February Needle Magazine by Gary Hammerschlag

Matt Dusk is back with a stunning new album

My Funny Valentine

(The Chet Baker Songbook)

My funny Valentine is Duskâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ode to Chet and the music he grew up on. Featuring: Arturo Sandoval, Emilie-Claire Barlow and Guido Basso

AVAILABLE FEBRUARY 12, 2013

ALSO AVAILABLE MAGNETA LANE Witch Rock

ZIGGY MARLEY In Concert

JOE BUDDEN No Love Lost

VARIOUS

Californication (Season 6)

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by Entertainment One Canada

THE POGUES Very Best Of...

PUTUMAYO PRESENTS Vintage France

TWO HOURS TRAFFIC Foolish Blood

SAINT ALVIA Static Psalms

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Turn On The Bright Lights Eels ringleader overcomes tragedies and burnout to find his Wonderful life

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photo by Piper Ferguson

JUST LIKE GRAHAM PARKER before him, Eels frontman E—a.k.a. one Mark Oliver Everett—was stunned to recently receive word from film director Judd Apatow, requesting his participation in his most recent comedy, This Is 40. “I had met him before—he’d come to our shows and we played a benefit thing he did a couple of years ago,” recalls the musician of his surprise benefactor. “And then one day I get a phone call saying, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and act with Paul Rudd?’ You know,” he chuckles, “as one does.” With Rudd playing a former music-industry exec now running his own indie imprint, E adds, “I just played a hyper-reality version of myself, and I’m on his label. It seemed to go over really well, although I’ve never seen any of the footage.” Nor will audiences. At least not until the DVD/Blu-ray hits the shelves in a few months, with a bevy of deleted scenes. For the moment, E’s on the cutting-room floor. And he’s unusually comfortable with such disappointment. “Stuff like that happens all the time,” he sighs. “And you don’t really talk about it until it sees the light of day, and then you have to talk about it. But for me, there’s been tons of stuff. So, you just keep your nose to the grindstone and you keep doing the stuff that feels good to do. Plus, I’m always too busy working on the next thing to notice too much about something I did in the past.” The L.A. native—who started out as a solo artist with masterful quirk-pop debut A Man Called E back in 1992, and its equally brilliant follow-up, Broken Toy Shop, a year later—has had many projects to occupy his time of late.

Like his rapid-fire trilogy of releases, Hombre Lobo, End Times and Tomorrow Morning, which he backed with two exhausting world tours. Or Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, the mind-bending BBC documentary he filmed about his late physicist father, Hugh Everett III. Or his whimsical autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know. In fact, he grew so inundated that he decided to take almost all of 2011 off. Just to catch his breath. “I just wanted to take a break, so I really didn’t do much of anything—I just sat around,” says E. “But I had to self-impose that boredom on myself, because it’s important to take breaks from creativity whenever you’ve gone through a high-output phase. It was important for me to stay away from it for awhile.” During this fallow period, he admits that he grew obsessed with Mad Men. “It’s the best show ever, as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “And when I’m sitting around on the couch watching TV, I don’t pick up the guitar and start noodling—I purposely stay away from the guitar for months, so when the day comes when I finally pick it up again, it feels fresh and exciting.” As it did when E expanded his cramped basement studio to a new building, which he dubbed The Compound, and—with current Eels members Knuckles (drums), Koool G. Murder (bass) and co-guitarists P-Boo and The Chet—started work on his 10th epistle, Wonderful, Glorious. The album is buzzing with renewed vigor. Literally, starting with hornethive opening stomper “Bombs Away” and its defiant mission statement: “I’ve had enough of being complacent/I’ve had enough of being a mouse/I’m no longer keeping my mouth shut/Bombs away, I’m gonna shake the house.” A sinewy, slithering “Kinda Fuzzy” follows, with the singer’s patented parchmentpapery wheeze warning that, yes, he’s feeling a bit off his game, “but don’t mess with me, I’m up for the fight.” Like a thesis, E builds his self-empowering case through a buzzsaw-jagged “Peach Blossoms,” gentle, coulda-been-a-contender ballad “On The Ropes,” swaggering funk processional “New Alphabet” and the three closing cuts (“You’re My Friend,” “I Am Building A Shrine” and the title track), wherein he tentatively finds his footing again. He emerges from the therapeutic process bloodied but

unbowed: triumphant, confident and full of humble just-happy-to-be-here grace. A deluxe edition boasts 13 more bonus tracks, like “Your Mama Warned You,” “Happy Hour (We’re Gonna Rock),” “I’m Your Brave Little Soldier,” even a live cover of “Summer In The City.” Wonderful, Glorious—licensed to Vagrant through E’s own E Works—is also being issued in a double-10-inch orangevinyl edition. E was overly conscious of the disc’s track sequencing. “In this case, it starts in a darker place, in the name of trying to get to a brighter place,” he says. “And if you have an album called Wonderful, Glorious, it can’t all be wonderful and glorious. That’s why there’s a picture of a plane dropping bombs on the cover—I’m just trying to reflect all the different flavors of life. I think I often get pegged as being ‘the sad guy’ or ‘the depressed guy.’ But for anyone who’s really paying attention, that stuff is always in the name of getting to a happy place.” Usually, E begins recording with a blueprint, a preconceived lyrical and/or musical notion of where his recording will go. This was the first time he didn’t. His only rule: There would be no rules. The only pattern he began to notice was a lot of fighting in the words, a man trying valiantly to duke himself out of a corner. “If anything, I am a fighter,” says the man who watched all of his closest family members pass away over the years. “I have fought my way through a lot of tough situations over the course of my life.” But don’t get him wrong, E cautions—he is incredibly grateful where his songwriting gift has taken him. And he’s relieved that his 10-year-old dog Bobby Jr.—seemingly at death’s door this year—made it through spinal surgery, and is now prancing around like a puppy again. So, ultimately, Wonderful, Glorious is a metaphor, he says, “for all of us making a little effort—you can’t just sit back and expect shit to happen. I mean, shit does happen, but you’ve got to do your best to be ready for it to happen, in case it does. “Sometimes you’ve got to work hard, and it’s not fun,” he says. “But it’s all in the name of getting to a fun place. And I’m used to that equation now. It works well for me.” —Tom Lanham

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The Gaze That Slays The Joy Formidable spikes big riffs with bigger rumination RITZY BRYAN IS LOST somewhere in America. This is nothing new for the diminutive, platinum-blonde powerhouse frontwoman of the Joy Formidable, but after two years of nearly non-stop touring, it’s still a bit unsettling. “One of those waking-up moments when you go, ‘Fuck, where are we?’” she says. “Somebody told me we’re in Richmond, Va. It’s a beautiful, bright day.” Living in the moment—and figuring out where you are when you get there—is something of a shared philosophy between Bryan and bassist Rhydian Dafydd, one that serves them well in advance of their now just-released sophomore album, Wolf’s Law (Canvasback/ Atlantic). After a much-raved-about debut, 2011’s The Big Roar, and gigs that spanned from intimate clubs to opening for Foo Fighters and Muse, expectations from fans and critics are higher than ever. There’s also the dreaded specter of the “sophomore slump” that, clichéd as it may be, still haunts any band that’s found success straight out of the gate. Yet Bryan—who speaks passionately and from the gut, unafraid to punctuate a thought with a little blue language for emphasis—isn’t worried about expectations. Any stress leading up to the release of Wolf’s Law is an internal force, she insists, one that’s essential for her art. “The only pressure that we ever put on ourselves is to write music that we can completely stand behind,” she says. “That’s just keeping yourself alive and excited and inspired by this band.” The Joy Formidable’s roots reach back to 2007, when childhood pals Bryan and Dafydd founded the trio in their native Wales after a few starts and stops with other projects. Something about this version clicked, led by Bryan’s hard-driving riffs, sweetly-sung pop hooks and a mesmerizing Jekyll-and-Hyde stage presence that’s part dreamy songbird, part headbanging rock madwoman. The band’s first taste of the buzz to come arrived with its first single, “Austere.” NME spotlighted the song, but it was a fan-made video—headshots of folks pleasuring themselves—that earned a YouTube ban and put the Joy Formidable on the international radar. Still, even then as a yet-unsigned artist, Bryan made it clear that the music, not the expectations, was the priority. “Some bands think the record deal is the reward at the end of it all,” she told a Welsh newspaper. “But to us, it doesn’t work like that.” Their major-label debut, The Big Roar, delivered on the hype, earning mentions on yearend best-of lists and praise from sources as

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diverse as The New York Times and Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee. Anchored by new drummer Matt Thomas’ metal-influenced rhythms, the album and the live sets that followed showcased a wide-ranging sound: orchestral touches, well-placed double-bass patterns and ambient guitar swells. With a minor altrock radio hit in “Whirring” that earned them a high-energy Late Show With David Letterman performance, the members of the Joy Formidable went from relative unknowns to mid-size club headliners in just a year. Wolf’s Law is a different animal, and a far cry from the recording of The Big Roar, which Dafydd describes as “turbulent” and “claustrophobic.” For the follow-up, after building a collection of riffs, melodies and lyrics while on the road, the trio retreated to a lakeside cabin studio in Maine to piece it all together and enjoy the silence. “When you go to that sort of environment—Portland, January, very wintery—we felt very put off from the normal chaos of touring, the normal pace of life,” says Bryan. “It gave us a lot of time for reflection. We went into those sessions feeling very hungry to get back into the studio. There was a lot of energy, a lot of focus.” Bryan and Dafydd stripped each song to its barest bones—vocals and acoustic guitar or piano—and built up from there, with no regard for categories or labels. “That’s the beauty of music,” says Bryan. “There are no rules. There are no limitations. If you have a very clear, defined voice and you know what it is you’re trying to say, then the genre, the sounds, the instrumentation—if you’re excited by it and it fucking turns us on musically, then you can turn your hand to absolutely anything.” The result is a sonic step forward, with more emphasis on orchestration (both Ryan and Dafydd have classical backgrounds) and dynamics. “Silent Treatment,” a staple in their live encores last year, is unadorned, with only Bryan’s voice floating about acoustic guitar, while the title track builds to a churning swell of strings and guitars that falls just on the right side of the line between grand and grandiose. That tension between the floaty and the firm is borne of the band’s songwriting process. “We all challenge each other in a good way,” says Bryan. “There’s a creative pull and push to this band. It’s not nicey-nicey and content all the time. But at the same time, we’re a tight, respectful unit. Egos don’t get in the way.” Dafydd, who cites Jimi Hendrix as his musical spirit guide, says he’s not concerned that the violins and delicate moments throughout Wolf’s Law will alter the band’s DNA. “Guitar

doesn’t make anything rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “It’s the attitude, you know? It’s not just the sound for us, either. It’s the message.” The album’s themes are nearly as varied as its sound, starting with the title—inspired by a 19th-century medical theory that bones strengthen with use and atrophy without. That serves as a loose metaphor for the circle of life and the healing process, subjects Bryan wrestled with recently, as her parents divorced and her grandfather passed away during recording. “The Turnaround,” an aching ballad, is dedicated to his memory. “He was without a doubt our biggest fan,” says Bryan. “There was a real sense of, ‘Fuck! He’s not going to be around to enjoy it.’” Another intimate moment is “Tendons,” which Dafydd says is the first time he and Bryan have written about their romantic relationship. It’s no valentine, with lyrics like “We clung onto each other/There was no one else around” and “Tendons that we are/Tendons stretched too far/Tangled up and heavy”— instead, it’s an exposed nerve, a mutual entreaty to appreciate this complex passion for their music and for each other. “It’s a really bizarre but really special relationship, and I’m proud of that song,” says Dafydd. “It seems to encapsulate this extraordinary friendship we have, and now we’ll look back fondly on that song, whatever happens.” All of the raw emotion and the snowy solitude of Maine didn’t make Wolf’s Law a downer. Another standout track is “This Ladder Is Ours,” a buoyant anthem that serves to balance some of the album’s darker themes. “It’s a song of encouragement to somebody who feels they’ve lost their lust for life and has become numb to the world,” says Bryan. “It’s a plea to them to reawaken and make use of this time that we have. There’s the sense that time is precious and the time is now.” That spirit best sums up the space the members of the Joy Formidable occupy in this moment—not worried about the curveballs life and love have thrown at them, how the next single will chart or even where they’ll wake up tomorrow. “It goes back to that thing of just playing the shows and throwing yourself into it, and committing to it completely or don’t fucking bother, you know?” says Bryan. “We’re not going to do anything half-assed.” —Richard Rys

photo by JF MINCHIN

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photo BY Neil Krug

Graphic Content How woodcuts and keyboards inspired My Morning Jacket ringleader Jim James to see the Light IT STARTS WITH A ROLL of tympani, the pluck of strings and the crackle of surface noise before the piano comes in, the sustain of each austere notion of the form ringing out until it merges with the tape hiss and begins again. A voice—familiar and yet otherworldly— sings, “Daylight come/Daylight go,” the piano beginning its refrain again, the singer’s breath reverberating between bars. “How far will it reach, ain’t nobody know,” the soothsayer extols in a tone that’s part lullaby, part doomsday prophecy. The piano strain continues with its lullaby allusion until this voice from beyond gets right to the heart of the matter: “You sign on forever when you sign it in blood.” There is a Faustian deal about to go down, and our narrator will not let us turn away, for fear of his own soul, for fear of ours. It’s an exceptionally heavy moment draped in an ethereal veneer. The narrator is one Mr. Jim James, singer and primary songwriter for Southern festivalscene superstars My Morning Jacket, and the song is “State Of The Art (A-E-I-O-U)” from James’ solo debut, Regions Of Light And Sound Of God (ATO). Produced and engineered by James himself at his home studio in Louisville, Ky., Regions finds the singer in the most contemplative and personal state yet, creating an LP that’s as cozy and intimate as a Jacket record is sprawling and epic. It’s not a solo album in the “fuck these other dudes, I’m doing my own thing” sense—it’s an addendum to the band’s work rather than a counterpoint, an exploration of thoughts and feelings that can only be divulged in private, beyond the presence of four other people and a field full of fans. It’s also an album that substitutes that bombast of guitars—one of MMJ’s signatures—for the nuance and subtlety of keyboards in all their many forms. “I used to think I was tired of guitar, but I realized that’s not true—I still love the guitar, but it didn’t really play that big of a role on this album,” says James. “It’s a lot of keyboards, a

lot of different keyboards. I’m a big fan of trying to mic things in an abstract way and get a direct signal—I like to have a certain precision, but I also like it to be 3D. “I feel like if you can do both, if you can get a really, really super-direct signal, but also find some creative way to mic that signal from another source, that’s how I look at keyboards to provide them with realism. A lot of times a keyboard can be boring, or it can just sound like a keyboard you’ve heard 20 times if you’re just using it direct—out of the keyboard’s output right into your recorder.” And it’s not just the keyboards on Regions that combine precision and abstraction to stunning effect—the songs themselves constantly walk a line between straightforward and surreal. Based loosely on God’s Man by Lynd Ward (the wordless 1929 woodcut series that was a direct influence on Will Eisner and the creation of the modern graphic novel), Regions blends the gray-shaded world of real life with Ward’s high-concept, high-contrast images. Regions is the sound of an artist mediating on art, sacrifice and fate; on success and self-doubt; on the stories you tell yourself in the quiet moments and the explanations for circumstances that almost feel inexplicable. “I felt it had to have been the favorite book of a past-life me back when it came out or something; I just felt this immediate connection to it,” says James. “Strangely, some of the events were paralleling things that were happening to me in real life. I was reading the book, and music was just pouring out of the book; I felt like I was scoring the book. I scanned all of the pages and put them on an iPad and would kind of flip through it so it felt like I was watching a movie. I wrote to that, and that as well gave the album a cohesive feel—it was not completely informed by the book, but there was a lot of inspiration.” And it’s this inspiration that separates Regions from your run-of-the-mill rock-star

vanity project—it’s not an album that declares, “Aw shucks, it sucks to be in a band that people love and make music for a living”; it’s not a work of ego and self-absorption. Rather, it’s a careful, mindful rumination on a life where your soul is on display for all to see, where your life and livelihood are on a precipice in its most integral moments, and a spectacular fall could come from each changing wind. James deconstructs the complexities and tensions within the creative process, the personal and philosophical quandaries inherent to a life of creative endeavors, and deconstructs the costs and benefits of allowing one’s inner-self to be seen by the outside world. “It was philosophical, but it was also kind of literal—I had just fallen off the stage and gotten seriously injured,” says James. “And that was some thing that happens to The Artist— literally, he falls off a cliff and gets injured— in the book. Part of me felt like it might have been the end of my life, but I fell in love and got rescued, and things turned out brighter. Those are the parts of the book that I really connected to, though I don’t feel like I ever sold my soul to the devil. “But I felt like before I fell off the stage I was going down a super-dark path that led me to that. I don’t know, but the way it all played out in the book, I really related to it. I hope that’s the only part I relate to—I really hope the devil doesn’t come back to take his due. It all was strangely déjà vu, over and over again.” Like the woodcuts in Ward’s seminal work, the individual frames that make up Regions Of Light And Sound Of God—the square-synth Phil Spector buzz of “A New Life,” the laconic snare hits of “Dear One,” the double-tracked and echo-drenched vocals of “God’s Love To Deliver”—are accomplished artistic statements, but shine brightest when ingested as a whole. Landing somewhere between Sade and the deepest, longest experiments of Norman Whitfield’s psychedelic era at Motown, Regions is a smaller, more intimate work from an artist who has become better known for his ability to perform on a stadium scale. There’s a warmth and a joy and a zen to James’ music that can get overshadowed by the epic nature of his day job, but those qualities are front and center here. “I just wanted it to be an enjoyable process for myself, didn’t really even tell anybody I was making it,” says James. “I just wanted to have time to do it and really worry about doing it. It’s a different luxury—I found it was very fun.” —Sean L. Maloney

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You Beta, You Bet Ra Ra Riot shifts several gears with the synthpop dance vibe on Beta Love LONG BEFORE RA RA RIOT performed a single note of its dancetronic third album, Beta Love (Barsuk), the band talked at great length about the need for a change. The viscerally charged chamber-pop outfit had maintained a steady course after the tragic 2007 drowning death of beloved drummer John Pike, blossomed on its 2008 Barsuk full-length debut, The Rhumb Line, and flourished with a variety of subsequent beatkeepers, but everyone felt the inevitable tug of creative evolution after 2010 sophomore album The Orchard. Well, almost everyone. Cellist Alexandra Lawn was perhaps less enchanted with the directions being discussed, which ultimately led to her departure early last year. Lawn’s resignation opened the floodgates for Ra Ra Riot to push its already strong new-wave roots down a new electronic path. “After Ali left, that allowed us to change even more than we thought we were going to be able to,” says frontman Wes Miles. “The way we used to work, I or someone in the band would have a demo and we would run

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it through the Ra Ra Riot machine. That sort of became a burden after a while, this sort of additive, stapling onto the demo of instrumentation when all of the songs may not have benefitted from that process. We wanted to pare things back and have more space.” The roles of violinist Rebecca Zeller and guitarist Milo Bonacci changed the most dramatically; with the dominance of the synthesizer on Beta Love, Bonacci was forced to radically reimagine/rewrite his guitar contributions and take on more expansive sonic duties, while Zeller, who wrote all previous string arrangements with Lawn, was freed up to explore new approaches with her instrument and the spare strings the band utilized. “Becca said she was most excited about the string arrangement on ‘Dance With Me,’” says Miles. “It was just two notes. It’s so simple, but it’s something we never would have done before. Milo may have had the most interesting role for this record. He’s into tweaking stuff on a very final level, but it was more than that. He worked on what the

song needed on a more whole level. That was an important step for all of us, to get to that mentality. Now, nothing is precious. We don’t have to be hamstrung by instruments. They can work without getting in the way of the melody or the song.” While Ra Ra Riot continues to be guided by many of the new-wave influences that informed its first two albums and a handful of EPs, Miles notes that Beta Love evolved from a variety of fresh new sources. “You always find new things in music that you like, and not just new music, but things you hadn’t heard in the same way before,” he says. “There’s a lot of science fiction from books I had just read. I got into William Gibson in the middle of thinking about this record, and (bassist) Mat (Santos) and I really got into Ray Kurzweil as a scientist and conceptualist, and that influenced the lyrics as well as the music. We took more electronic sounds that may have been inspired from Devo or Kraftwerk. In the past, that stuff was a drone and didn’t really do much.” —Brian Baker

photo by Daron Gild

eels’ 10th studio album, WONDERFUL, GLORIOUS “that rarest thing in contemporary pop: a unique sound”

the new yorker

“i eagerly await each new release”

Standard and deluxe edition

available February 5th

toM waitS

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Mission: Illogical Anything goes in the genre-bending world of Major Lazer MAJOR LAZER SOUNDS like a ridiculous idea on paper: a white American dance-music producer helms a project built on reggae dancehall rhythms that features a cartoon-comic superhero narrative and numerous, disparate guest vocalists. But Diplo is deeply serious about Major Lazer, and the music he and his partners create is seriously fun, wildly inventive and immediately exhilarating.

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Major Lazer started as a whim, just another side project among Diplo’s many roles as producer (Robyn, No Doubt, Justin Bieber), recordlabel maven (Mwad Decent), charity-fund honcho (Heaps Decent), filmmaker (Favela On Blast), Blackberry spokesperson and superstar DJ. When he spoke to us, he was in the middle of a five-day stint that saw him DJing in China, Las Vegas, San Diego and Los Ange-

les. Diplo (Thomas Wesley Pentz) got his start in Philadelphia, hosting genre-bending dance parties called Hollertronix at tiny places like the Ukrainian League Hall, and he came to international acclaim for his work with M.I.A. (on her first mixtape and album, and on inescapable single “Paper Planes”), and then with Santigold. In 2009, Diplo and London producer Switch partnered to create the first Major Lazer al-

illustration by Ferry Gouw

bum, Guns Don’t Kill People … Lazers Do. The LP slowly found its audience. “Pon De Floor” became a hit in Jamaica, then in New York City dance clubs and, eventually, turned up as a sample in Beyonce’s huge hit “Run The World (Girls).” Now, Major Lazer has turned into Diplo’s primary focus, at least for this year, which sees the release of second album Free The Universe (Mad Decent/Downtown) as well as Reincarnated, the Major Lazer-produced album by Snoop Lion, the reggae alter ego of Snoop Dogg. “Major Lazer came to be as an accident,” says Diplo. “But then the last few years it just blew up, with ‘Pon De Floor’ getting big. We were in this cool pocket of music that was in this dance scene that was happening all over the U.S., and our little project Major Lazer was this cooler thing … that was tangible and fun,

with reggae music mixed in. The last couple years, I realized that this project was my biggest voice as far as the music that I want to make, the stuff that I feel like speaks for me the most.” Switch left Major Lazer in 2011, replaced by MC Walshy Fire and DJ Jillionaire (“we’re the quality control for all the records that we do these days,” says Diplo), and the new LP features guest turns from reggae artists such as Vybz Kartel, Elephant Man and Shaggy, indierock singers such as Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman, and pop stars such as Bruno Mars, Wyclef Jean and Santigold. One of the reasons the album took so long, aside from Diplo’s ridiculously busy schedule, is that he wanted to make it sound cohesive even with the radically divergent guests, and even while making each track a surprise. Some songs from high-profile guests, including Usher and Pharrell, didn’t make the final cut, and several tracks took more than a year to finish. “I take a lot of pride in (the fact that) although we’re not the most popular group or our songs don’t hit the charts or get on the radio, every record we do, we want people to go and listen to it and be like, ‘Damn, that’s really different, that’s weird,’ or make people shake their heads a little bit,” says Diplo, who now lives in Los Angeles, but is only home eight to 10 days a month. “It’s good to have patience. You got to believe in what you do. You can’t jump on trends, because you’re going to get fucking laughed at in the end if you keep hopping on trends.” “Get Free,” the lead single that features Coffman, was inspired by both old roots reggae songs and minimal techno, and it’s an eerie, insinuating track that’s a far cry from the first album’s pumped-up party starters like “Hold The Line.” Diplo had worked with Coffman on Rusko’s “Hold On,” and he gave her a rough outline of the song to work with. “I sent it over to her, and she started doing her Dirty Projectors-style screaming on it and placing the parts really weird,” says Diplo. “I was like, ‘This is awesome, this isn’t like anything else I’ve heard before.’ I’m surprised no one hits her up all the time to sing on songs, because she has such a crazy voice. It didn’t make sense when we were making it, but when we make Major Lazer records, we just throw everything together in a pot and start cooking it. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” The song, which first came out last spring, took about a year to complete, including help from the Projectors’ David Longstreth and ancillary production work that owes debts to the rise and fall of minimal

techno, those crescendos that break down to just a kick and hi-hat. It’s an unusual style for Diplo, who most often gets called upon to do maximalist, party-starting mixes. “I love doing those downtempo, moody records, but I just don’t find ears for them,” he says. “I’m not as good as Bon Iver or whatever making those records. I think I was building on these old roots reggae records. I love those spooky reggae tunes from the ’70s, something like ‘Babylon System’ by Bob Marley, or stuff like ‘Strange Things’ by John Holt, ‘Truths And Rights’ by Johnny Osbourne. That’s the kind of record I really love; those are the records I listen to on my own.” The album’s comic-book cover art also grows out of the old reggae and punk records that Diplo loved as a kid, and the LP is loosely based on the vampire-fighting and hard-partying character Major Lazer as he embarks on his “first big mission.” But that narrative is tangential to Diplo’s goal to bring innovative and eclectic music to the dancing masses. “My heroes are like people like J. Dilla and Rick Rubin, who really took such precise care on production, and who really pushed their own attitude and made their own style and carved their own caves out of this music scene,” says Diplo. “They made things completely different and then took it to a level that sounded so familiar. Even stuff like Radiohead. Kid A was a hugely influential record for me. When it came out, I was like, ‘God, it’s so fucking weird, but every song sounds so right, like this is what it’s supposed to sound like, but wow, how?’ As an adult, I’ve gotten deeper into the Beatles, stuff like Revolver, and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Even Bob Marley was such a huge influence on me the last four years. I always dismissed Bob Marley as white-boy college music. I never liked it. It took me a while to start listening to his older stuff and the stuff he did with Lee Perry, and I started listening to the production, and I was like, ‘Damn, this guy is one of the best.’” Diplo is aware of questions of authenticity and cultural appropriation that could be leveled at a white American working with traditionally Jamaican styles, but he also notes the cross-cultural, worldwide popularity of reggae. Sean Paul and Shaggy can command large audiences all over the world as easily as metal bands like Sepultura. And Major Lazer records in Jamaica with Jamaican artists, and is eager to work within the culture itself. “We do try to take this reggae sound outside of Jamaica,” says Diplo, “but we take a lot of care to try to keep it popular there and get respect from the artists and producers that we work with there. We’re not inherently reggae artists, but we do our best. The (term) ‘cultural appropriation’ is so weird. I feel like culture, especially music, is so homogenous now. It’s sad and exciting how everything is so connected, everything is blending together. That’s what we’ve always done in Major Lazer. Reggae’s the backbone, but we try to incorporate everything.” —Steve Klinge needle

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Isn’t She Lonely Thao And The Get Down Stay Down do whatever uncommon people do THAO NGUYEN IS a tireless performer. She’s been touring with her band, the Get Down Stay Down, since she graduated from college, and is used to the rigors of the road, including backhanded compliments like, “You play pretty good for a girl.” Nguyen laughs. “That only fans the flames and makes me want to play even better.” Anyone who has ever seen her live, or listened to one of her records, knows how far off the mark that comment is. Nguyen is one of the most innovative guitarists around, with a style that blends grinding power chords, the jittery fills of a funkateer, a dash of country twang, clanging rock guitar pyrotechnics and staccato singlenote runs that add a skewed melodic feel to her songs that’s halfway between bluegrass and hip hop. “I developed my feel practicing in my bedroom,” says Nguyen. “I loved Motown, bluegrass and old country songs. Since I was playing alone, I filled the sound out with percussive rhythm playing. I started doing open mics. I wanted to present myself as a guitar player. People see I’m a girl with a guitar and they jump to conclusions about what I can or cannot do.” Nguyen started playing solo, but after drummer Willis Thompson joined her, things took off. After hearing her 2005 debut, Like The Linen, Laura Veirs took her on tour and helped get her signed to Kill Rock Stars for 2008’s We Brave Bee Stings And All and 2009’s Know Better Learn Faster. Between tours, she moved

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to San Francisco and took a year off to write the songs that became We The Common (Ribbon). “Know Better was recorded at the end of a relationship,” she says. “It was introspective and self-involved. This album is a celebration of connection and community, stories of people sticking up for each other. There’s still a lot of longing, but this time I’m more hopeful. I’m not sinking into the well of loneliness.” We The Common was recorded at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Bill Callahan, Walkmen). It features contributions from friends who add xylophone, cello, harpsichord, piano and horns to Nguyen’s inventive arrangements. “It was great to have people come in and add their input and take the songs in new directions,” she says. “I was open to any idea that served the meaning of the lyrics.” Winning tracks include the edgy funk of “City,” the ominous seduction of “Clouds For Brains,” the slow stomp of “The Feeling Kind” (which blends tango with ’50s R&B) and the cowboy swing of “Kindness Be Conceived,” with Joanna Newsom adding harmony vocals. Nguyen’s guitar and Jason Slota’s drumming skitter in and out of the mix, adding ingenious grace notes and breaking the rhythms into unexpected meters to serve Nguyen’s unique, slightly-beforethe-beat vocals. “I didn’t try to develop a singing style,” says Nguyen. “I listen to a lot of old country music and hip hop. I like the way syllables and cadences are manipulated in both genres. If that contributed to my sound, I wasn’t conscious of it.” —j. poet

photo by Nick Walker

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Sleep Paralysis The Orlando-based dream folkers in Day Joy pluck a restless course

THE FIRST MUSICAL ELEMENT you’ll notice on Day Joy’s debut album is a banjo. Emerging through a lush backdrop of natural ambience, Peter Michael Perceval III—tentatively at first, then with a more urgent laconicism— coaxes indulgently languid canopy folk from the instrument, as his harmonies and those of bandmate/co-songwriter Michael Serrin intertwine in somnolent solidarity. It’s a winning, wistful formula that informs much of Go To Sleep, Mess (Small Plates). The banjo, it would seem, is as inseparable from their present aesthetic as the ukulele was to Dent May’s public persona circa 2009. So, it’s surprising to learn that this Orlando-based quintet is kind of over the banjo. “I don’t see the banjo being a big part of our music in the future,” Perceval says of the instrument he fell in love with after watching documentary Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus. “It was a big thing for me at moments of a lot of our songs in the past, but now I envision our sound moving out of that space.” A Roland Juno 6 synthesizer the band recently acquired—which Serrin describes as a “completely brash and irresponsible deci-

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sion”—and a new electro-harmonics voice box may figure into prominently in Day Joy’s currently-in-gestation material. All of this might be worrisome if Mess didn’t establish Perceval and Serrin as a crack songwriting team. The pair met in a Spanish class as students at the University of Central Florida, bonded over an acid trip soundtracked by Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion and emerged, once the sun rose, with the basis of what would become “Animal Noise,” Mess’s immersive glen-at-dusk opener. More judiciously livedin songs followed: plaintive, yodel-hooked “Talks Of Terror,” unadorned, spine-tingling torch song “Everything Is Going To Last” and “CCD,” a weary, organ reverb-swamped treatise on dogma that’s equally reminiscent of America’s self-titled debut and R.E.M.’s Up. “One of the lyrics on ‘CCD’ is, ‘Tragedy’s honest, just like they taught in church as a kid/ Learn what to call it, learn how to draw it prettier than it is,’” says Serrin, who writes most of the band’s lyrics. “‘CCD’ is almost entirely dedicated to my feelings on religion and accepting—rather than denying—our mortality. I guess it’s hard to look your child in the eyes

and tell them they’ll one day die. Maybe that’s what religion is for.” Unease and relaxation are fitful bedfellows in the bucolic, near-Californian reverie that is Mess: These songs are Tempur-Pedic campfire dreams that aren’t quite enrapturing enough to quell age-old fears. As evidenced by the origin of the LP’s title, Day Joy is well aware of this. “Originally, when we were first drafting the album, I had this grandiose concept of the album mirroring a late-night tossingand-turning, finally falling asleep and having beautiful nostalgic dreams, then a nightmare, then awakening,” says Serrin. “The album still follows this trajectory; I think it’s just a little more interwoven. The line between the waking and dream states is blurred. I think it’s actually more effective this way. Go To Sleep, Mess was kind of the obvious choice.” —Raymond Cummings

photo by David Plakon

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Notes From The Underground

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No Reservations Roger Knox delivers Aboriginal country music from Down Under

“IT’S HARD TO MAKE IT singing country music as an Aborigine,” says Roger Knox, an Aborigine who sings, writes and plays American country music. “We’re not formally segregated, but there aren’t many decent gigs.” Knox is speaking to me from the home of his friend and producer Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers). He has just finished a mini-tour of the U.S., including a date at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. “I grew up in a Government Mission, what you call a reservation over here,” he says. “No school, no shops, just 500 people in 30 houses, poorly supported by the government. No one could come in, and we couldn’t leave.” Despite their isolation, Aboriginal men fought for Australia during World War II and brought back American country music albums when they returned home. Knox was inspired by their sound and started playing Aboriginal country music. “I got a guitar when I was 10 and taught myself to play after a cousin showed me the basic chords,”

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he says. “I liked Johnny Cash and the gospel songs of Hank Williams.” Aboriginal country singers like Harry Williams and Jim Ridgeway also inspired him. In the ’80s, he had a band called Euraba, which concentrated on Aboriginal audiences in remote locations, as well as prisons and detention centers. Knox also played Indian reservations in Canada and the U.S. “An Australian country singer named Brian Young eventually asked me to play in his band and be his opening act,” says Knox. It was the break he was waiting for, but three months into the tour, there was a plane crash. Knox was left with burns over most of his body. Scar tissue made it difficult for him to play guitar, but he continued singing, writing songs and making albums. In 2000, director Andy Nehl made a film of Buried Country, a book that detailed the history of Aboriginal country music. Knox was featured in the movie and the accompanying album. Langford heard the soundtrack and added songs Knox had written to his sets.

“I heard Jon singing my songs at a festival in Australia,” says Knox. “It was amazing. We started talking about the Aboriginal artists even Aborigines didn’t know and decided to make a record.” Langford produced Stranger In My Land (Bloodshot), a collection of tracks written by the Aborigine country artists who inspired Knox. “The songs tell the story of our struggles and who we are as a people,” says Knox. The record was made in Australia and Chicago, and it features guest shots by Charlie Louvin, Dave Alvin and the Sadies, but it’s Knox’s strong, soulful vocals that capture your attention. The songs are full of Aussie slang and sardonic humor, tales of hard times and outrage that will resonate with anyone who works hard to make ends meet. “We get angry sometimes,” says Knox, “but humor and music are big a part of our culture. The best way to get to know people is to speak to them, and music lets you speak to people who might not listen otherwise.” —j. poet

photo by Jean Cook

on the record

a conversation with

Beck BECK HANSEN IS a present-day legend of genre-shifting music with oddly theatrical tics. Yet, his newest and quietest move might be his grandest. Along with spearheading a Philip Glass remix album in 2012, Rework, Beck has spent the last several years producing albums for Thurston Moore (Demolished Thoughts), Stephen Malkmus (Mirror Traffic), Charlotte Gainsbourg (IRM, which he co-composed) and parts of Bat For Lashes’ The Haunted Man. He’s been part of tributes to Caetano Veloso and John Martyn, and played on albums by the Lonely Island, Tobacco and Jamie Lidell. But what he hasn’t done, since 2008’s Modern Guilt, is make his own album. The recent The Song Reader won’t break his silent streak. The well-manicured McSweeney’s-produced package is an elegant curio, a set of 20 separately designed, newly written Beck tunes such as “Do We? We Do” and “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” crafted by him as sheet music. Just sheet music. For you to sing and play. Not him. From the occasionally weary sound of Beck during our chat, he’d really prefer that you take the lead on this one. —A.D. Amorosi

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photo by Gina Ribisi

In the last several years you’ve spent more time behind the board than in front of it. Why has production become more important than making your own music at this point? I’m recording my own music. I just haven’t gotten around to releasing it. I have an album I recorded in 2008, a couple dozen other songs in the can. There are a lot of reasons why they’re not out. I have my own studio, and when one of my engineers went off to work with someone else, I needed to get a new team together. I started getting those other jobs you talked about. Time moves quick, and next thing you know, four years passed. There’s a lot of personal reasons, too. Anything you can tell me about? Not really. Without putting too much more emphasis on you being away from recording, were you looking for a way to make music without having to make music and go through the usual hassles? Yeah, definitely. I’ve been thinking of different things that I could do. You know, I think I’ve gone through periods like anybody else, wondering what the next move should be. What I should do. I think that now that I spent a certain amount of this year working on the book—I’m hoping to catch up on everything that I put aside. I’ve been doing this for a while, 18 years of recording. There is so much that I wanted to do, experiment and try, not within music. That’s cool. No one ever questioned Picasso how long Guernica took or how he stressed about it. It sounds, though, as if you have a certain amount of burnout. Music is tricky. You start wondering whether or not I should be doing this, or have I been doing the same thing for too long? So much to think about. Should I get out of the way for the 40,000 other bands out there? You know what I mean? There’s just so much music out there now. I do. Though I dare say some of those 40,000 should get out of your way. I can make music all day. But I don’t always feel like ... I wonder if mine would be just another thing clogging the system [laughs], just more tracks to be downloaded and sit there. I just don’t think its pressing. I have been thinking about this for years. Maybe I was dodging the question, my questions. But I do like the art of the song, so I’m getting back into it this way.

My own personal reference to the Song Reader sheet-music deal: Like you, I grew up with a dad who played several instruments and arranged, and surely, like yours, had tons of sheet music around the house— stuff he bought for gigs or stuff he wrote with. Sheet music with the photos of the artist all framed in the center—that was everywhere in my house. Sound familiar? Totally. Your dad was a jazz musician? That’s cool. I do like sheet music as a document. They had a certain look. Plus it was a unique experience apart from buying records. I remember going into a sheet music store like 10 years ago and being struck how different it felt from buying albums. Especially the people. They weren’t the same folk that you see in a record store. And I thought for years how prevalent sheet music was years ago, how essential it was to places that played live music, that culture at large. And how it’s died out. Part of this project was me thinking about how and what we’ve lost, and how we can change that. It’s hard to fathom how deeply embedded into the culture sheet music was. The idea that your mom or dad would pick up songs on the way from the grocery store and that you were all going to sit around the piano that night after dinner and learn how to sing and play those days’ popular hits. It sounds happily arcane, foreign even if you didn’t live through it or have family that did so. That was the norm. And for a long time, it was as normal as putting television on after dinner. In that not-so-distant past, singing songs from sheet music was the shared experience amongst your loved ones and friends. There was a lot of social interaction around the idea of making music together. The closest you can get to those same people now in your living room is if you play video games together. You just had to be able to play an instrument or sing. That’s impossible to fathom: There was a time—any time—before recorded music. You just said something interesting: the instrument thing. People you know and I know make music with apps and laptops, not conventional means. Going into this, was that a consideration? Is Song Reader a reaction against how insular making music can become? Yes. It wasn’t so much a concern as it was just reality—that the idea of putting out a book of songs in solely notated form means you’re cutting out 90 percent of the public. Even a lot of people who can play might not

take the time to learn these songs. They just might not have time. They barely have time to get through the mp3s that are clogging their inbox. That is no sales pitch. It’s interesting to think about—this project is a book that is has a collection of songs. But the book isn’t the idea. It’s the sharing, the transmission of it all, and the book being this self-contained world. Sheet music, the way it is presented: the cover artwork, the text, the feel of it, the song is almost secondary, not as interesting. It’s the whole thing. That’s why there are piles of sheet music at old antique shops. People just couldn’t throw them away. They are an abstraction that holds some sort of power, like how old unplayed vinyl has the power of image. It’s a genie a bottle. Was it you or McSweeney’s that had the visual idea for this? Dave Eggers is a friend, but the idea came from this sheet-music version of my albums. I was sent a copy by its publisher; the songs were all collected in an unbound book. The way they notated the thing, they took songs that were often sonic experiments and attempted to distill them down to piano arrangements. It didn’t really work, but I felt bad because the wheels were already in motion. Somebody was going to buy this in a store, flip through and try to play these weirdly notated bits of guitar feedback and synthesizer noise. The whole thing felt backward, but it forced me to think about that era when a song had to exist in its most reducible form. That oral tradition or written first tradition of music created a different type of song than what we do today. Probably had more legs and life to it. But will people play these songs? I think it’s going to be more of an artifact than a useful song tool, but I certainly want people to try to play them and share that with me. Are there versions of these songs somewhere, or are they just penned without you having played them? I have a few things in rough form, a few I recorded quickly with myself and a piano and the person who helped me notate them. You have got to be crazy curious as to how all of these tunes will wind up in other people’s hands? Oh yeah, that’s far more interesting to me than anything that I could have done with them. I know my limitations.

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Camper Van Beethoven celebrates its 30th anniversary by uncorking its weirdest album in decades. story by hobart rowland | photos by jason thrasher

“Should I call you professor?” Uttered in jest, the question has been posed to one David Lowery in an attempt to get him to open up about his thriving side vocation at the University of Georgia. ¶ “Well, sort of,” says an apparently taken-aback Lowery over the phone from Athens, Ga., after an uncomfortable few seconds of dead air. “You know, uh … getting to teach kids about the music business—especially the finance side of it, which is sort of my specialty—is pretty cool, because mostly these people don’t get good advice. Most of the stuff you read online is pretty crappy.” The number-crunching angle certainly makes sense. When he wasn’t stirring up trouble in sundry early-’80s incarnations of Camper Van Beethoven, Lowery was studying to be a mathematician at UC Santa Cruz. And the onetimealt-rock-fixture-turned-campus-scholar has had his share of real-life industry run-ins, coming away relatively unscathed—or at least in better shape than many major-label castoffs. “Most of the usual suspects giving young people advice don’t actually have any experience,” he says. “I feel like I’m doing a public service. The digital revolution is not a people-empowering revolution—it’s actually a corporate-empowering

revolution, and kids need to think about that. The people who create the content need to be compensated fairly, whether it’s a writer, a photographer, a moviemaker or a musician.” Nowadays, the 52-year-old Lowery is enlightening a few hundred students in “several” courses, while shuttling back and forth between Georgia and Richmond, Va., where his two sons live with his former wife. In 2010, he married Velena Vego, the talent booker for Athens’ legendary 40 Watt Club. Vego also manages CVB and its more conventional spawn and (now) co-headliner, Cracker. A year later, Lowery squeezed out a pretty respectable solo album,

The Palace Guards—his first, mind you. “I did about 70 shows last year,” says Lowery, which he says is about average these days. For a guy who’s staring at the back half of his existence, Lowery is stretched pretty thin—and, at the moment, he’s losing patience with the line of questioning: “We have the new Camper record coming out, and I don’t really have a shitload of time here, so can we talk about that and not about school?” Lowery is referring to La Costa Perdida, which kicks off CVB’s 30th-anniversary year amidst an orchestrated (if deserving) surge in recognition for the group—everything from Paul Rudd donning a vintage Camper concert tee in the film This Is 40 to glowing quotes from members of R.E.M. and the Meat Puppets. “They’re not touted like the Pixies or Pavement, but they mixed all these genres in a way that seemed natural and effortless and fun,” says Elf Power’s Andrew Rieger, a longtime fan. “They weren’t one of these bands that spawned a lot of imitators, because it would just be hard to try to copy their sound.” Out now via 429 Records, La Costa Perdida is CVB’s first album since 2004’s New Roman Times. In the interim, the group has been in a fitful state of hibernation. Guitarist Greg Lisher is living in Santa Cruz and prepping his third solo effort. Bassist Victor Krummenacher resides needle

in nearby San Francisco, where he works as a graphic designer for Wired and recently eked out his seventh solo release, I Was A Nightmare But I’m Not Gonna Go There, a Kickstarter-funded, vinyl-only collection of covers featuring songs by the likes of Rowland S. Howard, Jeffery Lee Pierce, Kate Wolf and Bill Morrissey. Both gents take part in the long-running post-CVB project, Monks Of Doom, which will emerge with a new album—its fifth in 25 years— later in the year. The group also includes two

on-again, off-again Camper members, drummer Chris Pedersen (who plays on two La Costa Perdida tracks) and guitarist David Immerglück (also with Counting Crows). CVB multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel has had the most colorful life of late. He had been teaching music theory and “desktop musicianship” at two Bay Area colleges, until a recession-induced layoff prompted him to accept a job as a listener advocate for Pandora. “I got fired there this past spring for not shutting

“We broke up when we couldn’t get along, and we got back together when we could.” Victor Krummenacher Krummenacher

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up about decision-making I didn’t agree with,” he says. The timing couldn’t have been worse at home for Segel, with a wife and a new baby. After losing their house in Oakland, the family relocated to Sweden this past June. “I’m an immigrant, trying to learn a new language and figure out how to get a gig here,” says Segel, who released his “guitarheavy” second solo album, All Attractions, last year. “But at least my daughter has health care and great schools.” La Costa Perdida was mostly recorded at Segel’s home studio a year prior to his move, and finished at Sharkbite Studios, with Michael Urbano filling things out on drums. “The process was similar, perhaps, to the recording of Camper’s third album, in that we could experiment and had time to work on things,” says Segel. “The first two CVB albums were recorded in a weekend.” Fittingly, La Costa Perdida should resonate

with fans of the group’s early incorrigibility— and mostly frustrate those who embraced the more-focused late-’80s CVB. Perdida is rambling, silly, occasionally obnoxious, sometimes beautiful and almost always weird. Unlike the frenzied, stylistic clusterfuck that lent a trailblazing, cerebral heft to even the group’s most esoteric mid-’80s music (some Eastern Bloc folk dirges to go with your skapunk, comrade?), Camper’s eighth proper LP is the work of a band with nothing else to prove, and certainly no one left to impress. It has the up-and-down pacing and hit-or-miss feel of a living-room jam session among old friends—and that’s pretty much what it is. “It was chaotic,” says Krummenacher. “We seem to bring the chaos sometimes.” And with that chaos came one fundamental difference. “Back in the day, David would bring in chord progressions and lyrics, and the

rest of us would write our parts,” says Lisher. “This time, we wrote the songs as a band from the ground up. Someone would start playing something, someone else would start riffing on that, and so on and so on.” “This album was a relaxed, organic growth— like growing vegetables,” says Segel. “Some of us had small germs of ideas we’d shared as far back as 2010. But they didn’t really germinate until we all had a week together at my house.” Predictably, the cloistered collaborative conditions amount to a mixed bag. It’s tough to explain away a line like “Bring to me the anti-venom, and make me a sandwich”—uttered not once but multiple times on the insufferably bizarre (albeit fitfully amusing) “Too High For The Love In”—or shrill faux-blues rant “You Got To Roll.” By contrast, languid opener “Come Down The Coast” ranks among the prettiest songs Camper has ever concocted, while the title track is a charmingly demented lowlife tale. “There was a push to make the new songs longer—trying to be hippie in sort of an aciddamaged way,” says Lowery. “We were reacting to what we were hearing around us—an antidote to what the indie-rock kids are doing now—which is how Camper has always worked.” Perdida tops out with the wistful, casually ornate “Northern California Girls,” the closest to Brian Wilson’s wheelhouse Camper is likely to ever come. “I was trying to overdub the bass part while David sang it at the top of lungs and screamed coaching tips … ‘Lay out. Cool. Now play like James Jamerson—gimme some Marvin Gaye. OK, Brian Wilson,’” says Krummenacher. “It was confusing and kind of irritating at the time. In retrospect, though, I love it because the results were good. It said a lot about how we can push each other to do things.”

ecades later, accounts still differ as to the details of Camper Van Beethoven’s initial disbandment. A popular take among outsiders was that Lowery’s increasingly more refined songwriting approach and pop-leaning proclivities had alienated the rest of the group. Looking back, though, it wasn’t that cut and dry. “In a lot of ways, Key Lime Pie was me and Greg’s album,” Lowery says of the group’s 1989 release, which would be its last for 15 years. Lisher blames the road. “We were all really young and had been going nonstop. We just started to burn out,” he says. “If the touring wasn’t as crazy as it was, we could’ve lasted longer than we did.” Camper’s finest album top to bottom, Key Lime Pie would’ve been one hell of a parting shot. By then, the band’s working relationship with producer Dennis Herring had moved beyond simply tightening and fattening-up

the group’s sound. He’d done as much a year prior on CVB’s major-label debut, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, a slightly disconcerting sonic leap for some fans. “If the argument is: ‘Herring cleaned up Camper,’ I don’t really agree,” says Krummenacher. “We were headed there already.” It was all enough to send Segel packing in early 1989, while the band was demoing tunes for Key Lime Pie. “Jonathan had kind of a whiny shit-fit about the first (Herring) album because his violin parts got muted in a few places,” says Lowery with a chuckle. “He would talk about how he hated all the reverb on it. It was kind of weirdly negative. But I was always like, ‘Dude, that’s our album.’” There were plenty of fans who welcomed the upgrade. “When a lot of the indie bands of that time signed to a major, they’d polish the sound too much and lose the charm that made them endearing in the first place,” says Elf Power’s Rieger. “But I really felt it was the opposite with Camper. When they tried to take a step up, it really worked. The songwriting was better; the production was better. There was still some humor, but the throwaway, jokey songs were gone, and it felt way more thought-out and conceptual.” Rieger also believes Camper would’ve accumulated more style points as innovators if they’d hung in there through the ’90s. “David picked up on some of that momentum with Cracker, and Camper probably would’ve done the same thing,” he says. What some fans might not know is how close Cracker guitarist Johnny Hickman came to once becoming an official member of Camper Van Beethoven. “David, Chris Molla, Mark Phillips and I had a loose side project called the Estonian Gauchos (in Redlands, Calif.) that was the seed that eventually grew into Camper,” says Hickman. “David went north to enroll at UC Santa Cruz, where the band grew. When Chris left, David called and asked if I wanted to come up and play guitar, but I’d just signed a record deal.” Even with Cracker enjoying more commercial success than Camper ever had, Lowery can recall only two years when he wasn’t actively communicating with at least one member of CVB. “We had all kinds of business stuff to do in common,” he says. Krummenacher concurs, though with this caveat: “After 23 years, I think everybody is going to have a different memory of what happened. Memories are what they are, which is to say biased. I leave it at this: We broke up when we couldn’t get along, and we got back together when we could.” If Lowery has his way, there will never be another official CVB breakup. He doesn’t see the point. “We grew up with each other,” he says. “It’s kind of hard for us not to at least talk.” M

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Twenty-five years after quitting the Smiths, Johnny Marr finally goes solo. Plus, everything you wanted to know about the Smiths but were afraid to ask and/or didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have their phone numbers.

This Charming Man story by Jonathan Valania photos by Gene Smirnov

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being johnny marr

is nice work if you can get it. Lots of travel, flexible hours, money for nothing, chicks for free. Most days you walk between the raindrops. You are rakishly handsome, impossibly talented, effortlessly cool and beloved by all. Born in Manchester and raised in public housing, you meet your soulmate when you were 14, you quit school when you were 15, and at the ripe old age of 18 you start a band that NME readers will, 20 years hence, declare the most important band of the last 50 years, edging out the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Small wonder everyone wants you to join their band in the studio or onstage for a song or a tour, or even an album or two: Talking Heads, the Pretenders, Modest Mouse, R.E.M., Beck, Oasis, Bryan Ferry, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Bragg, Black Grape, Jane Birkin, Happy Mondays, The The, Chic, Dinosaur Jr, Pearl Jam, Crowded House, Tom Jones and, last but not least, the guy who started Joy Division. You almost never say no, because you are not just a legend, you are also a nice guy. Here you are, a year shy of 50. You still have the soulmate, two grown children, your looks and all your hair, plus a line of Fender Jaguars named after you, along with a numbered limited edition of Johnny Marr Ray-Ban Signet sunglasses with light blue-tinted lenses and gunmetal frames. And, best of all, 25 years after walking away from your own band, you are finally going solo. “The ideas became stronger to me and the well filled up—that’s the right time to do it,” Marr says when asked what took so long. “It was pretty much all there before I started to work with it.” The album is called The Messenger and it is easily your best work since the Smiths. Some of it is clearly as good as the Smiths, and some of it, arguably, is better than the Smiths. Ah yes, the Smiths. Before we go any further, let’s just get this out of the way: The Smiths will not be reuniting. Not now, not ever. Not that I didn’t try to make it happen, but the sad reality is when the queen is dead, she stays dead. A full Beatles reunion is more likely.

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Or, to quote Morrissey’s publicist, “The Smiths are never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to reunite—ever.” And if the more determined among you can parse that quote for a glimmer of hope that there’s still an outside chance of a reunion, please note that there’s eight “ever”s in that statement, meaning eight eternities in a row that will have to run their course before a Smiths reunion comes to pass. Given that the median age of the members of the Smiths is 50, and the life expectancy for British males is currently 78.2 years, it doesn’t look good. Especially when you factor in that Morrissey has not spoken to Smiths bassist Andy Rourke in 16 years. Drummer Mike Joyce has not spoken to Johnny Marr since 1996, when Joyce successfully sued the both Moz and Marr in Britain’s high court for a quarter of all Smiths recording and performance royalties, up from the 10 percent each both he and Rourke had been afforded up until then. On top of it all, Moz and Marr were ordered to pay Joyce $1.5 million.

As you can imagine, Morrissey was not pleased. There are many things Morrissey can do better than most: make grown men—straight men, mind you—swoon with just the tremble in his voice and a wave of his daffodil scepter, or eviscerate the high and the mighty, the brutish and vulgar, the thick and the ignorant with his switchblade wit. But inarguably, his single greatest talent is holding a grudge with inexhaustible doggedness. The trial, and all the bitterness and acrimony that surrounded it, probably poisoned the waters for all time. “I wish the very, very worst for Joyce for the rest of his life,” Moz told an interviewer back in 2002. Ten years later, there is no sign the mutual enmity has subsided. “I don’t think anybody in the Smiths came out of this looking very good or very clever,” says

Tony Fletcher, author of the mammoth, just-published A Light That Never Goes Out, which may well, in the fullness of time, prove to be the definitive Smiths biography. “I chose not to write about that for a very clear reason: It would end the book on such a negative, poisonous note, and I wanted my book to be a celebration.” I tried to get Joyce’s side of the story, but he demanded payment of $500 for an interview. Mercifully, Rourke, who currently lives in New York, where he DJs on an internet radio station called East Village Radio, was happy to talk for free.

rourke: That’s just the way the Smiths worked.

Why didn’t you and Mike Joyce stand up for yourselves from the get-go and demand that songwriting royalties be split equally?

It’s not just the estrangement of the rhythm section that stands in the way of a Smiths reunion. Morrissey and Marr were once the inseparable Glimmer Twins of post-punk British pop. As of

I’m guessing you wrote all your own bass lines for those songs, right?

rourke: Yeah, that was the case. Well, that’s just as important to writing a song as coming up with a drum beat or a guitar part or the lyrics.

rourke: I think Morrissey and Marr wanted this kind of Lennon/McCartney, Leiber and Stoller image. But it came at my expense and Mike’s expense.

late, the closest the two have come to meaningful social interaction is @JohnnyMarr trading quips about Oscar Wilde with @MorrisseysCat on Twitter. I’m not even kidding. Or to put it another way, when I asked Morrissey’s publicist if Moz would be willing to supply a few quotes for a cover story about his old bandmate and songwriting partner, her response was this: “As I’m sure you can understand, I can’t even present this to Morrissey.” Emphasis mine. However, the good news for Smiths fans is, aside from the fact that there is a new Morrissey album in the can with a release date TBD, Marr has just issued The Messenger (Sire/ADA), his first solo album. No longer content to play the don’t-blameme-I’m-just-the-wandering-guitar-hero role for an album or two in other people’s bands, Marr is

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finally willing to step into the spotlight, consequences be damned, to bask in the praise and/or shoulder the blame. Judging by repeated listens to The Messenger, there will be precious little of the latter and heaping helpings of the former. The Messenger is a compendium of ultra-catchy postmodern pop showcasing not just the deft, strummy jingle-jangle guitar work that was the cornerstone of the Smiths, but also the roar and crunch of his later collaborations with Modest Mouse and the Cribs. It’s not even so much the notes he plays, it’s the way he moves the air around. Like the true greats, he’s more felt than heard. The six-string wizardry should come as no surprise—he is a guitar hero after all. What is somewhat surprising—outside of the welcome return to the concision and clarity, as well as the earworm-baited hooks of the songcraft—is how bold and convincing the vocals are. “I always thought of the guitar as a machine for making pop music,” says Marr. “Sometimes guitar culture doesn’t like being mixed with pop. I think that’s rockist and old-fashioned. At the same time, it’s important to me that I make music for my age group, about my age group.”

Johnny Marr was born Johnny Maher on Halloween 1963 in Manchester, England, the son of two Irish-born immigrants. He came of age in the Wythenshawe Council Estate, the British equivalent of public housing. From the beginning, he possessed an almost preternatural sense that he was destined for the big time. He even knew the tool that would get him there: the electric guitar. When he was four, Marr got his first guitar. Never mind that it was a toy—he painted it and tricked it out with beer bottle caps to simulate the volume and tone knobs of a real guitar. Every year he got a new one. Come Christmas morn, there would invariably be a telltale triangular box with a bow on top. “My parents still have them and proudly display them the way most parents would display plaques,” he says. “I used to watch every little bit of available television that had a musician on it. Didn’t matter if it was some middle-of-the-road singer or some chart act or somebody backing a comedian; if it had a guitar or a bass, I was glued to it.” By seven, Marr graduated from toy guitar to the real thing, and almost immediately started “stringing chords together and making some tuneful noise out of it.” By the time he reached puberty, he’d already bought his first record with his own money: the “Ride A White Swan” single by T.Rex. Glam was his first major influence— Bowie, Mott The Hoople and Marc Bolan—followed by the Rolling Stones, then Neil Young, then the Stooges and Patti Smith. He pored over each new album he acquired like a Talmudic

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scholar hunched over the Dead Sea Scrolls. “My approach to guitar was always about playing along with the records, but not just copying the guitar part,” he says. “I would play every instrument that was on the recording. So with, say, ‘All The Young Dudes,’ I didn’t just play the riff; I also played the piano and the organ parts on guitar.” The first time that Marr met Morrissey was at a Patti Smith concert when he was 14. “It was all of about eight seconds,” says Marr. It would be another four years before anything would come of this initial meeting, but the impact of Smith’s performance was immediate and irreversible.

“The differences between Morrissey and Marr were too profound to make any kind of partnership sustainable. They had enough in common musically, and in terms of their objectives and their Manchester backgrounds, that the differences in their personalities worked very well for a time. But it ultimately brought them apart.’” —Tony Fletcher, Author, A Light That Never Goes Out “She was incredible—I had never seen anyone take performance to that level,” he says. “It was like she was performing incantation. It was lifechanging. I had a paper route back then, and I remember the day after looking up at the sky and thinking that everything looked different.”

For the deeply devoted —and they are

legion—there are but two periods in the history of mankind: The time Before Smiths and the time After Smiths. The years B.S. ended in Manchester one May afternoon in 1982, when Johnny Marr—his rockabilly quiff stacked high and retro, Brando-esque Levis cuffed just right—ambled up to 384 Kings Road and knocked on the door. One Steven Patrick Morrissey, unemployable bookworm homebody, who at the ripe old age of 22 was beginning to get the distinct feeling that life

Signed, Sealed, Delivered Johnny Marr cryptically breaks down The Messenger, track by track

“The Right Thing Right” A target, but at least I know it. Half of the battle is won. Guy Debord was on to something. Musically born out of a few new Northern Soul All-Nighters with the gang.

“I Want The Heartbeat” Man meets woman, wins lottery, swaps woman for ECG machine and hooks up every night. A love story.

“European Me” Crossing all borders, physical and otherwise, always been the Europeans’ way. Pablo goes to Paris, Isherwood goes to Berlin and many, many heroes in empty stations. All starts with a riff.

“Upstarts” Defiance as entertainment kicking against the pricks. A happy tune.

“Lockdown” Most of my nights in the U.K. as a teenager with nowhere to go except into imagination, which is fine.

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“The Messenger” Stranger in a strange land.

“Say Demesne” A street in south Manchester, difficult to say where some kids end up. Accidentally inspired by Baudelaire and Paris Peasant and some chords.

“Generate! Generate!” I know what I’m like and how I sound, thank you very much. Cogito vergo dumb.

“Sun & Moon” Fame’s fair game. Kids with face jobs. What?

“The Crack Up” Following on, a friend whose life was on the runway and became a machine. Poor Ruslana didn’t make it.

“New Town Velocity” Was looking for a song to fit my dreams. Left home, left school. Mission velocity.

“Word Starts Attack” Relationships to and from pixel power. Bang out the tune, and let’s get out of here.

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had passed him by, answered the door. Marr did not bother with the inane niceties of small talk, and told Morrissey, in so many words, that he was starting a band, it was going to change the world, and you are going to be the lead singer. In that case, you had better come inside, Morrissey said. Years later, after he’d been ensconced as the poet laureate of a lost generation, Morrissey would say he had expected something like this all along, that for years on end he kept vigil in his bedsit sanctum in his mother’s house waiting for destiny to knock on his door. And so it had. They went up to Morrissey’s bedroom, which was wallpapered with floor-to-ceiling shelves heaving with books, and all roads seemed to lead to a typewriter on a desk. A failed rock critic, Morrissey had taken to writing poetry as of late. They bonded immediately over a shared love of ’60s girl groups like the Shirelles, the Crystals and the Shangri-Las. “There was so much yearning in those records,” says Marr. “They had a great sound, there was a real magic and exuberance about them. Phil

Spector’s production work had a gothic intensity. He created these three-minute explosions of sound. It was these mini-symphonies sung by teenagers in Brooklyn and Queens, and each one made a statement. It meant more to me than whatever tired shit was going around in the U.K. in 1982. I wanted to make records that had that kind of intensity. I thought that Morrissey was the only other person who liked the kind of music I liked for the same reasons I did. There is an understanding there, you know?” The next time, they met at Marr’s house. Up in his attic bedroom, they sorted out the truly important things—the color of the label on their first single (blue), the record company they were going to sign with (Rough Trade)—and then they started writing songs. Morrissey had brought with him two poems. The first was titled “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle,” with its gloomy intimations of domestic violence and sexual abuse (“There’ll be blood on the cleaver tonight”). The second was called “Suffer The Children,” and its subject matter was the infamous Moors Murders. Between July of 1963 and October

Life On Marr Pretenders: The Pretenders was somewhat of an emergency call from the band, because the guitar player, Robbie McIntosh, decided to leave, and the band still had North American and South American dates booked opening up for U2 on The Joshua Tree tour, the one they made the movie (Rattle And Hum) for. It sounded like fun and somewhat of a challenge. What I mostly remember about it (was) having four or five days to rehearse (before playing at) the Olympic stadium, or whatever it’s called in Los Angeles. With the Olympic flame going and a huge crowd of people waiting for U2 to come on. My friendship with Chrissie Hynde was very close, philosophically; she was someone that I really needed in my life that point in time. Older, wiser and good fun, too.

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1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley kidnapped, raped and murdered five children in and around Manchester. Three bodies were recovered from the moors outside town, hence the name. The crimes haunted Morrissey’s childhood, and continue to cast a long dark shadow over Manchester to this day. “Suffer The Children” was a hell of a long way from “Da Do Run Run,” but in the space of a few hours, Morrissey and Marr had written their first two songs. Exactly one year later, Rough Trade released “Hand In Glove,” the Smiths’ debut single. The label on the center of the 45 was blue. The Smiths rose to fame on both the catchiness of Marr’s ringing Rickenbacker arpeggios and the sheer poetry of Morrissey’s lyrics, not to mention his acerbic wit and outrageous public pronouncements. Morrissey, avowedly vegetarian and proudly celibate, gave voice to the quiet desperation of the bullied, the bookish, the bruised and the broken. “He was speaking to the disaffected, the unhappy, the suppressed, the people who are confused, the people who are being put down,

The Smiths guitarist reminisces on some of his more memorable collaborations.

The The: We ended up having to explain ourselves ad infinitum. Poor old Matt Johnson caught a lot of flak for harboring an exSmith, and I caught a lot of flak for joining a London guy with political and philosophic aspirations. It brought out a certain kind of fuck-the-world spirit in us. Lucky for us, the record that we made (Mind Bomb) stood the test of time. The second record we made (Dusk) is probably one of my top three favorite albums I’ve ever made. It’s probably one of the few records I would still listen to for pleasure. Pet Shop Boys: They know that I want to make good pop music. Contrary to popular belief, it’s incredibly hard-working and inspiring. It’s not like we’re in the back of the recording studio, reclining on a chaise lounge while someone is pushing the buttons on a synthesizer. They are incredibly accomplished musicians. They are always working on an opera or a ballet or some orchestral piece, or some bangin’ pop music.

Electronic: I wanted to know about electronics, synthesizers and programming. It was the time in my life to do something really different from what I am known for. Bernard (Sumner, of New Order) was influenced by Kraftwerk, and I was influenced by Chic. And they became our touchstones, along with David Bowie and Brian Eno. It was that whole notion of using the studio as an instrument to create something new, instead of just four guys against the wall. Johnny Marr & The Healers: I was reluctant to be the frontman instead of just the guitar player, but at the same time I kind of liked it more. I think you have a better connection with the audience. It was another good learning curve for me, really. A lot of responsibility. But I sort of took to it and met a lot of good people out on tour. I still think it’s one of the best names, ever, for a rock group. I’m still … even now I catch myself calling my band the Healers, whichever the lineup. It’s better than calling it “my band.”

Talking Heads: I had just gotten out of the Smiths and didn’t really know what was going to happen. And then these amazing people started calling me up. Tina Weymouth was somebody I was really intrigued with; I couldn’t quite figure out how she did what she did, so getting to write songs with her was a really great experience. Looking back, I was quite wide-eyed, but I think I held my own pretty well. The song I really like off Naked is called “Cool Water”; that’s where David Byrne and I worked very closely together, and we threw the rulebook out. I remember detuning a 12-string electric, making this weird drone and using slides and making this very druggy atmosphere. Very atmospheric song. I enjoyed working with David a lot. His lyrics just kept getting better and better. I really enjoyed his words on that album. “Nothing But Flowers” was hilarious. I was in the video; I remember I got so high on grass, I’m not sure how I managed to stay still through it.

the people who had awful schooling, at a point that people in Britain were surely falling apart and no one cared,” says Fletcher. “Every day you would get knocked around on the streets and no one—not the teachers or the police or even your parents—seemed to care. Unless you were incredibly masculine, you risked getting beaten up every day. England was and still is an incredibly violent country.” Out of the gate, Morrissey tapped into a deep well of private despair, sublimated anger and social dislocation, a pervasive sense that the machinery of The Establishment—the school system, the justice system and government itself— was at best incompetent and unresponsive to the actual needs of the people, and at worst cruel and abusive by design. But instead of articulating this emerging anti-Establishmentarian consensus as raw spleen and vitriol, as did the punks that came before him, Morrissey would come bearing flowers, his rage-against-the-machine wrapped in Wilde-ian aphorisms, take-me-back-to-OldBlighty whimsy and gentle, velveteen guitar pop. Every Smiths song is like a candy apple with a ra-

Modest Mouse: Isaac Brock called me up. I really like the band, but in all honesty, I couldn’t get it in my mind how that was going to work. He has such a dense guitar sound. I wondered why he wanted me to write with him. But I was intrigued. He and I agreed that I would go and play with him for 10 days, a kind of experiment, which was an idea I loved. We were both coming from different places, but it fit very well together, and I remember thinking, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m feeling really good.” We came up with 19 songs after a couple of months of writing. The second thing that happened, I was out walking around the city and thinking, “I really like Portland.” So, I changed my plane ticket, and I didn’t go back for a long time. I’ve got a little house there that I miss. I’d like to think that one day I will return. The Cribs: In the early 2000s, there wasn’t a lot of rock music in the U.K. that I was excited about. Except I liked Franz Ferdinand and I liked the Cribs a lot. They asked to me do an EP, like an old thing you would do in the ’60s, like a four-track 45. I had some riffs that I was kicking around, and it just kind of caught fire. I wanted to commit to the songs and the guys, and show everybody that I really meant it. I became

zor blade inside. It was a heady moment in the arc of pop cultural history, but it seemed like it was over almost before it began. Five years and 73 songs later, the Smiths were no more. There is no one reason why the Smiths broke up—money, drugs, ego and bad business decisions all played a role—but it

“With the Smiths, I think Morrissey and Marr wanted this kind of Lennon/McCartney, Leiber and Stoller image. But it came at my expense and Mike Joyce’s expense.” —Andy Rourke

a member of the band for a few years, and that was another great experience. To be honest, 2005 happened, and the next time I turned around, it was 2011. I played with both bands, hundreds of gigs, and I made a couple of records that I still think were really good. Inception Soundtrack: I went to the cinema to see the incredibly cerebral and entertaining Kick-Ass. Then my friend said to me, “Oh, check this trailer for this movie.” So, I saw the trailer for Inception and read the credits for it—directed by Christopher Nolan and music by Hans Zimmer, who I have a great deal of respect for. And Leonardo DiCaprio was in it, and it sounded like a film that I really wanted to see. Then I got back to my house a couple of hours later and the phone rings, and it’s Hans Zimmer, who I have never spoken to before, asking me to come and do the soundtrack to Inception. So, that was pretty weird.

is generally understood that the band’s almost overnight success sowed the seeds of its foreshortened demise. “I think it all happened a lot quicker than anyone imagined,” says Rourke. “I think it was within two or three months that we were catapulted into fame. Although we were very confident about what we were doing, in hindsight, we weren’t really prepared for that.” When you press Marr on why he quit the band in July 1987, his first response is characterized by the caginess and mild irritation of a man who’s been asked the same two or three questions almost every day for two and a half decades. The why is in the eye of the beholder, he says, which, when you think about it, is actually the most honest, enlightened and accurate answer to that tired question. “Anybody who is really interested, I suggest they read the four or five books (about the Smiths) and hundreds of interviews, and they can decide why,” he says, clearly irked at having to go through all this ancient history again. Perhaps sensing he is in danger of losing his cool, and thereby violating the prime directive, Johnny Almost Out Of Patience, who is almost never is seen in public, is replaced by Cool Hand Johnny, who everybody’s come to know and love. “After 70 songs and an incredible time, it was just the right moment to move on,” he says. “The differences in our personalities, which early on worked to our advantage, just wore us out. We’re too different—that’s the answer to your question.” “The differences between Morrissey and Marr were too profound to make any kind of partnership sustainable,” says Fletcher. “They had enough in common musically, and in terms of their objectives and their Manchester backgrounds, that the differences in their personalities worked very well for a time as a kind of yin and yang balancing act, kind of opposites attract. But it ultimately brought them apart; they were so different that five years down the line, they looked at each other and said, ‘It’s hard to imagine spending the rest of my life working with you this intensely.’” There is a prevailing storyline that somehow Marr’s consumption of drugs and alcohol contributed to the demise of the Smiths. This narrative was fueled by Marr himself, who told NME back in 1987, “‘Worse for wear’ wasn’t the half of it: I was extremely ill. By the time the tour actually finished, it was all getting a little bit ... dangerous. I was just drinking more than I could handle.” Out of context and overstated, says Marr now. “All of that had as much to do with it as the color of my socks,” he says. The truthiness of said narrative extends to Marr now being a teetotaler and unable to tolerate the company of anyone who is otherwise, much to his chagrin.

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“I don’t like alcohol. I was always more into smoking pot; for Manchester musicians, it’s practically the law,” he says, when you ask him what condition his condition is in. “I don’t really do hard drugs. I don’t want to do anything that will distract me or slow me down. I don’t have a philosophical problem with psychedelics. It has been kind of useful and hasn’t done as much damage to people as the other stuff. But I’m not into getting messy. It’s not very dignified; it’s not really my bag. I like being present, and I like being wide awake. The problem is when you talk about these kinds of things, a lot of journalists are very reductive and tend to reduce things to clichés. They make assumptions that if you don’t drink or smoke, you are like Aerosmith, some kind of contrite rock star with a tragic backstory. That wasn’t really the case for me. I’m fine with people doing whatever they want to do, and if they want to do stuff around me, that’s fine, too. I do have a rule: If someone starts to tell the same story five times, I’m out of there.” Marr long ago mastered the art of making a graceful exit. When you’re a hired gun, you can’t afford to make messy personal attachments. Not that he hasn’t made friends with or enjoyed the company of all the people he’s worked with since the Smiths, but he’s only there for the song, man, not the people or the party afterward. Because sooner or later, they will break your heart. Been there, done that. He got his fill of melodrama and thrill-seeking with the Smiths, thank you. Which may explain why he’s never put down long-term roots with any one project. Not even the Smiths—when you stop to think about it, that was just five years. The Rolling Stones have been together for 50. “I think his personality is such (that) he is only able to commit to projects for these creative bursts of energy, which last a few years at a time,” says Fletcher. “It just doesn’t seem to be in his personality to be in a band for 30 years.” The other answer is that he just gets bored and restless, or senses that he’s not going to catch lightning in the bottle again with this or that project, and moves onto the next thing. And the next thing is Johnny Marr, solitary man, lone wolf, eponymous. Not the guy from the Smiths who plays with Talking Heads or the guy from the Smiths who plays with the Pretenders or the guy from the Smiths who plays with Modest Mouse. Just Marr, myself and I. And so, without further adieu, come hell or high water, ladies and gentlemen, heeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny. When asked point blank about the prospect of a Smiths reunion ever happening, Marr speaks volumes with what he doesn’t say. “I just like looking forward, and I really like what I am doing now,” he says. “I can only speak for myself. I really like all the other fellas, but I like looking forward and that’s it.”

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“I don’t like alcohol. I was always more into smoking pot; for Manchester musicians, it’s practically the law. I don’t really do hard drugs. I don’t want to do anything that will distract me or slow me down.” —Johnny Marr

That’s all well and good, but it would be folly to think we really have any say in the matter. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” Or to quote the poet P.T. Anderson, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” As far back as 2006, British Prime Minister David Cameron has touted his love of the Smiths, telling the BBC that “This Charming Man” would be on his Desert Island Disc. Cameron is a member of the Conservative Party, the British equivalent of the Republicans, minus the gun nuts and religious fanatics. The one thing the Conservative Party and the Republicans have in common is a pitiless determination to dismantle the welfare state. During a heated Parliament debate over the Conservative Party’s proposed tripling of tuition fees at state-subsidized universities as part of a grand austerity plan, Labour MPs openly questioned the depth of Cameron’s knowledge of the Smiths, resulting in a volley of Smiths song titles batted back and fourth across the floor of Parliament. This, as you can imagine, made headlines. Marr and the Smiths were always outspoken in their support of the Labour Party, which is more or less England’s equivalent of the Democratic Party. Marr took to Twitter and demanded that the Prime Minister stop co-opting his old band to provide cover for his austerity agenda: “David Cameron stop saying you like the Smiths ... I forbid you.” Says Marr now, “In the culture I came up in, if you were a British indie band, you were against Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party. Because that government was going about the business of dismantling the welfare state that we had benefited from and relied on when we were children. Back then, working-class communities all around the U.K (were) being decimated (by

austerity measures). Nobody in any U.K. band worth a damn would ever vote Conservative. The Smiths reflected that, and we spoke about all of that all the time in public, and our audience understood that. So, how the current prime minister can listen to the music and the words and say that he is a fan of the band, as well as a direct descendant of Margaret Thatcher, doesn’t make sense. Unless he was just dancing around the bass line and ignored everything else about the band, I don’t get it.” The proposed tuition hike triggered riots and demonstrations across England. Some 50,000 student protesters flooded London in November 2010. At one point, Conservative Party headquarters was stormed by protesters and thoroughly trashed. On the day after the Smiths debate, Parliament scheduled a vote on the tuition hike. Outside, protesters manned the ramparts. The students lost that day; the tripling of tuitions got the necessary votes from Parliament. But a remarkable photo emerged from the protests that would resonate far and wide, and answer once and for all which side of the fight the Smiths were on. It is a picture of a lean and wiry student-age woman with a blonde ’80s bob, wearing skinny jeans and Doc Martens—a look that would not be out of place at a Smiths show at the Haçienda in 1983—climbing to the top of the barricade and towering over a phalanx of riot police looking up at her in full-blown stormtrooper riot gear. The girl is wearing a Hatful Of Hollow T-shirt and leaning forward, striking a defiant pose, clearly spoiling for a fight. Behind the stormtroopers, the tower of Parliament, that beacon of official power, leans toward the girl like they are about to go head to head. The State meets The Resistance, and The Resistance is wearing a Smiths T-shirt. “I got sent that picture, and I looked at it for about three minutes before it sunk in what it really was,” says Marr. “I thought it was some Photoshop thing or some design by somebody. I kept doing a double take because it looked too good to be real. I then sent it to Morrissey straight away. He loved it. Really loved it.” At this point, Marr gets a little emotional. His tone is hushed. There is a slight hitch in his throat. He chooses his words carefully. “I thought about when (me and Morrissey) sat in my attic room the second day we ever got together—which was really the first day of the partnership—we had a lot of dreams that were as attainable as playing a gig on Mars,” he says. “Not only did we reach them, we went beyond them. But never, ever would we have conceived of that picture happening one day. It’s one of those times in my life where all I can do is blink and wonder how did all that happen just from playing a guitar?” M

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Frightened Rabbit p. 52

| Iceage p. 56 | Local Natives p. 58 | Tegan And Sara p. 60 | Tomahawk p. 61

Not So Mellow Yellow

they continue the move toward the tighter concision found on 2009’s King Of Jeans, but unlike Pissed Jeans’ previous efforts, there isn’t a seven-minute dirge Coruscating, misanthropic punk spirit on Honeys. That might be because, when lives on in Pissed Jeans’ latest you’re writing a song wishing death on a couple coworkers, you might want to get f all the noise-rock bands that popped up in and out of there quickly. On “Cafeteria Food,” Korvette opens with a list of trivial over the past decade or so, Pissed Jeans stood annoyances with a project manager beout because of a secret weapon: frontman Matt fore imagining getting a message saying Korvette, an insurance claims adjuster who probably has that manager died. He compares the joy of hearing the news to “feeling like I’m a lot of interesting conversations with coworkers about not the father” and “feeling like I won the Pissed Jeans playing in a band called Pissed Jeans. His acerbic wit has Super Bowl.” He zeroes in on a broker in the next verse. already given use caustic takedowns of joggers who shop at But Korvette doesn’t spare himself Whole Foods, lamentations on male pattern baldness and a either. On “Male Gaze,” he describes the Sub Pop titular look as “when a smile becomes a song called “Ashamed Of My Cum.” On Honeys, the band’s stare and it starts to burn,” later admitfourth album, Korvette uses his nine-to-fiver vantage point ting, “I’m not innocent.” And nine-to-fivto address all the little ways other people are dicks, and it’s usually pretty ing gets attention again on “Chain Worker.” Even with all the indignities suffered in such a life, he moans, “My chain hilarious. ¶ None of this is meant to overlook the contributions of his provides me with safety.” All this is housed in the band’s bandmates; Pissed Jeans know when to lean into a riff and ride it to neo-pigfuck that’s shed some of the heavier riffs from Hope For Men and a lot of the most atonal moments on its breaking point, or they can open up an ominous groove that they their debut, Shallow, in favor of the streamlined and more then scatter with shards of feedback and skronk. On the band’s latest, obviously punk sound they’ve sported the past few years.

Honeys

photo by sasha morgan

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reviews Along the way, the band members have begrudgingly grown up, but Honeys makes the case that teenage angst isn’t that much different from grown-up angst. Korvette sums it up on album closer “Teenage Adult”: “There’s no reason to ever grow up when there’s so many toys/You don’t care about being a man when you’re one of the boys.” —Matt Sullivan

Amor De Dias

The House At Sea Merge

Las palabras de amor

Trading in the shimmering styles of their respective bands, Alasdair Ma-

cLean (Clientele) and Lupe Núñez-Fernández (Pipas) united as the acoustic-based Amor De Dias around 2008. Where the duo’s 2011 debut, Street Of The Love Of Days, was pastoral and atmospheric, Amor De Dias’ new LP recaptures some of MacLean and Núñez-Fernández’s transatlantic pop leanings. The House At Sea finds the wayward rhythm section from the Clientele joining the fold, resulting in a more balanced mix of upbeat and contemplative songs. In addition to delicate tracks like “Same Old Night” and “Hampshire Lullaby,” MacLean shows his love for bossa nova on opener “Voice In The Rose.” Elsewhere, Núñez-Fernández gets intense on the hurried “Day,” and multi-lingual on “Viento Del Mar” and “Piedras Rosas.” The graceful title track and the playful “Jean’s Waving” highlight the interplay between the two singers’ complementary voices. Alternately gentle and jangly, The House At Sea is a delight. —Eric Schuman

Common Mammals A glossy sheen does little to augment Frightened Rabbit’s relatable angst

ith its blend of raw emotionalism and soaring, swoony, sing-along-ready choruses, Scotland’s Frightened Rabbit walks a fine line Frightened Rabbit between brilliantly crystallized angst and melodrama. Its prePedestrian Verse vious full-length, Winter Of Mixed Drinks, used dissonance as a bulwark against emo indulgence. The band opened tracks—inCanvasback/Atlantic cluding the wonderful, anthemic “Skip The Youth”—with noise collages and employed ragged handclaps. It was a perfect cocktail of desperate euphoria and pop accessibility. There are moments on Frightened Rabbit’s latest that live up to that lofty ideal. Opener “Acts Of Man” has a stark, atonal piano intro, and begins with a classic bit of lyrical disarmament from frontman Scott Hutchison: “I am that dickhead in the kitchen/Giving wine to your best girl’s glass.” It builds to a swirling melange, anchored by a booming drumbeat.

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Beach Fossils

Clash The Truth

Captured Tracks

Valuable detections

No other Brooklyn band of the current renaissance falls into place so perfectly. On their uncommonly pure, eponymous debut, Beach Fossils connected every loose end of Real Estate into a perpetual motion machine of two reverb guitars and backof-the-room vocal drones over a drum kit with only a snare you could be sure of. Hooks were plentiful; waste was not. The new one is faster, hookier, clearer. From the oddly anthemic title tune to the psychobilly feel of “Crashed Out,” they race through comfort-food drones at aerodynamic speeds unheard of by, oh, the Stratford 4. “Generation Synthetic” somehow marries the B-52’s with R.E.M.’s Chronic Town, while “Sleep Apnea”

Unfortunately, by the second song, we are camped firmly on the other side of that aforementioned line. The production is simply too polished and straightforward to bear the weight of all those feelings. It’s—dare I say it—a bit cheesy. Gone is that rough tinge, that homespun magic that made this band stand a head above the rest of its peers. Fortunately, Hutchison is still a wonderfully honest and arresting songwriter. His brogue is ever-charming, and he sings with conviction. But then on “Dead Now,” the bleak lyrics (“I am not myself/I am/A broken box stuffed with glass and sand”) and trickily jaunty verses are undercut by a by-the-numbers chorus lacking dynamic punch. These guys do so many things well— now if they could only find their weird again. —Lee Stabert

photo by tim richmond

wastes no more than 2:26 on a swirling ballad. Zigzagging around miniature sound-effect intros, the trio does everything in its sharp, limited power to prove that soft and pretty need not be slow. And when they must conform to moderate tempo, they outpour it into an ageless beauty like “Taking Off.” —Dan Weiss

Brokeback

Brokeback & The Black Rock Thrill Jockey

Climbing the dusty trail Despite a 15-year history with spotty amounts of activity, head honcho Douglas McCoombs (also of Tortoise and Pullman) wanted to treat present-day Brokeback like his first band. This meant regular rehearsals and live gigs, as well as plenty of time spent writing and refining material. Luckily, McCoombs’ experience also meant that the usual first-band nonsense like lack of studio knowledge, songwriting greenery and “we’re going to be huge!” bravado was removed from the picture. The result is a finely crafted collection of music that speaks volumes beyond its instrumental presentation. Brokeback’s sound recalls stripped-down Tejano music. There’s a sense of desolation and isolation from the off, as Western twang splits a balance with solos deep from the heart of the secessionist movement. McCoombs’ day gig is most present on “Don’t Worry Pigeon,” while “Tonight At Ten” incorporates mariachi elements and exhibits the album’s biggest weakness: a meandering length of pieces that could have been tightened up for greater impact. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Buke And Gase

General Dome Brassland

Rip it up and start again

Named for its hand-crafted instruments (an electric baritone ukulele and a guitar strung as a bass, respectively), Buke And Gase arrives with an easy-to-target quirk. What’s remarkable about the Brooklyn duo is that its mechanical tinkering never overshadows its musical product. On its second fulllength outing, the DIY duo expands upon last year’s Function Falls EP, which displayed more refined songwriting than its more scattered and rambunctious earlier material. By now, the duo’s command of its own sonic capabilities makes for an impressive—and impressively approachable—patchwork of noiserock sputtering, post-punk splintering, chamber-pop layering and agit-pop urgency. “My Best Andre Shot” is a stunning, searing threeand-a-half minutes of Battles-esque math rock and churning pop. The title track imagines St. Vincent on a Big Black tear. The duo has called its gear “cannibalized,” but that same urge to tear apart and repurpose extends to the way these songs are assembled. In the case of General Dome, it’s a canny hybrid. —Bryan C. Reed

Samantha Crain

Kid Face

Ramseur

Lonely love songs for lost souls

Samantha Crain is a Native American singer/ songwriter from Shawnee, Okla., known for her literary lyrics, dark melodies and unique phrasing. She’s a keen observer of human relationships, particularly the dysfunctional kind. “Taught To Lie” ponders how much honesty a relationship can take before it shatters, with the protagonist finally deciding the truth matters more than happiness; Crain’s despondent vocal adds emotional depth to the song. “Never Going Back” is a bit brighter, a sprightly farewell to a bad relationship, while “Ax” advises a friend to turn away from fear and anger, as hard as that may be. Most of the people she writes about are struggling with emotions they can’t quite get a grip on, often torn between emotional paralysis and the desire to run and hide from everything and everyone. These down-tempo laments are made even more powerful by the band’s dark, brooding arrangements and Crain’s fragile, aching delivery. —j. poet

Chris Darrow

Artist Proof Drag City

Drawn together

America’s country-rock renaissance was well established by 1972— especially in California—and multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow was in the middle of it all. Having emerged from a stint with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and overtly eclectic psychedelic group Kaleidoscope, Darrow revived his country and bluegrass roots when making his solo debut. Like his talented Kaleidoscope bandmate David Lindley, Darrow could play anything with strings, and did. Although his singing voice wasn’t distinctive, Darrow’s musicianship was sterling, and the music he made on Artist Proof was not unlike the work of outsize contemporaries like Gram Parsons. Highlighting pedal steel, mandolins, fiddles, acoustic and electric guitars, and multiple vocal harmonies, Darrow shines on songs like “Beware Of Time” and emotive closer “The Sky Is Not Blue Today.” Replete with bonus tracks from Darrow’s demo recordings, this long-forgotten collection is a fine, representative memento of California country rock in its heyday. —Mitch Myers

The Deer Tracks

The Archer Trilogy, Pt. 3 The Control Group

Frozen Swedish duo completes its trilogy

Before reading the biography of the Deer Tracks, I could tell they were from someplace cold. And as it turns out, they’re from Sweden.

The glitchy ambience of their new album and the slightly off-kilter accent of the vocals fit the region to a T. On the finale to their Archer Trilogy—not concept albums based on The Hunger Games, unfortunately—the music is as icy and snow-covered as from whence it came. (Also, have you noticed the trend of bands making trilogies recently?) Pt. 3 opens with “III,” a short prelude of wordless vocals from Elin Lindfors and David Lehnberg, which is as melodically straightforward as the album gets. The rest takes synths, beats and assorted eclectic noises, and puts them on the cutting block, rearranging them into stuttered formations. Through all the soft factory noises, like on “Divine Light,” Lindfors’ breathy voice centers the proceedings, always giving the songs a tuneful counterpoint. —Bryan Bierman

Ducktails

The Flower Lane Domino

Room to bloom

Once the stuff of somnolent tape warmth and pedal-board symphonies, Matthew Mondanile’s Ducktails project is now as far away from that lonely bedroom hinterland as it gets. For starters, The Flower Lane finds the singer/guitarist backed by his Ridgewood, N.J., countrymen in power-pop quartet Big Troubles, as well as big city pals like Oneohtrix Point Never and Cults’ Madeline Follin. And the tunes are even more carefully structured and produced than Mondanile’s better known group, Real Estate. The Flower Lane finally completes his slow metamorphosis from atemporal ambient to pointedly “retrolicious” songcraft, à la Ariel Pink. In fact, Mondanile seems to fancy many of the same genres and techniques Pink does: soft-rock sax solos, psychedelic delay trails, sub-Saharan funk guitar and so on. If you’re a limited-run cassette connoisseur or else Simon Reynolds, perhaps best to pass—but this is particularly adept record-collector rock for the rest of us. —Jakob Dorof

Fonda

Sell Your Memories Minty Fresh

Back-dating England by the pound

It’s somewhat ironic and telling that Fonda’s creative duo of guitarist David Klotz and vocalist/keyboardist Emily Cook originally met on a movie set some 15 years ago. Since their The Invisible Girl debut, they’ve recorded handfuls of grandiose and cinematic pop, and were even hired by Miramax to write music for that filmic masterpiece Spy Kids back in 2001. That sense of size and volume has been combined with shoegaze’s effects-pedal spaciousness here on album number four. There are traditional-sounding reverbed-out alt-rockers like “Last Goodbyes” that bring to

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reviews mind Lush and the Stone Roses, but where Fonda makes its mark is with its upbeat and sugary psychedelic sensibility. It’s the sort of thing that has “You Got A Life Of Your Own” and “You And I” sounding like a cross between Madchester and the Monkees. Which bodes well for this duo, as it brings a sense of levity and fun to a genre usually associated with mopey attitudes. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Free Energy

Love Sign

Free Energy

Superior to pure energy!

At first blush, Love Sign feels like a solid, dependable retread of Free Energy’s fabulous 2010 effort, Stuck On Nothing. It’s not until you spin them back to back that it’s clear how much this album preserves—even perfects—the spirit of its delirious debut, while fashioning it into something even bigger: brighter, tighter, better, more. The Philly fivesome’s cowbell-smacking, riffs-blazing reclamation of bygone rock ‘n’ roll glory days rages on, but it’s like the scruffy, all-American small-town dreamers of the first record got their big major-label break (in fact, times being what they are, they’ve taken the self-release route this time) and teamed with some hotshot producer (ditching has-been fogey James Murphy) to add some polish—a couple horns, even some of them newfangled synthesizers—to their raggedly earnest anthems. Every damn song sounds like a single. But their hearts are truer than ever—that ’70sjocking swagger is matched pound for pound by a disarmingly cheery, transcendental softness that deflects any dint of untoward classic-rock machismo. —K. Ross Hoffman

Lisa Germano

No Elephants Badman

Budget-busting

In the post-crash world, even James Bond is economizing. What does a musician whose sales rarely matched her reviews during good times do in an era of diminished resources? Lisa Germano’s efforts to jam econo yield the best parts of this frustrating release. Why spring for lots of extra instrumentalists when you can get a nifty electronic sound from the feedback of a cell phone near a computer monitor and a heart-wrenching chorus from a yelping puppy? Germano’s songs have often foregrounded her emotional struggles, and here anxiety seems to have permeated her high-pitched vocals, which are so breathlessly sung that she sounds like she’s verging on a panic attack. This restricts her melodies a bit too much for

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Two Thumbs Sideways Petra Haden’s a cappella film-covers project is adorably inessential

etra Haden is a behind-

Petra Haden

Petra Goes To The Movies

the-scenes legend, a jill-ofall-trades who made that Antidog. deserve a much bigger cult with her screwy violin and sour-sugar harmonies, and the Decemberists a fuller band ready to mount the top of Billboard. She’s the first sound you hear on Green Day’s “Hitchin’ A Ride,” and a utilized associate of folks as disparate as Foo Fighters and Sunn O))). Even if there’s at least a handful of others capable of making an entirealbum a cappella tribute to The Who Sell Out, who would have the chutzpah? Seven years after, she returns with another (mostly) a cappella tour de force, covering instrumental passages from Hollywood history using only her virtuosic larynx and the occasional accompaniment, with breaks in the middle for the Goldfinger (gloriously dynamic) and Tootsie (guitar-anchored, project-cheapening) themes. Two problems arise: the best inclusions are also the most well-known, like the theme from Psycho and “Hand Covers Bruise” from The Social Network. What’s the last album you heard where the highlight is the Superman theme? Then, as with all impressive novelty albums, it’s hard to imagine getting to a sixth play of these nonetheless flawless interpretations, and even those would mostly be for friends and neighbors. —Dan Weiss

photo by Steven Perilloux

their own good, and some more dynamic performances near the album’s end can’t save if from fading in a poof of uneasy effervescence. —Bill Meyer

Indians

Somewhere Else 4AD

Destination unknown

To say that there’s something otherworldly about Somewhere Else would be a gross understatement; everything is otherworldly about the debut album by Indians, a.k.a. Copenhagen’s Søren Løkke Juul. From his fractured, creepy-angel vocals and soundscapes that evoke, oh, let’s call it space church, to Juul’s awkwardly evocative lyrics (“Oh girl redblood, I am your man”), Indians live up to early billing as Bon Iver with fjords. On album opener “New,” swept up with echoing percussion and what sounds like an alien marimba, Juul sings disarmingly, “The war is just outside my door, and I’m going out to win/ My clothes are lying at the floor, and I’m naked in the wind.” Despite its bold beginnings and occasional flashes of hope, Somewhere Else is largely consumed with loss, both bitter (“I Am Haunted,” about a love who couldn’t stay) and tragic (“Magic Kids,” about a love who couldn’t stay alive). While some songs drag, others are absolutely enchanting. We welcome future transmissions. —Brian Howard

Matmos

The Marriage Of True Minds Thrill Jockey

A muted, Baltimorean Psychic Friends Network

A sacrilegious cover of the Buzzcocks’ “ESP” stakes out fertile, freaky common ground between GWAR, prog rock and Americana. On “Tunnel,” Jay Lesser’s synthesizers and Owen Gardner’s guitars chase one another around like gangs of feral cats and dogs: dropping out of earshot for a couple seconds here, scared shitless by a beatboxing robotic omnipresence there. “Mental Radio” suggests an ambitious attempt to remix boisterous crosstown traffic and flood-zone field recordings into a simulacrum of M.I.A.’s “Bird Flu.” All of which is to say that The Marriage Of True Minds is pure, latemodel Matmos: perverse, urbane, crowded— contributors include a tap dancer, Keith Whitman Fullerton, plus a veritable who’s-who of Baltimore’s musical underground—hilarious, and efficient. Years of telepathic experiments and transcripts formed the conceptual bases for Minds, but the seams of the thematic toil of Drew Daniels and Martin Schmidt barely show. To laypeople up in the cloud vibing out on, say, the Pavlovian beardo funk of “Teen Paranormal Romance,” this artistic and romantic couple simply achieved perfection of a clandestine alchemy. —Raymond Cummings

Mountains

Centralia

Thrill Jockey

Fuck gravity; let’s frolic

Ambient music and drones rely on making air molecules vibrate in ways where traditional instrumental skills aren’t a prerequisite. But if properly deployed, they add a lot. On their seventh album as Mountains, Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg wax consistently virtuoso without ever letting their command of technique even hint at distraction. This is an attribute they share hella big with labelmates and fellow nature lovers Barn Owl, but the latter’s approach hinges more on guitar tones cast like phantom nets over one yawning nocturnal void or another, while their Brooklyn-based counterparts generally opt for the day shift and utilize a broader, wetter palette. Within those slack parameters, all other bets are off. From the bubbling, leaping synth lines that populate “Sand” to the deftly picked acoustic guitar that urges “Liana” forward, the duo constantly varies every element of its sound in ways most rock bands could learn plenty from. —Rod Smith

Nightlands

Oak Island

Secretly Canadian

Less vibes, more pop

When Dave Hartley’s Nightlands debuted in 2010, it felt almost magical. Forget The Mantra was an ethereal, expressionistic LP, with layers of vocals and spacey tones that sounded like nothing else out there. Since then, the Philadelphia multi-instrumentalist and War On Drugs bassist rekindled an evident love of ’70s pop, first with a covers seveninch (featuring a sweet rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Trouble”) and now with Oak Island. Hints of the Bee Gees and Queen fill the more direct and accessible set, but results are mixed. “So Far So Long” is a winner out of the gate, a lush and snappy mid-tempo number reminiscent of 10cc. “I Fell In Love With A Feeling,” by comparison, is a squealing, stampeding mess, coming off like ELO on speed. The moments where Hartley works in the comfort of the first album’s vibeyness feel tame and tempered; you can tell that’s not what he’s into this time. Instead, he seeks to boldly chase his pop-music idols, which hits the mark only about half the time. But when it doesn’t, at least it’s a glorious miss. —John Vettese

Christopher Owens

Lysandre

Fat Possum

Repeat ’til defeat

The debut solo effort from Christopher Owens (Girls) is, by far, his most focused effort to date. The album is remarkably cohesive conceptually, almost to the point of monotony. Lysandre recounts the story of an

on-the-road romance with the girl who lends her name to the title. The LP opens with “Lysandre’s Theme,” a short melody that’s referenced continually, almost compulsively, over the course of the proceedings. Rather than convey the myopia of love, the theme’s ubiquity robs the songs of their identity, reframing them as mere variations. This, paired with the fact that every single song is in the key of A, condemns pleasant and inoffensive tunes to the realm of dreariness. One of Owens’ strengths has always been delivering clichéd content with such earnestness that it becomes immediately lovable. Lyrically, Owens pulls this trick off once again; musically, he does not. Flute and saxophone abound on this record, employed with a degree of schmaltz that works against the songs more often than not. —Theo Spielberg

Pere Ubu

Lady From Shanghai Fire

Rambling on

Back in 1948, critics complained that Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai was a mess, and you could say the same about this latest Pere Ubu album, which has nothing to do with the movie it’s named after. You might bang your head against the wall, trying to figure out what makes this Pere Ubu’s “dance album,” or how it’s going to “smash the hegemony of dance.” You could count how many times David Thomas sings “the truth hurts” before the six-minute “Lampshade Man” mercifully fades into silence. But you shouldn’t deny yourself the earsplitting, anti-rock romance of “And Then Nothing Happened,” which ends with a long cacophony of ringing alarm clocks; or the cowbell-smacking, space-age dissonance of “Musicians Are Scum”; or the numbing, nightmarish expressionism of “414 Seconds,” about a man waking up from a dream that may or may not have been a dream. Sure, it’s a mess. But it’s a brilliant, manically theatrical mess, true to Welles’ self-destructive spirit. —Kenny Berkowitz

Radar Brothers

Eight

Merge

Spaceboy at 40

Radar Brothers’ alt-country-by-way-of-lilting-indie-rock has long had a spacey sheen to it, but the addition of exBroken West guitarist Dan Iead on pedal steel (alongside Brian Cleary and Ethan Walter on keys and synths) sends the band wending and winding around a lush, reverb-y stratosphere for the first half of Eight, the ebb and flow revealing a nascent preference for natural, sometimes unruly blossoming over Miyagiesque pruning. And though the b-side descends into rootsier, more straightforward indie-pop territory,

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the impression nevertheless remains that vocalist/guitarist/mastermind Jim Putnam is still only scratching the surface of a palette transformed considerably by the band’s circa 2008’10 dissolution and reformation—a phoenix act that brought new blood into the fold and allowed Putnam to re-center himself artistically. Eight is the sound of a band in flux, and that churn makes for some of Radar Brothers’ most intriguing, compelling work yet. The sky, it seems, is not the limit. —Shawn Macomber

Alasdair Roberts & Friends

A Wonder Working Stone Drag City

Habitual rituals

I’ll admit that I was a little bitchy when I reviewed Scottish singer/songwriter Alasdair Roberts’ last album. But even with his new LP, which is a triumphant return to Roberts’ roots in arcane ballads of ancient Scotland, I still say that the key to his music is his voice. It reaches inside your flesh and scrapes at your bones in the most unsettling way. It disturbs the mind in the same way that the old songs of the British Isles disturbed—by tapping into the cold frisson we all feel when we hear of a particularly gruesome murder, or a vicious betrayal. Roberts is perfectly suited to sing Scottish traditional music, but with A Wonder Working Stone, he creates new songs from the ruins of the old. This music has been cunningly handcrafted, despite the album’s larger ensemble sound, and at times the songs come off like incantations. I would recommend checking your backyard for wicker men after listening to this one. —Devon Leger

The Ruby Suns

Christopher Sub Pop

Fjord escape

In retrospect, maybe he should’ve changed the name. Ryan McPhun’s departure from psychedelic globetrotter to cranial crystal-baller on 2010’s Fight Softly was so dramatically drastic that many devoted Ruby Suns worshipers renounced their faith— ignoring what is, independent of context, an often overpowering synth-pop exploration. (Revisit “Closet Astrologer” and try not to gawk.) He’s not winning any of them back with Christopher. The full monty to Fight Softly’s striptease, McPhun’s fourth LP is a polar-bear plunge into the crowded straits of Scandina-

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Breaking The Thaw You’re Nothing feels good for the improving post-punkers in Iceage

othing essential happens in the absence

of noise.” So argued French economist and philosopher Jacques Attali in his landmark 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy Of Music. It’s a maxim that muchIceage lauded Copenhagen quartet Iceage takes to heart on its sophoYou’re Nothing more album, a rousing gut-punch hybrid of the sort of riotous abandon, artful guile and caterwauling fury the band previously Matador pantomimed without ever quite fully actualizing. And what a glorious cacophony Iceage is capable of summoning when it cuts tether and runs flailing into the maelstrom! As alluring as the studiously abrasive, noisy thump/convulse/thump post-punk of 2011’s New Brigade could be, You’re Nothing is the record destined to retroactively justify the somewhat overwrought hosannas of the last two years. The coarse sonic atmosphere remains—to these dudes, Pro Tools is probably a $15 Radio Shack mic and a glass of water to pour over guitar amplifier cones—but in nearly every other respect, the evolution is substantial, from the vastly expanded sophistication of dissonant, noisemaking prowess to a quantum leap in the vocal delivery of Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, who graduates from a sneering Johnny-Rottendoing-an-impression-of-Shane-MacGowan style to something considerably more fierce, intricate and harrowing. “Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract and castrate meaning,” Attali wrote, “forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent.” You’re Nothing may be a casually nihilistic title, yet what lies within is very noisy and, consequently, very much alive. —Shawn Macomber

vian faux-disco; but unlike before, he mostly sounds like a fish out of water. It’s as if the two records should be reversed: Fight Softly highlights “Cranberry” and “Dusty Fruit” actually could be mistaken for the Tough Alliance or Air

France, whereas Christopher merely apes their flashy keys and ricocheting bass. Download “Dramatikk,” the one heart-throbbing exception, and wait for the next uprising. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

photo by Pooneh Ghana

RunnAmuckS

Deficit Of Dreams Ripping

Loss leader

Navigating the margins at somewhere between “a crawl” and “gradually” since 2000 or so, RunnAmuckS (imagine the “A” as an anarchy symbol, and its hash mark providing dashes) mixed catchy thrash-metal riffing with “punk ‘n’ roll” much like the betterknown Annihilation Time or Midnight, but added a decidedly adolescent aesthetic through both their politics and sense of humor, like a PG-13 G.G. Allin obsessed with the teaching of NOFX (or Old Skull). They could spit out a barn-burner or two when they wanted to, but sadly, that one crucial

element is lacking from Deficit Of Dreams, and an obvious shift into “pop” mode can’t fill the void when the hooks are this difficult to muster. The imagery used as cover art was most likely done so without permission, yet regardless of the motive behind this decision, Deficit Of Dreams is destined to serve out its sentence well under the radar. —Andrew Earles

Chris Stamey

Lovesick Blues Yep Roc

Tears in his beer

No, Lovesick Blues isn’t an album of old country covers, although Chris Stamey appropriates the title from a great Hank Williams song. Nor is it Stamey’s solo

800-Pound Gorilla Over the influences, Local Natives now must contend with themselves

RIZZLY BEAR startled out of hibernation. Ra Ra Riot before getting tear-gassed. Vampire Weekend ditching its cardigans for board shorts. The four Southern Californians in Local Natives have heard it all—if peer pressure Local Natives was the band’s primary metamorphic agent of change, there Hummingbird would be no telling what to expect from this sophomore outing. Proggy chamber ska, anyone? Frenchkiss As it happens, the comparison from which it suffers most is to itself. Unwilling or unable to ascend the vertiginous heights of 2009 debut Gorilla Manor, Hummingbird instead buries its beak in the sand. The approaching stampede of advance single “Breakers” proves a ruse; there is no “Sun Hands” here. “Heavy Feet” shows the band’s toned-down approach can yield something just as

version of the jangly power pop of the recently reactivated dB’s, although you can find trace elements woven in its DNA, and longtime pal Mitch Easter is here to help out. Instead, Lovesick Blues is a wintry, understated orchestral-pop album, draped in strings and woodwinds, and with allusions—musical or lyrical—to Leonard Cohen, XTC, Tom Petty, the Zombies and Harry Nilsson. There’s even some Chet Baker here, in piano ballad “Occasional Shivers.” The songs seem autobiographical in their expressions of two sorts of lovesickness: as a desperate longing (“I Wrote This Song For You”) and as a careworn expression of a broken relationship (“Anyway”). Stamey inhabits this guise with ease; this is a lovely, bittersweet and nuanced album. —Steve Klinge

memorable: Moved by percussive somersaults, choral handclaps and two welltraveled words (“After/Everything”), the second track is a mid-tempo specter that haunts the rest of the album like a deceased previous tenant. Gorilla Manor may be topheavy, but Hummingbird seems to give up the fight once “Breakers” stops breathing. After crossing over into the mushy slog of “Three Months,” side two is all build and no release, a grounded fleet of leaden zeppelins (“Colombia”) or revving engines that never take flight (“Black Balloons”). Do stick around for “Bowery,” a light at the tunnel’s end that follows the lead of Gorilla weeper “Who Knows Who Cares” with enough dynamic shifts and roiling backbeats to maintain interest—and to remind us that these Natives haven’t completely rested. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

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reviews

Texas Is The Reason

Do You Know Who You Are?—The Complete Collection Revelation

It’s not their fault

The band took its name from the Misfits’ JFKassassination song “Bullet” and titled its only album after the supposed last words John Lennon heard before Mark David Chapman fired his gun, so it’s not all that surprising that Texas Is The Reason pulled its own plug after just one massively influential LP. Formed in New York City in 1994 by members of hardcore Krishna bands Shelter and 108, Texas Is The Reason left its roots behind and instead rode college rock’s coattails to become underground royalty in the three years it was active. On this retrospective, two previously unreleased tracks join the band’s catalog, bringing the grand total of TITR’s output to 16 solid songs. Without a doubt, the band’s restless, pop-smart guitars and nasal cries helped inspire the modern emo-rock white-boy aesthetic, which made insecurity and overwrought feelings mandatory for indie credibility. —Jeanne Fury

Richard Thompson

Electric

This Must Be … Pop? We can’t get Tegan And Sara’s “sellout” album out of our heads— for better or worse

EGAN AND SARA have tinkered with their sound throughout their career, mixing elements of confessional singer/songwriter folk, pop/punk and Tegan And Sara Heartthrob indie rock over the course of their previous six albums. The Sisters Quin often seemed eager to be identified with outsidWarner BroS. ers and underdogs, with songs full of conflicted emotions, even as they occasionally flirted with pop success. On Heartthrob, Tegan And Sara leave behind all traces of understatement—it’s an all-in glossy electronic pop album, the kind of thing that could very well lead to a string of top-40 pop hits, lasting suburban mall anthems and cries of selling out from old fans. Whereas Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla produced their last two studio albums, Heartthrob uses three producers, and the choices are revealing: Mike Elizondo (who’s worked with Pink), Justin Meldal-Johnsen (who’s played bass for Beck, M83 and Garbage) and the Bird & The Bee’s Greg Kurstin (whose work with Kylie Minogue might be most relevant here). While Heartthrob’s glossy surfaces occasionally belie dark or subtle sentiments, most of these songs are writ large and broad to match their big hooks and dance-pop rhythms. “Closer” and “Drove Me Wild” are straightforward love songs, albeit with a nice edge of lust (unlike past albums, though, most of the relationships in these songs could as easily be straight as gay). Heartthrob is surprising and catchy and airtight; it’s bright and shiny and perky. It may bring Tegan And Sara a new generation of fans. But it also risks being faceless—it’s Tegan And Sara’s least personable, most superficial record. —Steve Klinge

New West

Current events

A Richard Thompson album entitled Electric damn well better have some guitar solos. On the British folk/rock vet’s latest, songs like “Sally B” and “Straight And Narrow” give plenty of room for his wiry, English reel-like leads. (Though he never stretches out here like he often thrillingly does in concert.) But, as with most Thompson albums, there’s also ample acoustic guitar on the likes of “The Snow Goose” and “Saving The Good Stuff For You.” What gives? The album title likely nods to Thompson’s interplay with his band, bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome, as well as guests like Alison Krauss and producer Buddy Miller. Overall, Electric is another consistent yet unsurprising recent Thompson album. But he’s been recording in varying configurations for 45 years. The steadfast quality of his music is impressive enough. Just make sure you hear albums like Unhalfbricking, Pour Down Like Silver and Rumor & Sigh first. —Michael Pelusi

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photo by bryan sheffield

Toro Y Moi

Anything In Return Carpark

White noise reduction

Chop House

Avant-metal supergroup Tomahawk flaunts its basest instincts

hen power baritone Mike Patton

decided to form this indie/oddball/avantgarde supergroup, he had no problem lookTomahawk ing through his Rolodex (c’mon, Patton has been around the Oddfellows block since people used Rolodexes) and finding giants of the form from previous collaborations. That’s what a résumé Ipecac including stints with John Zorn, Dan The Automator, Buzz Osborne and Dillinger Escape Plan—to say nothing of his legendarily crunching Faith No More—offers a big man with a big voice. Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle) and John Stanier (Helmet, Battles) can and have turned on a Tomahawk dime in the presentation of doom metal at one moment, tipsy cocktail jazz at another and mongrel space-prog at yet another— sometimes all during one song, with Patton’s man-of-a-thousand-faces voice fronting such diverse and divine madness. After the 2012 Record Day vinyl release of its first trippy trio of albums in one package, Eponymous To Anonymous, Tomahawk set about, on Oddfellows, to funnel its freak-flag sound into something sharply cohesive. With that, bassist Dunn and drummer Stanier lay down weird sprightly grooves, while guitarist Denison arranges their melodies into something hard and densely poppy with arch-but-upbeat harmonics pulled from Pet Sounds. There’s metal and there’s mayhem to be found on a cut such as “Waratorium.” There’s certainly more Ennio Morricone references to be found within Oddfellows than there are a Sergio Leone boxed set. Yet, the linearity and boom-mic wail of Patton—full-throated and clear throughout on the slinky rocking “Stone Letter”—is done with such a straight face that its normalcy is more stunningly strange than if they came out skronking. —A.D. Amorosi

Chillwave is basically sensual, bedroom-produced, adult-contemporary R&B and clubby neo-electronica tightly packaged to sound good in earbuds, at a low volume on laptop speakers or drifting over the stereo at a chic eatery. Basically, this is background music, and Chazwick Bundick (a.k.a. Toro Y Moi) is very good at crafting it. But on Anything In Return, the Southern synthpop auteur gets a little overzealous. For something that, on paper, should sound relaxed and hypnotic, there is an inescapable restlessness here. By the sound of it, on tracks like the opening “Harm In Change” or the fittingly titled “So Many Details,” Bundick spent a lot of time tinkering with arrangements and adding in sounds without settling into a groove. Likewise, his airy, detached vocals fight with jazz-tinged, funky chord progressions, club beats, the occasional clean guitar flourish and a pile-on of shimmering synths and kitchensink samples for space. On nocturnal comedown jams like the trance-y “Rose Quartz” and trip-hoppy “Cola.” Anything In Return is ultimately a chill listen, but not a necessarily memorable one. Though I’m not sure it’s supposed to be. —Adam Gold

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Jagjaguwar

Sophomore simmer Though II finds the band enjoying a record deal with indie heavyweight Jagjaguwar and nearly two years past the sleeper success of the home-recorded, self-released debut, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s sophomore effort is marked by a certain familiar mystique that does well to recall the charisma and dazzling psychedelia of its predecessor. Amid all the signs of the typical secondrecord blues (“No Need For A Leader,” fairly depressive opener “From The Sun”), guitarist/ frontman/songwriter Ruban Neilson’s remarkable hook-writing chops—equally indebted to ’70s AM pop-radio cheese and Sly Stone in all his whacked-out glory—are well-intact throughout, and prove still to be the group’s strongest suit on lead singles “Swim And Sleep” and “One At A Time.” Album centerpiece “Monki” catches UMO at the peak of its powers, though, packing stabs of frenetic guitar between bits of a delightfully off-kilter groove stretched into a seven-minute sprawl of delirious funky goodness. —Möhammad Choudhery

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/movies

Dame Maggie Smith and Shirley MacLaine face off in Downton Abbey’s Third Season.

Dear Abbey W

How PBS’ Costume Drama Downton Abbey Exceeded its Own Genre by Emily Trace

in a period drama, it is almost invariably the central focus of the story; but in the pilot episode of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey, one of the largest-scale disasters of the 20th century is just the kick-starter for an array of new plots that expand relentlessly, addictively, beyond the Jack-and-Rose world we thought we already knew. With that kind of rocket fuel driving the story forward, Downton Abbey has never slowed down since, and now launches into its third season by transitioning into the sensual, subversive Twenties. You may have already become entangled in Down52

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ton’s new decade since PBS began airing episodes earlier this month, but on January 29th, North American audiences can follow the story at their own pace when the third season is released on DVD and Blu-ray. The new episodes are brimming with everything that made the Crawley family and their servants so uniquely compelling to an unprecedented number of people, including their sassiest guest star ever in the form of Shirley MacLaine debuting as Cora’s American mother, Martha. As well as being the fiercest rival that the audience-favourite Dowager Duchess has ever been challenged by, MacLaine’s character will infuse the new season with an electric vitality charac-

h e n w e h e a r t h e T i ta n i c m e n t i o n e d

teristic to the Roaring Twenties. In a recent Collider interview, teenage years. Rather than interpret a work of literature from the Julian Fellowes asserts Martha’s importance in heralding the new time period as many have done before him, Fellowes gave himage, saying that “one of the key elements that Shirley brings into self the freedom to be original, saying that this allowed the show the show is to remind us that Cora’s upbringing was not the same to “go into areas of the period that a contemporary novel would as Robert’s,” and that as the plates begin to shift, Cora is much not have done. There are many subjects that we range, whether less afraid of the changes and challenges that the Crawley’s will it’s women’s rights or homosexuality, or whatever, which you have to navigate. “If anyone understands the world that’s com- wouldn’t find in a novel written in 1906.” This freedom, and the ing, it’s Cora,” says Fellowes. “The bringing in of Martha ushers risks it took to get it, has paid off. in that new era.” With the first season set in the very last breath of innocence These references to the shaping of a new world are a huge part before the First World War, we are introduced to the Crawleys of what makes Downton Abbey so unique, and so successful. Very as their aristocratic social power is both spiking and fading sifew costumed dramas have made fireworks across demographics multaneously. We see Sybil attending labour protests and suffralike the epic poem of the House of Grantham; usually it takes the gette campaigns, even rocking the closest thing to pants women star-power of James Cameron or Keira Knightly to could wear in those days. This is an England that draw in the massive audiences that contemporary is beginning to rebel against it’s own 1%; there may films and shows attract. Though BBC historical be strong elements of the Old World to charm us, pieces are generally received in North America by but the show leaves enough room for us to see a passionate but specific fanbase, Downton Abbey ourselves reflected in its transforming landscape. has captured the hearts and minds outside that Fellowes cites this as one of the main strengths of consistent viewership. It’s not just ardent Engthe show, saying that the audience is constantly lish literature fans that can animatedly describe surprised that “these people are much more like every intricacy of the show’s complex social polius and much more normal, and that there isn’t a tics; even YouTube celebrity Michael Buckley is place called Period where these strange people wild about the show, gleefully recommending it to live in funny clothes.” Downton Abbey has all the his one million teenaged subscribers on a regular drama and intrigue of classic escapism, but there basis. are mirrors woven into the show that reflect our Though each episode’s budget comes in at own world, showing us where it comes from. And around a million pounds, this exceptional popularin the second season, witnessing the Crawley ity can’t be accounted for just by money. No show daughters contributing to the war effort is like can buy its way to being the most nominated nonwatching an entire generation come of age. Even U.S. show in Emmy history, and the Golden Globe the high-maintenance Edith desires a more meanfor Best Supporting Actress has been awarded this ingful existence than the useless one she led before very month to Dame Maggie Smith. At this mothe war, and is willing to sacrifice some luxuries ment being express-shipped to the actress who for it. It’s profoundly engaging to watch the era we was too badass to attend the ceremony, the brandknow emerge as the character’s identities develop. new award attests to Downton’s staying power, a And with Season 3 opening right at the dawn power that comes from the show’s consistent conof the lustrous Twenties, Downton Abbey is only nection to our own world. going to become more evocative of our time. We’ll Julian Fellowes went outside the box when see the Crawley’s face what millions of families afhe set the show in England’s less-travelled postfected by the unstable housing market have had to Titanic, pre-war era, and left the box behind encope with, as well the gutting experience of investtirely when Lady Mary, his virtuous ivory goddess ing in a company that sells out its shareholders. of a main character, engaged in some delightfully Featuring the challenges of being a single mother, Downton Abbey: Seasons interracial “amourous congress” with a dashing the injustice of a high-profile court case, and even 1, 2 & 3 are available on DVD and Blu-ray from Turkish diplomat. Setting up the potential for a look into the world’s first co-ed clubbing scene, Entertainment One. scandal so early on in the show, Fellowes created the third season is packed with dramatized refera world that teeters grippingly on the edge of precarious propriety, ences to the present day. Fellowes relishes mapping out the transiwith lust or malice lying behind every gracious smile. The Abbey tion from old to new, saying that “it’s rather fun to be journeying itself might be the largest house of cards ever built, held together through that bit in the middle” between the antiquated Victorian by ceremonies that are bizarre and mysterious to a modern audilandscape and Nazi-dominated wartime Europe “that we’ve all ence, but it is Downton’s curious similarities to our own reality seen exploited in different films.” that have made it such an unprecedented hit. What could be more exciting than a threshold of such massive When creating the show, Fellowes says that he knew the Georcultural scale? With enough familiarity to captivate and enough gian and Victorian eras had been done to death in films and mini- uncertainty to keep us in suspense, Downton Abbey’s momentum series; audiences knew those eras better than the very decade that is still on the upswing, ready to release forward into the modern shaped our own: 1912 to 1919, the modern century’s formative world. needle

/movies

NEGLECTED

CRITERION

Madea’s Big Police Adventure

Naked City 1948 / Director

essay by

Stan Michna

The movie’s strewn with them: little nuggets modern philosophy’s big power hitter? of wisdom (with the afterlife of radioactive Though dead 200 years, and someone who isotopes) that remind us why Tim Burton’s wouldn’t have known the difference between Ed Wood (1994) ranks among the best films a balustrade and a crane shot, Kant nonetheless offers more insight into movie-making ever made about movie-making. In one scene, a sympathetic old-timer than a year’s worth of Inside The Actor’s Stugrants Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood access to a dio.) Which brings us—like Supertramp, we’re film studio’s morgue, a kind of movie ossuary for old films and stock footage. We see taking the long way home—to Alex Cross. random, rather ordinary clips of stock footThis time it’s director Rob Cohen’s turn to age that have clearly captivated the starry- bring author James Patterson’s titular hero/ eyed Ed. Unable to contain his enthusiasm protagonist to the screen, following appearand imagination, he intones in a faux narrator ances in Kiss The Girls (1997) and Along hoodoo voice: “Mysterious explosions! Buf- Came A Spider (2001), both times played by falo stampeding! Soldiers landing on a beach!” Morgan Freeman and both decent thrillers (if Then, to the old-timer: “Gee, you could make too obviously influenced by Se7en). a pretty good film out of this stuff.” On this occasion, however, Of course, poor old Eddie never the Sherlock-Holmesiandid, neither with someone else’s whipsmart-psychologist-copnor his own original footage. But cum-serial-killer-hunter-exothers—like Joseph H. Lewis and traordinaire-cum-fabulousthe other Ed, Edgar G. Ulmer, to husband-and-father (whew!), name two—did, sometimes with Alex Cross, is played by Tyler budgets that required squeezing Perry. (That would be the bignickels until shit came out of the ol’-badass-mama-in-drag-Madea buffalo (or beaver, if they were Tyler Perry.) And believe it or not, squeezing Canadian nickels). Enthat’s the least of this film’s probthusiasm, imagination, money and lems. Alex Cross will be available on DVD yes, talent, all count for something The plot, a mash up of several and Blu-ray Combo in movie-making, though not necCross novels by Patterson (who February 5 from uses collaborators and is himessarily in equal measures. Entertainment One. The great transcendent mystery self, by definition, a mashed up in movie-making, then—and the point in the author), has Cross and his team tracking a saEd Wood scene— isn’t whether a movie is distic serial killer and trying to anticipate the good, bad, or mediocre. Rather, it’s that un- killer’s next target who appears to be a corpoknowable alchemical process that separates rate titan. Or is he? Or maybe—just maybe— the bad film from the mediocre one, and the this isn’t about some crazed psychopath out mediocre from the good. to create mayhem but a bloody diversion, obWhat—and by how much—separates, scuring a deeper motive like . . . money! (Hello, for example, Manhunter (1986) from Red Die Hard franchise, and about 70 per cent of Dragon (2002), or in the case of Peter Jack- all movie and TV cop shows ever made). son, his Heavenly Creatures (1994) from Alex Cross plays like an extended reel of his dopey, look-how-smart-I-am King Kong jumped up stock footage: big fight-and-chase (2005)? And could any amount of manipula- scene in abandoned warehouse/theatre? tion and massaging ever transform Plan 9 Check. Serial killer cut and chiselled like De From Outer Space (1959) into Invasion Niro in Cape Fear? Check (even if the most Of The Body Snatchers (1956)? Or Glen notorious serial killers in recent history have Or Glenda? (1953) into Tootsie (1982)? The been fat and dumpy). Family in peril? Check. questions are necessarily rhetorical because Hero seriously wounded but inexplicably as Immanuel Kant observed, some things are lives and prevails? Check. Seen it all before, in simply unknowable. one form or another, only done better? Check. (Whoa! Ed Wood and Immanuel Kant, Aside from its dreadfully pedestrian

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Jules Dassin Why It’s Neglected: Primarily because of the current fascination with the genre du jour: Film Noir. In Naked City the crime isn’t solved by a roguish, wise-cracking private eye, but by plodding cops. The Theme: It’s the obverse of the great, troubling themes of Film Noir. Instead, following the turmoil and sacrifice of the war years, government institutions are there to provide the stability citizens expect in their quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Story: A beautiful good-time girl is found murdered in her bathtub. Methodically running down every clue, the cops (led by Barry Fitzgerald) discover that the victim was the bait in a honeytrap used to rob wealthy clients/acquaintances. Shot on location—they used 107 different ones—in New York, Naked City is the classic police procedural (and template for shows like CSI and Law and Order), examining the lives of everyone affected, from the cops and suspects to the killer and the grieving parents. What You Get: A flawless print; a wonderfully informative commentary by the screenwriter; and two endlessly fascinating interviews, one of them by the co-writer of Ric Burns’ New York. Highly enjoyable.

script—or because of it: Idris Elba, of Luther and The Wire fame, took one look and backed out of the lead—Alex Cross suffers from a kind of resignation or ennui. Jean Reno looks and sounds like a melancholy Maurice Chevalier who will never again sing Thank Heaven For Little Girls. And casting Edward Burns as Cross’s detective partner is not just bizarre, it’s wasteful. Equally wasteful—and almost heartbreaking—is seeing the great Cicely Tyson reduced to playing the proverbial sassy, wooden-spoon wielding granny. (Please watch Sounder instead.) As for Tyler Perry? Madea’s Witness Protection is currently available on DVD.

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FEBRUARY 5 16 Storybook Classics Above Suspicion: Set 2 Airport Terminal Pack Alex Cross Alias Smith & Jones: The Complete Series America’s Railroads: Steam Train Legacy Andy Griffith Show Animaniacs: Volume 4 As I Stand Baby Geniuses and the Mystery of the Crown Jewels Back Then Ballad of Narayama: Criterion Collection Balto III: Wings of Change Beast Beneath Bela Lugosi: Scared to Death Collection Ben 10 Omniverse: A New Beginning Volume 1 Best of Kids Say the Darndest Things Volume 1 Best of Kids Say the Darndest Things Volume 2 Best of Kids Say the Darndest Things Volume 3 Best of Naked City Best of Warner Bros.: 20 Film Collection Musicals Beverly Hillbillies Collection Beyonce: Baby & Beyond Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes Blue Lightning BMF: The Rise & Fall of a Hip-Hop Drug Empire Bonanza: Collector’s Edition Bouquet Breakfast Special 2: Revenge of the Omelets Bubble Guppies: On the Jo Cabaret: Anniversary Edition Cannon: Season 3 Casshern: The Complete Series Cat in the Hat: Safari, So Good Caught on Tape Celeste and Jesse Forever Clifford: Celebrate With Clifford Coition Cougar Town: The Complete First Season Cougar Town: The Complete Second Season Cougar Town: The Complete Third Season

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FEB 5

DeSean Jackson: The Making of a Father’s Dream The Philadelphia Eagles’ sometimes-explosive wideout— frequently referenced in Silver Linings Playbook—alternates between petulant and empathetic, but is never less than compelling.

[Passion River]

Deadfall Deadly Companions Desean Jackson: The Making of a Father’s Dream Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel Dynamiter Elmo’s World: All Day With Elmo Emma Victorian Romance: 1st Season ESPN Films 30 for 30: Ghosts of Ole Miss Flight Fried Green Tomatoes/Coal Miner’s Daughter Frontline: Poor Kids Gene Kelly: Dancing – A Man’s Game Gunsmoke: Seasons 1-7 Gunsmoke: Gene Kelly: Dancing – A Man’s Game Gunsmoke: Seasons 1-7 Gunsmoke: The Seventh Season Vol. 2 Here Comes the Boom Hostage/Set Up House of Cards Trilogy In My Pocket In Our Nature Jedi Junkies A Late Quartet Laura Listen to Me Girls I Am Your Father: The Complete Collection Little White Lies Mafia

Mark Twain Original Family Classics Minnie’s The Wizard of Dizz Monster High: Friday Night Frights/ Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Munsters: The Complete First Season Munsters: The Complete Second Season My Worst Nightmare National Geographic: Top Secret Sites Declassified Navy Seals Untold Stories: The Complete Series Norman Wisdom: The Rank Collection Volume 2 NYC 22 Paul Williams: Still Alive Perfect Evening Peter Pan PoolNorman Wisdom: The Rank Collection Volume 2 NYC 22 Paul Williams: Still Alive Perfect Evening Peter Pan Pool Power of Myth: 25th Anniversary Edition R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour Vol. 3 R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour Vol. 4 Red Skelton: America’s Crown Prince Rob: The Complete Series She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens Side by Side So Undercover Solomon Bunch Somewhere Between Southland: The Complete Second, Third & Fourth Seasons Spirit of the Church: Celebration/ Black Music Vol. 1 Star Is Born Switch/Extract Talking Cat!?! Toriko Part 2 Toys in the Attic Tyler Perry’s Madea Gets a ob Ultimate Spider-Man: Avenging Spider Man Virginian: The Complete Seventh Season

Whitney Houston: The Woman Behind the Voice Whole Truth Wild Alaska Will Hay: The Rank Collection Vol. 2 Yelling to the Sky You May Not Kiss the Bride

FEBRUARY 12 10-Film Horror Cult Classics Collection Vol. 2 28 Hotel Rooms Affairs Aladdin and the Death Lamp Aliens & UFOs: Secret Agenda All Screwed Up Alpha Males Experiment Apocalypse: Final Countdown Babar: The Movie Big Bad Beetleborgs: Season 1 Vol. 2 Bigfoot’s Wild Weekend Blacks Game Bonanza: The Official Fifth Season Bonanza: The Official Fifth Season Vol. 1 Bonanza: The Official Fifth Season Vol. 2 Boris Karloff Triple Feature Bruce Springsteen: Glory Days Bully Chanbara Beauty: Movie Vortex Chuggington: Safari Adventures Code Two Cold Play Come & Get Me Comeback CrocZilla Dangerous Liaisons Death in Small Doses Dedd Brothers Diamonds Are Forever Die Screaming, Marianne Doomsday County Dora the Explorer: Dora’s Butterfly Ball Dr. Who: The Reign of Terror Duck Dodgers: Dark Side of the Duck Season 1 ESPN Films 30 for 30: Benji ESPN Films 30 for 30: No Place Like Home Fairfield Road Family Matters: The Complete Third Season Famous Bombers of WWII Famous Fighters of WWII

FEB 19 Atlas Shrugged: Part II

The creaky, eventless adaptation of Ron and Rand Paul’s favorite book earns a sequel despite the first installment pulling in a limp $1.7 mil its opening weekend.

[Either Or Productions]

Ghost Trap Goldeneye Gossip Girl: The Complete Series Gossip Girl: The Complete Sixth and Final Season Grateful Dead: Dawn of the Dead Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Mysteries: Seaseon Three Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? House of Whipcord Inuyasha; The Final Act Set 2 Jay & Silent Bob Get Irish: The Swearing o’ the Green Jet Bombers Set Jets at War: 1950-2013 John Building: The Life of a Building Kid With a Bike: Criterion Collection Kill for Me Led Zeppelin: 1975 A Year of Living Dangerously Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman Life Stories: David Attenborough Living Daylights Loretta Young: 100th Anniversary Edition Louis Prima: The Wildest Luna Park Man With the Iron Fists Martha & Friends: Martha’s Magnificent Egg Matlock: The Eighth Season May I Be Frank? Mimesis

Murder Is My Beat Music for Millions New Fist of the North Star: Complete Collection New Hope Nova Science Now: What Are Animals Thinking? Nurse Jackie: Season Four Octopussy On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Pastor & Mrs. Jones Perks of Being a Wallflower Pierce Brosnan 007 Ultimate Edition Purge Quantum of Solace/Casino Royale Red Hen & More Cooking Stories Resistance Rise of the Zombies Robot & Frank Roger Moore 007 Ultimate Edition Vol. 1 Roger Moore 007 Ultimate Edition Vol. 2 Salute to the Marines Scene of the Crime Schizo Sessions Silent Hill: Revelation Sleepy Eyes of Death Collection Vol. 3 Slugterra: Return of the Shane Gang Smiley Smithsonian Channel: The Origins of Oz Smithsonian Channel: Undersea Edens Spy Who Loved Me Storage Wars Vol. 4 Tarja Turunen & Harus: In Concert – Live at Sibelius Hall Teddy Bear Thieves This Land Is Mine Thug Love/Confessions of a Lonely Wife To Be Heard Tomorrow Never Dies Top Gear: 50 Years of Bond Cars View to a Kill Waiting in the Summer: The Complete Collection Weeds: Season 8: The Final Season WWE: The Very Best of WCW Monday Nitro Vol. 2 Yo Gabba Gabba Live You Only Live Twice

FEBRUARY 19 3 Weeks to Daytona 4 Assassins 4 Film Favorites: Bruce Willis/ Wesley Snipes Four Film Favorites: Denzel Washington/White House Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake Adventures of Chuck & Friends: When Trucks Fly Air Fronts Alvin & Chipmunks: Easter Collection American Girl: McKenna Shoots for the Stars American Experience: Henry Ford Anna Karenina Argo Atlas Shrugged: Part II Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Vol. 6 Awesome Adventures of Johnny Test Axd Bagdad Café Baka & Test Barney: Barney Loves You Collection Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome Best in Show Besaire Beverly Hills Teens Vol. 1 Big Cats: Secret Lives Broken Roads Bugs Bunny’s Easter Funnies Cat in the Hat: Breeze From the Trees Celtic Pride/The 6th Man/The Associate Chateaubriand’s Last Love Closre Collingwood O’Hare Collection Complete Adventures of Flash Gordan Country/A Thousand Acres/ Paradise Cyclist Deep Rising/Puppet Masters/The Minion Dinosaur Train: Submarine Adventures Don Giovanni Dora the Explorer: Dora’s Easter Collection Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! Dr. Seuss: The Lorax Duets/Cradle Will Rock/South

Pacific Eagles Farewell Tour I: Live From Melbourne Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town Easter Parade Elmo’s Rainbow & Other Springtime Stories Elmo’s World: Springtime Fun European Rails Factory Family Film Favorites Fathers of the Sport First Easter Rabbit For Ellen Fun Size Future Flight Collection Game of Thrones: The Complete Second Season Garfield Show: Spring Fun Collection Ghost Encounters: Paranormal Activity Abounds Ghost Saint Aubin Great Fight Gun Shy/Before & After/Good Mother Hat Off to Dr. Seuss Highlander 2: The Quickening Hipsters Hitler’s Forgotten Nazis Hollow Holy Lad of Tyrol Innocent Bystanders Insider Irreconcilable Differences It’s Pat/Cabin Boy/Frank McKlusky C.I. Jayce & The Wheeled Warriors Vol. 2 Julius Caesar Junior High Spy Kaboom: Egg-cellent Easter Kamisama Dolls: The Complete Collection Lake Placid: The Final Chapter Les Miserables Letter Bee Complete 2 Life and Times of Grizzly Adams Season 2 Mafia/The Wrong Guy/Gone Fishin’ Miami Rhapsody/Crossing the Bridge/Holy Matrimony Missions That Changed the War: Doolittle Raid Monster Squad Monsters Inc. Mooring Naked City: 20 Star-Filled Episodes

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/movies/new_releases

Nest Next Up: Best of the Sunset Strip Night of the Demons 2 Norman Wisdom: The Rank Collection Vol. 3 North Sea Texas Nova Science Now: What Will the Future Be Like? Nova; Ultimate Mars Challenge On the Waterfront: Criterion Collection One Good Cop/A Stranger Among Us/Veronica Guerin Package Peanuts: It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown Pill Play It to the Bone/The Tie That Binds/Last Dance Pocoyo & Fries Prison Profile of a Killer Puppy Love Riddle Running Man Scenes From a Mall/Angie/Boys Seeds of Destruction Sesame Street: Being Green Sesame Street: Love the Earth Sid the Science Kid: Rock & Roll Easter Sinister Six Million Dollar Man: Season 3 Small Apartments Special Forces Street Sharks: The Complete Series Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad Vol. 1 Sushi Girl Swamp People Season 3 Terminal Velocity/Fire Birds/Bad Company Terminator Terrovision & The Video Dead That Cold Day in the Park Thief of Bagdad Thomas & Friends: Full Steam Ahead Collection Tiger & Bunny Set 1 Top Gear USA: The Complete Second Season Top Guy Toy Warrior/Kiddo the Super Truck UFC 154 Undefeated Vigilante Vigilante: Battle for Expression

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FEB 26 Holy Motors

Holy shit. Not saying this is shit. More as in wow. Leos Carax’s underseen episodic mind-eff is a triumph of imagination and invention. You don’t need a synopsis. Just watch. [Open Road

Films]

Wacky World of Tex Avery Vol. 1 Will Hay: The Rank Collection Vol. 3 Word World: Lucky Duck FEBRUARY 26 2013 Allstate Sugar Bowl 2013 AT&T Cotton Bowl 2013 Discover BCS National Championship 2013 Discover Orange Bowl 2013 Rose Bowl Presented by Vizio 2013 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Abismo De Pasion Africa: Eye to Eye With the Unknown Aliens & Crop Circles Ambush at Tomahawk Gap Apache Ambush Bamboo Prison Barbie in the Pink Shoes Battle Girls Time Paradox: The Complete Collection Berenstain Bears: Get Ready for Spring Beyond the Clouds Blue Moon Border Run Brigand Carol Burnett Show: This Time Together Cesar Milllan: The Real Story Chartres & The Spirit of the Middle Ages Chang Mavericks Chicken With Plums Chronicle of a Summer: Criterion

Collection Diary of a Chambermaid Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare Falling Uphill Fast Girls First Performances Vol. 1 Five Golden Hours Freaky Deaky Fushigi Yugi Ova: Mysterious Play Garrow’s Law: The Complete Collection Gerber Syndrome Ghost of the China Sea Girls Against Boys Golden Pomegranate Great Spy Chase Happy in the Valley Hardflip Harvard Park Heaven’s Lost Property: Angeloid of Clockwork Hey Japanese Holy Motors House That Dripped Blood How to Survive a Plague Hypercane I, Marquis De Sade Iron Road Joshua Tree Kiss the Abyss Lady for a Night Law & Order: The Twelfth Year Liberace: The Candelabra Collection Lisa, Bright & Dark Little Baby Disciples Vol. 1: The Lord’s Prayer Loneliest Planet Madrid 1987 Magic School Bus: All About Earth Maigret: Complete Collection Man From Shaolin Marvel Animated Series: Blade Vol. 2 Marvel Animated Series: Wolverine Vol. 1 Matter of Wife and Death Midnight Horror Show: The Master Collection Midnight Movies Vol. 11: Mondo Midnight Movies Vol. 12: Shockumentar Midnight Movies Vol. 13: Suspense Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Season 2 Vol. 1 Monsieur Gangster Monster From Bikini Beach

Much Ado About Nothing Mulberry Tree My Lucky Elephant New Life Nobody Gets Out Alive Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds: International Magic Live Nova Science Now: How Smart Can We Get? Oasis of the Zombies Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow Panzers at War Paranormal Activity: The Ultimate Collection Phineas & Ferb: Perry Files Animal Agents Plain Clothes Prime of Miss Jane Brodie Qwaser of Stigmata Collection 2 Re-Modeled: Season 1 Reagan Presidency Red Menace Red Tears Robin Hood Sansho the Bailiff: Criterion Collection Scooby-Doo: Mask of the Blue Falcon She Devil Silent Souls Simple Life Sins Skyler Sons of Guns: Season 2 Spanish Prisoner Springtime Collection Featuring Max’s Chocolate Chicken Stolen Seas Strangers in the Night Suzane Evolution Target Hong Kong Teenage Bank Heist Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rise of the Turtles There’s Always a Woman This Is Not a Film Total Retribution Ultimate Zombie Feast Vol.1 West Point: The Complete Series What Goes Around Comes Around/Love in the Nick of Tyme/Mr. Right Now Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 25th Anniversary Edition Word World: Word Play WWE: Royal Rumble 2013 Zombie Lake Zombie Massacre: Army of the Dead

/music/new_releases FEBRUARY 5 Sunyata Willing Bottom of the World Deathlike Youngblood Face the Music Look Inside As Time Goes By Oh, Mayhem Bastards Bloody Hammers A Fairway Full of Miners What a Life Comfort/Distraction The Bronx (IV) Mannibalector Budden No Love Lost Terri L. Carrington Money Jungle Vinnie Caruana City by the Sea Cheetahs Extended Plays Tasha Cobbs Grace Coheed and Cambria Afterman: Decension The Como Mamas Get an Understanding Harry Connick Jr. Smokey Mary Crossbreed KE 101 Darkstar News From Nowhere Mark De Cllive-Lowe & The Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra Take the Space Trane Deep Purple Slaves and Masters/The Deluxe Edition Defeated Sanity Passages Into Deformity Robert Delong Just Movement Desolate Shrine The Sanctum of Human Darkness Destruction Spiritual Genocide Diamond Youth Orange Dog Bite Velvet Changes Dur-Dur Band Volume 5 Eels Wonderful Glorious Endezzma Erotik Nekrosis Feeding People Island Universe Flotsam and Jetsam Once in a Deathtime Focus X Fonda Sell Your Memories Foot Village Make Memories Frightened Rabbit Pedestrian Verse Funeral for a Friend Conduit Gloria Morti Lateral Constraint Al Green The Love Songs Collection Josh Groban All That Echoes Guards In Guards We Trust Hammerfall Gates of Dalhalla Hanging Garden At Every Door Hate Solarflesh Heaven’s Basement Filthy Empire Hell or Highwater Begin Again Jim James Regions of Light and Sound of God Jenny O Automechanic Jewel Greatest hits Fela Kuti The Best of the Black President 2 Le Roux Last Safe Place Le Roux So Fired Up The Lord Weird Slough Feg 3CD Boxset Taj Mahal Complete Columbia Albums Acrimonious Airstrip Terry Allen Ancient Wisdom Audrey Horne Avant Nils Bech Tony Bennett Bettie Serveert Bjork Bloody Hammers Boats Erin Boheme Broadway Calls The Bronx Brotha Lynch Hung Joe

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Bullet for My Valentine Temper Temper

Feb 12

These guys started out as a thrash/metalcore hybrid, but

have been inching closer to the hard rock mainstream the last few years. They mean well, but are deeply boring. [RCA]

Vicci Martinez Maveth Tim McGraw Eugene Mirman

Misfits Eddie Money Eddie Money Eddie Money Eddie Money Moonroot Morbid Carnage Mumford & Sons Mumford & Sons Necrowretch Night Beds Mike Oldfield The Outlaws The Outlaws Pink Cream 69 Placebo Matt Pond Elvis Presley Elvis Presley Elvis Presley Elvis Presley Elvis Presley Quadrivium Red Rings of Saturn Riverside Roxy Music Saffron Savages 7 Suefo Seaven Teares Set Your Anchor Ron Sexmith Wayne Shorter Silverstein Ballake Sissoko Snakecharmer Soundtrack Soundtrack

Vicci Coils of the Black Earth Two Lanes of Freedom An Evening of Comedy in a Fake Underground Laboratory Dead Alive Eddie Money Life for the Taking No Control Playing for Keeps Under the Ancient Oak Merciless Conquest Babel Gentlemen of the Road Edition The Road to Red Rocks Special Edition Putrid Death Sorcery Country Sleep Tubular Beats Bring It Back Alive Soldiers of Fortune Ceremonial Once More With Feeling The Lives Inside the Lines in Your Hand Brilliant Elvis: Country Brilliant Elvis: Love Songs & Gospel Favorites Brilliant Elvis: Movie Songs Brilliant Elvis: Rock and Roll Brilliant Elvis: The Collections Methocha Release the Panic Dingir Shrine of New Generation Slaves Complete Studio Recordings 72-82 Dawning Worldstyle Power Ballads For the Hopeless Forever Endeavour Without a Net This Is How the Wind Shifts At Peace Snakecharmer Bullet to the Head Microcosmos

Soundtrack Safe Haven The Spinto Band Cool Cocoon Chris Stamey Lovesick Blues The Steeldrivers Hammer Down Strike Master Majestic Strike Thao & The Get Down Stay Down We the Common Richard Thompson Electric Those Who Fear Unholy Anger Tosca Odeon Tyrant Goatgaldrakona Horns in the Dark Unknown Mortal Orchestra II Townes Van Zandt Sunshine Boy Various Artists Now 45 Various Artists The Ultimate Smooth Jazz #1s Various Artists Vows of Love Gene Vincent Sweet Gene Vincent Zombified Carnage Slaughter and Death FEBRUARY 12 311 Threads & Grooves Allman Brothers Band Macon city Auditorium 2/11/2 Allman Brothers Band Nassau Coliseum, NY 5/1/73 Marco Beltrami A Good Day to Die Hard Ben UFO Fabriclive 67 Black Tape for e Blue Girl Tenderotics Bowfire New Flame Bullet for My Valentine Temper Temper C2C Tetra Johnny Cash Threads & Grooves Coma Don’t Set Your Dogs Ferry Corsten Once Upon a Night 3 Matt Costa Matt Costa Miles Davis Threads & Grooves Nataly Dawn How I Knew Her Elton Dean Into the Nierika The Deer Tracks The Archer Trilogy Pt. 3 Furio Di Castri & Joe Lovano Unknown Voyalge Judy Dyble Talking With Strangers Bob Dylan Threads & Grooves The Enid Something Wicked This Way Comes Eyefear The Inception of Darkness The BryanFerry Orchestra The Jazz Age Foals Holy Fire Lisa Germano No Elephants The Green Violinist More Thrill and Never Ending Blessings Merle Haggard Complete ‘60s Capitol Singles Daryl Hall & John Oates Threads & Grooves Hatriot Heroes of Origin The Jimi Hendrix Experience Threads & Grooves Hipower Entertainment Presents Notorious Life Boxset HPG Presents Mr. Criminal Favorite Street Disc Glenn Hughes Live in Wolverhampton Iggy &The Stooges Threads & Grooves Imagine Dragons Night Visions (Deluxe) INXS Shobooh Shoobah/The Swing Wanda Jackson The Classic Capitol Singles

Animal House (Anniversary Edition) U.D.O. Faceless World (Anniversary Edition) U.D.O. Mean Machine (Anniversary Edition) U.D.O. Timebomb (Anniversary Edition) Various Artists 50 Shades of Dubstep Various Artists A Tribute to Rage Against the Machine Various Artists Bluegrass Gospel: Power Picks Various Artists Cajun Honky Tonk: The Khoury Recordings Various Artists Celtic Favorites Various Artists Magic City Various Artists Punk & Nasty Various Artists Reason to Believe Various Artists Remixed to Hell: A Tribute to AC/DC Various Artists Romantically Yours Various Artists Ultra Dance 14 The Virginmarys King of Conflict Wicked Minds Hostility Kelly Willis & Bruce Robinson Cheater’s Game The Wonder years Sleeping on Trash U.D.O.

Pissed Jeans Honeys

feb 12

Probably the best album to come out this month. These

frenetic punkers are experts at making engrossing fodder out of day-to-day monotony, and are only improving at their craft. [Sub Pop] Best of 1971-1982: Loving Arms George Jones The Complete United Artists Journey Threads & Grooves Kingcrow In Crescendo Roger Knox & The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Stranger in My Land Korn Threads & Grooves La Moresca Senza Cchiu Terra Little Annie & Baby Dee State of Grace Lord Infamous Best Of The Magick Brothers Live in San Francisco Heather Masse & Dick Hyman Lock My Heart Pat Metheny The Orchestration Project Joni Mitchell The Studio Albums 19681979 Adrien Moignard Between Clouds Mother Mother The Sticks Willie Nelson Threads & Grooves IarlaO Lionaird Foxlight Roy Orbison Threads & Grooves Anders Osborne Three Free Amigos The Lucky Peterson Band Live at the 55 Arts Club Berlin The Pineapple Thief What We Have Sown Pinnick-Gales-Pridgen Pinnick-Gales-Pridgen Pissed Jeans Honeys Elvis Presley Threads & Grooves Psychic Friend My Rocks Are Dreams Quiet Riot Threads & Grooves The Rouge Blurry S.U.N. Something Unto Nothing Ulrich Schnauss A Long Way to Fall Smash Bombshell Snoopy-Public Enemy Studios Presents Favorite Hood Disc Soundtrack Beautiful Creatures Soundtrack Haywire Soundtrack Sofia the First Spirits Burning and Clearlight Healthy Music in Large Doses Spiro Kaleidophonica Spoken Illusion The Stone Foxes Small Fires Otis Taylor My World Is gone Peter Tosh Threads & Grooves Tarja Turunen & Haru In Concert Tom Jans

FEBRUARY 19 8th Sin Cosmogenesis The Acacia Strain Money for Nothing Herb Albert & The Tijuana Brass Fandango Aleister X Half Speed Mastered Alexander Spit A Breathtaking Trip Biagio Antonacci Sapressi Dire No Archon Ouroboros Collapsing Art Department Social Experiment 003 As They Burn Will, Love Life Atlas Genius When It Was Now Baptists Bushcraft Beach Fossils Clash the Truth Bentcousin Everybody’s Got One Big Wreck Albatross Blac Head Lion 5 Years in 50 Minutes Black Abyss Possessed The Black Twig Pickers Rough Carpenters Bombs of Hades The Serpent’s Redemption Boulder Dam Mourning Buckcherry Confessions (Deluxe) Burial Vault Ekpyrosis Larry Carlton & Robben Ford Unplugged Celtic Thunder Mythology Cependant Homme Invisible Todd Clouser’s A Love Electric The Naked Beat Cocoa Tea In a Di Red Complete Failure The Art Gospel of Aggravated Assault Concrete Knives Be Your Own King Samantha Crain Kid Face Craving Craving Cryptopsy Blasphemy Made Flesh Cryptopsy None So Vile The Charlie Daniels Band Hits of the South Dark Ages Chronicle of the Plague Dark New Day Hail Mary Darwin Deez Songs for Imaginative People Data Romance Other

Deadborn Mayhem Maniac Machine Devourment Conceived in Sewage Dismember Where Iron Crosses Grow Disperse Living Mirrors Dobie We Will Not Harm You Eight Bells The Captain’s Daughter Eisenherz Fluch Der Zeit Endless Boogie Long Island Enshadowed Magic Chaos Psychedelia Kevin Eubanks The Messenger Euphoric Defilement Ascending to the Worms Fatboy Slim Big Beach Bootique 5 Flea Helen Burns Flourishing Intersubjectivity Flume Flume Robben Ford Bringing It Back Home Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside Untamed Beast Dan Friel Total Folklore The Garbage & The Flowers Eys Rind as If Beggars The Jerry Garcia Band Garcia Live Vol. 1 Capitol Theater Godflesh Hymns: Special Edition Guttural Secrete Nourishing the Spoil Paul Hardcastle Paul Hardcastle VII Hrvrd From the Bird’s Cage Iceage You’re Nothing Inc No World Susan James Driving Toward the Sun The Jealous Sound A Gentle Reminder Deluxe Edition Jungle Rot Skin the Living (Reissue) Paul Kelly Nothing But a Dream Paul Kelly Ways & Means Paul Kelly & The Stormwater Boys Foggy Highway Al Kent Disco Love 3: Even More Rare Disco & Soul Kongh Sole Creation Mark Kozelek Like Rats Mark Kozelek Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne Nina Kraviz Nina Kraviz Jamie Lidell Jamie Lidell Magnus Lindgren Fyra Bobby Long Wishbone Lotus Build Maladie Plague Within Manes Under Ein Blodraud Maane Manilla Rod Mysterium Jason Marsalis Vibes Quartet In a World of Mallets Matmos The Marriage of True Minds Maxmillion Dunbar House of Woo Todd May Rickenbacker Girls James Montgomery Band From Detroit to the Delta Moon Safari Lover’s End Neal Morse Momentum Live Mr. G State of Flux Nachtvorst Silence Necrophobic Satanic Blasphemies Obscenity Atrophied in Anguish Overtorture At the End the Dead Await Conny Plank Who’s That Man: Tribute to Conny Plank Prophecy Salvation Psychic Ills One Track Mind Raven Black Night Barbarian Winter Raven’s Creed The Power The Relatives The Electric Word Rhino Bucket Sunrise on Sunset Blvd.

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/music/new_releases

Down in Louisiana The Bloodshed Summoning Sadistic Flowers for My Father Siggi Schwarz New Love Songs Shai Hulud Reach Beyond the Sun Skineater Dermal Harvest The Slide Brothers R. Randolph Presents Sonic Reign Monument in Black Soul Clap Social Experiment 002 Soundtrack Focus Features 10th Anniversary Soundtrack Snitch Spektr Cypher Storm of Perception Into the Sun Strfkr Miracle Mile Suffocation Pinnacle of Bedlam Swingin’ Utters Poorly Formed Robin Trower Roots and Branches Tsjuder Desert Northern Hell (DLX) Two Hours Traffic Foolish Blood Ulcer Grant Us Death Various Artists America’s Greatest Hits 1959 Various Artists Cabin Fever Volume 1 Various Artists Change the Beat: The Celluloid Records Story Various Artists David Bowie/T-Rex Various Artists KMS 25th Anniversary Classics Various Artists Son of Rogues Gallery Various Artists Steampunk Experiment Various Artists Unforgettable Choir Melodies The View Cheeky for a Reason Void of Sleep Tales Between Von Branden Flammenreich Bobby Rush Sacred Steel

FEBRUARY 26 Music From the Motion Picture Aborted Engineering the Dead Dave Adkins & Republik Steele That’s Just the Way I Roll Ah Nee Mah Native visions Alcoa Bone and Marrow Eric Alexander Touching Joan Armatrading Starlight Atoms for Peace Amok Autre Ne Veut Anxiety Syd Barrett Barrett Syd Barrett Opel Syd Barrett The Madcap Laughs Chuck Berry/Bo Diddley The Ultimate Doubles Don Bikoff Celestial Explosions Bilal A Love Surreal Blackburner Drop Bass Not Bombs Michael Bolton Ain’t No Mountain High Enough Boy Mutual Friends Amanda Brecker Blossom Randy Brecker Brecker Brothers Band Reunion (CD/DVD) Kutt Calhoun Black Gold Cappadonna Eyrth, Wynd & Fyre 10,000 Maniacs

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Mysticum

In the Streams of Inferno (reissue)

Feb 26

In 1996, “gothic black metal” nearly broke out,

thanks to the likes of Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir. This album stood as a unrepentantly cold contrast, and its reissue is long overdue. [Full Moon]

Wilf Carter Montana Slim 1933-1941 Cat Mother & The All Night Newsboys The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh Centurain Contra Rationem Chola Pinup Presents Favorite Cholo Disc Peter Daltrey &The Asteroid No. 4 The Journey Darkthrone The Underground Resistance Jesse Dee On My Mind/In My Heart Diamond Dawn Overdrive Chris Duarte Group My Soul Alone Patty Duke Don’t Just Stand There/ Patty Patty Duke Sings Songs From Valley of the Dolls Etana Better Tomorrow Fanny Fanny Bill Frisell Silent Comedy Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds International Magic Giacomo Gates Miles Tones Denita Gibbs Nothing Better Than You Gold Fields Black Sun Grateful Dead Dick’s Picks Vol. 25 Grave Babies Crusher Great White 30 years Benny Green Magic Beans Herbert Groenmeyer I Walk Wayne Hancock Ride Steafan Hanvey Nuclear Family Justin Hayward Spirits of the Weste Jeff Healey Band House on Fire Helker Somewhere in the Circle The Hello People Fusion James Hunter Six Minute by Minute Ivan & Alyosha All the Times We Had Jack Jezzro & Friends Bossa Nova Romance Dora Jurarez Cantos Para Una Di’Spora Nuru Kane Exile Katzkab Objet No. 1 Freddie King The Complete King Federal Singles The Lions This Generation Lloyd/Moran Hagar’s Song Clint Mansell Stoker

The Messenger In Time Listen to the Warm Sold Out at Carnegie Hall More Than Words Whisper Miracle Temple Desfado Sounds Like Hell, Feels Like Heaven Mustasch The New Sound of the True Best Mysticum In the Streams of Inferno (CD/DVD) Nectar Journey to the Centre of the Eye Next Collective Cover Art Britt Nicole Gold Orianthi Heaven in This Hell Overkill The Electric Age J. Period & Kanye West G.O.O.D. Music Player Too Many Reasons Karine Polwart Threshold Karine Polwart Traces Popstrangers Antipodes Taddy Porter Stay Golden Putumayo Presents Vintage France Raekwon The Tonight Show Jeff Rona Phantom Ruins Place of No Pity Alice Russell To Dust Antonio Sanchez New Life Saurom Vida Saxon Sacrifice Daniele Sepe Anime Candide Shaman’s Dream Prana Pulse Shout Out Louds Optica Shub Niggurath The Kinglike Celebration Deluxe Reissue Stratovarius Nemesis Sweet Honey in the Rock A Tribute Live! Jazz at Lincoln Center Tangerine Dream Zeitgeist Concert Various Artists Classic Celtic Music From Smithsonian Folkways Various Artists Jukebox Gems Various Artists Legends of Country Various Artists R&B Hit Box Various Artists Rough Guide to Cumbia Various Artists Rough Guide to Irish Music Various Artists This Is Dubstep 2013 The Vicar Songbook #1 Vietnam An American Dream W.E.T. Rise Up Waylander Honour Amongst Chaos Steven Wilson The Raven That Refused to Sing Within the Ruins Elite Zucchero La Sesion C Johnny Marr The Mavericks Rod McKeun Rod McKeun Brian McKnight Marion Meadows Mount Moriah Ana Moura Mustasch