Needle flip july2013

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photo by terri loewenthal

A Series Of Unfortunate Events Tragedy imbues a dynamic and unsettling new Rogue Wave record Nightingale Floors (Vagrant), the new al-

bum by Oakland’s Rogue Wave, contains some of the most heartfelt and challenging music the band has ever made. It takes the best elements of synthesizer-heavy dance outing Permalight and mostly acoustic solo project Release The Sunbird, and brings forth music that walks the edge of an emotional precipice without plunging into the abyss.

“Anything I say about the music we’ve recorded is always with the benefit of hindsight,” says frontman Zach Rogue. “There’s a lot of tension in the songs, but the music isn’t whiny.

It’s melodramatic. There’s an equal amount of joy and sadness. If you pick up a newspaper or go on the internet, you can’t escape the everyday beauty and joy—or the dread and terror—that surrounds us. Connecting with another human being and sharing yourself is the only thing that it makes it worth going through. That’s what art and music are about.

“Before we started working on the record, we scored an HBO show called On Freddie Roach. That got me excited about ambient sound and tape delay and digital effects. One of my favorite pastimes is messing around with different sounds, using an octave pedal and experimenting with noise. I like melody, but I don’t want it served up on a silver platter. I love digital recording, but it can sound compressed and flat. Acoustic instruments and tape have a depth and warmth; mixing them together creates a cool tapestry. The tension, the push and pull, is from the clash of opposing elements. I’d say the new record isn’t different—just the completion of a circle.”

Listening to Nightingale Floors is an unsettling experience, a mix of light and dark, blending the bright, experimental psychedelic sounds of the band with Rogue’s tender minor-key melodies and melancholy singing.

Spacey synthesizer sounds and harmonies that bring to mind the Everly Brothers make “The Closer I Get” sound like a country song from outer space. “Used To It” is a gritty, off-

kilter waltz that sounds like the Band trying out a heavy-metal guitar player, and “College” mixes glistening guitar arpeggios and Pat Spurgeon’s percolating drums with Rogue’s anguished vocal.

The drama in the music comes naturally.

Rogue and his bandmates have seen more than their share of adversity in the past few years. Rogue had a compressed disc in his neck that made it impossible to play music for a while, Spurgeon had a diseased kidney replaced, original bassist Evan Farrell died in a house fire, and both Rogue’s grandfather and father passed away. The one bright spot was the birth of Rogue’s first child, a girl.

“If you stick around long enough, stuff happens,” he says. “My own physical problems kept me from playing music for a while.

When I started again, I was hoping the music wouldn’t be dictated by my personal drama, but just as we started the new record, a call came telling me my dad was dying of cancer.

It’s impossible for those kinds of situations not to bleed over into the music. There was joy in reconnecting with the band mixed with my personal emotional pain. When I’m writing songs, it’s impossible to not address my life, so they always reflect what I’m going through.”

Rogue and the core band—Spurgeon and bassist Masanori Mark Christianson—cut most of the album live with producer John Congleton (Modest Mouse, Explosions In The Sky) at Prairie Sun Recording Studios. The process was a balance of intuition, preparation and improvisation. “When you’re making up noises in the studio, there’s no continuous or conscious progression,” says Rogue. “All I see is what’s happening right now and what I’m feeling. Permalight was about controlling all the details of the production. This album is about letting the emotions flow. The lyrics are the most direct I’ve ever written, and we left in a lot of mistakes. If a vocal went slightly off-pitch at times, we left it in. We didn’t play to a click track. John has the same approach as

Steve Albini: Make the band sound like they do when they’re onstage. I wanted to do multiple takes of some songs, but he said, ‘You got it.

You don’t need to do another take.’ He encouraged us to experiment and make mistakes. He knew the album closer, ‘Everybody Wants To Be You,’ was a primal-scream therapy song, and he only let me do one piano take. I thought it was riddled with errors and that I was just stabbing at what I wanted. He told me that I had it down, that I’d never be able to improve on it emotionally, and he was right.

“The process started with me and Pat messing around in our studio on our little Pro Tools box, then bringing ideas to the rest of the band. We worked on demos for six months, sending them to John to get feedback. A lot of the songs have odd time changes, which I’m not aware of when I’m writing, but Pat is a drummer—and patient—and lets things evolve as we go down the rabbit hole. He’s good at finding out if a song’s really a song or just a bunch of melodic ideas. He’s also a good engineer and remixer, so we work rapidly. We did 30 songs, building up from sounds Pat and I got with delay pedals, tape loops and synthesizers. John said we’d already nailed some of them on the demos, so the album is a hybrid, studio sounds laid on top of the original versions.

“It’s a quiet album for the most part, but definitely rock. We could have hammered you with the guitars, but we mastered the record so it could be played softly. I don’t think there’s much subtlety to the music you hear these days. We like to be quiet and not pummel you before you hear what’s going on in a song. If you want to turn it up, you can, but we use a lot of dynamics, a lot of sounds ebbing and flowing, a lot of give and take.”

Rogue says the mysterious album title is a translation of a Japanese expression he picked up on a trip to Kyoto. “The nightingale floor is an ingenious security system warriors used to protect themselves,” he says. “They trained on wooden floors that would creak if you didn’t tread lightly. If someone moved behind you, you’d know they were there because the floor would squeak. It was a smart way of using sound to know what’s coming at you.

It was a beautiful experience to walk down those creaky floors, knowing that in earlier times, if you walked down this same corridor, you could be killed. To me, it brought to mind the sounds we make—music that can help you cope. Songs can shield you from the things that want to do you harm.” —j. poet

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Let It Mellow Smith Westerns chill out on album number three; just don’t say they’ve “matured” At first, Smith Westerns seemed easy to

peg: Chicago prep-school teens play garage rock with a glam-rock slant. Their debut arrived in 2009 on the HoZac label, the offshoot of punk zine Horizontal Action, and the boys got a rep for raucous live shows. With 2011’s excellent Dye It Blonde, the group—singer/ guitarist Cullen Omori, bass-playing brother Cameron and lead guitarist Max Kakacek (and a rotating cast of drummers)—began to step away from the garage-rock template. Smith Westerns smoothed some edges, upped the use of synths and the quality of the musicianship, and created catchy tunes like “Weekend” and “Imagine, Pt. 3,” songs that shared the immediacy of their debut, but broadened the stylistic scope. But once you’re pegged, you’re pegged, and Smith Westerns still got called a garage-rock band.

That should change with Soft Will (Mom + Pop), the band’s third album. Its sunny disposition favors mid-tempo tunes and gentle singing, and it’s loaded with breezy melodies, drenched in reverb and laced with echoes of several eras of Britpop. They sound familiar, in the way classic, well-crafted songs do, but they’re not easy to place. They’re wonderfully catchy, although they assiduously avoid rocking right out of the gate like the signature songs of their past.

It wasn’t plotted that way, but according to Kakacek, the long tour for Dye It Blonde catalyzed a shift in direction for the band. It toured solidly for 18 months, and the members’ listening habits in the van shifted, as did their desire to change the template for their songs. In one way, the story of Smith Westerns’ growth is the story of the music they played in the van.

“You get sick of certain music that you listen to all day,” says Kakacek. “We’ve been very lucky that our interests have stayed the same as they’ve changed, between the three of us.

We all still usually agree on most music, even though our tastes have changed from faster punkier stuff to more mellow, melodic things.”

When they were young, they listened to a lot of what Kakacek calls “super-fast, rowdy garage/punk stuff.” When they tired of that, they turned to glam rock and stadium rock, and their first album owed as much to T.Rex as the Seeds or other Nuggets-era bands. But by the end of the Dye It Blonde tour, they were listening to “more flat-out pop songs rather than immediate, fast, short things.” That meant a

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lot of music from the ’80s, like the Cure and OMD, “things that take an orchestral backing to pop songs,” he says, and tracks that build with more patience. While nothing on Soft Will overtly mirrors either of those bands, the interplay of synths and guitars and the lushness of the arrangements can sound like an outgrowth of them. But that influence was more subliminal than conscious. When they got home to Chicago after touring, they weren’t immediately sure what direction the new album would take.

“When we were first starting, there was a certain sense of … panic is definitely not the right word, but there was a sense of getting back and it being writing time after being on the road for a year and a half, and playing and playing and playing all the time,” says Kakacek.

“We had to sit down and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make.”

Kakacek and Cullen Omori are Smith Westerns’ primary songwriters. They work separately to come up with initial song ideas— chord progressions, a verse or a chorus—and then collaborate to hash out basic song structures. After that, Cullen creates the vocals and lyrics, and Kakacek does the arranging for the guitars and keyboards. The first song they wrote for the album—its eventual opening track—was “3 A.M. Spiritual,” which begins with some gentle synth chords and a solitary guitar strum, and Cullen softly crooning, “It’s easier to think you’re dumb, like you were/It’s easier to think you are no fun.” After nearly a minute, the song kicks into gear, although not a high one; it’s a song that shimmers rather than burns, and it’s all the more indelible for it.

“We’d just gotten back from tour, and I think we wrote it that way because we needed a break from the immediate,” says Kakacek. “We’d been playing all the same songs on tour. ‘Imagine,’ ‘Weekend’—all the songs start right off, in a way. So, when we got back, we settled down and we wanted to make a song that built up slower, compared to the other songs. For us, it was refreshing in a way, to hold off on everything and be patient with the songs.”

By the time they were ready to record, they had most of the album fully written. They re-

united with Chris Coady, who produced Dye It Blonde, and they decamped to Sonic Ranch outside of El Paso, Texas, the same studio complex that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs used for Mosquito. (YYY drummer Brian Chase had cameo’d on Dye It Blonde.)

To make Soft Will sound more lush than previous records, they cloaked the vocals and guitars in more reverb, and gave a more prominent role to the keyboards.

“We had a pile of pedals in the corner, usu-

photo bY sandy kim

ally like 30 or 40,” says Kakacek. “A lot of the ones we ended up using were subtle reverbs and delays that make things fade into the background and make things lush, but aren’t really a hard effect. Most of the time they weren’t in reference to anything, but from the music we were listening to, we kind of picked up on that.”

“Idol,” for instance, layers guitars with delays, and there are hints of New Order and Ride to them, but they’re combined in such a way that diminishes any sense of nostalgia. It’s not imitation, nor is it pastiche: Smith Westerns haven’t gone dream-pop, but they have incorporated some of its elements, as well as other elements that drew on ’80s pop and new wave.

“Especially with guitar and synths, I was trying to split the difference between the two as lead instruments,” says Kakacek. “Whereas on Dye It Blonde the synths stayed in the background

and the guitar was always way louder, on this one they play off one another a little more.

The vocals we mixed louder than usual, which is another pop influence that crept in there. And in general, the songs are longer; now they probably average around four minutes. I think we got more interested in how a song progresses, and in adding little things randomly in songs that kind of catch you and never come back again.”

“Foolproof,” the album’s centerpiece, contains all those elements, and it’s the song that helped defined the album for Kakacek. Over the course of its four-and-a-half minutes, it rides a jangly strum and a killer, easygoing melody while seamlessly shifting the focus among trebly eighth-note keyboards, tumbling drums, moments of keening guitars and a brief guitar solo.

The album came into focus when they first listened to the song playback in the studio.

According to Kakacek, “I remember all of us sitting back and thinking, ‘We’re almost there.

We’re making music that we’d actually listen to.’ It sounds weird, but at the same time, when you realize that you really, really like the music you’re making, it’s a pretty exciting thing. You can hear it as if it’s a band that’s not your own, and you can really like it. It seems kind of silly in a way, like it should go without saying.”

Kakacek rejects the suggestion that Soft Will is a more mature album than the previous two, but as the band’s listening habits have grown, so has its music.

“I don’t really want to call it growing up,” he says. “I think the thing we want to keep about the band is that it stays new to us in some way.

We’re always trying to find some new genre of music to incorporate.”

Makes you wonder what the group will be playing in the van when it’s out on the road for Soft Will. —Steve Klinge

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Dark City Folk/country upstart Houndmouth revels in the underbelly of society After high school, Matt Myers didn’t really

feel like going away to college, so he stayed in New Albany and went to Indiana University Southeast, across the river from Louisville. He didn’t feel like concentrating on anything, so he majored in general studies with a minor in philosophy. Six years later, when the time came to graduate, he thought a little about working in a coffee shop, but he never got around to finding a job.

“I was just looking to get out of school and do something unrelated to anything I had any knowledge of,” he says. After one last winery gig, he traded in the acoustic duo he had with Katie Toupin and went electric with drummer Shane Cody, an old friend who’d moved back to town. Cody called up bassist Zak Appleby, and something almost clicked.

All they needed was for Toupin to join them on organ, and halfway through a session with too many dogs barking in the background, Houndmouth was born.

Recorded over five days in the high heat of the Hoosier summer, From The Hills Below

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The City (Rough Trade) feels like the second coming of the Band, mixing folk, country and rock into a whole that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, with each member writing songs, switching back and forth between instruments, and taking a turn on lead vocals.

Mostly, the band is telling stories about smalltime losers, like “Casino” (about a woman who puts her faith in whips, chains and freebasing), “Palmyra” (a love song to a girl who tastes like medicine) or “Comin’ Round Again” (about a coke dealer who’s fallen on hard times). “Had a couple of drinks in Memphis/ Had some whiskey and some malt,” sings Myers. “But when I tried to fight the waitress/ She showed me the asphalt.”

Says Myers, “Nobody likes to hear about a guy who gets exactly what he wants. Then the story is pointless. It’s always better when somebody doesn’t get what they want, and there’s a problem at hand, and things are perfectly tragic. That’s what makes the best stories. Technically, the songs aren’t about me. Might be somebody I met, or a line I had

written down. But every time I write about a character, there’s a little bit of me in there.”

In the process of recording From The Hills, Houndmouth started writing songs together, and with this first album behind it, there are at least a dozen songs ready for the next one, which can wait until the band finishes touring Europe and North America this summer.

By then, Myers expects Houndmouth will be happy to come back to New Albany, “technically, your normal, boring little city,” where it will be free to do all the things Hoosiers do: shop, eat, shoot hoops and hang around the house playing guitar.

“I’m always busy now, and it’s good being busy, as opposed to scrounging by in college, just sitting around doing nothing,” says Myers.

“I pretty much had a blindfold on; that’s how I was living my life. Looking back on it, it was pretty … horrible, not living like I should. But now, I feel alive and awake. I get to travel, meet people. I question myself now. It’s like I know myself better, I analyze what I’m doing. And that’s the biggest change.” —Kenny Berkowitz

photo by Alexander Hallag

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Zero Tolerance Alison Moyet refuses to suffer fools, be it lovers or labels

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photo by Anna Isola Crolla

The writing was on the wall nearly two

decades ago. But British chanteuse Alison Moyet just didn’t see it too clearly at the time.

Hindsight, however, is 20/20. And now the ex-vocalist for Vince Clarke’s short-lived Yazoo project (known as Yaz in the U.S.) can view certain early-to-mid-’90s meetings with a revolving cast of executive characters at then-label Sony with a mixture of bemusement and sheer disgust.

“My last years at that company were very difficult,” she says. “And the most torturous thing about it was, every single new A&R man that came in had a different idea about what I should be doing. And those were just the ones who had any interest—there were a couple who just saw me as excess baggage.”

Worst powwow ever? The fateful day Moyet sat down with her latest handler who—grinning like a jackal—played her a less-thanstellar song he wanted her to cover. “And it was atrocious,” she says. “And I remember saying to him, ‘If you loved this song—really loved this song—I still wouldn’t like it, and I still wouldn’t do it. But I’d have respect for you for truly believing in it. But the thing that annoys me most is, you’re asking me to record a song that you wouldn’t even listen to yourself. And that is just plain offensive.’” After she left Sony with 1994’s Essex, her fourth, she wouldn’t issue another album until Hometime in 2002.

Surely, show business has changed in the interim, softened ever so slightly? Not exactly, Moyet guffaws. Meetings with various prospective imprints just got weirder, more frustrating, leading right up to her recent decision to simply self-finance her latest effort, The Minutes—a collaboration with legendary producer Guy Sigsworth, which he squeezed in during his between-project downtime. Over and over again, execs said they’d give her a shot, if and only if she’d track an entire collection of covers. Her angry response: “For fuck’s sake, does anybody need another version of Etta James’ ‘At Last’? If you wanna hear ‘At Last,’ shouldn’t you be listening to Etta James herself? Because you can bet your bottom dollar that she does it better than me!”

Naturally, there was a final straw that broke the camel’s back. The diva, possessed of one of the smokiest, most rafter-rattling bluesbelter voices in modern rock—just listen in awe to Yaz’s stunning two-album catalog, 1982’s Upstairs At Eric’s and 1983’s You And Me Both, or her 1984 solo bow, Alf, for proof— had metaphorical pen in hand, ready to sign on a certain label’s dotted line, when she squinted closely at the fine print. Provisional in the contract were a series of shameless reality-TV appearances. “And it was just a case then of enough is enough—that simply cannot be a good enough reason to make an album,” she says.

The 51-year-old mother of three won’t specify the program in question. “Because it’s not the show’s fault,” she says. “But I’ve been offered all of those, too: the Big Brothers and the I’m A Celebritys, I’ve been offered the lot. And I try to be reasonable about these things—I understand that the industry is imploding, and it’s so hard to get a new act promoted now, let alone someone who’s been around a long time. I just think the music industry is missing the point about what people really wanna hear. As we’ve just found out with this album in England—it’s getting radio play and it seems to be catching people by surprise. This is all new material, and people are actually interested in hearing my new material.”

How did Moyet get The Minutes made? She called a summit of her own with her management team, informed them she was sick of hearing cover pitches, sick of major imprints in general. She believed wholeheartedly in Sigsworth’s studio skills, and he believed so much in her he was essentially willing to work on spec. “So, I said, ‘If I never make another album, I have to make this collection of originals. Now. This is simply what I’ve got to do,’” she says. If a label picked it up? Fine. If not, she swore she’d give it away online. In the end, Cooking Vinyl stepped in to release it worldwide.

Given its labor-of-love genesis, The Minutes turned out that rarest of birds: a coldly electronic album that feels universally warm throughout. Much of it can be attributed to Moyet’s soulful stylings, which can spark to life an ominous synthesized rumble like “Horizon Flame,” add a fluid candor to the jagged bass line of “Changeling” or put some real human menace into a robotic clubland thumper like “Right As Rain,” especially when she snarls, “I’ll fight you every step of the way,” to an unfaithful lover who thought he’d simply slink away, undetected—the exact opposite of her early breakthrough hit “Invisible,” from Alf. Moyet admits that she thoroughly enjoys calling cads on the carpet nowadays. “As I’m getting older, I’m getting really tired of romantic language,” she says. “When I first started writing songs, I was very influenced

by Janis Joplin, so there was all this bleeding/beating heart stuff in my work. But with this album, I almost started off on that same tip until I caught myself and said, ‘Fuck it! I wanna be more observational. And if you don’t like it? Bollocks!’ I really just wanted to start thinking in terms of painting myself quite ugly. And that’s something that you do find in French music, for example—Jacques Brel had no problem with making himself seem despicable when he chose to, or when it suited the song.” She snickers disdainfully. “I mean, we’re not all noble, now are we?”

The diva’s dynamic voice wrings emo-

tion from every last breathy word on current overseas single “When I Was Your Girl,” which opens on a simple piano melody, but builds into a monolithic chorus. For extra oomph, she added her daughter Caitlin to the video clip, lip-synching her mother’s words as she strolls along a Quadrophenia-bleak British pier. Another number, the heartbeat-blipping “Filigree,” was inspired by an afternoon she spent at the local cinema, watching Terrence Malick’s heady visual experience The Tree Of Life. One by one, almost all of her fellow viewers began walking out on the perplexing film, halfway through. But she stuck through it to the very end, and was visually rewarded for her trouble.

“And it really made me think about that whole concept of The Minutes,” says Moyet.

“Of our joys in life, and how we feel cheated when our life is not a stream of joy. We feel like somebody else has got it right, and we’ve just horribly got it wrong. But when you get older, you actually understand that it was never that way, never been that way for anybody. And these joys—our redemptions, our releases—they happen in minutes, minutes that are strung together in pedestrian years.

So, it really is about the journey. But we waste so much of the journey rushing somewhere, don’t we? And totally forgetting to look up.”

The Basildon-bred Moyet (who started off a snotty punk rocker before going synthpop sleek with Yazoo in ’82) has heard one comparison over the past couple of years— that Grammy-winning R&B chanteuse Adele sounds a lot like her. Or, for younger listeners, that she bears a sonic similarity to Adele.

Moyet adores the kid, and doesn’t mind.

“But where the similarity is, is that—if you look at me when I was young—we’re both black-clad, stationary performers who really got involved in the songs,” she says. “But Adele, in all truth, is far better put-together than me, in every element; she’s better-looking, she had more confidence at a younger age and she was more developed, right out of the gate.”

Indeed, the music business has changed dramatically. Most stars have teams that carefully groom them before any personal appearance. “But for me, I remember the very first time I was on television with Vince, on Top Of The Pops, a big show in England which, in those days, confirmed that you’d had a hit,” she says. “It wasn’t until the music started that I first thought, ‘Shit! What am I gonna do with my feet?’ I had no idea how to present myself! But at the same time, there was a complete joy back then, because there was so much more room for freaks, and you really got a sense that you could understand the identity of the person you were connecting with a little bit. Whereas now, everyone’s always fashionable and fabulous, because they’ve all got the same stylist!” —Tom Lanham

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Beat Happening The Features flash their ’80s love muscle on a groove-happy, synth-savvy new LP “It seems like every time we put a record out,

we’re a new band,” says Features singer/guitarist Matthew Pelham with an audible groan.

And he has a point. His remarkably resilient Tennessee outfit has deflected enough false starts and dead-ends to kill most groups.

Absorbed in full, it’s quite the litany of misfortune: at least two unreleased full-length albums to close out the ’90s; a pair of fruitless label dalliances—one with a now-defunct indie imprint, the other with once-mighty Universal; the departure of three band members. Yikes.

“Actually, we recorded three records between 1995 and 1999, and the only thing that came out from those three was an EP,” says Pelham. “The first seven or eight years of us being a band were pretty frustrating. It was definitely discouraging. But we keep doing it because we like it. It’s not like we feel we’re

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owed anything.”

It’s oddly fitting, then, that the Features’ new LP is a self-titled affair. And apparently they’re also late-bloomers, given the measurable bump in song quality and musicianship that propels The Features (Serpents & Snakes/BMG). With its four members now well into their 30s, the band sounds like it’s just now coming into its own—particularly keyboardist Mark Bond and drummer Rollum Haas, whose contributions loom large throughout. They nudge the Features into unexpected territory, while cushioning the group’s renowned stylistic shifts with soothing synth washes and hyper-mechanized grooves that you’d swear were the work of a deranged programmer if they weren’t so friggin’ ass-backward funky.

“Our influences are all over the place, and

it gets pretty ridiculous,” says Pelham, the group’s primary songwriter, who grew up with Features bassist Roger Dabbs in the tiny town of Sparta, Tenn. “But this album is probably a bit more cohesive.”

As for the aforementioned unexpected territory: Think Depeche Mode meets Al Green meets Maroon 5 (“Ain’t No Wonder”); think angular, Television-like guitar lines and ascendant, howl-at-the-moon choruses (“Tenderly”); think Talking Heads on HGH (“The New Romantic”) and a remarkably spot-on Ultravox approximation (“In Your Arms”). Even when the album does conjure the incorrigible Features of old—as on anti-smartphone rant “This Disorder” and nosebleed rocker “Won’t Be Long”— the band’s precision is breathtaking.

Where 2008’s Some Kind Of Salvation seems frantic in its efforts to impress and

photo by hayley young

2011’s Wilderness is frayed and unwieldy, The Features sounds honed and confident. The sizable evolutionary leap comes as a pleasant surprise to everyone in the band. “In my head, this new album was very thrown-together,” says Pelham.

The Features was recorded at Ripcord Studio in Vancouver, Wash., almost two years ago, just before the band hit the road for Wilderness. “We’d show up at the studio, start on a song, work it out and have them hit the record button,” says Dabbs. “There’s a lot of stuff that was spontaneous, and a few songs were written in the studio.”

“For previous records, we’d already been playing a majority of the songs live for a good bit of time,” says Bond. “This is a studio album we had to find a way to translate to a live performance, as opposed to vice versa.”

Finishing the sessions in just a few weeks, the band and Wilderness engineer Craig Alvin made the conscious decision to bring the drums and bass up in the mix. “We wanted to make sure the rhythm section was heard,” says Pelham. “We felt like it was getting lost on the last two records.”

Haas, for one, isn’t complaining. “It was definitely a fun record to make, for sure,” he says. “We went into this album with superloose arrangements.”

Haas grew up in a rural Tennessee town where bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit were the popular soundtrack for weekends spent on a road to nowhere. It wasn’t much different for Pelham and Dabbs in Sparta. “Most people would just cruise up and down the strip, which was a loop around Hardee’s about a mile and a half to the other end of town, around Sonic,” says Pelham. “You’d just go back and forth.”

Pelham and Dabbs started playing together in eighth grade. “When our other friends were out driving around town trying to figure out what kind of mischief to get into, we were at band practice,” says Dabbs.

By the time the two moved to Murfreesboro to study music at Middle Tennessee State University, their classic-rock mindsets had been infiltrated by the likes of Camper Van Beethoven and the Jayhawks. They eventually left college to focus full-time on the Features with fellow members Parrish Yaw, Don Sergio and Jason Taylor. The group had a nice follow-

ing in the Nashville area and was championed

by Matt Mahaffey (Self), who signed them to his Spongebath Records. “They funded our records, but apparently they didn’t have any intention of putting them out,” says Pelham.

“It was a really strange time.”

It took the Features several years to fully recover from their run-ins with Spongebath and Universal. By then, Sergio was out, and Haas had replaced Taylor on drums. Keyboardist Yaw was the last of three original members to leave in 2004. Bond auditioned for the group at Haas’ urging, and his more methodical approach helped focus the Features’ sound. Meanwhile, a friendship with the fellow Tennesseans in Kings Of Leon led to the band’s signing on KOL’s Serpents & Snakes label.

“I was a fan of the Features before I was a member, and they really stood out like a sore thumb,” says Haas of the group’s early keyboard-driven sound. “It was the peak of the grunge era, and they wore matching costumes and kinda had a little shtick … [Laughs] Maybe that’s something Matthew doesn’t want me to talk about.” —Hobart Rowland

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Tinker Tailor Perfectionism drives the Love Language toward moodier blues It’s past nine o’clock in Chapel Hill, N.C.,

and Stuart McLamb can barely move. He’s just driven back from dinner at his mother’s house, and even though he’s trying to cut back on meat, there was no way he could refuse the beef brisket. If that means he’s a little late getting home, that’s alright. He’s nowhere near as late as the Love Language’s Ruby Red (Merge), which was supposed to be finished more than a year ago.

“I can definitely overthink stuff,” says McLamb, the band’s singer, songwriter, guitarist, bassist and only full-time member.

“When we first started to track this album, I had a bunch of demos, and my goal was to finish the record before we left for South By Southwest. We did, but when you’re in the moment, and you’ve got all that forward momentum, it’s hard sometimes to step back and look at everything you’ve done. That’s what happened on the drive to Texas, which is when we all knew things needed to be fixed.”

Over the next year, those fixes grew and grew and grew, until McLamb wound up throwing away some old songs, writing some new ones and recording the whole album all over again, bouncing between 21 musicians and four cities before he and co-producer B.J. Burton decided they were done. (“I’m like the right brain, and he’s more like the left,” says McLamb. “Or maybe it’s the other way around.”)

It was one of those times when recording was harder than writing, but now that it’s all in the past, McLamb describes himself as “genuinely happy. The album is a little dark—well, for us—but dark for us is still pretty upbeat.

It’s definitely not cohesive in the sense of having a particular mood or genre, and even before I started the writing process, I knew that’s what I wanted to go for. The first two records had a lot of songs dealing with my relationships, and I wanted to see how I could expand that, to start looking at things outside myself. I wanted to blow up the possibilities for where this band can go.”

Instead of reaching back for ’60s innocence, the production pushes toward ’80s moodiness, reliving its ringing-guitar-andmultilayered-keyboard glory, from the opening, angst-ridden “Calm Down” to the closing “Pilot Light,” with its Beatlesque piano,

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strings and uplifting harmonies. In between, there are nods to the Church, Cure, Flock Of Seagulls, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and countless other bands, as McLamb waxes poetic on love, life and a newly arrived age of enlightenment, right here, right now.

“It’s like we’re in the middle of this crossover, the end of something and the beginning of something else, this new era for humanity,” says McLamb, his voice trailing off and

his mind wandering. “It’s been a long year of obsessing over mixes and doing all the things that aren’t fun about making music. And now we get to the fun part of playing this live. Ultimately, you go through everything else because you get goosebumps a few nights of the year playing in front of people. You tap into that transcendence; your soul feels aligned with, I don’t know, some higher power, and that makes it all worth it.” —Kenny Berkowitz

photo by devin ludwig

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False Positive Tricky would rather appropriate than kill his idols Talk to Tricky and you find he’s eager, un-

pretentious and forthright. For an artist known for his dark and insinuating raps, whose best work often gets praised for being “murky,” who favors slow and eerie beats, he’s a surprisingly enthusiastic and upbeat conversationalist. Even though he’s the interviewee, he’s interested in having a two-way conversation.

But that makes sense, too, because Tricky has always been a collaborator, a generous spirit in highlighting new talent and sharing his spotlight.

In the early ’90s, Tricky helped invent trip hop. He was part of Bristol’s Wild Bunch, and he contributed vocals to Massive Attack’s groundbreaking Blue Lines (recently given a well-deserved 20th-anniversary reissue).

Maxinquaye, his 1995 debut, was a gamechanger. Featuring Martina Topley-Bird splitting lead vocals with Tricky and spooky, ominous, sometimes frenetic songs like “Aftermath” and “Brand New You’re Retro,” it defined an era, especially in the U.K. Its paranoia was seductive—and is still, retaining its power while much of the coffeehouse trip hop that it inspired now sounds limp and dated.

Tricky (born Adrian Thaws) maintained his momentum, with his collaborative project Nearly God (featuring vocals from Björk, Alison Moyet, Neneh Cherry and others) and an excellent follow-up, 1996’s Pre-Millennium Tension (that title pretty much defines Tricky’s style).

He was in-demand to remix tracks, and he continued to be an inveterate collaborator. But soon Tricky seemed to deliberately subvert his success, dabbling in American gangster rap, Jamaican ragga and dancehall, in-

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viting far-flung guests to his albums (Cyndi Lauper? Ed Kowalczyk?), sometimes seeming pathologically bitter, sometimes seeming to recycle earlier ideas. His restlessness was a virtue and a curse.

“I need change all the time,” he says. “But then again, I do the same things. I could eat the same food every night; it’s not a problem for me.”

Tricky’s need to change led to some inconsistent albums, and he says his last couple records, 2008’s K n ow l e

photo bY Tricky

West Boy and 2010’s Mixed Race, were not as true to himself as he would have liked. He had signed to Domino, and he felt like he was trying to incorporate more of the guitar-band sound of the label’s other artists.

“Knowle West Boy is kinda like the Specials in 2000-something,” he says, adding that he never felt pressured by the label to conform to any expectations. “I think I was thinking too much when I was on Domino. It’s my fault. I was kind of thinking how could I do something good for them. With an artist like me, trying to stick to rules of getting a radio song and a commercial video, and then going to the radio and hope that they play you, it’s not going to work. My music is not commercial enough for the Record Deal 101 plan.”

Now he’s back, with False Idols, his first album for his own label of the same name.

He’s framing it as a return to the style of Maxinquaye, but while that’s true—old fans who’ve given up on him, take note—that risks cheapening the album’s immediacy and vitality. There’s not a whiff of nostalgia here, not a hint of him trying to recapture his glory days.

Instead, he’s revitalizing the sparse, spacious beats, the rumbling bass and the judiciously deployed guitars, and he’s found new female vocal foils to mesh with his murmuring, threatening voice.

“This one is more my thing,” he says, “more what I would listen to.”

Of course, that could be a boilerplate comment from most artists about their new album, but Tricky has a way of making it seem honest and direct. He’s self-effacing enough on False Idols to be the secondary vocalist on most tracks,

allowing protégés such as Fran Belmonte and Fifi Rong to sing lead, as he did with Topley-Bird in the past. There’s the soulful, string-soaked “Nothing’s Changed,” the smooth R&B of “If Only I Knew,” the dissonant, electronics of “We Don’t Die,” the trip-hop throwback of “Nothing Matters” (featuring a impressive vocal turn from Nigeria’s Nneka).

Unlike much of Tricky’s past work, False Idols is inviting rather than alienating.

“In the last few years, mate, I realized how lucky I am,” he says. “I’m not a moneyhead; I don’t care about money. When you realize as an artist how lucky you are, it keeps you more grounded. Being recognized is not healthy for you. I’m not ultra-famous, but I do get recognized, and I know it’s changed me—being in the music business—from when I was a kid when I was beginning.”

False Idols opens with a reimagining of Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” focusing on the opening lines (“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”) on “Somebody’s Sins.” It’s a slow and eerie track, with Belmonte’s lead vocal much more ruminative than Smith’s bold declaration. Tricky loves Smith’s classic song, but he admits to not being deeply familiar with her other work.

“To be honest, I’m not a fan,” he says. “I couldn’t name you loads of stuff, although I know what level she is as an artist. Those lyrics just blow my mind, do you know what I mean? There’s so much insight in those lyrics. People know me as a music person, but I started off as a lyric person. I admire people’s lyrics—that song for me is incredible.”

Tricky has played with religious iconography throughout his career, and opening an album called False Idols with Smith’s challenging reference to Jesus—and ending it with a murmured rap called “Christ On The Cross”—could suggest that he is attacking Christianity. Instead, he just relishes the implication of the allusions.

“I don’t believe in God or this guy on the cross, right, but because—like everyone else—I’ve had these images burned into my mind since I was a youth, I always have this cross thing,” he says. “I think it’s like I’ve been programmed like everyone else. It’s fun to play with in music, but I don’t believe it. That’s the funny thing. It’s just very powerful imagery.”

In some ways, his penchant for covers and appropriations of other songs also comes from his desire for powerful imagery. When he uses the chorus of Chet Baker’s version of “My Funny Valentine” on “Valentine,” Baker becomes an incongruous, anachronistic partner to Tricky’s syncopated rasp and Belmonte’s sweet, dreamy longings. Tricky’s covers sometimes totally revamp the song: Witness the gender-switched version of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos” from Maxinquaye.

Other times, he hews closer to

the original: False Idols includes a version of the Antlers’ “Parenthesis,” which is closer to a remix than a cover.

“I want to do a covers album, someday, maybe more than one,” he says. “If I love something, I want it to be mine. If I’m listening to some music, like, say, a great PJ Harvey song, I’ll pretend it’s my song. I’ll make a video of it or something. My favorite things, I want them to be me; if it’s a song, I wish I did it. So, I’m like a magpie: I take a bit here, a bit there.

I could listen to the same song 20 times in a row, with my eyes closed, over and over and over. I’m quite passionate about things I love, and then once I love it, I want to be part of it, you know what I mean?”

“Parenthesis” came about after he met the Antlers at Portugal’s Primavera music festival—they literally bonded over coffee, when he showed them how to work a backstage espresso machine—and he was impressed by the band’s lack of pretension, as well as by its “amazing” performance.

“I thought it was incredible because it was so basic and real,” he says. “There was no acting. Everyone in the band was with it, and there was no pretense there. For young guys, it was so pure onstage. I think we need more of that stuff, to be honest.”

Tricky offered to remix a track for them, and ended up working with “Crest.” In return, Peter Silberman sent him some tracks, and Tricky used vocal and guitar lines to create his own version of “Parenthesis,” a track that first appeared on the Antlers’ 2011 album, Burst Apart. The False Idols version puts the Antlers’ crashing guitars and Silberman’s dramatic croon in high relief against Tricky’s dark interjections and martial beats. It’s a fascinating hybrid.

“With the Antlers, they are just so normal and cool,” he says. “They get by just writing great songs and great music, with no persona, no bullshit.”

That could be said of Tricky, too. He is reluctant to be in the spotlight in any way that would distract from the music he creates, and although he wants to be appreciated, he doesn’t see himself as a commercial artist, and never did. He’s just as excited to talk about the younger artists he plans to promote through his label as he is to talk about his new album. (Or the one he says he has planned for later this year.)

“I don’t want to become so famous where it’s not even about my music, it’s about me as just another famous dude,” he says. “We don’t need another famous person around.

There’s nothing worse than when you meet someone you’re a fan of, and they’re affected.

Like Prince. I always thought Prince was a genius, but I can’t listen to Prince anymore. That pop-star shit is played out; it’s finished. I find it pompous. We’re just normal people. Prince is a talented guy, but he’s a very lucky guy to have the life he’s had. I don’t want to become bigger than my music; I want my music to speak for me.” —Steve Klinge

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photo by moses berkson

This Time It’s Personal Eleanor Friedberger takes the reins on a pseudoautobiographical sophomore solo effort “What do you think of the title?” asks

Eleanor Friedberger.

She’s referring to Personal Record, her second album outside of the Fiery Furnaces, the unpredictable, verbose, manic band she started with brother Matthew. Her solo career began in 2011 with Last Summer, which used her storytelling skills to recount memories, often of life in New York City. She recorded that album before she had a label to release it, and in the interim between finishing it, finding a label (Merge) and the LP’s eventual release, she collaborated with John Wesley Harding to write more songs, many of which became part of her set list when she toured, both as a solo acoustic act and with a band.

Road-testing new songs was a different experience for Friedberger: The Furnaces’ albums were built from lots of studio overdubs, mostly her brother’s.

“Most bands write a song and perform it live; they test it out, and then record it,” she says. “I’d never done that before; the Fiery Furnaces never did that, with the exception of maybe our first album. For me to have an idea of what a song was supposed to sound like, and then record it and be able to execute it, was satisfying and different.”

Personal Record rocks harder than its predecessor, with revved-up tracks like the noisy “Stare At The Sun,” the jaunty, Furnaces-like “She’s A Mirror” and the twangy “My Own World.” But it also has room for a lovely bossa nova (“Echo Or Encore”) and some more elaborate, orchestral arrangements (“I Am The Past”); these songs exhibit growth with “the singer/songwriter hat” that Friedberger says she tried on for the first time with Last Summer. The new album was recorded quickly with members of her touring band, and it sounds more organic than its predecessor, which retained remnants of its GarageBand beginnings. Personal Record also contains some of Friedberger’s best writing, with songs about romance of the interpersonal as well as musical kind, full of concrete details and multifaceted narratives. But what about that title?

“I’ve been holding on to this title for a while, and I thought about using it for the last record, but I felt that record was almost too impersonal in some ways,” says Friedberger.

“I wanted that record to feel nostalgic. I love

the title. It’s a great pun. The album artwork is kind of sports-related, of me swimming a lap in a pool. I like that it’s also about sports, a physical and emotional test.”

So, if the LP is her personal record, does that mean it’s her best album, her best achievement? Ask Friedberger a question like that, and an answer can come in a torrent of words, not unlike some her breathless songs.

“I hope it’s not my best, but I think it’s better than the last one,” she says. “You know, I was in a band where I sang loud and hard and fast for so long, and then suddenly I was in this totally different setting of trying to present these songs in a kind of quiet way, and that was very foreign to me. I started listening to a lot more ’70s singer/songwriter music, which I’ve always loved, but I started paying closer attention to it. To me, those songs are all romantic songs, and I wanted to write extremely romantic songs. I’ve always written autobiographical songs, and these songs are very personal and true in many ways, but I think they’re also universal love songs. I like that. Although it’s called Personal Record, I think it’s even more relatable than anything else I’ve done.”

Friedberger looked to British singer/ songwriters like Duncan Browne and Al Stewart, and to Canada’s McGarrigle Sisters, for inspiration—songwriters who balanced the directly personal with broader perspectives, and who weren’t constrained by traditional forms. Although Friedberger’s solo work is much more compact and accessible than some of the Furnaces’ more extreme albums (multifaceted magnum opus Blueberry Boat, for instance), it still has a playful streak, and songs like “She’s A Mirror” and “Other Boys” twist and turn unexpectedly. And, as on Furnaces albums, the songs connect thematically.

“If we’re talking about big themes, almost every song is about music, or has music in it,” says Friedberger. “That was really important to me, to make them love songs about music as opposed to about people. That’s why there’s so many references to other bands and being onstage.”

Sparks, Soft Machine and “Come On Eileen” all get name-dropped in the lyrics, and some songs refer to being onstage or in a music club. Most of them seem to be auto-

biographical, first-person accounts, although she says several of the songs, including girlcrush tale “When I Knew,” are stories of other people she knows.

The title, then begs the question: Just how personal is her personal record? She bristles a bit, though, at an out-and-out confession.

“Is that a question I have to answer? It’s very personal; it’s extraordinarily personal!” she jokes. “That’s another reason I like the title Personal Record. Because, I don’t know, I can just say, ‘It’s none of your business,’ or I can just say, ‘Yeah, it’s all about me.’ That’s something I’m always asked: ‘Oh, is this all about you?’ It gets kind of tiring.”

She says some people thought, incorrectly, that Last Summer was a break-up album. (Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos and Spoon’s Britt Daniel are among her exes.)

Even if a song contains autobiographical details, it’s not meant to be read as clues into diagnosing the singer’s life.

“I don’t know why people have to attach that kind of thing to albums,” she says. “It always seems to be ‘break up.’ It seems really lame and boring.”

One thing is for sure, though: The album is personal because it shows Friedberger becoming comfortable in her role as bandleader.

“The first record was very much a learning experience,” she says, “but this time I felt I knew what I wanted. I’ve never been so happy as sitting in the control room and listening to the tapes. It was really satisfying. I was in a band with my brother, and we both had a say in what we did, but I definitely deferred to him, particularly in the studio. There always has to be somebody in that role; I don’t know any band where it’s democratic. In those kinds of situations where a decision has to be made, someone has to make the decision. It feels good to be in that position—and to want to be in that position, more importantly.”

Don’t take that past tense reference to the Fiery Furnaces to be definitive, however.

Although Matthew now lives in Paris and is churning out solo concept albums at an alarming rate, the siblings are still in touch, and although her solo career and her personal records are her current priority, she won’t rule out another Furnaces album.

“We’re just taking a break—that’s the only way I know how to say it,” she says. “I’m going to see how this goes and then see what’s next. The good thing about being in a band with your brother is that he doesn’t go anywhere.” —Steve Klinge

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on the record

a conversation with

jared leto

Jared Leto never seems to take the easy road. He could have spent eternity as a handsome movie idol with his mix of major studio fare (Panic Room) and independent films (American Psycho). Yet, he got his pretty face pummeled in Fight Club and, in his newest flick, Dallas Buyers Club, appears as an emaciated transsexual woman with AIDS. Then there’s that music career, where he and brother Shannon started a tech-heavy prog band, 30 Seconds To Mars, and set about making hits and garnering platinum albums. ¶ That is, until the group tried to leave its label, EMI/Virgin, and attempted to sign with a new one, prompting EMI to file a lawsuit for $30 million, claiming that 30STM was contractually obligated to produce three more albums. Leto and Co. won the battle, resigned with Virgin, made a documentary about the legal process (Artifact) and its ensuing recording (This Is War) and, finally, a brand new old-school electronic album, Love, Lust, Faith + Dreams, that shows the war is over, but the rage stays in place. —A.D. Amorosi You made and continue to make a solid, even innovative, transition from thespian to musician without looking or sounding like a dick. Few actors do. Why you?

I appreciate that, but I certainly don’t think of my work in contrast to anyone else. I tend not to ask those questions. I love what Andy Warhol said about that: “Labels are for cans, not for people.”

No. I get that.

I enjoy being in the studio a lot, writing songs, going on tour, as well as making films. I do.

I love it all: the design work, the acting, the editing. I love everything that I do and feel very grateful that I am able to do it. I believe in hard work and doing things well. You’ve got to remember, we’ve been doing this for a while now, since 1998. This is our 15th year of making music, but I’ve certainly been in bands before that.

After that, I was in art school studying to be a painter. While I was studying to do that, I was also taking classes in pottery, photography and filmmaking. I fell in love with that.

It really became my focus toward the end of art school—all I did was make experimental films and videos before moving in front of the camera. I actually came to California to be a filmmaker. But all the while I was making music—I never lost that. It just started taking up more and more of my life again about 15 years ago. At that point, my brother and I decided that we wanted to make an album and go on tour. We honestly just wanted to share what we were doing with people. Art is a two-way conversation—it’s no good to just scream down your corridor alone. It is more interesting to talk with somebody. The whole process was more organic than anything else.

No real sit-down and map-out. After that, it was actually pretty hard to get a record deal.

So, do you know why you chose so late in your life to make music as a professional?

It’s a little later than most people might.

If you want to go back even further, I have truly been making music since I was a kid.

Do you know why you couldn’t get signed?

Was there a moratorium against this type of music in 1999?

No. I think they didn’t want to sign me because I was acting. That was a big issue,

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especially back then. Plus, we were making 13-minute long prog-rock songs. Things have definitely changed so much. It is much more common for people to be polymaths, and not just those in the public eye, but anyone who chooses to be so. It’s rare now for someone to have one single job for 40 years, get a gold watch and retire. It’s just more common to have many jobs by the time they are 30 and 40. There are guys like Julian Schnabel and Steve McQueen who are wonderful painters and amazing filmmakers. There’s a lot more flexibility at work in society.

You haven’t made a film in, like, five years, I’m guessing due to the band’s schedule.

What spoke to you about Dallas Buyers Club that made you want to stop making music for a sec? Were you not seeing scripts that you liked?

Everything from the part, the script and the director made me want to do the film. It was really challenging. And I hadn’t read a script in a year or two.

On purpose?

Yeah, I wasn’t looking to make a film. We toured for two and a half years and got a Guinness World Record for longest tour due to that. Honestly, the band got more success than we ever dreamed of. I didn’t plan on stopping acting. I didn’t make any formal decision about it or retire. This film opportunity came up and just felt special. I’m glad it came up.

With the film that you did about going up against Virgin and This Is War, there’s a great narrative through-line—the artist as slave—to start with, as well as some fantastic legal-speak. Did you know about the De Havilland Law before you pitched the lawsuit?

I had heard about an actress fighting against the studio system, but didn’t know the specifics. I learned rather quickly, though, when the lawsuit commenced. The labels are still run like the studios of the ’40s. That suit was crucial for us. We battled an entire industry.

We sold millions of albums only to find out while recording the next one that not only

were we never going to make a single penny, we actually owed millions of dollars. We had a virtually criminal arrangement with the label, one unfortunately that’s par for the course.

Luckily we fought and fought and lived to make a film about it.

Plus, you signed with EMI again, albeit with a crew of execs who are much different than the lot you worked with.

Besides, we’re not anti-label. The idea of a record company, at its core, is great—someone who works on your behalf to bring your vision to life and share your work. If not for that, we would’ve had to hire people to do that. Then we’d have to manage those people. Record company: good idea. Greed and corruption: bad idea.

The new album has some very sleek, but very old-school-sounding electronics at work: the songs “Bright Lights” and “Pyres Of Varanasi” in particular. What are you listening to?

I love the analog synth sound, Giorgio Moroder and Tangerine Dream in particular. My first instrument, besides the piano, was a Roland Juno 106, so I think that stuck with me. It’s all over the new album.

Were you a big space travel kid or astronaut fan? I ask because you guys sent your new single, “Up In The Air,” onto the most recent NASA mission.

My grandfather was in the Air Force, and we used to visit him on base. Those guys have a lot of similarities to the NASA folk. Going to space for the band was really great, a whole re-launch, so to speak.

Were the NASA guys an amenable lot? How did they take to the “wrap my hands around your neck” lyric?

They were wonderful. These guys make the impossible possible. It’s surreal watching your work being shot out of a giant rocket.

There wasn’t an issue with that lyric. I think it has wrongly been given this over-sexual connotation. It’s really about power. Besides, they’re big boys and girls over there at NASA.

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magnified

The Tenth Power Guitars are overrated in Decades’ chamber-pop dreamworld

Toronto’s Decades have been making

fuzzy dream-pop noise for a few years now, though you likely haven’t heard them unless you caught one of their two cross-country Canadian tours. Which is fine, as it turns out, because the road time and constant woodshedding allowed the band to take the shape it wanted for its first record. Founded in 2010 as a garage-rock foursome, Decades spent three years working out the sound they wanted, tracking demos and playing a mix of styles.

Eventually, they took a left turn and recorded a single shimmery, echo- and reverb-laden track.

“And that was it,” says bassist Greg Peters.

“That was what we wanted to do from then on.”

When the band heard that experimental track mixed, the die was cast, and Decades now deliver spacey orchestral pop where even the vocals are mixed like instruments, and the guitars are processed to sound like bells, keyboards, ringing tones—anything but guitars.

To build its debut, instead of starting from hooks or lyrics, the band worked in a me-

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thodically collaborative methodology, building songs together from the ground up, with Mike Kaminski vocalizing melodically even before any words had been written. The songs on Decades (White Girl) were half-done when they toured Canada twice, in order to get the experience of being a working road band under their belts. The writing slowed down as a result, but the songs sometimes went in entirely different directions as the group worked out variations on the road, finalizing them in the studio.

“We probably went through 20 or 30 mixes when we were getting the album together,” says Peters. “We emailed different mixes around until everybody was happy.”

That meticulous crafting is most noticeable in the details on Decades, particularly Kaminski’s vocals, which—though sometimes whispered and sometimes shouted—rarely fluctuate dynamically. The result is a sort of constant cascade, a waterfall of sound and tone that plays like pop, but sounds rather like chamber music. It’s a brave mixing choice, and not one that many bands with Decades’ aesthetic would make.

Kaminski agrees, but adds, “We were looking for that lush pillow sound, where the voice would work like another instrument. I don’t want to hear the hardness of the consonants, or the scratch of the throat, or anything like that. I always imagine mixing a voice like finding a perfect core, a concentrated center, and then the perfect shine or aura radiates from it.”

For all the processing, minimal effects are contributed in the studio that can’t be replicated live; Kaminski even uses a pedal for his vocals in the band’s stage show.

“That collaboration, finding that sound together—that was the best part and the hardest part,” he says. “We kept exploring and then coming back to the center. Listening to the demos now, I can almost see the trail.”

And Decades was where the path led: a shiny, spacey, fuzzy jewel. —Eric Waggoner

photo by Alicia Giammaria

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They’re Like The Wind Rock, folk, soul and blues seamlessly intertwine on Treetop Flyers’ breezy breakout

When Reid Morrison, singer/guitarist of

Treetop Flyers speaks, his London accent is almost impenetrable. When he sings, it’s in a smooth, clear tenor that perfectly channels the resonance and pronunciation of the California folk/pop artists who influenced the sunny sounds of his band. His vocals bring to mind a blend of Stephen Stills and Neil Young, with a soulful yowl closer to Young.

He doesn’t mind the comparison.

“I listened to Harvest endlessly when I was a kid,” he says. “I grew up with my parents’ albums: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Band, John Prine, Van Morrison. The rest of the band liked the same stuff. What you hear in our music is the sounds we listened to growing up: country, American folk, ’70s West Coast singer/songwriters, early blues and country, rock and soul. Sounds that have stood the test of time.”

The Treetop Flyers got together before the current British interest in folk and roots music exploded, but Morrison says they’d be playing this music even if they didn’t make a

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living at it. “We like mixing electric and acoustic guitars, mandolins and banjos,” he says.

“We’re just lucky that people are getting into that stuff again.”

Four of the five band members—Morrison, guitarists Sam Beer and Laurie Sherman, and bassist Matthew Starritt—grew up in London.

Drummer Tomer Danan is the lone American.

“We all knew each other from different London bands,” says Morrison. “Sam had a birthday party, and when we started talking, we realized we all had the same ideas. The first time we played together, we could see the green light flashing.”

Early on, the Flyers sent in a demo to the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition, but with 23,000 bands submitting, they knew their chances were slim. They were on tour when they got an email asking them to audition for the finals.

According to Morrison, “We played for the judges, and 20 minutes later, they told us that we’d won.”

Their opening gig at the Glastonbury Fes-

tival’s mainstage made them instant stars.

An album was the next step. They created a wish list of the producers they wanted to work with, and their first choice, Noah Georgeson (Devendra Banhart, Bert Jansch, Strokes), invited them to Malibu Canyon to record. The result is the shimmering, smoky folk/pop of The Mountain Moves, an album that sounds like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fronting the Band. They recorded most of the tracks live, adding harmonies while clustered around a single mic, just like artists did in the ’70s.

As the sessions unfolded, they also found themselves dipping into the sounds of soul, early R&B and doo-wop. “We all write together, everybody providing melodies and lyrical ideas,” says Morrison. “Nothing ever comes out the way you expect it to. ‘Postcards’ has a Memphis-soul groove, and we added a doowop chorus we’d written years ago. When we dropped it in, it was a perfect fit. Rock, soul and country all have influenced each other, so there will probably be more of that in our sound on the next album.” —j. poet

photo by sam ford

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War All The Time

Psychedelia, grunge and country collide on T. Hardy Morris’ uncompromising solo debut

“If I were to play some super familiar-

sounding Southern-rock riff, I’d just have to laugh at myself, like, ‘What if I made a song out of that, ha ha?’”

T. Hardy Morris is in Athens, Ga., soaking in the warmth of a semi-warm day as he gears up for the release of his solo debut, Audition Tapes, available July 30 via Dangerbird. MAGNET has been waiting for this conversation for months, maybe even a year, ever since word broke that the Dead Confederate and Diamond Rugs guitarist was working on the album.

“But some people do that,” he says.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, that would be a great song.’

No, that would not be a great song.”

And for all of our anticipation, Audition Tapes does not disappoint; the album is packed with great songs, distinctly but not stereotypically Southern. Morris has always found the country at the fringe of his psych/ grunge compositions, but Audition Tapes moves those vibes front and center, fractured as they may be. Stripped bare of his other outfits’ bombast, each song becomes a laconic rebellion, a laid-back “fuck you” to an uptight music world, especially lead single “OK Corral.”

“It’s definitely a slow-burner of a first single, but you know, whatever,” says Morris.

“If you listen to an album for another year, you’re always sick of the single. The single is never the best song. It might be the catchiest, but it’s not the best. It doesn’t really

photo By Cory Llewellyn

have the longevity.”

“OK Corral” is a curveball of a coming-out party for the relatively unknown artist—Dead Confederate could rank as one of the most criminally overlooked bands of the last decade, and the Rugs are by far the most popular of John McCauley’s side projects—but for an artist like Morris, it fits. It’s a devotion to craftsmanship over commercialism that connects Tapes with the rebels of ’70s songwriting, in spirit if not in sound.

“Those 1975, late-night records where they were probably at the end of their contract and just doing what ever they wanted … ” says Morris. “We wanted Audition Tapes to have that tape-y late-night feel.”

It’s an album of subtle shifts and minimal arrangements, an LP that can elicit tension and yearning and release in the softest of strums, an album that evokes a foggy mountain morning with heart-melting fuzz tones. There’s a creativity and resourcefulness in Audition Tapes that recalls when the world wasn’t overrun by Dust Bowl poseurs traipsing about with false positivity and overwrought traditions. Morris is an outlier, and it suits him just fine.

“It’s not like I’m making African ambientnoise records that people are going to be like, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’” he says.

“It’s a tough thing to traverse—I’m not ever going to be the guy who writes toe-tapping, happy-go-lucky stuff, I don’t think. It doesn’t happen.” —Sean L. Maloney

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Home Sweet Home With Time Off, Steve Gunn makes myths of his Brooklyn neighbors

Boerum Hill, a small, gentrified plot in the

northwestern section of Brooklyn, boasts all the signs of urban renewal. The New York Times described the neighborhood as “clean slate sidewalks, self-conscious cafes and neighbors who do more than merely say hello.”

The neighborhood has been home to Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jonathan Lethem and—perhaps unexpectedly—singer/songwriter and guitarist Steve Gunn.

“I live in kind of a posh neighborhood,” says Gunn. “I’m lucky to have a super-cheap apartment that my girlfriend and I share, but we don’t necessarily belong in this neighborhood, demographically.”

And, he suggests, they might not be the only square pegs in Boerum Hill. “There are a lot of people walking around, and a lot of people that are kind of fixtures in the environment where I am,” says Gunn. “It seems to me that a lot of these people have really rich stories, and they’re often just people that no one pays any attention to.”

Gunn’s latest album, Time Off (Bachelors), memorializes some of these characters. The inspiration of “Street Keeper” is a friendly, self-appointed neighborhood watchman. “The Lurker” imagines the lives of the neighborhood’s hangers-on, left over from its downscale past. “I’m realizing how much of a reflec-

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tion of my environment the music that I make is,” says Gunn.

But Gunn’s people-watching predilection isn’t limited to his 10 years in Brooklyn. “Maybe it became more intense because it’s just a bigger place and there’s more of everything,” he says. “But I’ve certainly had that sort of curiosity since I was pretty young.”

After growing up in a Philadelphia suburb (Gunn attended grade school with Kurt Vile; in May, his band joined Vile’s on tour), Gunn moved into the city, took a job at an ice-cream stand in Reading Terminal Market, befriended guitarist Jack Rose (the inspiration for Time Off’s “Old Strange”) and found roommates with record collections. “My world really opened up,” he says. “I discovered so many different kinds of music. It was a real turning point for me. I just took it all in.”

Gunn’s focused study and eagerness to collaborate eventually developed a singular sort-of blues. His 2009 opus, Boerum Palace, matched Gunn’s fingerstyle acoustic and husky vocal with steel-guitar accents courtesy of psych-vet Marc Orleans. Two wandering ragainformed instrumental albums with drummer John Truscinski followed: 2010’s Sand City and 2012’s Ocean Parkway. In April, Gunn joined North Carolina folk/rock explorers Hiss Golden Messenger on the kosmischecountry one-off Golden Gunn.

For Time Off, Gunn wanted to take another new route. His first album to feature a rock-trio configuration (with Truscinski behind the kit and longtime friend Justin Tripp on bass), Time Off maintains Gunn’s

signature blues-derived storytelling, intricate guitar playing and rustic singing.

“In a way, it’s almost an extension of what I’ve been doing,” says Gunn. “It’s almost like I was working up to this point, and when it finally happened, it was super easy for us to fall into it.” —Bryan C. Reed

photo by STEVE GUNN

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Dangerous Minds

Some Stranger just wants to write rad songs and jump off desks—got a problem with that?

“My personal direction was, ‘Hot Snakes

riffs, heavily pitch-shifted loopy lead lines and 180bpm or higher.’ Tym basically wanted to write demented pop songs with ‘more hooks than a tackle box’ that didn’t sound like pop songs.”

That’s guitarist Daniel Danger of aggressive indie-pop/alt-rock duo Some Stranger giving MAGNET a quick estimation of the sound he and former Daytrader vocalist Tym (just Tym) have been focusing their talents toward.

“Ninety percent of my goal in this band is to mess with Tym via songwriting,” he says.

“It’s fun to challenge him with something fast and erratic with dominant melodies and lead hooks, then seeing what he comes up with by ducking and weaving around what I’ve put down. The bridge of ‘Silver And The Sun’ was a great early indication of that working. He was like, ‘I dunno, man, this is ... weird. Does this fit?’ I was like, ‘No, it rules—you have to get weird, too!’”

The pair had an online association for the better part of a decade before finally meeting in person in 2010 while on the hunt for artistic

photo by Zac Wolf

expression and the perfect tune.

“Tym and I met via an internet message board in maybe 2003 or 2004,” says Danger.

“He ran a record label, and I did the cover art for one of his releases. We kept in touch over the years despite not actually meeting in person until 2010 at a Daytrader show in Boston.

When he left Daytrader, he expressed wanting to get right back into making music.”

From there, it was a matter of the two creative minds making use of the power of the internet to bounce ideas off one another in creating the sumptuously bright verses and massive choruses of “Sirens” and “Points East.”

“I’m an insomniac who feels the need to constantly be doing or creating something,” says Danger. “I just so happened to have folders and folders of poppier, up-tempo demos with no band to take them home. I shared a few with Tym, and one stuck out to him—now aptly named ‘Song One’—and he asked if he could try singing over it. A day later he sent me a nearly complete song with finished vocals, and basically said, ‘Another, please.’ I obliged.

Studio time was booked, interested parties

were curious what he was up to, I was excited to be playing noodly guitar in a band again and being able to focus solely on the instrument, and off we went.”

The resulting self-titled EP is also notable for its curious release on Robotic Empire, a label much more in tune with the loud and noisy side of things, having brought the world Torche, Pg. 99 and Isis. But this is a mere nomenclature blip to a duo that may have shifted genres, but hasn’t extinguished its imaginative fires.

“Initially hesitant to make another go at it at age 30, I told Tym early on I would do whatever as long as I got to eventually play a late-night talk show,” Danger (probably) jokes. “I’ll break the band up the moment I jump off Conan’s desk. My housemate commented a while back that he was endlessly entertained that, while I approached the music industry with skepticism and distrust, I countered it with excessive amounts of writing and involvement. I just wanna write rad songs and jump off shit.

I don’t much care what happens outside of that.” —Kevin Stewart-Panko

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/music

Like Father, Like Son

Legend remixed by sons Ziggy, Stephen and EDM’s hottest names

by Emily Trace

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Legends are tricky; exalted, celebrated ,

they enter the public consciousness in a permanent way and yet, they’re rarely as intimidating or untouchable as the word might have us believe. An album that reaches the status of a legend is almost unvaryingly a seminal one, inspiring countless other musicians to create in its wake. And as we’ve seen from the last decade of superhero and myth-based blockbusters, very few legends are closed off to reinterpretation.

This being said, Ziggy Marley’s decision to produce a remix edition of his father’s most successful album—in conjunction with brother Stephen and some of electronic dance music’s hottest names— must have been a nerve-wracking one. Because there are legends, and then there’s Legend: the world’s best-selling reggae album and the second longest chart-topper

in Billboard’s history, this 1984 collection of Bob Marley and The between homage and innovation, the Marley boys’ risks have Wailer’s greatest hits was immeasurably influential on people’s paid off with Legend: Remixed. lifestyle choices as well as musical tastes. It’s a good thing then, This isn’t to say that the album is perfect. While an overthat when Legend: Remixed drops on June 25, 2013, fans may find whelming majority of the songs evince a unified commitment that it is as much a reunion as it is a remix. to creatively honouring the reggae icon’s work, there are a few Though the word “remix” might strike fear into the hearts tracks that fans will be divided on. Getting playful with the inof Marley purists, Ziggy’s commissioned artists that have ap- struments, genre, and general rhythm of the song is expected proached the revered tracks with thoughtful, respectful, and with remixes, and for the most part, it works very well here. It’s frequently inspired energy. With Stephen Marley and him- only when some of the artists try to change the mood or message self tackling some of the biggest hits, the team includes Pretty of the originals that the album hits a snag. Though he’s proved Lights, RAC, Photek, Beats Antique, and Thievery Corporation, himself with the other tracks he collaborated on, not all fans may all known for their experience in successfully remixing the work appreciate Stephen Marley’s reworking of “No Woman, No Cry,” of fellow musicians. which changes out the cosy, sentimental mood of the original for When asked in a recent Liners interview about the concept of a snappy, upbeat tempo. Similarly, Jason Bentley’s rendition of the album, Ziggy Marley described the approach as “an eclectic “Is This Love” replaces many of the simple, romantic lyrics with expression of artistic pieces that would take the songs some- a recording of Bob Marley saying “good music, and dancing muwhere else while respecting the original recordings”, and it is sic, and good vibrations”, which might work in another song but this exact balance of respect and innovation that makes much seems somewhat out of place here. It will depend on what is most of the album so exciting to listen to. important to fans about the original versions; you may appreciate Ziggy personally remixed “Stir It Up” and “Redemption Song”, hearing the familiar lyrics paired with a different mood, bringing and the two tracks are such obvious standouts that one can’t help a fresh perspective to the song. Either way, there is more than but be relieved that he oversaw the production of all the other enough on the album to satisfy practically everyone, regardless of what you’re looking for in a remix. songs. It’s very clear from both tracks that he wasn’t thinking of how to make his father’s songs “better”.

Other standouts include Photek’s “One Love”, What emerges in “Stir It Up” is an introspective, which, like Ziggy Marley’s “Stir It Up”, gives a heartechoing reimagining that retains the relaxing, and warming reggae song a meandering, techno introsubtly sexy overtures of the original, while seamspectively that achieves the same relaxing tenderness that the original did. But the album isn’t overlessly incorporating bluesy techno elements. But it’s “Redemption Song” that’s his greatest achieveburdened with meditative and emotional tracks; ment, if only because the original almost never fails it’s interspersed with some refreshingly energetic to make listeners cry, or at least feel lifted out of pieces, such as RAC’s “Could You Be Loved”, which hopelessness. Despite the high stakes of remixing wisely focuses on the song’s catchiness. Adding Legend: Remixed such a beloved song, Ziggy Marley knows what he’s some compelling synth undertones to the beat and is available now from doing with “Redemption Song”, because he’s clearly drawing out the vocals on the well-known refrain, Universal Music paid attention to what made this piece so powerfully making the question “Could you be loved, and be important to fans of multiple generations. His remix delivers ev- loved?” sound intriguingly rhetorical. ery ounce of Bob’s emotional content, while adding just the right Another highly danceable track is Pretty Lights’ “Exodus”, amount of background percussion and a little Hendrix-esque which fills in the edges of the original with more complex inelectric guitar to complement and even enhance the elements strumentals and a very appropriate beat. Like the other effective that made the original work. It’s a bull’s-eye if there ever was one. songs on the album, Pretty Lights doesn’t try to colour over the Stephen Marley is working from the same rulebook; he evi- spirit of the original, working with Bob Marley’s vision instead dently realized not much can be improved on with “Three Little of obscuring it inside his own ideas. Guided by Ziggy Marley’s Birds”, because he and Jason Bentley offer very restrained en- commitment to the integrity of his father’s work, these artists hancements that groove with the original’s simple, refreshing shine because they are specifically not trying to outshine their mood. But with “Buffalo Soldier”, his skill truly shows as a cre- source material. “Nothing will ever be better than the originals, ative artist who can take electrifying risks. He introduces a very we know that,” says Ziggy. “This is just another experience and well-timed and poignant piano, and even adds an undertone of another way to experience Legend. Enjoy the ride.” contemporary dubstep that works alarmingly well with the regThough he is remembered as one of the most iconic and influgae elements. It takes a perceptive ear to identify the original’s ential figures of the 20th century, his music and lifestyle inspircapacity for such an inventive reworking, and a lot of nerve to ing literal millions, Bob Marley died before his two oldest sons explore that potential with such a seemingly sacrosanct song. But had a chance to form an adult relationship with him, or work Ziggy Marley cites his father’s own openness to the blending of with him beyond the Melody Makers. Perceptively identifying genres, saying that “from the very earliest times [he] showed a the spirit of the songs and their lyrical substance, they expand willingness to be inclusive of sounds from the universe of music”, rhythmically on the original album’s subtext. Because of this, and both he and Stephen seem to be very much guided by Bob Legend: Remixed seems to be a way for Ziggy, Stephen, and some Marley’s belief that “music can’t stick to the same t’ing otherwise very accomplished fans to pick up where the jam session left off, it become mechanical; music have to be fluent.” Mediating deftly keeping the legend alive. needle

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S I H T R E V DISCO ums You Need…

Five New Alb

The Guru

In the time it takes you to read this, Robert Pollard will have written and recorded three brilliant albums and disbanded Guided By Voices again. stages a Beer Summit to find out how and why. story by jonathan valania • photos by chris buck

I think the consensus opinion of the post-reunion albums was that you were putting your poppier stuff on your solo records and your more experimental stuff on the GBV records.

Is that true?

gets past the front door of Desmond’s Tavern,

a grungy windowless tap room in midtown Manhattan that looks like a VFW hall crashed into a sports bar and smells like a frat house at low tide. And the afternoon crowd seems to like it that way. They like to do their drinking in the same place the fly got smashed. With its tobacco-cured walls, expansive array of Anheuser-Busch products and classic rawk on the jukebox, it’s the closest thing to a Dayton dive this far east of the Buckeye State. Which is no doubt why it was selected to host MAGNET’s summit with the clown prince of the menthol trailer park, a.k.a. Robert Pollard, the mic-swinging, high-kicking, Bud-swigging past-present-and-possibly-former frontman for Guided By Voices. We must count our blessings—an audience with Pollard is a rare thing these days. He hasn’t granted an in-person interview in two years.

For most MAGNET readers, Pollard needs no introduction, and space is in short supply, so I will be brief. But if you are new to the Pollard saga, know that he is, hands down, the most gifted, beguiling and—by a wide margin—prolific songwriter of the indie-rock era. By his own count, he has released upwards of 80 records, including 20 Guided By Voices albums, 19 solo LPs and countless albums, EPs and seven-inch singles from his endless string of one-off collaborations and side projects, among them Boston Spaceships, Airport 5, Circus Devils, Acid Ranch, Lifeguards, the Moping Swans, Lexo & The Leapers, Hazzard Hotrods and Howling Wolf Orchestra.

The sheer volume and velocity of Pollard’s recorded output continues to amaze and overwhelm even his most devoted disciples. “I think it explains his lack of extreme, worldwide fame,” says director Steven Soderbergh, an avowed Pollard superfan. “I think people don’t trust him. I think they’re just very suspicious of the amount of material. And it’s so unusual … I don’t know if they find it threatening, or if they’re just bewildered, or they don’t have the stamina to even keep up with it. But all I do is keep listening and marveling at his ability to generate really highquality music. The last couple years … I don’t think he’s ever been bad, but the last couple years in particular he’s been very, very good.”

MAGNET’s interview with Pollard was occasioned by the release of Honey Locust Honky Tonk, 36

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his 19th solo record and arguably his best to date.

We begin with Pollard dropping the bombshell that he has grown bored with the reunion of the so-called classic lineup of Guided By Voices after four albums and a couple tours, and may well pull the plug on it, at least as far as making new albums is concerned. But fear not, my droogs.

Even if that happens, there will be plenty of Pollard to go around. The Fading Captain is a lifer. He shoots himself with rock ‘n’ roll. The hole he digs is bottomless, but nothing else can set him free. pollard: Honey Locust Honky Tonk is basically the songs I wrote for the next Guided By Voices album, but I’m not sure there’s going to be a next Guided By Voices album. I’m not gonna say for sure, but it’s already got a little bit stagnant. To me, it’s kind of run its course.

Really?

We really did a lot within the course of two or three years.

Four albums.

Four albums. First it was a reunion tour, and then it was a proper tour, supporting a new album. But now I’m thinking, probably, I’ll relegate GBV to the festival circuit, you know? People at festivals don’t want to hear a new album—they want to hear the greatest hits. And I’m not that interested in that. I’m more interested in what comes next.

Well, you know, to me, I don’t know if that’s true. What I thought is: I was putting my more mature stuff on my solo record because it has a name of a person, and some of my less mature stuff with the band name because you can do whatever you want—there is no age limit.

Robert Pollard is 55 years old, but the singer for Guided By Voices is whatever.

Your rate of releasing new material is just astonishing, and it’s only gone into overdrive in the last five to 10 years.

In the time it takes some of my contemporaries to put out two albums, I will have put out 30 albums.

That’s pretty ridiculous.

It overwhelms people. People feel like they can’t keep up. “I lost track.” I hear this all the time from people, especially when I mention that I was going to interview you. People were saying that to me back in the early ’90s, and it’s only gotten worse now that you’ve put out a gajillion records. It’s kinda like trying to swallow the ocean.

That’s what I do. I love to write songs, I love to write songs. You can’t turn it off, because you don’t want to turn it off. If you turn it off, maybe you can’t turn it back on.

What do you say to people who tell you you’re oversaturating the market?

Well, first of all, I work at a very strong pace. I’ve been putting out much, to the chagrin of people … a lot of people say that I “dilute my genius”— “genius” is their word, not mine, by the way. But I disagree because that’s the way I work, and I’m afraid to not do it that way; I’m afraid to turn it off because I’m afraid that I wouldn’t be able to turn it back on, you know?

But what if—just to play devil’s advocate here—you wrote and recorded songs, but didn’t put them out as quickly as you do?

Well, I’ve done that. You asked me how do you choose. Well, for the most part, I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ll have a batch of songs, and that’s pretty much what they’re gonna be and they all make it. But occasionally, some of them don’t.

One time I finished an album and I went to this bar and there was a band playing. And there were all these middle-aged women up there dancing to it. I started kind of just daydreaming and gazing and second-guessing myself about what I just did. I was watching the dancers and was like, “Would they dance to my new record? Would they be dancing like that?” And the answer was yes. Yeah, they would dance to it. So, I got rid of the whole thing.

So, you don’t fall into that trap that a lot of musicians do where they can’t even listen to their own albums because all they hear are the mistakes and it drives them nuts?

I make so many mistakes that I’m artistically exempt. It became almost a good thing. It’s almost like, at times, I’m doing that purposely. Not that I want to make mistakes on purpose, but I don’t have to worry about it so much because people don’t seem to care so much. I don’t need to be perfect; I’m not Bowie.

What’s the longest you think you ever spent on a song?

I have read that you have 2,000 songs registered to BMI.

That’s probably five years ago; that count was probably five years ago.

And you released something like 50 albums, between Guided By Voices and side projects and solo records.

Actually, it’s closer to 80.

I remember reading somewhere that you said a couple of years ago someone played you a song of yours that you didn’t even recognize.

It wasn’t even that old of a song. Like, from 2003 or something.

Didn’t even know what it was. The thing is, I got some hardcore fans. And a handful—not a lot, but it’s a handful, about 500, 1,000—are hardcore.

And they know way more than I do. They’ll say,

“You know ... ” And I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ll have no idea what they’re talking about. We’ll be sitting in a bar: “Sing it out, dude. That’s you.” And I’ll be like, “It is?”

You didn’t even know it was you? How much do you listen to records after they’re done?

Hardcore for a month, and then that’s it. Hardcore for a month: “Yeahhhh.” Then after about a month, “That’s enough.” Then I’ll listen to it four or five years later, like, “Yeah, now it’s gotten good. Now it’s ripe.”

Recording it and then rehashing it and all that?

You know, usually when you do that, it’s not worth it—you just throw it away. When I was on TVT, I was almost being arm-twisted into spending too much time. You know, “It’s not an album; you’re holding back on me.” “I’m holding back on you?” “Yeah, where’s the hits? Think cars, girls, summer, that kind of shit?” OK, I can do that. So, I go back and write “Glad Girls” and “Hold On Hope” and shit, and I would labor over it a little bit. There were all these songs that, in hindsight, I’m not happy with. “Oh, we love those songs.”

That’s fine. That’s all good and fine, but I don’t.

They were looking for hits, and we stepped into that trap when we took a step up. And I don’t know if I told you why we even did that in the first place. But we were playing these festivals where we were, you know, third stage, 11 o’clock in the morning and shit. And Tenacious D is second from the headliner on the mainstage. I’m sick of that shit, so I kind of had this thing like, “We’re going for it.” Yeah, and it was a pretty stupid, silly move. But I backed up quick enough, I think. I still kind of like those albums. It was cool to get to work with big-time producers: Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf. It was fun, but it was just … that’s not my bag. We weren’t allowed to drink in the studio. I’m not saying that those records are bad.

It’s just like I don’t appreciate not being able to drink when I’m making my own art. I should have said something, but it was like, he’s Ric Ocasek.

So, you still live in Dayton. Born there, probably gonna die there, right?

Looks like it. I’ve got some good friends in Dayton, and my cop-out is always like, “Man, any place you go to after a while is going to suck.”

Plus, my parents are still alive, and it’s like, when your parents are still alive … you know, they’re around 80, and they’re still doing well. It’s just hard to leave. Remember you came and hung out with us?

Jay Carney / W h i t e H o u s e p r e s s s e c r e ta r y I love the themes of Bob’s songs: robots and planes and drinking. The hint of meaning within the mysterious lyrics, the humor. British invasion/alt rock/lo-fi: all my buttons. Favorite GBV record is Bee Thousand. Also love Sunfish Holy Breakfast. And Fast Japanese Spin Cycle.

Solo album I know best, and love, is his first: Not In My Airforce.”

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Are you kidding? Of course I do. It was 1999, for the cover of the September issue.

My wife hates that.

Do you remember some of the crazy shit we did? Remember we got kicked out of the fucking strip bar?

Why?

Because your brother said, that woman’s got “the finest fartbox in Dayton.”

So, what’s a typical day in the life of Robert Pollard these days?

I know! [Laughs]

I get up ...

But why did we get kicked out? Because we were being loud or something?

You write three albums, have breakfast?

I don’t think we deserved to be kicked out. You know, what the fuck? What are you supposed to do?

They’re naked and you’re giving us beer! What do you think we’re going to do?

What are we supposed to be, the perfect little choir boys? We didn’t do anything to deserve to be kicked out.

That was fucking great. That was like going to Guided By Voices fantasy camp. Do you know how many people would have killed to come to your house and hang out at the Monument Club? Go down to the Snake Pit and rifle through all your vinyl? Sit on stools wearing headphones hunched over the fourtrack you recorded Bee Thousand on? See the rooster with the six-pack ring around its neck that lived next door? Go to the elementary school you taught at, and then going to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they took the alien bodies and crashed spaceship from Roswell?

Man, I appreciate that. Those are the things I’m always worried about, like after you left. Like, “Man, I bet he thought that was weird, that we were fucking retarded.” [Laughs] Not at all, no. I grew up in Allentown, Pa., which is very much like Dayton. That’s a big part of why I’ve always related to your story—because I totally know what it’s like to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, in love with rock ‘n’ roll, with no hope of ever “making it.” Rock stars don’t come from where I live. So, you drink beer with your buddies down in the basement, plug in and turn it up, and close your eyes and fake it until it becomes real, until you’re Live At Budokan.

Yeah, that’s it basically.

Dayton is also the ancestral home of the Breeders. Where did the Deal sister grow up?

The Deal sisters grew up in Huber Heights, which is close to where I grew up.

You know what I came across last night that I haven’t heard in forever? That cover of “Love Hurts” you did with Kim Deal. That’s still one of my all-time favorite Bob Pollard recordings.

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That’s with Kim. She thinks we were in love. We kind of were. [Laughs]

I read a lot. I get up early, very early. Anywhere from two to seven in the morning. People say, like, “You need to get up every once in a while and see the sun rise.” No, I get up five hours before the sun rises. I go back to bed before the sun rises. I get up, feed the cats, let them out. I have coffee. I like to go listen to records real early in the morning with my headphones on. I’ve been doing that since I was a little kid. First thing in the morning.

And then go to work, maybe do some collages.

Until about maybe noon, and then I start getting kind of bored a little bit, and then maybe exercise.

Just go out for a little run, maybe. Which I don’t do as much as I’d like to. Then maybe I might take a drive, find maybe a thrift shop and find stuff to cut on for collages. My drinking is usually from four to eight. I got this old-guy schedule, because I’m old. So, my drinking is from four to eight, which is not too bad. A Miller Lite, maybe a couple shots of Cuervo, go home, maybe watch the Reds for a while or whatever. Ten o’clock, I’m out. Every day. That’s what I do.

How have you managed, after all these years of being Mr. Pounding Buds Guy, how do you wind up not becoming a casualty or a bum?

I know. Especially when it became part of the glamour and we played that that up, you know?

First of all, a lot of people think I’m just a raging alcoholic. I was going to tell you … there’s people from, like, the community that I was raised in. This one guy came up to me one time—this was about 20 years ago—after he saw one of my shows. He goes, “Man, we’re really concerned about your drinking.” I was like, “Really?” “Yeah.

It’s not good.” I go, “That’s on a stage, dude. OK?” And it’s not that bad. I don’t get that bad. I realize I go overboard sometimes.

This guy is like, “We’re worried, we’re concerned about you.” Really. I haven’t seen you in 15 years, and now you’re concerned about my drinking? But anyways, the same guy, like eight years later, comes and asks me if I know where he can find a job. You know, I’m still doing what I do.

What’s the last good book you’ve read?

What I’ve been reading, and I’ve been reading a lot of it, I’ve been reading surrealism. I’ve been reading French surrealism, and I’ve read biographies about Rimbaud and André Breton and, before that, Victor Hugo. So, I’ve been reading all these biographies. I’ve been getting into art.

And I’ve read the Peggy Guggenheim biography and Max Ernst. So, that’s what I’ve been reading.

I like to read occult stuff, metaphysical studies and shit like that. That’s the kind of stuff I’ve been reading. I usually keep two, three, four different books at the same time going.

What’s going on with this Cleopatra: The Musical project that you’ve been working on with Steven Soderbergh?

That’s going on and on and it just … at one point it was going to happen as a movie. We were going through contract offers and figures, and Steven and (ex-GBV bassist and band biographer) Jim Greer came out, and we spent time together working on lyrics. We actually got to the point where we had 21 or 22 songs, and they hired musicians and went into the studio and recorded them. I’ve heard the tapes. Sounds good. And they got the drummer from Bowie’s band, from around Ziggy Stardust … what’s his name? Woody Woodmansey? Great drummer. So, I thought it was going to happen. But for some reason, it didn’t happen. (Soderbergh) started doing other things, and then I heard reasons like, “Well, we’re thinking about making a Broadway musical.” And I’m like, “OK. OK.” Meaning, “I’m out”?

No, I’m not out, but just I’m not going to get excited. They were going to have Catherine Zeta-Jones play Cleopatra, but now I’m not sure. They could maybe make her up. She’s still good-looking, but is she young enough to be Cleopatra? Cleopatra was fairly young, wasn’t she?

How long ago was this?

This was five years ago. Even then we were talking about, “We gotta do it quickly because ... ” [Laughs] The thing about Broadway is you don’t get a bunch of money up front, but I guess, if it does well … if it doesn’t do well, you get nothing, but it does real well, you’re set for life almost.

You know? It’s like Cats or something. [Laughs] I wouldn’t mind being the Andrew Lloyd Webber of indie rock.

So, you have a huge record collection: thousands and thousands, which I can personally

Colin Meloy / D e c e m b e r i s t s Bob’s songs are just pure concentrated pop, culling any unnecessary parts. It’s all about economy, which all great pop songs are, but it’s economy to the point of absurdity, where you’re only getting a verse and a chorus. His songs are pared down to their perfect essence.

And that’s what got me.”

attest to. Here’s a hypothetical: You wake up in the middle of the night, your house is on fire, there’s only time to grab one album.

What do you grab?

Propeller because it’s worth more money! It’s worth more money than the butcher cover (of the Beatles’ Yesterday & Today)! I have it! I have that!

Is it true that you sold a signed a copy of Propeller for $4,000?

$6,200. And my brother sold one for $4,800. And they’re still going for at least $1,000.

Wow, good on ya! I read in this interview that you were saying that, “Some people were saying I was gouging the fans.” Nobody would ever accuse Picasso of gouging his fans. You are selling your art to people who want to own it for whatever price the market will bear.

When we make a limited run, we don’t sell them for $50 apiece; we sell them for whatever an LP or an EP or whatever else is going for at the time.

And if you didn’t get it, you didn’t get it. Here’s another thing I’ve been accused of, like I told you before, “You make too much music—it dilutes what you do.” Why then, every time I see one of my records, maybe three or four years after they’ve come out, they got a big-ass price tag on it? Because it’s out of print. Because we don’t make many of them! I make a lot of records, but not many of them. Never more than 1,000.

Guided By Voices? Maybe 3,000. [A band starts setting up instruments on the nearby stage] I think we’re getting ready to rock here tonight. [Hollering toward the stage] “Alriiiiiight!!! Hello, New York!!!” We used to do that. When Guided By Voices first played live, we still had people come up and introduce us like that: “Alriiiiiight!!! Are you ready to rock?!”

I still get a chuckle every time I think of that story you told me years ago about an early band photo session. You guys wanted to look like you just came offstage and were all sweaty, so you ran around the block before you took the picture.

In Beatle boots! We had towels around our neck, looking like Uriah Heep, high-fiving and hugging each other, and we’d never even played a show. [Laughs] How do you rank your own records? Do you have a hierarchy?

I treat them all as my children.

So, you love them all equally. Or at least say you do.

I have favorites. I totally have favorites. The first one we ever did, Devil Between My Toes, was one of my favorites. Propeller, Bee Thousand, Universal Truths And Cycles. Solo-wise, I love From A Compound Eye, Moses On A Snail.

Steven Soderbergh / f i l m d i r e c t o r Music has changed so much in terms of how people listen to it, and what ‘popular music’ even means, that you could make an argument that Bob was just born 20 years too late …

I’ve got an iTunes folder of my personal ‘Best Of GBV,’ and it’s got, like, 350 songs in it. And that’s just my first pass at trying to pull out gems.”

What do you make of these GBV tribute bands? Are you aware of this? There’s a Japanese GBV cover band I found on YouTube.

There’s one called Tigerbomb from Portland.

Not bad at all. The singer kind of looks like John Goodman, but that’s OK.

Somebody told me that they said, “We do Guided

By Voices better than Guided By Voices.” That’s not possible! Nobody can do your band better than you do! I think there’s a cover band called Textbook Committee. There’s one called Guys With Bad Voices.

There’s something called the Euro Heedfest in London every year, where it’s like eight hours of Guided By Voices cover bands, acoustic GBV sets, GBV dance parties, GBV karaoke all day and all night, and kegs and kegs of beer.

Yep. I sent them a little blurb, like, “Sorry I can’t be there.”

What’s your favorite album of all time?

Well, I want to say this first of all: After much deliberation and meditation and listening and spending time, my religion is rock. I’ve decided that the greatest album of all time is Wire, 154.

Yeah. That’s not even a top-20 band, but that’s the greatest album. I listened to it again the other day, and it’s the most intelligent, rewardingwith-repeated-listenings album that I … it just never fails.

Let’s talk about your collages. When did you start doing that?

Probably like in third grade or something. You look at the old album covers—those are collages and shit. I used to ask artists to do drawings and stuff, but people would never come through. I was like, “Fuck ’em, I’ll make the covers myself.”

They’re great.

They’re getting better. I’ve done shows.

You did a gallery show in New York, didn’t you? It was called Do The Collage, right?

I did three shows in New York. A lot of people came. The thing is, I was really out of my element doing an art show, but it turns out doing an art show is easy. It’s like playing a fucking rock show, and you get fucked up, but you never come out of the dressing room. And you got people looking at your silly shit on the wall, and all you have to do is go over and explain it. This couple’s like, “What’s that mean? What are you saying here?” That’s Rosie O’Donnell on a mushroom cloud. [Laughs] How much do the collages go for? What’s the

price range?

Usually anywhere from $300 to … I’ve sold a few for $7,000, $8,000.

That’s an artist, my friend.

That’s an artist, yeah. Well, somebody told me one time, “Like, let me get this right: You just cut pictures out like when you were a little kid and glue them back together?” And I go, “Yeah, basically.” A little bit more elaborate than that. It’s somewhat of a process. First of all, there’s a store, it’s called the Goodwill Outlet. It’s a huge store, and it’s insane, man. You can get hurt in there.

Because they just bring out all these bins of shit and people start knocking you over to get there, and it’s just all junk, but it’s a treasure trove for me. There’s one section that’s nothing but books and magazines, and I find, like, mid-18th-century, 19th-century anatomical diagrams and stuff with crazy, you know, skulls and shit. I’ll get a bunch of stuff, I’ll take it home, look through it and I’ll start cutting out what I want. Then you kind of start moving things around until they start assembling themselves.

That strikes me as a good metaphor for your songwriting process: It’s basically you kind of raiding the deep-cut archives of rock from the last 40 years, just grabbing this beat from here and this chord change from there.

It’s all cut and paste. The art, the words, the music—it’s all moving things around and cutting and pasting and scrambling and descrambling until you like it. It’s appealing to your eye or your ear. That’s what I do. Because I don’t have any technical ability, or know how you are supposed to do it.

You have no art training?

No training whatsoever. No music training, no art training, nothing. The only training I have is, like, sports training. Yeah. I was cool. I was pretty fucking good. Especially when I was a little kid, I was a good athlete.

Did you ever think about playing pro ball?

Oh, I thought it about it my whole life. That’s what I was supposed to do.

But?

Well, I always wanted to do rock ‘n’ roll. My dad, he always tried to dissuade me from it. He wanted my brother and I to be pro athletes—that was what we were supposed to be. I always wanted to do rock, but I never thought that was possible.

Sports was possible; I could do that. Rock, I don’t know anything about it.

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Well, what happened to sports?

Bob Dylan ever wrote. Or John Lennon.

Sgt. Pepper …

I injured my arm right before I went to college.

Something popped in my elbow, and I still played college, I still pitched college and I pitched this no-hitter, but it was never as lively as it was my senior year. My dad pretty much raised me to go pro. He had dollar signs in his eyes. But I secretly wanted to do rock anyway. I just didn’t think it was possible. Plus, there was nobody in my high school that could even play. So, eventually we just forced ourselves to do it anyway. I taught myself how to play the guitar.

It’s about making you smile in your soul; that’s what we try to do. It makes sense to the happiness of what you love. That’s art. Art doesn’t have to make any sense, does it?

Just wait…

I think you get a lot of credit for writing catchy hooks and melodies, but you kind of get short shrift as a lyricist, and I think you are one of the best who ever was in that regard.

I was just listening to Sunfish Holy Breakfast the other day—still one of my all time favorite GBV releases—and that line about “cock soldiers and their post-war stubble.” That just nails that dreary burnout and national PTSD of the ’70s post-Vietnam era, and yet it speaks to now, too. Now that all these guys are coming back from Afghanistan, and it’s not like the heroic, clean-shaven, good-looking guys with great hair triumphantly marching off to war, like, “America, fuck yeah!” of 10 years ago. They all come back and they’re just like, “We got fucking used, man. This was all bullshit and, like, my arm’s blown off.”

Life doesn’t, so why should art? Let’s talk about Bee Thousand. I really can’t believe it came out almost 20 years ago. Amazon recently named it the greatest indie-rock album of all time.

What makes it a masterpiece? I don’t know, but it’s now considered to be a masterpiece …

It is a masterpiece. In its own way, it really is as great as Exile On Main Street, as great as

You caught lightning in a bottle … the light shined on you ...

I don’t want to get all hung up, motherfucker, in why is that better than this? It’s just an accident, a masterpiece by accident.

Well, most of them are. That record cast a spell on me, and it’s never left me. So, the question I wanted to ask you is, has it become this albatross around your neck where every record was compared to that? Like, “Here’s another Guided By Voices record that’s not as good as Bee Thousand.”

Exactly.

And then there’s that song about “the flying party is here.” Which is really eerie and surreal, yet somehow familiar. Like, my friends are coming over, and we’re all going to go flying.

Like we all know how to do it.

[Singing] Flying party is here.

And then at the end you sing, “Hello, John, the sun loves you.” Which just makes me smile in my soul, and I’m not sure why, but I can feel the love. I can’t put my finger on how that goes with “the flying party is here,” but I can make the leap. I think a lot of people can.

And that’s a sign of a great songwriter. Like a lot of your lyrics, it’s these fragments of fascinating narrative that we come to in media res and then we’re onto the next fragment of fantastical narrative. Very dreamlike. “I’ll climb up on the house/Weep to water the trees/And when you come calling me down/I put on my disease.” Wow. That’s as good as anything

Mike Watt / M i n u t e m e n , S t o o g e s He is one prolific motherfucker. His songwriting is really important, because it isn’t just Guided By Voices these days. Sometimes it’s just his own name. No matter who he’s playing with or whatever context he’s putting himself in, you can tell it’s his music. I think he’s just a really essential part of the fabric of the scene or movement that I’ve been a part of a long time. He’s a beacon, a lighthouse.”

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photo by jonathan valania

I’m not trying to create another Bee Thousand, because I don’t know how to do that. It’s got to be an accident, I guess. Bee Thousand was an accident.

It doesn’t seem like you spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not people are going to think the next album and the one after that and the one after that is as good as Bee Thousand.

I think they are. I think they’re better. I’m proud that we have what people consider to be a masterpiece. Not too many people get that. But I think they all are. I think I’ve got, I don’t know if its 500 or 300 or 1,000, but there is between 300 and 1,000 people that think every album I do is as great as Bee Thousand, and they know them all, and that’s good enough for me.

Tell me about how it was made. It was these fragments of old stuff, but …

We did 100 fucking songs for that album. That was my theory back then: If we do 100 fucking songs, 20 of them have to be good. That’s why there’s all those EPs, because it was originally going to be a double album. We had all these crazy songs we were going to put on there.

Like “Hot Freaks”?

Do you know how many takes of that we did? One. That was just all made up on the spot. We were down in Toby (Sprout)’s basement, and he had this instrumental, this groovy cocktail-sounding thing, and he played that, and I go, “OK, I think I’ve got a lyric for that.” And upstairs they were having a garage sale, and all they could hear was me screaming, “Hot freaks!” People were like, “What is going on down there?” And he just rolled tape, and I just sang my lyrics in one take, and then we listened back like, “Wooooowww, yeah.”

I want to read you some things that I found on the web, and want to give you a chance to respond. I love this quote—it’s from the Washington Post: “Pollard is sort of the Grateful Dead equivalent for people who like Miller Lite instead of acid.”

Basically. My answer to that is: basically.

“Robert Pollard doesn’t need three minutes to make a song stick in your head for the rest of your life. Hell, sometimes he doesn’t even need a minute.”

I’m a student of hooks. I’m always looking for the Eternal Hook, that perfect combination of a lyric and a chord pattern that gives you that chill up the back of your head. You know what I’m talking about?

I totally know what you’re talking about. It’s a drug—it’s why you keep buying every album.

It’s why you keep going to shows: “I want that feeling again.” It’s like chasing the dragon.

I want that, I gotta have that. That’s spiritual. Mu-

Tobin Sprout / G u i d e d B y V o i c e s My first impression of Bob was he had something special that I hadn’t seen before, or at least not up close and in person. To see it from the beginning, I remember a lot of great before he had greatness. Even the name Guided By Voices had some magic implication to it. “OK, this is going somewhere. I’m not sure where.” And at the time, it was nowhere, but there was a feeling something was going to happen, clandestine. He had an air about his writing, a sort of a sacred space around his songs. They just have that thing that reaches you somewhere in your heart and makes you feel connected to the song, as if channeled from heaven. And he just keeps going; he is obsessed. He is a mad scientist, but in a good way.”

sic exists on the physical plane, but it transcends into the mental and then spiritual plane. Animals love it—that’s why you have to carry an acoustic guitar around with you at all times, in case you get attacked by a pack of dogs.

Soothe the savage beast, as it were. “Robert Pollard seemed to dream of playing to packed stadiums. As is part of indie-rock folklore by now, back in the late ’90s the ragged group of musicians who played with him in Guided By Voices were disbanded, replaced by a tight, competent backing group. Pollard and this new version of Guided By Voices worked with former Cars lead Ric Ocasek to produce a glossy, punchy and generally unloved album (Do The Collapse) that was meant to be the band’s major label debut. The major labels passed on hearing the final product.”

Guess what we’re getting paid the big bucks for now? The old guys!

I’ll be honest with you: I lost interest in the band when you were really going for it. Having said that, I actually liked Do The Collapse.

I think those guys were really nice, they were great musicians and the band sounded pro, but the charm was the narrative of the old group. You guys were from Dayton, you’re a schoolteacher, Toby was a painter, and Mitch (Mitchell) is a truck driver and chain-smokes onstage. Greg (Demos) wears these crazy striped white bell-bottoms. You guys drink beer until it comes out of your ears and jam until these magic songs start coming out.

First of all, man, that wasn’t my decision. Toby was quitting.

Star. Even from Guided By Voices’ earliest days of basement home recording, that tension always created interesting dynamics, as the two sides of Pollard’s split songwriting personality fought it out for dominance with each other and with his bandmates, often within the same song. Since Guided

By Voices’ second incarnation broke up in 2004, however, Pollard seems to be increasingly inclined to compartmentalize his songwriting styles. His endless stream of solo albums have for the most part displayed his more eccentric, whimsical side, while the hard-charging power-pop anthems found an outlet through his main side project since 2008, the Boston Spaceships.”

I’m a professional songwriting machine. I just keep adding to the jukebox; mainly it’s for my own entertainment. I wish I had written “I Can See For Miles,” then I’d quit.

One last one. This is actually, I think, the best writer of all. This is about the classic lineup tour. “Philadelphia has smiled on Guided By Voices since the band broke from the twilight obscurity of … ”

They said “twilight obscurity.” That’s funny— what the fuck is that supposed to mean? “… Dayton, Ohio, packing the Khyber time and again to watch Pollard baptize himself with Budweiser and belch out the greatest songs never heard ... ”

I love that one.

“And for one beery moment everything still seemed possible.”

Everything.

I know that. He had newborns and didn’t want to be on the road.

Kevin (Fennell) was having problems.

Right, a drug problem.

I had to do it. You’ve got to make a move. If it wasn’t for that, the lineup probably would have stayed the same forever.

“Pollard has always had two primary songwriting modes—the ramshackle, throw everything-at-the-wall pop experimentalist, and the writer of power-pop anthems in the mould of the aforementioned Cars and Big

“If your passion for GBV has slowly diminished as the production value of each ensuing album has steadily evolved from field recording-fuzzy to radio-friendly, this is a good chance to get back to where you once belonged. It will remind you of why you first fell in love with the legend of beerpounding, ex-teacher old dudes building four-track masterpieces in the basements of the Midwest.”

Four-track masterpieces. Who wrote that?

I did. M NEEDLE

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The Sun Always Rises

Down a key member, Sigur Rós unsurprisingly retains its majestic grandeur

S

igur Rós has always been a patient band. The group favors

slow tempos, gradual crescendos, quietude within long songs and lengthy pauses between albums. Discounting live sets, soundtracks and collaborations, full-lengths have appeared at three- or four-year intervals, so it’s a shock that Kveikur comes only a year after last year’s Valtari. More significantly, it’s the first album since the departure of keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, who joined the band for 1999’s landmark Ágaetis Byrjun. Although Jónsi’s voice and bowed guitar define Sigur Rós, Sveinsson’s piano played Sigur Rós a large part in the delicate beauty of the band’s soundscapes, and he often handled the orchestral and string arrangements that added to their grandeur.

Kveikur ¶ As if to dispense with the past, Kveikur opens with a moment of staticky xl electricity, then a heavy crash of rumbling bass, thunderous drums and dense washes of bowed guitar. It’s as if the trio—bassist Georg Holm, drummer Orri Páll Dýrason and singer/guitarist Jonsi (Jon Por Birgisson)—chose to skip their archetypal patient crescendos and go right for the climax. The song, “Brenninsteinn,” possesses a little of the horror-film darkness of 1997’s Von, the first Sigur Rós album (pre-Sveinsson), although once Jonsi starts singing, that dissipates: His angelic voice soars above the weighty instrumentation. At nearly eight minutes, it’s Kveikur’s longest track (most hover around five), and it’s bifurcated by a middle pause that allows a brief breather before the band kicks back into gear. photo by ryan mcginley

On the whole, Kveikur is more focused and aggressive than previous Sigur Rós albums, especially compared to the placid and diffuse Valtari. However, it doesn’t come across as a radical departure, at least not as much as the band’s recent version of The Simpsons theme song. Sigur Rós has constantly tinkered with its sui generis sound, so touches like the backward vocals on “Yfirboro,” the electronic distortions and feedback on the densely martial title track or the clattering percussion of “Hrafntinna” are simply new variations. And the album doesn’t completely forsake keyboards or strings, although they play a more secondary role than usual, bolstering rather than driving several tracks—at least until the closing coda of “Var,” a somber piano-led

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reviews instrumental that sounds like a requiem.

Because Kveikur’s prevailing tones are dark and ominous, the moments of brightness offer sharp relief, and they provide several of the album’s highlights. “Isjak” drapes Jonsi’s voice in reverb and layers it to sound like an ecstatic boys’ choir. It approaches the giddy joy of his solo album, as does the chiming, orchestral “Stormur,” the LP’s most beautiful track. And for lovers of Sigur Rós’ cathartic climaxes, there’s “Rafstraumur,” perhaps the album’s most perfect combination of earthly power and heavenly transcendence.

Kveikur is a loud record—the hard-hit tumble of tom-tom drums drives most songs—and an invigorating one. It sounds like a band getting down to business, adjusting its identity to account for downsizing while consolidating its many strengths. —Steve Klinge

Joseph Arthur

The Ballad Of Boogie Christ Lonely Astronaut

Put on your boogie … sandals?

You can’t just tell people you’ve recorded a psychedelic-soul record—mention that it’s got some grit, a few background vocalists and a good horn section, and leave it at that.

Brooklyn-by-way-of-Ohio art-popper Joseph Arthur does a handy job with his own riveting R&B-tinged journey. He invokes the Lord and spaceships while plinking a foppish doo-wop piano and nestling his gruff vocals against a dense bank of tenor saxophones on “The Currency Of Love.”

Arthur takes to positive howling affirmations about wrestling with addiction (“All The Old Heroes”), makes hymns from his own lean epistles (“I Miss The Zoo”) and playfully intones the message and magic of Christ (“I Used To Know How To Walk On Water”) in a soulful manner befitting both a man of humor and the crises of faith. Mostly, though, Arthur goes at it more heartily than ever on autobiographical treatises like “King Of Cleveland,” with a fullblooded band of renowneds (Garth Hudson, Ben Harper) and a funk that matches his usual finessed frenzy. —A.D. Amorosi

Bell X1

Chop Chop Belly Up

Carving out something new

Bell X1’s ninth full-length relies more heavily on the pop side of the pop-electronic playbook, but it’s a heavy record even so. Having built a following as one of Ireland’s most impressive live acts, the band splits Chop Chop about evenly between soaring, grand-scale compo-

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Redemption Songs Steve Earle reigns as the fittest of survivors on a new retrospective

S

teve Earle has become the wise, old, long-

bearded sage of slow-moving indie/roots/country.

There’s aged ire in his voice, and elegy in every bruised ballad and roughhouse rocking melody. Earle was Steve Earle confident enough in that newfound position to use the moniSteve Earle: The Warner Bros. Years ker Steve Earle And The Dukes (And Duchesses) to record new album The Low Shout! Factory Highway. That record is the first to feature the Dukes title since 1987’s Exit o. With that, Earle seems to be in a reminiscing mood, or at least one generous enough to include musical collaborators that demarcate band work from solo material, à la Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. The Warner Bros. Years is perfectly timed: an end-of-the-’90s catalog that includes studio LPs such as Train A Comin’, I Feel Alright and El Corazón, unreleased concert album Live At The Polk Theater and the To Hell And Back DVD, a live gig filmed at Tennessee’s Cold Creek Correctional Facility.

These recordings are the sound of a man back in the game and ready to pounce. Earle was freshly free (in 1995) of cocaine and heroin addictions, and just out of a jail-time rehabilitation center after a possession arrest, so there’s rugged redemption in every breath of this boxed set. Train A Comin’ sounds the chinkedbrass bell of freedom—from drugs, from incarceration— in a raw and glorious fashion. Earle’s voice is tattered but proud, his lyrics wearily emotive with an eye to the immediate future, nothing tentative or halting. Yet it’s the live recordings that show off Earle’s role as the inheritor of Johnny Cash’s redemptive mantle—an outlaw still, but a saved one—even down to the jailhouse concert recording. Amen to all this. —A.D. Amorosi

photo by seÑor mcguire

sitions and more intimate arrangements for piano, percussion and noise effects.

The latter cuts are the most interesting, since Bell X1 grew its rep largely on the sweep and size of the music, but that confidence marks even the more reserved songs on Chop Chop. Leadoff single “Careful What You Wish For” trades in the band’s established sound, but it’s the centerpiece hat trick of “Diorama,” “Drive-By Summer” and “Motorcade” that seems to point a slightly new direction, with melodies like a set of lost Scott Walker tunes and a low-end percussion anchoring assured, slinky melodies. Hypnotic and punchy by turns, it’s a riveting album that finds Bell X1 pushing its established aesthetics in admirably new directions. —Eric Waggoner

Boards Of Canada

Tomorrow’s Harvest Warp

They came, they reaped, they sowed

When April’s bafflingly complex cyber-scavenger hunt turned out to be an announcement that Boards Of Canada’s first LP since 2005 was forthcoming, even the most optimistic fans could be excused for holding back their elation until they actually heard Tomorrow’s Harvest’s lead single, given the group’s infamous penchant for baiting its ever-overzealous faithful’s patience with hints at new material.

It’s a pleasant surprise then that Tomorrow’s Harvest wasn’t just well worth the eight-year wait, but BOC’s best full-length since its hallowed 1999 debut. A newfound discordant bent—evident in the frigid claustrophobia of “Come To Dust” and “Jacquard Causeway”— sits well here alongside everything that’s made the duo one of the most beloved cult acts of the past couple decades. (Case in point: the impeccably harmonic lilt of instant classics “Nothing Is Real” and “Cold Earth.”) Though it’s easily the group’s densest, most challenging release to date, Tomorrow’s Harvest will likely gratify anyone willing to dig deep enough to reap its wonders. —Möhammad Choudhery

CSS

Planta SQE Music

Our kind of all-nighter

It doesn’t matter what season it is when CSS puts out an album; the band’s music always sounds like summer. Its next release should feature the Brazilian party band riding jet skis on the cover, Go-Go’s style.

The Dave Sitek-produced Planta keeps things light and easy. “Atomic”-esque opener “Honey” sets the tone with its refrain: “You can turn me on, and I will never turn on you.” “Hangover,” a break-up song, feels more like a party, a cross between “Paper Planes” and “Steal My Sunshine,” punctuated with mariachi horns. Diana Ross’ “Love Hangover” would approve. For

CSS, a break-up is like a hangover—just sleep it off, get up and do it all over again the next night. After all, as the band says, “We are glitter in a sea of dots.”

“Dynamite,” with Gossip drummer Hannah Blilie guesting, is a party on Planet Claire, while “Teenage Tiger Cat” conjures disco freakazoids in heat. “Frankie Goes To Hollywood,” is not, as I’d hoped, a remake of “Relax,” but something sweeter: a plea to a missing gay friend to come back home. —Sara Sherr

Date Palms

The Dusted Sessions Thrill Jockey

We have ignition

Core Date Palms members Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons have been working toward this state for a while.

Separately, each of them has made albums that plumb the mysteries of pure sound. Together, they’ve already recorded two Date Palms records on which they’ve honed a languid, low-velocity instrumental sound that reconciles Carnatic (Southern Indian) and psychedelic elements.

But on The Dusted Sessions, they’ve nailed it. The whole album feels like one slow, spiraling dive through the realm of the senses and into the unknown. Electric bass and Rhodes piano set the unhurried pace, and pedal-steel guitar and violin play melodies whose contours would have been banned under the old Motion Picture Production Code. Behind it all, long tones from electronics and tambura exert the gravity that takes you all the way out. This record’s controls are set for the heart of the drone, and the crew knows precisely where they’re going.

—Bill Meyer

Daughn Gibson

Me Moan Sub Pop

Gothic, electronic Americana

Daughn Gibson’s 2012 release, All Hell, sounded like it had been made by someone who had fallen into a mud puddle while leading a pack of horses down a dirt path and drinking moonshine. It’s unhinged country music with electronics and pitch shifts thrown in. It worked exceptionally well. Gibson has now found a home at Sub Pop, and he’s cleaned up a bit.

The production is crisper, the songs seem less abrupt, and the vocals are less murky.

What has remained is Gibson’s picturesque storytelling. “Took a walk at 10 a.m./Cemetery riches abound/Put my jacket on the ledge/ Smoke my broken cigarette,” he sings on the gorgeous “All My Days Off,” and the listener travels the unfocused day with him. Although the musical ditch-drops of his last release were compelling, a bit of soap and water doesn’t hurt Gibson much. This is someone to watch. —Jill LaBrack

Jesse Harris

Borne Away

Undertow Music

Unplugged, electric; he knows why and how

After scoring big as a songwriter with “Don’t Know Why” in 2003, Jesse Harris was free to explore his swingy pop ambitions in all subsequent contexts. Although he’s never strayed far from the jazzy folk/pop that defined his early work, Harris has found diverse ways to sculpt his songs into interesting new shapes.

On Borne Away, Harris allows the acoustic bones of each quickly written but intensely focused track to establish its identity, his delicate finger-picking and subtle songcraft enhanced only slightly by studio frippery performed almost exclusively by Harris himself. (Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger vocalist Charlotte Kemp Muhl’s siren-like contributions electrify “The Silent Sea” and the compelling title track.) Harris weaves an eclectic sonic tapestry across Borne Away’s 14 tracks—the Nick Drake-tinged “Stray Dog,” the Tin Pan Alley/Randy Newman lope of “Do You Really Love Him,” the circuitously beautiful “The Pain Has Just Begun”— in the service of the most nakedly engaging album in his impressive canon. —Brian Baker

Hausu

Total

Hardly Art

Gimme indie rock

Based on the name, we were expecting a band that sounds like a screaming demon-cat from a Japanese b-movie. But, alas, we ended up with something much, much better. (Hard to believe, ain’t it?) It takes about two minutes of Total before you start thinking, “Damn, is this some sort of lost ’90s indie-rock gem?” and begin throwing around comparisons to slacker-noise torchbearers like Archers Of Loaf, Sebadoh, Silkworm, Polvo and Pavement.

But this isn’t a dusty relic from some dudes who have long since submitted to adulthood— this band is barely old enough to buy its own booze, which means that it’ll be cranking out jagged, noisy gems for years to come. (Hopefully.) On songs like “1991-2001,” “John Codeine” and “Kool Off,” Hausu connects with the discordant and anarchistic end of the postpunk spectrum to create an album that’s tense, confrontational and thrilling. —Sean L. Maloney

Hebronix

Unreal ATP

The right call

When Daniel Blumberg said he was quitting Yuck to “work on other things,” here’s what he meant: songs that are quieter.

Slower. Moodier. More solitary and introspective. Without Max Bloom’s guitar or Mariko Doi’s bass or Jonny Rogoff’s drums or any-

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reviews thing else getting in the way of his brooding. With a keyboard that sounds like a harp one minute, a glockenspiel the next. With a two-note chord on organ repeated 97 times. With swelling strings that fit perfectly alongside everything else, rising out of a cloud of noise that’s been building since the opening note 10 minutes ago.

With layer upon layer of electric guitar, an orchestra of guitars arranged into a fugue, playing songs that fade into nothingness. That wait until the last 50 seconds to begin the guitar solo. That let him sing lines like “I’ve got some things to do/Some private things to do.” Or “My tongue is standing on the edge of a thousand words.” Or “I feel unreal,” which must be what it’s really like to be Daniel Blumberg.

Put them all together, and you get something that’s very lovely and poetic and melancholy and vulnerable and unspeakably beautiful.

—Kenny Berkowitz

The Horse’s Ha

Waterdrawn

Hidden Agenda

We vote neigh

The Horse’s Ha may be Chicago-based, but its spirit seems to reside in a remote English village. The second collaboration between Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day, Freakwater) and Brit expat Jim Elkington (Zincs) is another collection of elegant, somber folk songs that take their cues from Pentangle and Fairport Convention.

This isn’t freak-folk—there are few Ren Faire pretentions or lysergic explorations. It’s just 11 songs (plus one instrumental) that let Bean’s clear voice float over acoustic guitar and sparse accompaniment, with Elkington’s baritone vocals lending frequent support. The duo often casts an entrancing spell one song at a time, on the likes of “Hidey Hole” and “A Stony Valentine.” Over the course of an entire album, however, the mood can frequently drag. A few bursts of levity or a different energy might have helped. —Michael Pelusi

Blind Leading The Blind Pete Yorn and J.D. King team up as inconsistent-yet-amenable popsmiths the Olms The Olms

The Olms

I

t’s hard to fault supremely talented loner

Pete Yorn for wanting to explore the benefits of interaction—if only the results thus far weren’t so harvest mixed. His fey-pop tryst with Hollywood ingénue Scarlett Johansson barely warranted a shrug, and Black Francis’ efforts to impart some grind to his honed aesthetic worked less than half the time on 2010’s Pete Yorn. Now, his collaboration with musically inclined photographer J.D. King has produced the Olms, a fetishistic lo(wer)-fi effort laid down on King’s vintage AMPEX 440 analog recorder that, at times, can’t quite get out of its own precious way. Often, though, it finds comfort—and occasional transcendence—in familiarity.

The touchstones are obvious: British Invasion pop, especially Face To Face-era Kinks (“Rise And Shine,” “Twice As Nice”), quieter Velvet Underground (“On The Line,” “Someone Else’s Girl”) and doomed cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons (“Another Day Dream”). Despite the sometimes bleak subject matter (King’s “She Said No” puts a spaghetti-Western spin on a grim murder/suicide), the overall vibe is copacetic.

Case in point: leadoff “Wanna Feel It,” an effortless commercial jingle in waiting. If anything, The Olms offers ample reassurance that Yorn is one hell of a craftsman, even when he’s striving for a less-is-more aesthetic—though the jury’s still out on whether he’s an artist best left to his own devices. —Hobart Rowland

Jimmy Eat World

Damage RCA

Grilling and killing me (notso-softly)

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t mature in the same way Jimmy Eat World’s major-label overlords wanted me to. If it’s too loud, you’re too old, a bumpy old man once said, and I guess I’m not getting any older. The last time JEW even remotely stoked the fires of kinetic musical energy was with parts of 2001’s Bleed American, so it’s not like anyone’s expecting the band to revert back to its mid-’90s guise.

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photo by Jim Wright

Like the Goo Goo Dolls, Lemonheads and Saves The Day, Jimmy Eat World has become a purveyor of modern rock that just so happens to have a noisier background that jerks like me won’t let it live down. This permits recognition of well-penned, upbeat numbers like “Appreciation” and “How’d You Have Me,” the emotion behind “Please Say No” and the epic White Album feel of “Byebyelove,” but I’m still hanging on to the inner broil that comes with the knowledge that the white picket fence and 2.5 kids down the street will be cranking this at their Fourth of July BBQ. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Steve Kilbey & Martin Kennedy

You Are Everything

KilbyKennedy

Ambient melancholy for beautiful losers

Steve Kilbey, singer/songwriter of Australian band the Church, has one of the purest, most emotional voices in pop. Martin Kennedy is the architect of lo-fi electronic outfit All India Radio, known for its moody, ambient sound.

You Are Everything is the duo’s third collaboration, and like the others, it’s a slow simmering ride into the more desolate spaces in the human heart.

Opener “I Wouldn’t Know” sounds like something the Church might have cut in a quieter moment, and there are other moments here that rock, albeit quietly; most of the tracks are soaked in a lush, ambient melancholy. Kilbey croons, moans, talks, chants and sings with his usual emotional power, effortlessly drawing us into his world of heartache and longing. Kennedy’s expansive soundscapes intensify the unsettling aura of Kilbey’s vocals with warm, autumnal tones that add to the pervasive feeling of grief and resignation. —j. poet

Femi Kuti

No Place For My Dream Partisan Arts

Papa did preach

We do not envy Femi Kuti’s position. It’s one thing for us to fill our father’s shoes—he’s kind of a putz; it was pretty easy— but Kuti’s dad, Fela, is one of the most iconoclastic recording artists the world has ever known.

Equal parts Bob Dylan, Johnny Rotten and James Brown, Fela upped the ante on social consciousness and rebellion in music. Those are immense shoes to fill, but fortunately Femi can hold his own and then some; this ain’t no Wallflowers record, that’s for damn sure.

While Femi’s flame doesn’t burn quite as strong as his dad’s—again, that’s a lot to ask of a person—the Kuti family still holds the belt as reigning champs of Afrobeat. Tracks

like “No Work No Job No Money” and “Politics Na Big Business” bristle with immediacy, the funky, swirling grooves connecting with the insanity that has so far defined the 21st century. —Sean L. Maloney

Man Or Astro-Man?

Defcon 5…4…3…2…1

pointedly painful pop that forces me rush out, buy all 11 albums that came before it and never get around to opening the packages. —Kenny Berkowitz

The Octopus Project

Fever Forms Peek-A-Boo

Communicating Vessels/ Chunklet

Space is still the place There’s really only one band that does what Man Or Astro-Man? does, and thank goodness, it still does it well after a 12-year absence. What set the Astromen apart from their garage-surf peers was their fascination with campy sci-fi; from their use of b-movie dialogue clips to sampling archaic consumer electronics in their compositions. For their first album since reforming in 2010, the core trio of drummer Birdstuff, bassist Coco The Electric Monkey Wizard and guitarist/infrequent singer Star Crunch showcases all that made the band lovable in the first place.

The churning “Disintegrate” and the vocoded “All Systems To Go” evoke early MOAM favorites, with Star Crunch’s vocals buried just beneath Steve Albini’s pummeling mix. Defcon 5…4…3…2…1 is tied together by five impressively eclectic “Defcon” instrumentals, each showing off a different side of MOAM. It might not be as wildly experimental as past releases, but Defcon re-cements Man Or Astro-Man?’s status as skilled spacemen who live every day like it’s the 24th century. —Eric Schuman

Mark Mulcahy

Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You Mezzotint

Notes to self Whatever that elusive, indefinable quality is that makes a performer compelling, I don’t have it, and neither does Mark Mulcahy. When other people are covering your songs—like Frank Black, Vic Chesnutt, Juliana Hatfield, Michael Stipe and Thom Yorke did on 2009 tribute Ciao My Shining Star—then it’s not a problem. When you’re planning to do it yourself, and you want to record all 11 songs in a single day, you’re asking a lot.

It’s easy to hear the brilliance in lines like “It all starts with the alphabet/A is for all I can get,” and the genius of songs like “Bailing Out On Everything Again,” where Mulcahy realizes he’s fallen in love with all the things he hates, or the bittersweet “Poison Candy Heart,” with its whistling solo, faux-flute, poppy ’60s backbeat and refrain of “Who’s going to clean this up?/ Probably me, like I always do.” But it’s hard to listen, and that makes Dear Mark the kind of

Trippy, electro-psych fun for all

The press release for the Octopus Project’s fifth studio album says it’s “10,000 giga-pets doing flips in unison.” That sounds about right.

This is a weird band, though it’s the type of weird that’s super fun, like a Japanese game show. Armed with a mob of synth sounds and drum machines, the group make psychedelicpop music, but not in an aping-the-’60s way; this is a new psychedelia, which incorporates hip hop and dance beats in its holy goofiness.

Fever Forms is more song-oriented than its predecessor, the atmospheric Hexadecagon, which was designed for an eight-channel surround system. There’s still plenty of instrumentals, such as proggy workout “Pyramid Kosmos,” which sounds like a song called “Pyramid Kosmos” should sound. The rhythm section is thoroughly strong, giving the band freedom to travel as far into the bleeps and bloops as it pleases, which is many miles. It all flows into itself, making the trip feel shorter than it is.

That’s always a good sign. —Bryan Bierman

Overseas

Overseas

Overseas

Lions and lambs

Spare, haunting and yet somehow redemptive, Overseas packs a disproportionate amount of emotional punch for its modest run-time, though we should hardly be surprised. Its creators—David Bazan (Pedro The Lion), Will Johnson (Centro-matic, South San Gabriel) and brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane (Bedhead, New Year)—are responsible for more than two decades worth of gritty, melancholic songwriting, and they seem to only get better and more economical with age.

Over the course of 10 songs, Johnson and Bazan trade places singing atop the beautiful, longing dirge, occasionally harmonizing in a way that allows us to see the two veterans— whose voices we’re used to hearing solo—in a new light. This sentiment could palpably be extended to the whole Overseas endeavor, which hits all the soft spots of longtime fans (Bazan’s gripping introspection, Johnson’s rough-andtumble mew and the Kadane brothers’ acute sense of melodic structure), while cohering easily into a new and striking whole. —Ryan Scott Burleson

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reviews Owen

L’Ami du Peuple Polyvinyl

Declaration Of Independence These New Orleans trad-jazz masters deliver a new album of stompin’ originals

Owening it

That the seventh album from Mike Kinsella’s post-American Football vehicle is a work of sly, artful brilliance should come as no real surprise—outside of Ted Leo and Doug Martsch, Kinsella is probably the most innovative guitarist of his mid-to-late’90s indie-rock cohort. Its exuberant eclecticism, however, is another story altogether.

Though Kinsella has steadily expanded Owen’s sonic palette since essentially perfecting fiery minimalism on 2002’s No Good For No One Now, those flourishes have almost exclusively been employed around the edges to accentuate his signature sound. L’Ami du Peuple sees him surrender a bit more fully to less familiar muses, drawing ragtime-y piano, shoegaze-tinged atmospherics, strings, electronica, countrified finger-picking acrobatics and, yes—halle-fucking-lujah!—America Football-esque off-kilter serpentine riffage into the mix. All without subverting the idiosyncrasies or harrowing forthrightness that makes Owen such a formidable and special aural monster.

If only every artist’s left turns were this intriguing and satisfying. —Shawn Macomber

Queens Of The Stone Age

Preservation Hall Jazz Band

P

reservation Hall is one of the best-known

music venues in the world, famous for keeping the flame of traditional New Orleans jazz alive. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band is the club’s house band, and with Legacy 50 years in the business, the group is just as venerated at the club it calls home. After 20-some odd albums centered on the tunes and composers that created jazz, the band celebrates the half-century mark with a platter full of original tunes. Current members wrote all the songs, and while they tend to echo the sounds of yesteryear, they’re delivered with a contemporary flair.

“August Nights” lives up to its name with a warm, sultry groove, burnished late-night sax excursions by composer Clint Maedgen and moody, muted trumpet work by Mark Braud. “Dear Lord (Give Me The Strength)” is a funeral march, with an arrangement that borrows from gospel, swing and R&B. Tuba player Ronell Johnson supplies a soulful, growling vocal with an inspirational message for transcendence. “Rattlin’ Bones” is a spooky, funky strut, a ghost story full of wailing trumpets and a raw, raspy vocal from trombone player Freddie Lonzo. “I Think I Love You” is a sexy rumba with a second-line backbeat, sparking piano work by Rickie Monie, a smooth sax solo from Maedgen and a sly vocal from 80-year-old sax man Charlie Gabriel. The title track rides a dark, rollicking groove, with Joe Lastie’s rolling paradiddles and Johnson’s earthy tuba laying the foundation for an extended trumpet solo by Braud, backed up by a honking horn section. —j. poet That’s It!

...Like Clockwork Matador

extinction

Countdown to

Having recently completed a 15-year leap from alt-metal upstart to hard rock’s concurrent ambassador to both the classicrock pantheon (as acting frontman to John Paul Jones in Them Crooked Vultures) and the indie-rock set (acting as a Tim Leary of sorts to blog-darlings-gone-skuzzy the Arctic Monkeys), Josh Homme returns to Queens Of The Stone Age for its sixth album with quite the supporting cast in tow, ranging from the usual suspects (Dave Grohl and Trent Reznor) to the downright shocking (Elton John?).

Regrettably, though, there aren’t any disco-tinged surprises to be found here (instead we get a limp, uninspired ballad that makes the very least of that muchdiscussed Sir Elton guest spot), as nothing on ...Like Clockwork turns out to be anywhere near as exciting as its album credits. For the third album running, Queens Of The Stone Age lumbers its way through a series of increasingly skronky, sludge-by-numbers jams and sound, here more than ever like a band completely out of ideas. —Möhammad Choudhery

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Restorations

LP2

SideOneDummy

From the past comes the storm

Longtime fans of post-rock, psych-punk and what-have-you should embrace this Philly band for the very reason that Restorations bring a set of cojones to the table. There’s no doubt they do the (early) Smashing Pumpkins, (early) Soul Asylum and (all eras of) All State Champion brand of borderline indie-punk/ mathy grunge with a certain melodic aplomb.

However, the gravelly voice of Jon Loudon oversees minor-key hooks, ’90s Sub Pop guitar tones and enough delay, echo and reverb to make it feel like you’re listening to this while standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon.

“D” and “New Old” will get the youth of today’s arms up and swaying, but also possess the ability to drive a long-lasting point of emotion home with the old, cool and jaded who gave up on Smashing Pumpkins years and years ago, are super-skeptical of Soul Asylum’s continued existence and wish All State Champion would get the fuck back together. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Sonny & The Sunsets

Antenna To The Afterworld Polyvinyl

Space is the place Across three albums with the Sunsets and his “100 Records” art project—in which he wrote songs in varied styles for 100 fictional bands—Sonny Smith has exhibited an unlikely consistency. From the garage pop of Tomorrow Is Alright and Hit After Hit to the countrified break-up songs of Longtime Companion, and well into the more far-fetched entries in “100 Records,” Smith’s most distinctive qualities—his wry, unassuming vocal; his crooked, buoyant shuffle—never waver.

With the fourth Sunsets record, Smith adds sci-fi imagery, glossy synthesizer accents and cooing boy/girl harmonies to songs that, otherwise, fit neatly into his catalog. On album bookends “Dark Corners” and “Green Blood,” he employs lush arrangements behind simple melodies worthy of Camera Obscura. Still, with more propulsive cuts like “Path Of Orbit” and “Earth Girl” for contrast, Smith keeps his garage-rock grounding—and his distinctiveness—intact. —Bryan C. Reed

Spectrals

Sob Story

Slumberland

A minor setback

Spectrals’ Louis Jones, a U.K. pop prodigy who was just 21 when Slumberland debut Bad Penny was released in 2011, does indeed possess a powerful knack for pop perfection of the fully formed, accomplished

and wickedly infectious variety. History has dictated that if there’s one thing that can act as kryptonite to this sort of wunderkind, it’s the mistake of over-ambition, which usually occurs via the sophomore album.

I’d love to report that Sob Story is an exception to this pattern, but the Style Council-style blue-eyed soul and precise power pop of the debut now have some company that doesn’t work, like the ’70s Nashville countrypolitan exercise of the title track. Still, there’s enough of what made Bad Penny great to satisfy fans, and let’s not forget about the next part of this tried-and-true script: The third album will be the solid return to strengths. —Andrew Earles

Mavis Staples

One True Vine Anti-

Climbing on

Mavis Staples has been making records since the late 1950s, has one of the greatest gospel/soul voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, and is still recording relevant music today. Credit Jeff Tweedy for her most recent comeback. The Wilco frontman produced 2010’s Grammy-winning You Are Not Alone, and continues the hot streak with her newest LP. Besides the gospel bona fides, Staples is a top-notch interpreter, and there’s a lot of worthwhile material for her to perform here.

Automatically providing some contemporary credibility, Tweedy works his production magic with a light touch. Besides his own composition, “Jesus Wept,” he guides Staples toward songs

by Nick Lowe (“Far Celestial Shores”) and Funkadelic (“Can You Get To That”). Even more impressive is the ever-glorious gospel mantra by the legendary Washington Phillips, “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today.” Answer? Probably listening to Mavis Staples. —Mitch Myers

Survival

Survival

Thrill Jockey

The tribal council has spoken

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix released a couple notgreat/not-terrible black-metal albums as the frontman for Liturgy, all while declaring his band the torchbearer in a new era of the genre.

This pissed off a lot of metalheads. Then drummer Greg Fox left the group in late 2011, and there hasn’t been much noise from the Liturgy camp since. Enter Survival, Hunt-Hendrix’s collaboration of mostly stale post-hardcore/ math-rock with Greg Smith and Jeff Bobula.

Recorded by Colin Marston (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Behold… The Arctopus), the guitars dominate the mix, but they don’t do much to justify taking up the space. They’re spidery, and occasionally make interesting and unexpected turns, but more often come across as a bunch of interchangeable parts from what could be

the same track—throwaway riffs from the Polvo songbook. The moaning “chants” that pop up in Liturgy are the main vocal reference points here, so imagine Layne Staley fronting an alsoran math-rock band and you’ve got a good idea what Survival sounds like. —Matt Sullivan

Thundercat

Apocalypse

Brainfeeder

Sweetest purr-fection

If you thought the last Flying Lotus album was lacking in excitement and surprise, his virtuoso bassist buddy Stephen Bruner (a.k.a. Thundercat) has got you covered. The new Apocalypse is leaner and funkier than the more jazzy and sprawling Golden Age Of Apocalypse. And with FlyLo producing, there’s plenty of whirling knives and jarring noises in the mix to rough up all the bumping, wobbling solidity.

But there’s also songs: “Without You” does more for AM-radio fusion than anything on this year’s Toro Y Moi album, while the squealing electricity of “Oh Sheit It’s X” might be the single best track Bruner has ever put his name on. Where Flying Lotus is all-or-nothing chaos or quietude, Thundercat seeks to emulsify his extreme impulses—in a bass soloist, there are many—and work the middle to a good sweat.

When the Brainfeeder label boss himself cuts up “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” you might break out Miles’ Agharta just to see which sounds spacier. —Dan Weiss

Tunng

Turbines Full Time Hobby

Round and round they merrily go

Tunng has made it through five full-lengths and a full decade as a band without its members ever really coming across as professional musicians. Not that the music on Turbines (or any of its excellent predecessors) is in any way sloppy or amateurish—indeed, the delicacy of its craftsmanship is evident and enviable—but the group has managed to retain a sense of innocence, freshness and pure joy in the act of creation that’s well-conveyed by the name of its longtime record label, Full Time Hobby.

Some of that has to do with Tunng’s chosen musical approach: fingerpick-friendly folk-pop that lends itself well (and frequently) to wholegroup sing-alongs, crossbred with gently playful electronica that’s less about banging beats than subtle, whimsical sonic inventions and interventions. Turbines doesn’t offer anything vastly new or different for the British six-piece, but it’s a welcome consolidation of its crafty communal vibe, a reminder that novelty can be overrated when there’s so much pleasure to be gleaned from simply reexamining (or gently tweaking) the wondrousness of the everyday.

—K. Ross Hoffman

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reviews Various Artists

Sweet Relief III: Pennies From Heaven Vanguard

Sweet sounds of salvation

Most musicians, even famous stars, don’t have health insurance; as they age, they’re often one illness away from being homeless. This benefit CD will help fund Sweet Relief, an organization that provides care to artists in need. There isn’t a weak track here, but several stand out.

Ron Sexsmith’s acoustic take on “Pennies From Heaven” includes the seldom-heard introduction, and tips its hat to the ’20s. Joseph Arthur gives Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You” a larger-than-life country/pop arrangement, Victoria Williams delivers Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” with her usual understated power, and Zooey Deschanel croons “King Of The Road” backed only by M. Ward’s subtle, twang-heavy electric guitar. Jackson Browne’s quiet take on Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” is just guitar and voice, and adds a quiet power the poignant lyric to close the album on a hopeful note. —j. poet

Timing Is Everything

An early-years Three O’Clock comp only tells a fraction of its psych/pop story

Emily Wells

Mama Acoustic Recordings Partisan

Woman on wire

Emily Wells’ Mama isn’t a soundtrack for the Guillermo del Toro-produced creepfest of the same name, but this spooked version might be. Skinned and slowed to a crawl, left to develop in overdubs and echoes, the record molts to reveal a different animal: Wells’ theremin voice unplugged and violin strings unstrung, her static-y trip-hop blues realized and ruralized closer to Marissa Nadler’s frosted folk or Joanna Newsom’s milk-eyed mending.

Which is to say it’s even more interesting.

Shedding the fancy dresses, Mama’s bones come alive, and the reanimation is often transportive and rarely a disappointment. Closer “Darlin’” trades its 1990s pop sheen for an 1890s train hop, while the lone new track, “Los Angeles,” breathes heavy not from road rage, but wagoner’s wear. When Wells scrapes the ceiling of “Mama’s Gonna Give You Love,” her only accompaniment a ritualistic guitar flick, best not look over your shoulder. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

David Yow

Tonight You Look Like A Spider Joyful Noise

Beautiful, dark, twisted heavy-metal fantasy

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The Three O’Clock

The Hidden World Revealed

H

ere’s one for the fans. The Three

O’Clock was a charter member of the Paisley Underground; the band’s Michael Queromnivore cio coined the phrase to describe the loose aggregation of mostly L.A. groups in the early ’80s—including the Bangles, Green On Red and Rain Parade—that took their musical and sartorial cues from the Byrds, the Beatles and ’60s psychedelia. The Three O’Clock, although inspired by punk’s DIY spirit in its earliest incarnation as the Salvation Army, mingled baroque pop, British Invasion rock and the chiming guitars of power pop. Thanks to Quercio’s reedy vocals and the trebly keyboards of Mike Mariano, the band had a light, bubblegummy sound even when it rocked, and that was a large part of its charm.

The Hidden World Revealed presents the early phase of the Three O’Clock’s story, mostly through demos and alternate versions of tracks from the band’s time on Frontier Records. From 1982’s Baroque Hoedown EP, we get the zippy, catchy “With A Cantaloupe Girlfriend” and a buzzy alternate version of “I Go Wild”; from 1983’s Sixteen Tambourines LP, the perky acoustic jangle of “Stupid Einstein” and the thumping power pop of “Jet Fighter”; and there are the transitional tracks—a disruptive blast of punk rock from a Salvation Army home demo, some early versions of songs that would appear on excellent 1985 major-label debut Arrive Without Travelling (including a great demo of “Girl With A Guitar,” Quercio’s collaboration with the late Scott Miller of Game Theory and the Loud Family), plus some b-sides, one-offs for radio stations and covers of the Bee Gees and Byrds.

Although fun, this isn’t the place to start with the Three O’Clock: Neophytes should stick with the full versions of Sixteen Tambourines and Arrive Without Travelling (and hold off on 1988 swansong Vermillion, which Prince put out on his Paisley Park label). Or, check the band out live—the Three O’Clock recently reunited to play this year’s Coachella. —Steve Klinge

photo by bart everly

The first thing you notice about David Yow’s debut solo album is how willfully it sidesteps the presumed appeal of a David Yow solo album: He doesn’t unsheath the careening, bewildered vocal whiplash that Jesus Lizard fans know and love to fear. Instead, the 15-years-in-gestation Tonight You Look Like A Spider is a brilliantly rabid opus, all instrumental risk, asylum murk, running eyeliner and liberal punning.

“Opening Suite” navigates cunningly through a discography’s worth of compositional climates in 10 minutes, but Yow’s just getting warmed up. “Lawrence Of A Labia” seesaws expertly between baroque dread and backhanded uplift. Jacked strains of Afrobeat show through the tattered, droning hairshirts and dental-drill weedle of “Visualize This.” If “Bleth My Soul” invents garage/grunge gothwave, “The Door” offers a vista into a Hell that consists of infinite marble slabs dragged along endless concrete floors.

But Spider is at its fiercest and most antisocial when the fingerless gloves come all the way off: “Senator Robinson’s Speech” rearranging words random-note style over mad, atonal pianos, or the stiff-backed, minor-chord drunk swing of the title track. —Raymond Cummings

Zomby

With Love 4AD

He’s still twitching

Where were you in 2008?

U.K. producer Zomby was juggling the dubstep-rooted explorations of his early singles with a gaze cast to the past, darkly, in the hardcore rave throwback stance of Where Were U In ‘92?, his first full-length,. Five years on, that initial, promise-filled “post-dubstep” moment feels strangely, insurmountably distant, but the residue of its grainy, grimy,

grayscale ethos still looms large for the idiosyncratic producer, underlying a faltering futurism that’s still streaked with plenty of backward glances.

As a 33-track double album, With Love has space for a small village’s worth of memory lanes: manic drum ‘n’ bass (“Overdose,” “777”), 8-bit video game twinkles (“Shiva”), airhorns ‘n’ breakbeats ragga-jungle (“It’s Time”), bleary-eyed sample-soul (“Rendezvous”) and ravey 808 tech-house (“This One”), while the more somber, unified back half is dominated (almost oppressively) by the tense, trendier twitchery of trap music (though none of its joyous abandon). Zomby remains resolutely uninterested in coherent presentation—these all-too-brief cuts jam awkwardly into one another when not fading out unceremoniously like so many Amazon preview samples—but he’s got life in him yet.

Maybe even a bit of love. —K. Ross Hoffman

Low Wattage Killer guest list aside, Primal Scream delivers the same old same old

F

or decades now, Primal Scream has tended

to follow a well-worn path, releasing experimental brilliance (Screamadelica, XTRMNTR), interspersed with hoary old-rock bollocks where the band aims for the dissolute cool of Exile-era Stones, but instead comes off like a bargain-basement Black Crowes. Then there’s the ones where the group blends both, to decidedly mixed results. (See Evil Heat and Beautiful Future.)

Primal Scream Primal Scream’s latest, the twisted state-of-the-nation More Light address of More Light, falls firmly into the latter category. It strives for the righteous fury of XTRMNTR, but all too often ignition consists of pale imitations of past triumphs. It’s not without merit. More Light features the usual magpie-esque grab bag of musical touchstones: souped-up garage punk, krautrock grooves and Steve Mackaystyle free-jazz sax freakouts. The band is faultless throughout, there’s a dizzying array of instrumentation, and the production is flawless; if nothing else, it’s a fantastic-sounding record, thanks largely to producer David Holmes.

Then there’s the guests—the Scream team has always had immaculate taste when it comes to collaborators, so we have Kevin Shields back on board, while Robert Plant lends his patented rockgod croon to the spectral “Elimination Blues.” That said, erstwhile agit-pop hero Mark Stewart makes an appearance on “City,” and while he no doubt believes his atonal screeching conjures a dystopian Orwellian nightmare, he sounds nothing so much as a particularly irate Dälek (and a fucking annoying one at that). Still, it’s not an overall disaster, it’s certainly never dull, and there’s plenty to keep the loyalists happy. Business as usual then.

—Neil Ferguson

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M AY E R H AW T H O R N E

Jason Blaine is back

with his new album

Everything I Love Featuring the single ‘Rock It Country Girl’ AVAILABLE JULY 9TH

ALSO AVAILABLE DIO

MAGICA (DELUXE EDITION)

JADEA KELLY CLOVER

HIGH ON FIRE

SPITTING FIRE VOL. 1

QUASIMOTO

YESSIR WHATEVER

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by Entertainment One Canada

HIGH ON FIRE

SPITTING FIRE VOL. 2

JUSTIN BIEBER

ALWAYS BELIEVING (DVD)

OST

DESPICABLE ME 2

BRUCE COCKBURN

PACING THE CAGE (DVD)

/movies

by Stan Michna

Ol’ Man Sammy, He Keeps On Rollin’ Along It’s not exactly Showboat, but something “If you want to send a message, use Western about A Turtle’s Tale 2: Sammy’s Escape Union.”) There’s nothing wrong with so worthy From Paradise evokes the image of a sluggish, and pressing a message, but so much is lost in the translation and delivery that the kids for immutable Mississippi river moseying its way whom it’s intended just aren’t going to heed it. through eternity.

This animated, sort-of sequel to 2010’s A And the principal reason is (are) the directors’ Turtle’s Tale: Sammy’s Adventures concultural touchstones, as alien to the sensibilitinues the saga of Sammy the leatherback—at ties of kids today as the movies of Pola Negri least I think it’s a leatherback—sea turtle’s purto their parents. suit of environmental life, liberty and reptilian What seven-year-old, for instance, would happiness. Old Sammy’s a grandpa now, but as nod in appreciative, triumphal acknowledgephlegmatic as ever, so it takes a while before ment of the transformation of the loopy, pixithe drift of the obvious story line unfolds. lated hippies of the first Turtle’s Tale into In short, Sammy and his long-time turtle the committed, prescient environmentalists buddy, Ray, are nabbed by poachers and sold of its sequel? Hippy? Isn’t that why mom goes to the gym or wears black all the time? And reto an aquarium/restaurant in Dubai—oilally, Jimi Hendrix’s brilliant, but utterly inaprich, Arab Dubai! In the middle of the desert!

(I think there’s a Message compropriate interpretation—resigned and ing)—and thrown into the Tank fatalistic—of All Along The Watchtower with an assortment of exotic sea on the soundtrack? Instead of Bob life, each with its own we-areDylan’s frantic, urgent, gotta-get-outta-here original? More to the point for the-world accent, each assigned a place in the pecking order, just the seven-year-old: who the heck are like in one of those old-timey Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan?

Hollywood prison movies. When Yet for all its glacial pace—like Sammy’s grandkids get tossed Finding Nemo on Prozac—and malinto the same lock-up, Sammy’s adroitness, Turtle’s Tale 2 gets some reptilian brain figures—finally— things right, not least its spectacular A Turtle’s Tale 2 is it’s time to plan the great escape. visuals. One brief sequence in particuavailable July 9th on DVD and Blu-ray from “Old-timey Hollywood movlar—of the turtle-hunting poachers— Entertainment One ies” isn’t a slur. Indeed, some of harkens back, in the best sense, to Diswhat Hollywood produced in its classic goldney’s classic Dumbo (the scene of the rousten age stands up to anything made today, and abouts struggling to erect the giant big top).

Like an Edward Hopper painting in motion, Turtle’s Tale 2 strives mightily (if not inadvertently) to inhale some of its magic vapour. it intimates rather than depicts a spectrum of Sammy and Ray turtle-napped and thrown speculation and rumination. You imagine not into the jug? It’s a premise straight out of a just the fear and shock of the imperilled turtles, Hope and Crosby picture and could have been but contemplate, too, the circumstances that entitled Road To Dubai (except that it would led or forced the poachers into the dangerous have to be funny). Prison escape? Where to and—who knows?—perhaps soul-destroying begin?—except to note that Turtle’s Tale 2 is world of endangered species trafficking. It’s a less Brute Force, I Am A Fugitive From A stream-of-consciousness flash across the fronChain Gang or Cool Hand Luke and more tal lobe of the cerebrum, but it’s there, even for Shawshank Redemption-ish (minus the a seven-year-old—and a pointed reminder of soap-and-shower scene, of course, although what A Turtle’s Tale 2 might have been. that creepy Sea Horse …oh, never mind).

Still, leatherback turtles can live up to 50 Co-directors Ben Stassen and Vincent years (some species of sea turtles up to 200), Kesteloot are no Dardenne brothers, their leaving plenty of time, in their next instalment, Belgian compatriots whose rich examinafor Stassen and Kesteloot to advance and entions of family dynamics are to Turtle’s Tale hance those few glimpses of unlimited potential.

2 what Crime And Punishment is to Berenstain Bears. Turtle’s Tale 2 is what used to be called The immensely knowledgeable Stan Michna “a message picture,” in this case an environruns the DVD department at Sunrise Records, mental message writ large. (Legendary mo336 Yonge Street in Toronto. Feel free to bring gul Sam Goldwyn once said about such films: your DVD quest downtown.

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NEGLECTED

CRITERION

The Night Porter 1974 / Director

Liliana Cavani Why It’s Neglected: It’s regarded as an exploitative variation of Bertolucci’s notorious Last Tango In Paris made two years earlier; butter is a sexier lubricant than broken glass and jam.

The Theme: Understand above all the context: political beast Cavani’s ferocious anti-fascist proclivity; era of Brigate Rosse and Baader-Meinhof terrorists; and Cold War Western governments’ continued propensity for playing footsie with crypto-Nazi ideology. Mix in an array of psycho-sexual disorders—voyeurism, sadism, masochism, Stockholm Syndrome, death wish—and you grasp the scope of Cavani’s inquiry.

Its essence: humanity’s monstrous instincts, prodded and unleashed by fascist ideology, have contaminated everybody and everything, individuals to institutions. The consequence?

Imprisonment in a destructive, irresistible and repetitive downward spiral into a vortex of oblivion.

What It’s About: In 1957 Vienna, ex-Nazi death camp officer Dirk Bogarde, night porter at a fancy hotel, encounters guest and sole camp survivor Charlotte Rampling with whom he had an intense sado-sexual relationship. While the ODESSA—a secret organization sheltering Nazi war criminals from prosecution— prepares its defence for Bogarde, he and Rampling renew their grotesque attachment (graphically underscored in a series of gut-wrenching flashbacks), oblivious to the threat posed to the ruthless ODESSA. What You Get: Not much (it’s one of Criterion’s earliest releases). Instead, a withering political tract never made today (and rarely then). And two crushingly fearless, almost professionally reckless performances by Bogarde and especially Rampling (!!).

/ dvds

JULY 2 12 Movies for the Man Cave 3 Films on 1 DVD: Voice Collection 4 Films on 1 DVD: Icon Collection 4 Films on 1 DVD: Pop Collection 4-Film Western: Sam Elliott & Tom Selleck 6 Souls 8-Film Action: Christian Bale & Joseph Gordon-Levitt Air Force An American Girl: Saige Paints the Sky An American Tail/Balto/An American Tail: Fievel Goes West Armynel The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu Battle at Bloody Beach Best of Warner Bros.: 20 Film Collection Comedy Bird of Paradise Black Market Babies Black Sabbath: DVD Collector’s Box Blood Runs Cold Blowing Fuses Left & Right: The Legendary Detroit Rock Interviews Bob Saget: That’s What I’m Talking About Bon Jovi: The Second Phase Boys of Valor: Volume 1 Call of the Wildman: Season 1 Confirm or Deny Constitution USA With Peter Sagal David Guetta: The Life of the Party – Unauthorized Don’t Gamble With Strangers Dora the Explorer: Dora’s Enchanted Forest Adventures E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Employer Falcon Fangoria Presents: Entity Fat Slags The Fighting Lady Frontline: The Retirement Gamble Fun: We Are Young – Unauthorized George Spanky McCurdy on Drums: off Time/On Time The Girl

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july 2 Fat Slags

And they say all the great titles are taken. This nightmare’s about two “unrepentantly vulgar and crass” U.K. women “shagging and boozing” their way to London. Jerry O’Connell, tragically, co-stars.

[Artists Independent]

Good Day for a Hanging Gotye: Life as a Painting – Unauthorized Gucci Mane: The Lost Footage – Unauthorized Homefront Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere: Season 2 Hot Sauce: The Re-introduction: Back to the Streets Volume 1 Hot Wet Nursed The House I Live In How to Train Your Dragon The Human Factor Inescapable Into the Woods Irresistible Impulse Ivan the Incredible J Cole: My Life, My Story – Unauthorized Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings Jaws Kelly Clarkson: The All American Girl – Unauthorized Kurt Cobain: The Boy in the Bubble Last Resort: The Complete Series Least Among Saints Legends of the Old West Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time Lou Ragland & Hot Chocolate: Live Luciano Pavarotti: A Christmas Special Luciano Pavarotti: A Legend Says Goodbye The Majestic Wild: Exploring the Exotic Far East

Marilyn Manson: Inner Sanctum Marines, Let’s Go Martha & Friends: Summer Fun NASA: The Spirit of Apollo National Geographic: Inside World War II Nicky Deuce Night Court: The Complete Ninth Season The Night Visitor North & South One of the Missing/Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge The Painted Veil Pajanimals: Party Paris After Dark] Prom Night/Halloween Rake: Season 2 Ruin Explorers: Essential Anime 1 Santa’s Summer House Secrets of Henry VIII’s Palace: Hampton Court Smark Cookies Smokin’ Aces/Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels/Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift Street Boxing 2: Self Defense Against Weapons Tai Chi Hero The Tower Unexpected Places Venus and Serena Waka Flocka: The True Story – Unauthorized Why We Laugh: Funny Women Wiener Dog Nationals Women in Bondage Zandy’s Bride

JULY 9 8 Mile Admission Airport America 3000/Arena/ Eliminators/Time Guardian American Graffiti Angelina Ballerina: Mousical Medleys Assassins Tale Attack From Beneath Babe Backdraft Barney: Imagine With Barney Ben 10 Omniverse: Volume 2, Heroes Rise Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

The Big Lebowski The Birds Black Magic M-66 Blood and Sand The Blues Brothers Bonanza: The Official Sixth Season The Bourne Identity Boy The Breakfast Club Bruce Almighty Bruce Campbell Triple Feature Cape Fear Captain Cook: Obsession & Discovery Car Wash Casino Cat in the Hat: Show & Tell Sure Is Swell Charade Cohen & Tate Combat Girls Craig Ferguson: I’m Here to Help Dark Power Dark Side of Genius Darwin’s Brave New World Dead Man Down Dynasty: The Complete Seventh Season The Expelled Finding Bigfoot: Season 2 Follow the River For Richer or Poorer Frontline: Never Forget to Lie The Gatekeepers Gator Boys: Season 1 Gattaca Hands of the Ripper Happy Gilmore Hetalia: Axis Powers Complete Series The Host How the West Was Won: The Complete First Season Irresponsible Captain Tylor TV Series Is There Life Out There?

Jeffrey The Jerk Killing Twice Kimba the White Lion: The Complete Series Knocked Up Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1999 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen The Legend of Korra: Book One Air

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This is probably not the most artful movie that Hollywood could have made about race barrier-shattering Dodgers pioneer Jackie Robinson, but it’s informative and enthusiastic all the same. [WARNER BROS]

Liar Liar The Life of O’Haru The Lovers & Friends Show: The Final Season Mamma Mia! The Movie Marvel Knights: Wolverine Origin Mindless Behavior: All Around the World Movies 4 You: More Spaghetti Westerns Movies 4 You: Spaghetti Westerns Mr. Hockey My Best Enemy Nature: Big Cats Collection Night Nightjohn Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger The Old Curiosity Shop Open 24/7 Out of the Woods The Pathfinder Pickin’ & Grinnin’ Portlandia: Season Three The Preacher & The Gun Private Psycho Punk Vacation Quincy M.E.: Season 6 Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Robot Chicken: DC Comics Special Rose of Versailles Part 2 Secrets of Althorp: The Spencers Sesame Street: Arts and Crafts Playdate Shun Li & The Poet Sid the Science Kid: Sid Wings It Sixteen Candles Smokey and the Bandit

Solomon Burke: Live at Montreux 2006 Spartacus Spring Breakers Stan Lee’s Lightspeed The Sting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Enter Shredder A Turtle’s Tale 2: Sammy’s Escape From Paradise The Twilight Zone Season 3 Tyler Perry’s Temptation Tyler Perry’s The Haves & The Have Nots Unforgettable: The First Season Vixens of Kung Fu/Oriental Blue Warehouse 13: Season 4 White Fang Collection Who Is Delsin Will a Man Rob God William & Kate: A Royal Life Women Who Kill Wordworld: Picture Day Would You Rather Wow Wow Wubbzy: Best of Daizy!

X-Men X-Men Origins: Wolverine X-Men Trilogy X-Men: The Last Stand X2: X-Men United

JULY 16 40 Years Later: Our People 42 42nd Street Pete’s Superstars of the ‘70s Stags 45 Minutes From Broadway 5 Shells The Adored The Adventures of Mickey Matson & The Copperhead Treasure An Affair of the Heart All the Good Things Alphas: Season Two America’s Test Kitchen: Season 13 Animals Great & Small Arlington Road Arthur Stands Up to Bullying Battle Creek Brawl/City Hunter Becker: The Fifth Season Belstone Fox The Border: Complete First Season

Bringing the Girls Over Bubblegum & Broken Fingers Bullet to the Head Caillou: Big Kid Caillou Cannibal Possession: Heart of Ice Certified Combat: The Complete Fourth Season The Come Up: Battle & Freestyle The Come Up: Dreams & Nightmares The Come Up: Kendrick Lamar The Come Up: Welcome Back to Mollywood Crazy Kind of Love Damages: The Final Season The Dark Side of Love The Definitive Guide to the Mob Dinosaur Train: Nature Trackers Dirty Old Movie Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited The End of Love Endeavour Series 1 Erased Eve of Destruction Evil Dead Femme Fatales: The Complete Second Season Flying Fists of Kung Fu Flying Monkeys The Flying Wallendas: The Show Must Go On The Fruit Hunters Gangster Empire: Rise of the Mob George Lopez: The Complete Third Season God Don’t Make the Laws The Good Life Heavy Sedation: The Complete Series Volume 1 Heavy Traffic Hecho En Mexico Hell on Wheels: The Complete Second Season Hiding in Plain Sight Ice Road Terror Iron Doors Jacob on the Road Joanna Lumley’s Nile Kickin’ It Shaolin Style Korean War: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Collection The Lady Vanishes

Leapfrog: The Complete Scout & Friends Collection Letters From Jackie: The Private Thoughts of Jackie Robinson Liberty’s Kids: The Complete Series The Life After Death Project Lincoln: Profiles of the Great Emancipator A Little Bit Zombie London: The Modern Babylon Lord of the Flies Loveholic Lovely Complex: The Complete Series M: A Married Woman Manhunt of Mystery Island Matlock: The Complete Series Matlock: The Ninth & Final Season Misfits: Season 3 Naruto Shippuden Box Set 15 National Geographic: Tigers of the Snow/Search for the Afghan Girl Olympia Omega Doom The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure Patlabor TV Collection One Phi-Brain Puzzle of God: Season 2 Collection 1 Power Rangers samurai: The Ultimate Duel Volume 5 The Prize: An Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power Regular Show: The Complete First & Second Seasons Road Hell Rooster Teeth: Best of RT Shorts & Animated Adventures The Sacred Science Secrets of Chatsworth Secrets of War: The Complete Series Shameless: Seasons 1 & 2 Shark Week 2013: Fins of Fury The Smurfs: Smurfs to the Rescue Solomon Kane Special A: Complete Collection The Story of Prunella Super Why: Hansel & Gretel, A Healthy Adventure The Sweeter Side of Life

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/ dvds

The Tails of Abbygail: New Friends and Adventures Terror Theater Tom & Jerry: No Mice Allowed!

Unwelcome Strangers Vietnam Chronicles Vietnam: The US Government Collection Part 2 The Virginian: The Complete Eighth & Final Season War Between the States When Things Were Rotten White Frog Wild Bill Wild Deep WWE: Payback 2013 Young Justice Game of Illusions Season 2 Part 2 Zombie Lover

JULY 23 The 300 Spartans Arcadia Babette’s Feast Big Swell Bikini Royale Bikini Royale 2 The Bitter Buddha Case Closed: Season 1 Case Closed: Season 2 Case Closed: Season 3 Case Closed: Season 4 Chosen: Season One Cost of a Soul Deceit Detention of the Dead Dora: Musical School Days/ Blue’s Clues: Blue’s Big Musical Dragons: Riders of Berk Part 1 Dragons: Riders of Berk Part 2 Duck Dodgers: Deep Space Duck Season 2 Fairy Tail: Collection 2 Fairy Tail: Part 5 Fatal Call Fish N Chips: The Movie The Gangster Ginger & Rosa Glove Graceland Great White Shark: Living Legend Hammerhead

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july 30 G.I. Joe: Retaliation

The first live-action dud featured Channing Tatum on the cusp of stardom. Tatum enjoyed a different kind of “rise of the cobra” in Magic Mike and is understandably barely in Retaliation. Kablooie!

[PARAMOUNT}

Harlow Horror Quad House Party: Tonight’s the Night How the States Got Their Shapes; Season 2 Hunky Dory Improper Conduct Jack Benny Program: Lost Programs The Jeffery Dahmer Files Kiss of the Damned Ladies of Leisure Let’s Learn: Colors Loose Cannons Love and Honor Medieval Park Miss Sadie Thompson More Than a Secretary Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXVII New World Ngiht Boat One Piece Season 5: Voyage One Our Wild Hearts Party of Five: The Complete Fifth Season Pieta Rebel: Loretta Velasquez, Secret Soldier of the American Civil War Redline Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles/Love Live Alive Salome Shadowland: The Legend The Shaw Festival: Behind the Curtain The Silence

Sin Reaper 3D Starbuck Summer and Smoke Super Friends! A Dangerous Fate Season 5 Superjail: Season Three Taken by Grace Teen-Age Crime Wave Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Season 3 Templar Nation Trance Twixt Uranium Bloom Vehicle 19 A Viking Saga: The Darkest Day The Wedding Chapel Welcome to the Punch Will WUSA Zero Killed

JULY 30 Amor BRavio Angel & The Badman Angry Beavers: The Complete Series Another: Complete Collection Assault on Wall Street Back-To-School Movies Bad Girls Behind Bars Collection Banshee: The Complete First Season Betty Boop Essential Collection Volume 1 Between Us Black Rock The Bronte Sisters The Bullfighter & The Lady Cloudburst The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell Cry Vengeance Dead Wight The Demented The Devil’s Backbone Emily’s First 100 Days of School Fernando Di Leo: The Italian Crime Collection Vol. 2 Filly Brown Fire Maidens of Outer Space Flyign Lessons

The Fog Forever My Love Full Contact G.I. Joe: Retaliation God’s Little Acre Hamlet The Incredible Melting Man Indescribable Jussi Bjorling: He Sang With a Tear in His Voice Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox Kendra on Top: The Complete First Season The Last Will & Testament of Rosalind Leigh Lupin III: A Woman Called Fukiko Magic School Bus: In a Pickle Magic School Bus: Revving Up Magic School Bus: Space Adventures Martial Art of Muay-Thai The Matchmaker Meet the Small Potatoes Movies 4 You: Timeless Western Classics My Awkward Sexual Adventure National Geographic: Alpha Dogs A Night for Dying Tigers Orphan Black: Season One Power Rangers: Seasons 4-7 Robert Williams: Mr. Bitchin’ Rushlights Sandbar Space Warriors Teen Beach Movie That Touch of Mink Touched by an Angel: The Eighth Season UFC 159 Under the Bed Vanished War Flowers War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State The Wheels on the Bus: All Around Town The Wheels on the Bus: Animal Adventure WWE: ECW Unreleased Vol.2

/music/new_releases

JULY 2 Bell X1 Capitol Steps

Chop Chop Fiscal Shades of Gray Editors The Weight of Your Love A Great Big Pile of Leaves You’re Always on My Mind The Henningsens America Beautiful Iration Automatic Joe DoubleBack: Evolution of R&B The Leisure Society Alone Aboard the Ark Chante Moore Moore Is More Owen L’Ami Du Peuple Pretty Lights A Color Map of the Sun Stepper Sly & Robbie Present Stepper Takes the Taxi Various Artists The Lone Ranger: Wanted – Music Inspired by the Film Blood, Sweat & Tears Rare, Rarer & Rarest King Curtis Do Your Thing Joe Farrell Quartet Joe Farrell Quartet Herbie Hancock Four sail Love Four Sail The Masked Marauders The Complete Deity Recordings Sha Na Na The Night Is Still Young Stalk-Forrest Group St. Cecillia: The Elektra Recordings Various Artists Asi Kotama! The Flutes of Otavalo, Ecuador Various Artists Los Nuggetz: 1960s Punk, Pop & Psychedelic Music From Latin America Various Artists Nile Rodgers Presents the Chic Organization: Up All Night JULY 9 Bad Cop Big B Ciara 60

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Light On Fool’s Gold Ciara

Philip H. Anselmo & the Illegals Walk Through Exits Only

july 16

The metal iconoclast takes a big departure from his

Pantera and Down days with this slab of avant-garde guitar extremity. Patience will be rewarded, but it’s patience of the “listen five times through” variety. [Housecore]

The Deadly Gentlemen Dirty Streets Omar Dykes

Roll me, Tumble Me Blades of Grass Runnin’ With the Wolf Grenour Blood on the Face Skylar Grey Don’t Look Down Grounders Wreck of a Smile Geoffrey Keezer Heart of the Piano LX Sweat City of Sweat Maps Vicissitude Michael Martin Murphy Red River Drifter The Octopus Project Fever Forms Park Time PDA Robert Pollard Honey Locust Honky Tonk Preservation Hall Jazz Band That’s It Speedy Ortiz Major Arcana Thriftstore Masterpiece Presents Trouble Is a Lonesome Town Trampled Under Foot Badlands Pat Travers Band Keep Calm & Carry On Various Artists Pippin: New Broadway Cast Recording Whirr Around Solomon Burke Live at Montreux 2006 The Byrds Younger Than Yesterday Merry Clayton

Redbone

Best of Merry Clayton

The Witch Queen of New Orleans

JULY 16 Philip Anselmo & The Illegals Walk Through Exits Only Sara Bareilles The Blessed Unrest Bitch In Us We Trust Body Language Grammar Cherry Poppin’ Daddies White Teeth, Black Thoughts Court Yard Hounds Amelita Dead Boots Veronica Raheem DeVaughn A Place Called Loveland George Duke DreamWeaver Ezra Furman The year of No Returning Candice Glover Music Speaks Kara Grainger Shiver & Sigh Mayer Hawthorne Where Does This Door Go The Icarus Line Slave Vows Joey + Rory Joey + Rory Inspired David Lynch The Big Dream Sarah Miles One Matt Nathanson Last of the Great Pretenders Pepper Pepper Pet Shop Boys Electric Robert Randolph & The Family Band Lickety Split Lawson Rollins Full Circle Serena Ryder Harmony Seven Witches Rebirth Sick Puppies Connect Cody Simpson Surfer’s Paradise Sons of Hippies Griffons at the Gates of Heaven Blue Oyster Cult Blue Oyster Cult Blue Oyster Cult Tyranny and Mutation Blue Oyster Cult Secret Treaties Blue Oyster Cult On Your Feet or On Your Knees Blue Oyster Cult Agents of Fortune

Van Dyke Parks Blue Oyster Cult Some Enchanted Evening Blue Oyster Cult Mirrors Blue Oyster Cult Cultosaurus Erectus Blue Oyster Cult Fire of Unknown Origin

Icon In Search Icon The Best of the Ministry Years Keith Green Icon Thelma Houston Breakwater Cat/ Never Gonna Be Another One Andy Kaufman Andy and His Grandmother Aaron Neville Icon: Aaron Neville Gospel Nichole Nordeman Icon Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio A Woman Needs Love: Expanded Edition Stryper Icon Tawatha Welcome to My Dream: Expanded Edition Various Artists Going Wild: Music City Rock ‘n’ Roll Various Artists That Lovin’ Feelin’: Best of Blue-Eyed Soul Various Artists Verve Remixed: The First Ladies Doc Watson The Definitive Doc Watson Jeremy Camp Chance The Goodmans Keith Green

JULY 23 Aidan Knight Kyle Andrews

Small Reveal Brighter Than the Sun Marc Anthony 3.0 Bombadil Metrics of Affectation Mariah Carey TBA Fight or Flight A Life by Design

Songs Cycled

july 23

Coming off a renowned collaboration with Brian

Wilson, the legendary composer, arranger and vocalist strives for more simplicity in this topical, politically-charged collection.

[Bella Union]

Get Dead Bad News Selena Gomez Stars Dance Sarah Hickman Shine The Love Language Ruby Red Lustmord The Word as Power Mean Lady Love Now Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros Sombear Love You in the Dark ETruth & Salvage Col. Pick Me Up Van Dyke Parks Songs Cycled Wallpaper Ricky Reed Is Real The Winery Dogs The Winery Dogs Otis Redding The Complete Stax/Volt Singles Collection The Smashing Pumpkins The Aeroplane Flies High (box set) Various Artists Keb Darge & Little Edith’s Legendary Wild Rockers 3 JULY 30 Backstreet Boys In a World Like This Glen Campbell See You There Ebone East Get Low, Get Nasty Five Finger Death Punch The Wrong Side of Heaven and the Righteous Side of Hell Vol. 1 Michael Frantic & Spearhead All People David Garrett Music

Vince Gill & Paul Franklin Bakersfield Buddy Guy Rhythm & Blues Hawthorne Heights Telepathic Love Jennifer Holiday Love Me by Name Ethan Johns If Not Now Then When Moreland & Arbuckle 7 Cities Kendra Morris Mockingbird T. Hardy Morris Audition Tapes Chris Shiflett & The Dead Peasants All Hat and No Cattle Robin Thicke Blurred Lines Bobby Brown Icon Natalie Cole Icon Nat King Cole Icon Great White Icon Billy Idol Icon Freddie Jackson Icon George Jones Icon Steve Lawrence Sings of Love and Sad Young Men/ Portrait of Steve Maze (featuring Frankie Beverly) Icon Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr. The Two of us Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr. Marilyn & Billy Nilsson The RCA Albums Collection (box set) Novo Combo Novo Combo Dionne Warwick The Complete Warner Bros.

Singles Dionne Warwick We Need to Go Back: The Unissued Warner Bros. Masters

Andrew LloydWebber Icon Whitesnake Icon Steve Winwood Icon Bobby Womack Icon

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BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS’ ICONIC ‘LEGEND’ ALBUM REMIXED INCLUDING “THREE LITTLE BIRDS (REMIX)” AS HEARD IN HYUNDAI TV ADS. FEATURING BEATS ANTIQUE JASON BENTLEY MY MORNING JACKET’S JIM JAMES PHOTEK PRETTY LIGHTS RAC STEPHEN MARLEY THIEVERY CORPORATION Z-TRIP FEATURING LEE SCRATCH PERRY ZIGGY MARLEY AND MORE

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z jkl i / C 2013 The Island Def Jam Music Group.

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