it. It’s one of those things where I kinda was on the fence about even doing it, and it’s very possible I could’ve let it go and not done it and regretted it.”

On the roof of the loft, Wilco’s cohesiveness from years spent on the road and making music together is evident in the band members’ casual, comfortable banter. Tweedy even jokingly reprises an a cappella version of his “Rock That Body” performance. It’s apparent that they’ve gelled in the studio, too.

“Look at this beautiful kitten.”

“Fuck you, that kitten’s a socialist.

You’re a fag.”

Basically, that’s the crux of all Internet discussion. jeff tweedy “We’ve learned how to interweave our different sort of sounds and personalities,” says Stirratt. “Whether it’s like Nels’ sort of glitchy guitar and Mike’s sort of electronic burble and Pat’s maybe more traditional or sort of more classic-rock swoops, we’ve been really been able to kinda orchestrate those more in a live setting. Whereas I think the first two records, Sky Blue Sky and especially on the last record, which is more dense, it was just more of a struggle. The atmosphere guys in the band, sitting back and just really orchestrating what they do; in a way, that was one aspect that I knew would keep getting better and better in the studio over

the course of making records with this lineup, and it really has.”

Despite Wilco’s ups and downs, from lineup rotations to genre-bending, the group has managed to cultivate a rabid fan base. “I think it has to do with playing a lot,” says Tweedy. “We’ve worked hard to maintain some goodwill between ourselves and our audience and not treat them as just consumers, but hopefully feel like there’s some sort of collaboration that’s going on. I feel there’s a community that we’ve been fortunate to have grow up around the band that is a pretty welcoming group of folks.

And I guess it’s just gotten big enough that it doesn’t really piss people off who were there at the beginning.”

Naturally, they’ve lost and found fans along the way. “The idea was to gain more people than we lost, but I think that the core audience, the sort of the live thing, has been the real cohesive bond and has been for a long time,” says Stirratt.

“Now it’s kinda gotten much bigger with the advent of the Internet sort of communication. I think that just the culture around the band has been as important almost as the band itself.

And it’s something that’s self-sustaining.”

The Internet can bolster bands, but it can also shoot them down. “I would be lying to say I don’t have moments where it’s disheartening,” says Tweedy. “I really wouldn’t be me, Wilco wouldn’t be Wilco, without having a real passion to be heard, and we do it with a lot of earnestness and sincere desire to connect. And being dismissed is probably more painful than being hated in that regard, you know? But yeah, at the end of the day, I’m fully capable of putting things into perspective, and I understand that the Internet is a completely altered universe in terms of feedback. If you’re looking for a dialogue as an artist, it’s a pretty dangerous place to be, you know? Any dialogue inevitably descends into a ‘you’re a fag’ on the Internet.

So, that’s the way it works, that’s the nature of it. ‘Look at this beautiful kitten.’ ‘Fuck you, that kitten’s a socialist. You’re a fag.’ Basically, that’s the crux of all Internet discussion.”

Still, Wilco has persevered longer than many bands born in the Internet age, and the lineup as it stands now has beaten the odds. Maybe the dad-rock label isn’t so bad.

“Well, I think [dad-rock] means rock ‘n’ roll,” says Tweedy. “Just rock ‘n’ roll isn’t cool anymore, and rock music isn’t very cool to a certain segment of young people writing about rock music. I’m assuming that Human League is cooler than Chuck Berry or something. I don’t know. It seems to me it just means rock ‘n’ roll, and I’m not going to bet against rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t think there’s anything undignified about being a dad or being a rock musician or playing rock ‘n’ roll.” M

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81 reviews Lindsey Buckingham p. 52

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twin sister p. 58

Wilder Things

Key to their sound is how seamlessly they mesh no-nonsense pop punch and no-net wizardry. Where most democratic bands are either a meeting of like-minded technicians who take a uniform apVeterans of Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, Helium proach to their tools or a clash of and the Minders cast a powerful spell opposites, Wild Flag’s way isn’t so simply cooperative or comxpectations are high when you’ve got a pedipetitive. What makes it work is gree like Wild Flag’s—two guitar mavericks, a hot-shit the tension between the authoritativeness of former Sleater-Kindrummer and trusty keyboard player—and its selfney bandmates Brownstein and titled debut delivers nothing less. Mary Timony heads up the Weiss and the crisp iconoclasm Wild Flag mystic expeditions, and Carrie Brownstein brings the classicof Timony and Cole.

The sense of authority comes rock muscle; Janet Weiss and Rebecca Cole dole out girl-group through clearest in the songs heart and R&B swagger when you’d least expect it. “Romance” Merg e on which Brownstein sings lead: “Boom” struts, “Endless Talk” isn’t just a match made in heaven between Timony’s instantly yelps, “Racehorse” howls. “Furecognizable bendy notes and Brownstein’s fresh, itchy riffs, but ture Crimes” is the battle cry of a mash note to the music that binds them. And as the first track on the album, someone who doesn’t know if her partner’s really on the same side. “If you’re gonna be it serves notice of the group’s loyalties: “We love the sound/The sound is what a restless soul/Then you’re gonna be so, so tired,” she warns. “If you’re gonna give up on found us/Sound is the blood between me and you.”

E

Wild Flag

photo by john clark

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51

reviews the fight/Then I’m gonna call you a liar.” You can imagine a room full of acolytes shouting out the hook, but Cole’s reedy organ turns it into something more than an anthem. It’s an apt lead-in to “Racehorse,” a leather-lunged bruiser that transcends the limitations of its classic-rock roots.

Timony’s leads have more built-in air. As she sings on “Electric Band,” which shimmers like a short, sudden summer breeze, “All we are is dust and air.” “Black Tiles” is the space an acrobat might shuttle through; “Something Came Over Me” is more of a breather. And on “Glass Tambourine,” witchy harmonies bridge the short-yetsignificant distance between psych-rock vamp and sprawling sonic field. Here’s a band that’s absorbed as much from “Radio Ethiopia” as from “Ask The Angels.”

It’s not a complete revelation; if you’ve ever listened to the Spells’ one-off 1999 The Age Of Backwards EP, you knew Brownstein and Timony had something special. But with the right proportion of leadership and lawlessness, Wild Flag sounds like liberation. Long may they wave.

—M.J. Fine

AM & Shawn Lee

Celestial Electric ESL Music

Chiller than chillwave

We’ll admit it: We’re a bit obsessed with multi-instrumentalist/producer Shawn Lee. Not quite restraining-order obsessed, but we’ve got pretty much everything the dude has ever done: his work as the Ping Pong Orchestra, his collabs with mysterio-jazz auteur Clutchy Hopkins and Chinese harpist Bei Bei, the Christmas seven-inch, the Christmas album, all of it.

So, when we say that Celestial Electric, his team-up with West Coast singer AM, is his best work to date, we really, really mean it. Imagine Steely Dan as dub provocateurs with a jones for dancing in outer space. Lush and smooth, funky and ethereal, Celestial Electric is a sublimely downtempo album filled with beautiful vocals and gorgeous orchestration, a grown-up album for fans of way-out sounds from one of the most exciting producers in the industry today.

—Sean L. Maloney

Meg Baird

Seasons On Earth Drag City

Springing forward

Dear Companion, the 2007 solo debut of Meg Baird (from Philadelphia psych/folk group Espers), was a fine collection of mostly traditional and cover songs. Yet it only hinted at the artistic leap that she makes on her sophomore effort, comprised of eight Baird originals and two covers.

Prolific Philly producer Brian McTear and some outstanding musicians lend support, but

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Lindsey The Automator

Fleetwood Mac icon needs a healthy dose of fresh air

L

indsey Buckingham is one of pop music’s

great studio rats, a dedicated experimenter who’s never settled for one guitar track when five will do.

Lindsey Buckingham But even the most dedicated mad scientist needs to air out Seeds We Sow the lab once in a while, which is exactly what’s missing from his sixth solo album, Seeds We Sow. Self-produced, -recorded, merge -played and -released, it’s a one-man effort by an artist who functions best in the company of wills equal to his own.

For much of Seeds We Sow, it’s just Buckingham’s (often multi-tracked) voice and his virtuosic acoustic-guitar playing, full of fluttering 16th-note runs and off-kilter rhythms, shown off to daunting effect on “Illumination” and “Rock Away Blind.” It’s a pleasant sound, enough to fool you into thinking the album’s better than it is if you don’t listen too closely. But after awhile, you start to realize there’s not much beneath the sheen, and the more it wears away, the more Buckingham’s breathy, strained vocals grate.

What’s missing from Seeds We Sow is a sense of perspective, or humor, or anything to leaven Buckingham’s monochromatic intensity. (Does the title track really refer to “the penny arcade of Edgar Allan Poe”? ’Fraid so.) “That’s The Way That Love Goes” provides one of the album’s few moments of unrestrained bliss, when the delicate verse opens up into the chorus’ fuzz bass and harpsichord, then into a stinging guitar solo that’s unmistakably the work of the budding genius who stepped into the studio with Fleetwood Mac all those many years ago. Seeds We Sow makes it sound like he’s never left. —Sam Adams

Baird is the most compelling voice here, her soprano vocals and precise acoustic guitar in perfect tandem. Dedicated to late guitarist Jack Rose, Seasons On Earth can’t help but be infused with a palpable sense of loss. But this is not a depressing listen. Whether Baird is drawing from the Espers aesthetic with the extended, modal-like structure of “Share” or conveying the stark beauty of “Friends” (originally by ’70s group Mark-Almond, not the Soft Cell guy), this compelling album is dominated by a spirit of grace and hope. —Michael Pelusi

Big Troubles

Romantic Comedy Slumberland

Jersey foursome tries dream pop on for size

Sonic costume changes are a regular thing for Ridgewood, N.J., foursome Big Troubles. Last year’s Worry EP was dressed up like Real Es-

tate in home-recorded hiss and an energetic psychedelic fuzz. One-off track “Phantom,” released this spring for Weathervane Music’s Shaking Through series, recalled the big-bang ’90s with towers of power chords and Corganesque lead-guitar tones. Romantic Comedy splits the difference—“Misery” sounds huge and spacious, but generous room-tone cuts the rumble and orients the band’s full-length debut more toward DIY dream-pop territory.

This might be an obvious, perhaps even opportunistic direction, given Big Troubles’ recent acquisition by Slumberland and the huge success of new labelmates the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart—which, true, this record sounds a hell of a lot like. But the songs’ infectiousness outweigh their questionable stylizations. “You’ll Be Laughing” sparkles like early-’90s Cure, and “Minor Keys” is the album’s very meta indiepop pinnacle. Call it a sped-up BMX Bandits or a downsized Teenage Fanclub; either way, these kids wear it well. —John Vettese

A.A. Bondy

Believers

Fat Possum

Tuesday afternoon moody blues

A.A. Bondy’s first post-Verbena solo album, 2007’s American Hearts, was a blend of contemporary Americana and several Delta-blues variations, while 2009’s When The Devil’s Loose found him busking on a sparse folk corner. With Believers, Bondy keeps things on the spartan side, but he weaves a palpable atmosphere into the album’s 10 songs, crafting a set that drifts and sighs like Brian Eno or David Lynch had a say in its creation.

The gorgeous melancholy lilt of “Down In The Fire (Lost Sea)” is a languid approximation of a Jeff Buckley/John Cale collaboration, “Skull & Bones” sports the swampy textures preferred

by Daniel Lanois, “The Twist” unfolds like a Nick Cave/Jimmy Webb co-write, and the unchar-

Defeatist Mentality

Grizzly veteran Chris Taylor CANT quite connect on new solo project

CANT

Dreams Come True terrible

time recording on his own as CANT, a project that explores uncharted recesses of Taylor’s synthesizer-fixated mind. Released on another one of Taylor’s ventures, the newly s the multi-instrumentalist and frequent established Terrible Records, Dreams Come vocalist for Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear, Chris Taylor has True is CANT’s difficult, artsy and frustratalready been a part of some wonderfully unusual mu- ingly reclusive full-length debut. sic. In the time since his main band released 2009’s celebrated Without the help of co-writing and coVeckatimest, Taylor’s been busy working as a producer, helming singing bandmates, Taylor is left in the comdiscs by the Morning Benders and Twin Shadow. He’s also spent pany of machines, primarily his trusty bass guitar and a cavalcade of keyboards. Though there is some semblance of humanity in the music, Dreams Come True is not inviting.

Barely plucked notes and haunting vocals are patched together over awkward beats too fleeting to groove to. Dreams Come True works better as aural landscaping than as engaging art.

Though the LP is the opposite of an immediate record, there is a handful of rewarding moments for the especially patient listener to unearth. Highlights include the opening pairing of “Too Late Too Far” and “Believe,” two of the more accessible cuts on the record. The nervous beats on “Rises Silent” and the arrestingly spacious “She Found A Way Out” give Dreams Come True a diverse-yet-uneven feel. The lack of focus and discernible melodies keeps CANT from being anything more than an interesting diversion. —Eric Schuman

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reviews acteristically upbeat, yet still down-tempo, “Surfer King” shimmers with an exquisite and dusty beauty. If Bondy’s been searching for a suitable solo identity, Believers may be his charmed third time. —Brian Baker

Brown Bird

Salt For Salt

Supply & Demand

Old sounds, new beard

We’ve got to stop judging bands by their beards. But it’s so easy these days to pigeonhole a group based on its members’ facial hair. Some critics have even coined a new term for this wave of bearded indie folk: beardcore. But it’s not so easy to peg the beardy folk songs of Brown Bird’s David Lamb. He’s rocking a soupcatcher that would make Sam Beam envious, but this ain’t your whispered, mystical folk singer, nor is he an indie hipster.

Brown Bird’s marketing keeps talking about rustic, rural imagery, but all banjos aside, this isn’t rough-hewn folk music. Really, this is a modern coming of early Tom Waits—two artists (Lamb and cellist/singer MorganEve Swain) able to channel Waits’ mishmash of American roots music with urban/gypsy/ punk/cabaret sounds. It works, mostly, and though we’ve heard this music before, it can still manage to sound fresh. —Devon Leger

Cave

The Final Countdown

Feist continues to traffic in the comforting sounds of late-night melancholy

Neverendless Drag City

Collections Of Colonies Of Bees

Giving

Hometapes

Well-developed postmoves

Collections Of Colonies Of Bees’ sixth album and Cave’s third have more than a little in common. Both are mostly instrumental (a couple tracks on the latter feature brief chants). Both favor long-form compositions. Both revolve around deep, hypnotic grooves informed by vintage krautrock and the likes of Terry Riley.

Even the ways each band constructs and decorates those grooves don’t differ all that much. As with 2008’s Birds, Giving gets much of its charm from guitarists Chris Rosenau and Daniel Spack’s intricate, interlocking melodies and master drummer Jon Mueller’s impeccably groomed beats. But the Milwaukee-based post-rock sextet pretty much turns its back on proggish theatrics this time around, instead crafting tracks so organic, they could pass for natural phenomena.

Though Cave takes a similarly additive approach, the Chicago psych quartet forgoes

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eist exploded in the U.S. when Apple used

her song “1234” for an iPhone commercial, but she was already a star in her native Canada. 2004’s Let Metals It Die won two Junos (the Canadian Grammys), and she spent time in a high-school punk band, was a member of Broken Interscope/ Geffen/A&M Social Scene and toured as a dancer and backup singer with foul-mouthed Canadian rapper Peaches.

You’d never guess she was once a punk rocker from the low-key music on Metals, an album full of subtle melancholy, despite its heavy title. Most of the songs deal with romance in its more dysfunctional guises, but Feist’s comforting vocals keep things from getting too forlorn. “How Come You Never Go There” is a mellow R&B excursion, with Feist’s less-is-more vocal spinning a soothing cocoon of sound, supported by unexpected horn stabs and gospel-flavored backing vocals. On the dark “Anti Pioneer,” she bends the notes of the melody until they almost break; a subtle guitar solo with a jazzy, late-night feel and swooning Beatles-esque strings complements her disconsolate vocals. “Bittersweet Melodies” is has a minimal R&B flavor marked by mixed-down keys and percussion; it sounds like Motown played by a folk/rock band.

The only song that strikes a dissonant chord is “A Commotion.” It has a simple, jittery pulse (guitar? processed cello?) that brings to mind the Velvet Underground.

The arrangement is full of unexpected rhythmic accents and an agitated vocal that’s more edgy than anything else on the album. —j. poet Feist

CoCoBee’s sun-drenched filigree in favor of friendly fire. Muscle, too, to the extent that by the time guitarist Cooper Crain’s frenetic solo erupts on opening rock banger “WUJ,” it’s less sneak attack than subconscious wish come true. The band’s mood is every bit as celebratory as CoCoBee’s. That Cave’s mode of celebration runs a little more visceral makes the albums natural mixtape mates. —Rod Smith

Class Actress

Rapprocher Carpark

Ghosts in the machine

The actress in question would be ex-folkie (and “former drama major”) Elizabeth Harper, who indeed seems to have some class; her voice projects both hi-gloss glamour and a personable, almostcasual geniality, a slightly paradoxical conjunction mirrored by the balance of synthetic elegance and homespun imperfection in Mark Richardson’s electro-purist productions. That vaguely amateurish analog wobbliness—the result of a dogmatically anti-MIDI m.o. and/or steadfast fealty to the standard slate of ’80s synth-pop forebears (it’s chickens and eggs, really)—gives full-length bow Rapprocher an impressive period authenticity, sometimes at the risk of dulling its melodic hooks (already of variable sharpness) and muddying its dancefloor potential.

Especially in today’s digital context, the album feels torn between big-P Pop à la La Roux or happy-mode Goldfrapp (or, at least, Annie circa 2004) and the darker, broodier likes of Ladytron. Even if, vision-wise, Actress can’t hold a classy candle to class-of-’11 counterparts Austra, it’s still good to hear electro music made by fallible humans. —K. Ross Hoffman

Jonny Corndawg

Down On The Bikini Line Nasty Memories

Bears live by bear laws

Whew! For a second there, it looked like Down On The Bikini Line, the new album from current Brooklynite/former Nashvillian Jonny Corndawg, was going to be left in record-label limbo. It was almost a case of “too weird for Nashville, too country for the rest of the country,” but thankfully there are enough folks out there with good sense and a Kickstarter account to make sure that this nugget of wry, clever hard country wasn’t left to languish.

Tunes like “Chevy Beretta,” “Silver Panty Liners” and “Life Of A Bear” showcase a sophisticated, humorous approached to country that has been more or less illegal in Music City since Roger Miller hit the pop charts, while Corndawg’s backing band lets it rip like it was 1971. Comedic, but never cornpone, Corndawg brings a much-needed sense of jocularity to the country-music underground.

—Sean L. Maloney

Annie Crane

Jump With A Child’s Heart Constant Clip

Silmarillion dollar baby

I don’t want to ruin your day, but skylark-voiced singer/songwriter Annie Crane did not write a concept album about harvesting and smuggling kids’ organs for sale on the black market. No, sadly, Jump With A Child’s Heart refers to being carefree and fearless and stuff like that. Yeah, I know. Which almost leads us to the main Crane conundrum: She can croon like a two-cigs-a-day elvish queen and play that acoustic like some British troubadour of yore, but there’s not much of an edge here.

Her arrangements are finicky recreations of dusty-road Americana, Joni Mitchell/Gillian Welch storyteller folk and Celtic traditional music so old its whiskers have whiskers. Every once in a while, she drops a phrase that stinks of pretense and grandiosity (i.e., “Father Time our foe” and “let go, hi ho, reach for a halo”).

Look, “Copenhagen Heart” is a nice song, “Money Only Hates Me” is a peppy little pepper the whole family can agree on, and maybe putting “Hell’s Gate” on a mix will help you steal the heart of some hottie at the Ren Faire. In which case, if you need to unload it, I know a guy. —Patrick Rapa

Mikal Cronin

Mikal Cronin

Trouble in Mind

Friendly rivalry yields excellent results

California garage basher turns in a sweetersounding record that lets the pop crafstman shine through the scuzz. Yeah, we heard that line before, with Ty Segall’s Goodbye Bread.

But frequent Segall collaborator Mikal Cronin sets out on his (Segall-produced) solo debut to best his bud’s acclaimed effort—and mostly succeeds.

Cronin learned how to pack garage/punk fuzzbombs with big hooks as the Moonhearts’ frontman, and he hasn’t lost the ragged-andreckless urgency here. Instead, he’s reined in the chaos, using it more sparingly and to greater effect. Opener “Is It Alright” might begin with a harmonic Beach Boys coo, but it ends with a double-time rush and a particularly inspired flute spree from Oh Sees head John Dwyer. Along the way, Cronin dips into murky drone pop (“Slow Down”) and ’60s jangle (“The Way Things Go”), imagines Brian Wilson demo reels (“Hold On Me”) and, ultimately, turns his scorched garage rock into a perfectly messy pop confection. —Bryan C. Reed

Fruit Bats

Tripper

Sub Pop

Over a decade under the influence

Eric D. Johnson and his Fruit Bats have always

seemed to garner more admiration from critics and fellow musicians than everyday listeners.

By definition, that trend is continuing as you read this.

Tripper is the Fruit Bats’ fifth album in twice as many years, and it’s a strummy, breezy delight. Johnson’s melodic falsetto is underpinned by jaunty acoustic guitars, shimmering electrics (often psychedelic, as on opener “Tony The Tripper”) and rustic percussion. The pastoral sounds of “Heart Like An Orange” and the folksy funk of “You’re Too Weird” show off Johnson’s variety of influences, but it’s Johnson himself who has served as a spirit guide to many of today’s mainstays. He has partnered with the Shins and been covered by the Decemberists, making the Fruit Bats a best-kept secret that’s itching to be revealed.

—Eric Schuman

Grandaddy

The Sophtware Slump The Control Group

A sophter bulletin

It wasn’t just creative core and frontman Jason Lytle’s beard that put Grandaddy way ahead of indie rock’s conceptual curve when its second album first dropped 11 years ago. From the Byzantine psych episode that closes “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot” to the frost-latticed sludge of “E. Knievel Interlude (The Perils Of Keeping It Real),” everything about the California quartet’s modestly epic exploration of technological and societal breakdown reeks of uncanny prescience— especially lyrics.

“Joe The Humanoid” anticipates the stillnascent salvage-punk movement years before its birth. “Miner At The Dial-A-View” does the same for Google Street View and then some, depicting the titular contraption as half-fading lifeline, half-ringside seat to humanity’s defeat at nature’s hands. Lytle’s Neil Young fixation helps him come off, appropriately, like a friendly, time-traveling ghost. If ever a reissue merited as much hunting down as it’s surely going to take … —Rod Smith

David Guetta

Nothing But The Beat EMI

No one wants to be defeated

David Guetta started out in the same ’90s Paris nightclubs as Daft Punk, and even now his music is stuffed full of the spangling filters and ear for 3D beats that typify the French house music from that era. But it’s stuffed too full. Working with Black Eyed Peas has not, let us say, encouraged Guetta’s better tendencies, and on this overlong showcase for the producer’s Rolodex, he demonstrates his absolute fealty to the obvious.

The hilariously overblown vocal filters and cheap-jack electro groove of Snoop Dogg feature “Sweat” demonstrates that there are no

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reviews limits to what the gangsta limper will do for a check; the nothing boasts of “I’m A Machine” come from Chri$tyle, who blends Ke$ha’s dollar sign with Katy Perry’s bellow. It’s fine that none of this is the least bit subtle. Memorable, or anything other than baseline catchy, is another thing entirely. —Michaelangelo Matos

Hella

Tripper Sargent House

Back to complicated basics

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from math rockers Hella. There have been countless side projects and collaborations, but the last record to sport the Hella tag was 2007’s There’s No 666 In Outer Space, which saw the original duo

of drummer Zach Hill and guitarist Spencer Seim balloon to a five-piece prog-rock ensemble. On Tripper, it isn’t just the personnel that’s been pared down to its core—gone, too, are the spacey forays found on 2005’s Church Gone Wild/Chirpin’ Hard. This is the most blistering set the duo has put out in a long time.

There are still occasional keyboard flourishes and other overdubs across the 10 instrumental tracks, but for the most part, Hill and Seim are back to ripping shit. Seim’s guitar lines are characteristically Beefheart-ian, alternating between surfy and pulverizing, and Hill drops jaws for 40 minutes. It’s easy to understand why the two would want to venture out into less-confining spaces (not that the time-signature fuckery here is in any way straightforward), but the no-filler shred-fest on Tripper is more fun. —Matt Sullivan

Matthew Herbert

One Pig

Accidental

Not how the sausage is made, but how it tastes

One Pig, the third and final installment in Matthew Herbert’s One trilogy, boasts a concept as burdensome as it is enticing. Created entirely from recordings gathered from the lifecycle of one specific pig, from farm to fork, the album (which raised the ire of PETA before it was even released) suggests a political statement it never delivers. That’s a good thing. Instead of an aural Omnivore’s Dilemma, One Pig is an exhibit of Herbert’s ability to make anything sound like pop music.

Its music-first outcome functions much like Matmos’ surgery-sampling A Chance To

These Two Kings The super-hyped Jay/Kanye collabo is just what you expect, and a little more

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obody’s coming to Watch The Throne cold. What-

Jay-Z + Kanye West

Watch The Throne ever opinions you may have about Jay-Z and Kanye West, this album will likely confirm them—unless, Roc Nation/Def Jam say, you somehow believe either to be humbly self-effacing or blandly conventional.

Throne is many things: an idiosyncratic showcase for two uniquely complex personas, a gleeful celebration of ostentatious excess (Hov’s words: “Black excellence, opulence, decadence”; also: “new watch alert!”), an overstuffed smorgasbord of bold and occasionally dodgy musical experiments and, not least, a literally gilded monument consecrated to ego. Some things it’s not: predictable, pedestrian, a mindless victory lap or a rote cash-grab; neither is it a consummately crafted album for the ages. But it’s certainly never boring.

Notwithstanding their long, storied history together (which itself provides some fertile lyrical grist), Jay and ’Ye seem like a potential mismatch for a full-length collab; they have equally recognizable, but markedly dissimilar flows and, increasingly, musical wheelhouses, and each is utterly confirmed in his own particular strain of solipsism. But—along with their obvious, infectious camaraderie—they turn out to be pretty good influences on one another. Jay sounds generally reinvigorated: good-humored, full of nimble, intricate wit and atypically emotionally revealing, and if Kanye’s rhymes occasionally remain as clumsy and crass as his personal life choices (“sophisticated ignorance/write my curses in cursive” sums it up well; Pig Latin, too, we learn), he drops far fewer boners than usual.

Between the misfires—the discrepant gender politics and clunky ersatz “old school” flava of “That’s My Bitch,” the stale puff-paint triumphalism of “Liftoff”—and the winners—stark anti-clerical blues “No Church In The Wild,” exultant coming-up anthem “Made In America” (two more notches for rookie-of-the-year Frank Ocean) and the touching “New Day” (with its woozy, artfully auto-tuned Nina sample)—our heroes come off only intermittently regal, but resoundingly, royally human. —K. Ross Hoffman

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Cut Is A Chance To Cure, which successfully spun its potentially unsettling source material into carefully crafted and melodically engaging pieces. Herbert doesn’t mask the sounds of the squealing piglet, its slaughter or the people cooking and eating it, but as the tracks build from raw samples to lush, graceful instrumentals, the album reflects more of Herbert’s house pedigree than his thoughts on animal rights. —Bryan C. Reed

Van Hunt

What Were You Hoping For? godless-hotspot

We were hoping for this, actually

The Kid Is All Right August Darnell’s infamous alter ego has rarely been this potent

T

he shame of August Darnell’s career as

Kid Creole has indeed been that alter ego of his.

Oh, perhaps there is an issue of real ego, too, but Kid Creole And The certainly the notorious ladies man should take that up with his Coconuts Coconuts. Whatever the case, picking up the mantle of that I Wake Up Screaming wide-brimmed fedora after leaving the employ of his brother Stony Browder’s Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band has Strut meant both fame and trouble. The trouble stems from the fact that Darnell got pigeonholed as cartoonish. Shame, as the fame (but not enough of it) comes down to his heady mix of disco, big band, no wave, tropical nuance, avant funk and show-tuned magic more in league with Stephen Sondheim than Emilio Estefan.

Darnell has written and produced as many alluringly and subtly contagious melodies— featuring lyrics rapt with cuttingly humorous tales of ruined relationships, self-satisfying sexuality, vacation thrills and street-level detritus—as Sondheim, only Darnell has a lousier publicist. While he’s been responsible for the stuff of legend, here’s Darnell without a major label and this first album in 10 years, while lesser men roam free.

So, from the robust hustle of “Stony And Cory” to the psychedelic disco (and Greek mythological tale) of “I Do Believe,” the swing, the catchy choruses and the catty lyrics are in place. The swelling balladry of “Tudor Jones” and the bumping “Attitude” find Darnell in epic vocal form, the latter even pulling a Little Anthony-worthy falsetto out of his prominent hat. And while “This Is My Life” finds his shuffling Compass Point groove of yore in place and modernized for the 21st century, “Love Remains” manages to be honestly life-affirming while avoiding the corniness that Darnell always eschewed.

Welcome back. —A.D. Amorosi

You ever hear an artist and say to yourself, “There’s no way this can not be huge,” and then some jackass at some major label fumbles the ball and that artist languishes in semi-obscurity? Van Hunt is definitely one of those artists.

Somehow his 2004 self-titled debut and 2006 follow-up, On The Jungle Floor, managed to not make major waves, even though they happened to be two of the best retro-soul records of the ’00s.

But like any great artist, Hunt isn’t letting an industry full of idiots stop him from doing what needs to be done: making some damn great art. Newly independent, Hunt manages to turn in his most intense and provocative album yet, a stunning mix of prog, punk and soul that can challenge even the most jaded listener. Think Van Der Graaf Generator and Hüsker Dü collaborating with Prince, and you’ve got an inkling of just how awesome this is. —Sean L. Maloney

Loney Dear

Hall Music Polyvinyl

Intimate apparent

“It’s not sad, but it’s not OK,” sings Emil Svanängen on Hall Music, neatly delineating the album’s emotional landscape, a narrow isthmus of calm stretching into a sea of sorrow. Hall Music, Svanängen’s sixth album as Loney Dear, takes its name from the largescale venues he’s been playing in his native Sweden, whose reverberating depths inspired its expansive sound.

“Name” opens on the simplest of notes— just voice and a slowly swelling organ chord— but you can hear the space waiting to be filled, as if an orchestra were awakening around him piece by piece. “Maria, Is That You” swims in a sea of echo, while the undulating lull of “Calm Down” abruptly gives way to a lopsided drumbeat and vibraphone solo, as if a jazz combo had been discovered lurking in some previously darkened corner. Although he’s writing for bigger rooms, Svanängen doesn’t let it go to his head. Instead, he languishes gorgeously and doesn’t overstay his welcome. —Sam Adams

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reviews June & Jean Millington

Play Like A Girl Fabulous

No gender on a Fender

Forty years ago, the Millington sisters hit the charts with the thumping rock of their all-girl group Fanny. There’s nothing as compelling or invigorating as Fanny’s signature single “Charity Ball” on the Millingtons’ self-made Play Like A Girl, but guitarist June and bassist Jean expand and deepen the stylistic explorations of Fanny, exhibiting all they’ve absorbed and translated in the intervening years.

“Let Love Linger” bumps and glides with funky authority, “Endless Lies” marries a jazzy lope to a nice guitar bite, “All The Children” is a gentle folk/pop nugget, “When You Bottom” bops along on a jangling riff, and the title track churns like ’60s hot-rod rock with an appropriate girl-power message borne of the Millingtons’ long industry battle after being devalued because of their gender. Play Like A Girl is the maturation of a betterthan-average boogie band into a quietly powerful and even more diverse unit, and June and Jean Millington aren’t good for girls—they’re just good.

—Brian Baker

Nig-Heist

Nig-Heist

Drag City

Did it offend you, yeah?

As far as comedy bands go, Nig-Heist was the stuff of legend. Fronted by Steve “Mugger” Corbin, roadie for seminal ’80s punk label SST, the band featured a revolving door of musician friends like Greg Ginn, Ian MacKaye and Bill Stevenson and played a brand of mock cock rock designed to offend the hardcore skinheads in the crowd. And it worked: Mugger typically donned a girl wig (and little else) before tearing into a high-energy and absurdly vulgar set that he and his bandmates were almost never able to finish, thanks to the violent protests of those in attendance.

As this reissue of its sole, 1984 album demonstrates, Nig-Heist’s definition of controversy is somewhat dated—the lyrics of “Put My Love In Your Mouth” and “Life In General,” with its chorus of “Money is sex/And sex is money,” are no more provocative than a Drake or Lil Wayne single—but a lot of what’s here still manages to rock, shock and entertain. Most reissues are released because we still need a forgotten record or style of music, perhaps more than ever; Nig-Heist is just fun to have around. —Jakob Dorof

Prince Rama

Twin Killing

Long Island dream poppers take their time and see the sights

T

win Sister’s most singular asset—and,

apart from a general sonic softness that could be described as “twee,” In Heaven’s only really Twin Sister consistent attribute—is Andrea Estella’s singing voice: a In Heaven supple, adorable coo that’s got a soupçon of Lætitia Sadier, a playful pinch of Judy Garland by way of Nellie McKay and, domino particularly when layered and harmonized, a warm, velvety mellifluence akin to underrated California popsters Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal (Rubies, Call And Response.) True, the band’s carved out a distinctive, likable, retro-indebted yet minty-fresh baseline sound: dappled, spacey lounge pop, which calls to mind Baudelaire’s “luxe, calme et volupté” (also, incidentally, the mantra of romanticist Canadian lushes Stars) and is perhaps best exemplified by opening ditty “Daniel,” with its glowing, drifting Tortoise-shell veneer of vibraphone and organ and its gently zippy beatbox bossa. (Call it the Sea And Cupcake—with Estella as the gooey frosting—or, alternatively, Coctail Twins.)

But Heaven, if anything, only ramps up the genre-hopping of Twin Sister’s early EPs, rendering it a rather diffuse, perplexing miscellany. Viz., infectious funk-slice “Bad Street” struts into kewpie disco territory (somewhere in the suburbs of “Funkytown”); aptly named “Space Babe” ushers in the synth-washed and ponderous dream pop of “Kimmi In A Ricefield” and “Luna,” whose gauzy solemnity is then undercut by a spate of campy weirdness: “Spain” (torchy spy-theme pastiche), “Gene Ciampi” (spaghetti-Western clip-clop) and “Saturday Sunday” (easy-listening bubblegum?

Petula Clark takes on Rebecca Black?), which largely dial back the synths in favor of screwball guitar. So: Heaven? or Las Vegas? or, more probably (circa late ’90s), Chicago?

Hard to predict quite where Twin Sister will end up, but it’s a lovely, leisurely, labile journey all the same. —K. Ross Hoffman

Trust Now

Paw Tracks

Visions of excess

Modern indie pop possesses a surfeit of eccentricity, much of it rarely pro-

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jecting beyond shallow and narcissistic attention-seeking, which helps the sister duo of Taraka and Nimai Larson stand out. Drawing from their past, and arguably ongoing,

embrace of Hare Krishna, their Prince Rama performance-art/devotional-music project has drawn in outsider-music dilettantes like Animal Collective toward their sincere—if oc-

casionally absurd—musical creations.

On Trust Now, their first Paw Tracks release minus founding member Michael Collins, the sisters continue in the vein of “NOW-Age,” nondenominational spiritual hymns, occasionally embracing synth-pop melodies (one of them in “Trust” uncomfortably resembling Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric?”). Like their most obvious historical forebears Ya Ho Wha 13, they focus more on freeform jams than commercial song structure. Then as now, it makes for indulgent and difficult listening. But if the path of wisdom lies in such excesses, then the Larsons are certainly well on their way.

—Justin Hampton

Puscifer

Conditions Of My Parole Puscifer Entertainment

“B” is for bad

As the frontman for Tool and A Perfect Circle, Maynard James Keenan spent a couple decades cultivating the persona of The Serious Artist. Sure, Tool showed playfulness with an industrial track that featured a militant-sounding German ranting about what ended up being a cookie recipe, but the band’s subject matter by and large dealt with Important Stuff. When Keenan performed in drag, he played it off as less a gag or commentary than something that obviously you weren’t artsyfartsy enough to get.

Then Keenan unveiled solo project Puscifer and released an album called “V” Is For Vagina. The follow-up EP was “C” Is For (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference HERE).

Lucky for Conditions Of My Parole, Puscifer has graduated from embarrassingly stupid to simply boring. Most of the dozen tracks are moody, understated numbers. “Telling Ghosts” approaches the dynamics of Keenan’s other bands, but it buckles under ham-fisted lyrics like “The more you take, the more you need/The more you suck, the more you bleed.”

—Matt Sullivan

Rustie

Glass Swords Warp

Why is the dance floor quaking?

Something tells me that Glasgow-based producer Rustie was the kid in his kindergarten class who wrung the most enjoyment out of recess. Glass Swords, his debut LP, is a testament to the importance of cutting right to the chase, boiling house music down to climaxes the way Lightning Bolt compresses wild metal soloing into hard, gnarly blasts of attitude.

This means jitterbugging keyboards shadowboxing soaking-wet drum constructions (“Flash Back”), epileptic interludes spent tripping into K-holes (the hard, shattering “Global”) and zipper-y, arrhythmic synths lost in Möbius strip thrall (“Death Mountain”). Most of the time, Rustie’s vocal samples are stuck tight

in laptop amber, limning the contours of our host’s exuberance. But when he gives these looped snatches of ecstatic revelry too much prominence or leash—as on the busy, Daft Punk-esque “All Nite”—his Grand Guignol vision of club pop verges on the garishly cartoonish, as if the music itself is snickering at how sickeningly live-action and three-dimensional we listeners are. —Raymond Cummings

Social Climbers

Social Climbers Drag City

It’s up there

Another rough gem scored

by Drag City in the label’s recent early-’80s salvage efforts, Social Climbers’ self-titled LP originally collected three self-released singles.

The trio traded in the kind of post-punk/nowave inflections that might have garnered it a small following were Tribeca within spitting distance, but stranded as the band was in Indiana, it’s no surprise that Social Climbers never made much of an ascent.

The album holds up better than most dustbin acquisitions reissue labels make, but it’s not without its limitations—namely, in the way it mixes and matches aesthetics. At times, the eclecticism works nicely: “Chicken 80” dresses Talking Heads art funk in a chorus more befitting a Mötley Crüe or Thin Lizzy, and it rubs up against songs like the instrumental “Palm Springs” and magnificent teen fantasy “Chris And Debbie.” But the flimsy synth pop of “That’s Why” sounds pathetic in comparison, and “Taipei” cuts the potency of a radio-ready hook with crap operatics, lame jokes and directionless modulation. The rest is worth a shot if you’ve tired of those Liquid Liquid anthologies by now. —Jakob Dorof

Toro Y Moi

Freaking Out EP Carpark

Not riding the pine

If you’ve ever figured, as I have, that Toro y Moi’s press claque overstates the electro-funk aspects of his music, his new EP has an answer for you. Or, really, a few answers, but the most obvious one is an utterly faithful cover of the Jam/Lewis-produced Alexander O’Neal/Cherrelle duet “Saturday Love.”

Granted, Chaz Bundick shouts more than purrs—he sounds more like her than him—but it’s no mere gesture.

Bundick is adamant that Freaking Out’s five tracks aren’t merely outtakes from February’s Underneath The Pine, and clearly they’re not.

His songwriting keeps growing hookier and more ingratiating: “All Alone” leads it off with a sharp-lined synth riff that introduces a vocal line just as rhythmically slanted, while “Freaking Out” rides busy electro hi-hats and joyful organ. If Cherrelle or O’Neal are in the market for something a little indie-leaning, they know who to call. —Michaelangelo Matos

We Were Promised Jetpacks

In The Pit Of The Stomach FatCat

Jane, don’t stop this crazy thing

We Were Promised Jetpacks began eight years ago as the winning entrant in an Edinburgh high-school band competition, sparking a move to Glasgow and widespread airplay based on a three-track demo. WWPJ’s full-length debut, 2009’s These Four Walls, mixed frenetic punk with bombastic rock, inspiring references to early U2, Big Country and the Cure. After last year’s muted The Last Place You’ll Look EP, WWPJ returns to the moody and energetic sound of its debut with In The Pit Of the Stomach, a 10-song set that bristles with raw postpunk power while pulsing with pop subtlety.

“Medicine” and “Boy In The Basement” are propulsive rockers reminiscent of Echo & The Bunnymen’s dark intensity with slightly shinier exteriors, while “Act On Impulse” motors along on insistent guitar/synth lines and tribal drums that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Smiths hit package. Forget the old promises; these Jetpacks deliver the sky. —Brian Baker

Craig Wedren

Wand

Nerveland

He’s a magic man

Before the backlash to ’90s indie nostalgia officially begins, save some time for Craig Wedren. He successfully made the transition from frontman of the oft-unclassifiable Shudder To Think to in-demand soundtrack guy (The United States Of Tara, Role Models). His latest solo album covers all this and more.

Songs like “Crush You” and “Rectory Girl” feature the off-kilter rhythms and heavy guitars of Shudder To Think’s deranged masterpiece, 1994’s Pony Express Record. The eerie arrangements of “Heaven Sent” and “Are We” attest to Wedren’s ability to set a musical mood. Then there are the skewed takes on new-wave pop (“I Know,” “Make Me Hurt You”).

And don’t forget the accompanying movie in the works, filmed entirely in 360-degree panorama. (For now, the clip from “Are We” is available at craigwedren.com). Throughout the album, Wedren knows exactly when to go from maximalist to minimalist. And his multi-octave vocal range still delivers accessible melodies.

—Michael Pelusi

Wilco

The Whole Love dBpm

Not being there

As someone who remembers the days when Wilco concerts would culminate with long, hairy, defiantly unhip guitar solos from Jay Bennett (R.I.P.), the band’s

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reviews current status as urbanite dad rock strikes me as hilarious, sad and, in retrospect, kind of inevitable.

Truth is, during its heyday (1996-2002, at least), Wilco’s albums held the potential to shoot off into exciting territory. Initially, The Whole Love threatens to return to this spirit.

First track “Art Of Almost” is a relatively obtuse mini-epic, filled with buzzes and beeps and assertive drums. For the rest of the album, Jeff Tweedy, et al, mostly alternate between energetic, sometimes quite memorable guitar pop and gentle acoustic numbers that veer dangerously close to self-parody.

The Whole Love works best as aural comfort food. The album’s nadir comes last: “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” is 13 minutes of don’t-wake-the-baby whispers and arpeggios that go absolutely nowhere. —Michael Pelusi

Wooden Shjips

West

Thrill Jockey

Which way is up?

It’s a marvel that San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips’ spacey, psychedelic rock conveys the lazy, depressive mood it does, being as upbeat as it is. Most of the time, West feels like you’re sitting in the corner of a dark, hazy drug den where eyelids are heavy, movements are limited and headbands are the rule, not the exception. That’s because sound is perpetually at odds with mood.

Case in point: “Lazy Bones” and “Looking Out” are at once mellow, reserved and fluttery, but those qualities are draped over the quickest tempos the record offers. The hi-hat cymbal patterns dance and tambourines shake like asses in the front row undoubtedly would on “Home.” If the stoner rock of the Atomic Bitchwax and Nebula crashed, with care and caution, into Swervedriver and the Doors (vocalist Ripley Johnson has a Morrison-esque quality to his drawl), you’d have West.

—Kevin Stewart-Panko

Zola Jesus

Conatus

Sacred Bones

Dead can dance

Nika Roza Danilova’s latest album opens with a salty salute to romance: “Fill my heart, fill my body with love.” Not what we expected from the diminutive Wisconsin singer/songwriter, who has perfected a brand of gothic gloominess and existential despair that makes Ian Curtis look well-adjusted, but her approach has softened—slightly—on recent releases.

Shimmering pop ballads like “Lick The Palm Of The Burning Handshake” no longer stick out like a sore thumb, but the rest of Conatus hits

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Worn Copy Jako b D o r o f o n wax

A

nother month, another foot-long slab of King Of

Limbs remixes. I have been on record saying the one featuring Four Tet is the best in 1 Radiohead’s self-tribute series, but this fourth installment (on Ticker Tape) is no slouch, either. The Thriller House Ghost remix of “Give Up The Ghost” lifts Radiohead’s earthen original in an analog ascent of haunted Boards Of Canada melodies; Shed’s deconstructed “Little By Little” befits its title; and Illum Sphere’s twilight drive take on “Codex” makes for a cinematic beaut I prefer to Radiohead’s own(!). Cop it.

On her new split 12-inch (on Palmist) with 2 Slim Twig , Philadelphia noise queen Meghan Remy—as U.S. Girls—specializes in the kind of recombinant record-collector rock Simon Reynolds stodgily lambasts in new tome Retromania. Listening to these fragmentary, lo-fi songs and shorts is like trying to identify all the different flavors that have gone into a masterfully blended smoothie; I taste notes of Phil Spector girl groups, early Motown, early M.I.A., Suicide, Little Peggy March via Dirty Beaches, Moondog playfulness and Sun Ra synth noise. This wide platter gets an enthused recommend on the strength of its a-side alone.

Unfortunately, Toronto’s Slim Twig doesn’t uphold his flip side of the bargain. like a miniature hurricane in a box. Thanks to crystalline production from Brian Foote and supple string arrangements on tracks like “Hikikomori,” Zola Jesus has moved beyond a mere bedroom curiosity. Mostly, though, it’s

Speaking of nostalgia and sound-recycling, 3 Big Troubles are one of the finer ’90s revivalists out there, if their new single is any indication; they even nabbed Mitch Easter (Pavement, R.E.M.) to produce. Between “Sad Girls” (a lil’ taste of their fresh Romantic Comedy) and exclusive outtake “Phantom,” this seven-inch (on Slumberland) packs some of the best fuzz-gnarled shoegaze and soft-sung Britpop hooks you’ve heard since any of these kids’ favorite bands played shows that weren’t for a reunion tour.

Black Dice’s 4 Eric Copeland has proven himself to be a solo act of considerable versatility, applying a noise fiend’s sensibility to warped takes on everything from exotica to J 1 Dilla beats. With this new seven-inch for “Whorehouse Blues” (Post Present Medium), he adds its titular genre to his repertoire. That’s the case with “UFOs Over Vampire 2 City,” a lo-fi and loopbased reimagining of old American bluesmen like Howlin’ Wolf and Mississippi John Hurt. The other cuts, meanwhile, sound like a couple of garage/ 3 punk nuggets unearthed from ’60s Transylvania. In a month of stiff competition, this one’s inessential, but if nothing else, it’s your best bet for something to 4 spin on Halloween.

Danilova’s soaring alto vocals that drive Conatus. And on “Ixode,” looped and layered vocals create the illusion of a full chorus of Zola Jesuses. Too much, as they say, is never enough.

—Nick Green

OCT

11

OCT

04

OCT

04

BEFORE, DURING, OR AFTER THE COSTUMES, COCKTAILS AND THE CANDY COMA, YOU’LL NEED SOMETHING THAT FITS THE MOOD.

SOMEONE’S BEEN BUSY. 3 NEW ALBUMS. 3 NEW SOUNDS. PURE HANK 3.

3 Bar Ranch

Cattle Callin’ A new mind-bending ‘Cattle Core’ sound, featuring Hank 3’s speed metal woven in and around actual cattle auctioneering.

ALL IN STORES SEPTEMBER 6

Attention Deficit Domination

Attention Deficit Domination All Hank, on all instruments. A pressuredropping doom rock statement.

Hank 3

IN stoRes 10/11

Ghost To A Ghost/ Gutter Town A double album epic featuring guest appearances from Tom Waits, Les Claypool, Alan King, Hank’s dog and more.

johnny

cash

Bootleg Vol III Live Around The WorLd 2 CD/3 lP set a travelogue from his earliest days at the Big d JamBoree in dallas to his shows as a statesman amBassador at the white house, and everything in Between

YOU CAN FIND SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE AT YOUR LOCAL RECORD STORE. *THESE TITLES IN STOCK AT PARTICIPATING RECORD STORES. STREET DATES SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

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10/24

Peter Gabriel

NEW BLOOD: LIVE IN LONDON

Gavin DeGraw

Lady Antebellum

Switchfoot

Needtobreathe

Beth Hart/Joe Bonamassa

SWEETER

OWN THE NIGHT

VICE VERSES

THE RECKONING

DON’T EXPLAIN

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“Every day should be Record Store Day!” —THOUSANDS OF RECORD STORE CUSTOMERS

A CONCEPT ALBUM OF SPACE-THEMED

ROCK COVERS?

including PANIC AT THE DISCO! • DAUGHTRY RAVEONETTES • BOXER REBELLION (UK) • THE DUKE SPIRIT BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB • SERJ TANKIAN A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS • CROSSES • BLAQK AUDIO

FROM WILLIAM SHATNER?

YES.

William Shatner’s distinctive interpretations of intergalactic anthems from the likes of David Bowie, Queen, Deep Purple, Elton John, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and more.

AVA I L A BL E OCTOBER 4

FEATURING

Zakk Wylde, Peter Frampton, Sheryl Crow, Brad Paisley, as well as members of the Kinks and The Strokes.

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the back page

by phil sheridan

Party Like It’s 1995 We know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong, as usual: Now that 1995 is back, here comes MAGNET to cover the bands it already covered to death. Literally.

Except MAGNET didn’t die, and this apparent resurrection has nothing to do with the sudden return of Guided By Voices, Pavement, Archers Of Loaf and Superchunk. Granted, it is a kind of weird coincidence that we could reprint cover photos from 15 years ago, and no one would even notice. And yes, it is strange that some of the best shows we’ve seen in 2010-’11 were by bands that put on the best shows we saw in 1993-’94-’95.

But cause and effect? Nope. Sorry. Save your snide cynicism for your 37 Twitter followers.

The full reason for this little interregnum can’t be revealed just yet. Most of it is still classified. Let’s just say our country needed us, and we answered the call. Let’s just say it took a little longer than expected.

Let’s just say getting into Pakistan undetected is more of a bitch than it looked like in the planning stage.

Let’s just say Team Leader Miller could have shaved a year off the damn operation just by stopping and asking for directions at that gas station outside Abbottabad. But let’s also just tip a cap to agents Fritch and Cost and Hickey. And let’s not be falsely modest. Agent Merritt is a hell of a shot, a hell of a shot. She took Osama Bin Laden out, Valania blew up a chopper for kicks, and we got the hell out of there.

Mission accomplished, as someone once put it.

So, we’re back, and frankly, we’re more than a little disappointed. We turn our backs on the music scene for a little while, and what happens?

Bon Iver? Are you fucking kidding us? And what’s with all the stupid freaking beards? We have to wear fucking flea-and-tick collars when we go to shows now. Trust us, you’re all going to look back on this era and wonder what the hell everyone was thinking. Or if anyone was thinking. Bon Iver?

Fleet Foxes? Christ.

To be totally honest, we were a little skeptical when the ‘90s revival got going in earnest. Pavement, which barely gave enough of a shit to play good shows in its heyday, announced its reunion shows something like 20 months in advance. The message: Pay us a ton of money right-fuckingnow and maybe we’ll show up in your town next year and slouch through a Terror Twilight medley. No sooner had we plunked down hard-earned, easily squandered debit-card funds for that looming travesty than Robert Pollard announced the reformation of GBV’s “classic lineup”—“classic” being a euphemism for “guys who couldn’t keep up with Uncle Bob’s beer consumption the first time around.” Oh, and Archers Of Loaf were going on tour, too. And look, kids! A new Superchunk album!

What was next? Grohl and Novoselic doing a reality-TV series to pick a Cobain doppelgänger for the big Nirvana reunion? Elliott Smith’s exhumed remains propped up on a stage with that blue cap pulled extra low?

Jay Farrar and Spencer Tweedy touring the Uncle Tupelo back catalog?

Better Than Ezra?

We were properly appalled.

Then we went to the shows. Pavement played the Mann Music Center in West Philadelphia. You know what? They were fucking awesome. It took about half a song for us to wet our pants. (OK, this is where the first64

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person plural becomes a crutch; “we” didn’t wet “our” pants; that was your humble narrator, and it was really just a little bit of moisture, almost impossible to be sure of its origin; but we digress here.) Really. Speculate all day on the band’s ultimate motivation—cash grab or dedication to its ever dustier oeuvre—but the show was everything we love music for.

The songs were great, the band was sharp. It was a celebration. Of what?

Fading youth or classic songs or the fashions of the previous century? We don’t care. We just danced, screamed along and wanted to hug everyone in the band except Malkmus. Him, we wanted to get in a headlock and give him some noogies.

We saw the GBVs twice. First time, we were a little underwhelmed.

Maybe expectations were too high.

Maybe the crowd of bearded fat guys jammed into the venue and breathing up all the goddamn air left our oxygen-depleted brains incapable of full function. Dunno. Do know that we almost didn’t go to the second Philly show, which was outdoors along the Delaware River. Decided to go, just in case, and we were rewarded by one of those transcendent experiences that we chase every time we buy tickets to a concert. Pollard kept calling us “kids,” but we didn’t mind because we felt like kids. Tobin Sprout anchored the band and delivered sublime versions of his contributions to those stellar early albums. Greg Demos may have had a bit of extra material hemmed into his legendary striped trousers, but he and Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell just looked like they were having a blast. We sang along, we danced, and except for a bit of beer spray, we kept our own pants dry.

By now there is surely a young chap or two stroking his enormous bushy facial abomination and chuckling at the image of some pathetic, middle-aged, razor-using jerks wallowing in their boozy nostalgia trip.

“Obviously,” he says, plucking a louse from his chin region, “these guys are out of touch, clinging to the music of their youth rather than embracing today’s new artists.”

To which we retort, “Wrong on every level, Bon Iver breath.”

This is not the music of our youth. Shit, we were middle-aged when these bands hit the first time. To wallow in nostalgia, we would have to go to a fucking Who or Clash or Kinks show. And we just might, should the opportunity present itself.

But no, we binged on Pavement and GBV and the rest because they were (and, it turns out, still are) great bands. They were the best bands of their time, and they are still better than most of the sewage that’s seeping onto your iPod right now. It is not just our preference, it is our duty to find and celebrate the best and most original and powerful music of any era. We didn’t close our ears when Sleater-Kinney broke up. (They broke up, right?).

Whether it’s Neil Young or Will Sheff, Paul Westerberg or Timothy Bracy, Corin Tucker or Jenn Wasner, the Psych Furs or the National, Aimee Mann or Beth Wawerna, Elliott Smith or Scott Hutchinson, Nick Drake or Sam Beam, the Wrens or the Wrens—it is the music, not the calendar, that matters. Always has been.

Oh, and we lied. We like Bon Iver.

MAGNET’s back, kids. Don’t worry. It’s all going to be fine.

Pink Floyd

DISCOVER. EXPERIENCE. IMMERSE.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

WISH YOU WERE HERE

ALSO REMASTERED:

THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS MORE UMMAGUMA ATOM HEART MOTHER OBSCURED BY CLOUDS THE FINAL CUT THE DIVISION BELL

ANIMALS

THE WALL

14 remastered studio albums, in special Discovery editions Special box set of all 14 albums, with photo book Special Deluxe EXPERIENCE (2 CD) and IMMERSION (6 CD) editions of the legendary The Dark Side of The Moon

MEDDLE

A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON

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