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Broken Crown Halo Available April 1st www.lacunacoil.it

! S I H T R E V O C DIS Augustines Augustines “With its open-armed energy and elegiac grace, Augustines marks a colossal leap forward for Votiv/Oxcart recording group Augustines – no mean feat considering the extraordinary power of their breakthrough 2011 debut, Rise Ye sunKen sHiPs. songs like “now You Are Free” and the plaintive “Walkabout” are both immediate and engaging, joining joyously unrestrained arrangements with singer/guitarist Billy McCarthy’s signature affective lyricism. Augustines marks a milestone on Augustines’ amazing journey, the work of a gifted band ascending to new heights while simultaneously grappling with their place in the universe.”

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WAke oWl tHe PRiVAte WORlD OF PARADise Wake Owl, 2014 JunO Award nominee for Breakthrough Artist of the Year and one of HuffingtonPost.com’s “20 Artists to start listening to in 2014,” release their debut full length album tHe PRiVAte WORlD OF PARADise, produced by Richard swift (tennis, Foxygen), on March 4th. the album features singles “Candy” and “letters,” which both give a taste of the album’s upbeat atmospheric vibe. Visit wakeowl.com for more info and a list of the Canadian cities where you can catch Wake Owl on tour in March.

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st. Vincent st. VinCent Critically acclaimed singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark (aka st. Vincent) returns with her self-titled 4th studio album. the album includes the singles “Birth in Reverse,” “Digital Witness” and the new ballad “Prince Johnny.” “some of the most entertainingly perverse electronic pop music likely to surface this year” 8/10 – uncut “Every song bashes together classic pop with new surprises…a brilliant record” 8/10 – Clash “It really does look like being one of the year’s landmarks” – the guardian “The most exciting thing about St. Vincent is not knowing what she’ll do with your mind when she has it” – nMe

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AmericAn Authors OH WHAt A liFe Brooklyn’s American Authors have exploded into being music’s new golden boys overnight…literally. if you haven’t yet heard of this pop-flavored alt rock four piece well then, prepare yourself, because that’s about to change… Offering up an emotional and propulsive mix of summery indie pop and meticulously crafted, commercial modern rock, the band fall somewhere in between the heady introspection of Alt-J, the arena-sized folk-rock of Mumford & sons, and the urban, heartfelt grandeur of Fun. their new single “Best Day of My life” can be heard on radio stations across the country, and their debut album OH WHAt A liFe is available now.

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Eight New Albums You Need…

semi Precious weAPoNs AViAtioN semi precious Weapons recently relocated from New york City to los Angeles where they began collaborating with grammy award-winning, multi-platinum, megahit maker “tricky” stewart (Beyoncé, rihanna, frank ocean) on new material, before signing to his new redZone Music label venture, redZone records. the band worked with tricky writing and recording, for much of 2012 and 2013, before putting the finishing touches on what the band calls “the album we had always hoped to make.” An evolution of sound, AViAtioN seamlessly blends the band’s dance punk and future-now rock approach with tricky’s powerful pop and urban influenced production. “Our goal for this new album was to just write the best songs we could, and have the sound be whatever it needed to be to serve each song,” says singer Justin tranter.

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DrAke Bell rEADy stEADy go

Aloe BlAcc lift your spirit

Thus owls turNiNg roCKs

Drake Bell is the most popular tV star in Nickelodeon’s history. But his talent goes way beyond acting. With music being his first love, Drake has just made the most rockin’ and exciting album of his career. Wait ‘til you hear this collection of melodic pop, and at the same time hard-hitting rock-n-roll, on his new record coming worldwide 2014. Drake’s millions of fans around the world (and many new ones about to come) will be very happy with what they hear. And so will you!

Aloe Blacc’s affecting voice, perceptive lyrics, and dapper sartorial flair are already familiar to music lovers around the world. the soulful singer-songwriter co-wrote and provided vocals for Avicii’s international hit “Wake Me up.” With previous overseas recognition, the California native has cast an eye toward expanding his phenomenal European success to North America as he releases his full length major label album debut with contributions from the likes of pharrell Willams and DJ Khalil. the first single “i’m the Man” has already taken over the radio airwaves after first going viral in a slew of television ads. Album also includes “love is the Answer,” “Can you Do this,” and an acoustic version of “Wake Me up.”

thus owls are a five-piece Montreal/stockholm band based around husband and wife duo Erika and simon Angell. the band originated in sweden as an outlet for Erika’s songs and unique vocal-style. she met simon by chance while the two were touring in Europe as part of different bands paired on the same bill. it wasn’t long before they were married, and making music together as thus owls. turNiNg roCKs is their third album. Both a scrapbook of memories and oral transmissions from an island in sweden, it’s a sonic experiment in tone and colour recorded in Montreal by a band clearly finding its footing.

“I want to sling a guitar over my shoulder and rock. So that’s what I did with this record.” -- Drake Bell “True to his roots, Bell delivers on something that defines originality...4 stars” -- Examiner “Unapologetic know-how in his delivery” -- ultimate guitar “McCartneyesque...with enchanting harmony vocals” -- AllMusic

Available April 22

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photo by danny north

Educated Unrest Kaiser Chiefs’ reinvigorated frontman learns that you’re only bored if you’re boring British alt-rockers Kaiser Chiefs burst onto the

U.K. scene in 2005 with snark-witted, firecracker debut Employment, which earned an NME Award, three Brit Awards and even a prestigious Mercury Prize shortlisting. And it’s not as if the band’s next three efforts were lackluster or forgettable. Far from it. In fact, 2007 followup Yours Truly, Angry Mob spawned number-one smash single “Ruby.” By 2008, though, the hits had stopped coming. Only now, in retrospect, can charismatic frontman Ricky Wilson see the problem clearly. “For a few years, personally, I’d gone off the radar, and I felt like I hadn’t achieved anything,” he says. “I’ve been in the wilderness. I’ve been boring.” He suddenly catches himself. “No, I’ll tell you what the word is: I’ve been comfortable.” When Wilson was a kid growing up outside of Leeds, his father used to kid him about his aversion to the nineto-five life, telling his son he’d never seen anyone work so hard at not finding a job. The singer dogmatically believed that he’d be a star someday. “And I got what I always wanted,” he says. “I was in a rock ‘n’ roll band, I was touring the world, I got it, it was given to me. I was happy. Comfortable. Lazy. I needed to get that hunger back. I needed something bad to happen.” He got his wish. In December of 2012, founding drummer and key composer Nick Hodgson announced via Twitter that he was leaving the group. “And I needed Nick—my best friend, the person I’ve never written a song without—to go away,” says Wilson. “Because you have to get to the point where things are really bad. That’s where the spark of creativity happens.” There’s no trace of complacency on Education, Education, Education & War (ATO), Kaiser Chiefs’ buoyant new post-Hodgson return, a record that comes out swinging with working-class anthem “The Factory Gates” and keeps landing social-commentary punches through “Cannons,” “Ruffians On Parade” and closing dirge “Roses.” Crooning like his life depended on it, Wilson shrewdly skewers post-Britpop England, sounding every bit as disenfranchised as your average unemployed lager lout, somberly drinking his dole money away at the local pub. “I was very unhappy when Nick left,” says Wilson. “But now? He did us the biggest favor ever, because we turned that around. We turned that negative into a positive.” Even before Kaiser Chiefs entered an Atlanta studio last year with producer Ben H. Allen—who promptly in-

formed them that they were under-rehearsed and had to approach Education with the same aggressive consistency the Clash employed on Combat Rock— Wilson was getting other shape-up messages from the universe. Previously, he’d been renowned as the artist who always replied no to any project he was pitched; he decided to start saying yes instead. So, when rock impresario Jeff Wayne approached him about appearing as the Artilleryman in a modern update of his classic 1978 concept album Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds—subtitled The New Generation—Wilson instantly agreed and tracked his performance. “And working on War Of The Worlds taught me another thing,” says Wilson. “Because I really had to fucking sing, you know? And it was hard. But for the first time ever, I thought, ‘Wow! I can actually do this!’ And then Jeff said, ‘Out of curiosity, would you want to do the stage show, as well?’ And again, I said yes. And there I was with this big hologram Liam Neeson (as an invasion-documenting journalist), acting and singing the songs in arenas in the U.K. and Europe. I learned so much from it, and it gave me a confidence I didn’t have before.” And the offers kept right on coming. This January, Wilson replaced the Script’s Danny O’Donoghue as a swivel-chaired coach on the reality show The Voice UK, working alongside will.i.am, Kylie Minogue and the legendary Sir Tom Jones. “Saying yes to things that scare the shit out of me is the only way I’ll grow,” says Wilson. And Jones has already taught him a few life lessons. “What I learned from him is, you work hard. If you want what you want, you work hard—it’s not gonna come along and bite you on the ass. There’s a lot of luck and timing, but the main thing is creating that luck and timing. And to do that, you have to put the fucking hours in.” What advice has Wilson given his Voice protégés? He laughs, “I think I got more out of it than they did. Because when I was turning around in the chair and looking at ’em, I saw the hunger in their eyes. It reminded me of something I’d lost along the way. And I thought, ‘Fuck. How could I have been so stupid?’” —Tom Lanham

Ritual Abuse The writing’s on the wall: Ricky Wilson may be a bit too superstitious Ricky Wilson isn’t guided by his say-yes concept alone. He’s also seriously superstitious. It started innocently enough, with simple rituals like saluting magpies in the wild, or placing his wristwatch in the same symmetrical pattern every evening on the nightstand. “It’s getting ridiculous now,” he says. “It’s not like I just do old superstitions. I make them up on a daily basis.” The man’s kookiest? “It sounds ridiculous, but you know your cell phone, when it says the time on a digital clock? If the numbers are the same, like 12:12 or 10:10 and I see that, I have to stare at it until it goes away,” he says. “You wouldn’t think you’d look at a clock that much at those times. But you do.” Wilson was even forced to put Scotch tape over the digital clock readout in his car. “But If I do hit a telephone pole, it’ll be good for record sales,” he jokes. “Everyone loves a dead rock star!” —T.L.

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Waste Management Emphysema, misanthropy and crummy hospital food can’t keep a good punk band OFF! Some artists deal with the subject of

mortality in delicate, reflective brushstrokes. OFF! bandleader Keith Morris confronts it roughly the same way a hungry pit bull meets a T-bone steak—with fang-gnashing ferocity. To wit: multiple compressed assaults from the band’s new sophomore salvo, Wasted Years (Vice), such as “Meet Your God,” “No Easy Escape,” “Time’s Not On Your Side,” “I Won’t Be A Casualty” and the 1:10-long kickoff single, “Void You Out,” a treatise on man’s ongoing inhumanity to man. Because, at 58, the Circle Jerks/Black Flag vet (who still maintains a spin-off combo dubbed Flag) has faced his own frailties, overcome most of them, and simply accepted—then soldiered on—with the rest. The dreadlocked, dry-witted proto-punker didn’t sense the dark theme during the writing and live-to-eight-track recording of Wasted Years. But he admits that he can clearly hear it now. Especially since he was seriously ill for its sessions. “We’d gone to South America two weeks before we tracked the album,” he says in a laconic drawl, just a few degrees less sneering than his singing voice. “And on the flight coming back, with all these people sneezing and hacking, I picked up some kind of lung infection. So, I’m coughing up phlegm and getting winded halfway through one of these minute-long songs, and there was something ridiculous about that. But I found out I

Flagged Content How Raymond Pettibon’s iconic OFF! artwork almost didn’t happen

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had emphysema. “ Suddenly the exuberant, hyperspeed project OFF! Morris had started in 2009 with Burning Brides guitarist Dimitri Coats, Redd Kross bassist Steven Shane McDonald and Rocket From The Crypt drummer Mario Rubalcaba wasn’t so much fun anymore. But the vocalist persevered, like he had through three recent diabetic comas. The third one last year forced the cancellation of OFF!’s West Coast tour. The first one occurred in Norway, where Morris had flown to play an outdoor festival with Turbonegro. When he touched down, he rehearsed so late that he couldn’t find any open restaurants where he could counteract his insulin shot. Well, he did find a 7-Eleven near his hotel, Morris amends, taking a Grampa Simpsonlengthy time to relate his yarn. “But they didn’t even have any microwave burritos,” he says. “They had some Norwegian equivalents to pasta and stew, but it all looked like … well, I’ve got a lawn out in front of my place in Los Feliz, and we have this new rash of self-entitled yuppie people walking their dogs, and their dogs shitting on our lawns. That’s what the stuff in the refrigerated showcase looked like—I thought, ‘I’m not eating that because I stepped in that somewhere!’” The hotel maid found him sprawled across the bed, unconscious, and the desk clerk phoned the paramedics. Morris woke up in a local university hos-

It’s no surprise that the Wasted Years cover sketch— depicting an aviator-shaded, cigarette-smoking Spicoli stoner, with the ironic quotation “I wish every boy was like my surfer boyfriend”—was done by OFF!’s go-to artist Raymond Pettibon, renowned for his earlier work with Black Flag. But what did come as a shock, Morris says, was what happened after they got his permission to reproduce the piece: “Suddenly, somebody posts a photo of the artwork on our Facebook page and tells us, ‘No, this artwork has already been used by another band.’” OFF! had to take the notice seriously, and pursue it through several legal channels. “So, we jumped

pital, where he stayed for seven days. Which made him even grouchier. “I mean, thank you to the fine citizens of Norway for their socialized medicine,” he says. “But boy, is their food horrible. They tried to serve me shrimp in a tube and this large gray cracker, like a saltine that had been sitting in some cupboard for two years. And my roommate in the hospital said, ‘Hey—are you gonna eat that?’ He got all the food they brought me.” Except the apple juice and candy bars. But it was the second coma that proved most life-changing. Granted, it was also a tad embarrassing—Morris had just flown home from Australia to have an insulin-leveling dinner with his significant other. “But one thing leads to another, and boyfriend and girlfriend are doing what they normally do, getting all lovey-dovey and squishy and mushy,” he says. “And I pass out after we get through, and in that process, I’m also slipping into a coma.” His lady called 911, threw open the bedroom drapes. “So, when I come to, the room is brightly lit, I have six dark figures standing over me, and I’m like, ‘OK—I’ve seen the light. Maybe this is that fabled light at the end of the tunnel!’” Now, the rocker checks his blood glucose levels three times a day, eats as healthy as possible and accepts as many outside assignments as he can, like the Gun Club cover he just recorded with Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer for a tribute album. But Wasted Years doesn’t only view mortality with disdain—it sees the world the same cynical way. “I just write lyrics about whatever affects me, whatever I see, things that I hear,” says Morris. “You turn on the news and it’s just one fucking huge parade of garbage. And that’s what fuels me—that’s what comes through in the lyrics. This world is fucked. And unless you’ve got a good chunk of dough and you’re able to provide for your kids, why would you even brings kids into this world?” —Tom Lanham

through all these flaming hoops, only to find out that the band that used the image didn’t get Raymond’s permission,” snarls Morris, who last October achieved another victory when a U.S. District Court judge ruled against Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, who was suing Flag for trademark infringement. “And the image that they used? They had an artist redo Raymond’s original piece!” So, the image stayed. “It’s a stoner surfer, and Steven and Mario and I grew up with those characters—people who are just stoned out of their minds,” says Morris. “So, that picture is totally appropriate.” —T.L.

photo by Steve Appleford

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A Perfect Storm Despite a sunny forecast, Cloud Nothings bring the thunder

It’s Saturday evening in the bohemian 18th

arrondissement of Paris, and the possibilities are endless for an able-bodied 22-year-old. “I might sit at home and watch a movie,” chuckles a soft-spoken Dylan Baldi, mastermind for Cloud Nothings. “I just bought some comics. Big night.” After two years of relentless touring behind 2012’s Attack On Memory, not to mention writing and recording a new album, you can forgive the singer/guitarist for taking a breather. And he’s doing just that, having decamped from his hometown of Cleveland to crash with his girlfriend in the City of Light. Not surprisingly, Baldi is in a good mental space these days, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to Cloud Nothings’ fourth record, Here And Nowhere Else (Carpark). “Yeah, it’s not happy-go-lucky carnival music,” says Baldi. “Lyrically, at least, it’s coming from a less dark kind of place. The last one, I’d been in the band for two or three years, and people were writing about us, but touring, we’d play to nobody. It would just get kind of depressing. Luckily, it kind of took off. Now I’m not necessarily thinking such depressing thoughts. But I still write the same songs, you know?”

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Actually, Baldi’s songwriting has evolved significantly since recording tracks in his parents’ basement circa 2009. Back then, Cloud Nothings was a one-man band, with Baldi playing caffeinated, fuzzed-out bedroom pop. A seismic shift occurred with the third record, however. Recorded with Steve Albini, Attack On Memory saw Baldi adding to the fold bassist T.J. Duke, drummer Jayson Gerycz and guitarist Joe Boyer (who has since left the band) for an album of ’80s-inspired indie punk. (Journalists have tried to hang the Nirvana label on Cloud Nothings, but Baldi has often cited the Wipers as primary inspiration.) Having garnered critical hosannas and a growing fan base, you might expect that the band would now pursue a more commercial path. “I don’t like anything with polished edges,” says Baldi. “If I made something like that, I wouldn’t be happy with it.” True to his word, Baldi ups the noise factor significantly on Here And Nowhere Else. Not surprisingly, the album was recorded in a little more than a week, live

in the studio, and with few overdubs. “We just kind of played ’em a bunch until they sounded good,” says Baldi. “Just record it once and get it over with.” In that same spirit, like Attack, the new record is brief—just eight songs. “A ninth one would just feel too long,” says Baldi. “Because all the songs sort of have a similar style. No one wants to listen to a 60-minute record. I don’t.” Still, for all its clatter, Here And Nowhere Else still displays Baldi’s gift for melody and a pop hook, even if these attributes are buried a little deeper in the urgent mix. Cloud Nothings will hit the road again this spring, but until then, you’ll find Baldi north of the Seine. “I don’t speak French, really,” says Baldi. “But other than that, everything’s nice. It’s a little more comfortable than Cleveland.” —Matt Ryan

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New York State Of Find Liam Finn’s view of Manhattan inspired the dark corners and intimate expanse of The Nihilist

Liam Finn could rightly be identified as a

world citizen. The New Zealand native was a globetrotting toddler, accompanying father Neil Finn on Crowded House tours, repeating the experience as a young adult with his own band, the renowned Betchadupa. To record FOMO, the sophomore follow-up to 2007 solo debut I’ll Be Lightning, Finn relocated to London, but moved to New York City three years ago after touring FOMO. “We found ourselves in New York, which is somewhere I’ve always dreamed of living,” says Finn, on a working holiday back home in New Zealand. “It’s really inspiring. Every time you leave the house, you feel like you’re in a movie, and it adds an element of surreality to your day, which I find is great for creativity. If anything, it kicks you up your ass to be better at what you do to be able to stand out.” If Finn’s third solo set, The Nihilist (Yep Roc), is any indication, consider his ass creatively kicked. The title track’s diary of debauched decadence is set to a soundtrack of Split Enz-ian art-rock chaos and Crowded House pop melodicism (a family birthright, after all), filtered through the loopy electronics that have progressively defined Finn’s solo explorations. Conversely, the album’s first single, the subversively titled “Snug As Fuck,” is a slice of Beatlesque pop polished

to a contemporary Broken Bells shimmer. The Nihilist runs the gamut of Finn’s genetic and experiential influences, and reflects the reality behind his New York fantasy. Finn was luckless in securing a rehearsal/ studio space when a real estate agent connected him with a group of guys who had rehabbed a warehouse for their own studio and had an underutilized room to rent. Finn converted it into a studio/performance space where he has established a weekly residency, dubbed Murmurations. The space proved divinely inspirational. “It was almost too good to be true,” says Finn. “It had the big windows that I’d dreamt of. It ticked all the boxes. That’s where I wrote and recorded the majority of the record.” Starting with a personal goal of spending more time on songwriting before hitting the studio, Finn was captivated by the Manhattan skyline visible through his big windows. That view steered him in previously unexplored directions. “I worked a lot of nights, and I was looking out these windows at Manhattan, and I got obsessed with this concept of it being this vibrating, bubbling dimension of endless possibilities,” says Finn. “Every time you make a decision, it’s a combination of your consciousness and your subconscious that makes it. I guess I explored the idea of

In With The Finn Crowd Liam Finn is the latest contributor to his family’s extraordinary musical legacy, stretching back to his uncle Tim’s formation of Split Enz in 1972. Since then, the Finns have directly created dozens of albums and produced, collaborated and appeared on dozens more, making them iconic superstars in their native New Zealand and wildly popular worldwide. Neil Finn (father) Split Enz (1977-1984), Crowded House (1986-1996, 2006-present), solo (1997-present), Pajama Club (2011-present), duo with Paul Kelly (2013) Finn Fact: Neil’s charity projects have included the Rock Party (for the National Campaign Against Drug Abuse) and 7 Worlds Collide (for OXFAM).

the amount of different realities you could be living on the inside, and maybe it’s like this Manhattan-like world. I could let my mind go into some dark places and then be like, ‘Well, that’s probably happening somewhere in Manhattan.’ So, it’s just living vicariously through the subconscious.” The Nihilist also represents the sum total of Finn’s studio education. On I’ll Be Lightning, he worked solely in the analog realm and largely alone, while FOMO found him embracing the possibilities inherent in the digital realm. Finn discovered a way to execute The Nihilist as an analog/digital mash-up. “It was definitely a combination of analog and digital that made this record,” says Finn. “I needed to realize that I wasn’t bad at Pro Tools, and it is just a tool, and it can be used as complicated or as simply as you want to use it. Now I’ve become sort of a nerdy sound scientist.” In addition, Finn combined a live-in-studio performance vibe with a more thoughtfully produced approach, positioning The Nihilist at the intersection of demo primitivism and studio sophistication. “I don’t normally like to demo because I get too attached,” he says. “So, this time I forced myself to demo, taught them to the band and tracked eight of the 12 songs fully live as the band. But immediately, I missed the spontaneity and uniqueness of the sounds. In the studio, you can quite often sacrifice the originality because engineers— as much as I love them and as much as they are all-knowing—there is something lost in that expertise. I ended up with songs that sounded almost finished, but they didn’t sound like what I was picturing in my head. Then came the agonizing next six months of using the live tracks and keeping the energy of the performance, but turning it into something I was imagining. It was hard, but incredibly exciting and vindicating once I reached those goals.” —Brian Baker

Tim Finn (uncle) Split Enz (1972-1984), solo (1983-present), Crowded House (1990-1992), Finn Brothers (1995-2005) Finn Fact: June 5 is Tim Finn Day in Pittsburgh. Sharon Finn (mother) Pajama Club (2011-present) Finn Fact: Longtime session vocalist Sharon handcrafted the stage chandeliers for Crowded House’s Everyone Is Here tour. Elroy Finn (brother) The Tricks (2006) Finn Fact: Elroy served as live guitarist for Crowded House when he was 18, and has drummed on Liam’s records and solo tours. —B.B.

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Core Strengthening Jessica Lea Mayfield on the joys of Stone Temple Pilots and their lead guitarist, Dean DeLeo

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“The first song I ever learned on guitar was Stone Temple Pilots’ ‘Creep.’ When I was 11 years old, I begged my brother to learn it and show it to me. Dean DeLeo’s guitar playing is part of what makes STP one of the most distinctive bands in history. I don’t think there will ever be another band like them. I’ve absolutely been inspired by him, even just in the way his guitar playing makes me feel when I hear it. He’s so fucking

fun to listen to. “It amazes me how many people dog STP and cannot see that they’re a band that revolves around musicianship. I think a lot of people find it hard to like the best of the best: Jeff Gordon got a lot of haters for ... winning a lot of races? I like awesome shit, and I don’t care if people think I’m uncool because I don’t exclusively root for the underdogs.”

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Alternative Medicine Lapsed folkie Jessica Lea Mayfield finds a new muse in ’90s grunge Although she’s been performing for two-thirds of

her 24 years, Jessica Lea Mayfield is starting over with third album Make My Head Sing…(ATO). Mayfield joined her parents’ bluegrass band when she was eight. In her teens, she sang Foo Fighters covers at coffeehouses in and around her home of Kent, Ohio, and did some recording with her brother, privately releasing an album under the alias Chittlin’ in 2007. That led to recording with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and her official debut, With Blasphemy So Heartfelt, which came out in 2008, when she was 19. That well-received album presented Mayfield as a moody, rootsy singer/songwriter of precocious talent, confirmed by its follow-up, 2010’s Tell Me, also produced by Auerbach. But then Mayfield became disillusioned. “I was touring for Tell Me, and in one of the most awkward stages of my life,” says Mayfield. “The age when everyone doesn’t really know who they are, when you’re in your early 20s. I was out there, and I had to kind of front. I didn’t even know what kind of clothes I liked to wear, but I was out there every single night, just trying to be myself and not even really sure who that was. It just got real tiring. I realized at one point that this isn’t the kind of music that I would put on and listen to.” Mayfield considered giving up on music altogether. She married fellow musician Jesse Newport, and they settled in Kent. Newport was eager was to record with her, but she had little interest. “We got married, and I was on the downspin from Tell Me,” she says. “He was like, ‘Let’s just record for fun,’ and I would be like, ‘I fucking hate music. I don’t want to play anymore. I give up.’ I want to have an old folks’ home for animals, anything. I was so done. I was so fucking bored. I like all kinds of music, but I took the wrong pill or something and went down the folk alley. Now I feel like this record is the first record that I ever made. I started really getting into playing guitar, and the record kind of just wrote itself.” Make My Head Sing… will surprise listeners who expect a third set of Americana-style folk rock. Produced by Mayfield and Newport, it’s a grungy power-trio album that places Mayfield’s calm voice in a squall of her elec-

tric guitar. The crackling, distorted guitar line of “Oblivious” opens the record, and it sounds like a declaration of purpose: This is hard rock, not Americana. Although it includes a few restrained moments that recall her past work—the reverberating “Standing In The Sun,” wistful love song “Seein* Starz”—the dominant tone is heavy and aggressive. “What got me into music was ’90s alternative, bands like the Stone Temple Pilots,” says Mayfield. “I never got big into learning all the guitar tones that I loved so dearly, but now I’ve realized that I can make those sounds in my pajamas in my house, and it’s really become a passion of mine and something I really fucking love.” She calls the album “a tribute to what I sit around and listen to.” The reference points are bands such as Soundgarden, Queens Of The Stone Age, Nirvana and Foo Fighters. Without slavishly imitating them, Mayfield has mastered their visceral energy and metallic power chords. It’s also ominous and eerie on songs like “Party Drugs,” the first she recorded for the album, which she calls, “just me and guitar and getting into making things sound fucked up.” Mayfield still professes a fondness for the old-time country of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, but claims, “there’s not a lot of new music that I like.” She’s a purist and has little patience for electronics. “I get so pissed off when I go out, if I’m watching a band at a festival and I hear things that I don’t see onstage,” she says. “I don’t want to hear this magical computer shit. I just want to see a band: I want to go to a show and I want to see a fucking band.” For this record, Mayfield also wanted to be in control, to be the one taking the chances and making the decisions, to create something that reflected who she is now. “I’m not going sing about the shit that a teenage girl would sing about—I’ve got to make something that’s a little more coherent with my life,” she says. “I turned 24 years old in August. This is the year I’ve figured out that life is about working hard and enjoying the work that you do. If you’re not doing those two things, then you’re doing something wrong.” —Steve Klinge

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photo by Madison photo Rowley bY ?

Stoned And Rethroned Eclectic fearlessness ignites country journeyman Stone Jack Jones’ triumphant return By the time he reached 55, Stone Jack Jones had

spent a lifetime as a carnie, ballet dancer, lute player and hundreds of other things, trying his luck from Buffalo Creek to Charleston to Boston to New York to Fort Worth to Atlanta to Nashville. Mostly, he made music—even if it was just playing on the street or at a nearly empty open mic. Then in 2003, he met Roger Moutenot, who’d engineered albums for They Might Be Giants, Yo La Tengo and John Zorn. And all of a sudden, something happened. “Our wives knew each other, and Roger needed a temporary place to mix,” Jones says from his Nashville home. “I had a studio—it didn’t have any recording equipment, but I call it a studio, and we agreed to share the space. That first night, he walked in while I was playing, and just stood there. He goes, ‘I thought you played country music.’ And I said, ‘Well, I thought I did, too.’ And he goes, ‘I don’t think that’s country. Let’s try recording it.’” So they did. The song was “Johnny Boy,” about a guy looking for a fix, with lines like “I was simply dreaming I was dreaming in a dream.” It started with Jones singing and strumming acoustic guitar, but by the time they were finished, there were thick, dark layers of guitar noise on top of a fuzzed-out organ, wobbling bass, echoing drums, disembodied voices and a high hat that sounded like an alarm clock in the middle of a hangover. Like “Venus In Furs,” if Lou Reed had grown up in a holler. Or “Suzanne,” if Leonard Cohen’s father had been a coal miner instead of a clothing salesman. “It felt very natural,” says Jones, whose third album, Ancestor (Western Vinyl), keeps working that same vein. “Roger started recording me as though we were live. He has an incredible amount of energy, so if he had a free night, we’d work from nine ’til three in the morning, usually one song a night. It was very spontaneous—more like playing than recording. I felt comfortable working with Roger, and when I heard a song coming out of the speakers, it wasn’t embarrassing. It didn’t sound like a second-rate country singer; it sounded special.” His first two albums, Narcotic Lollipop and Bluefolk,

were pretty damn special, but hardly anybody heard either one. With Ancestor and his upcoming 66th birthday, Jones is hoping that’s about to change. It’s certainly the best of the three, with a deeper sense of home and a sweeter, simpler sadness in the songwriting. On “Joy,” he’s dreaming about the afterlife; on “Jackson,” he’s remembering a better time; on “Black Coal,” he’s thinking about his father, a fourth-generation coal miner who passed away three years ago. “It was an actually an old song I found myself singing around the house after he died,” says Jones. “It just came back to me and took me over, just out of respect. That was in 2010, when I started on this. Every record has to start from something, and this one started with a string band, just thinking about vibrating strings and the stories they tell. I went in with the bare bones, let myself feel that Appalachian string band, and have it grow from there.” With Jones multi-tracking on acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, Fender bass, Dobro, harmonica, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer, piano and tambourine, Ancestor doesn’t sound like his father’s folk music. (Or his father’s marching band.) On top of that, there’s e-bow, organ, vibraphone, glockenspiel and high-strung guitar by Lambchop’s Ryan Norris; Casio, Moog, Roland and toy piano by Moutenot; drums processed through a telephone mic; cocktail-party sounds from Nashville and Berlin; and “little blips of weirdness” by Ben Smythe. Pile them all together, slow the tempo down to an opiate nod, and you get a roomful of ambient noise surrounding what Jones calls “a simple, confessional song, humbly presented.” “The songs aren’t very different from the ones I wrote 30 or 40 years ago,” he says. “The clothing on it—the way it’s dressed sonically—has changed. But underneath, the structure of the songs and the attitude in the songs goes back to very simple country songs, or bluegrass, or old-timey—that ethnic stuff I grew up around. That’s where I started, and I think I’m still there.” —Kenny Berkowitz

Soul Brothers Stone Jack Jones rhapsodizes about his lifelong fascination with Lou Reed Like the other 30,000 people who originally bought 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, Stone Jack Jones was inspired to start a band of his own. But first, he needed to meet the man. “I heard Lou Reed pretty early on, and went to New York City to find him, wandered around forever and ever,” says Jones. “I was looking for the Factory, just like a dumb kid, and kept asking people, but no one knew where it was. I thought it was on 27th Street or something, but I don’t know if I was even vaguely in the right part of town.” (He was 20 blocks away.) “‘Venus In Furs’ is still one of my all-time favorite songs—it transports me, makes time, fear, everything disappear. It’s a beautiful phenomenon, like there’s an atomic chain reaction that started with him, and I think that’s the way our souls work. Like there’s a piece of Lou Reed’s soul in my soul.” —K.B.

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on the record

sounded under-produced in comparison to everything now. That means my old Bowie albums, the Stones. That reinformed where I am now. Plus, I really didn’t want to sound as if I was trying to be hip, trying to compete with the kids. I wanted something that sat easily with me.

A C o n v e r s at i o n W i t h

Boy George

In his time, Boy George has been as notorious for his offstage exploits as he was admired for his onstage conquests; as famed for his style choices, pithy commentary and hedonistic lifestyle as his gorgeous smoky vocals and soulful songcraft, be it on his own or with the pop reggae-fied Culture Club. Since divesting himself from the Club in 1986 (with whom he’s reunited for shows, a 1999 album and, surprisingly, 2014 writing sessions), George has concentrated on several solid solo efforts, occasional guest spots (e.g., Mark Ronson) highlighting his lustfully smooth vocals and a high-profile house-music DJ career. Now this Nichiren Buddhist is focused on his first full-length in 18 years, This Is What I Do (Very Me/Kobalt), and a tour where he’ll strip the hits and show off the power of his lustrous voice. —A.D. Amorosi It’s no secret you’ve been through ups, downs and nefarious stuff. Without scandalizing, does any of the trouble you’ve gotten into seem ridiculously silly in retrospect? Well, answering that question just drags it on. Everything you go through hopefully educates and changes who you are. I was thinking about this randomly, you know, as I’m someone who can think creatively, yet when it comes to my own personal development, it sometimes takes me a really long time to get it. I can be extremely slow to find out when something isn’t working. It’s taken me the best part of 52 years to approach sanity and maturity—how I feel now. I don’t know if I necessarily had to go through what I did to get here now, but I do feel in charge. That’s a godsend, especially considering that it all is behind me and feels like a myth. I did it all, but when you’re going through madness, you’re removed—fortunately—until much later. I lived in London at the start of your singing career and have seen you DJ. Is there the same sense of contentment through spinning that you got through live music? Absolutely. DJing has become an amazing

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second career. It’s enabled me to go forward. You can’t live in the past. A lot of my contemporaries have had to keep going back to what they were to survive. Luckily, I haven’t had to do that, which is very positive for me. When I talk about music that I like, I’m normally talking about dance music, as I have no idea at all who is on the pop charts. I know the obvious ones—the Beyoncés, the Gagas—but my focus isn’t theirs. If it’s new, I’m thinking dance stuff. I’m as excited about DJing as I have been about anything else I’ve done. Plus, It’s an interesting time for it, especially considering its popularity in America now. You guys gave us dance music in the first place. Now, it’s not in its original form. It’s more European, but still young kids are looking at their dance heritage and discovering new things and new old things. The sonic and lyrical vibe of your new album is more casual than slick, more happy than tortured. Clue me in to its relaxed vibe. Thankfully, I’m not that tortured soul to start. I went back to the music I truly loved in the ’70s—albums I put on when I’m feeling melancholy—which meant records that

Without sounding too precious here, there’s a holy presence throughout several of the new album’s songs. Do you feel as if your particular belief system—the specifics of Nichiren Buddhism—fueled that? I think that I have always been interested and inspired in faith, religion, and the power they hold, even if we reject those things. I grew up in a Catholic family, but I was never actually forced to believe in anything. We were always allowed to make up our own minds. I claim Buddhism as my own, but my mother would tell me that I’m a Catholic, and I never had a problem with that. I have always been fascinated about the fear that people attach to Catholicism, the beneficence of it all. For a writer, it’s a rich subject. My own kind of faith is open, without fixed beliefs. I have an open mind as to who and what God is or can be. It’s always more of a question than a fixed view. I actually sort-of believe in everything, as no one can prove or disprove anything definitively. I won’t even try to argue any of this with people—it’s all possible. I saw Culture Club the last time you got together. I’m certain the reunion bookers must throw outrageous numbers at you, but I have a funny feeling that you would choose to not move backward. True? Yes, but oddly enough, I’m writing with the band again next week, which does not mean, or entail, moving backward. We’re moving forward. If we do choose to do something in the future, it will be based upon what we do now, as opposed to remaining in the past. We’ve written a bit already, and next week I’ll be writing in Los Angeles with Roy (Hay, Culture Club guitarist and composer), so something is in the cards, but who’s to say what? When I do my solo shows, I do the old songs—not exclusively, but I do them. When I go to see Prince or Bowie, I want to hear the old songs. It’s only natural, a respectful thing because you want your fans to go home with a smile on their face. People love my old songs. So do I. But you have to move away from nostalgia. Nostalgia is something that you have to keep in check, or it can rupture everything new that you hope to achieve. What I wanted to do with this new album of mine is a reflection of who I am at 52, not who I was 30 years ago.

photo by dean stockings

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Observe And Report Futurist noise-folkie EMA hacks and slashes preconceptions With the success of her debut album as

EMA, Erika M. Anderson began to feel that she was losing control of her image. She was grateful for the overwhelmingly positive reception of 2011’s Past Life Martyred Saints, but felt ambivalent about the attention. She began thinking about the relationship between privacy and identity in the information age; she read William Gibson’s 1984 prescient cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. Those ideas crept into the songs she began writing. “They know about the things you do/They know more of it than you do,” she sings on “Neuromancer.” “There should be a law about it/when they can take videos of you,” she sings on “3Janes.” Those lines and others on The Future’s Void (Matador/City Slang) sound like they could be written in response to the headlines about Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks and mass identity theft. But they weren’t. “I didn’t set out to do something topical, at all,” she says. “But I feel like now those things are almost everywhere; it’s kind of happened. I don’t know if it’s a zeitgeist thing or collective unconscious or what. When I first started writing these things, I was kind of embarrassed to be writing about them. These were very real feelings that I was having, and I was really hesitant to share any of them, or I was embarrassed or ashamed about some of these feelings. But I’ve found that if something touches you that emotionally, especially if you’re

under the influence with EMA

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Cyberpunk Film And Fiction

scared that you made it, it usually means that it’s going to touch people or be effective.” The songs on The Future’s Void are sharper and tighter than on her debut, with more electronic textures and more aggressive percussion. It’s also more diverse, from what she calls the “meta-grunge” of “So Blonde” to the elegiac “Dead Celebrity” to the widescreen electro-pop of “Solace.” It’s a fearless album, in the tradition of PJ Harvey, but with a sly, knowing sense of humor, too. “I like putting people a little bit out of their comfort zone,” she says. “We’ve been exposed to music and pop culture for so long that almost within the first four bars of something, you can be like, ‘I know how this song is going to go, I know how I read this, I know all the trappings that come with it.’ I kind of like things that make you wonder, ‘Is she serious? Is this funny? What is happening?’ You have to take an extra second to make up your own mind. You can’t rely on previous tropes to tell you how you think about it.” —Steve Klinge

“Right now I am super-feeling cyberpunk film and fiction. Most of it was written 30 years ago, but it’s all coming true now, and it’s fascinating.”

Olympia, Wash.

“Living in the Northwest, I’ve been inspired by the spirit of Olympia, Wash., and K Records/Kill Rock Stars, in particular. I’ve had Don’t Tell Me Now by the Halo Benders on repeat.”

Sticking It To The One Percent

“I’m not talking about successful entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, business people. I’m talking about plutocrats who avoid taxes and unfairly influence politics. Awareness is spreading about income inequality, and I’m optimistic that changes can be made.”

photo By alessandro simonetti

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Brother Apart Four years after a split with his siblings, Simone Felice finds his solo sweet spot Simone Felice has always had an affinity

for losers. “I grew up with a lot of them, and I’m proud to say that I’ve been one of them,” says the 37-year-old singer/songwriter/ multi-instrumentalist.

under the influence with Simone

Felice

photo By Tajette O’Halloran

Just back from chopping wood to heat the home he shares with his wife, Jessie Lee, and three-year-old daughter Pearl at the base of New York’s Catskill Mountains, Felice is explaining the inspiration behind “Molly-O!” “She

Violent Femmes Violent Femmes

“This was my favorite band when I was a kid in the late ’80s. I’d write the lyrics in spray paint on the wall of an abandoned church we’d break into, congregate, worship a Ouija board and smoke cheap cigars. This winter, I found my cassette tape and played both sides alone by the fire for the first time in 20 years. Holy shit!”

was this character in The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, about these addicts in Chicago,” Felice says of the ebullient first single from Strangers (Dualtone), the confident follow-up to his patchy-yet-promising 2012 debut. “This tragic angel has been in my heart for long time, and I finally found the melody and inspiration to breathe life into her.” Strangers is hardly the work of a loser. A minor folk masterpiece that echoes the measured beauty of Jim Croce’s quieter work, it features guest appearances from several of Felice’s well-connected pals, including the Lumineers’ Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites, and drummer Zack Alford (David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen). Though littered with the autobiographical detritus of poverty, abandonment, addiction and death, its 10 songs—each tightly focused and simply, classically melodic—are a celebration of life. Felice almost lost his four years ago, when a congenital heart ailment prompted emergency surgery. On tour with his siblings in altroots outfit the Felice Brothers, the drummer passed out while negotiating a set of stairs in Italy. “I flew home the next day,” he says. “And they rushed me to Albany Medical Center, where they basically said, ‘There’s no medical explanation why you’re still alive; you need emergency heart surgery tomorrow.’ It had gotten to the point where I was only getting about 10 percent of my blood flow.” Two days later, doctors replaced a calcified aortic valve with a mechanical version, and Felice made a full recovery. The brush with death was enough to compel him to go it alone. “On the new album’s quieter songs—like ‘The Best That Money Can Buy’—you can hear my valve tick on and off,” he says. “We couldn’t dampen the sound.” —Hobart Rowland

Pete Seeger “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

“Like everything he turned his hand to, like every song he sang, it was for the people, the community, the Hudson River. He never gave up on the thought of a better world, splitting his own firewood into his 10th decade on planet earth. His is a fire that can never be put out, a flame imperishable.”

Big Star “Thirteen”

“The recording, the arrangements, the harmonies and, most of all, the distillation of the lyrics. We’re all 13 when we close our eyes, listen and let go … awkwardly and painfully in love.”

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Gentlemen Broncos Riffs speak louder than words for the country-rock upstarts of Whiskey Myers The good ol’ boys in Whiskey Myers like to

play a couple hundred shows a year, but they don’t like to plan too much, or think too much, or talk too much. Describing their sound on Early Morning Shakes (Wiggy Thump), singer/ guitarist Cody Cannon gets as far as “dirty” before he runs out of words. “Just dirty,” he says again. “That’s it.” So, we talk about how the band—Cannon, guitarist Cody Tate, guitarist John Jeffers, drummer Jeff Hogg and bassist Gary Brown— is named after a fighting chicken. How the boys grew up on Skynyrd and Hank, Jr. How

under the influence with Gary

Brown

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Southern rock

surprised they are, because they went into the studio to record a couple of songs, and stayed long enough for a whole album. How it takes Cannon five minutes to write a song, except the title track, which didn’t take any time at all, because he was standing onstage hung over, and his hands were shaking and he opened his mouth and the words just poured out: “I been out praying for sunshine, all I see is pouring rain/I been out praying for good times, and all I get is more pain/There’s a monkey on my back, got some habits that I can’t break/So, I’m out standing in the sunrise

“There’s a lot of good music coming out lately, and we’ve been finding inspiration in the Cadillac Three and Blackberry Smoke. It’s good to see that other musicians are thinking along the same lines as us.”

Jägermeister and Red Bull

“To have an occasional Jägerbomb before a show kind of takes the edge off.”

with a case of the early morning shakes.” To me, that sounds a little like growing up, reaching for something deeper than their second album, where the songs were more about the night before than the morning after. Cannon isn’t buying it. “Man, I don’t know, like, if we’re maturing,” he says. “I think we’re getting better at our craft. I think we got something right on this record, the sound we’ve been looking for. I don’t know, man—we’re just playing music. Being in the moment. Doing what we love.” —Kenny Berkowitz

God

“We always have a prayer before we go onstage. So, while we’re playing, and there are all these people in front of us, we can feel like we’re on our own little island, which is God’s way of quieting everything around us.”

photo By Gary and Kaysie Dorsey / Pixel Peach Studio

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Zeroes To Heroes Philly heavy-hitters Nothing are more than just metalgaze “It sounds like God falling from the sky—it’s

just the loudest thing ever.” Domenic “Nicky” Palermo is on the phone from Philadelphia, trudging through the snow on a beer run (“It’s my day off, I’m starting early”) when MAGNET calls. Palermo’s band Nothing has just returned from tour, and it’s gearing up for the release of Relapse debut Guilty Of Everything, an album as beguiling as it is infectious, as corporeal as it is ethereal. Lazy journalists will likely slap the “shoegaze” tag on Guilty and move along, but closer in-

under the influence with NICKY

PALERMO

photo By shawn brackbill

spection reveals an LP that is daring, heavy and dangerous, despite its gauzy veneer. “Since the beginning, our way of staying a punk-rock band, our way of still just being like, ‘Fuck off,’ is just playing as loud as we fucking can,” says Palermo. It is this punk-rock attitude that pushes Guilty beyond the pack of second-string Bloody Valentines and puts the band closer to the riot-provoking feedback squalls of the early Jesus And Mary Chain. Guilty rides a line between the beautiful and the ugly, between lightness of heaven and

Adderall

“I would wake up every day and steal my lady’s Adderall, and me and Brandon [Setta] would dump it in our coffee, and chain-smoke cigarettes and write riffs. And at seven o’clock, we start drinking boxed red wine so we’d be able to sleep. Then wake up and do it all again the next day.”

heaviness of hell. It’s a tension that seems unlike that of many of the band’s peers, a tension that keeps listeners on edge right until the moment of release, then drops them through the infinite vastness of space. And at the very heart of Guilty, beyond the dynamic interplay and mountains of fuzz, are songs that burrow into your ear and cycle through your head until it’s effectively, well, nothing. The buzzsaw riffs and laconic vocals of “Bent Nails,” the pummeling cascade of “B&E” and the title track’s shift from pastoral to conflagrant are so defiantly beautiful and deceptively alluring that they could be described as nothing less than punk as fuck. —Sean L. Maloney

Inebriation

“I’d rather do this than real work, so there’s always that. But it can definitely be aggravating; we’d start arguing about what should be where, how things should transition. You start getting all fucked up on Adderall and drinking, and you become this tone-pussy. You realize when you’re fucking playing that you can’t even tell what’s going on.”

Tones

“Thinking about some of those conversations we were having, there’s definitely some things I would have done differently—I mean, I couldn’t even tell the difference, know what I mean? You get stuck worrying about little things. And we were really particular about a lot of the tones from track to track.”

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c•l•a•s•s•i•c•s t h e

m a k i n g

o f

S l i n t ’s

spiderland

story by nick green he idea that slint remains part

of the cultural conversation is mindblowing. Admittedly, Spiderland was a crucial linchpin in the genre that eventually became “post-rock,” and its loud/quiet/loud dynamism certainly proved inspirational for Rodan and PJ Harvey, continues to reverberate in the work of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and serves as the practical template for Louisville’s Temporary Residence Ltd. label. However, back in 1991, the only guy who had any sense of the importance of what Slint had created was Steve Albini, who awarded Spiderland “10 fucking stars” in an eerily prescient review in Melody Maker, and suggested, “Play this record and kick yourself if you never got to see them live. In 10 years, you’ll lie like the cocksucker you are and say you did anyway.” Of course, by the time Touch And Go released Spiderland in 1991, Slint had already broken up. The band spent every last dime of its recording budget tracking and mastering songs over two successive weekends at River North Recorders in Chicago in August 1990, then blew through its entire promotional budget remastering a pair of tracks in October. Ardent fans had to wait until 2005 (or 2007) to see anything from Spiderland played live. According to singer/guitarist Brian McMahan, “Sales were almost nonexistent. People just didn’t hear Spiderland. It was kind of let go into a vacuum.” Nevertheless, in an odd turn of events, Spiderland recouped Touch And Go’s initial investment in 1993, and the members of Slint began to receive modest royalty checks—in 2014, the album remains one of the label’s most consistent-selling releases. It’s not as if Slint was a well-known commodity before Spiderland. The band essentially released its previous fulllength Tweez by itself (through friend Jennifer Hartman), and it was an insular affair: The songs were all named after the band members’ parents, as well as drummer Britt Walford’s pet dog, Rhoda. Tweez was jagged and primordial, with sketches of songs, lyrics culled from in-studio conversations and—allegedly—spliced audio from a tape the wry teenagers had made of themselves defecating. Tweez is an album that entertains imperfections, and then-bassist Ethan Buckler was so alienated by the experience of making the record that he promptly quit the band. needle

“When we were working on Tweez, Ethan and I had a lot of serious conversations about the sound of the band—we wanted there to be clean guitars and a truly organic sound,” says Walford. “I think Ethan felt like the band’s vision was steamrolled in the studio, and that Slint was heading in a direction that he didn’t enjoy. It really wasn’t personal, from my point of view. He was probably right that the band was kind of blown away and enthralled by Big Black and Steve Albini, and perhaps overly influenced by that sound on Tweez.” Guitarist David Pajo recruited his former bandmate Todd Brashear to replace Buckler, even though Brashear—a self-described “Slint superfan”—had never played bass before. Slint toured a little bit in support of Tweez (there’s a cool cover of Neil Young’s guitar geek favorite “Cortez The Killer” on the new Spiderland boxed set to represent that era), and that’s where some of the songs on Spiderland began to take shape. When Touch And Go head honcho Corey Rusk extended an offer for Slint to make a full-length follow-up, the four band members mutually decided to take the year off from college, work through the material as much as possible before entering the studio, and spend the rest of the time touring to support the album in the U.S. and Europe. But Spiderland was really birthed in the basement of Walford’s parents’ house, over a threemonth period in the summer of 1990. McMahan acknowledges that there was room for “beer drinking, a fair amount of psychedelic drugs and a lot of stupid male bonding,” but as you could guess from the delicate, layered approach of Spiderland, all of the band members were unified by a compulsive work ethic. According to Pajo, “Nobody felt weird about spending hours trying to figure out a three-second transition. If we didn’t finish it one day, we’d go back to it the next. There was literally no concept of time in that basement.” “It was liberating to take the year off and practice three to five hours a night for five days a week,” says Walford. “When you’re doing something, and you increase the frequency with which you’re doing it, you fall into this sort of groove where what you’re doing keeps getting better through sheer repetition. Aside from ‘Don, Aman,’ which I was still tinkering with and hadn’t presented to the rest of the band, everything was worked through. We had a lot of momentum heading into the studio.” Discounted studio time came courtesy of McMahan’s day job at River North Recorders, a high-end jingle studio in downtown Chicago that mainly operated during regular business hours. The band took possession of the space on a Friday night and worked around the clock until

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“Nobody felt weird about spending hours trying to figure out a threesecond transition. If we didn’t finish it one day, we’d go back to it the next. There was literally no concept of time in that basement.” —david pajo

Monday morning, then returned to the studio to track vocals and mix the record the following weekend. Brian Paulson—who the band knew from his work with Squirrel Bait offshoot Bastro—drove down from Minnesota each weekend to man the boards. By all accounts, it was a tense, pressure-filled affair: Walford set everyone else in Slint on edge by introducing “Don, Aman” at the last minute, and McMahan reportedly asked that the lights be turned off in the studio to calm his nerves while recording the vocals for “Good Morning, Captain.” “I was really embarrassed whenever someone came to visit us in the studio,” says Pajo. “It always happened when we were doing something that was so boring that they’d be like, ‘Is this the record that you’re making?’ Jennifer Hartman showed up when we were listening back to a recording of ‘Don, Aman,’ and she asked us if we were making a new-age record! I also remember that Britt spent a lot of time tuning his drums to A when we did ‘For Dinner…’ and I was looking at the clock the entire time. In hindsight, I’m really glad that he did, because I can totally hear it now—it’s in pitch with the chord.” “There are still plenty of records that don’t use digital editing and click tracks, but it’s kind of cool to think back on how we made the record—we just went in there and played it and did a few overdubs later,” says Brashear. “That’s probably why Spiderland has the vibe it has; with Britt, you don’t really need a metronome. And, yeah, we were all feeling pressure because time was so limited, but we were all prone to thinking about stuff too much, anyway. If we had an unlimited budget for the record, it probably never would’ve come out. We would never have been able to leave it alone.” Spiderland is meticulously sequenced, and was always intended by the band to be experienced on vinyl, with a break in the middle to flip the record and cleanse the listener’s palate. Side one opens in a warm, triumphant fashion with the major chords of “Breadcrumb Trail,” segues into the album’s most straightforward “rock” song (“Nosferatu Man”) and closes with Walford and Pajo’s pas de deux “Don, Aman.” Side two, by contrast, is all about abstraction: Slint

keeps things (relatively) loose on “Washer” and “For Dinner…,” then builds toward a maximum crescendo on “Good Morning, Captain.” Everything about Spiderland—from McMahan’s plaintive vocals to the extremely iconic album art (famously recreated in the Shins’ “New Slang” video)—still comes across as shrouded in mystery. Curiously enough, what became the album’s cover was originally intended as a press shot for the band’s aborted European tour. Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy), a grade school classmate of McMahan and Walford, followed the band to its preferred hangout spot across the Ohio River in Indiana. Oldham initially shot Slint while standing on the bank of the Utica Quarry, then caught the band all by surprise by jumping in with his camera held overhead and snapped a few frames while treading water. McMahan and Walford returned to Chicago in October 1990 to remix the opening and closing tracks on Spiderland, “Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning, Captain,” but the afternoon at the Utica Quarry represents the last major thing the band did together before breaking up. According to the Lance Bangs documentary that accompanies the Spiderland reissue/boxed set, Slint reconvened briefly in 1992 and 1994 to work on new material, but failed to come to terms on both attempts. One song from the sessions (“King’s Approach”) eventually made it into the band’s live set, and a sketch of another (cobbled together as “Todd’s Song”) is included as a bonus track on the Spiderland reissue. A decade later, Slint did reunite successfully, touring in 2005 and 2007. Brashear, who did not participate in either of the reunions, sensed that fans might still have questions about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the creation of Spiderland, and spearheaded a coordinated push to untangle the band’s convoluted history with a reissue. The result—five years in the making— is a highly illuminating labor of love, and full of curious oddities for Slint fans to geek out on. “We never got a chance to sit back and listen to Spiderland in an objective way; it was always colored by the fact that Slint didn’t exist anymore,” says Brashear. “I think this process has

been therapeutic for all of us, in a way, because it’s something we agreed to work on together, and we managed to come to a consensus on everything pretty well. I didn’t imagine that we would have that much that we’d ever want to charge people money for—Slint was never a particularly prolific band. But it was cool to find out that we were unable to unearth material that had some historical value. I’m kind of interested to find out whether this changes the way people feel about Slint. Will that mystique still be there?” The process of revisiting Spiderland over the years has led to a sort of cognitive dissonance for both Walford and McMahan. “Louisville is

kind of a backwater town, so it was remarkable that any band got it together to make a record on a ‘big’ label,” says McMahan. “Admittedly, Britt and I both played in Squirrel Bait, and we kind of defied the odds there by releasing a couple of records with Homestead. But we really didn’t have any role models that had set the bar for us. I do think that Spiderland is a good record, and I think that everyone who worked on the boxed set did an amazing job of keeping things spare and true to where our heads were at when we made it. But any good reception that we have received over the years feels a little mystifying and surreal. If anyone has gotten over it, it’s probably Dave.”

“I actually didn’t like Spiderland at all for about 10 years after it came out,” says Pajo. “I couldn’t even listen to it. All I could hear was the mistakes and all of the little things that I wanted to change. It was hard for me to revisit it, because I had this ideal version of it in my head. Now I can appreciate it for what it is. Honestly, the whole Spiderland experience has totally shaped how I feel about music. When the record came out, there was no touring or promotion. Nobody knew anything about it. But the reason Spiderland has currency now is directly due to the power of word of mouth. It made me have faith in music. If the music is good, people will find it.” N

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After a decade of cheap beer, positive jams and killer parties, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blood on the carpet, mud on the mattress. Needle goes to Brooklandia to watch the Hold Steady sleep it off and wake up with that American sadness. story by jonathan valania â&#x153;&#x2022; photos by gene smirnov

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One day, he vowed, with God as his witness, he would make pretty girls cry when he died. This remains a work in progress. This year, Finn turns 43, and the Hold Steady turns 10. (Technically 11, but who’s counting?) The kids at their shows now have kids of their own, as the song goes. On March 25, the Hold Steady released Teeth Dreams, its sixth studio album. (The band also boasts six EPs and a live LP.) If the Hold Steady was the Replacements, this would be its Don’t Tell A Soul. It’s been four years since the Hold Steady released an album, which is something like 16 in rock ‘n’ roll years. Entire presidencies, college sports careers and World Wars come and go in the span of four years. In that time, the Hold Steady came closer to ceasing to exist than anyone in the band cares to admit out loud. Ego, exhaustion, addiction and communication breakdown—the great hungermakers of rock ‘n’ roll’s infamously insatiable appetite for self-destruction—have left their scars, as they invariably do to bands around the six-album mark. Which only goes to show that there is always a crack where the darkness gets in, and even a critically acclaimed band that has waved the flag of positivity highly and mightily is not immune to private despair. Fortunately, the members, all at or nearing 40-something, were mature and self-aware enough to recognize the warning signs and course-correct before it was too late. So, they when hold steady frontman craig finn was growing took some time off. Finn started working on a up in suburban Minneapolis in the shag-carpeted ’70s, there was novel, then flew to Austin and recorded a wellreceived solo album, which he toured on for a nothing musical about the Finn family. Nothing at all. Nobody year. Guitarist/primary songwriter Tad Kubler played an instrument. Nobody played records on the stereo. They got clean. Drummer Bobby Drake bought a bar in Brooklyn with Spoon’s Rob Pope. Keydid not even sing show tunes on long car rides. boardist Franz Nicolay took his leave and was replaced by noted six-string shredder Steve But when Finn was eight years old, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham choked Selvidge. (The latter is the son of late, great folk singer/ to death on his own vomit, and that’s when a young boy discovered the awesome, recordist/indie-label pioneer Sid Selvidge, a pillar of the Memphis music scene for five decades who will be rememmood-altering, life-changing power of rock ‘n’ roll. Up until this point, he’d thought of rock ‘n’ roll as nothing more than the interstitial music between the zany capers and bered for, if nothing else, having the sheer balls to release Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbert, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s wacky hijinks on The Monkees and The Bay City Rollers Show. But judging by the trail of tears running down the apple-hued cheeks of his babysitter—a pretty neighborhood all-time great hot messes.) They got new management, a teen he had a secret crush on—this was an Important Cultural Moment, right up new label, a new producer and a whole new attitude—more heart, less cowbell. And unto the world a new Hold Steady there with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. His babysitter made him listen to Led Zeppelin A-Z that day, and there would be no turning back. album was born. 40

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Finn is too nice of a guy to return fire, so I’ll do it for him. Craig Finn—who, come to think of it, doesn’t really look all that different than Gerard Cosloy—has something that the Cos, for all his vast reserves of hipness and uncanny knack for recognizing what’s next before everyone else, will never have: the gift of the common touch. Like the Boss, from whom he is a clear descendant, Finn has never pulled a shift on the line, he doesn’t play beer-league softball with the boys on Saturday afternoons, his hands are soft, and he votes straight Democrat. Hell, he read Infinite Jest. Twice. But, also like the Boss, he has an unshakeable belief in the transcendental power of a shit-hot bar band to set the working man free on a Friday night—if only until last call—and is more than willing, night after night, to shed the requisite blood, sweat and beers it takes to git ’er done. So, word to Mr. Cosloy: Next time they ask you about Charlemagne, be polite and say something vague.

t’s 3 p.m. on a yet another colder-than-awitch’s-tit late-winter afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Craig Finn is nursing a seltzer and lime at a back table at Lake Street Bar, an old-man dive short on old men and long on beardo Brooklandians getting a head start on tonight. Finn asked to meet here because he knows the owner—Hold Steady drummer Bobby Drake, who is presently restocking the bar in preparation for the coming happy-hour onslaught— and, as the song goes, the drinks are cheap and they leave you alone. He’s a little bummed at the moment. His friend Oscar Isaac didn’t get an Academy Award nomination for his indelible portrayal of Llewyn Davis in the latest Coen brothers film. “I think he got screwed,” says Finn emphatically. “He was mind-blowing.” The first thing you notice about Finn when you get up close and personal is the kind, clear eyes hidden behind his trademark Clark Kent spectacles. Soft-spoken and courteous, dressed in a blue V-neck sweater over a crisp white oxford, his hairline making a slow northward retreat, Finn looks more like the guy who would do your taxes than the fierce, suds-fueled, battle-hardened, 21st-century defender of the rock ‘n’ roll faith in his press clips. He knows this, of course. He gets it all the time. And he made his peace with it a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean that, deep down, it doesn’t still sting a little. Matador Records honcho Gerard Cosloy famously dismissed the Hold Steady as “later-period Soul Asylum fronted by Charles Nelson Reilly.” “I remember when that came out, I was like, ‘If I read that, I’d probably want to go see that band,’” says Finn when I ask if he cares to respond. “Honestly, though, I was also disappointed because it wasn’t meant to be complimentary, and the dude’s label has put out some of my favorite bands. But you’ve got to let some of this roll.”

ack in 2003, when Craig Finn and fellow Lifter Puller alum/Minneapolitanturned-Brooklandian Tad Kubler assembled a Paul Shaffer-style house band to pound out Bowie, Cheap Trick and AC/DC covers between sketches by a short-lived, Upright Citizens Brigade-derived improv comedy troupe called Mr. Ass, they had no greater ambition than to drink beer and, like, really fucking kill it on “Back In Black.” Exhausted and dispirited after spending the better part of the last decade in Lifter Puller trying to smash through the glass ceiling of local celebrity back in the Twin Cities, Finn had more or less called off the search for the holy grail of rock stardom. It was supposed to be fun, but by the end of Lifter Puller, it was anything but. However, this really-fucking-killing-it-on-“Back In Black” business? That was fun. A lot of fun. So, even when Mr. Ass went away after two or three shows, the band kept going. It even started writing songs, with big muscular AOR riffs and dense, cinematic word clouds for lyrics. Even in his Lifter Puller days, Finn was a fierce and formidable storyteller, able to connect the dots of human foibles with an eagle eye for microdetails, a master of the withering aside with a gift for transmuting public experience into private mythology, his barbed-wire snarl spitting out ultra-vivid vignettes of debauchery and grace at an amphetamine pace. But when wedded to this new group’s propensity for unironic, unapologetically anthemic hard-rock crunch—more Zep, less Wire—Finn’s noirish, photorealistic rants sounded like the Gospel according to Charles Bukowski. There were recurring characters awash in American sadness— Charlemagne, Gideon, Hallelujah, Hard Corey—scratching around in the dark of some post-kegger purgatory for dope, sex and transcendence … or at least one last cigarette before they slip into unconsciousness. Hmmm … maybe they were onto something. A show was booked at Northsix, which meant they needed a name. They met for breakfast to discuss it. Finn wanted to take a phrase from “Stay Positive,” one of the first songs they ever wrote: All the sniffling indie kids: hold steady And all you clustered-up clever kids: hold steady And I got bored when I didn’t have a band And so I started a band, man We’re gonna start it with a positive jam Hold steady

“I was married at the time, and it kind of felt like after Lifter Puller broke up in Minneapolis, it was either like, ‘Buy a house and have a kid,’ or else double down on rock ‘n’ roll.” —craig finn

All it needed was the definite article the, and behold: An action becomes a thing. A many-splendored thing. A second chance at glory. A band on a last-chance power drive. All were agreed: The Hold Steady it is. So, they had songs and they had a name; now all they needed was a crowd. This being the days when dance-punk was ascendant, they weren’t so sure how it would play with the cool kids. I mean, they liked it; they thought it was good—maybe even great if they went all in—but what did they know about New York? They were from the Midwest. “I knew it was going to be an affront to some people, but there was a lot more people at the first Hold Steady needle

show than I thought there was going to be,” says Finn. “I thought it was 100, but maybe it was only 60. A fair amount of them were people I didn’t know. That’s the thing—like right away, there was people I didn’t know.” One hundred people—or for that matter 60 people—show up to see the first gig of a band that didn’t even have a name before breakfast this morning? Yes, they were definitely onto something. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, but that’s because F. Scott Fitzgerald never heard Almost Killed Me.

n the beginning, Craig Finn was born in Boston; but in grade school, he moved to Minneapolis, where lived until 2000, when he moved to Brooklyn. He’s been there ever since, but if anyone asks, he’s from Minneapolis. His dad was a tech guy for a big accounting firm, and his mother was a housewife. He has no brothers and one sister. She is five years younger than him and

still lives in Minneapolis, as does his dad. His mother is deceased. The first band he fell hard for was the Ramones. “I didn’t even know they were punk rock,” says Finn. “I just thought they were a less successful rock band that I heard and I liked.” By junior high, he started figuring it out. His friends had older brothers. Mix tapes were traded. Rock elder wisdom was dispensed. One day he saw a flyer on a telephone poll advertising a TSOL show at the local VFW or some such. “Where is that and how do I get to that?” he asked himself. After asking around, turns out you could get there from here, and he started going to all-ages punk shows all the time. One night, when he was all of 13, someone from the Descendents asked Finn and his buddies if they knew a girl who would give him a blowjob. “If we knew that, why would we be here with you?” Finn told him, displaying a mastery of the withering retort well beyond his years. “We weren’t even close to knowing somebody like that,” he says now. Growing up in the suburbs, you had to take

a couple buses to get to the cool record store in town. It was not easy; you had to want it. This was pre-Cobain. You couldn’t just go to the mall. Every Saturday, Finn and his buddies would get on the bus. The plan was simple, but very effective. Everyone would buy one album, and then they’d go home and everyone would make a cassette tape of everyone else’s purchase. So, for the price of, say, R.E.M.’s Reckoning, you also got the first Violent Femmes record, the Replacements’ Let It Be and Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. The Replacements. Was that an important band for you?

Finn: The most. I heard about them from this guy who said his older sister knew them. I didn’t know if that was even true, but I went and got Hootenanny and couldn’t believe that this was happening near me. I had never seen anyone in my life that looked like Steven Tyler or knew anyone like that, but I knew dudes who looked like the Replacements. I knew where to find them, you know? So, it was sort of more believable.

Craig Finn goes song by song through Teeth Dreams I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You It’s about this gang called the Cityscape Skins. When I was growing up in the late ’80s at the hardcore shows, there were these warring gangs of skinheads. There was one group that was antiracist, and they would fight the racist gang. But no matter how much they hated each other, they always ended up at the same party. There’s two million people in Minneapolis, so why do you have to be at the same house? Then there would be a fight. I was like, “Yeah, I’m part of this cool hardcore scene,” but it could get violent. Then, when I moved to Boston, I realized, “This isn’t fun at all. People are getting really track

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hurt. Like hospitalized or stabbed. This isn’t fun hardcore, like a little wrestling match—this is crime and violence.” Spinners There’s a line in the song that goes, “Let the city live your life for you tonight,” just go out and see what happens. I don’t do that much anymore. I live with my girlfriend, so there’s no cause for me to go out and try to meet somebody I don’t already know. I’ve lived in New York for 13 years, so I don’t have as much excitement. But you see people all dressed up and hopeful getting off the train on a Friday night with so much expectation for their evening. I don’t really miss it, but I love that it’s still going on. track

The Only Thing There’s a line in there that goes, “Last night her teeth were in my dreams.” Teeth dreams are supposed to be anxiety dreams. I was thinking a lot about anxiety and how the truth relates to it. I went to this party and met this dude who was a doctor, and he said, “The vast majority of the people who enter my office, as a general practitioner, are there because of anxiety.” They think their shoulder hurts, but he’s like, “No, it’s not that.” Then I noticed the Times has an anxiety column. Then I started thinking about … Facebook and Twitter, and how people’s projections of themselves are so important in this day and age. It’s all about getting upgraded to first class track

in the airport, or they’re checking in when they are eating at this amazing restaurant. They’re projecting a life that is not very accurate. You know, when you put up your Facebook photo of you 10 years ago when you were 50 pounds lighter, I think anxiety in some cases fills the space between our real selves and our projection. We have so many ways to project right now. I was thinking about the relationship between the truth and our anxiety and our

modern life. But then I saw Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, and that (screaming face) is anxiety about the modern life in 1900, so maybe it’s just part of us always. The Ambassador In Minneapolis, they had 3.2 bars that don’t have liquor, but you can get a 3.2 beer. Most beer is 5.0. It’s some sort of weird Scandinavian Protestant thing, like, “We don’t want you gettrack

Did they reinforce the notion that you don’t have to go to a stadium to see a rock show? That you can go to an all-ages show in a basement or rec hall and be three feet away from them?

Finn: And we would. I remember being—and it’s so funny, because you go to shows now and you’re always trying to time it to see the band you want to see—but it would be like “doors open at 4 p.m.,” so we have to get there at 3:15 at the latest. You know, if I missed 10 minutes of the opener I would be bummed. But every band was good. Or at least always worth it. But I had really weird ideas about what it meant to play in a band at that level, like I couldn’t do the math somehow. Like, “Oh, they’re probably making $40.” I didn’t even really know about touring. I was thinking, “The Descendents are coming— they must be flying in for every show.” I mean, we were having conversations at one point about going to the Amfac, which was the nicest hotel downtown at the time, to see if we could get Black Flag’s autograph.

ting too drunk.” What surprised me about those places was you would have pretty hardcore alcoholics hanging out there, and you would be like, “Guys, this doesn’t make economic sense.” We liked hanging out in those places because they tend to be more run-down and more welcoming. I’m interested in how we manufacture these highs and lows and what that does. Because it’s like, I’m someone generally who will say, “I drank a whole bunch last night. I am not going to drink for two days.” But there’s a lot of people who say, “Let’s keep it rollin’.” I used to be married. Right around Boys And Girls In America, my wife had started to have problems with depression and alcoholism. Bad ones. I had to move her back to Minneapolis because I’d go on tour and would come back and things would be bad. I was like, “Let’s get you around your family. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” But then eventually it was just like, “This isn’t going to

Now what about Hüsker Dü? Not as important to you?

Finn: Very important. It’s funny—they kinda did not appear punk enough to me as a young kid. Bob Mould was kind of chunkier, Grant Hart had the long hair and bare feet, and Greg Norton had the handlebar mustache and short shorts. I was like, “What is this?” I mean, they are my second favorite band. Soul Asylum was the third; they were awesome and almost combined the two. Finn and his friends started a band called, regrettably, No Pun Intended—or N.P.I., as was the style of the day. It was slow going at first. It took them weeks to get the hang of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” which might as well be called “Punk Rock For Dummies.” Finn did not yet have the cojones to pull off lead singer; that job fell to the “cool, good-looking guy that could actually sing.” Instead, he played guitar, barely. And, more importantly, he started writing songs. N.P.I. lasted four years. Mainly covers. They broke up when they all graduated and Finn left for

work.” It was hard, because it was at the point where she had medical problems because of the depression and the alcohol. Meanwhile Boys And Girls In America was our biggest album, but it was such a sad time together. I remember thinking at the time, “Is this some kind of karmic payback for what I put my characters through?” So, I’ve always been interested in that moment where the party has become the problem. On With The Business That line about “waking up with that American sadness” is something I got from David Foster Wallace. I read an interview with him where he says that we are all afflicted with a certain type of American sadness, which is basically that we somehow have this hole or tear in us that we can’t assuage through this accumulation of stuff, and in the end you get this big basement full of shit. By creating a transient life for myself with the touring and living in a track

small apartment, I somewhat have been able to free myself from that. Big Cig That one was kind of a fun one where I just started riffing on the idea of those long cigarettes. I remember when my friends started buying them, they were like, “These will be better ’cause they are longer and will last longer,” so you get more for your money. Especially for a kid that’s 16, it’s, like, “You look terrible smoking that.” track

Wait Awhile There’s a line there about “collecting boyfriends isn’t such a healthy hobby/I’m sorry, but there are other words than yes.” That’s back to the consumer thing and American sadness. Like, consuming all these goods are not going to make you happier; consuming all these people and working your way through all this attention might not fill that American sadness. track

Boston College. BC was a much different scene than the Twin Cities, fairly conservative. He had a few friends who liked music, but he invariably wound up going to hardcore shows by himself. So, Finn hunkered down and did the college-dude thing: girls, beer, classes. But the last semester of his senior year, he formed a band in the Dinosaur Jr/Buffalo Tom mold, as was the style of the day. It was called Sweetest Day, which is sort of the Canadian Valentine’s Day. Finn switched off on bass and guitar, and sang with a lazy, stonery J Mascis-style yowl, as was also the style of the day. The band got good enough to play the Ratt. Suddenly, people reacted differently to him. He felt cool. And it felt good. After college, Finn moved back Minneapolis, where rent was cheap and he “knew a lot of people who worked at bars and played in bands, and stuff like that.” He got an apartment with one of his fellow BC alumnae, a guy named Dave Gerlach. They started a band and called it Lifter Puller—a pun on a Twin Cities bong euphemism. A bong gets you high, so it’s a lifter. And the per-

Runner’s High I run quite often. I’ve done some half-marathons, and I like it a lot. When I was 19, I’d hear about “runners get a runner’s high.” I’d be like, “Who cares? I can get high high.” But these days I prefer it. track

Almost Everything We were in a Waffle House way down South one time, and the waitresses were like, “Are you guys in a band?” I said, “Yeah, we’re a band,” and these two African-American waitresses asked, “Can you play us some Pink Floyd?” and I was like, “I did not expect you to say that.” They were like, “Oh, we love Pink Floyd,” but I was like, “We can’t play anything right now.” track

Oaks The song originally didn’t have that outro, and it was dark, dark, dark. I wanted to acknowledge that these characters have some wants or desires beyond getting wasted and then track

driving around looking for more. Everyone has— even if they are caught in that cycle—things that they love and think about and want. It’s not like all those things get shut off. So, I have the dream about nature. Dreams of this beautiful stuff like trees, mountains and boats. Then juxtaposing it with hanging from a tree, or being on a boat that’s rocking right, and the trees are just evaporating like the dream. On this record, I feel like there is less salvation than there has been on previous records. I always want there to be some hope in there. All these people are trying to get somewhere reachable. They are all trying to either outrun something or go toward something. But I don’t know in this case if they find big-time redemption other than in small moments. When these guys started playing me the music, I was like, “This sounds darker, and reminds me of Van Halen’s Fair Warning,” which I love, but that’s their darkest album.

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son who sucks the smoke out of a bong is a puller. Doing bongs equals pulling lifters. Hence, Lifter Puller. He changed up his vocal style. Less Mascis, more Mark E. Smith: acerbic, talky, cutting. Partly it was a function of singing out of an amp at rehearsals and trying to get over the band. Partly it was a function the clipped, percussive, hard-consonant lyrics he was writing. Partly it was a function of him having figured out a long time ago that he was neither a pretty boy nor a crooner. Lifter Puller put out three albums over the course of six years. More importantly, for our purposes here today, one Tad Kubler, straight outta Janesville, Wisc. (pop. 63,588), arrives in town at roughly the same moment that Lifter Puller was in the market for a bassist. A guitarist by trade, Kubler was willing to take a bullet for the team. In 2000, Lifter Puller called it a career and Finn took off for New York City. “I was married at the time,” he says, “and it kind of felt like after the band broke up in Minneapolis, it was either like, ‘Buy a house and have a kid,’ or else double down on rock ‘n’ roll. And I knew Minneapolis had gotten a little small, and there was also a bit of a drinking culture there that I saw that was maybe going to go down a … there was a lot of just sitting on a barstool going on there. That’s fine, but I just sort of was like, ‘Maybe this is the time.’ I moved to New York about three weeks after Lifter Puller played their last show. It was the Internet Age, so I got a job quickly working for a start-up that did webcasting of concerts.”

t’s a couple hours prior to my audience with Craig Finn, and I’m sitting in Tad Kubler’s Lilliputian Greenpoint apartment, which he shares with nine-year-old daughter Murphy and a cat named Mouse. It has been pointed out on Hold Steady message boards that the blonde and bespectacled Kubler looks like the less googly-eyed brother of The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant. When Kubler was seven, Cheap Trick’s manager at the time lived across the street in Janesville, and one day he got to meet Rick Nielsen. There would be no turning back. After bumming around Madison for a while, he made his way to the Twin Cities at precisely the moment that Lifter Puller was in the market for a bass player. When LP called it a career in 2000, he headed to L.A. to pursue portrait photography before ricocheting back east until he wound up in New York City, where he found work shooting the likes of Leonard Cohen, Gregg Allman and Arctic Monkeys for Rolling Stone. Eventually the Hold Steady took over as his primary passion/creative outlet, then, a couple years after that, his day job. Up until a few years ago, he was Neko Case’s boyfriend. Alcohol, like sex, dope and God, is one of rock n’ roll’s great force multipliers (see: the Replacements). It’s also the great undoing of the many languishing in the Dionysian precincts of rock stardom (see: the Replacements). If nothing else, the Hold Steady is the world’s greatest bar band. In the early days, the Hold Steady played loaded for bear. On a good night—and depending on how much they and you had to drink—they didn’t just rock; they summoned up sweaty Springsteen-ian salvation. Rock ‘n’ roll was their church, and beer was sacrament. The problem with rock ‘n’ roll as religion is that the only way to get to heaven is to die. Back in 2008, Kubler almost got there. For a while there, he was drinking a bottle of whiskey 44

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a day, if for no other reason than he could. “I’m one of those guys with that metabolism where I can just do more than most and it doesn’t have much effect,” he says. “I could drink almost a liter of whiskey and get onstage and play a show.” Until he couldn’t. By 2008, Kubler had drank himself into acute pancreatitis, which leads to organ failure, necrosis, infected necrosis, pseudocyst and abscess. “Basically, your pancreas stops working and then tries to kill everything else in your abdomen,” says Kubler. “It’s also very painful. It feels like somebody smashed a windshield and you swallowed a handful of broken glass and washed it down with a glass of orange juice. And then the pain grows—it gets to be so bad you are vomiting and then passing out because it’s so painful. The thing about pancreatitis is there is no treatment for it; you just have to stop using it. No food, no water. Two weeks. In intensive care for five days, and then a regular room, on morphine and Dilaudid the whole time. “So, you get out of the hospital and you can’t drink anymore, and you’re like, ‘I know what I’m gonna do—I’m gonna go pro (with heroin). I would have bouts where I would try to get cleaned up and would wind up drinking again. When we were working on Heaven Is Whenever, I wound up in the hospital again. And they were like, ‘The fuck you doing? We told you this was going to happen.’” Being in the Hold Steady but not allowed to drink, on pain of death, is like running a brothel with your wife. “Being on a bus with people who are drinking and partying, I kind of built up a wall,” says Kubler. “I knew none of those guys would go there, so it was like my thing. It feels incredible for a while, and then after a while you’re just maintaining, and then you’re fucked.” By 2010, around the time the band was finishing up Heaven Is Whenever, Kubler had had enough. “I was like, ‘Fuck this. I don’t want to do this any more,’” he says. “OD scares? Sure. Because I used alone, there were times I would just wake up a few hours later and be like, ‘Fuck!’ And you make all kinds of deals with yourself. I don’t want to turn this into an NA meeting, but a lot of my using was resentment, and resentment, as they say,

save his relationship with Finn. The bottle and the damage done. The seeds of doubt had been planted. “I’m sure by that point he was thinking, ‘This guy could not even be around in a year,’” says Kubler. “I’m sure he was worried about me as a friend, but also worried about me as a business partner and a songwriting partner. I don’t blame him for doing a solo album. The only problem with it is he didn’t do a very good job of communicating what his plans were, so it went from taking three months off to taking a year and a half off. In that time, me and Bobby and Galen (Polivka, bassist) and Steve would get together and work on new material. So, by the time he gets back, we have 24 songs with no lyrics, and at that point, after touring for a year, he’s emotionally spent, creatively spent, and now he’s got an overwhelming amount of material that he’s got to come up with words for, and he’s not super-inspired. That’s why it took another year to get the album done. When he got back, I could tell he just wasn’t clicking. It felt like Heaven Is Whenever, when we weren’t clicking and we should have just shelved that and come back to it. But all that had to happen for us to get to where we are now.” Where they are right now is backstage at the Williamsburg Music Hall. It’s a couple weeks later, and the Hold Steady is celebrating its 10th anniversary (11th, if you’re actually counting) at the club where the band played its first show. (Back then it was called Northsix.) That’s the problem with starting a band in Brooklandia. Sooner or later, your creation myth will be gentrified. The show is way sold out, and the club is hot and heaving. Many cups runneth over. The bartenders pull on the taps like a Texas prison warden flipping the switch on the electric chair: over and over and over again. Outside its dressing room, the Hold Steady lines up in the narrow hallway leading to the stage and, as per band ritual, high-five each other the way baseball players shake hands at the end of a game. Except this game has just begun, and it’s definitely going into extra innings. is like drinking a bottle of poison and expecting the person you resent to die. Here I am The band takes the stage to the strains of the Velvet in a band that’s about partying and I can’t do that anymore, so I’m just going to hide.” Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time There were other resentments, too. Kubler writes all the music, but Finn gets all the Together.” Moments before the Hold Steady launches into credit. That’s not necessarily Finn’s fault—he is the frontman, lyricist and the face of “Stay Positive,” Finn straps on his guitar, grabs the mic and makes a declaration. “This is for anyone here who saw us the band (the glasses, the smirk, that hairline), and it comes with the territory. “When you are the lead singer of the band, there’s more scrutiny, and you tend to be at Northsix and anyone who wakes up and says, ‘I’m not the focal point of a lot of derision and animosity and criticism—and that’s tough—but old—I’m old fucking school!’” Crowd goes nuts. you are also the focal point for a lot of the praise,” Kubler says, carefully choosing his And then he takes off his guitar, the instrument which, words so as not to sound bitter or needy. “I’m sure it’s hard to deflect that. To say, ‘Wait, it is well known, he does not play so much play as wield you are this, but it’s actually that.’ To be like … it’s all happening so quickly, you can’t like a shield. “My New Year’s resolution is to stop playing really stop and be like, ‘This is what really happened.’ So, you just let it wash over you fake guitar,” he says. “It’s 2014—let’s stop lying to each other.” The band lurches into the rutting bump and grind and you let it be that.” Kubler had gotten clean and sober in the nick of time, but it may have been too late to of “Stay Positive” before segueing right into the Stoogeian electric mainline of “The Swish.” Finn flops around the stage, alternately poking his finger in the crowd’s chest in that heyyou-kids-get-off-my-lawn way of his, or frugging comically like Igor doing the time warp again. The crowd goes ballistic. Beer showers down from the balconies, baptizing a sea of pumping fists in warm PBR. Two hours and two encores later, they end with the last song from their first album, “Killer Parties.” It’s the one that starts with that line that goes, “If they ask about Charlemagne, be polite and say —Tad Kubler something vague.” N

“You get out of the hospital and you can’t drink anymore, and you’re like, ‘I know what I’m

gonna do—I’m gonna go pro with heroin. I would have bouts where I would try to get cleaned up and would wind up drinking again.”

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reviews Afghan Whigs p. 48

Baseball Project p. 50

Avey Tare p. 52

Unclean Thoughts Industrial machinations fuel Liars’ gloriously confounding seventh album

lectro-tom-fuckery mutants Liars have a résumé of six previous

albums that spin a diverse, spiky wheel across the back of “dance punk” as most know it. And, as if to add further urban-arts credibility to their canon, those records were given life in Brooklyn, Berlin and Los Angeles. After reading Jonathan Valania’s excellent and compelling Moby cover story in issue #104 of MAGNET, we’ve come to realize that—contrary to our perception of La-La Land’s arts scene—there is something of value happening out left having little to do with bad thrash metal, the silver screen and the idiot box. With a regional population totaling more than 16 million people, the law of averages dictates that something of worth, interest and decent quality is going on, and its creators aren’t sweating shelling out $2,700-plus for a one-bedroom to do it. The ironic thing is, if you didn’t know any better, Mess sounds like it emerged from the midpoint of those three cities—probably somewhere terminally unhip like Flin Flon,

photo By Zen Sekizawa

Manitoba, or Nuuk, Greenland, or something. It’s always been tough trying to place your finger on where Liars are coming from album-to-album, so for the sake of getting

Whigs p. 54

Liars

Mess M u te

into a rote history lesson—that will, of course, be up for debate—and the consideration of space, let’s just call ’em “experimental rock” and get on with it. They’d probably prefer it that way anyway. Immediacy seems to be prized here. The album’s first lyric/sample on “Mask Maker” warbles “Take my pants off!” and is underwritten with a vocoder and the sort of propulsion Einstürzende Neubauten used to great impact on Perpetuum Mobile. Thankfully, Mess retains a similar sense of cohesion and fights off becoming the mess—nyuk-nyuk—that can crumble around a band for which shape-shifting is a deliberate feature. Harkening back to the group’s dancier roots, Mess’ most salient reference points include ’80s and ’90s EBM like Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and even a little KMFDM,

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reviews

Beauty Of The Beast The Afghan Whigs return in the style we’ve grown accustomed to

ack in their ’90s heyday, Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs didn’t entirely fit in with their Alternative Nation brethren. Sure, their guitars were on overdrive and Greg Dulli could scream cathartically with the best The Afghan Whigs Do To The Beast of them. But with their nods to classic and modern R&B, their sleekly tailored suits, and Dulli’s anti-charisma and chroniSub Pop cles of romantic train wrecks/sexual head games, they were a harder sell than Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Now that rock bands are even more likely to tweak tradition and mix genres, the Afghan Whigs have picked an ideal moment to release Do To The Beast, their first album since 1998. The opening two tracks, “Parked Outside” and “Matamoros,” almost sound like the group is taking a cue from Queens Of The Stone Age. The repetitiveyet-seductive grooves and guitars tough as action films fit the outfit’s m.o. perfectly. (In fact, much of the album was recorded at the studio of QOTSA’s Josh Homme.) Only Dulli and bassist John Curley remain from the band’s original lineup, and they are abetted by a diverse cast of players. Yet Do To The Beast fits in their idiosyncratic oeuvre. Rather than recall what’s generally accepted as their masterpiece, 1993’s Gentlemen, the Afghan Whigs practically pick up where their last two albums—the funk-noir of 1996’s Black Love and the New Orleans swelter of 1998’s 1965—left off. The band’s flair for drama comes to the forefront on the “Be My Baby”-quoting “Algiers” and intensely epic closer “These Sticks.” —Michael Pelusi

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Since They’ve Been Gone How Greg Dulli and John Curley have kept busy during the Afghan Whigs’ hiatus With Do To The Beast, Greg Dulli and John Curley are now the only people who have played on every Afghan Whigs album. They’re one of those bands that can never quite hold on to drummers. And original guitarist Rick McCollum left after the group’s 2012 reunion tour. Outside of the band, Dulli and Curley have kept busy over the years. Dulli’s the most prominent, with solo albums, long-running side project the Twilight Singers, the Gutter Twins (a duo with Mark Lanegan) and another with Steve Kilbey of the Church. But Curley’s no slouch. He owns Ultrasuede Studio in Cincinnati and has produced and/or recorded a number of noteworthy bands, including the White Stripes, the Greenhornes and Wussy. —M.P.

photo by piper ferguson

albeit with more soaring minimalism and a lot less dystopian heaviness. The album’s highlights come in the form of the aristocratic textures included in “Can’t Hear Well” (cabaret vocals atop a calliope backing track à la the Young Gods’ Play Kurt Weill), the R&B soul-meetsTeutonic techno of “Mess On A Mission” and the healthy dose of knuckleheaded Rammstein pounding out “Pro Anti-Anti.” The alterations and differences may be slighter and more comparable to alt-music’s lexicon, but that’s bound to happen after a decade and a half. Still, the redefinition continues, and so does the compelling art. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

The Belle Brigade

Just Because

For me, these few minutes are the apogee of Range Of Light, Carey’s second full-length, but my guess is listeners will find their own emotive pockets in every nook and cranny of the consistently nourishing collection. Indeed, it’s telling that Justin Vernon’s presence on a few songs here is an afterthought. Carey’s album, which is essentially a folk effort with strains of modern classical, jazz and Americana, would be a triumph with or without a Grammy winner’s name attached. —Ryan Burleson

Bryce Dessner And Jonny Greenwood

St. Carolyn By The Sea/Suite From There Will Be Blood Deutsche Grammophon/ Universal Music Classics

ATO

Dark songs from the land of sunshine

Barbara and Ethan Gruska are the grandchildren of Star Wars composer John Williams, but the music they make together is a lot more down to earth, rooted in the sounds of California pop circa 1973 and the ethos of Laurel Canyon singer/songwriters. On their second album, the music is still upbeat, and the vocals are still drenched with their lush harmonies, but there’s a dark emotional current running through most of these songs. Regret, missed connections, insanity and nostalgia for lost love figure heavily in the lyrics. The melodies are arranged with a cinematic sweep that elevates small moments of self-doubt and heartache into something bigger and more universal. From time to time, they drop slightly disturbing instrumental textures into the mix to intensify the emotional dissonance they’re singing about. This technique is particularly evident on “Back Where You Began,” where the muffled percussion adds a spooky, surreal atmosphere to the proceedings. —j. poet

A split classical album from two of rock’s most elegant composers

The press release for St. Carolyn By The Sea/ Suite From There Will Be Blood states that both the National’s Bryce Dessner and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood were chosen to release a split album, because their work shares “quintessentially American themes such as the vast expanses of the country’s landscape, or a sense of nostalgic longing … ” Sure. But it could be they were chosen ’cause they’re in rock bands and they make classical music. Either way, Dessner and Greenwood’s atmospheric pieces do complement each other. Dessner’s side, performed by the Copenhagen Phil and conducted by André de Ridder, features gentle guitar from Bryce and brother Aaron, skittering violins and snare-driven crescendos—in particular, the lovely title track. As for Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood suite from 2007, I won’t even review it, because you should already love it. —Bryan Bierman

Luther Dickinson

Rock ’N Roll Blues New West

S. Carey

Range Of Light Jagjaguwar

The full spectrum

It’s been a while since a piece of music caused my chest to constrict, hinting at the onset of glazed eyes and a sheepish look left to right, hoping the dog doesn’t see. But that’s what happened roughly halfway through “Alpenglow,” when an already gorgeous piece of songwriting slipped into a majestic, slowmotion avalanche of strings, delayed guitars and softly galloping piano. Bon Iver percussionist Sean Carey sort of hums or “ooh”s in the midst of it all, his cool whispery voice mixed just right in the scene.

Country blues with a city edge

Luther Dickinson is best known for his lead-guitar work with the Black Crowes and the North Mississippi Allstars, the rootsy blues band he fronts with his brother Cody. On his third solo album, he strips things down to the bare essentials. A little electric guitar pops up from time to time, but most of this LP is pure acoustic folk/ blues, albeit with a modern attitude. The songs tell the story of Dickinson’s evolution from punk rocker to blues-guitar ace, but there’s no shredding. Everything is tasty and understated. Stand-up bassist Amy LaVere and drummer Shardé Thomas (granddaughter of late blues fife player Othar Turner) provide a driving acoustic backbeat that’s as much jug

band as it is roots rock, Even when Dickinson is singing about the “bleeding eardrum, backbeat backlash, bloodshot black-eye rock ‘n’ roll blues,” the songs maintain a quiet, down-home feel. —j. poet

Elbow

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything Fiction/Concord

Delayed departure For well more than a decade, Elbow has cast a shrug at everything that makes popular music popular. Adrift in a sea of bite-sized singles, Elbow’s billowing arrangements have served as both the band’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. More often than not, singer Guy Garvey’s tales turn out to be quite transcendent, but only to those who stick around for the entire journey. On The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, Elbow takes a few tentative steps outside of its comfort zone. An out-of-place vocoder envelops Garvey’s husky plea on “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette,” and synthesizers lock horns with a real orchestra on sluggish closer “The Blanket Of Night.” There’s probably room for electronics somewhere in Elbow’s music, but the band is at its best keeping things natural (as on “Charge” and “My Sad Captains”). Like most of Elbow’s albums, The Take Off is not all that remarkable the first few times around, but it nonetheless hints at rewarding repeat visits. —Eric Schuman

Future Islands

Singles 4AD

See the light

There’s a clue to Future Islands’ current place on the precipice of greatness in the Baltimore band’s album titles, abandoning prepositional setups In Evening Air and On The Water for the definitive Singles: With this debut redux, the painful transitioning has passed, and what didn’t kill tortured singer/songwriter Sam Herring has indeed made him stronger. Not every song justifies Herring’s bold imprimatur, but enough do to make them stand out in a catalog that wasn’t wanting for impact tracks. Singles teases by opening with its four best: “Seasons (Waiting On You),” “Spirit,” “Sun In The Morning” and “Doves” illuminate everything that makes Future Islands stick in the throat and lodge in the chest, Herring biting off lines like a voice-over heavyweight while flashbulb synths and newly live drums strobe around him. “What you know is better, is brighter,” he belts on side-two anchor “Light House.” Believe it. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

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reviews

Designated Hitters It’s déjà vu all over again as the Baseball Project continues its winning streak

he world’s best baseball-themed

band—is there competition?—returns with the aptly titled 3rd, its latest collection of The Baseball Project witty, insightful and heartfelt national pastime an3rd thems. Main writers/guitarists Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn, drummer Linda Pitmon, bassist Peter Buck Yep Roc and new addition Mike Mills again endearingly mine the game for its humor and pathos. Subjects this go-round include Lenny Dykstra and his downfall, the current-day Oakland A’s and Robin Yount’s brother Larry, a hurler who never threw a pitch after blowing out his elbow while warming up for his first and only major-league appearance. Wynn, a Yankees fan, is sneeringly angry on “13,” a withering takedown of Alex Rodriguez: “You were sure that you wouldn’t get caught, sneaky and serpentine.” Mills contributes the catchiest tune, the short, rocking “To The Veterans Committee,” a plea

Diamond Gods Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn play favorites

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Like any fans, Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn have their own baseball idols. “I saw Willie Mays close up the first time I went to a game, and I was never the same,” says McCaughey. “He made baseball seem like so much fun and did everything with flair, even striking out. Mostly, he did

to enshrine an Atlanta Braves legend in Cooperstown (“Forget about the cheaters and all the steroid-eaters/I wanna see Dale Murphy in the Hall of Fame”). Musically, 3rd is a little different than the group’s first two efforts (nothing against them; they’re great), toughersounding and more cohesive. 3rd is somewhat overstuffed at 18 songs—19 if you count the hidden, wonderful solo version of Volume 2: High And Inside’s “Panda And The Freak” by auxiliary member Josh Kantor, Fenway Park’s organist. But it’s still an ideal soundtrack for the dead of winter, when you’re pining for pitchers and catchers to report, or when your team’s out of the race by the dog days of August. —Matt Hickey

everything better than anyone ever did. He still shows up in my dreams, runs wild in my memories and is synonymous with baseball.” “Sandy Koufax was wild and uncontained with talent that seemed would never come to fruition, and he turned it around—then he quit at age 30,” says Wynn.

“He was in incredible pain, and destroying his body with cortisone shots, but I love that he walked away in his prime. He was a lefthanded Jewish kid from Brooklyn who came to L.A. and took the city by storm, a sensation that dovetailed with the era of JFK and the Beatles. —M.H.

photo by Joanna Chattman

Glenn Kotche

Malachai

Cantaloupe

Domino

A ghost is reborn

Time for a makeover

Adventureland

Here’s a dazzling jumble of sound, textural curiosity and thrilling movement; inviting to explore, though far from easily untangled. Unlike the first three strictly solo percussion offerings from Glenn Kotche—better known as the drummer for Wilco, Loose Fur and On Fillmore, though only the latter of those bears any real relationship to what he’s up to here—Adventureland compiles compositions for larger ensembles. The ever-game Kronos Quartet takes on “Anomaly,” while the five-part “The Haunted” is scored for “two pianos vs. percussion” (though, truthfully, the pianos are treated as just another part of a wide-ranging percussive onslaught). Oddly, instead of presenting these pieces independently, their movements are alternated and interspersed with others (jaunty gamelan episode “The Traveling Turtle,” disorienting soundscape “Triple Fantasy”). Perhaps this is meant to enhance a sense of album-ness, though it mainly serves to ensure a total lack of continuity. It’s unclear whether even Kotche really knows what’s happening half the time here, but it’s a delightfully puzzling ride nevertheless. —K. Ross Hoffman

Little Hurricane

Gold Fever

Beyond Ugly

On their third album proper, the Bristol psych-rockers in Malachai brew up another collection of heady, fuzzed-out jams that again finds them dipping their toes in everything from dusty, widescreen spaghetti-Western twang to dubby, elastic funk. True to its title, Beyond continues in the adventurous spirit of predecessors Ugly Side Of Love and Return To The Ugly Side, this time trading in the starry-eyed psychedelia that the group mined on previous efforts for a meatier sound. They’re aided by guest appearances from members of the Ruts and Kasabian, as well as longtime champion/mentor Geoff Barrow, who lends mid-album highlight “Dragon’s Ball,” a sinewy backbeat that wouldn’t sound out of place on his own work behind the boards with Portishead. As a whole, though, Beyond often rings with the bumbling awkwardness of a band taking itself too seriously for the first time, most blatantly on woeful protest jam “I Deserve To No,” a hapless “protest ballad” set to a garish Bollywood sample that somehow plays out even more canned than its miserable title suggests. —Möhammad Choudhery

Man Forever With Sō Percussion

Ryonen

Thrill Jockey Death Valley

Gonna make you sweat

Little Hurricane’s sophomore record initially works the same earth as its self-released debut, Homewrecker—part dirty blooze, part fuzztone and late ’60s-style echo/reverb. But as the album grows from insistent stomper “Summer Air” through the midway point, the arrangements on Gold Fever branch out much farther than that idiom, into soul horns and grooves. It’s all American music, though it’s the slow-burn Americana of the California desert (the band’s home base) and the swamps and wide spaces of the Southern states that provide most of the reference points. Dirty, then, but lived-in; sweaty, but with some genuine heat baking out of the speakers. The fat sound of Gold Fever is all the more impressive given that the band is a two-piece. Where a duo like the Kills would roll around in the dirt, Little Hurricane seems to prefer the front porch, the friendly space between wildness and domesticity, where the music can feel home-grown without sounding too tame. —Eric Waggoner

So fresh and so clean Who’d have thought that once Oneida downshifted from being a superb, provocative rock band into a sporadically active art installation, its most vital spin-off would be Kid Millions’ project for drums tuned to recreate the harmonic blur of Lou Reed feedback epic Metal Machine Music? Man Forever has not only endured, but grown with each of its four albums. Ryonen is a collaboration with Sō Percussion, a modern classical ensemble that’s previously worked with Steve Reich and Matmos. The band brings unprecedented precision to Kid’s compositions, and his layered vocals and interventionist mixing give the music added depth. The record’s two pieces are fields of rhythm that seem to pull away from your reach like a curtain blowing in a breeze, yet swing back to knock you on your ass. —Bill Meyer

Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s

Sling Shot To Heaven

sembling Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s in 2004, shapeshifting from indie-pop savior to disenchanted major-label dissident to Paul Westerberg disciple. Margot’s sound has faithfully reflected those changes: wide-angle chamber pop, epic (vs. Epic) rock expanse, stripped-down and amped-up confessional garage folk. On Sling Shot To Heaven, Edwards and MATNSAS return to the scuffed romanticism and lush chamber-pop score of 2006’s The Dust Of Retreat while tapping gently into the lean, mean perspective of 2010’s Buzzard and 2012’s Rot Gut, Domestic. As Edwards’ storysongs on Sling Shot play out as mind movies, it’s not difficult to hear everyone from John Cale (“Hello, San Francisco”) to Ryan Adams (“When You’re Gone”) to Jimmy Webb (“Swallowing Light Beams”) in the soundtrack. And yet, it’s always distinctly Margot; who else is likely to toss out lyrics like “neo-Nazi heartache backrub” and “when I grow up to be a dog”? —Brian Baker

Pattern Is Movement

Pattern Is Movement Hometapes

Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little bump ‘n’ grind

After a six-year silence, Andrew Thiboldeaux and Christopher Ward come back with this slinky, spacey outing. After paring down to the founding duo for 2008’s tangled All Together, Pattern Is Movement seemed an easy complement to Dirty Projectors’ shape-shifting pop and Battles’ abrupt, whimsical math rock. And, while those elements haven’t disappeared, Pattern Is Movement is more restrained on its self-titled fourth album, playing in steadier grooves with lush, slinky R&B synths. Thiboldeaux—who balances piano, synthesizers, bass and multi-tracked vocals—grants a more confident delivery to his impressionistic croon, and tempers his melismatic indulgences with rich harmonies. Drummer Ward, for his part, keeps the songs nimble, pushing and prodding in an unpredictable swing. But with shimmering synths and complex rhythms offset by soft singing and filmic orchestral flourishes, an enticing record emerges, boasting intricate instrumental latticework with the smoldering focus of slow jams. This is bedroom music for prog-nerds. —Bryan C. Reed

Perfect Pussy

Say Yes To Love

Captured Tracks Mariel Recording Co.

Fade to black. Roll credits. Beautiful. Sigh.

Richard Edwards has hit for the cycle since as-

Not so prurient interests

The mindfuck of being a young woman in this day and age is enough to make anyone scream into the nearest mic.

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Cleaving The Scene Animal Collective’s Avey Tare hacks up a hit-or-miss horrorthemed side project

vey tare’s new record may not be the stuff of Saw V. But make no mistake, it is spooky. You couldn’t expect less from the Animal Collective Avey Tare’s co-conspirator. Enter The Slasher House’s first song, “A Slasher Flicks Enter The Slasher House Sender” (a low-end synth-squiggle), introduces the album’s sonic constants: watery guitars, hard-tapped hollow-body Domino drums and Tare himself—an echo-laden reverberating goof whose panicked vocals sound like an overly caffeinated meeting between Marc Bolan and Alan Vega. That same drum snap gets faster and more precise as Tare frantically works up a sweat on “Blind Babe.” The liquid FX of “A Sender” get applied to Tare’s high-pitched voice on “Duplex Trip,” a clip-clopping nursery rhyme that finds him yelling out, “You will come back,” in a manner more threatening than promising. On Slasher House’s initial cluttered, speedy tunes (and later, during songs like “The Outlaw”), you sense there are catchy melodies—heard in spurts, really, rather than actually getting an opportunity to bathe in Tare’s songcraft. Busy music has no bigger fan than this reviewer, but Tare’s clusterfuck arrangements work against making sense of his melodies. It’s when things slow down—as they do throughout the gentle disco of “Little Fang,” aptly titled shuffling samba “Catchy (Was Contagious)” and the spacey, clanging train ride that is “Roses On The Window”—that Tare and Co.’s melodic intentions (and intensity) get a better, clearer outing without losing their daring noisiness. When he sings, “You’re something special/You’ve got to know it’s true” on “Little Fang,” you actually feel a sense of devotion in league with (rather than despite) the effects-heavy processing, —A.D. Amorosi

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Animal Crossing A history of Avey Tare’s idiosyncratic solo output Avey Tare is no stranger to yanking melody from noise and clutter. Those elements were more like actual requirements when it came to co-founding Animal Collective. The same things are doubly true of Tare’s many efforts outside the Collective: 2010 solo album Down There; a psych-punk affair with Eric Copeland (Black Dice) as Terrestrial Tones; the Pullhair Rubeye pairing with múm vocalist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir. Yet, if you’re to believe what’s been said of Tare’s other new band, Slasher Flicks, they didn’t come from a place of noise, but rather a place of kitsch humor. Tare is a rabid fan of the horror movies he’s named his band after, as well as the kind of novelty songs that made campy radio archivist Dr. Demento famous. Boo. —A.D.A.

photo by atiba jefferson

Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves is a classic punk frontwoman in the Poly Styrene/Kathleen Hanna mold. Her voice is air-raid-siren high, playful and potent at the same time. Say Yes To Love’s opening salvo “Driver” declares, “Watch me, I’m kicking the wall/I’ll break through it before I go and leave a hole/My shape in everything you know.” The songs are like manifestos, delivered in short, sharp bursts just shy of the two-minute mark, not following the typical verse/chorus/ verse format. While it’s a deeply cathartic break-up record, it’s both personal and political, a woman asserting her independence and identity, and questioning domesticity when your friends start pairing off, like on “Interference Fits.” “Big Stars” is a killer cheating song with this poignant, universal message: “I’m not afraid of losing time/Just worried about missing out/It’s weirder to stay alive.” Live long, Perfect Pussy. —Sara Sherr

the pillars of tradition down,” even if you’re not sure why. From there, the rest is pure Chuck in all his gravel-throated, guitar-strumming, ragged intensity, rasping his way through anthem after anthem as he hangs his heart out to dry. It’s his best album in years—or maybe ever—with plenty of help from Todd Beene (pedal steel), Jon Gaunt (fiddle), Joe Ginsberg (bass), David Hildalgo, Jr. (drums), Rami Jaffee (glockenspiel, organ) and Christopher Thorn (electric guitar, lap steel, dobro, piano), who find the subtleties in the middle of all this populist rock ‘n’ roll classicism. Together, they’ve road-tested these songs before recording, and it shows, beginning with a songwriter’s gift for excess and giving it the shadow of greatness. —Kenny Berkowitz

Ratking

So It Goes

Linda Perhacs

The Soul Of All Natural Things Asthmatic Kitty

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Linda Perhacs released Parallelograms, her until now only album, in 1970. It was a mystical folk record, equally informed by new-age spirituality, the contemporary folk music of Joni Mitchell, and abstract, ambient experimentalism. Rediscovered and reissued at the turn of the century, it has become a totem for the freak-folk movement and other experimental artists, and Perhacs began to perform again. Remarkably, The Soul Of All Natural Things sounds like a legitimate sequel to its 44-yearold predecessor. Perhacs sings in a delicate, intimate voice that can mass into an angelic choir, and while the keyboards are definitely more modern, they retain Parallelogram’s dreamlike aura. Perhacs’ light touch contrasts with the often heavy-handed lyrics: She proselytizes about nature’s beauty, God’s ubiquitous soul and the need for truth in a world spinning out of control. She earns the right to the hippie idealism, however. It’s undiminished since Parallelograms. —Steve Klinge

Vonnegut-inspired MCs are enthused, but green

Originality out of the gate is a myth, most of the time; to debut is to arrive reeking of your influences. Ratking—the feted NYCbased trio of Wiki, Hak and Sporting Life— is no different. Within a few spins of So It Goes, you can easily grok what the threesome likely came up on: Talib Kweli and HiTek’s Reflection Eternal, early Clipse, Native Tongues, Underachievers. So, their stinging, smart wordplay is dependably knotted and sneered, and even though it’s difficult to separate their cadences, the collective passion present is undeniable. At moments, they transcend these concerns via that special, swaggering chemistry borne of childhood friendships, productions sourced from dusty soul LPs, how their rappity-rap vs. bum-rush into nearBone Thugs-N-Harmony-worthy choruses; chestnuts like “Eagles are our brothers, and flowers our daughters” are gravy, and the taut, bugged-out “Protein” knocks hard. By the next album, they should have the kinks worked out. —Raymond Cummings

The Skull Defekts

Dances In Dreams Of The Known Unknown

Till Midnight

Saudade

ESL Music

Absence and fondness

Sonically speaking, the Thievery Corporation is prepared to appropriate whatever it wants. Its biggest task, within an electronic/dance/world recordingartist-type scenario, has always been to figure out what it is that it’s wanted. While its previous cross-pollinations of multiple genres have been successful commercially and aesthetically, and prepared listeners for the option of going in any and all directions at once, the group has settled, at least for the moment, to fully meditate on its first love. That is, an entire CD of Brazilian music—and why not? If you’re Thievery Corporation’s Eric Hilton and Rob Garza and want to chill Brazilian after an extended period of ecstatic club-life and pioneering studio science, a measured tribute to warm, seductive, yearning samba inspirations like Jobim and Costa is just the thing. Showcasing numerous guest vocalists—friends new and old—this hauntingly enigmatic recording only gets deeper as it progresses. As it should. —Mitch Myers

Tokyo Police Club

Forcefield

Mom + Pop Thrill Jockey

Sideonedummy

The first few bars are so quiet, so pretty, it’s hard to believe you’re listening to Chuck Ragan. But soon enough, the backbeat arrives, your head starts bobbing, and before you know it, you’re pumping your fist in the air and singing along, shouting, “Tear

Thievery Corporation

Hot Charity

Chuck Ragan

Feed him any time

Lungfish front-beard Daniel Higgs. This has resulted in a concurrent shift away from the now-quintet’s previous harsh noise guise. Experimentalism still exists in droves, especially in the oddball tunings, grating guitar duels and other unique ephemera they wrangle from six strings. It doesn’t matter if those sounds are a rusty door slammed on the fingers of the Fall, Cows and the latter-years Dischord catalog. What hasn’t got as much attention is how menacing, dark and dangerous the Skull Defekts sound. The casual violence of their noise rock has been twinned with a sense of collapse akin to Jim Thirwell’s Foetus (minus the witty puns and dry humor) and fellow Sverige night-crawlers Årabrot. It’s not a pretty album, but it will evoke reaction on either side of the coin. And there’s no doubt about—or ignoring—that. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

soothes

Love hurts, noise

Two aspects of this Swedish band’s recent development have been locked in the crosshairs of an overwhelming majority of press and public. First, Dances In Dreams Of The Known Unknown will be the second album to feature the shamanistic presence of former

Don’t taze me, (indie-pop) bros!

No single song on either Tokyo Police Club’s raucous, raw 2006 debut EP or the ensuing Strokes-y-clang-with-occasional-hipstersynth full-lengths broke the four-minute mark. Indeed, most never saw three. So, when an eight-plus minute opus entitled “Argentina (Parts I, II, III)” opens Forcefield,

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reviews

Primal Screamers The chameleonic Whigs are at their best plugged in and peppy

arning: Do Not Listen to Modern Creation

on a Friday, while you’re still stuck in the office. Nope, save this one for the after the quittin’ The Whigs whistle screams and you’re on the open road. Or, at least, save it Modern Creation for when you’re slowly inching your way toward the open road, which would be a helluva lot quicker if these jackasses knew how New West to merge. Modern Creation is an album for furious air-drumming and single-serving sing-alongs, for weirding out your traffic-neighbor with your exuberance and flailing. The Athens, Ga.-birthed band did not record an album that facilitates docile, professional behavior, and unless your business card says “Office Freak Show,” we suggest saving Modern Creation for your own personal time.

Modern Creations “Friday Night” It’s that moment we’re all working toward, the light at the end of the day-job tunnel, the handful of hours where you can actually fucking unwind. Which happens a lot quicker with pummeling punk drums and a fuzzed-out guitar rave-up tugging the frayed threads of your work-week consciousness.

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The Whigs have always felt out little out of time—grungy when indie rock was at its most twee, jangly when things swung back around to flannel and Doc Martens—but with Modern Creation, it seems the Venn diagram between popular taste and Whigs creativity has finally overlapped. Which is not to say the Whigs sound like ’90s-revival Johnny-come-latelys—their approach to classic modern-rock tones feels like it could have beamed out from a pre-Clinton college radio show or plucked off that mixtape you had in college with the Del Fuegos and Flop. Modern Creation is big, buzzy guitar pop that is as timeless as it is timely. Even if the rest of the office thinks you’re weird. Especially if the rest of the office thinks you’re weird. —Sean L. Maloney

Three standout tracks from the new Whigs LP

“The Difference Between One And Two” You gotta have a cool-down after a good workout, and the slow-burning swagger of “The Difference” closes out Modern Creation on the right note. Unfussy organ and a steady chugging rhythm = a long, deep cleansing breath.

“The Particulars” If there’s one thing that Modern Creation improves upon within the Whigs milieu, it’s their sense of groove. “The Particular” grinds low and hard, taking the laconic psych vibes and pouring them out like molasses on a cold day, to build a sublime sludge-pop chug-along that echoes modern-rock staples like the Cult and Drivin’ N Cryin’. —S.M.

photo by Joshua Black Wilkins

you might wonder if the band perhaps spent the past four years learning to embrace a rep-defying inner proggy sprawl. Once the final note of this charming, churning declaration of indie-pop independence rings out, however, what follows—in two- or three-minute delectable salvos—is refinement, not wholesale reinvention; a continued journey toward dreamier, increasingly lush sonic pastures punctuated by cascades of jangly, vivifying chords. (Think members of Teenage Fanclub and Modest Mouse reimagining The Soft Bulletin.) Tokyo Police Club has always possessed a certain charisma that drove the band’s best songs and carried the lesser, but Forcefield achieves a sound, which—despite the title—is all allure, no repellant. —Shawn Macomber

analog-pop bliss in ways that the Sandison brothers would never touch. While Dirty Vegas or Zero 7 used this model as an easy Trojan horse into the world of car commercials, the layered simplicity of Tycho’s sound has more to do with craft and economy. On last album Dive, Tycho perfected this amalgam of E-Z listening and driving music on stunning single “Hours,” and came close enough on the rest. For the follow-up, he cranks up the palm-muted and Edge-delayed guitars for an eight-song chaser that, again, miraculously never fades into stasis. Memorable stops along the way include nighttime highway cruise “Montana,” the strummy “Dye” and, best of all, the almost crunchy “Spectre,” which is techno where you can learn the chords. —Dan Weiss

Tweens

UMe

Frenchkiss

Dangerbird

That youthful glow

A shaky foundation

Tweens

“I’m too young to be this tired,” 21-year-old Tweens singer/guitarist Bridget Battle laments in a voice sounding like Belinda Carlisle doing a Joey Ramone impression on “Bored In This City.” From there, Cincinnati’s sneering, self-proclaimed “trash-pop” trio delivers an exuberant 11-track burst of insanely hooky, vintage pop/punk (à la Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers) that careens by in a whiplash-inducing 34 minutes. Simply put, Battle and Co. sound anything but bored. Sure, on cuts like aptly titled instrumental jam “Stoner” or yearning, sleazed-out ballad “Don’t Wait Up,” the band simmers down to Sex Pistols tempos, letting Battle’s devil-may-care millennialism take center stage. But it’s the album’s infectious, breakneck bashers—like the less-than-two-minute “McMicken” (which sounds like sped-up, doowop Bratmobile) or why-nice-guys-finish-last real-talk rocker “Be Mean”—that really stand out here. By no means is this debut original, but the hooks are sharp enough and the no-frills, overdub-free presentation shreds hard enough that it doesn’t really need to be. —Adam Gold

Tycho

Awake

Monuments

If UMe had even half as much to say on Monuments as Queens Of The Stone Age or the Foo Fighters (two much better bands also produced by Adam Kasper), the hard-rock trio would justify some of its upstart hype. As it stands, the band has little to offer beyond the simple novelty of being female-fronted. What Monuments manufactures most effectively are heavy bass lines paired with unconventional vocal harmonies; what it obviously lacks are discernible, rousing lyrics. Aside from vaguely describing some boilerplate relationship highs and lows, UMe’s greatest failing is its inability to grip listeners with sentiments beyond the occasional heart-pang brought on by traditional chord progressions. Undeniably reminiscent of Metric vocalist Emily Haines, UMe’s Rachel Larson creates a counterpoint from the hard-rock instrumentation via gentle, crooning melodies; but this LP does little to propel her anywhere near the ranks of the big-name women of contemporary pop/rock. —Brittany Thomas

Various Artists

Bob Dylan In The 80s: Volume 1 ATO

Ghostly International

Still superior to Legho

Vintage equipment collector Scott Hansen does one thing only, and he does it well: He heard Boards Of Canada’s “Roygbiv” and exploited its otherworldly

Knocked out and saved Like all tributes, this is uneven. But two factors make it one of the most interesting and rewarding Bob Dylan tribs. First, the roster is a solid mix of artists both established and upcoming, including Langhorne Slim & The

Law, Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween), Reggie Watts and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. Second, the ’80s still rank as the most controversial decade of Dylan’s career, beginning with the born-again turn of Slow Train Coming and ending with 1990’s Under The Red Sky, an, er, flawed album by any standard. Cherry-picked choices such as Finn’s blasting “Sweetheart Like You” and Built To Spill’s gritty “Jokerman” aren’t surprising, but the critical dismissal of most of Dylan’s catalog from this era means Freeman can recast the reviled “Wiggle Wiggle” as fauxreggae and make it a genuine hoot, while Hannah Cohen’s take on “Covenant Woman” can sound soulful and humble without coming off too reverent of its source material. Well worth a listen. —Eric Waggoner

Rufus Wainwright

Vibrate: The Best Of Rufus Wainwright UMe

Rufus Wainwright

Live From The Artists Den Artists Den/UMe

His hand never wavers

If David Bowie would have carried on as the cosmopolitan cabaret boulevardier hinted at on Aladdin Sane— or if Leonard Cohen liked Tin Pan Alley schmaltz—each would have had much the same career as Rufus Wainwright. His strong, winnowing voice is impeccable, with its bassoon-ish lows and towering highs. His lyrical skills—developed in part through the DNA of dad Loudon III and mom Kate McGarrigle—paint pragmatic, impressionist portraits of a life around the corner. His music’s breadth—well, he’s covered Judy Garland and has written nearly traditional operas, elegiac paeans, bouncy pop and bouncier Cole Porter-ish songs about cigarettes, chocolate milk and sexualizing one’s teacher. While the Artists Den Blu-ray set from Manhattan’s Church of the Ascension proves that Wainwright’s recent reach for pop stardom, Out Of The Game, was as tough as it was tender (and zealously vibrant), Vibrate also revels in all things NYC, with the smartly sophisticated likes of “Me And Liza” and “Dinner At Eight,” as well as the clip-clopping SoCal cool of “Going To A Town.” Buy Vibrate’s deluxe version and get additional live heartbreakers such as several Judy tunes and “Do It Again.” —A.D. Amorosi

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/movies

by Stan Michna

Sponge Bath Special “Nurses. I married one. They’re the best, baby! The best!” That’s what one of my football coaches once excitedly told me during a practice when he learned I’d been dating a nursing student. He then had our team run wind sprints until we vomited on our cleats. The moral? Heated passion for nurses has consequences. And if you develop a wolfish itch for Paz de la Huerta’s nurse Abby Russell in Nurse 3-D, you’re not only asking for Trouble with a capital “T” but can expect Consequences with a capital “C.” Perhaps best known as Lucy Danziger, Nucky Johnson’s trampy “little tiger cub” in Boardwalk Empire, third-billed de la Huerta is the whole buenísina enchilada (and hottest tamale) in Nurse 3-D. Pitched incorrectly—it’s far too goodlooking and professionally assembled— by its promoters as “grindhouse,” Nurse 3-D can more accurately be described as a prettified version of a species of the grindhouse genus. It’s what the grizzled raincoat brigade, the loyal habitués of sticky-seated grindhouse theatres, used to call “roughies”: an amalgam of lowrent, raincoat-flapping, good old sexand-violence. In Nurse 3-D, de la Huerta is the sex and the violence. If she’d been around 45 years ago, her picture would have been Scotch-taped to the bathroom walls of two-dollar-a-night rooming houses everywhere. With features suggesting a Vulcan face meld of a young Mick Jagger with a young Jennifer Tilley, de la Huerta’s exotic face conveys, simultaneously, earthly delights and deadly menace. When she speaks, though—she sounds almost exactly like the Lolita-ish Melanie Griffith from Night Moves—you know immediately that to “delights” and “menace” must be added nuts-as-a-bunny “crazy.”

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In Nurse 3-D, de la Huerta’s nurse Abby is (in Philip Roth’s immortal phrase) “a compassionate femme with knockers to match.” Poured into a nurse’s uniform short enough to expose her garter belt and flashing enough cleavage to bruise the eyes of passersby, de la Huerta’s initial appearance provokes an immediate question: When was the last time the filmmakers were in a hospital? If nurses’ uniforms—including that of nominal star Katrina Bowden’s nursebabe, Danni—were really like this, men would mutilate themselves in droves to gain admittance to hospitals. And that’s when de la Huerta has clothes on. (Which suggests a dissertation subject for Masters of Fine Arts graduates: Why, since the medium was invented, do television series about nurses, Nurse Jackie excepted, fail miserably? Yet shows about doctors, going back to Medic in the early 1950s, not only thrive, but dominate the airwaves? Conversely, feature films about doctors reached their apex in 1930s, and are virtually extinct today; whereas movies featuring nurses, long a Hollywood staple, continue—albeit in a sexier, most un-Florence Nightingale-ish context--to be cranked out?) Most of the time in Nurse 3-D, however, de la Huerta is either naked, partially naked, about to get naked or getting dressed after being naked, usually after killing, or about to kill some leering, tush-grabbing, no-goodnik of a faithless husband. That she sometimes teases and provokes such behaviour is irrelevant: This is a woman, after all, scarred by a childhood trauma, and killing is the only way to cope with the hurt. Needles in the scrotum or neck? Slitting throats? Surgically sawing off arms? Why, it’s a cry for help! Psycho, Single White Female (Abby has the hots for Danni), Friday The 13th,

3D / Blu-ray / DVD Combo Available April 8th from Entertainment One Halloween or even This Gun For Hire, Nurse 3-D`s hoary storyline of scarredchild-becomes-murderous-adult is as persuasive here as well as it’s ever been (i.e., not very, either then or now). But that’s of little consequence given director Douglas Arniokoski`s playfulness and sense of mischief, particularly in his casting. Kathleen Turner, for example, has a brief cameo as the head nurse welcoming the new batch of sexy nursing graduates. Even better is casting Judd Nelson(!) as a hard-driving, ultra-competent doctor whose lecherous ways land him on de la Huerta’s operating table (minus the anaesthetic, of course). Sporting both a bandido moustache and a soul patch, Nelson looks clearly like what the English scathingly call a “wanker.” But Nelson plays him straight, as if he’s in some Eugene O’Neill play, and Nurse 3-D, believe it or not, is raised to the level of finelyhoned sleaze thanks to his presence. (A compliment, by the way.) I hate to think what the trashily alluring de la Huerta`s future holds (she can’t continue flashing her physical assets forever, unless she intends eventually to give birth to a new line of gerontology porn, or something). Until—or maybe even when she does—she’ll be a lot of fun to watch, especially for what remains of the grizzled raincoat brigade. The immensely knowledgeable Stan Michna runs the DVD department at Sunrise Records, 336 Yonge Street in Toronto. Feel free to bring your DVD quest downtown.

/music/new_releases

APRIL 1 Soul & Swagger: The Complete “5” Royales 1951-1967 (box set) Abba Gold: Greatest Hits – 40th Anniversary Edition Soul Makossa Afrique Keith Allison In Action: The Complete Columbia Sides Plus! Matt Andersen Weightless Fever in the Road The Bamboos The Voice of the Eagle Robbie Basho Jeff Black Folklore John Cage Early Electronic and Tape Music S. Carey Range of Light Chevelle La Gargola Chiodos Devil Cloud Nothings Here & Nowhere Else Combichrist We Love You Robert Cray Band In My Soul Sweet Disarray Dan Croll Dan + Shay Where It All Began Charlie Daniels Band Off the Grid – Doin’ It Dylan Sings Her Great Doris Day Movie Hits Deep Purple Live in California ‘74 Mac DeMarco Salad Days Mike Dillon Band Band of Outsiders A.J. Ellis Bury the Devil Grateful Dead Dick’s Picks Vol. 19 10/19/73 Oklahoma City Fairgrounds Arena, Oklahoma City, OK Hellion To Hellion and Back Holmes Brothers Brotherhood Ibibio Sound Machine Ibibio Sound Machine Infamous Stringdusters Let it Go Education, Education, Kaiser Chiefs Education & War Eddie Kendricks Love Keys Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles Complete Atlantic Sides Lacuna Coil Broken Crown Halo Jon Langford & Skull Orchard Here Be Monsters The “5” Royales

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The Afghan Whigs apr 15 Do to the Beast

Cincinnati’s soulful altrock legends are back, but without lead guitarist Rick McCollum, this comeback record isn’t as intense as we’d like, more closely resembling frontman Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers side deal.

Cyndi Lauper

Vicki Lawrence

Manchester Orchestra MKTO Nickel Creek Justin Nokuza Odyssey Ohio Express

Ohio Players

She’s So Unusual: A 30th Anniversary Celebration The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia: The Complete Bell Recordings Cope MKTO A Dotted Line Ulysees Hollywood Party Tonight Beg, Borrow and Steal: The Complete Cameo Recordings Love Rollercoaster: Anthology 1967-1988

Alan Parsons Project Complete Albums Collection

Christina Perri Leon Russell The Slambovian Circus of Dreams Otis Span

Head or Heart Life Journey

A Box of Everything Sweet Giant of the Blues Josh Thompson Turn It Up Joe Turner The Real Boss of the Blues The Used Imaginary Enemy Various Artists Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne Various Artists The Complete Fame Singles Vol. 1: 1964-67 Various Artists This Is Your Life Weaves Weaves White Hinterland Baby

APRIL 8 Black Label Society Catacombs of the Black Vatican Carlene Carter Carter Girl James Durbin Celebrate EMA The Future’s Void For the Fallen Dreams Heavy Hearts Highasakite Silent Treatment Eric Hutchinson Pure Fiction Chuck Inglish Convertibles Wilko Johnson/Roger Daltrey Going Back Home Martina McBride Everlasting MercyMe Welcome to the New Mike + The Mechanics Living years: Deluxe Edition Nostalghia Chrysalis Joan Osborne Love and Hate Patton Oswalt Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time Ratking So It Goes Linda Ronstadt Duets Squarepusher x Z-Machines Music for Robots The Strange Familiar The Day the Light Went Out Todd Terje It’s About Time Trophy Scars Holy Vacants Various Artists XXX: Three Decades of Roadrunner Records

APRIL 15 The Afghan Whigs Do to the Beast Ian Anderson Homo Erraticus Del Barber Headwaters Del Barber Prairieography Bee Gees The Warner Bros. Years 1987-1991 (box set) The Complete Albums Black Sabbath 1970-1978 (box set) The Both The Both Breathe Carolina Savages Jack Bruce Silver Rails Rodney Crowell Tarpaper Sky

Wye Oak apr 29 Shriek

Lithium Burn Eternal Enemies Beauty in Disrepair The Hustle Is Really on Stone by Stone The First Four Albums and More Ziggy Marley Fly Rasta Ingrid Michaelson Lights Out Stanton Moore Conversations Illmatic XX Nas Ken Navarro Ruby Lane Needtobreathe Rivers in the Wasteland Oak Ridge Boys Boys Night Out Jamie O’Neal Eternal Billy’s Back on Billy Porter Broadway The Secret Sisters Put Your Needle Down Shonen Knife Overdrive The Gospel Music of Marty Stuart Marty Stuart America’s Greatest Various Artists Hits Vol. 8: 1957 Hard to Find Jukebox Various Artists Classics: 1963 – Rock, Rhythm & Pop Various Artists NOW That’s What I Call Music! 87 Muddy Waters The Complete Aristocrat & Chess Singles As & Bs 1947-62 The Winery Dogs Dog Treats: The Winery Dogs Deluxe Special Edition The Winery Dogs The Winery Dogs Special Edition Deleted Scenes Emmure Emerson Hart Mark Hummel Ikebe Shakedown The Lettermen

APRIL 22 Agustana Life Imitating Life Army of the Pharaohs In Death Reborn Francesca Battistelli If We’re Honest Ready, Steady, Go! Drake Bell Alfie Boe Trust Cameron Carpenter If You Could Read My Mind

Death

Death III

These Baltimorebased indie darlings are improving with each release, now blending the unhinged guitar squalls of predecessor Civilian with the danceability of frontlady Jenn Wasner’s Dungeonesse project.

Dwight & Nicole Eels

Shine On The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett

G. Love & Special Sauce Kelis Neon Trees Joe Satriani

Sugar FOOD Pop Psychology The Complete Studio Recordings (box set) The Seldom Scene Long Time… Seldom Scene Semi Precious Weapons Aviation To Kill a King Cannibals With Cutlery Can’t Bury Your Past Turchi The Whigs Modern Creation Winter Better Days Comin’ XTC Skylarking: :Corrected Polarity Edition

APRIL 29 The 5th Dimension Earthbound: The Complete ABC Recordings Cannonball Adderley The Black Messiah Damon Albarn Everyday Robots Nat Baldwin In the Hollows Olga Bell Krai Brigitte DeMeyer Savannah Road DWNTWN DWNTWN Space Police: Edguy Defenders of the Crown Embrace Embrace Jackiem Joyber Evolve Blake Lewis Portrait of a Chameleon Nils Lofgren Face the Music (box set)

Chameleon Most Messed Up Encino Man Delicate Sound of Thunder Pink Mountaintops Get Back Prefab Sprout Crimson/Red Pretty Boy Floyd The Ultimate Pretty Boy Floyd Eli “Paperboy” Reed Nights Like This Chris Robinson Brotherhood Phosphorescent Harvest Rodrigo y Gabriela 9 Dead Alive Saliva Rise Up Curtis Stigers Hooray for Love Strange Talk Cast Away The String Cheese Incident Song in My Head Toto 35th Anniversary Tour: Live in Poland Chad VanGaalen Shrink Dust The Complete Atco Vanilla Fudge Singles White Rock Rick Wakeman Ben Watt Hendra Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys Riding Your Way: The Lost Transcriptions for Tiffany Music, 1946-1947 Cassandra Wilson Blue Light ‘Til Dawn: 20th Anniversary Expanded Edition Wye Oak Shriek Under the Big Black X Sun (Expanded & Remastered Edition) Yanni Inspirato Harvey Mason Old 97’s Pigeon John Pink Floyd

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A L L Y O U C A N E AT T H E F E A S T B E G I N S A P R I L 1 ST

steelpantherrocks.com

Featuring

“ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL” Tour Dates APR 24 • PHOENIX CONCERT THEATRE • TORONTO APR 25 • CORONA THEATRE • MONTREAL MAY 28 • COMMODORE BALLROOM • VANCOUVER

AVAILABLE

04.01.14