Shuffle No. 15

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sh uffle deniro farrar + paint fumes + matt northrup + river whyless

Free!

Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

shufflemag.com Issue #15 spring 2012

bye bye xiu xiu

Midtown Dickens

Find Their Way Home

Amendment One

Legislative Overreach Spurs Outrage in NC Music Community

Xiu Xiu

masthead Publisher/General Manager Brian Cullinan Managing Editor John Schacht editorial

Music Editor Jordan Lawrence Contributing/Online Editor Bryan C. Reed Design Taylor Smith Patrick Willett Ben Gelnett

24

Design Intern Alexandra Nelson Photo Editor Enid Valu Contributing Writers Grayson Currin Corbie Hill Brian Howe Jon Kirby Topher Manilla Alli Marshall Steve Salevan Christopher Toenes Eric Tullis Patrick Wall Contributing Photographers D.L. Anderson Jeremy M. Lange Jordan Lawrence Christian Smith

AMEND

MENT ONE

JU20ST SAY NO 28 Amendment One

Midtown Dickens

32

Collectivization: Post-Echo

sales/marketing

James Wallace: Columbia, SC Sales Mgr. Bryan Dowling: Charlotte, Asheville Christie Coyle: Greensboro/Winston-Salem/Triad Brett Nash: Charleston Jo Doyle: Asheville Kelly Sweitzer: Wilmington special projects/events

Josh Robbins: Special Projects/Events Phil Venable: Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Send Stuff To: Shuffle Magazine Attn: Music Submissions P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, N.C. 28224 -1777 Main Phone: 704.837.2024 Cover Photograph: Jeremy M. Lange Copyright Shuffle Magazine, 2012. All content property of Shuffle Magazine, LLC. No reproductions or reuse of this material is authorized without the written consent of Shuffle Magazine.

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To Do List Gear Deniro Farrar Matt Northrup Paint Fumes River Whyless Hot Spot: Boone Now Hear This/Editors’ Picks The Insider: Sin Ropas

For more info on submitting music, please visit: www.shufflemag.com/submissions Shuffle magazine is not responsible for your music tastes, just our own.

shufflemag.com

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online exclusives Visit us at shufflemag.com for more exclusive features!

Grave Alchemy How Lost In The Trees turned personal tragedy into one of the year’s best albums.

On Healing Bowerbirds return with The Clearing, their most poised and professional effort todate. But it almost didn’t happen at all.

(Fever-)Dream Weaver Ramphastos’ hallucinatory synth-psych gives a new adventure to old soul.

Photo courtesy of Trekky Records

Photo by D.L. Anderson

Photo by Alicia Hickey

to do  list

Archers of Loaf

04.13 Grey Eagle, Asheville 04.14 Motorco, Durham

05.11 Grey Eagle, Asheville 05.12 Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw 05.13 Kings Barcade, Raleigh

Drive-By Truckers

04.14 Music Farm, Charleston (with Centro-Matic) 04.19 Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro 04.20 Greenfield Amphitheatre, Wilmington (with Megafaun) !!! with Shabazz Palaces

Events You Won’t Want To Miss Visit shufflemag.com every Thursday for our weekly update of the best shows in the Carolinas.

Lambchop with Crooked Fingers

may

april

21

8

on vote no am e n d e record ment on store day

04.18 Motorco, Durham Yelawolf

04.19 Amos’ Southend, Charlotte 04.21 Greene Street, Greensboro 04.22 The Orange Peel, Asheville Sharon Van Etten

04.21 Grey Eagle, Asheville Melvins with Unsane

(photo courtesy of Drag City Records)

05.12 Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro Beach House

05.13 The Orange Peel, Asheville M. Ward with Lee Ranaldo

05.15 Page Auditorium, Durham Ty Segall with White Fence

05.19 Kings Barcade, Raleigh Jack White plus Alabama Shakes

05.19 The Orange Peel, Asheville The Donkeys

05.21 Kings Barcade, Raleigh

04.26 Amos’ Southend, Charlotte

Damien Jurado

Steve Earle

Polyphonic Spree

05.22 Kings Barcade, Raleigh

05.02 Neighborhood Theatre, Charlotte

05.28 McGlohon Theatre, Charlotte

Behemoth with Watain, The Devil’s Blood

tUnE-yArDs

05.04 Amos’ Southend, Charlotte Ty Segall

Spiritualized

06.06 The Orange Peel, Asheville The Clean with Times New.com Viking shufflemag   |  5

06.08 Local 506, Chapel Hill

Kit Confidential

“I

t’s a 1986 Tama Superstar kit. I ordered this because I knew the guys in Corrosion of Conformity and Reed (Mullin) had a Tama Superstar kit, and I loved the way that sounded. I wanted to get what was a (Tama) Artstar kit at the time because it has a 26-inch bass drum, but they didn’t have white and I wanted white more than I wanted a 26-inch bass drum.” China cymbals: “I use the china types because I love the contrast. They really jump out at you if you use them the right way. And I use the cheaper ones because they have more contrast than expensive chinas. I have a china right at the hi-hat and a big Latin Percussion ice bell that’s turned upside-down that’s just right there, easy to hit when I’m rolling off of the hi-hat.” Rack toms: “I’ve got three mounted toms. They’re all the deep shell toms, which is why I have to play them at such an extreme angle. They’re so tall I can’t really reach over and play them from above.   If you sit back there, you see the extreme angle; my toms are pointed right at my head.” Bottom heads: “These heads came in the mail with the drumset in 1986. I’ve never changed them. My drums have a pretty unique timbre and whenever I go into the practice building and somebody’s playing my kit, I know right away it’s my kit. I think that has as much to do with it as anything, and I’ve been nervous about changing them.” Splash cymbals: A. “This (cymbal) in the middle is my Sabian 12-inch splash that has turned into sort of a signature cymbal. I’ll choke it, just by itself or with a snare hit, and it’s like a real exclamation point in the middle of stuff. It’s the cymbal that drummers ask me about the most. B. “And then I’ve got these two Sabian mini-splashes sandwiched on top of each other. That ends up sounding like the chimes on a tambourine. So I just use that with my bass drum more than anything else, just a little effects thing.” Stands: “Do yourself a favor, get the heavy-duty stands, because I’ve had these a quarter-century and I don’t think they’re going anywhere.” Two hi-hats: “I thought I would end up playing around with that more than I actually do. It’s a good way to transition from an open hi-hat part to something that’s eventually mainly going to be crash cymbals. It just helps you build there in steps. It helps the transition. It blends a little bit better.”

6  |  gear

shuffle fifteen

Photo by Jordan Lawrence

I Am And

Am Music, d So Can You!

The Toy Box

Carolinas music gear in review

Animoog synthesizer app for iPad, iPhone (Moog Music Inc; Asheville, N.C.)

Area musicians show off their gear

Steve Shelton, drummer: Confessor, Loincloth One sunny February day in north Raleigh, Steve Shelton of metal outfits Confessor, Loincloth, and Far and Away gave Shuffle’s Corbie Hill a tour of his nontraditional kit. “Everything’s a tight little cockpit back there,” he says, pointing out the rack toms aimed at his face and the sideways ride cymbal. Yet this counterintuitive setup matches the self-taught drummer’s style.

There are plenty of adjectives applied to Moog’s products, but “inexpensive” is rarely among them. The Asheville-based Moog earned its reputation by revolutionizing music and simplifying the process of making sounds; it maintained that reputation by crafting high quality, pro-model equipment — with a price to match.   But the $29.99 tag on the Animoog synthesizer for iPad (and its $9.99 version, optimized for the iPhone) raises the question: With its new budget-friendly synth, has Moog created a timesucking toy or a professional tool?   At first glance, the Animoog is a reminder of old vector synthesis boards like the Korg Wavestation, novel for their ability to morph four separate timbres. Not to be outdone, the Animoog has eight timbres, each being one of almost 60 configurable wave shapes. Each waveshape is assigned to a section of the retro-style oscilloscope CRT, and your position within the eight-timbre sound cloud is denoted by a brightly-colored point which follows a user-specified path and orbit. As your point moves along the screen, Moog’s Anisotropic Synthesis Engine calculates the change in wave shape. It’s a cool idea and in practice makes for textures ranging from powerful to somber.   Another set of features, familiar to any analog synth player, come wrapped around the ASE. This includes, most notably, a collection of analog-style lowpass, highpass, and bandpass filters, including a convincing recreation of the classic Moog 4-pole lowpass filter. You also get an LFO, four configurable modulation routings, and traditional

Image courtesy of Moog Music Inc

ADSR envelopes for VCA, VCF and modulation amount. These are a powerful set of soundcrafting tools in their own right, and the analog-sounding filters lend a surprisingly warm quality to the sound.   With knobs and buttons all over the place, the interface encourages tinkering. Particularly exciting is the ability to perform some wild sonic shifts in real-time by touching the oscilloscope screen. The touch keyboard follows scales and keys, much like Korg’s touch-pad Kaossilator. Sweeping up and down on each key allows you to set the amount of modulation for each note, ideal for anything from lush Vangelis sweeps to the next Skrillex record. MIDI interfaces are supported as well, so you can treat it like a regular polysynth in a professional setting.   The app also includes tools to fatten the sound, such as an oscillator detune knob, a bitcrusher and an overdrive. The recording notepad is especially well-suited to drones, as its default overdub mode sounds roughly like Frippertronics in a box.   Ultimately, the Animoog is a worthy addition to Moog’s legacy and opens the Moog sound up to a new audience. It would be a steal at a hundred bucks as a VST plugin, and at $29.99 it’s more than worth checking out. —Steve Salevan

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Deniro Farrar Plotting and Planning By Eric Tullis

O

ne February night, as Charlotte rapper Deniro Farrar prepares to open for YMCMB (Young Money & Cash Money Billionaires) artist Tyga during a hometown show at The Fillmore, he’s tweeting in the third-person from his East Charlotte home. He’s worried about having to “talk educated” for a phone interview with Shuffle. “Don’t want people under the impression that Deniro Farrar is or may be stupid,” he wrote.   Deniro, born Qushawan Farrar, was raised in two of Charlotte’s notorious, high-crime communities – Little Rock Apartments and Tuckaseegee – and, as these things often happen, he made it to high school but never past the ninth grade.   That decision wasn’t stupid, just misguided, but in early 2010 he found that he had a knack for rapping and maybe a new music career to go with it. What resulted was Feel This, a 31-track mixtape that found Farrar toying with youngblood themes and song titles such as “Solo Cup Living.” Most of the material was a direct reflection of Farrar’s street life, lacking in morality and consequence. If he expected to make some sort of admirable career out of rapping, he had to grow up, come up with more provocative material, and think big. Bigger than just Charlotte.   He figured this out in less than a year, and with his latest independent release, DESTINY.

Photo courtesy of Black Flag Records

altered, he calls his growth a “revamping and reincarnation.”   A few years ago, Farrar couldn’t have handled dual-consciousness songs like “Dyingtoseeanotherday” or “No Games” – both songs engage in promotion and condemnation of the rough street life he survived. It’s a conflicted attack, shared by many of his peers in hip-hop’s latest renewal of thug-worship (see: Freddie Gibbs, Schoolboy Q, A$AP Rocky), but unlike Farrar, they offset their toughness with their own distinct weirdness. In Farrar’s case, being weird isn’t necessarily about being an eccentric as much as it is about how many revoltingly perverted and homicidal lines he can cram into one screwy song.   “Acid” is a wonky, circus-tent knocker, corrupted by Farrar’s evil deeds, while the porn tales of “No First Night Sex” are loaded with farce, filth, and fellatio. Elsewhere on DESTINY. altered, producers Storm Watkins, Ryan Hemsworth, and David Heartbreak’s fearsome beats vie for Farrar’s grimiest narratives.   It’s also doubtful that, a few years ago, Farrar could have held his own in the company of guest rappers Emilio Rojas, G-Side, Nacho Picasso, and Rapper Big Pooh, all of whom appear on DESTINY. Altered. They’re all big names within small, niche hip-hop circles, and for a guy like

Farrar – who has only been rapping for three years – it’s not only helped his skill set, but also taught him to broaden his audience.   Whether he’s joking his way through “Frat Boy Wasted” for an all-white following at a UNCChapel Hill fraternity house, or breaking out the grind-time anthem, “Waiting For?” in front of an all-black audience during a performance at his hometown’s annual CIAA basketball tournament weekend, Farrar wants his music to strike a chord with everyone.   “They love me,” Farrar says of the distinctively different crowds. “But, I don’t give a damn who it is. You can be out there blind and in a wheelchair or the richest man in the world. It doesn’t matter. Everyone can identify with struggle.”   For now, Farrar will be busy completing a collaborative EP with Bay Area rapper/ producer Shady Blaze. Then, he’ll set out to record a left-field project with the hip-hop/electro duo Flosstradamus that could grant him the nationwide appeal he’s long desired.   “It was never my goal to develop a fan base in Charlotte,” Farrar says. “I know that Charlotte doesn’t support their own. I’m not concerned with being a local celebrity. That’s bullshit because they’re broke too.” This isn’t the tone of a jaded man, but rather, a position taken by one who won’t commit to any sort of Atlas-ian responsibility until he can fully live up to his city’s expectations. Farrar wants to be the great rap ambassador that Charlotte has never really had. He just wants to be smart about it.  sm

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Matt Northrup Truly Post-Rock By Bryan C. Reed

M

att Northrup does not rock. Sure, he played guitar with indie rockers Mutant League, and he still plays bass in the art-pop outfit Casual Curious, and as a solo performer, he’s toured mostly in bars and rock clubs, and with rock bands.   But the 21-year-old Greensboro guitarist kicked off his sound-sculpting solo setup to escape the rock & roll grind.   “I’d been in a rock band for a while and I was just getting really tired of getting up on stage and rocking out really hard and jumping around for people,” Northrup says. “I wanted to just do something that I was a little more passionate about; it was almost just for myself.”   Inspired by like-minded loopers Daniel Francis Doyle, Dustin Wong and Mark McGuire, Northrup began experimenting with his guitar rig, collecting pedals to expand the sonic capabilities of his instrument. The first year, he says, was spent just gathering tools. “I had a big setup in mind that I really wanted to get, so I probably spent a year

Photo by Andy Marino

just saving up the money to get pedals.”   In December of 2010, Northrup assembled his debut, Word Is Bond, a five-song EP that established Northrup as a player given to playful bursts of rhythm, bright tones and fluid shifts between glassy drone and kinetic melodic runs. His then-roommate, the minimalist composer Andrew Weathers, released Word Is Bond on his Full Spectrum Records label the following March.   The project wasn’t intended for a stage, but it was bound for it. “[Weathers] opened up my mind a little bit about what a performance is,” Northrup says. “I didn’t think I could make a really exciting solo performance, but he really pushed me to focus on the solo project.”   And focus he did. “It’s amazing when you’re fully in control of all the creativity and the production, you are however ambitious you want to be,” he says.   In 2011, Northrup embarked on five tours (by his recollection), and still found time to write his next two records. He self-released Soft Touch,

another five-song EP, January 2, 2012. The second record offers a more moody, drone-driven feel. It was less rigidly composed than Northrup’s other work, and he says it shows. “I don’t really jam, you know.”   Lucky Stumbles, Northrup’s first full-length, written immediately after his May 2011 tour, is more deliberate, showing more restraint and confidence. Fittingly, its writing process was more intense, too.   “You just come up against so many walls,” Northrup says. “It’s sort of shitty to be in the practice space by yourself listening to the same loop for three hours. It’s kind of like a puzzle.”   But the attention to detail paid off. Lucky Stumbles, released by Full Spectrum, maintains the playfulness of Word Is Bond, but its playing is more assured. Rhythmic jaunts drift easily into warm beds of sustained chords. At moments, it even rocks.   For a solo experimentalist playing mostly rock clubs, this is an advantage. “No one ever expects me to come out and do this solo guitar thing, especially performing just under my name, they think some singer-songwriter’s going to come out,” he says. The “crushingly loud” performance complements a rock-band bill and offers the audience the same non-rock escape Northrup sought for himself.  sm

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sh uffle Help Wanted Know your way around your local music scene? Shuffle magazine is looking for part-time sales/market reps in Raleigh. Prior or existing media sales experience helpful but not necessary. A passion for what we do, intimate knowledge of the local music scene and great relationships within it are what we’re looking for. Flexible schedule requiring a few hours a week making sales calls/visits. A great gig for someone already employed in the local scene looking to help us out and make some extra dough in the process. Interested? Email publisher Brian Cullinan: brian@shufflemag.com

Paint Fumes Up Out of the Sewer By Bryan C. Reed

W

hen Elijah Von Cramon picks up the phone, it’s about 8 p.m. and the Paint Fumes frontman has just woken up from what he describes as a “really

weird nap.”   I brush it off; dude deserves some rest.   This time last year, Paint Fumes was barely formed. “I never really played music before, but I always wanted to,” Von Cramon admits. “So last year for a New Year’s Resolution, I was like ‘I’m gonna fucking write some songs and learn how to do shit, start a band and play a show by the end of January.’”   It didn’t take long for Paint Fumes to become a staple in Charlotte’s underground rock scene. It helped that Von Cramon supplied his own venue for early gestational gigs, the defunct house-party HQ Sewercide Mansion. The nascent Fumes — formed around guitarists Von Cramon and Brett Whittlesey — met drummer Josh Johnson when they opened for Johnson’s one-man blues explosion Pinche Gringo in the Sewercide basement.   The house named after the Electric Eels song became Charlotte’s rock & roll hub, hosting locals like the Fumes and Brain F≠ , as well as touring bands like Acid Baby Jesus and Jacuzzi Boys. “It

Photo courtesy of Slovenly Records

was real gross in there,” Von Cramon remembers. “It was fun, but it was a free-for-all, with people like smashing bottles and shit. It was a punk-rock house.”   It was also an opportunity for Paint Fumes to build a reputation among the bands they hosted. A Milestone gig with Puerto Rico’s Davila 666 put the band in touch with Slovenly Records; praise from the Slovenly-signed Greek band Acid Baby Jesus sealed the deal.   “When we first recorded our stuff, once we got it mixed and mastered I sent it to Pete [Menchetti, Slovenly’s founder], just like, ‘Hey man, if you wanna check us out, here it is. We just finished recording this,’” Von Cramon says. “Then, like two hours later, he was like, ‘Let’s make an album.’”   By October, Paint Fumes were signed to Slovenly. On March 13, the Nevada-based label released the Fumes’ first 7-inch. “Egyptian Rats,” backed with “Waste of Time” and “Panic Attack,” is a rocket off the rails, skewering early-60s riffs with tangled leads and needle-in-the-red squall. Von Cramon howls and yelps as much as he sings, asserting more than he enunciates. (Here, it should be noted, Von Cramon’s indecipherable vocal detracts nothing; one assumes these are

the thoughts of the little head.) Johnson, somehow, is most in control even as he steamrolls his kit.   “We never really think about stuff, we just kind of do it,” Von Cramon confirms. And so far, the divining rod has steered the band soundly. The single sold through its initial pressing before its release date; “We had to send back our copies that we got because they needed to fill orders,” Von Cramon says. The Fumes’ LP debut, Uck Life, will follow later in 2012.   But more importantly, Paint Fumes are ready to burn gasoline. In addition to an already busy regional touring schedule, plans are in motion for an April jaunt that will take the band through California and Mexico; then, Von Cramon says, maybe Puerto Rico in July, Montana in August, the Hopscotch Music Festival in September, and perhaps even a European tour in November. For a year-old band born in a dingy basement, it’s a new reality. For Von Cramon, it’s a relief.   “It’s weird playing in front of people I know,” he says. “It bugs me out, kind of. It’s more fun to be some random person up on a stage that no one knows. You can lose your inhibitions more.” As if inhibition was a problem for these impulsive rockers.  sm

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River Whyless Lost and Found By Alli Marshall

W

hen Asheville-based River Whyless set out to record A Stone, A Leaf, An Unfound Door, they had a different name: Do It To Julia. That moniker was culled from a particularly irascible passage from George Orwell’s 1984 and dated back to the band’s inception as Appalachian State University students six years ago. The switch happened last year while the group was touring through the Deep South where no one knew them by either name.   “I think it was the best decision we’ve made,” songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Ryan O’ Keefe says of the old epithet. The beleaguered name confused some — “Who’s Julia?” — and struck others as misogynist. As songwriter/vocalist/violinist Halli Anderson was told by her father, “We were getting tired of lying to you about it.”   “It was a long-term decision,” adds Anderson. “We’re going to be a band for a while.”   With a new name came a new sound. Gone are the bubbly pop hooks, and bright dancey beats of DITJ’s 2008 debut Archie Carroll. On A Stone (its title also a quote, this time from Look Homeward Angel by Asheville author Thomas Wolfe), River Whyless opt for rhythmic-meets-pastoral indie folk numbers in the vein of Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes, with layers of fiddle and tasteful percussion ranging from booming kick drum to jazzy cymbal

14  |  snapshots

shuffle fifteen

brushes. The handclaps, shakers and simple bassline that back the vocal break on “Pigeon Feathers” are a high point. O’Keefe’s sinewy lead vocal is pleasantly raw and poignant, wellmatched by the sweetness of Anderson’s lyric contributions.   That’s not the end of the metamorphosis, though. Bassist Matt Rossario departed; Uncle Mountain’s Dan Shearin is stepping in while they shop for a permanent replacement.   A Stone is a slow burner, pretty and likable but revealing its nuanced artistry a little more with each listen. At its heart, it’s a concept album that delves into the idea of place — both physical locales and Arthurian-like fantasy worlds. O’Keefe says the fanciful sound, conjuring forest paths and knights on horseback, comes as much from hiking as the games of make-believe he once played with his brother as a kid. It’s a leap into the conceptual territory of existentialism and orchestral-prog rock, though the latter relates more to the symphonic use of strings than the lyrics – think Little Tybee and Andrew Bird rather than Yes or Genesis.   The recording was done in Martha’s Vineyard — the band jumped at an opportunity to escape the distractions of daily life in Asheville — during three weeks last winter, infusing the songs with the melancholy of sea and sky, damp

Photo by Brendan O’Keefe

earth and salt air. Cathedral acoustics come into play with the triptych of “Cedar Dream” parts I, II and III, but here the church is more the altar of nature. There’s a haunting charm to the way the first two songs meld together – the first quiet and pensive, the second punchy and textured — with shared themes and an atmosphere of hazy warmth. These are seasons of the heart, stations of the day. By part III, voices resonate in an imagined chapel of trees, building urgency toward a cool and airy conclusion.   Despite the effort and expense of the recording process, River Whyless are offering A Stone as a free download, paying it forward after funding the album with a successful Kickstarter campaign.   In redefining everything, from its name to its recording approach, River Whyless has found a sound worth exploring. A Stone shimmers between worlds, drawing the listener into the timeless places of nature and of make-believe. But it also bridges real locales, from its inception in Martha’s Vinyard to its completion back in Asheville. And it marries past and present, retaining Do It To Julia’s fetching harmonies and rhythms while embracing an expansive and mature new vision of arrangements, orchestration and vivid songwriting.  sm

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e’re happy to announce a new online feature of Shuffle that’s being brought to you by the good folks at Moog Music. AHA AVL spotlights music coming out of Western North Carolina. Together with our partners at Moog, Shuffle will select one band a month for live recording at Moog HQ in Asheville. Each video will be posted on our website. Videos for Kovacs and the Polar Bear, RBTS WIN, The Critters and Two Fresh are already up on our website, with videos from Lovett and Ahleuchatistas to follow. Big thanks to Moog for supporting local music and making this project possible!

See all the performances at videos.shufflemag.com

CRITTERS TWO FRESH To be honest, it feels a little weird watching Two Fresh perform inside Moog’s Asheville music factory. The brick be-decked palace is a Valhalla for the gear-nerd community, a pilgrimage point for the knob-twister in us all. The group’s head-knocking rhythms, while infectious and rewarding, come from a different place entirely. Thankfully, such mismatches have always been part of Moog’s legacy. Don’t forget, it was Bob Moog himself that helped advance the space blues of Sun Ra back in the day.   Two Fresh is, at its core, the joint effort of twin brothers Kendrick and Sherwyn Nicholls. Live, the pair is joined by drummer Colby Buckler, who gives a muscular, organic feel to their supercharged beats. It’s lush and overwhelming, more sonically diverse than most beat makers can manage. To be sure, it’s not the type of thing that normally appeals to synthesizer nuts, but it’s filled with enough lively sonic variance to win them over.   Drawing from kinetic EDM and boom-bap rap, Two Fresh sets a high bar in the still young AHA AVL series for energy that bursts off the stage (and screen). The performance finds Two Fresh at its most exciting, urging a singalong and pushing the crowd to move with the trio’s infectious jams.

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In a better and braver world, the Critters would have provided every generation with their summer soundtrack, not just this one. As you can plainly tell from their AHA AVL appearance, the quartet’s jubilant blend of psych-pop and garage scuzz is volatile enough to bring their young fans to a feverpitch of hormone-fueled ecstasy.   The band have built a rep for no-holds-barred live gigs replete with instrument destruction and occasional clothing-optional segments (on stage or in the crowd, it’s all good to these gents). This rock & roll mischievousness began in 2008 in true woodshed fashion — a single-room cabin in the woods outside Old Fort, N.C. There, the Critters honed their infectious, fuzzy guitar rock sound, and by 2010 had graduated to curating by hosting two weekend-long bonfire extravaganzas, the Bigfoot Bonanza and Sin & Salvation in the South.   That road eventually landed them on the stage at Asheville’s annual Bel Chere Festival in 2011 and a coveted spot among the local weekly’s Best of Western North Carolina rock bands. But none of that would’ve happened without killer tunes, the first batch of which have finally arrived via the Visions of Light EP. These boys know a hook when they implant one, and as their devotees sing along to arena-sized choruses it’s as though the Critters have been doing this for decades...if they keep this up, they probably will be.

KOVACS & THE POLAR BEAR Kovacs and the Polar Bear recorded their debut LP in a refurbished barn out in the back-country west of Asheville, and you can hear that Appalachian flavor trail after them in almost everything the band plays.   Note it here in their AHA AVL take of the opening track from Second Sister, the excellent 2011 follow-up to their mountain-borne debut, Loathsome Teeth. On “Dandelion,” the guitar and keys swirl around each other like stars in a time-lapse night sky, bass and drums driving the tempo forward in a relentless martial beat. “The farmers on the other side were up to no good,” sings Nick Kovacs, tapping into the region’s rich imagery and sounding for all the world like the Southern cousin to War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel.   And that is what’s so promising about Kovacs and the Polar Bear — their twang doesn’t rely on the traditional tropes to sound down-home, true and honest. The folk and indie rock influences are easily identifiable, but the sum of the parts adds up to something definitively Southern and modern. By pulling that off throughout Second Sister, the band becomes a perfect reflection of the city and region they come from — rich in unique heritage, but always looking forward.

Two Fresh photo courtesy of Two Fresh All other photos courtesy of Moog Music Inc.

RBTS WIN The logo for RBTS WIN that accompanies their AHA AVL video is also the cover to last year’s The Dark Ones LP. It’s a drawing of the three members of the hip-hop-infused electro outfit baring their teeth and glaring at the viewer. The all-white version here loses some of the charm of the original. The otherwise black-and-white cover is graced by stark read blood dripping from their mouths with sanguine zombie eyes to match. The implication is that RBTS WIN are ferocious, a violent force that can’t be stopped.   At first blush, the image might seem mismatched. RBTS WIN are not chaotic or particularly aggressive. They bleed sensual bass-heavy rhythms from dubstep and hip-hop and infuse them with electronicleaning indie pop and super-sexy soul. It’s lush and intoxicating, but it’s not really aggressive. Taken another way though, the image still makes a lot of sense. These are three truly blood-thirsty musical omnivores, gleefully snatching bits and pieces from different genres and refashioning them with such confident vigor that the seams rarely show.   In horror terms, these are no simple zombies, relentlessly, mindlessly cannibalizing their peers. RBTS WIN are more highly evolved, and their listeners are better for it.

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Record Store Day In The Carolinas A Buyer’s Guide A

pril’s here, and with it comes that nobly intentioned, indelibly nerdy fake holiday, Record Store Day. What began five years ago as a Who-like assertion of continued presence from a loose contingent of indie record shop survivors was quickly overtaken by an oily deluge of overpriced, unnecessary major label throwaways, managing to waste perfectly good petroleum while baiting poseurs who’ll either flip their bushel of false-scarcities on eBay or insist upon referring to them as “vinyls.” Something about the surface of the road to hell springs to mind...   But rest assured, dear reader, there are locally-relevant treasures and trolls among the piles. We here at Shuffle have taken the liberty of panning the tar pits on your behalf. You’re welcome. Limit one per customer.

LOCALS ONLY G.G. Allin & Antiseen, “Violence Now” b/w “Cock on the Loose” (Green Mist) Charlotte’s Antiseen age like Twinkies, apparently. They’ve been pretty consistently active since 1983. This RSD-reissue finds the Queen City scum-rockers teamed up with the lord of sewage himself, G.G. Allin, for a half-speed slur of inconsequential punk on the A-side, and a lewder and more forceful — but still hardly noteworthy — cut on the flip. But, it’s been out of print since ‘92 (one suspects low demand might’ve been a factor), and now it’s back in the world on a special-edition poo-poo brown platter. Yipee. Carolina Chocolate Drops & Run-DMC, “You Be Illin’” 7-inch (Nonesuch/Warner Brothers) The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ cover of Run DMC’s “You Be Illin’,” like their cover of Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style,” is a grinning novelty cut, better served as a standalone than an album cut. The Drops’ take on “Illin’” was released as a Deluxe Edition bonus track with this year’s Leaving Eden. Here, it shows up on a Coke-bottle green 7-inch, backed with Run-DMC’s original, part of Warner’s “side-by-side” series. Free Electric State, Monumental Life LP (Custom Made Music) The Durham band’s new album, Monumental Life, offers a refinement of Free Electric State’s gliding indie-rock, honing Sonic Youth guitar squall through Neu! momentum. Monumental Life gets its full CD release on April 24, but local shops will see a vinyl pre-release on Record Store Day, limited to 100 copies in silk-screened jackets. Hiss Golden Messenger, “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” 7-inch (Tompkins Square) Hiss Golden Messenger’s first RSD-exclusive release pairs the Poor Moon rustic and poetic album cut “Jesus

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Shot Me In The Head” — a standout single from the standout LP — with a dub revision of the track. It also bears the mark of the excellent folk and archival label Tompkins Square, which released a CD version of Poor Moon April 17. The LP is also available again, on a second-press from Paradise of Bachelors. Dan Melchior, Ghost In The Supermarket 12inch (Moniker) If the title track’s an indication, expect this to continue in the warped pop vein of last year’s Catbirds & Cardinals. But knowing Melchior — whose catalog ranges from primo primitive garage to delirious psychedelic meanders — there are likely a few new tricks in store, as well. The sardonic songsmith delivers this five-song EP in an edition of 500 white vinyl platters, via Chicago’s Moniker Records. Xiu Xiu & Dirtybeaches, Split 7-inch (Polyvinyl) A pair of covers from two pop-outsiders, this split — limited to 2,000 copies — finds Montreal’s Dirty Beaches taking on Francoise Hardy’s “Tu Ne Dis Rien” while the Durham-based (for now, anyway) Xiu Xiu echoes the title of its excellent new album with a cover of Erasure’s “Always.” Whatever Brains, Record Store Day 7-inch (Sorry State) A true locals-only release, Whatever Brains’ RSD 7-inch will be delivered by Sorry State Records, the outstanding Carrboro-based punk imprint. A tasty odds-’n’-sods collection, the Brains’ four-song EP features two covers (Double Negative and Wall of Voodoo), a demo track and a remix (produced by Carrboro’s Waumiss). A few copies may surface later on the label’s mail order and at Brains’ shows, but nobody’s making any promises.

HOT WAX FROM LOCAL LABELS DiggUp Tapes The active Raleigh start-up has an ambitious lot of RSD releases; so ambitious, in fact, the contents of this blurb should be taken as speculation. “We have a lot planned,” DiggUp co-founder Nathan Price says via Twitter. “Hopefully it all happens.” As of press time, those plans include a 12-inch split between synth-poppers Cassis Orange and brood-wave outfit Nieces and Nephews; a cassingle split boasting Lilac Shadows’ psych-pop and Nests’ fuzzy-twang; and a new EP from Daniel Michael’s skewed pop project NAPS. Merge Records Perennial big fish in the Carolinas’ pond, Merge has some big-name releases ready for the indie-rocking masses. Arcade Fire serves up a 12-inch single, featuring remixed versions of “Sprawl II” and “Ready to Start” from their Grammy-winning The Suburbs; Destroyer’s 2006 album Destroyer’s Rubies sees reissue over four sides of ruby-red wax; M. Ward serves up “Primitive Girl” on 7-inch; and Richard Buckner’s first-ever 7-inch features “Willow” backed with “Lost.” Three Lobed Recordings Three Lobed Recordings is a small but expert label, based near High Point, delivering consistently compelling slabs of out-there psych and traditional music digressions. The label’s Record Store Day compilation, Eight Trails, One Path features contributions from guitar innovators Alvarius B., Sir Richard Bishop, David Daniell, Danny Paul Grody, Steve Gunn, Lee Ranaldo, Six Organs Of Admittance and William Tyler.

A TALE OF TWO RECORD STORES (AND ONE BIG DAY) By Brian Cullinan

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tanding watch over Horizon Records’ wall-to-wall selection of new, used and rare records is a sign that reads “Because You Love Music.” The Greenville store owner, Gene Berger, has been operating what he describes as his “fiercely independent” record store since 1975. It’s the kind of place where you could spend hours browsing or chatting about music, all while feeling you’d never left your living room.   You can say the same for Asheville’s Harvest Records, opened by college chums Mark Capon and Matt Schnable in 2004. Although it’s hard to imagine today, Harvest began at a time when Asheville’s fortunes as a fertile ground for independent music were still on the rise. Since then, it’s become one of the region’s best known music stores and a cornerstone of the Asheville music scene.   Both are the type of record store survivors that Record Store Day was built around. Though there are few definitive RSD guides and no stocking obligations, planning starts as early as four months before the date – this year April 21. Each store navigates more than 300 releases to ensure they’ll have what their customers will clamor for when the doors open that day. “We apply the same prism as we do the rest of the year,” says Capon. “It’s all about knowing your customers and curating their experience that day,” Berger continues. Guess wrong and you’ll disappoint your best customers, wind up overstocked, or both.   Both stores’ owners agree that what’s become the record geek’s national holiday is worth it, albeit with some reservations.   “It takes a lot of energy that we usually have to divert from other stuff,” says Schnable. His partner Capon adds that “true exclusives are becoming more rare” after the first RSDs were focused on free giveaways. “Now it’s more about trying to repackage stuff from label catalogs,” Capon says. They cite one of this year’s special entries as a prime example: a “limited edition” Katy Perry 12-inch. There’s also discussion of the increasing number of single-purpose buyers who show up for mega-artist exclusives from bands like Phish or Pearl Jam.   Still, optimism and a passion for customer excitement prevail. “We’re psyched on people being psyched on records,” says Capon, who adds that “Record Store Day is their version of Christmas.” Schnable hopes the fanfare pulls in nontraditional customers whose RSD experience will make them customers for life. Berger takes the long view: "For us, every day is Record Store Day.”

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930 South Chapman Street Greensboro, NC 27403 336.446.9194 Open Monday-Saturday 1-8pm

www.CFBGs.com

amend

ment one

JUST SAY ‘NO’ On May 8, North Carolinians will vote on a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution which would permanently ban the already-illegal act of samesex marriage. For proponents, Amendment One is a protection of “traditional values.”For sane people, it’s an affront to civil liberties, a redundant salt-in-thewound insult and a step backwards for social progress in the South. By Grayson Currin

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am a 28-year-old, educated and white music critic. I am not married, but I am not single. My girlfriend and I live in a rented ranch home close to downtown Raleigh. We have a good-sized yard and a dingy hammock out back. We have two dogs, one cat, two cars, a lot of records and too many cooking tools to fit our postage-stamp kitchen. We would like to buy a house within the next year; we’ve been meeting with realtors, and truth be told, I’ve been fixing my credit. Again, we’re not married, but I think fairly soon, we will be.   I assume that you’re thinking, “Well, good for you.” I’ve started a little family, and soon enough, my girlfriend and I will bind these last few years by law. But then again, maybe my byline has you confused. Sure, in elementary school in a small rural N.C. town, the family name my parents gave me could be a bother, as being called “Gayson” or being told your name is weird is fun for only so long. But I’ve known as many girl Graysons as boy Graysons, and maybe you have too. So am I gay? Straight? Some variant thereof?   Does it matter?   Actually, yes, it does: The United States government does not yet recognize same-sex marriage. And in North Carolina, same-sex marriage actually isn’t legal, either. In fact, only six of 50 American states (and the District of Columbia) allow same-sex marriage — three through legislation, three through a judicial ruling. In the rest of the states, the issue gets either vastly complicated or decidedly clear: California’s stance on gay marriage is a spider web of policy, while Washington and Maryland are close to granting same-sex licenses, but not there yet. More than 40 states either ban same-sex marriage constitutionally or within their own state code.   On May 8, in a statewide referendum, North Carolina voters will decide whether this state’s constitution also needs this explicit amendment: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.”   Lucky for me, I guess, I am indeed a 28-year-old, educated and white man. I say ‘I guess’ because, in 2012, nationwide legislative attacks on issues of women’s health care largely by groups of stodgy white men sometimes make this group a troubled one with which to identify. But so it is: When the time comes to tie the knot with my girlfriend, there will be no great political hand-wringing. We’ll simply do the thing much like it has long been done.   We can’t say the same for many of our gay friends, of course, many of whom have been in committed relationships even longer than us. They will still not have the right to marry in the state they call home, and they’ll also be reminded of that fact by an unnecessary and hurtful addition to the state’s constitution — for North Carolina, the first of its kind, Amendment One. What’s more, the recognition of long-standing civil unions, whereby unmarried partners can enjoy the legal benefits and protections of their partnership, would be over. As the Coalition to Protect NC Families posits, unwed women could lose the harbor of domestic violence laws, while unmarried partners

could forfeit the ability to visit one another in the hospital. Children of heterosexual or homosexual unmarried couples could miss insurance benefits or visitation rights.   All this to say: Amendment One isn’t a gay-versus-straight issue; it’s a tolerance-versus-intolerance issue, an attempt to force people into normalcy in exchange for rights they deserve as, well, people.   So I called Michael Taylor, another straight and white and educated man, to ask him how he felt about it all. He moved from California to North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and son, Elijah, in Durham. “Amendment One is messed up on so many levels. As an openly Queer Black Woman Artist, I see the intersections of racism, classism, and homophobia in the fine print of Amendment One, efforts to disavow the various ways we define family. My beautiful and brilliant partner of eight years works with an organization called SONG (Southerners On New Ground). SONG is part of the Coalition to Protect North Carolina Families’ Steering Committee and Kai (my partner) and I have extensive ‘pillow talks’ about the numerous ways this amendment endangers

the fundamental human rights of dignity and safety for all people. I am also a part of a community (artists, organizers, activists, etc.) that works everyday toward a liberation of ideas, actions, choices and bodies. I would further posit that North Carolina is in the midst of a creative and cultural shift and our voices are important in defining the South (and the world) we want to live and love in. Defeating Amendment One is imperative to that process.”

shirlette ammons mosadi music, collaborator with the Dynamite Brothers   On the phone, Taylor immediately admits he’s not a very political person, but he is a Christian who wrestles with his issues of faith in his splendid folk-rock band Hiss Golden Messenger. He can’t abide the claims of his fellow Christians who claim this amendment is the right way. No, this, he says, is the ignorant, spitefully conformist way.   “I think that it’s cowardly and a cop-out and very, very unChristian. People that are truly in the spirit truly understand that it’s just the wrong thing to do. Jesus Christ wouldn’t have been behind it,” he says. “And what does this tell our children? When I’m trying to explain to my son that some of his friends’ parents can’t get married and are not thought of in the same way as his mom and dad because they are gay, that doesn’t make sense. It’s embarrassing.” 

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Amendment One (cont’d) .  .  . That embarrassment won’t come quietly, at least. All across the Carolinas, musicians are making stands that are either intimate or extensive, speaking out as much on behalf of gay rights as they are mutual respect. When I started researching this story, I e-mailed about 20 musicians — married, straight, gay, bi, ambivalent, black, brown, white, whatever — across the Carolinas, asking if they had and would like to share strong views on Amendment One. All but two responded within an hour, one even volunteering a late-night/early-morning phone call from a European tour stop. They wanted to share their feelings.   In Asheville, the band Alligator Indian is releasing a free digital

“I feel three things when the subject comes up: Bored, because it shouldn’t still be an issue; saddened, because I know that people can be quite cruel, even regarding love and people’s differences; and pissed off, because I will not be judged, regulated, or treated by anyone as a second class citizen. It’s important to inject these feelings into the music that you make, even if it’s not direct. I have always been able to put it out there in Babyshaker and Snagglepuss, and am lucky to have band mates who not only support me in that, but also walk the walk when it comes to standing up for what’s right.”

Scott Weaver Snagglepuss, Babyshaker

single of an archival tune about marriage equality, packaged now with new remixes by like-minded North Carolinians. Their aim — as member Christian Church puts it – is to “help spread the word and get people to the polls May 8.” The goal is a humble but most essential one.   “We have a song on our upcoming LP that we wrote a few years back about marriage equality,” Church explains. “We’re planning on releasing it as a digital single before the vote and ask people to spread the word online about the vote in exchange.”   In Durham, Heather McEntire of the bands Mount Moriah and Bellafea is organizing a massive gathering of music and speeches for early May. The goal is more about awareness than money.   “I just want to open all of Main Street and invite everyone,” says McEntire, who is bisexual and has been in a partnership with a woman for the last four years. “I think what we’re going to do is going to unify people. All we can do is fight in our own way — playing, organizing, singing and knowing that all the people there are behind this fight.”   If this fight needs an anthem, McEntire actually wrote it two years ago and released it last year on Mount Moriah’s self-titled debut. A steely shuffle that balances child-like kindness and adult-like resolve, “The Reckoning” is an open letter of sorts to her mother. It’s a sweet

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but stern explanation that her daughter’s love for and happiness with her girlfriend should matter more than whatever the Bible might say about the matter.   This is the lasting kind of love, McEntire tells her mother, the kind that makes her ready for the future. She’s suffered for this family, lived through its worst times; now, she needs to be accepted for who she actually is. In the galvanizing chorus, McEntire draws a line in the heavenly sky between herself and the past, between ideals and actual family matters: “If your old book says it’s true/ Back of your knees locked to the seat of the pew/ If this is painful and pure/ I will reckon you.”   McEntire grew up in western North Carolina in a largely conservative family; her parents worked for Billy Graham. For years, she led a double life: she was open about her sexuality within the supportive communities of Durham, Chapel Hill or indie rock at large; back at home, she had to hide the truth.   “The bubble that we live in here is pretty progressive. I was out to everyone, and it helped me become really confident,” she says. “But I’d go back to the mountains, and it was really hard to come out and stay out. It felt like this enormous weight I was carrying around for 15 years, and I’m still not out to everyone in my family.”   Coupled with the battle of Amendment One, the act of having written such an autobiographical song has made her reconsider that stance. She’s thinking about coming out to everyone. This vote, she says, is a chance to open a dialogue, showing her more rural family and friends that being gay isn’t just some aberrant thing that happens in the big cities — and that discrimination affects people you love, people you went to high school with, people whose groceries you carried as a kid.   “Letting someone in those small towns know that they know someone who is struggling with this issue is important,” she explains. “This isn’t just about me, this person in your family. Let’s let this start an openness, not with the expectation that this will change any minds. Visibility is so important.”   In all of the bands she’s ever led, McEntire has only played with one other gay person — and that was a temporary fix for a member who couldn’t tour. Until our conversation, she’d never actually considered that fact or its implications. Essentially, McEntire’s strange place of singing songs that are occasionally about the struggles of being gay in the South while leading a band of heterosexuals points to the underlying fallacy of legislation like Amendment One — that is, that the queer community is somehow less important or deserving of its rights and places in this world than the rest of us.   An hour or so after our conversation, McEntire e-mailed some more thoughts on her position out front of Mount Moriah, as if realizing the potency of that parable for the first time.   “They’ve watched me have to be self-conscious about my identity in a way that they weren’t, and they have wanted to talk about it. Even from their white heterosexual male perspective, they have wanted to try and understand it,” she wrote of her bandmates. “They have been instrumental in me developing the confidence to confront my family and stand up for myself, to tell my story.” .  .  .

If Mount Moriah wrote the anthem by which to rally against Amendment One, Justin Robinson & The Mary Annettes are the full-band equivalent. A biracial five-piece from Durham, one female member is single, another is engaged and another is married. Drummer Josh Stohl is married to a woman, while bandleader and namesake Robinson has been married to Thaddaeus Edwards, a man, for nearly three years. They got married in Boston while Robinson was still a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. That marriage isn’t recognized by the state that Robinson, a Gastonia native, has always called home; if Amendment One passes, their five-year partnership won’t be recognized, either.   “We decided to get married because we wanted to. I’m not sure what it means on a more philosophical level,” says Robinson, talking about his relationship with the press for the first time. The Carolina Chocolate Drops chose not to make an issue of it because, as a blackstring band, they already had enough things to explain. “People at this stage in this country only get married because they want to. There’s no amount of societal pressure that forces people to get married if they don’t want to — not kids, not parents.”   The Chocolate Drops focused on saving old songs and sounds from complete obscurity, often playing the role of conservationists or historians for the roots-music crowd. When I ask Robinson about whether or not he ever considered the irony of old white music fans listening to a young black gay man play string-band music, he laughs and admits that, indeed, some of that audience might have been uncomfortable with his orientation.   “It never had anything to do with the music. You can extrapolate and say, ‘Because of this, then this.’ But you can do that with anything,” he explains. “It never really came up because we weren’t popular enough for people to be asking those kind of poignant questions. Going to mainstream country or something on CMT, that might be a different story.”   The Mary Annettes, though, offer a future vision of what folk music could sound like, taking polyglot turns through several different strains. There’s hip-hop and Appalachian tunes, indie-rock balladry and a touch of (thanks to Stohl) Klezmer. Their songs are testaments to integration or at the very least cooperative creation, where old ideas get stronger by colliding, fracturing and forming something new. When Stohl answered Robinson’s “Musician Wanted” advertisement on Craigslist, he didn’t know that Robinson was black, gay or a Grammy winner; he just knew that the music Robinson was mentioning sounded fascinating   “We see ourselves on a continuous timeline, meaning you should reach back and forward at the same time, if possible,” explains Stohl, speaking not only to the music the band makes but, indirectly, to its

Chris Toenes gathers more reaction to Amendment One from a host of other N.C. musicians at... shufflemag.com/AmendmentOne

strangely unified roster. “We don’t have a religious or political agenda, but just by the five of us coming together, we are providing some sort of social commentary. What we represent is people coming together from different backgrounds. They contribute to what is going on, but they don’t define it.” .  .  . Kym Register is the other chief organizer of Durham’s election-week rally Heather McEntire is staging in Durham. Register has lived in

Isaac Jones Braveyoung “This should provide ample proof of the backwards nature of our political system. People building careers off of bigotry. People imposing an outdated and arbitrary morality onto those who elected them into their position. It’s a completely detestable game these people play with our lives. Anyone who thinks heteronormativity is the only answer for healthy families is willfully ignorant and has absolutely no right to sit in a position of power. Fortunately, the facts are on the side of the LGBT community, and the nonsense these dogmatists spew makes less and less sense as time marches forward. We will unravel it, with or without the imposition of law.”

the city all her life, and the 30-year-old has been openly gay since she was 16. She plays in the band Midtown Dickens and co-owns the downtown bar The Pinhook, which has become a somewhat accidental pub not only for queer people within the Triangle but throughout the Southeast.   The Pinhook hosts queer film and dance nights, not to mention bands whose content often approaches that of polemics on sexuality. That said, The Pinhook also welcomes sweaty, nasty, virile garage rock and scabrous heavy metal, stuff that has nothing to do with queer politics.   “People call, and they’re like, ‘Is this a gay bar?’ It’s hard for people to understand it doesn’t need to be one or the other,” Register says. “Everyone should feel comfortable.”   That’s exactly how The Pinhook operates, too — as an open place, where expression and inclusion are valued and welcomed above all else. Ultimately, Register’s not trying to exclude anyone. That’s how the world should work, she says. On May 8, she runs the risk of being legally excluded from something as basic as marriage by the state that raised her.   “We just have to educate people,” she says. “I believe in the general desire of people to do good. I think it can all work out.”  sm

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No More Bull by Jordan Lawrence

Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart bids adieu to Durham with Always, a frank and adventurous exploration of pained lives lived in society’s margins

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hiskey, a dark, comfy and strikingly well-appointed liquor bar in downtown Durham, is replete with rules for its patrons. Though the legal drinking age is 21, Whiskey only admits persons 23 and older. There’s also a strict dress code; Men may not wear sleeveless shirts. Athletic or camouflage gear and clothes that are excessively torn or baggy are not permitted either. And hats of the everyday persuasion are mostly prohibited – “No ballcaps, beanies, do-rags or Castro caps.”   On a nippy late February evening, a young journalist learns of the last rule first-hand and has to remove the toboggan that hides his unruly locks. He’s nervous about how he looks as the man he’s meeting is known for his critical nature – Durham and its denizens being one of his favorite targets. The reporter pays for his beer and slides into a corner table, awaiting his appointment’s arrival.   Jamie Stewart calls 10 minutes later. He shares a car and the other driver is late. As a result, Stewart will have to bike the short distance to the bar. Ten more minutes and Stewart strolls into Whiskey, his face flush from exercise and the cold. He wears a black coat with a matching black toboggan and a brown scarf with sock monkey heads dangling at each end. He greets the reporter and excuses himself to say hello to the bartender. They shake hands warmly and chat for a couple minutes, and Stewart returns to the table with a glass of water. He and the reporter chat just shy of 90 minutes, and then Stewart takes his leave. At no point during the interview does he remove his cap, nor is he asked to.   Stewart, the leader and only consistent member of the avanteverything musical project Xiu Xiu, moved to Durham four years ago – six years after starting the band in his home state of California. To some, the notion that Stewart would be so at home in a bar in his adopted home base might seem unbelievable. After all, his negative opinions of the city – expressed on his Twitter account and in blog posts, both personal and for the Huffington Post – have rankled many proponents of the city’s recent, hard-fought efforts at urban renewal.   “For a very, very long list of very, very good reasons, I hate it,” Stewart writes in his most recent post for the Huffington. “I say it all the time on my stupid website, and people here get insanely angry with me about it. Do they love their red-bricked city so little that my pointless releases of graying steam are able to cast such a thick fog over their valiant but reactionary burg and so they feel the need to so strenuously curse me?”   No, Stewart doesn’t fit in with the Durham scene – even when it comes to music. His records are painted with a dark but frenetic brush, melding blackened dance abstractions to dramatic rock that borrows equally from David Bowie’s manic glam and Swans’ abrasive melodrama. It’s a thrilling and eccentric mix of twisted pop hooks, crushing grooves and devastating narratives that Stewart delivers with an airy warble that contorts into a crazed howl during Xiu Xiu’s more desperate moments. It’s a confrontational style, one that’s earned him a fervent mix of respect and disdain from critics, but it doesn’t really mesh with the rock, experimental folk and hip-hop that dominate Durham’s music scene. As a result, Stewart finds himself in artistic purgatory.

All photos by Jeremy M. Lange

On a personal level, Stewart doesn’t feel he fits in any better. He’s a bisexual male. Raised in Los Angeles and having spent time in both Oakland and Seattle, Stewart is used to more robust gay communities than the one he’s found in Durham. In his last Huffington article, he complained that while the city played host to an active lesbian scene, he found there were few options for queer men. Raleigh, which does have hot spots for gay males, is “30 minutes away by car, and one can’t drive home drunk from there.”   Back at Whiskey, Stewart seems less comfortable now than when he walked in – though this likely has more to do with the probing about his fraught relationship with the Bull City and less to do with the bar around him. His piercing gaze seems slightly unnerved as he considers each question. He sits up straight in his chair and begins almost every response with a flustered “Oh,” hesitating for just a second as though every question pains him a bit to answer.   “I had played here a couple of times and had a different picture of what it was going to be like,” Stewart says, wrangling his words into wellmanicured responses that belie their agitated beginnings. “When I initially moved here it was even more difficult. I didn’t know where was what. I had to find my way really quickly. I lived like way in the sticks, down (Highway) 70, almost at the border of Raleigh, like in the no-sidewalks, track-hoe area for a while. It was a 20-minute drive to here. It was very, obviously, incredibly isolating.”   In California, Stewart says he rarely endured insults to his sexuality – apart from the stray 8-year-old who had just learned the word “faggot,” but even then he says the mortified look on the child’s mother took away the sting. In the South, his appearance has garnered more aggression. Your typical good ol’ boy probably doesn’t buzz the sides of his head and slick back his hair or walk around wearing a scarf bedecked with stuffed animals. As some people do when threatened by something outside their everyday norms, they sometimes lash out at Jamie, usually in the form of name-calling or jeering. Stewart estimates he has to deal with these verbal attacks once a month or so, more frequent than in any other place he’s lived.   Only once have these confrontations risen to the level of physical violence. As Stewart was walking into Durham’s Whole Foods shortly after he moved here, a guy walking out called him a “faggot.” That time, he decided he wasn’t going to take it.   “I just yelled something back,” Stewart says, “and as people do when they say something shitty, when people don’t take it, he was like, ‘What!?! You insult my judgment of you by not taking it?’ He pushed me into a corner and said he was going to beat me up, and then he didn’t.” 

“I don’t feel like I’ve grown as much as I would have hoped... That would have probably been a little easier had I been in a place where there was a little more input.“ - Jamie Stewart

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No More Bull (cont’d)   Despite the bigotry he’s endured, Stewart doesn’t have much to say about Amendment One, the landmark legislation on the ballot in May that would ban gay marriage in North Carolina. When it comes to the area’s social issues, he sees himself as simply passing through.   His chief concern while living here has been his own artistic isolation. Angela Seo – his best friend and a member of Xiu Xiu who is currently attending school in Durham – is his only locally based collaborator. Working alone isn’t exactly unprecedented for Stewart. He’s been recording much of his music alone since Xiu Xiu began 10 years ago, utilizing the musical faculties of his personal computer long before the practice had become so commonplace. Still, he relishes having another ear to bounce ideas off, and the occasional extra hand to help bring his concepts to fruition.   “I don’t have anybody here to play with,” he says. “Before, it was something where if I had kind of half of an idea it would be really easy to call somebody, and they could come over and we could work on something together. Now, I’ve got to fly somebody out, and it’s a condensed period of time and it may not necessarily be the hot moment. But we’ve got to get it done at that point. It’s certainly been less convenient.”   But the struggle to invigorate himself musically hasn’t hurt the quality of his output. Always, Xiu Xiu’s feisty ninth LP, explodes in a multitude of directions. Opener “Hi” is a devilish take on synth-propelled dance rock, finding room within kinetic keyboard lines for rhythmic embellishments and a nervy undercurrent of experimental noise. “Chimneys Afire” affirms Deerhoof ’s Greg Saunier as the record’s producer with a twisted romp of clanging hi-fi piano chords and fuzzy, psychedelic strings. “I Luv Abortion” lives up to its abrasive title with blasts of hyper-rhythmic noise that are paired with moments of catchy melody via horns and keys. While Stewart’s voice as a songwriter is steady throughout, the album’s sonic palette is a constant variable.   “I can’t say that Xiu Xiu has gone in one direction,” Saunier says of the way the band’s sound has evolved. He has an insider perspective on Xiu Xiu’s progression, having helped produce the outfit’s four most recent records. “I just feel like the approach to making music gets reinvented every time there’s some new music to be made. I can’t sum it up in some sort of evolution or just some direction. I just feel like he’s an extremely creative spirit. You never know what’s coming next basically, and that could be from album-to-album or song-to-song within an album. Surprise is part of it and self-surprise is part of it.”   The intensity of Stewart’s music is something he traces in part back to his father, the late Michael Stewart. The guitarist for the 1960s’ folk outfit We Five as well as a one-time member of The Kingston Trio, he died in 2005.

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“We didn’t really ever talk about music very much,” Jamie remembers. “But he mentioned to me that one thing he’d always wished that he had done was that he had taken things a little further than he did. A lot of the music he did was really good and really complicated, but it was pleasant. I don’t mean that in a derisive way, but it was nice to listen to, harmonically nice, texturally nice to listen to. For him, he had a really miserable life, and he was trying to create something that was the opposite of that. But he just said that he wished that he had taken things a lot further.”   In Xiu Xiu’s music, misery is channeled into powerful expression. Stewart’s recent records have trended more and more towards dance music, but this is not to say the new songs are remotely happier. Stewart is fascinated by the way most dance music is lyrically sad, frankly poignant choruses about deepest heartbreak painted over by transformative hooks. In Stewart’s music, the impact of these elements is tweaked, darkening the textures and using the energy of synthesized drums and keyboards to fuel depravity rather than cover it up.   Last year’s cover of Rhianna’s “Only Girl (In the World)” exemplifies the approach. In the original, blasts of stereotypical club synths bolster Rhianna’s demand that her man make her feel like she is, in fact, “the only girl in the world.” Xiu Xiu’s take isn’t so simple. The entire song is underpinned by whirring noise and stark, angular slices of effected strings. Stewart sings with his breathiest croon, trading Rhianna’s brash confidence for blatant insecurity. When he reaches the chorus it’s still defiant, but it’s also desperate, as if the feeling the narrator gets from her lover is the only thing keeping her alive.   “That came out of being at this dyke bar in Durham,” Stewart says of his version. “The dance floor was like empty, and that song came on and all the ladies came on and started singing it and totally re-contextualized the song. For a bunch of Southern dykes to sing it, it was really different. ‘Only Girl,’ the song itself, is fine, you know. Rhianna’s fine, likable, not bad, incredibly normal. But that group of people completely turned it into something different.”   Always incorporates dance elements more than any Xiu Xiu record before, a trick that Stewart uses to ends that on the surface seem contradictory, but in practice end up nicely complementing each other.. On songs like “Hi,” Stewart manipulates dance tropes with maniacal mischief. The synth lines are straightforward and kinetic, the beats intricately layered and propulsive. But the textures are hyper-aggressive, and the tunes are contorted into a minor key. If there’s a jig to be had here, it certainly won’t be a happy one.   The style fits Stewart’s conceit perfectly. He reaches out to those who feel oppressed or beaten down by society, relentlessly listing different struggles and asking those who identify to say, “Hi.” As the song builds, the situations get more harrowing and more graphic. “If your body is wrong and you regret residing in it,” Stewart offers in

the final verse, “Jack razor blade at your throat/ Broken hearts will shine for with the moon.”   “I Luv Abortion” inverts the formula. The song is a ranting confessional from the perspective of a young girl contemplating the termination of her pregnancy. The lyrics dig deep into the controversial issue as the narrator struggles to justify the procedure – to herself, to her baby, to the listener. “When i look at my thighs I see death,” Stewart sings with a glee so frenzied it borders on despair. “It’s rad/ I love abortion/ You are too good for this life.”   The music matches Stewart’s unhinged performance. The rhythm is intense and buried in a wash of caustic fuzz. It’s an incredible din, one that consumes your consciousness entirely. Stray elements flit in and out chaotically, a triumphant horn solo here, a far-off scream there. In all, it’s a transcendently confusing mess, one that approaches its subject with an appropriately conflicted perspective.   Most amazing, though, is the way Stewart is able to seamlessly inhabit a plight that he could never actually endure. On Always, it’s just par for the course. Throughout the album, he reaches out to victims of various different injustices. One minute he’s bemoaning the plight of the Asian factory worker (“Factory Girl”), the next he’s relating a graphic tale of incestual rape (“Black Drum Machine”). In every instance, Stewart’s empathy for his subjects is the kind that you’d have for the direst straits of a close friend.   “The motivation for doing it is to attempt to document something that to me or somebody else has been meaningful,” Stewart explains. “I’m a little bit hesitant to be analytical about the results of something like that. I think it has the potential to cloud any further attempts at it. Thinking too hard about what is happening or why it is happening when I’m not doing it and I’m not writing is really not a good perspective. I’m worrying about what it will mean to me rather than attempting to just write about what their experience is.”   Stewart’s honesty on record can overwhelm, but there are a few things he’s unwilling to talk about in the public forum. One of these is the “private family stuff “ that brought him to Durham, but he is happy that he will be leaving this summer, the mysterious business that kept him tethered to the South finally at an end. He may have had a rotten time here, but he admits that Always wouldn’t have become what it was without the time to tinker and write without distraction. When he leaves, he says he’ll take a new-found appreciation for the places he lived before, as well as a newly acquired taste.   “I’ve gotten a developed palate for hard alcohol,” he says, talking about Whiskey – and its whiskey – and how he’s come to love it. “I didn’t like it before, and now I genuinely love drinking hard alcohol. I think that’s great. It wouldn’t have happened had I lived at home.”  sm

“ The motivation for doing it is to attempt to document something that to me or somebody else has been meaningful.” —Jamie Stewart

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Brick By Brick I

From its DIY beginnings to the polished folk present, Midtown Dickens patiently built a Home all their own By Brian Howe

t’s hard to pin down exactly when the contemporary folk band Midtown Dickens came into existence, largely because the music is so thoroughly entwined with the lifelong friendship between principal songwriters Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton. It would be simple to peg their origins circa 2007, when the duo (with former drummer Michelle Preslik) figured out how to make cool sounds with every discarded instrument they could serendipitously acquire and then self-released Oh Yell!, a bunch of punky twee-folk songs about Tetris and playdates.   But you could also argue that Midtown Dickens began in 2009, when their revolving roster began to stabilize, and they released the surprisingly elegant Lanterns, a far cry from the Moldy Peaches-style slapstick of their debut. Or you could say that the project took root when Edgerton and Register were 14 years old, recording tapes of story-songs they made up together. You could even contend that

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Midtown Dickens begins in 2012 with the release of Home, the band’s third LP, their second with producer Scott Solter (Okkervil River, Centro-matic, The Mountain Goats), their first to see its initial release on a label (Chapel Hill’s Trekky Records) — and their best, most grown-up record to date.   In any case, you’d be sort of right. The concepts that feed into Midtown Dickens — community, accessibility, inclusivity, intimacy, creativity, and storytelling — have been important to Register and Edgerton for their whole lives. (This is to say that Midtown Dickens truly began in the early ‘80s, when the two were born.) Their transition from creative friends to studio band happened by imperceptible degrees, always in-progress, always beginning. But growth is not a steady slope: there are ledges where you pause to survey what you’ve already conquered and gather your strength for the next ascent.

Photos by D.L. Anderson

That’s what Home feels like — a plateau where the band can discharge the expertise they’ve gathered and affirm their new identity, which no longer has much to do with the signifiers of willful naiveté that residually cling to them in the press. The album features a variety of new instruments (some electronic), darker moods, and a solid lineup of four multi-instrumentalists: Edgerton, Register, Will Hackney, and Jonathan Henderson. It’s consistent with the band’s prior work, but it’s also on a new level of capability and polish. With songs already streaming on NPR and MTV Hive, it’s destined to earn Midtown Dickens a wider national assessment than Lanterns.   How, I wondered, did they get from Oh Yell! to here in just five years? And how did a band who galvanized their first fans by rolemodeling inclusive, start-from-scratch, D.I.Y. ethics weather the transition to working with a hired gun like Solter? Could they still be the same band? On an afternoon in early March, I drove out to their practice space to find out. .  .  . Just on the Bull City side of the Durham/Chapel Hill border, there’s a private road that runs through a protected wildlife habitat where the homes have names such as “Meadow View” and wild ducks strut imperiously below the canopy of kudzu-draped trees. Deep within this dappled refuge sprawls a big tumbledown house painted ‘70s salmon, flanked by a decrepit bus that has an air of landmark permanency.   This is the Trekky House, which berths a crew of musicians associated with the Chapel Hill label, including co-founder and Midtown Dickens member Hackney. It’s where Midtown Dickens rehearses, in a small anteroom that scarcely contains their proliferating instruments and personnel. As Edgerton, Register, Hackney and I gathered around the living room coffee table, Henderson tumbled in, carrying a white Carrburritos sack that was quickly expropriated as group property. That morning, he informed us, he had sprinted through the woods for half a mile, chasing a dog that was chasing a rooster with a “big froofy head on it.” The anecdote inspired much amusement about living in the South and caused Hackney to announce, “Jonathan Henderson in Country Fiasco!”   Silliness aside, Henderson’s story says something important about Midtown Dickens: it’s wholly a product of central North Carolina, where a fifteen-minute drive can carry you past august universities and humble hayfields alike; where you can have authentic country experiences in a climate of academic sophistication — a duality that Home reflects with its thoughtful, deliberate probing of folk music. These are not adjectives you’d have used to describe the Midtown Dickens who knocked together songs with dumpster-dived instruments they could scarcely play. (“Ramshackle” is the adjective many reviewers used, which has become a running joke among the band.)   The implicit message of Midtown Dickens’ early music was that you could do it too, although really, they were cheerleading each other as much as anything else. You didn’t need chops or a Y chromosome, just a certain degree of bravery and a supportive community. This message had special resonance for those who felt excluded, by gender or sexual orientation, from a music scene heavy on straight, bearded, male guitar gods. Still, to compartmentalize Midtown Dickens in an identity-politics niche seems contrary to their “holistic” (as Henderson put it) perspective.   “At times, I wish I was civically responsible enough to intentionally

embrace music as a vehicle for politics,” said Edgerton. “But I was raised by storytellers, so what comes naturally to me is storytelling. A queer identity is part of my story, so it’s bound to come through, but my identity — and especially the collective one of Midtown Dickens — is like dozens of layers in the tallest cake in the window. Although we don’t have a queer ‘agenda,’ putting ourselves on stage as mostly queer folks and allies feels like a way to help build up fuel for our community to confront issues like Amendment One.“   “When it was proposed, my heart sank,” Register said of the controversial amendment to the N.C. constitution, which will prohibit gay marriage in the state if it passes a vote on May 8. “I’ve never been an advocate of marriage — not that I don’t agree with monogamy for some, celebrating love, even mixing finances — but it’s a direct breach of the separation of church and state. As Catherine said, we don’t have an agenda so to speak, but music has always been used as a means of community building, and we want to use whatever platform we’re honored to have. Every stage I get on until the vote, I hope to spread the word that voting down Amendment One is a step further in the struggle for civil rights.”   All the different layers in the band members’ individual cakes play important roles in the band — Trekky has given it a label home, Henderson’s large footprint as a musician provides connections, Edgerton’s visual art graces album covers, and running the Durham bar and performance space The Pinhook has taught Register a ton about booking. They stressed to me the importance of making sure nobody has to be or do the same thing all the time, whether that means Edgerton’s new job-sharing collective or the band’s inveterate instrument-swapping. They found early solidarity with other “ramshackle” bands, but they also received indispensible aid from Durham’s Megafaun and, later, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.   The predicament of being a deliberately immature band and touring like crazy is that you can’t help but improve. “It eventually became kind of a crutch to be like, ‘Oh, we make mistakes all the time,’” Edgerton said. “When it was true, it was great, but it started to feel like a charm to limit ourselves from further growth. I used to really worry that we were going to alienate people we were connecting with by being humble and naïve, but you have to change, and there’s going to be a different dialogue with everybody.”   Register likens those early days to a musical adolescence, which she doesn’t view as a bad thing. “Kind of uncomfortable and awkward,” she summed up, “but important to do and have a community around. The life lesson for me was that it’s great to have knowledge and choose not to use it, rather than just not having the knowledge. We’re still involved with Girl’s Rock to show that this isn’t just something professionals do; we play benefits and community spaces and all-ages shows. We still get off the mic to play in the crowd. There’s a trajectory, but I don’t think you have to leave it all behind. The image that comes 

“It eventually became kind of a crutch ... ‘Oh, we make mistakes all the time.’” —Catherine Edgerton

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Brick by Brick (cont’d) to my mind is going from shtick-y cuteness to being a ‘cute woman’ to being a raging feminist to being a Woman.”   After recording Oh Yell! at Zeno Gill’s Pox World Empire studios, Midtown Dickens borrowed Megafaun’s recording gear and tried to record Lanterns themselves. “It sucked,” Edgerton said, laughing at the memory. Michelle Preslik looked up Solter, but not before Henderson and Hackney crept into the band. The latter, Edgerton and Register swore, just showed up with his mandolin one day and then simply didn’t leave. I got the impression that they were about 80 percent affectionately joking and 20 percent dead serious. At any rate, Hackney got to record with a producer he regarded as “a sage,” who brought a new discipline to the process while still honoring the happy accident.   Henderson’s band Diali Cissokho & Kairaba! — which shared Midtown Dickens’ CD release party at the Cat’s Cradle in early April — also recorded with Solter. “On both records,” Henderson laughed, “you can hear the same squeaky chair. A lot of engineers would be like ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I gotta get a new chair.’ But he leaves that chair in there.” Solter also pushed the band to do things they wouldn’t have done on their own. He made them record approximately 16 takes of the vocals on “Springs,” leading to a point, Hackney said, where “Kym, as a vocalist, was opening up into this powerful place she’d never been before.” When they returned to Solter’s Baucom Road studio in Monroe, N.C. to record Home, the pump was primed.   Edgerton and Register used to write together, finishing each other’s lines, but now they’re writing solo more. Even so, when they brought their new songs together, they were astonished to discover the theme of “home” written all over them. “There was a lot of debate over what to call it,” Hackney said, “not wanting the word ‘home’ to be too reductive. It’s actually a giant umbrella, and all the songs relate to the theme differently.” The band’s home is North Carolina, but their Home is everywhere. It can be found, Register said, in the world,

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outside of walls, outside of the norm, outside of the 9-to-5.   Over the course of a year, they lived at Solter’s studio in short spurts, working for up to 12 hours per day. They had brought in a record that was less fully written than their last, with space left for experimentation and atmosphere. This seed was planted on Lanterns, when the band devised a recurrent motif for singing bowl, lantern and trumpet to connect the songs. On Home, alongside the dusty acoustic guitar arpeggios, you’ll hear contact-miced cymbals bowed through distortion pedals, bowed steel drums, tuning forks, and even a bit of synthesizer.   “The most different song,” Hackney said of “Cross My Heart,” “has this building bed of synths and distorted saxophones and all these things. We had never executed it but had talked it out, and it came out exactly how I imagined. We spoke in adjectives more than instruments — we wanted something that sounded like the hull of a boat, or angry bees.”   “But we were deliberate about mostly using acoustic instruments,” Henderson allowed. “There’s synth on one song and one moment of electric guitar. That was Scott’s clearest contribution, creating the under-layer of synth on ‘Cross My Heart.’ But the big noisy ambient moment at the end of ‘Volcano’ is all acoustic.”   “Folk music has always told the story of a time,” Register explained, “and now we have access to all these pedals and electronics. We want to play our folk songs and work with the arrangements in a way that’s not just the G-D-C cowboy song, and add the influence of today with distortion pedals or whatever. A lot of folk artists I love now are doing that.”   It’s the sound of folk music’s strict association with acoustic instruments coming unraveled, now that samplers and synthesizers are as likely to be lying around as guitars. Midtown Dickens have quickly grasped that 20th-century authenticity is no longer authentic. sm

All Together Now

Post-Echo offers Internet-age full-service station for their artists By John Schacht

W

e all know that band – the one that makes music so mindbendingly beautiful you know they’d be huge if only people knew of them. That same act, however, imagines self-promotion to be even more unpleasant than syphilis, or simply doesn’t have it in their DNA. So, instead, they labor in on-going obscurity, hoping that talent and beauty will out.   Once, it might have. In the 80s’ and 90s’ indie label heyday, when self-promotion was practically anathema, word of mouth and artistic integrity could be enough to get the right band in the right room with the right label people. But in the Internet age, when the right room includes every other act on the planet plus the entire history of recorded music, this is pretty awful strategy.   Justin Schmidt, 27, and Franklin Jones, 29, are the main men at Post-Echo, and they want to help. The Columbia-based record label/promotion agency/ marketing start-up held its initial roster-meeting in September last year, and have put their strength-incollaboration aesthetic to the test with a three-LP release barrage this Spring. (Schmidt and Jones successfully road tested a local-musicians compilation, Future Y’all, in 2010, prior to forming Post-Echo.)   Divining lessons from models as far-reaching as 60s’ Motown and Jack White’s Third Man Records, Post-Echo aims to be the catalyst in a creative promotional vortex for its 12-act roster (they also represent two visual artists), beginning with Pan’s These Are the Things I Love and I Want to Share Them With You, Roomdance’s Sewn Inside, and Forces of a Street’s Pro Icarus (Schmidt and Jones are members of the latter).   There’s strength in numbers, sure, but that’s just the kindling for their idea. Schmidt and Jones say it’s about the bigger creative spark that results from having more creative minds rub more creative ideas against each other. A good story and real context can raise you above the masses, they say, but Post-Echo

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wants to take it one step further. They want context to be the concept, and concept to be king.   “There’s nothing wrong with making music and not caring about the perceptions around it or the context for it, but I feel that music is more powerful when there’s a story to tell along with it,” says Schmidt. “Everything we’re doing has a concept – nothing is out there by itself.”   With that in mind, Post-Echo’s releases come with Internetenhanced electronic press kits. Those were once currency exclusive to artist and music journalist, but no more. For Post-Echo bands, they typically include elements like updated “webisode” video segments with the musicians, song videos and live performances, and photo galleries to go along with digital streaming and downloads, physical merchandise order forms, and other non-music art projects – basically an umbrella for the artists to thrive under without worrying too much about promoting it all.   But it’s not exactly a promotionsfree pass, either. The hope is that the artistic cross-pollination will take the yuck-factor out of selfpromotion. As an example, Jones cites the LP cover painting done for Pro Icarus by Joe Floyd, who paints as Mouthes and Tongue and plays in Post-Echo band Pandercakes. There’s the album’s layout, too, done by graphic designer Heyward Sims, who happens to be Devereaux, another Post-Echo client. That’s the kind of synergy Post-Echo aims for in all its endeavors.   The goal, says Jones, “is to generate a more

Photo by Devereaux Franklin Jones and Justin Schmidt (right)

creative environment and have things to talk about other than simply just putting up your next recorded audio track and assuming that everything will just speak for itself.”   There is little orthodoxy here beyond the label’s guiding mantra that the music should not be bound by convention. Schmidt describes Pan as “epic, uplifting, energetic postrock,” and warns that Roomdance’s diverse sounds “are the antithesis of chill – there’s a tension there that you want to keep going rather than hear resolved.”   Their own record is a set of angular songs with tight rhythmic foundations and guitars that raze rather than buttress. They also acknowledge that the LP’s pro-Icarus theme could stand in for Post-Echo’s own story. “Most rock music can be boiled down to wanting to break some kind of boundaries,” says Jones, adding that “the boundaries that need to be broken now are boundaries of complacency.”   As a business, Post-Echo is still very much a work-in-progress. They have exclusive distribution and revenue-sharing deals set up with their roster, but exactly how it all works is only now fleshing itself out. They have a comic book/ graphic novel release scheduled soon, but aren’t yet sure what other components will accompany it.   But they are sure of one thing: “Everybody’s got their own niche, and their own way of presenting themselves,” Schmidt says of their roster. “All we want is for that to be as strong and clear as vibrant as possible.”  sm

Introducing...

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Produced by

Shuffle has teamed up with the multimedia experts at Six Foot Kitten to create a special concert series that features artists from each issue in an intimate and unique setting. Each performance will then be broadcast in on shufflemag.com and sixfootkitten.com. Stay tuned for an exclusive look at our first installment with Andy The Doorbum.

Photographs courtesy of Staton Carter Photography and 6FK. statoncarterphotography.com 6FK and Jerod Jacobs are a proud endorsee of Peluso Microphones. www.pelusomicrophonelab.com

Six Foot Kitten is a talented and dynamic group of creative freelance artists managed by producer Jerod Jacobs. As a media consultant, they assist businesses, artist, record labels, and filmmakers in finding their identity by arranging workflow and choreographing teams of Audio, Video, Graphic Design and Motion Graphics artist. Visit us online for more information.

Destination: Boone With a Naked God as tour guide, Shuffle explores the mountain town’s best eateries, drinkeries, and more Hot Spot

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aybe you know Boone as that valley place between Blowing Rock, Tweetsie Railroad and that little college that beat mighty Michigan, the first time a Division I-AA football team beat a Division I ranked school (suck it, Wolverines). If so, well, you probably still don’t know Boone.   To get a better idea, Shuffle tagged along – fiberoptically – with Naked Gods’ guitarist Christian Smith to learn what’s really going on in Boone. The 30-year-old has been embedded among the town’s inhabitants (17,122 as of 2010 census) for 12 years, ever since he moved here to attend Wolverines-whooping Appalachian State.   Smith proved an engaging hometown booster and tour guide who took us on a day’s journey through locally owned establishments and scenic diversions. Our first stop was for a much-needed cup of coffee at Espresso News & Mosaic Books, which Smith unabashedly calls the “best coffee shop on the face of the earth.” It’s a cozy two-story joint tucked away on a backstreet in downtown, the coffee is roasted and brewed on site, and you can hook up the laptop at the downstairs tables or grab a book off the shelves and relax on the couches upstairs. “If you’re unlucky,”

Smith laughs, the latest Naked Gods’ record, No Jams, may be spinning. There’s also a new hang-out called Low upstairs, a combined wine and fancy pie and cake bar for your diabetic coma.   Post-caffeination, we stroll up the hill and onto the main drag (West King Street) to visit 641 rpm, a local record store run by two longstanding local musicians, Travis Reyes and Kevin Freeman. Smith says you’ll find an “awesome array” of new and used vinyl, everything from psych and indie rock to Indian music, electronica, and all points in between. They host in-stores on occasion, and 641 rpm – named

after their old West Kings’ address – “also sponsors almost every show around town that you’d want to go to,” Smith says.   Having now blown a wad of paycheck on vinyl, we’re headed a few doors up to Watsonatta Western World. Smith calls it a cowboy store with “the biggest belt buckles you’ve ever seen in your life,” and the best place to get Western shirts, boots, and Wrangler jeans. ”I’m a Wrangler man,” he says, “and if you’re trying to buy some Wranglers, that’s the place to go.” (Editors Note: Christian Smith is not employed by Wrangler Jeans — yet!)   If you’re in the mood to shop vintage, Smith recommends Loretta’s Vendetta. “It’s not cheap,” he says, “but if you’re looking to deck out your apartment in mod furniture, mod gear, it’s the place to go.” I asked him how many Naked Gods had decked out their cribs this way. “None of us, but we all eagerly fantasize about it. The store looks like it fell out of the British TV show The Prisoner. It’s stocked like an estate sale from that little weird town/island place.”   By now it’s early afternoon, and a beer sounds good, which it typically does. Smith recommends The Boone Saloon. A saloon and a restaurant, it’s also the town’s biggest bar venue, he says, and the place that Naked Gods usually play or host “friend-bands of ours.” He cites Invisible Hand, Whatever Brains, Maple Stave and Yardwork as some of the recent regional visitors. “Not to sound like an asshole too much, but we pack it out pretty much every time we play it,” he says, not sounding like an asshole at all. (A side note of interest: The place nearly burned to the ground in 2008 during a Grateful Dead tribute band set.)   Okay, you’ve had a cold one or two, and could use some grub to soak it up. So it’s over to Black Cat Burrito, an underground joint (Smith recommends the enchiladas) that also hosts a lot of local shows. Smith calls the booking more “diverse” here than The Boone Saloon, including anything from total noise to psych rock bands. “It’s small,” he says, “and at night in turns into everybody’s wet dream of a rock club.” Shows in Boone are very rowdy, he explains, where “a really tight-knit community” that doesn’t have a lot to do really expresses itself when it does. It’s especially gratifying to see their friends play Boone for the first time. “They play in front of bigger crowds than (they) ever play in front of when (they’re) on tour,” he says, “and people are just getting down and having a wild-ass time.”   Before tonight’s show, however, we’ve landed a VCR (play along with the conceit, please) so we’re headed to Fat Cats Music & Video, where Smith insists they have “the most amazing collection of

34  |  scene report

All photos by Christian Smith.  Top: Old growth Hemlock at Sim’s Pond.

Lauren at Low

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film you’ve probably ever seen in one room – whether it’s crazy B horror movies, Euro-trash, science fiction or European art movies.” If you’re a VHS person, he says, “it’s like heaven.” They also sell records and books.   Smith suggests an outdoors frolic now because it’s early afternoon and a nice day outside. So we drive up to the Blueridge Parkway to hit some not-too-

Mike at Fat Cats Music & Video trying hikes – but only after enjoying a virtual “fat-ass joint” (Over the phone, I enjoy it much less). Smith recommends the Boone Fork, Sims Creek, or Beacon Heights trails, none of which he says exceeds 2 on the 1-to-5 degree-of-difficulty scale. And if it’s summertime, he adds, ask anyone who looks like they might know about swimming holes – “I’m not exaggerating, there are like 50 awesome ones in the area,” he says.   All hiked out, it’s dinner time. Smith recommends Proper (which this reporter seconds after a recent visit), an unassuming two-story house converted into a cozy restaurant. The all-Southern food kitchen is supplied almost exclusively by local farms, and tastes it. Smith, it should be noted, works there, and his girlfriend owns it, but this reporter vouches for everything said about it. “I see the lady who brings (the beef) in every day,” Smith says, adding that unlike some local produce-oriented restaurants in the area, this one doesn’t harp on that fact or make you pay for it with a pricey menu.   And the prices are reasonable, $8 or $9 for a big plate of protein, two sides, and either a steaming hot biscuit or cornbread. (The pulled pork is sweet and spicy, and trumps most Carolina BBQ joints; the fried chicken is soaked in buttermilk before it’s cooked and melts in your mouth – also make sure one of your sides is collards). This is the kind of place where a customer who compliments the home-made ketchup might just

Proper: Quality Southern grub

Shopping at 641 rpm

Featured Spots 641 rpm 691 West King St.  |  828.865.9641 Wattsonatta Western Wear 711 West King St.  |  828.264.4540 Proper 142 South Water St.  |  828.865.5000 Espresso News & Mosaic Books 267 Howard St.  |  828.264.8850 Black Cat Burrito 127 South Depot St.  |  828.263.9511

wind up with a free jar of it to take home (true story).   Stuffed and sated, this is time to walk off your meal. And it just happens to be first Friday Art Crawl night. Dodging the buskers, hippies and other colorful locals, Smith recommends two galleries featuring the works of local artists: the Nth Gallery, and The Collective on Depot. Both are studio spaces and galleries, so visitors can stroll through the open houses and see what the locals are up to. Smith, who has a studio at The Collective on Depot, says it’s not “stupid kitschy mountain art,” either, but modern art – from sculptors and fiber artists to painters and screen printers – done by a lot of talented artists who call these mountains home.   By now the sun’s down, so if it’s not too late and your timing’s good, you can catch an early house show at The Loven House (you’ll have to get directions

yourself, but it’s just outside downtown) before heading off to the late show at The Black Cat or the Boone Saloon. Smith says you should end the night with a post-closing time visit to the top of Howard’s Knob (by designated driver, natch), overlooking downtown Boone. You’ll want to “ignore that fence that says ‘park closed after dark,’” he says, and climb out on some rocks to enjoy the view – preferably “with someone you can make out with.”   So as you see, it turns out there’s more to Boone than strip malls, a miniature railroad, and a college campus. As Smith says, “the weather is cold as hell and there’s not a lot to do, so you have be creative.” —John Schacht

Loretta’s Vendetta 681 West King St.  |  828.268.9830 The Boone Saloon 489 West King St.  |  828.264.1811 Fat Cats Music & Video 965 Rivers St.  |  828.265.2287 Nth Gallery 683 W. King St.  |  828.264.7429 The Collective on Depot 125 South Depot St. artists@thecollectiveatdepot.com

Now Hear This

A Carolina Chocolate Drops Leaving Eden (Nonesuch)

Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes Bones for Tinder (self-released)

s the relatively unstable product of a broken home, I am for reconciliation at all costs. Sometimes this is a reminder to communicate — other times, a sentence to sustain relationships beyond their expiration date. For no good reason, I encourage the bands in my life to do the same, to forgo the indulgent side project, circumvent the love triangles, and to see the greener pastures for what they are.   The news of Justin Robinson’s departure from the Carolina Chocolate Drops was like hearing that my mom was moving into the apartment complex behind our high school all over again. There were so many memories: the albums, the festivals, the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. Fortunately, Justin Robinson’s decision to veer to the symbolic left at the fork in the road yields two distinct offerings — Bones for Tinder, the debut LP from Justin Robinson & the Mary Annettes, and Leaving Eden, the fourth studio album by the Drops — that both extend the boundaries of what can be done with a banjo in 2012.   The Carolina Chocolate Drops mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and their stringed music ranges from traditional to the anything but. Although multi-instrumentalist Robinson was assumed to have hammered hardest upon the group’s malleable output, the Drops do not crawl back to the fiddler’s convention with his departure. Enter the beat-boxing Adam Matta, whose percussive output ranges from tongue-twisting hambone to lip-smacking boom-bap. Matta is

D Corrosion of Conformity Corrosion of Conformity Candlelight Records

espite the title of their new LP, the trio currently carrying the most infamous moniker in Raleigh hard rock is not the definitive Corrosion of Conformity. Defining COC is in many ways antithetical to their identity. Yes, bassist Mike Dean, guitarist Woody Weatherman and drummer Reed Mullin recorded 1985’s Animosity – arguably the band’s best and most recognizable record – but more than a dozen dudes have played in the band during their 30-year-run. As is to be expected, the shifts in membership have led to an equally shifty sonic identity.   They burst forth in 1982 as one of the more ferocious first-wave hardcore bands, creating jagged-riffed chaos behind departed lead singer Eric Eycke. By Animosity they began to shift towards metallic thrash, maintaining breathless intensity, but opting for beefy, strung-out tones and over-the-top vocals that defied the punk aesthetic. In the 90s on through the mid-aughts the band reached their highest commercial peaks with boozy modern rock that paired crusty Metallica-Inc. riffs with swampy, Southern tones. Indeed, the COC catalog takes so many detours that it’s often hard to believe that all the records belong to one band.   It’s incredible, then, how well Corrosion of Conformity – the band’s first record since 2005 – manages to matriculate and synthesize the

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one of three new inductees, alongside New York banjoleer Hubby Jenkins and New Orleans cellist Leyla McCalla. The new recruits pedal more often than steer, and Leaving Eden affirms the presence of Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemmons more than it mourns Robinson’s departure.   The breezy simplicity of “Mahalla” recalls the score to a Caribbean Mario Brothers sequel unrealized, and if there was a black Dollywood , the commercials would prominently feature the boot-stomping “Ruby, Are you Mad At Your Man?” Giddens, who recalls Janelle Monae, Norah Jones, and Joni Mitchell at any given moment, lends her finest singing and songwriting to the album’s title track, which challenges James Taylor’s most sentimental waltzes. Buttressed by gusts of cello and a gentle mist of mandolin, Gidden’s lament, “I am not afraid of that bright glory up above/Dying’s just another way to leave the ones you love,” leaves one staring into the middle distance and, you know, thinking about things.   But while the Carolina Chocolate Drops rarely fake left and move right, Robinson’s debut is a series of wrong turns for the right reasons. If there exists a parcel of common ground between Andre 3000 and John Hartford, Robinson stands confidently upon it, shovel in hand. The record is dirty, and “Devil’s Teeth” is a danceable confluence of his far-flung influences that showcases the effortless innovation trained musicians rarely allow themselves to make.

On “Vultures,” Robinson’s dissonant declaration, “You’re all I need to get by,” nod succinctly to Tammi Terrell and Mary J. Blige’s transgenerational deliveries of the Motown title. “Thank You Mr. Wright,” with its thrift store harmonium and plucky guitar, pay whimsical tribute to powered flight from above the clouds.   While the Carolina Chocolate Drops have always sounded nice live, from the porch to the Carrboro Arts Center, Robinson’s impressive outing is more fit for the space between your ears. His shade of innovation, more Beefheart than Bela Fleck, exhibits fewer obligations to his catalog than the remaining Drops. The album is dense with sketches (“III Lil’ Babes”) and masterpieces (“Nemesis or Me”), the kind of scrapbook compiled in a fury of creativity, or in the bare-all sweepings of a posthumous release.   Despite their differences, Robinson and the Drops are still two sides of the same coin. By all accounts their separation has appeared amicable, and both factions seem content on pushing the same boulder, albeit up different mountains. A day may come when our children exclaim in disbelief, “Justin Robinson was in the Carolina Chocolate Crops?!” In the meantime we’ll just have to enjoy joint custody of North Carolina’s most industrious community of African-American string-band visionaries. Two Christmases! Two birthdays! Two records! We’re big kids now. We can handle this. — Jon Kirby

various styles that COC has inhabited in the last 30 years. Still, this album is in no way a summary. The trio marauds through their back catalog, collecting trinkets and cobbling them together with new elements. On their first self-titled record, COC eagerly engage their own legend. As with everything they touch, they find new ways to twist and, well, corrode it.   For the first few seconds, it sounds as though COC are content to repeat their recent history. “Psychic Vampire” plods to life on a monstrously over-the-top riff, bass and drums entering slowly and intricately. Amid the build-up, Dean releases one of the most gloriously cliched metal grunts you’ll ever hear. Suddenly, they kick into another gear, and we’re back in the Animosity era, riffs and rhythm crrashing about with time-honed intensity. These dynamic shifts of tempo and volume continue throughout as the band backs off in the verses and then comes roaring back for the choruses. If you weren’t sure which COC to expect, “Psychic Vampire” certainly wouldn’t help you figure it out.   COC continue in this mix-and-match vein for much of the album. “Rat City” roars headlong with hardcore speed and intensity, but its riffs take a trip through garage-bound blues. The “Detroit Rock City”-style call-and-response makes sarcastic

inroads into classic rock with Mullin taking the vocal lead. He drives the joke home with an affected croak, allowing each note to percolate fiercely through his sandpaper pipes. “Time of Trials” hinges on an almost sparkling post-punk riff, but COC ground it into the grimiest arrangement on the whole record, Dean’s oppressive bass lines made even more dense by the contrast. “River of Stone” starts as thundering-herd hard rock, somewhere between British blues metal and Savannah sludge, but it meanders into a psychedout stoner bridge. Weatherman’s ascent from hypnotic wah-wah to grandiose solo testifies to the prowess of his veteran chops.   Still, as with the return of most yesteryear heroes, Corrosion of Conformity is no classic. The trio’s experimental detours sometimes stall, and Dean, while more than adequate as the primary frontman, doesn’t quite have the gravitas to pull them through their failures. Still, COC never lets their legacy trip them up. They’re as irreverent with their own history as they have been with most everything else. After three decades, they still refuse to conform, and that makes Corrosion of Conformity as definitive as any COC album could ever be. —Jordan Lawrence

For a full list of this issue’s Editors’ Picks, go to www.shufflemag.com

Editors’ Picks For his 14-song debut, Phil Torres gathered: a $150 nylonstring guitar; his interest in mbaqanga and congotronics; keys and synths; mastering software; musical inspiration from the Books, Panda Bear and Dirty Projectors; lyrical inspiration from Cat Stevens; a naturalist’s aesthetic; and his computer. The Durham-based musician’s colorful bursts of the organic and digital stand out for their balance. Acoustic guitar figures circle each other like courting lovers, their ritual dances draped in warm synth Baobab textures and layers of overdubbed harmonies. Elsewhere, Boabab tribal rhythms conjure island vibes as synth swaths (Self-released) provide an urban grounding. You could be nature-bound or strolling through colorful favelas, but Baobab fits either setting. —JS Upheaval and subsequent renewal hit the Bowerbirds in the lead-up to The Clearing, their larger-than-ever third album. The duo of Phil Moore and Beth Tacular broke off their romantic relationship, Tacular fell mysteriously ill, and they ultimately returned to their little cabin in the Pittsboro woods with new purpose – and new tricks. Darker and more honest, these songs allow death and uncertainty to enter their tranquil folk musings, bolstered by dramatic swells courtesy of strings, Korgs and pianos. Bowerbirds Sometimes you have to burn part of a forest down to The Clearing keep it growing properly. Likewise, Bowerbirds have been (Dead Oceans) rejuvenated and enhanced by their hardship. —JL

Caltrop ten million years and eight minutes (Holidays For Quince)

If the title to Caltrop’s second LP is a joke, it’s a good one. It’s been four years since the Chapel Hill rock act’s loud and lumbering debut, a relative eternity in today’s download-a-minute music culture. But the pace suits Caltrop, who have refined their epic chops without losing what made their debut work. Tangled prog-ish solos are contorted with sludgy distortion and powered by concussive rhythms during the album’s untamed moments. But Caltrop explores the space between their freak-outs, indulging in heady psych-rock interludes. The result is hard rock with near universal appeal, recommended for Led Zeppelin devotees and Harvey Milk acolytes alike. —JL

On Free Electric State’s LP debut, 2010’s Caress, David Koslowski and Nick Williams churned dense sheets of noise, adding shoegaze heft to revved-up post-punk momentum as drummer Tony Stiglitz and bassist Shirlé Hale muscled the band underneath the gauze. FES’s follow-up is no departure, but it does amplify its strengths. Stiglitz’s Motorik throb is more insistent, given room to breathe by more dynamic textures. Hale, a nuanced singer able to shade sweet melodies with dark shadows, Free Electric State is granted a brighter spotlight. The hooks are sharper and Monumental Life dig deeper; the dynamics are more pronounced. But even (Custom Made Music) with this more accessible and bigger sound, FES hasn’t sacrificed any of the textural detail or raucous squall that made their debut exciting. —BR Joint D≠’s debut sounds a lot like another recent Charlotte punk record. Guitarist and singer Nick Goode is also a leader in Brain F≠, whose caustically catchy LP Sleep Rough was one of 2011’s best loud records. Strike Gently proves that was no isolated incident. Also featuring members of Yardwork and Great Architect, Joint D≠ trades Brain F≠’s tenacious hooks for increased brutality. Goode’s riffs trample along gleefully, filling in the gaps between tantric assaults with shrieks of triumphant Joint D≠ feedback. The rhythm section opts for brute force, finding Strike Gently the fastest, most forceful way to keep time as Goode (Sorry State) snarls with such vigor you can feel the spittle on your eardrums. —JL

The cover for Lost in the Trees new LP features a picture of Ari Picker’s mother. She committed suicide a few years ago, and the songs here find Picker reckoning with her depression, the anguish of her death, and the promise of her afterlife. His mostly abstract words aren’t shy with the details, but they jumble them up, revealing truths in heartbreaking tumbles. The arrangements hold serve, building from the orchestral folk of the band’s past into lush and gloomy art rock where string parts refract off of found Lost In The Trees sounds, echoing vocals and distorted guitars. It’s beautiful A Church That Fits and unsettling, a fitting tribute and a moving listen. —JL Our Needs (Anti-) Little in the instrumental rock world hasn’t been said already, so what matters is the conviction a band brings to their particular corner of the post-rock. For this Columbia quartet, the enthusiasm evident in the title courses through these dozen tracks like life blood. Pan relies more on repetitive riffs done at high RPM (“Joe Frazier”) and Southern-flavored guitar melodies (“Helen & Francis”) than most instrumental-rock acts, and when they add the gang-vocals, like on LP highlight “John From New York,” Pan the sense of elation takes on a triumphant sheen. These are These Are the Things conquering heroes returned from epic voyages and bearing I Love and I Want to the bounty of their adventures told in song. —JS Share Them with You (Post-Echo) Charlotte’s Lindsey Ryan is coaxed from her “withdrawn little weirdo songwriter tree” (her debut came out in 2004) and surrounded by some of the city’s premier musicians here to remarkable effect. Over 10 Southern-tinged vignettes about love and loss, Ryan’s poems (it’s okay, she’s got a masters in poetry) are embedded in plush organ textures and guitar reverb, cello and pedal steel, while brushed drums and double-bass nudge elegant tempos along. Ryan’s voice, part Kate Bush and part Karen Peris, Lindsey Ryan fills these ballads and twangy shuffles with striking images The Divers — “starlings in their little velvet gowns,” “morning comes, (self-released) undoes Orion’s buckle” – that stick long after her indigohued block chords drift into the ether. —JS Stripmines vocalist Matt LaVallee wrote the lyrics here in the midst of personal crises, and wound up penning an album-length violent protest against personal stasis, corrupt powers and complacent victims. His vicious bark doesn’t pull any punches in delivery, either. But the thematic grist is only one component of this supremely intense platter. Packed with sudden stops, forceful shifts and unexpected asides, the songs’ arrangements serve their singer’s fury well. The production gives this new batch Stripmines a fuller, more defined sound than the dry sound of the Crimes of Dispassion band’s EP, making these tumultuous tunes sound outright (Sorry State) cataclysmic. Hardcore doesn’t hit much harder than this. —BR Their first long-player having been released only last summer, Whatever Brains served up their second in shortorder. This slightly shorter album is a more concentrated effort than its predecessor. Instead of serving a varied and daring assortment of styles, the band is intent on strengthening its bent and tangled guitar melodies and streamlining the scabrous post-punk they’ve ridden to regional acclaim. The trade-off does mean that LP No. 2 loses some irreverence and playfulness, but the more Whatever Brains focused approach serves the Brains well, overall. Their Whatever Brains strength has always been in toeing the line between snotty, (Sorry State) confrontational post-punk and infectious pop, and at this, their latest LP excels. —BR

On the Euro Road

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anni Iosello and Tim Hurley are the Marshall-based duo Sin Ropas; sometimes they moonlight as the backing band for Califone’s Tim Rutili, as they did this past November on a 10-day tour of Europe (Hurley and Rutili played together in Red Red Meat in the 90s). Iosello’s second as-yet-untitled collection of short stories includes artwork by Nate Northup and will be accompanied by the next Sin Ropas release. Iosello reported from the European front lines for Shuffle…

The nsider

traveling with dead men or hostages – Hurley is slumped forward in his seat with a coat over his head. Rutili is wedged between the passenger seat and the window. We’re exhausted and uncomfortable, but it’s sunny out, and there are deer and foxes in the fields along the road. Halfway through the journey, Stefan barks out that we are smack in the center of Prague – Wenceslas Square, and we all awaken to see the National Museum and the bright lights of the Charles River. Nov 22 Fluc, Vienna, Austria. It’s cold here and raining ice. The

Nov 17 Schipol Airport, Amsterdam. Rental car on the highway.

I’m crammed into the back seat, guitars in my lap, my head against the window. The car glides past square houses with pointy roofs. We have one jet-lagged day to prepare for our first show. None of us have played together since the last tour in August.

promoter, Peter (whose last name translates to “Nightfog”), is delightful, with the delicate manners of a slightly debauched aristocrat. He points out that the club, a renovated underground train station, is directly across from The Prater, the historical park in the center of Vienna. As we load in, we watch the giant Ferris wheel lighting up the rain.

Nov 18 We have good friends in Holland who let us store our gear in

their practice space. We huddle there together against the European cold and go over some songs. There is a single lamp and a glass door leading out to the garden where two fluffy bunnies romp in a cage. Nov 19 Our driver, Stefan, arrives. He’s dressed in layers of black with

soft black shoes and a black fanny pack. He explains that this pack is secured with a chain around his waist, the keys on a strap around his neck. These can be either signs of organization or of drunken, forgetful nights ahead. He drives us to De Melkweg in Amsterdam for our first show. We play to a hushed crowd, still and pensive. Nov 20 Cologne, Germany. We load into a club called King Georg.

The promoter directs us to the place we are to set up – a linoleum circle on the floor cuddled by booths and bordered by a staircase that leads down to the bathrooms. I feel like The Stones could stumble in at any moment. The place is packed when we start. We’re so close together that when Rutili starts singing, I realize that I can’t see his face, all I can see is his hair, glowing like a halo in the lights.

Nov 23 Ravenna, Italy. I’m behind my drums, filming both Tims

soundchecking. They are playing a Red Red Meat song. I know I’m supposed to be cool here on tour with people I’ve known for almost 20 years, but still, I can’t help it, For a moment I feel like I’m in a state of grace as the sound of Rutili’s and Hurley’s voices wash over me. I pull myself together when the soundman calls out “kick drum, per favore.” Nov 24 Zurich, Switzerland. It’s eerily perfect here. We are greeted at

sound check by three beautiful men who lead us to wine and cheese and carry our gear onto the stage. As we set up, lovely creatures fuss about us, directing lights, placing mics, delivering glasses of wine. The audience, too, is exquisite. We are about to be carried away by it all until we go to dinner and see a man waiting in line at the theater cafeteria, a small man painted red, with horns on his head, holding a pitchfork and a huge book. He sits at a table near ours and reads. I’m sure our names are in it, and those of the people of Zurich. Nov 25 Paris, France. Not an Eiffel Tower in sight. The croissants

really are incredible. Nov 21 Berlin, Germany. I’m feeling that weird tour lull– the

undertow of sleepless nights and too much alcohol – as we stop in a music store in Berlin before going to sound check. I see a wicker basket filled with little yellow whistles and just have to buy one – it’s the only thing I can think of that can maybe stir me awake before the show. I pipe away at it quietly in the back seat of the van – a shrill, happy little sound, like fairies. I’m sure I’m about to be punched.

Nov 26 The Botanique, Brussels, Belgium. We load in through a

conservatory – palm trees, hot wet heat, ponds of fish lining the walkway. We push a cart loaded with gear past three men in suits drinking beer from plastic cups. Five young boys pound the glass from the outside, like caged animals. I don’t want this to end, I would scream and crash through walls and drink pond water and climb jagged palm trees in an effort to make it last, but the tour ends tonight.

Nov 22 We have a long ride from Berlin to Vienna. Stefan drives while

we sleep. I wake up, look around and realize that it feels a little like

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Photo by Tim Rutili

Catch Danni Iosello's video journal of Sin Ropas' European road trip with Califone at the online version of The Insider at shufflemag.com

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