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twenty Be Low Low commemorates its china anniversary with something old and something new on The Invisible Way

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photo by Zoran Orlic

ALAN SPARHAWK and Mimi Parker celebrate

anniversaries like any married couple, but as bandmates in the spare and eclectic Low, they are often forced by certain significant benchmark occasions to recount their long history when they would prefer to plan for their next accomplishment. Such is the case with Low’s latest quietly magnificent missive, The Invisible Way (Sub Pop).

Sparhawk, Parker and longtime bassist Steve Garrington not only reflect on the hushed expanse that has defined Low from the beginning, but also incorporate some noisier elements that have recently leaked into the mix. This is all taking place in Low’s 20th anniversary year.

“We never pictured ourselves being around this long,” says Sparhawk. “Our managers keep pounding into our heads that it’s our big 20th anniversary year. There are a lot of bands around for 20 years, and I’m not sure it’s an endearing trait. ‘Twenty years and we still like you guys?’ Joel from Kranky keeps telling us, ‘You guys need to make a bad record so people can pan it, then you can make a good record so people will come back and be excited like you’re a new thing.’”

The Invisible Way references sonic benchmarks associated with Low since its 1993 launch after Sparhawk’s defection from the grungy Zen Identity. It also sports some new wrinkles—namely a healthy dose of piano, provided by Garrington, and Parker’s increased vocal role.

“I was reluctant to accept the fact that we were going to record these songs based around the piano,” says Sparhawk. “Steve plays, and on (2011’s) C’mon there were a couple of keyboard songs, then we did a couple tours with Eric Pollard, our drummer from Retribution Gospel Choir, playing piano.

I remember it being a long process of weeding things out: ‘The piano is cool for this, but this I do not like.’ We spent a year getting an idea of what is the piano in Low, and meanwhile Steve was spending a lot of time with it. Every time he’d come to rehearsal and we’d work on a new song, he’d go home and go through it on piano and arrange it. Pretty soon, it seemed like there were songs that just hung on the piano. At that point, it became intriguing to me.”

Parker’s heightened vocal profile was perhaps just as serendipitous as Garrington’s keyboard presence, but it required a certain amount of coercion. “Much effort,” says Sparhawk of getting his wife up front. “It’s a running joke that’s not really a joke: ‘All right, next record you sing on everything.’ This time, I kept pushing her to sing more songs

and she happened to write some more, and I remember being excited about those and it worked out well. I know as well as anybody else the fans would probably prefer to listen to her voice.”

The Invisible Way also benefits from a sympathetic producer in the form of Jeff Tweedy. The band was introduced to Tweedy after longtime friend Nels Cline joined Wilco and suggested Low as an appropriate opening act.

“We’ve known Nels since he was in the Geraldine Fibbers, and when he joined Wilco, he was enough of a friend and fan to throw us in the hat as a possible band to open,” says Sparhawk. “I remember them saying, ‘You should come to the studio and check it out.

Maybe you’d like to record there sometime.’

I took that casual invitation as permission to entertain the idea.”

Last year, Sparhawk and Garrington hit Chicago while touring their Retribution Gospel Choir project, and arranged a visit to the studio. Sparhawk was greatly impressed by Tweedy’s facilities and process, exemplified by tracks from Mavis Staples’ recent Tweedyproduced album.

“I’m a huge fan of Mavis Staples, which may have clouded my judgment,” says Sparhawk with a laugh. “A lot of it pointed to the engineer, Tom Schick. The drums sounded so close and intimate, and every instrument was as raw and prominent as you could get it without stepping over this line that blows the spell. For Low, that’s always been an aesthetic we aspire to. Because we’re minimalist, we’ve worked very simply, and hearing an engineer that can take those things and let them be as huge as they can be is pretty rare and valuable. It was more than just, ‘Hey, listen to this record we did here,’ but more like, ‘Here’s the raw material of what we do and what this is like, essentially.’ The fact that we were listening to unfinished work was about as clear a picture as you could get.”

After establishing a timeline, Sparhawk and Parker began working up material. Parker, who normally composes and sings one or two tracks for every Low album, came up with five songs, and Sparhawk added another six.

Sparhawk decided they would go in with just what they’d written. “We knew we were going to have a limited amount of time; it’s all we could afford,” says Sparhawk. “The biggest time-waster is being three-quarters of the way there. You end up spending valuable time finishing things that could have been done by yourself in the basement. We turned in 11 demos of the songs that are on the record and sent them to Jeff, and he wrote back, ‘Sounds

great, let us know if there’s anything you want to change.’ We had a pretty specific agenda.

Even going in with 11 and ending up with 11 is rare; usually we do 13 songs and use 10 or 11.

I’m glad we did it that way. If we’d attempted even one other song, we wouldn’t have had time to do everything we did.”

Sparhawk describes the theme of The Invisible Way as being related to war—military, class, culture, drugs—but he clarifies it as closer to the struggle for power. Still, there are subtle and maybe even subliminal references to Low’s 20-year run. “On My Own” begins as a reflective acoustic folk ditty, which spins off into squalling Crazy Horse territory at the two-minute mark, ultimately giving way to a “happy birthday” chant; Sparhawk insists the phrase was a random addition to the finished song.

“I wish I could say it’s that intentional, or we’re conscious of what we’re doing at the time, but I’ve come to respect the fact that you are influenced by what you’ve done in the past, whether you’re observing it or not,” says Sparhawk. “Over time, I’m less concerned about that. On the first few records, I was more naively concerned by, ‘What are we doing? What does it say compared to everything else we’ve said? What are the people we’ve already convinced going to think of this?’ Having concern over those things doesn’t add or subtract anything positive.”

That said, Sparhawk admits there are specific and conscious references throughout The Invisible Way. “I count ‘Plastic Cup’ as the drug-war one, although it’s a look at society and what we place as right and wrong, and how over time that perception falls by the wayside and you’re left with an artifact from a thousand years ago that nobody understands,” he says. “The class war is a real and heavy thing in society, and has a lot of bearing on the happiness of the world. That’s another war. I try not to get too mouthy about shit like this, because it’s obvious that I don’t study as much as I should. I have a personal thing about class war and poverty, and the fact that there are responsible things that could be done and aren’t being done. I grew up very poor, and not having shit is not a big deal, but the mentality that it leaves in you, whether it’s, ‘This fucking world, what the hell?’ or ‘Eh, I’m not really the kind of person that can do those things or accomplish anything,’ that’s the legacy of poverty. It makes you paranoid and scared, and it changes the way you perceive what you do have. That’s something that comes up and wears on me.”

—Brian Baker

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photo by Gunnar Bjรถrling

They Love The ’80s Oddly evolving Swedes the Mary Onettes indulge in cheese, pass on pop “I LIKE TO CALL IT CHEESY, but in a good way.”

That’s how Philip Ekström describes Hit The Waves (Labrador), the new album from his band, the Mary Onettes. It’s the long-awaited third full-length from the Gothenburg, Sweden, quartet, and it largely abandons the soaring pop that was the Mary Onettes’ hallmark on its 2007 self-titled debut and 2009’s Islands. Those albums earned the quartet comparisons to the Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, although polished with a modern synth-pop sheen. Hit The Waves draws likewise from the ’80s, but instead of tuneful post-punk, it deliberately echoes some less trendy sources.

“We used a lot of synthesizers and sounds that maybe people would be like, ‘Oh no, don’t do that!’” says Ekström, who speaks quietly, but laughs often as he talks about the album. “Some artists that were big in the ’60s and ’70s, when the ’80s came, (they) didn’t know what to do about their sound or their music. So, they made these cheesy albums in the ’80s. Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith did some very ’80s albums. For a long time, people thought, ‘Oh no, the ’80s albums were crap,’ but now people realize the cheesy stuff is kind of cool. We wanted to make that album.”

Like Destroyer looking back to Roxy Music’s Avalon for Kaputt, or the Rosebuds doing a full-album cover of Sade’s Love Deluxe or, more obscurely, Ice Choir mimicking Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85, the Mary Onettes explore a style that hasn’t been high on recent indie-rock charts of trendy influences, instead looking to sounds that were commercially successful a few decades ago, but for a long time hadn’t aged well. It’s smooth, reverb-drenched and punctuated with syndrums and trebly synth chords. The LP also avoids the pop anthems that were the centerpieces of its predecessors—there’s nothing here as rousing as Islands’ “God Knows I Had Plans,” and that’s a deliberate choice.

“This album is not about taking a new direction for us,” says Ekström. “It’s more about finding 10 perfect identities for the songs on the album. At some point, I wanted to make a statement with this album that we are much more than just the band that people think we are. I wanted to get away from the simple pop songs in a way, what we usually are good at. For this album, I wrote like 50 or 60 songs. Somehow, we wanted just to make an album that was more like—how do you say that word?—like an artwork more than an album with 10 pop hits. I wanted to make something more atmospheric.”

There’s a pent-up tension to Hit The Waves—it’s reminiscent of the Blue Nile, to use another ’80s reference—with music that’s by turns placid and uplifting, and lyrics that are often dark and foreboding. The songs allude to end times, sometimes for relationships, but more often with broader, social concerns. “Can’t Stop

The Aching” moves from “Love is a feeling from space” to “Where are we heading to in this society?” and titles such as “How It All Ends” and “Evil Coast” foreground Ekström’s ominous perspective.

“The songs are like short stories in my mind— thoughts, ideas about everything around me,” he says.

“Maybe I’m a little bit apocalyptic about most things in my life, actually.” He laughs. “For example, ‘Hit The Waves’ is not about swimming in the ocean. It’s about people and fitting in and how you connect to other people. I always have a bit of trouble relating to people around me. The song is about catching the social wave, or understanding the social game between people.”

The making of the album caused tension, too.

Ekström and the band, which includes his brother Henrik as well as Petter Agurén and Simon Fransson, had produced their first albums themselves, but this time they brought in an outside producer: Dan Lissvik of the electro-pop band Studio. Lissvik had his own ideas about what the album should be, and he preferred working quickly, as opposed to Ekström’s tendency to be meticulous and precise. Ekström admits that he can be prone to “over-produce,” but he also thinks that Lissvik’s vision of the band was at odds with its identity at times.

That opposition was a source of disputes, but it was also a valuable learning experience.

Ekström feels that by working with Lissvik, the band “passed some obstacle in our career.” He’s eager to take what he’s learned when doing the next Mary Onettes album, which, he says, they will likely produce themselves, and should come quicker than the four-year delay between Islands and Hit The Waves. (Granted, between those two albums, the two Ekströms released a Swedish-language project under the name Det Vackra Livet.)

Hit The Waves bears no overt signs of the conflicts that brought it to life, nor is it a pure break with the band’s past. And, ultimately, the cheese factor is rather low. The Mary Onettes’ love of the Cure still comes through on the bouncy “Blues,” which could be an outtake from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, and their affinity for New Order surfaces in the delightful guitar hook of “Can’t Stop The Aching.” Ekström came to love that early-’80s era vicariously, through his older sister’s record collection. He’s not nostalgic for favorite bands of his youth; he’s inspired by bands of that time, and the Mary Onettes are all about exploring that sound anew.

“My sister listened a lot to ’80s movie music, the John Hughes soundtracks,” he says. “I was very little then, but they’re stuck somewhere in my mind.

People ask me if I listened to all these bands that I’m inspired by, and I hadn’t. If I did listen to them when I was young, I probably wouldn’t be making this music now.” —Steve Klinge

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Southern Comfort Sick of snow days, a rejuvenated Matt Pond finds his legs in the Sunshine State IT WASN’T a near-death experience, but it was enough to compel Matt Pond to hit the reset button. “I broke my leg on tour over a year ago,” says the newly emancipated, New Hampshire-bred frontguy for the ever-morphing outfit Matt Pond PA. “My drummer and I were benignly wrestling, and he put his knee right through my leg. It was in Pontiac, Mich., right across the street from an orthopedic hospital, which was good.”

Shaken by the freak occurrence and the ensuing surgery, Pond finished out the tour sitting down, then headed to St. Augustine, Fla., to convalesce with friends. Once there, he quickly took to the funky, historic northeast Florida town’s laid-back lifestyle and Southern lilt. Pond moved from Philadelphia to Brooklyn 10 years ago. And while family ties (he’s a preacher’s son) will always bring him back to the Northeast, he might just stay put for a while.

“Now I know why so many people come here; there are so many beautiful interior areas that people don’t even know about,” he says. “I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in.”

A rejuvenated sheen permeates The Lives Inside The Lines Of Your Hands (BMG)—especially the new album’s ebullient first half,

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which commences with a pair of buff companion pieces, “Let Me Live” and “Love To Get Used To.” Pond partnered for a second time with producer Chris Hansen, recording in various locales, including Philadelphia, Florida, Bearsville, N.Y., and Austin.

“We couldn’t really see what it was until we started mixing it this summer,” he says. “It was just such a mess—a manic vision of going in full motion, and then being shut down.”

It isn’t so much that Pond has abandoned the autumnal, inward-delving perspective that pervaded 2010’s The Dark Leaves, or his longestablished penchant for overt melancholy (see “Hole In My Heart” and “Human Beings”).

But he has given both a thorough airing-out with a blast of smog-free, temperate air.

“I’ve always been a sucker for lushness,” says Pond, who admits that the early, sedate stages of his recovery lent themselves to some excessive noodling. “When you’re motionless, your mind is more in motion. I couldn’t even grasp the album when it was done. Mix dysmorphia has got to be a real condition. It can be kind of confusing trying to wrangle all those tracks.”

On his ninth LP in 15 years, Pond worked with Hansen to give his folk-tinged chamber

pop a more a percussive impact, and it sounds like he’s finally made a lasting peace with keyboards. The arrangements are more straightforward, even as their sonic environments are more expansive and nuanced.

“The Dark Leaves was recorded in a (Bearsville) cabin,” says Pond. “This album started there, but we decided we weren’t going to settle for those claustrophobic sounds. The album started getting bigger and bigger.”

The Lives Inside sounds like a breakthrough (whatever that’s worth these days). Pond has been associated with the term before; three years ago, to be exact, when the Matt Pond PA track “Snow Day” was used for a series of Starbucks commercials.

“It’s not about coffee, but if people like it in that form, that’s fine,” he says. “People can assume all sorts of things by the choices you make. I try not to worry about it too much.”

Pond addresses the recent deletion of the “PA” from his moniker with the same healthy pragmatism. “As I moved further and further away from Pennsylvania, it seemed to make less and less sense,” he says. “I’ve played with some great people, but the band dynamic is tough—everyone gets a vote. Now, there are no limitations to what I do.” —Hobart Rowland

photo by A Horse With No Name

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The American Josh Rouse diverts from his extended Spanish holiday with The Happiness Waltz “I HOPE IT WASN’T TOO MUCH of a left turn— maybe a bit of a surprise.”

Josh Rouse is trying to convince his interviewer—and perhaps himself—that his 2006 relocation to Spain didn’t completely alienate his American fan base. It hasn’t, really. But he can’t deny that life overseas has done a number on him.

“It’s different—the hours are different,” says Rouse, who was born in Nebraska and bounced around the country as an adolescent and young adult. “I won ‘musician of the year’ in Valencia, so they kind of consider me one of their own, which is crazy. I did some songs in Spanish, and the press over here didn’t like that. All the Spanish artists are singing in English, and they don’t sound very good.”

A failed first marriage prompted Rouse’s move from Nashville to Spain, where a relationship with artist Paz Suay has led to a (mostly) blissful family life in the country’s third largest city. “About every week, I get fed up with it and go, ‘Pack your fuckin’ bags, we’re moving back to the States,’” he laughs.

“Now, whenever anything goes wrong, I blame

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it on Spain.”

Rouse returned to the U.S. briefly, living in Brooklyn with his wife and embarking an admittedly underwhelming tour behind 2007’s Country Mouse City House. Then Suay became pregnant with their first child, and access to the in-laws and the prospect of a more stable life lured them back to Spain. Rouse is now the father of two young boys, and his frequent This Is 40-style befuddlement laid the thematic groundwork for The Happiness Waltz (Yep Roc), out this month.

His ninth proper solo album is an overdue return to the tastefully swinging and sophisticated folk/pop that elevated 1972 and Nashville, both recorded not long before his Spanish immersion. Producer Brad Jones was the common denominator on those albums, and he returns for The Happiness Waltz, which was recorded at Rouse’s home studio in Valencia and finished at Jones’ Alex The Great Recording in Nashville. “The idea was not to do jazzy, moody songs,” says Rouse.

“Although it’s moody, it’s also pretty poppy.”

In the purest write-what-you-know fashion,

The Happiness Waltz’s dozen tracks constitute a thorough mulling of Rouse’s domesticated status, and the antsiness, boredom, astonishment and rapture that ensues, often within the span of 24 hours. When he’s not making his point in rather obvious ways (“Simple Pleasure,” “Our Love,” “Start A Family”), Rouse turns coyly impressionistic, as on the immediately memorable “Julie (Come Out Of The Rain),” the subtle and profound “Purple And Beige” and modest, low-mood epic “The Ocean.” Largely acoustic-based, but lush nonetheless, the instrumentation and arrangements feel effortless, belying an attention to detail that could’ve been suffocating—but rarely is. If anything, The Happiness Waltz—despite the internal battles waged in its lyrics—is a little too relaxed. It’s Middle American daddy angst with a sleepy Spanish pulse.

“I’m an only child, so I was used to everything being about me,” says Rouse. “Then I had kids, and it wasn’t about me anymore— and that’s hard. I’m still trying to accept it. But I get better at it every day.” —Hobart Rowland

photo by AlLEN CLARK

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Breaking Dawn Integrity and imagination imbue Beach Fossils’ sun-dappled post-punk IF IT’S A CLICHÉ, SO BE IT: The honest truth is that Dustin Payseur is a man of extremes.

He greets me, for example, on what he describes as “the laziest day of his life”—but over the course of our conversation, he speaks to an existential intensity that belies his latemorning rise to the somnolent tones of Brian Eno. Perhaps it’s a bit more like the golden-era post-punk and hardcore records he spends many daylight hours obsessively deconstructing, likely holed up inside a Brooklyn studio or the Flatbush digs he calls home.

“Urgent—that was the key word I had in my head from the very beginning of recording this album,” Payseur says of Clash The Truth (Captured Tracks), the latest and most ambitious release from his Beach Fossils project. “Because that’s how everything’s feeling around me. In kind of the best way possible, I think. Sometimes life just throws you these phases, and everything feels so urgent to me right now—I wanted to capture that.”

The sentiment may surprise those familiar with Beach Fossils, critics and die-hards alike. After having escaped a stale scene and drug-blunted band attempt in his native Charlotte, N.C., Payseur relocated to a barebones Bushwick apartment in 2009, where his demos attracted local labels like Woodsist and Captured Tracks. The latter went on to release Beach Fossils’ self-titled debut the following summer, which delivered exactly what it promised on the tin: Payseur’s balmy guitar leads and pacific beats recalled surf rock and C86 pop at their breeziest, the lo-fi textures a sensory equivalent to wiping the sand off a sun-dried starfish. 2011’s What A Pleasure EP added some clearer production, a few new-wave synths, increased input from then-bassist John Peña (who co-wrote three tunes) and an indoor melancholy formerly unvoiced by Payseur’s idle deadpan. But the core features of the Beach Fossils sound remained constant: detached vocals, gleaming guitar leads, rhythms either programmed or thin enough to sound so, and the knobs set to a golden ratio of reverb throughout.

Of course, that only covers a small fraction of a young life largely spent consuming and producing music. Clash The Truth encompasses a far broader and more kaleidoscopic spectrum of styles and sounds, as explored by a songwriter whose self-recorded career began in the sixth grade, when his archetypically cool dad—one-time member of a band called

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the Pompous Fuckheads, for one—gifted him a four-track tape unit.

The “horrible metal music” and “industrial garbage” of those pubescent sessions bear little influence upon Clash’s proceedings, but most of the varicolored genres Payseur has adored since do. Many of these songs, from the gorgeous title track to recent a-sides “Shallow” and “Careless,” are typified by the rhythmic kinesis of Payseur’s favorite ’80s touchstones (“Wire, the Fall, early Modern English”). The marbled bass lines and lean drum patterns reveal in his melodic lead work this post-punk affinity, previously obscured by his earlier recordings’ sun-worn fidelity and surfside aesthetic. “Sleep Apnea” meanwhile nails the depressive psychedelia of the Byrds on a down day, while instrumental interludes “Modern Holiday” and “Brighter” resemble ambient legends like Stars Of The Lid and Gas in miniature. “Ascension,” another, nods to Coltrane by title and Slowdive in spirit.

And though there’s plenty of pedal-board gizmodgery to obfuscate and nuance Clash The Truth, these 14 songs are delivered with a rich, clear sophistication that Payseur could once achieve only in shorthand via his own untutored, homebrew techniques. Ben Greenberg of punk mavens the Men handled production this time around, which Payseur, used to going it alone, found invaluable.

“I had recorded the entire album already at home, done to the point where I could have just released it if I had wanted to,” he says.

“But I felt like going into the studio, I felt like doing something different was necessary. Ben had experience recording punk bands, and above all, I wanted to work with a producer who recorded punk bands.”

Greenberg was interested in doing the album live in the studio, though the ever-revolving door of Beach Fossils’ lineup (having gone through a dozen drummers and three guitarists since the self-titled in 2010) restricted the personnel to Payseur and drummer Tommy Gardner. Still, Greenberg nevertheless helped the two achieve their goal, which was to finally capture the sound and conviction of Beach Fossils’ live show.

The songs were culled from a demo batch of nearly 75, which, along with Payseur’s casual admission that he hopes to finish three EPs for separate side projects before hitting the road in a few weeks, evinces his rare prolificacy. He mentions his preference to start and

finish a song in literally one sitting (“not even getting up for a glass of water”) and discards most that were done over two or three days, suspecting a song “can’t be any good if I’ve thought about it that much.” The notion, then, of writing with a specific person or audience in mind, let alone a corporation, is one Payseur condemns with an old-school measure of disgust.

“Early on, I made some mistakes there, because I didn’t know any better, and I didn’t have a manager,” he says. “I still don’t—even if you do, they want to steer you in that direction sooner or later anyways, because you basically become their product. But a fucking Doritos vending machine-shaped stage at South by Southwest is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen ... It’s just so disrespectful for a brand to even ask somebody to play on a stage that looks like a vending machine, let alone for a band to actually do it.”

“Generational Synthetic,” one of the sharpest barbs on the record, was written in response to the gutted music industry’s growing reliance upon corporate sponsorship and interests. At least it partially was; it’s also a reaction to British critic Simon Reynolds’ popular condemnation of the past decade-plus of music history being mere recombination and revision of previous generations’ innovations.

“Fear” and the “real” appear as well, two of the album’s most persistent themes next to the titular “truth.” As it turns out, it’s not so simple to comment directly upon the lyrical content of any one song on Clash The Truth, even for Payseur, as the entirety of the album’s lyric sheet was derived from a single epic poem he had recently improvised—which, enclosed between the record sleeves, makes for a pretty heady read.

Payseur tends to be coy when speaking of his goals or ambitions—after all, this is a guy who crumples and burns entire song drafts when the thought of what a listener might think threatens to pervert his process. For the most part, he seems content to have made a record he loves and can’t wait to take on tour. But his certainty that he’ll be writing songs “until the day he dies” implies some challenges for him, which Payseur seems to understand.

“It’s terrifying to me, to think of being 40 years old, writing songs for money, and having to craft them with a specific audience in mind,” he says, eyes widening. “That sounds horrible.” —Jakob Dorof

photo BY john pena

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Greener Pastures Throwback popsmiths Sharp Things opt for bite over bark MORE THAN ONE human being has come to the same assessment of the Sharp Things, Perry Serpa’s eye-opening rock combo: What a pleasure it is to like both the music and the person behind the band. With Serpa, a gregarious music publicist by day and a flourishing songwriter by night, you get both.

During what will become his Brooklynbased octet’s most prolific season yet, Serpa insists the Sharp Things intend to release no fewer than four interrelated albums over the next 12 months—all frolicking under the same banner: The Dogs Of Bushwick. The lead dog in the pack, Green Is Good, has just been issued on Dive. It’s an obvious logical successor to the band’s four previous LPs, all strong candidates, in their time, for best record you never heard last year.

The Sharp Things are anything but your average indie-rockers. In addition to the traditional format of guitar, keyboard, bass and drums, Serpa’s outfit adds violin, viola, flute, French

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horn, trumpet and trombone in all the right places. Some of the upbeat melodic material, with Serpa on lead vocals, sounds as though it could have come from a hip off-Broadway musical. “I’d love to write for the theater someday,” says Serpa, taking a moment to wallow in the thought like a warm bath.

Twenty years ago, during his tenure in a band called Lifehouse, Serpa felt he’d lost his voice. “It just didn’t feel like me,” he says. “Their music was angry, and I kept hearing songs with trumpets, strings and French horns.”

Serpa wrote his first tunes when he was 15, more than 32 years ago, in the East Amherst region of Queens. “I was a gas jockey,” he says, “filling up people’s cars all day and daydreaming of the Miracle Mets,” the 1969 club that shocked baseball fans everywhere by winning the World Series. “It was a bad neighborhood,” recalls Serpa of his gasoline years. “Lots of transvestite prostitutes. People were always stealing gas. I was even held up at gunpoint.”

He knew songwriting was his one-way ticket to something better.

Green Is Good, says Serpa, “has a real flow to it. Like the White Album or Abbey Road. You know immediately where you are. It has love songs, protest songs and songs that sound like Burt Bacharach.” It also features Serpa, on “Back Down The Rabbit Hole,” adopting an ethereal vocal range unheard since the glory days of Curtis Mayfield. And it pays loving tribute to the Memphis horns of Stax Records on “Flowers For My Girl.”

But the capper has to be “Dogs Of Bushwick,” a ballad about a struggling songwriter who fits Serpa better than the blood-stained gloves of O.J. Simpson. It’s a piece where the words of legendary singer Lee Hazlewood haunted him. “Someone asked Hazlewood what his greatest asset was,” he says. “And his answer was simple: self-editing.” Like those rare birds Serpa admires most, Mark Eitzel and Scott Walker, “it’s raw emotion I’m always chasing,” he says. “I feel I have this undeniable urge—almost a mandate—to communicate.”

—Jud Cost

photo by alex brown

THE HISTORY OF IRON MAIDEN, PART 3

Live ConCert reCorded at Birmingham neC on 27th & 28th novemBer 1988 SPeCiaL doUBLe dvd reLeaSe tUeSday 26th marCh

avaiLaBLe on...

diSC 1: the Live ConCert*

110 minute show filmed during the historic 1988 ‘Seventh Son of A Seventh Son Tour’. Featuring 18 classic Iron Maiden Songs, including 3 previously unreleased encores All digitally remastered in Stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound

diSC 2: BonUS diSC

1.‘The History of Iron Maiden Part 3’ 40 minute exclusive feature-length documentary 2.‘12 Wasted Years’ 90 minute documentary from 1987 covering the band’s first 12 years Plus 5 remastered promo videos

DOUBLE DVD

LIMITED EDITION DOUBLE PICTURE DISC VINYL*

SOUNDTRACK 2CD*

Concert filmed, directed and edited by Steve Harris Original soundtrack Stereo mixed by Martin Birch 5.1 Surround Sound and new Stereo mixes+ by Kevin “Caveman” Shirley

WWW.IRONMAIDEN.COM *Moonchild, The Evil That Men Do, The Prisoner, Still Life, Die With Your Boots On, Infinite Dreams, Killers, Can I Play With Madness, Heaven Can Wait, Wasted Years, The Clairvoyant, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, The Number Of The Beast, Hallowed Be Thy Name, Iron Maiden, Run To The Hills+, Running Free+, Sanctuary+

on the record

a conversation with

The Waterboys’ Mike Scott “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

—the second coming

by W.B. Yeats

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Mike Scott is pop’s only literate lyricist who

would dare take on the stately iconography of William Butler Yeats. Forget about the living proof provided by his band the Waterboys as they tackle the Irishman’s prickly poems through a series of 14 daringly diverse arrangements on the new An Appointment With Mr. Yeats (Proper American). You’d know that if you’ve listened to Scott’s richly robust cata-

log of Waterboys albums made since 1983, or even read his recently released book, Adventures Of A Waterboy. Though imbued with an intellectual curiosity beyond that of the most wizened scholar, Scott has long found himself inspired by Yeats’ vivid world-weary lyrical textures and smartly grammatical manner. On the other hand, he’s a big Twitter fan. Go figure.

—A.D. Amorosi

photo by paul mcmanus

What makes you fond of Twitter? I see that you’re active. I must say, I can’t imagine how you cram your wordy literary aplomb into 140 characters.

I love the way people use Twitter to make pithy but pointed statements. The limitation, the whole 140-character limit, is a great spur toward brevity and focus. When used to its best, Twitter is a strong medium for wit, sharpness and intellectual rigor. Plus I’ve made great friends there: Rosanne Cash, author Dan Levitin, singer and novelist John Wesley Harding, to name but three.

Lyrically, musically and collaboratively, what do you see—honestly—as the trajectory of your Waterboys albums? The new one feels more brusque and muscular as it winds its way through Yeats’ texts. Your voice sounds breathy and scuffed.

The first three are the evolution of the early layered Waterboys sound, culminating in (1985’s) This Is The Sea. The next two—Fisherman’s Blues and Room To Roam—are the rootsy albums we made in Ireland, and to my imagination, they sound kaleidoscopically colorful, and are full of great memories. Then there is the sequence of albums I made both with and without the Waterboys in the 1990s and early 2000s, which are variations on the exploration of spirituality, the mysteries of consciousness, ways of seeing myself and the world and framing those in the skin of a song. They are the inner-exploration albums.

Since then, it’s back to the world.

I enjoyed seeing you read from Adventures Of A Waterboy with an acoustic set of your faves following. Does it feel as if you have to constantly reintroduce America to your comings and goings?

Yes. Because we didn’t tour consistently enough here when the band started and establish ourselves, we are constantly catching up now. But I’ve got myself an apartment in New York, and I’ve hired some brilliant New York-based musicians, so expect to see more of the Waterboys in North America from here on in.

There are so many great author autobiographies. I’m recently keen on Future Indefinite by Noël Coward, along with—on a nonauthor tip—My Inventions by Nikola Tesla.

Was there a model from which you gleaned to shape your book?

I’ve read lots of biographies, including many music ones, but there was no example on which I drew for the shape or tone of mine.

I wanted my own voice, and let the events of my life shape the text’s narrative structure.

I know that you’re writing for yourself, that you cannot consider how quick on the uptake your readers or listeners are. But do you ever think that they might not fully grasp your use of metaphor, anthropomorphism or metonymy?

I think that I always work to make my lyrics understandable. I also think I’ve got better at that over the years. I like a song where various meanings are possible, of course, but I see no point in being sloppy and misleading people.

I want to duck back to the notion of America for a moment. I know that at your musical career’s beginning, you had a great feel for American-born folk, gospel and country—Fisherman’s Blues and This Is The Sea most certainly. From the instrumentation down through your love of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, and your use of Bob Johnston as producer, the work reeked of the American. What do you think of us now? And what do you think we think of you now—especially after all your time in New York City?

American music has influenced me more than I can say, but I prefer the music you made from 1920 to 1970—jazz, Broadway, blues, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, proper R&B, counterculture, soul— than anything made since. And what do you lot think of me? Ain’t got a clue.

You certainly have shown connection to Robert Burns, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald in your lyrics. Why has Yeats stood beyond that lot and stayed so—you picked on him for “The Stolen Child” on Fisherman’s Blues and “Love And Death” and “The Song Of The Rosy Cross.” What made you want to do an album of all-Yeats as opposed to, say, Lewis?

Yeats wrote so many lyrics that work as songs.

Simple as that. If Lewis had written brilliant poems that rhymed and scanned, and expressed a non-denominational, un-boundaried spirituality, I’d have set them to music, but he didn’t. Burns was a great poet—none finer, and as a Scotsman I’m fiercely proud of him—but he has been set to music definitely over the years by a myriad of composers and singer. I had nothing to add there.

Being that you’ve used C.S. Lewis as an influence in your work, how do you see Yeats take on religion as it relates to your own— and how did that affect what and where you went on Appointment With? And how are the personal questions of God’s role still part of your daily existence?

Yeats is marvelously free of religious limitations. Lewis was a great writer, and a great man, but the Christian framework of much of his work renders it frustrating to a nonChristian like me. Yes, there are still spiritual truths to glean from what he wrote—spirituality itself is beyond religious differences and specifics—but it makes it a job of work to translate, and to filter out the dogma. So, it is refreshing to read Yeats, who, like Whitman or Blake, goes straight to spirit, addresses it as a force in his life and ours, and doesn’t get fixed or stuck in a particular system or jargon.

As for me, I went through around 14 years of intense spiritual education and reading and

experience, from 1992 to 2005, and I’m still absorbing what I learned. Paradoxically, I don’t need to be reading or thinking about spiritual matters at the moment—just getting on with life, testing my knowledge in the field of deeds, as the song says.

Did you decide what poems, texts and “ballads” of his you wanted to use before you got into a studio? How were these particular words picked?

Yes, the adaptations were all done before we recorded An Appointment With. I chose whichever poems suggested a melody in my mind. I effectively made myself available to the poems, without imposing my own selection on them.

From there, you don’t seem to have been precious about trimming or reshaping Yeats’ original phrasing. Tell me a little bit about that process. I know you’re audacious and ballsy, but it takes big balls to reconfigure such classic texts.

I figure that for Yeats’ poems to live and breathe as contemporary song lyrics, I had to not approach them as museum pieces or sacred cows. In the folk tradition, words and tunes are constantly adapting, and so I brought some of that attitude to Yeats. If I wanted to go where the poems sent me musically, I had to make some little changes, sometimes merging two poems to make one song, or losing a line or even a verse if it didn’t serve the shape of the song. But I worked with the absolute rule that I would never change Yeats’ intention or meaning. Also that I would never insert any lyrics of my own among Yeats’.

That, to my thinking, would be the height of arrogance, and when I’ve come across other artists doing that, I’m very dismayed indeed.

It is so wrong.

On Appointment, there are a dozen different musical mood swings. How did you allow the musical settings to coincide with his words? Was it something organic where his words told you what to do, or did you have this palette that you wanted to use as paints behind and through his words?

The words directed the music. The poems, in effect, told me where to take the music. From there, I had my own palette of styles and skills to work with, though I managed to expand that when a poem—for example, “News For The Delphic Oracle” or “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”—pushed me into what were for me unexplored musical territories.

Sounds corny, I know, but was he alive and collaborating with you in a sense? Did Yeats physically bring out other voices within you?

I felt the will and personality of the poems, not the poet. To do my job properly, and to be as ruthless in my artistic decisions as the job required, I had to be uninhibited by the weight of Yeats’ reputation.

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All In

Vegas alt-rockers Imagine Dragons paid their dues before hitting the jackpot story by

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j. poet *

photo by

REID ROLLS

L

a s v e g a s may not be the first place

you think of when you hear the words “underground rock,” but it is the home of alt-rock superstars Imagine Dragons. Last spring, the band released their major label debut, a six-song EP called Continued Silence, which included the irresistibly catchy single “It’s Time.” The song shot to the top of the charts and the Dragons’ full-length debut, Night Visions, duplicated the feat, entering the Billboard Pop Chart at #2, one of the highest charting rock debuts of the decade.

“After we got signed to a major, we could have put out an album, but we’ve built this band from

the ground up, slowly and organically,” says band spokesperson and lead singer Dan Reynolds, “so we thought an EP would be a better idea. When we started, we hired my cousin to book the band, even though he’d never booked anyone before. When we told him he’d get 10 percent of whatever we made for a gig, he got on the phone and started calling clubs and casinos. It was a real family affair.

“After three years, we were known in Vegas and the West Coast, but we needed to create a buzz in the rest of the country. The EP did that. When the album was released, we sold 82,000 copies the first week. We were completely blown away.” [4]

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Like most bands, Imagine Dragons earned their “overnight success” with a lot of hard work and determination. “There’s an underground artistic scene [in Las Vegas],” Reynolds explains, “but it’s not something most people see. It’s away from the Strip and the casinos. There are artists, painters, photographers and musicians, but the city does exert its influence. It’s an extreme location and the lights, noise and cheap beer make it a good place to start a band. Everything is so grandiose and over the top that it inspires you to write songs that are larger than life.”

The band got their start in casino bars on the Strip, where they were playing six-hour sets, five days a week. “We decided we’d write all our own songs from the get-go, but to make ends meet, you have to play the casinos. After a six-hour set, you go home and collapse. Then you do it again the next day.

They let you do 40 percent original tunes if you do 60 percent covers. They don’t care who you cover, so we learned stuff by the Beatles, Stones, Cars, the Cure, Muse, MGMT, Arcade Fire, Led Zep. It was good for a young band, because you get a lot of time together, five days a week. You get to grow as musicians, and studying the songs of other bands makes you better writers.

“You also learn how to capture a crowd’s attention when you have to compete with slots, cocktail waitresses and roulette tables. We got good at pulling people away from the machines and onto the stage. We’d have singing competitions, and, by 3 in the morning, people were rushing the stage to sing with us. The stages were so tiny that we were standing on top of each other, but playing those gigs helped define us.”

Reynolds grew up in Las Vegas. Although he had always loved music, he was actually thinking of joining the FBI after he finished college at Brigham Young University. “When I made the decision to drop out of school and start a band, there was no longer a Plan B. I still don’t know what made me think about being an FBI agent.

Music is all I ever wanted to do. Even if I was going to fail, I knew I needed to try.

So, I looked for other guys who wanted to be career musicians. We didn’t start playing music to get girls or party. This was do or die. That’s why I’m glad I found Wayne [Sermon, guitar, mandolin, hammer dulcimer], Ben [McKee, bass] and Daniel [Platzman, drums, viola, strings]. They all

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went to Berklee [College of Music]. They’re incredible musicians.

“I had piano and drum lessons growing up, and taught myself guitar in middle school, but I play by ear, so we bring the worlds of playing by feel and technical proficiency together. When we collaborate, I’ll want to try things that don’t sound like they’ll make any sense, but they’ll try it, and if it works, it works. We’re very democratic and collaborative.”

After the quartet started playing together, they made a name for themselves by winning four battle of the bands competitions on the Vegas Strip. “I’d never do it again, but we were just starting out and played any gig we could get. I hate pitting artists against each other. It’s nonsensical.

Every band is different.”

Despite Reynolds’ distaste for the competitions, winning one battle of the bands competitions led to the band’s big break.

The prize was an opening slot at the Bite of Las Vegas Festival in 2010. “They wanted some local names,” Reynolds laughs. “We played our set at 10 in the morning; there were maybe 100 people in the crowd, but the festival promoters were there and they

liked us.” Imagine Dragons went back to the house they share and unpacked their gear. At 5 in the afternoon, they got a call from the promoters. Train’s lead singer had lost his voice. The voice on the phone asked a foolish question: “Do you guys want to be the headliners?” They set a speed record packing up their gear and driving back to the festival grounds.

“We played in front of 25,000 people,” Reynolds says. “It was amazing. I remember walking onto the stage. It was the best feeling I’d ever had in my life, and also the scariest. All I could think was, ‘They’re going to hate us.’” The opposite ensued. That gig made Imagine Dragons a force in Las Vegas.

The group continued playing the casinos, but in keeping with their indie rock ethos, they also started their own label and put out three EPs in two years: Imagine Dragons, Hell and Silence and It’s Time.

Reynolds and the rest of the Dragons have a highly developed work ethic. They’re constantly writing new songs.

“I’ve been writing since I was a kid,” Reynolds recalls. “Every day after school, I would write—sometimes a song a day. I

We played in front of 25,000 people. It was amazing.

I remember walking onto the stage. It was the best feeling I’d ever had in my life, and also the scariest. All I could think was, “They’re going to hate us.”

-- Dan Reynolds

may have 1,000 of them on old computers.

Some of ’em nobody but my dad has ever heard, or will ever hear.

“I write the lyrics and a lot of the melodies [for the band]. Most songs start on my iPhone, or computer, or a recorder. I wake up at night with an idea and put it down.

Sometimes you know right away it’s good; sometimes it takes a lot of work to go anywhere. I’ll overdub some instruments on it and send it to Wayne, or he’ll send me a track to sing over. We bring the skeletons to the band and see what works for them, then we play it live to see if it works for the fans.

Everyone has a say with the arrangements.

We all come up with our own parts.”

The songs Imagine Dragons perform sound like arena rock hits, with plenty of tension and release, and soaring sing-along choruses, anthems for a new generation of music lovers. “I grew up listing to my dad’s record collection, and I was born in the era of arena rock bands. Anthemic bands.

Since I was raised around that kind of music, it naturally fused its way into my head and melted my brain.

“Lyrically, I write from a personal place.

Songs have been my journal, or my diary,

since the age of 12 or so. I’m able to connect to my deepest feelings, my depression and anxiety, with music. I like to write realistically about what’s going on around me, but I also want it to be a bit abstract, so people can have their own impression of what I’m saying. We’re in a depression economically, we’ve been through a couple of long wars, there’s a lot of political unrest and uncertainty. These days, young people have to face reality at an early age.”

The EPs, and their regional success, eventually attracted attention from the major labels. The Dragons were signed to Interscope through Alex da Kid’s KIDinaKORNER label. Kid was a big fan, and although he’s best known for working with Dr. Dre and Eminem, Reynolds said he was the perfect choice.

“We were working on the album before we got signed,” Reynolds continues.

“Everything we’ve done before was selfproduced, so it was nice to add Alex and his fresh interpretations of the songs. He didn’t want to change the way we were doing things, but he’s pretty hands-on in the studio. He was especially helpful in getting a big sound out of the drums. He has a kick

drum sound you can feel in your gut, and a bigger, crisper snare drum attack.

“We rented Studio X at the Palms in Las Vegas, because we did our earlier EPs there and we’re familiar with everyone. We plugged in and played together. The initial recording was all live, then we layered stuff on top of it. Vocals were live, too; the album uses a lot of first takes. Some are even from the demos I recorded into my laptop.

If it sounds right, then it is right. Alex was good with that. He knew you didn’t need a $2,000 mike to get a good vocal. It doesn’t matter how you get there. All that matters is the result.

“If a song felt like it needed a folk instrument or a quirky feel, Wayne would play mandolin or hammer dulcimer to bring that to life. On ‘On Top of the World,’ we used a lot of percussion instruments from all over the world. Drumming was my first love; we probably did a lot of overkill on the album’s drum sound.”

With Night Visions out and lodged firmly at the top of the charts, Imagine Dragons are busy preparing for their first national headlining tour, but that hasn’t diminished their dedication to their craft. “We still rehearse a lot more than the normal rock band,” Reynolds attests. “All the guys put in hours of practice every day. You can hear it in the caliber of music they play. If they’re not practicing, they’re out looking for gear. None of us were ever the popular kids in high school. We were all music and gear nerds.”

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Partying Hard Superhuman Happiness puts all hands on its badass debut

“WE’VE DONE MORE, um, popular-style song-

writing—you know, where one person makes most of the song, he looks at the blank page, he stares at the piano, he bangs his head on it and screams, ‘I’ll never get it!’ And then he gets it. But we’ve done that before.”

Stuart Bogie, sax player for Brooklyn world-party septet Superhuman Happiness, is on the phone, and you can hear the excitement in his voice. There’s an electricity and enthusiasm as he breaks down the process of writing the band’s debut, Hands (The Royal Potato Family), that you don’t hear from many musicians, as if Bogie were a mad scientist and about to release his most diabolical creation yet. That creation, mind you, just happens to be one of the best party records of the year, a post-globalization cocktail of progressive sounds and playful rhythms.

“I wanted to find new ways of playing music and new ways of creating music,” says Bogie. “And in order to do that, I realized that I need to get out of that paradigm, out

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of the system. How do creative ideas get initiated? My belief is that the creative idea isn’t an isolated event—it happens between people … for every great idea, there’s a set of ears. In our system—and this is economical, too—of intellectual property, we always reward the person who moves their mouth and not the person who leans in and listens. So, I wanted to form a structure (in which) everyone can participate.”

It’s this simple, egalitarian approach— songs that start as improv jams, built from the ground up with the full participation of the full band—that makes Hands bristle with energy and positive vibes. From the very first bars of polyrhythmic clapping that open the album to the krautrock-meets-ethio-jazz motorik of “Elevator Elevation,” Hands is the sound of seven people having a helluva good time. Instruments interact and sounds play off one another with jazz-like precision as electronic flourishes and dub-style productions elements ratchet up the adrenaline,

pushing the whole affair to the edge of anarchy, but never losing site of the groove.

“We spent—and here’s the key thing— more time preparing our creative energy and cultivating a creative dialogue than we necessarily spent writing music,” says Bogie. “This is the critical part: We spent all this time establishing how to communicate with the music, how to mine these games for ideas, that when it was time to have ideas, it all happened in a rush.”

That rush comes through in the music with each song, despite their improv origins, sounding like they were handed down from the Party Gods, fully formed and ready to shake your ass. Whether it’s the twostepping horn blasts and the group chants of “Second Heart” or the funky guitars and staccato synth squeals of “See Me On My Way,” Superhuman Happiness taps into an energy that’s beyond the typical paradigm and one step beyond what we’ve come to expect from popular music. —Sean L. Maloney

photo by nathan west

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Family Matters

The folk/reggae upstarts in Wild Belle manufacture the right kind of buzz

HE DOESN’T HAVE business cards for his company yet. Not even a working name or an eye-catching logo. But Elliot Bergman—in addition to launching Wild Belle, a sleek new folk/reggae duo with his kid sister Natalie, whose self-produced debut Isles was the subject of a recent Columbia-won bidding war—isn’t just some multi-instrumentalist mastermind. He also hand-fashions kalimbas in his spare time. Kalimbas so resonant that Paul Simon himself wanted one. The Chicago-bred, New York-based Bergman grew fascinated with the African thumb piano in his previous Afro-pop outfit NOMO. “Kalimbas were just the tools that I ended up going to, because they’re very flexible, and based on how you process them, they can end up sounding like steel drums, a gamelan, orchestral chimes or an electric guitar,” he says. “They’re just a quick way into a set of sounds that aren’t necessarily turning up on every record you’re hearing on the radio these days, and just an easy way to make music.”

Naturally, the instrument informs several songs on Isles, like the dub-slippery “Keep You,” the ska-punched “It’s Too Late” and tropical/trip-hop hybrid “Backslider.” But

photo By Jennifer Tzar

for the past 10 years, the machine-shopschooled metalworker has been manufacturing his own kalimbas.

“I figured out the soldering techniques and just started making them,” he says. “And I was working a lot at the time with Warren Defever from His Name Is Alive, so we started building them together, and it just kind of went from there. It turned into this little side business, and a way that I made rent when I was in New York. Whenever things got too dire financially, I knew I could always crank out a few kalimbas.”

Word of the kalimbas spread. Paul Simon’s assistant bought one from a Big Apple shop, played it for Mr. Graceland himself, and soon Bergman was summoned to Simon’s offices so his bassist could sample the product. “The guy was just shredding on these kalimbas and singing traditional South African songs, and then he picked out a couple instruments he wanted,” he says of the surreal experience. “So, I haven’t met Paul Simon yet—just his people.”

Bergman has always had a keen ear for potential tools he can implement. For years, the age difference kept him apart from his sibling professionally (he’s 31, she’s 23),

even though Natalie could always sing in the perfect ’60s-girl-group voice. “So, it was just a matter of time before we had enough common ground between us to collaborate in a way that felt productive, you know?” he says. “She’d been doing her own music, writing songs and recording, and she’d become amazingly prolific on GarageBand.”

With Natalie on vocals, and Elliot on saxophone and keyboards, Wild Belle went through a filtering process to find the perfect approach. Reggae—especially vintage Studio One recordings—became a big touchstone. But why Isles?

“We had this concept that each song was like its own little island of sound,” says Bergman. “There were all these different elements coming together, and each one was distinctive in its own way, but also related to each other and influenced by each other. So, it’s like we made an archipelago.”

But what about a sporty kalimba company moniker? Like KaliCo? Bergman laughs.

“So far, I’ve just sold them on tour, stamped ‘NOMO’ on the side, or ‘Wild Belle’ on the side for Wild Belle shows,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I just haven’t incorporated in any proper fashion yet.” —Tom Lanham

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Kid Stuff

Samantha Crain finds poetry in the mundane

SAMANTHA CRAIN’S VOICE comes to you from

the space between worlds. Her songs are full of shifting shadows and sharp flashes of light, marked by ambient melodies that veer off in unexpected directions and pensive lyrics full of conflicting emotions. She augments her oblique poetry with a delivery that breaks words into rhythmic fragments that seldom follow the expected flow of melody or rhythm, stretching and bending until they give up their hidden meaning.

“I don’t have a conscious approach to my singing, but a lot of it probably has its roots in the music of the Choctaw tribe,” says Crain.

“I’m a half-breed and went to a lot of powwows and drum circles when I was growing up. Traditional songs develop with a steady rhythm, but the phrasing the singers follow has its own rules, not like normal pop music.

It has a foreign sound to people used to contemporary music.”

On Kid Face (Ramseur), Crain weaves a subtle hypnotic spell. Her warm, open-hearted vocals deliver a powerful emotional punch with a minimum of effort. With the help of her regular touring band and producer John Vanderslice (Spoon, Mountain Goats), she’s crafted 11 tracks of mellow, ambient Americana that perfectly complement her profoundly introspective songwriting.

“I was dealing with a break-up when I made my last album, so it sounded more rock than usual,” she says. “In the last couple of years, I started writing in a more ambient, soulful Americana style, which is what I do naturally.

After I moved away from rock, I kept my electric guitar and used it to produce dark sounds to complement the arrangements. My fiddle player, Daniel Foulks, has a good ear for the uncomfortable parts of a string arrangement.

What he plays (on the record) sounds good, but it’s also slightly disturbing.”

Most of the songs on the album revolve around Crain’s dexterous finger-picking, with ghostly ambient synthesizers drifting in and out of focus in the background to give the tracks a dense, slightly melancholy aura.

The sound is fitting for introspective material that deals with the inherent contradictions of life on the road as a young adult in a touring band.

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“Since I was a kid, I was embarrassed at how ordinary and uninteresting I was,” says Crain. “I didn’t think my life would make a good short story, much less a song or a novel. That stuck with me until recently. I started writing Kid Face while I was traveling around Europe by myself, navigating a lot of unfamiliar situations. I was thinking a lot about the feeling of aloneness, which is a physical state, versus loneliness, which is emotional. In the process, I realized that there’s nothing going on in my life that isn’t going on in everybody else’s life. I suddenly was able to see the poetry in normal things and communicate that to other people. I have a hard time being honest with people in my regular life.

In a song, it’s easier to say what I mean.”

—j. poet

photo by Keisha Register

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Prime Meridian As Helado Negro, Roberto Lange conjures a world all his own

ROBERTO CARLOS LANGE is an explorer. No

tone, instrument, idea, emotion, collaboration, genre or medium appears to be off limits.

The desire to “experience music and sound in different ways” is a process that evolves “second by second,” not record by record, according to Lange.

This curiosity has defined the Brooklynbased artist since his youth in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., when, inspired by recordings his parents and their friends made singing into a karaoke machine late at night, Lange began experimenting on guitar and his brother’s Casio SK-1 synth. And it continues now, as he creates sophisticated sound worlds in a variety of related yet disparate genres (beat music, ambient, dub-infused pop, among others) and under different monikers: ROM, Epstein, OMBRE (with Julianna Barwick), Savath y Savalas (with Scott Herren) and Helado Negro.

Lange has also been commissioned to build sound installations in creative spaces around the world, and says he’s currently developing a piece for a 20-member children’s choir that will be performed in October at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, Calif.

photo by Ryan dickie

I could go on (Google Lange’s Brain Finger Composition, for instance), but you get the point—he’s nothing if not a polymath.

Born to Ecuadorian immigrants, Lange is at his most personal creating as Helado Negro (Spanish for “black ice cream”). Or perhaps it just feels that way because of the dulcet, intimate nature of Canta Lechuza, the second Helado LP and the first that I heard. (Disclaimer: My wife and Lange were employed by the same creative agency for a time, which is how I came to know his music.) Billowing over with warm computer and synth-generated textures, Canta Lechuza (“owl sings”) feels like a soft-yet-enveloping beachside high on a tranquil summer day, the enabling spirit just present enough to create a gaping void when it disappears. The effect is enhanced by Lange’s calm, timeless croon and the Spanish-sung lyrics that drift languidly like cumulus clouds over one elegant tune after another.

If that record approximates blissful late afternoon intoxication, Lange’s newest, Invisible Life (Asthmatic Kitty), is the soundtrack to the lucid hours that follow. Everything is enhanced or tweaked, but only just enough.

The loping beats throb more; the synthesizers

carry a bit more grit. The album as a whole is more dynamic from track to track, leading you to shuffle your feet at times and stretch out in the grass at others. It should also be noted that Lange has a wizardly touch in the studio; Invisible Life is one of the best sounding records I’ve heard in quite some time.

“I’ve always made music like this … it was just really the right time to share it with people,” says Lange, when asked about Invisible Life’s increase in BPMs. He goes on to talk about how freestyle, Miami bass and, later, the electro, boogie, techno and soul of his college days informed him. And it’s true— the specter of those sounds lurks here and elsewhere in his robust catalog—but Lange is creating something that is unmistakably his with each new Helado Negro release, an aesthetic rooted in his Latino heritage and colored by the progressivism of the electronic music culture that he was reared on.

Something else lurks, too, which might partly explain Lange’s unquenched ambition.

“For me, (Invisible Life) has been this being that lives with me that’s being fed all these things to stay alive,” he says. “It’s a creature and mascot.” —Ryan Burleson

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Leave The Kids At Home They Might Be Giants

keep the parents happy with Nanobots, their second grown-up album in five years. story by hobart rowland

At 10,

my daughter has essentially discarded the kiddie version of They Might Be Giants. Like most pre-teen TMBG fans, she started with 2002’s No!, the Brooklyn duo’s initial foray into children’s music. She received her copy—signed by TMBG’s two Johns, Linnell and Flansburgh—as a Christmas gift. She listened to it a few times, then set it aside.

More recently, after a chance encounter with “They’ll Need A Crane,” she abruptly decided she’d be better served by their adult catalog.

With my help, she promptly went about dissecting 1988’s Lincoln and its 1990 follow-up, Flood, with the zeal of a kid running roughshod over her first PG-13 DVD. For me, that’s meant fielding questions about “prosthetic foreheads” and seemingly benign couplets that defy the logic of basic human interaction—like, “I’m just tired and I don’t love you anymore/And there’s a restaurant we should check out ... ” “You can get a lot of distance by invoking the concept of poetic license,” says Linnell, when

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photos by dominic neitz

informed of my quandary. “Explain the concept to her. It’s a way of expressing things that don’t make sense—that are, in and of themselves, mysterious. That would be a way to dodge the question, I’d say. But I’m kind of thrilled that she’s so curious about it.”

Perhaps it’s poetic license that has seen TMBG through a voluminous series of ups, downs and holding patterns over its three decades in operation.

“We were very lucky in that we somewhat carelessly didn’t make the sort of compromises a lot bands attempted just to make a living,” says Linnell. “When we were in our 20s, we weren’t even that serious about making money. As a result, we sort of carved out this area where we were widely perceived as doing our own thing.”

Through it all, there’s been cheesy drum machines and wheezing accordions, unlikely MTV lionization, awkward attempts at becoming a real band, TV theme songs, multiplatinum sales, even a Grammy.

And, above all, there have been tunes—tons of ’em, delivered via vinyl, cassette, compact

disc, download and the infamous Dial-A-Song.

“We were locked in this terrible struggle with these machines that we used for Dial-A-Song,” says Linnell, explaining its unceremonious 2006 demise. (Though there’s now a cool TMBG iPhone app.) “We tried to switch over to a computer-based thing, and that was a disaster. It just miserably petered out.”

At last count, the TMBG tally is more than 300 album tracks—one of them as short as four seconds. Never mind the stray tunes from numerous EPs and compilations. But who’s counting? Not Linnell and Flansburgh. They’re just happy to still be viable so late in the game.

“It’s very hard to make money making any kind of music nowadays,” says Linnell. “I really have a hard time imagining how you’d do something like what we’re doing and still enjoy the middle-class lifestyle we’ve had for the last 30 years. Everything that’s happened for us in the music business has made us seem more acceptable to people—less of a UFO.” Flansburgh offers this in the way of insight: “We’ve been lucky in that our muffler’s been needle

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dragging at various times, but we’ve never had to pull off the road.”

TMBG’s second adult album in five years and its 16th overall, Nanobots (Idlewild/Megaforce) boasts 25 new songs. And much like its big-boy predecessor, 2011’s Join Us, it could stand a little pruning, especially around a hindquarters saddled with prog-rock weirdness, disconcertingly abrupt swings in momentum and even a half-baked Pet Sounds homage (“Too Tall Girl”). Fortunately, the LP is front-loaded with hook-laden, high-energy TMBG—like “You’re On Fire,” (with an intro lick cribbed from the Jackson 5’s “ABC”), the dodgy (in the best sense) “Black Ops” and the conventional (but still bitchin’ and destined to kick ass live) rocker, “Lost My Mind.” “Circular Karate Chop” is giddy adolescent fun, and the title track has the same ratcheted-up faux-theme-song flair that made “The Mesopotamians” (from 2007’s The Else) such a trip.

“Nanobots involves some of the laboratorytype stuff we’ve been doing since the beginning,” says Linnell. “In some ways, we’ve been doing the same thing all along. The technology and the process have been changing, but I don’t really think that’s the point. The idea and song are the main things.”

Much of Nanobots takes advantage of what is now a fully acclimated quintet that also includes guitarist Dan Miller, bassist Danny Weinkauf and drummer Marty Beller. “We’d been functioning as a two-piece for 10 years, and we really just sort of talked ourselves into it,” says Linnell of the bumpy transition, which began in 1992.

“It’s still John and I making the decisions, but we lean heavily on the other guys for a lot of the musical resources. It’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

“When they first started working with a band, they were adapting it to what they already did,” says TMBG’s longtime friend and producer, Patrick Dillett. “But slowly, over the years, they’ve incorporated more of what’s standard for more traditional bands. It feels more organic.”

A three-time Grammy winner who’s worked with the likes of David Byrne, Tegan And Sara, Mary J. Blige and Mike Doughty, Dillett first ran into Linnell and Flansburgh when they were recording Flood in New York. “He was an assistant at Skyline Recording Studios, which was a very hierarchical kind of place,” says Flansburgh. “It was dominated by Nile Rodgers when we were there.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with Nile Rodgers. “The first time I heard ‘Let’s Dance,’ I remember thinking, ‘This sounds like what cocaine must feel like,” says Flansburgh with 30

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a chuckle.

Looking for inspiration at Skyline, Flansburgh and Linnell found a co-conspirator in Dillett, and he’s been involved in the recording of just about every TMBG album since. One glaring exception is 1994’s Paul Fox-produced John Henry, which precipitated a creative malaise for Linnell and Flansburgh that carried through their final Elektra release, 1996’s Factory Showroom, and into the next decade.

“It has some great songs, but it was their first full album with a band,” says Dillett of John Henry. “It was tough for fans. Many of them simply decided it wasn’t for them, and that lingers for a lot of people.”

“We took a very hard right turn,” says Flansburgh. “We were intimidated making the transition to live musicians, and we wanted to hold on to control of what were doing. We actually demoed the entire album (with Dillett) and our live combo, and the difference between the demos and the finished album is scant. In fact,

a lot of people prefer the demos.”

Though there were rumors to the contrary, Flansburgh says TMBG always played nice with Elektra. “People want to create drama when there often wasn’t much,” he says. “A lot of my best friends over the years have worked at record companies. If it wasn’t for Glenn Morrow at Bar/None, nobody would know who They Might Be Giants were.”

Morrow and, of course, MTV. “We started getting our videos played pretty early,” says Linnell. “Our stuff was being played alongside Whitesnake, and we were instantly perceived as something that was in opposition to the normal stuff. People thought of us as their personal discovery, and that worked in our favor.”

“To this day, I’m still kind of confused as to how the whole MTV thing happened,” says Flansburgh. “I think we were the happy solution to other issues at MTV. A lot of the spirit of our early videos is taken from the music sequences in A Hard Day’s Night. It’s a very

lighthearted, breezy way of doing a video, and we reintroduced that idea to MTV and other video directors.”

“At one time, ‘nerd’ was a much more pejorative term.

But something has changed in the culture now, and that’s no longer such a horrible thing to be.”

John Linnell

As successful as it was, TMBG’s five-year run on MTV did everything but change the public’s perception of the pair. “It seems really petty now to complain about this, but we did feel like we were being caricatured in a way that was unfortunate and limited people’s interest in us,” says Linnell. “People thought it was a shtick—that we were some kind of nerdthemed project.”

For years, that infuriated Linnell. “But over time, I relaxed about it,” he says. “At one time, ‘nerd’ was a much more pejorative term. But something has changed in the culture now, and that’s no longer such a horrible thing to be.”

Exactly where does the grown-up TMBG end and the more kid-friendly version begin?

The line is blurrier than you might think.

“When we started doing children’s music, we were fairly conscious of the idea that we wanted to apply the same spirit,” says Linnell.

“As a friend of ours said, ‘I can see that you’re not lowering your standards just because you

can get away with it.’ In other words, that somehow you can get away with shoveling filler into kids’ projects. The great thing about No! was that it was a fun and frivolous thing for us. We didn’t feel like it was a very high-stakes project, and so we wound up really enjoying ourselves making it, and being fairly reckless about what we thought was appropriate.”

TMBG’s subsequent crossover success led to a series of projects for Disney, one of which earned the duo a Grammy. “If your only musicculture navigation system is Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, They Might Be Giants might not exist to you,” says Flansburgh. “The kids’ stuff got the word out in the mainstream press that we were still around.”

And there have been other revelations. “Doing the kids’ stuff made me realize how much code people tend to assume there is in what we’re doing,” says Flansburgh. “I don’t think we’ve ever really lived up to our reputation as culture smugglers. In a way, we’re just doing this thing that’s very direct to us, and I think people might actually be projecting the winking part.”

So, could it be that TMBG isn’t really that much of a UFO, after all?

“The truth of the matter is, we got pulled into popular music the same way everyone else did: the Beatles and all the shiny things in rock in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Flansburgh. “We weren’t coming from some ‘anti’ place.” Still, there’s something very heroic about being in a rock band, and we thought it was somehow bigger than us.”

Kids could care less about perceptions. They just know what they like—and their affection for TMBG has created another interesting dilemma.

“A lot of the indoor clubs we play aren’t suitable environments for children,” says Linnell.

“We’ve had to insist that they’re 14-and-up or 18-and-up shows. It’s a complicated topic.”

And so, seeing as she won’t be joining me for a TMBG show anytime soon, my daughter had three questions of her own for Linnell, which I relayed to him.

The first: “How old are you?”

“I’m 53. How old are you, by the way?”

“I’m 46.”

“Wow, you’re a youngster.”

Second question: “Do you use synthesizers in your music?”

“The answer is a resounding yes,” says Linnell.

And the third: “What’s the favorite song you’ve ever written?”

“The gracious thing would be for me to pick a song by Flansburgh. Um, just tell her it’s the one I haven’t written yet.” needle

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!

S I H T R E V O C DIS w Albums You Need…

Five Ne

SERENA RYDER HARMONY Already the recipient of three JUNO Awards and two GOLD Albums, Serena Ryder unveils her most personal and ambitious album yet.

HARMONY – robust, passionate, optimistic, adventurous, haunting and addictive – features the smash hit “Stompa” and the new single “What I Wouldn’t Do.”

HARMONY is available now

ADAM GREEN & BINKI SHAPIRO DEBUT ALBUM

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB SPECTER AT THE FEAST

An album filled with the echo of late-sixties folk-pop and an easygoing rapport between two captivating singers.

“Together they’ve made an album of duets that’s neither kitschy nor cutesy, but full of sincere, deceptively gentle songs that carry lightly the pain in their lyrics.”

– Hermione Hoby, The Guardian

Specter At the Feast is the sixth studio album from BRMC, following up the highly successful Beat the Devil’s Tattoo.

The album has already garnered early praise from Rolling Stone who called it a “superb new album” while NPR crowned the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers “ones to watch in 2013”. The band will also be heading out on their first North American headline run since 2010, kicking off in April and including stops in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

DEBUT ALBUM is available now

SPECTER AT THE FEAST is available March 19

THE TOSSERS THE EMERALD CITY THE TOSSERS paint the town green with the release of their eighth studio album, The Emerald City. Predating fellow Celtic punk contemporaries FLOGGING MOLLY and DROPKICK MURPHYS, THE TOSSERS are celebrated for their authentic use of traditional Irish folk instrumentation comprised of the mandolin, fiddle, tin whistle, and banjo, all of which are incorporated brilliantly throughout The Emerald City.

THE EMERALD CITY is available March 5

HOLLERADO WHITE PAINT Juno Award nominees, Hollerado, present their highly anticipated sophomore album, White Paint.

The album is follow up to their debut, Record In A Bag, which received critical acclaim from SPIN (“Crazy-catchy melodies, raging hooks and riffs seal the deal”), FILTER (DIY! Just the way we like it!”), Entertainment Weekly (“Low budget awesome”) and more.

White Paint no doubt contains all the same Hollerado goodness and then some. New album includes the hit single “Pick Me Up.”

WHITE PAINT is available now

One Flew over the

Cuckoo’s Nest

life after 30 finds the original freak folker putting away

hippy-dippy things. Meet Devendra Banhart Version 2.0: shorn, showered, shaved, engaged, focused and wearing a shirt. He’s also making the best music of his career.

t's the crack of noon on a frigid winter day in greenwich village.

Devendra Banhart has risen, and with the help of a caffeine injection from Joe’s Coffee, he’s ready to shine. But first we need to stop by a bodega around the corner where they have, by Banhart’s description, the most extraordinary donuts.

story by jonathan valania photos by chris buck

He simply must have one. From there, we swing by Electric Lady Studios where Banhart will have a quick word with his pal Ric Ocasek, then it’s back to his place. He currently resides in a fairly upscale high-rise apartment building, just off Christopher Street, in the same Greenwich Village neighborhood where—as Banhart, ever the student of 20th-century bohemia, points out—E. E. Cummings once lived; Bob Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin, Frank McCourt and Norman Mailer once held court at the long-gone Lion’s Head Pub; and in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, in a down-market, Mafia-owned dive called the Stonewall, fed-up gay men rose up against perpetual police harassment and said, “No more.” Banhart’s pretty sure Stephin Merritt also lives in his building, although he’s never seen him.

He just got back from a tour of Russia. “In Moscow, all the taxi drivers can recite the work of their 10 favorite poets,” he says as we make our way to his apartment. “They’ll still kidnap you, but they are very well-read. We would play a game called Whoever Gets Kidnapped Last Wins.”

The lobby of Banhart’s apartment building has the faded, post-Czar glamour of a Russian tea room—high-ceilinged, edged in gilt and benign neglect. The thermostat must be set for the low 90s, and you smell that telltale aroma of roach spray everywhere.

A dozen or so floors up, Banhart shares a modest, two-room apartment with his fiancée, Ana Kras, a model-gorgeous photographer and high-end furniture designer from Serbia. They met two years ago when Kras came to shoot him for a magazine assignment, and Banhart proposed within five minutes of meeting her. They have been together ever since. Despite media reports to the contrary, they are not yet married, just engaged.

As she puts on her coat to run some errands, Banhart takes her face in his hands, looks deeply into her eyes and implores her to return.

“So, listen—come back when you’re done, and then we’ll walk to the studio, OK?” “I will, I will. I’ll come back,” she says.

“I say it every time; I say, ‘Please come back,’” he says to me by way of explanation. “I’m always shocked when she does each time.”

“Each time I come back home, he just hugs me and says, ‘Thank you for coming back home,’” she says as she walks out the door. “Where would I go? So sweet.”

Their apartment is barely furnished, with a futon, a couple of desks, and a guitar and amp. They’ve only been living here for a few days. For the better part of the past decade, Banhart has been ping-ponging back and forth between the East and West Coasts, with no fixed address.

If a Devendra Banhart didn’t exist, we would never think to invent one: half-Venezuelan, holy-fool, head-shop mystic beardo, long-haired leaping gnome, who came singing songs of love at the awful dawn of the 21st century, spreading freakfolk spores across the land like a nouveau hippie Johnny Appleseed. That’s the old Banhart, not to be confused with the new Banhart, or perhaps more accurately, the current Banhart. The beard is gone, replaced with gray-flecked stubble.

So, too, are the long, inky locks. He is currently rocking a high, bedhead fade last seen on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Also gone are the velvet bell-bottoms and the turquoise. These days, he dresses more like a hip prep-school kid raised in the tonier precincts of Williamsburg. All part of his grand plan, he says, for growing old gracefully, along with publishing a book of poems with Brother In Elysium. A limited edition with letterpress print run. That and getting more serious about exhibiting his art, maybe another group show in Italy or a solo one in New York.

His detractors may dismiss him as some kind of airhead hippie space cadet, but in fact he has a sharp inquisitive mind and an expansive knowledge of 20th-century music, contemporary art, underground cinema and Japanese poetry. He speaks in long, labyrinthine sentences, rich with cultural allusions, shot through with surreal humor and detours into the provocative and the absurd. Most of our rambling three-hour conversation is devoted to correcting misperceptions about his public image and untethering himself from outdated or inaccurate stereotypes. He’s really not that guy. Never was. Or at least he’s not anymore.

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banhart: People are always disappointed when I don’t want to get high with them after the show, so I’ve learned to let them down easy. When someone offers me weed or something I go, “Aw, man, that’s cool of you, thanks, but I already got super high, bro!” But when I smell weed, I run. I run away.

NEEDLE: Because?

banhart: Just, I hate it.

NEEDLE: You don’t like marijuana?

banhart: I’ve never, ever, ever, ever, ever liked it. The whole hippie-dumb and hippie-ness and folky-ness—all that stuff is really funny. I played with it and I contributed, and that became sort of a caricature.

NEEDLE: So, you’re telling me you never liked marijua-

na? You tried it once or whatever, and … just not your bag?

banhart: Yeah, no, never. I can’t stand the way it makes me feel, so I literally have to run away if I smell it, or hold my breath. It’s so disappointing to people to find out that I don’t smoke weed. And not only that I don’t smoke it, but I actually [whispering conspiratorially] hate it. But I don’t judge people that do, of course! It’s great! It’s wonderful!

NEEDLE: What do you mean—do you hate the idea of it,

or the way it makes you feel?

banhart: Yeah, for me, I can’t stand the way it makes me feel, so I literally have to run away if I smell it, or hold my breath.

NEEDLE: What about psychedelics?

banhart: I remember I was given a handful of tabs at a show on that first tour or two. Like, here’s a bag of LSD that I’m being given, assuming that this is going to be a gift that I’m going to be so happy about. These things are not recreational. Psychedelics are not recreational. They’re not. You can do it with the right frame of mind, prepared, with a guide; it’s a wonderful thing.

But I’ve only done it once or twice in my whole life.

NEEDLE: Are there any controlled substances that you

do enjoy?

banhart: No, but I just recently quit smoking.

Longtime musical partner and album producer Noah Georgeson backs him up on this when we talk later. “I’ve never seen Devendra smoke marijuana one single time, ever,” he says.

“People pinned this whole free-love, drug-culture, hippie thing on him, which—even though it was partly his fault for wearing too much turquoise jewelry and stuff—was never accurate.”

Still, he is not completely free of totems from the Age of Aquarius these days. Up until just recently, he was in possession of Jim Morrison’s couch. You see, Banhart’s manager is also caretaker of Mr. Mojo Risin’s estate. “I was just borrowing the couch; I just had it refurbished and gave it back,” he says with a mischievous grin, before directing his gaze at the chair I am sitting on. “Though I might have kept Jim’s reading chair.”

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devendra banhart was born in San Antonio on May 30, 1981, the son of a Venezuelan mother and an American father.

His parents were adherents of Indian guru Prem Rawat, who suggested the name Devendra, which means King of the Gods in Hindu. For good measure, they gave him the middle name of Obi, as in Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi master. His parents divorced when he was four, and his mother took him back to Caracas, Venezuela, where he would live for the next 10 years.

He would have no contact with his blood father for another 20 years.

In Venezuela, his mother met and married the man Banhart would come to consider his true father, an American telecom professional and part-time poet named Loring Baker. “I guess you could say he’s my step-dad, but he’s really my dad—he’s the only person I’ve ever called ‘dad,’” says Banhart. “One day when I was about six, I said to him, ‘Can I call you ‘dad’?’ I remember that. I was like, ‘It’s so beautiful; I’m old enough, you know, that I get to choose.’”

Banhart’s connection to his Venezuelan ancestry is bittersweet. “I do love it, but it’s complicated,” he says. “I feel very Venezuelan when I’m not there, but I feel very American when I’m there. There’s a deep sense of just a get-out-while-you-can sinking feeling that permeates my generation.”

Though he is reluctant to be drawn into a discussion of politics, I wheedle out his opinion of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez: “I don’t know a single person that lives in Venezuela that supports Chávez, and I know plenty of people that live here that are all about him,” he says.

“They think he’s a wonderful guy, the underdog that socked it to America. To them, he’s a superhero. But I don’t know a single person living in Venezuela that has anything good to say about the guy. What has he changed?”

When Banhart was 14, his stepfather moved the family to Southern California. Shortly thereafter, his stepfather gave him his first d ev en d r a b a n h a rt guitar. “It’s Christmas, the day goes by and nothing, I don’t get any gift,” says Banhart. “I go, ‘OK, now you’re a man, now you don’t need any gifts—who gives a shit?’ And then it’s, like, 1 a.m., and he’s like, ‘Oh god, I left my luggage in the car. Will you go get it?’ To myself, I’m like, ‘Fuck, dad, you don’t even give me anything for Christmas and now you want me to go get your luggage?’ And then I open the trunk and there was this guitar case … and it was such an incredible, beautiful feeling.”

In addition to guitar, he’d begun to try his hand at art. A

“People are always disappointed when I don’t want to get high with them after the show, so I’ve learned to let them down easy.

When someone offers me weed or something I go, ‘Aw, man, that’s cool of you, thanks, but I already got super high, bro!’ But when I smell weed, I run.

I run away.”

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perceptive and sympathetic high-school art teacher nurtured Banhart’s talents, turning him onto the likes of Billy Bragg (still one of his all-time favorites) and the Jam, and giving him hours alone to draw during the school day. He was good enough to be awarded a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. It was during his tenure at SFAI that Banhart befriended thenunknown Joanna Newsom, Andy Cabic of Vetiver and musician Georgeson, who has served as Banhart’s sideman and/or producer ever since.

“I met Devendra on Halloween 1999,” says Georgeson. “I lived in the Castro district, and there used to be a huge Halloween party in the streets every year—tens of thousands of people would be there, and it felt like the whole city became a giant gay

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dance club. So, for the few years I lived in the neighborhood, my house was sort of the headquarters for me and my friends. I was sitting out on the front porch, and a cab pulled up with my friend Tahiti and two guys he went to art school with, one of whom was Devendra. He was wearing a skirt and no shirt. To this day, I have no idea what his costume was supposed to be, but it’s not often you see someone get out of a cab without a shirt on, so I took notice. I was dressed as Björn Borg, but apparently Devendra didn’t realize that it was a Halloween costume, and he told me later that he had thought I was a French drug dealer.” when banhart moved to San Francisco, the light shined on him. Songs began pouring out of him, usually at the most inop-

portune time, when he was far away from his four-track. So, he started leaving songs on his friends’ answering machines so he wouldn’t forget them. His first public performance was at a gay wedding, where he serenaded the groom and groom with “Love Me Tender.” His second show was at an Ethiopian restaurant.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Around this time, his blood father reestablished contact.

He told Banhart he wanted to make up for all the birthdays and Christmases he missed. He would buy Banhart a roundtrip plane ticket to any destination in the world. Banhart chose Paris and, armed with his notebooks, sketchpads and trusty nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, jetted off to the City of Light. Once there, he managed to scam his way into opening slots for Black Heart Procession and Sonic Youth. Somebody turned him onto Vashti Bunyan, a Brit psych/folk protégé of Donovan, and Karen Dalton, an American folkie with a voice that sounds like a shivering Billie Holiday.

Both would have a profound effect on the way he wrote songs and, more importantly, the way he sang them.

When Banhart’s money finally ran out, he tried busking in the subway, only to learn the hard way just how territorial and quite literally cutthroat the underground busking scene is in Paris. “I started playing,” he says, “and this guy with a guitar comes up to me and pulls a knife on me: ‘This is my spot, get the fuck out of here.’ And he was like, ‘Don’t try it anywhere else, because other people probably won’t be as nice as me.’”

From Paris, he headed to Los Angeles to check out the Silver Lake scene and, unwittingly, bump into destiny. In December 2001, Banhart was booked to open for Flux Information Sciences, a three-piece noise-rock band from Brooklyn that was d ev en d r a b a n h a rt signed to Swans mainman Michael Gira’s Young God label. The drummer in Flux Information Sciences—one Siobahn Duffy, soon to be Gira’s wife—was outside the club smoking a cigarette when Banhart was doing a sound check. “I had to go see who it was because I’d never heard anything like that,” says Duffy.

“She was pretty amazed that this creature from another planet suddenly appeared before her,” says Gira. “And she got his little CD-R that he made. It was barely audible; it was so quiet. And she brought it home and I listened to it, and I was really entranced and amazed, and emailed him immediately, a very long email. And I guess from my powers of persuasion, I convinced him to move to New York City and be on the Young God label, and then we went from there.”

When Banhart moved to NYC, he was broke and—given his long hair, beard and penchant for shirtlessness—not exactly

“There was a rat next door that was trying to eat through my wall every single day. I had a pet mouse named Mr. Journey. I let it loose one day—it was a painful experience, but I just couldn’t ... this rat was going to eat him. There was this troubled man that would break in in the middle of the night.

Multiple times I would wake up with a dark figure standing over me muttering some gibberish.”

day-job material. He slept on Gira’s couch for a while, and then he found out about an abandoned salsa restaurant in Brooklyn where he could live for free if he was willing to put up with no heat, water or electricity.

“I found my bed in the trash,” says Banhart. “In the trash.

I mean, not near it, but inside of it. There was a rat next door that was trying to eat through my wall every single day. I had a pet mouse named Mr. Journey. I let it loose one day—it was a painful experience, but I just couldn’t ... this rat was going to eat him. There was this troubled man that would break in in the middle of the night. Multiple times I would wake up with a dark figure standing over me muttering some gibberish. That was truly scary.”

Despite such humble beginnings, Gira was fairly confident that Banhart was destined for big things. “I still think that he’s one of the most magically talented human beings that I’ve ever met,” says Gira. “He’s an avatar through which the forces of the universe pass. There’s a few people like that who I consider to be that way, and I guess one of them would be Bob Dylan.

But it’s just people who have no choice in the matter. They’re just a vehicle, and I was always pretty astounded and probably jealous at his ability to just flow with his creative profundities.

And he also had a quality about him: He’s one of those people that he’d walk into a room and instantly everybody wanted to know him and help him.”

It was around this time that Banhart met and befriended Adam Green, then of the Moldy Peaches, whose naïf anti-folk was the-then cause célèbre of indieland. “Devendra was very charming and enthusiastic; he had great knowledge of folk music and psychedelia,” says Green. “I’d bump into him on the street almost every day; he always carried around a satchel with him. He was multi-disciplinary—he drew amazing pictures, wanted to write this crazy book about a golden baby with 10 legs or something. Physically, he was very striking; he looked a little bit androgynous with really beautiful black hair. He always had cool boots and bell-bottoms. And he had mysterious origins. He was from Caracas, and I was a kid, and that seemed very far away.”

Meanwhile, Banhart and Gira began assembling those early answering-machine recordings into his Young God debut, Oh Me Oh My ... The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit. Banhart wanted to rerecord the songs, but Gira liked the crackly otherworldly quality of those early recordings.

“They sounded like something that you might discover in your grandmother’s attic,” says Gira. “That first album raised some interest and also got him some shows. The first one, he played it outside in Brooklyn on the street. He was just so nervous he couldn’t even finish the song. And then the next time I got him a show at Tonic, which was a great club in New York City for a while that hosted experimental music shows.

We put the word out to everyone we knew, and the room was packed, and he came on and he probably knocked his guitar over when he sat down. He was very nervous, and he started to play, and then he just put his guitar down and he stood up and sang a cappella in his jittery kind of … I don’t know what would you say, his hallucinating grasshopper mode. And people went nuts. He’s become sort of a pop commodity, but at the time he was just like this wild man. I remember when we were doing a sound check before the show and he kept getting feedback, and I told him to make sure he didn’t point the mic at the monitors because that why it’s feeding back, and he goes, ‘What’s a monitor?’”

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As a result of steady gigging around New York, Banhart was fast developing a reputation as a mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind performer who had to be seen to be believed. Antony Hegarty was one of the early believers.

“My first really strong memories of Devendra are seeing him perform one afternoon standing on a table in Other Music,” says Hegarty. “Maybe he was singing ‘A Sight To Behold’ or something, and I had such a strong feeling that I was watching the spirit of an elderly feminine man jumping out of the body of this 21-year-old hippie. His singing was really like channeling. It was unbelievably intimate; it was all teeth and ghosts.”

Gira took him out on an Angels Of Light tour as both a sideman and the opening act.

“By the end of the tour, he was bigger than Angels Of Light,” says Gira.

“His rise struck all of us as really crazy,” says Cabic. “It kind of corresponded with the rising influence of (websites like) Pitchfork.

They were always talking about him. I mean, I remember a couple months after he moved to New York, him calling me up and … he wasn’t bragging, but he was like, ‘You’re not going to believe where I was today.’ I was like, ‘Where?’

He said, ‘I hung out at Ric Ocasek’s house.’

He went on to become friends (with Ocasek).

Just a month or two before, he was bumming around San Francisco, and now he’s hanging out at Ric Ocasek’s home personal studio.

Blew my mind. I was like, ‘What?! How does that happen?’ Definitely when he moved to New York, everything happened for him, as you would expect.”

Banhart was incredibly prolific during this period, and Gira wanted to get him back into a studio as soon as possible. Gira had been contacted by an admirer who lived near the Georgia/Alabama border; he said he had a bunch of recording gear from the legendary Muscle Shoals studio, and Gira was welcome to come record whenever he wanted. So, one day Gira and Banhart got in the car headed south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In the studio, Gira could be a harsh taskmaster. “I had very little say,” says Banhart.

“Michael insisted that I sing and play guitar at the same time. Michael was like, ‘That’s not how they did it back in the day. That’s not how the real guys did it. You gotta sing and play the song.’ It was a real pain in my ass. I wanted just to be able to get the guitar down right, and then just focus on the singing. I’m not that kind of musician, anyways. Well, I guess I became one, thanks to Michael kind of forcing me to do that kind of thing.”

They recorded for two weeks and went back to New York with enough songs for two albums that would eventually bear the titles Niño Rojo and Rejoicing In The Hands. “He’s told me about those sessions, and it doesn’t

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“My first really strong memories of Devendra are seeing him perform one afternoon standing on a table in Other Music. I had such a strong feeling that I was watching the spirit of an elderly feminine man jumping out of the body of this 21-year-old hippie. His singing was really like channeling. It was all teeth and ghosts.” a n t o n y h e g a rt y sound like it was very fun,” says Georgeson.

“The image I have is of him in a sweaty shack in a swamp being forced to play take after take, getting yelled at in German until he got it right. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but that’s the impression I’ve been left with. Those records don’t sound particularly good, but I think they were effective in that they mostly just presented performances of the songs, and, while they may have been motivated by fear and anger, they were good performances. The lack of character in the sound of the recording makes you focus on the songs, which are wonderful, so it worked.”

The release of both albums in 2004 was greeted with louder critical acclaim and swelling crowds at his shows. That summer, Banhart booked a five-week tour with longtime friend and collaborator Cabic, and his friend Joanna Newsom, who had just released a much-buzzed-about debut LP called The Milk-Eyed Mender. He invited his filmmaker friend Kevin Barker to tag along and make a tour documentary. Barker shot more than 100 hours of film, and managed to catch some drama along the way. Mid-tour, Newsom’s best friend was killed in a car accident back home in Chicago; upon returning from the funeral, Newsom totaled her touring van. Meanwhile, Banhart was reunited with his biological father at a show in Houston.

By the end of the tour, both Banhart and Newsom would be full-blown indie-rock stars.

Barker eventually edited the footage down to

a 81-minute freak folk travelogue called The Family Jams, which had a brief theatrical run and garnered somewhat mixed reviews. “It got a critic’s pick in the New York Times, and it got a really good review in the Wall Street Journal, but it got a terrible review in the Village Voice, which called me an ‘asshole with a camera,’” says Barker, who will release The Family Jams on DVD this spring.

Barker sees Banhart as a transformational figure, somebody who befriended like-minded but far-flung musicians and brought them together to connect the dots on a bold new scene.

“To me, he was just this guy who brought people together,” says Barker. “Like, he was the guy who introduced everyone to everyone. That’s who he was to me. And you know, kind of like one of the first big gestures he did when he was done meeting everyone was putting together the Golden Apples Of The Sun compilation for Arthur magazine.” A big Sgt. Pepper-style photo spread in the Sunday New York Times—featuring Espers, Feathers, Vetiver and, of course, Banhart—heralded the arrival of a new scene: freak folk.

By 2005, it had become painfully obvious that Banhart’s star had risen beyond the capacity of Young God’s one-man operation.

Luckily, offers from bigger labels started rolling in. With Gira’s blessing, he jumped ship to England’s XL Recordings, which shelled out a proper recording budget for what became a double album christened Cripple Crow upon its release in September 2005. Banhart asked his old friend Georgeson help produce the album along with Thom Monahan of the Pernice Brothers, and the three of them set up camp at Bearsville Studios near Woodstock in upstate New York.

“Making Cripple Crow was hilarious,” says Georgeson. “We were in this beautiful old studio in a barn in the woods, and none of us except for Monahan knew what we were doing.

Devendra had asked a ton of people to show up and play or sing. I don’t think he actually expected most of them to show up, but every single one of them did, so there were constantly people coming and going, recording like one little thing and then sticking around for a week. It was absurd. We recorded 30 songs in three weeks, and then mixed them all in another 10 days or so. I’m surprised we were even able to make a record out of it.”

During those recording sessions at Bearsville, Georgeson noticed a somewhat disturbing trend that would continue for the next two albums. “Devendra was retreating from the spotlight on his own albums,” he says. “I think it was a combination of generosity and a misguided lack of confidence in his own abilities—like if he thought that one of his friends was technically a better guitarist than he was or something, he’d have them play a part in-

stead of him. As a result, I think the next two albums lacked his personality, and were not as interesting. Cripple Crow had a sort of recklessness to it that I think redeems it, but I’m not so sure about the next couple of records.

I produced Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, so I’ll take my share of the blame for that.

There are individual songs I think are good, but the records as a whole were inconsistent.

The last one—which I didn’t produce, but did play on—was the nadir in this regard, I think.”

Georgeson was not the only one to notice. “(Banhart) moved away from intimate music, and that bothers a lot of people,” says Barker.

“His first, like, three records were extremely intimate, and the appeal of them, I think, was that his personal charisma came through.

I think the records after that were less successful because the instrumentation was less simple, and they were more about his influences than they were about him.”

Declining record sales and the diminished enthusiasm of critics would seem to bear out Georgeson and Barker’s assessment of Banhart’s artistic trajectory. Devendra Banhart was officially losing his mojo. Still, it wasn’t all downhill. There were plenty of perks to being attached to Banhart’s star. Like dating Natalie Portman. Or hanging out with Brian Wilson at Neil Young’s house.

Georgeson was tapped to produce Bert Jansch’s The Black Swan, which would prove to be the last album the legendary British folk avatar recorded before his death in 2011. “I remember he came with me and Devendra to play at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit concert a few years back,” says Georgeson.

“The night before the show, there’s a dinner party at Neil’s ranch, which is one of the coolest places on earth, as you might imagine. It was such a bizarre experience—Brian Wilson was greeting people at the door, and later he was sitting at the piano playing with Neil, who had an acoustic guitar. I mean, it was his living room, so of course he was comfortable, but it was blowing our minds. Later in the evening, there was a bonfire, and we were standing around with Bert when Neil walked up and introduced himself to Bert, and told him he was the reason that he started playing acoustic guitar. It was a very touching and unforgettable moment.” we are somewhere deep into the third hour of conversation, and Banhart has his shirt off.

He’s giving me a guided tour of the extensive tattoos that cover his anatomy. A few years ago, he bought a tattoo gun and started tattooing himself on tour to kill the hours between sound check and performance. Despite the gun, they look like prison tattoos.

There’s sayings like “Thy Will Be Done” and “Mother May I” written in Russian. The one on

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“Devendra is one of the most magically talented human beings that I’ve ever met. He’s an avatar through which the forces of the universe pass. There’s a few people like that who I consider to be that way, and I guess one of them would be Bob Dylan. But it’s just people who have no choice in the matter.

They’re just a vehicle.” m i c h a el g i r a his calf says “Fuck Them All.” Some are just the names of friends, like Hegarty, Cabic, Fab Moretti from the Strokes. There’s a bunch of hermaphrodites writ like hieroglyphics.

“My entire ass is covered with a snake and a cloud, but I really don’t want to take my pants off,” he says. “And the rest are hermaphrodites. I really love the hermaphrodite. What I really never got to finish explaining to you is that I started singing as a woman. I’m seven, eight years old, and I wanna sound like these guys. I wanna sound like Mick Jagger and Axl Rose. There’s this band, the Rolling Stones, they’re played on the radio. And there’s this band, Guns N’ Roses, they’re played on the radio. Then there’s this band, suddenly—Nirvana comes out. Whoa, this is the most lo-fi thing I’ve ever heard. I’m eight years old. This blows my mind. Yet, when I try to sing like these people, I don’t sound like Kurt or Axl or Mick. But man, why? I wanna sound like them. It’s just frustrating.

“My mom leaves the house, I just have this thing. I don’t know—it just takes over. Let’s just try … it wasn’t a sexual thing, but I go into her closet and I just put on one of her dresses. I put it on, then I walked to the bathroom, and I pull my hair back and I have the comb and I just start (singing in falsetto), “Oooo la la la,” and I start doing it. It works. As this woman, I can sing. I now have permission to sing. Holy shit.

And my mom came home, and her friend was with her. And he called me a faggot. I’m eight years old; I didn’t even know what that was.

My mom wasn’t exactly pleased. She wasn’t like, ‘What a cool son I have.’ I would be really happy if I found my son wearing a dress at eight years old. But they weren’t really stoked about it. But that was the permission to sing. So, I was singing from that place, that perspective. It really wasn’t a sexual thing. But suddenly I can sing. As a woman, I can sing.” when devendra banhart started working on his new album back in the early days of 2012, he had no label, no pressure, no buzz and no expectations. He no longer had long hair or a beard or turquoise bangles. He was now a man without a scene. Freak folk, a term he always considered insulting, has had its turn in the sun. The last Espers album got a 6.1 from Pitchfork, Animal Collective went acid house, and Joanna Newsom was banging Andy Samberg.

Somewhere in the middle of all those things he no longer had is the reason Mala (Nonesuch) is the best thing he’s done since his debut. Back then, there were no movie-star girlfriends, no palling around with the dude from the Cars, no six-figure recording budgets blown in the hippie meridians of upstate New York, no dinner parties with Brian Wilson at Neil Young’s house. Back then, all he had was a beautiful mind and the shirt on his back—and sometimes not even that. There is a similarly reductionist quality to the new album. The instrumentation is spare and simple. Guitars are scarce, and synths are used inventively. Guest appearances are few and far between, so what comes through is the thing that’s always been Banhart's greatest asset: himself.

“I think one of the reasons that this record is successful is that we weren’t going for anything in particular,” says Georgeson. “As appealing as it can be, I think we both wanted the opposite of the classic sun-dappled canyon vibe that seems to be omnipresent these days. There was no pressure—Devendra didn’t have a label or anything, so we took as long as we needed, and really were only guided by our own thoughts. Except for a couple very specific spots, we really weren’t trying to recreate or even evoke a specific artist or musical style, either in the music or the way we recorded it.

In fact, we specifically used equipment that would generally be considered undesirable by most people. It wasn’t new and high-tech, and it also wasn’t classic or esoteric vintage gear—it was more like what you could get at Radio Shack in 1986. Like the first record, this one is a projection of what’s going on in Devendra’s head, unfiltered by a lot of other people, pressures and other nonsense that had been around during the last few records. The things in his head definitely aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago, but they’re just as compelling.”

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Big Bang Theory Thom Yorke and friends mine afrobeat, funk and more via Atoms For Peace

W

hat’s the most ridiculous thing Radiohead frontman

Thom Yorke did this past year? Probably handling DJ duties at pop salarymen Maroon 5’s star-studded Halloween blowout in the Hollywood Hills—whilst wearing a counterfeit Daft Punk helmet, no less. (How fitting; “human after all.”) ¶ Second-most? Finishing this album. That Yorke should finally follow up 2006 solo debut The Eraser is not much of a surprise in and of itself, but Amok, from conception through completion, is the product of a pretty damn lopsided approach. The lineup of what came to be known as Atoms For Peace first assembled in late Atoms For Peace 2009, when Yorke got a belated Amok itch to bring the laptop rhythms of his passion project to perspiXL rant life. Along with usual suspect/career producer Nigel Godrich covering multiple bases and Beck boy Joey Waronker on the drums, Red Hot Chili Peppers slap specialist Flea answered the call—converging for a couple brief American tours on either coast. Early bonding sessions took place at Flea’s spot over brews, billiards and, most significantly, wax platters by afrobeat originator Fela Kuti. photo by Eliot Lee Hazel

When Yorke booked a posttour weekend in an L.A. studio, the band entered with nothing in mind, and left with approximately 30 hours’ worth of jammed-out licks and polyrhythms. These served as the rough bricolage around which Yorke and Godrich recorded and programmed Amok over the ensuing two years. It was such an unusually backward modus operandi that Godrich has even speculated the album might be the first of its kind from a pro-

cessual perspective. Modern musicians almost always brainstorm and wireframe songs on their laptops and then flesh things out, where necessary, in the studio— seldom the other way around.

What’s unsurprising about this LP, then, is both the way it sounds (anxious, circular, post-singularity) and how good it is. Yorke’s vocal, thematic and general aesthetic trademarks are all in order, his rhythmically OCD recent work (The Eraser, Radiohead’s King Of Limbs)

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reviews the closest analog. Many of the fractured funk chords, anagrammatic bass lines and percussive timelines do indeed function as abridged updates of Kuti’s strophic Nigerian epics (helping to render the dollops of delay and reverb on Yorke’s vocals reminiscent of Hugh Masekela’s psych/jazz trumpet on his 1973 landmark, Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz). But the influence of the contemporary electronic producers who

monopolize Yorke’s Boomkat shopping cart effortlessly masks and modernizes these classic ’70s sounds.

To that end, there are the buffering grooves of fantastic single “Default,” the luminously echoic rhythm of “Ingenue,” the Four Tet-worthy beat of “Reverse Running” and its insectswarm climax (somewhere between Steve Lacy and Demdike Stare). Moments of “Unless” even remind of Radiohead’s “Reckoner” and Yorke’s “Black Swan,” by no means unwelcome.

True, nothing here ever astonishes, but coming from such a unique voice, the familiar bests most else. —Jakob Dorof

Chill, Lazarus, Chill

Buildup trumps release in Nick Cave’s curious, cinematic new album

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arly on in Nick Cave’s 1989 novel And The Ass

Saw The Angel, forlorn infant mute Euchrid Euchrow dreams of floating in heaven alongside his goldenharp-stroking dead twin brother: “A shower of silvery tones Nick Cave & broke over mah body … Mah brother stopped playing and rose The Bad Seeds into the air. His wings were black and veinous and oozed visPush The Sky Away cid phlegm. He rubbed two hairy legs and put the harp, which was now a crown, upon his head. Ah tried to fly but ah had no MUTE wings yet.”

This passage always seemed like a decent literary approximation of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ sound—sublime beauty jostling against beguiling iniquity—but on their latest record, Captain Cave and his naughty kernels never really abandon those “warm cotton clouds.” Push The Sky Away is easily the band’s most relentlessly

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Ólöf Arnalds

Sudden Elevation One Little Indian

Higher times

The indomitable Björk described fellow Icelandic chanteuse Ólöf Arnalds’ voice as “somewhere between a child and an old woman.” Who are we to argue with someone who’d show up in a goofy swan dress, shedding feathers all over our foyer until we paid attention?

This particular hack once posited that all Icelandic singers without Y chromosomes

atmospheric album since 2001’s No More Shall We Part, eschewing the garage-rock squall of 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and 2010’s Grinderman 2 in favor of ethereal aural tableaus across which Cave alternately croons and harangues in surrealist stream of consciousness—i.e., he’s got a “fetus on a leash,” believes in mermaids, envisions Hannah Montana on the African Savannah, etc.

Though at times exquisite, the slowburn even instrumental keel is, ironically, the most jarring aspect of Push The Sky Away. We are lulled, lulled, lulled, never shaken. Perhaps considering Cave’s growing film-score oeuvre, this twist shouldn’t be a complete surprise, but I can’t be the only one who expected “Higgs Boson Blues” to end with a big bang, right?

—Shawn Macomber

photo by cat stevens

sound very similar, mainly because of their mother tongue’s unique accent. But Arnalds hurls that theory out the window. Sudden Elevation sees her singing completely in English, and with that shift, the tender and lilting Kate Bush-meets-Joan Baez smokiness becomes more pronounced. Arnalds’ voice is the centerpiece, as each of the 12 tracks lives or dies by her pipes.

Moments span from kindergarten story time (“German Fields”) to the unleashing of pent-up angst (“Treat Her Kindly”). Sudden Elevation’s crowning achievement, though, is Arnalds’ ability to convey powerful emotion from the sonic sparseness provided by a simple acoustic-guitar-and-violin backup.

—Kevin Stewart-Panko

Autechre

Exai

Warp

Dervishes within selfcollapsing dervishes

Twelve years ago, with the release of Confield, Autechre’s Sean Booth and Rob Brown threw down a marker: theirs was a high, gestural art— savage, compact canvases strung together like blackened pieces of popcorn. The album as discontiguous gallery show, in other words.

On its first proper double LP, the English duo doubles down on its unspoken commitments to cross-pollinating on-the-fritz Geigercounter spasms, wriggling acid squelches and club-footed beats into soundtracks equally suited to wandering rain-slicked causeways or a non-representational sculpture exhibition. “YJY UX” is among the most intoxicating of the new jawns, what with its disassociative, vaporous hail of irregular bass impacts and wiper-fluid spritzes of splintered melody.

“FLeure” spits and nicks like an intergalactic game of jacks with cosmic consequences; on “T ess xi,” the blueprints for three or four acidtechno songs tussle for supremacy. The subterranean “recks on” packs a distorted, boombap slither alongside an effect suggesting the inverse of a slide whistle.

Autechre’s are notions as studied as they are transportive, and on Exai, the duo fairly dares us not to lose ourselves. —Raymond Cummings

Autre Ne Veut

Anxiety

Software

Melts in your hands

If you spent most of last year under a rock, you probably didn’t note the throng of sad-sack indie singer/songwriters who have begun to weave grooving R&B sensibilities into their weepy ballads. They seem to have grown exponentially overnight; their ranks are bolstered, no doubt, by the massive successes enjoyed in recent years by the likes of Frank Ocean and the Weeknd.

While it’s tempting to lump Arthur Ashin’s second LP as Autre Ne Veut—all clever synth

arrangements and impossibly smooth falsetto—in with the rest of said throng, doing so would mean passing up a brilliant, delightfully dejected record. Full up on slow-jam sensuality and a series of cathartic emotional breakdowns set on the dance floor (not the least of which is “Counting,” an early candidate for summer-barbeque jam of 2013), Anxiety is the rare electro-pop album that’s wholly synthetic, but plays without a hint of icy artificiality.

—Möhammad Choudhery

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Specter At The Feast Vagrant/ Abstract Dragon

Death in the family

For five albums, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s mostly fuzzy, Velvets-ish rock has been doled out at arm’s length. Even on standouts like way-back kicker “Whatever Happened To My Rock ‘N’ Roll,” the disaffected, leather-clad, too-cool-for-school-ness of it all never came across as detached. On Specter At The Feast, BRMC is actually wrestling with some hefty emotional baggage. It’s nighttime, and the sunglasses are off for once.

The Specter that haunts much of the band’s sixth album is the death of frontman Robert Levon Been’s father, former Call singer Michael Been. When the younger Been sings, “Your eyes have wept a thousand tears/You never needed mine/The crime is never what you steal/But what you leave behind,” on opener “Fire Walker,” then “What’s inside of you is the same as me,” it’s easy to think he’s talking about the late Been. And the band proves surprisingly adept at navigating the Spiritualized-nodding package it’s presented in. But the superficial snarl and by-the-numbers rawk in the middle on tracks like “Haste The Taste” and “Teenage Disease” never find equal footing with the album’s inspired bookends. —Matt Sullivan

Palmyra Delran

You Are What You Absorb Apex/East

The polyglot hop

South Jersey’s Lisa Cortes has been doing the ’60s-inspired garageband/girl-pop/psychedelic-bop mélange for so long that it’s hard to believe she’s not 70 and celebrating a golden anniversary. Younger than springtime and twice as heated, Palmyra Delran—the girl with a fuzz-tone guitar and expressive near-monotone voice—isn’t rounding the 21st century anytime soon. In fact, with each record, she refines her sassy take on the swinging decade that brought her here.

With You Are What You Absorb, she’s sharpened herself to first-Blondie-album diamantine brilliance: The hippy-hippy shake rhythm, buzzing guitars and winding, whining farfisa on “Shut Out,” the running-wild problem-child lyrics of “You’re My Brian Jones,” the Spector-

like bom-bom-bom-bom intro to “Could Be Together”: perfection. Still, the biggest surprises here are her most casual. Delran goes “Back To You” with her most naked, effects-less vocal, heavy-breathing harmonica and plucky harps.

Puckish stuff. Then there’s her new-old dance craze, “The Turtle,” where Delran, in Cortes’ most natural, melodious voice, gets all Ramsey Lewis “In Crowd”-like with jazzy, blousy pianos behind her. Frug that. —A.D. Amorosi

Doldrums

Lesser Evil

Souterrain Transmissions

Trippy electro with a sci-fi bent

Airick Woodhead, Canadian artist and former leader of Spiral Beach, certainly has a big imagination. The sci-fi backstory for his current project involves shared lucid dreaming, government conspiracies and a dystopian version of The NeverEnding Story. Doldrums’ debut is not a concept album, per se, though that story never sounds far off from the skittish electro featured inside.

There’s enough strange samples and jumpy beats to make Lesser Evil sound futuristic, but the album works best when the ol’ reliability of pop peeks its head in. On “She Is The Wave” and “Egypt,” the dubstep-inspired laser noises take front and center at first, until repeated listens highlight their soaring melodies. And Woodhead, who sometimes sounds like a pitch-shifted Thom Yorke, is an honest singer, leaving all his cracks and strains in. It’s a warped ride overall, though not without some solid moments hidden beneath the surface.

—Bryan Bierman

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

Old Yellow Moon Nonesuch

You’re hot, then you’re cold

Just because Emmylou Harris can do no wrong doesn’t mean she’s always right. Still, the granddame of country rock has good instincts.

The move to reunite with Rodney Crowell, her sideman from the mid-’70s edition of the Hot Band and a quality songwriter, is solid. There might even be commercial potential here—like her duets with Mark Knopfler in 2006.

The odd thing is how mainstream it feels.

You couldn’t have chosen a less offensive producer than their old Hot Band collaborator Brian Ahearn. The musicianship is smart and faultless, but also too subtle. Never the strongest songwriter, Harris chooses other people’s material. Besides tracks written by Crowell, they revive songs by Hot Band compadre Hank DeVito and Nashville cat Roger Miller.

Some of the subject matter is two-dimensional, i.e., tunes like “Bluebird Wine,” “Black Caffeine,” “Bull Rider” and “Spanish Dancer.”

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reviews Nostalgia for a great career and friendships notwithstanding, this is underwhelming until the beautifully sung title cut that closes the album—right when they were getting somewhere. —Mitch Myers

Helado Negro

Invisible Life

Asthmatic Kitty

Black ice cream

The latest offering by Helado Negro—one of Floridian EcuadoreanAmerican indie-electronic auteur Roberto Carlos Lange’s many musical brainchildren—is a headphone-friendly, Latin-flavored, hypnotic concoction of deep grooves, tropical textures and warped blips and bleeps compressed into fractured layers. Blended into the dreamy mix, Lange’s breathy, tranquil falsetto is processed to make him sound more like an electronic instrument than a human being.

On standouts like “Arboles,” the smoothsailing “Dance Ghost” and murmuring closer “Catch That Pain,” Lange obfuscates his melodies and sometimes-Spanish/sometimesEnglish lyrics to spurt out of the speakers, offering trance-inducing mantra-like chants.

But there’s also a darker side to the record. On harsher selections like “Junes,” “Lentament” and menacing, mid-album cut “Catastrophe,” distortion-drenched synth bass, backwardsounding beats and synch flourishes sounding like drips in a well all crackle and chirp like a chillwave dial-up modem. —Adam Gold

Herbert

Herbert Complete

Changin’ Times

Post-punk Seattle supergroup lives and dies by Dylan-esque folk

I

t’s been a half-decade since Cave Singers’ principals split from Hint Hint, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Cobra High and the Murder City Devils. Despite the members shucking their post-punk and lightweight Cave Singers punk backgrounds, they will always be saddled with a Barry Naomi Bonds-sized asterisk with folk/rock fans who believe punks Jagjaguwar in leopard print creepers can’t change their spots.

Their fourth full-length has the band members grabbing snippets of musical influence from all over the Pitchfork-approved map. Then they haul it down to a coffee shop’s open-mic night and soften (or sharpen, depending on your stance) the edges with a Dylan-esque vocal and lyrical style. This is folk as remembered by those who booed Dylan’s use of electricity at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. If July 25 is a day your parents taught you to rue—and you bought that crap—avoid Naomi at all costs.

“It’s A Crime” has a gritty guitar that touches on stomping surf rock, and masterfully climaxes in a swirl of aggressive accents and harmonicas. “Shine” is more subdued, but stirs and similarly builds to a powerful conclusion. When Cave Singers are propelling their songs forward with purpose, they shine hardest. On “No Tomorrows,” “Karen’s Car” and “Easy Way,” they match math-rock-lite, dime-a-dozen indie strumming and the Dylan influence with strong melodies and dynamic, quick-change guitar bursts, though coming across more restrained. Sadly, there’s just as much cut from the same cloth that sounds like filler patched together on the fly on “Week To Week,” “Northern Lights” and “Downcast.” Because of this, a borderline brilliant record becomes an exercise in developing a trigger-finger relationship with your skip/fast-forward button.

—Kevin Stewart-Panko

Accidental

One presumes Doctor Rockit Complete is forthcoming

Given the musique concrète-plying political animal he’s become (witness 2011’s One Pig), it’s easy to forget that Matthew Herbert started out banging in clubs. This 134-track iTunes boxed set collects all of his output as Herbert between 1996 and 2006, tracing his evolution from visionary young DJ with fresh ideas about what might comprise dance music to Zen master of glitches and found sound.

His four LPs from the period—including classics Around The House and Bodily Functions, whose source material is self-evident— are here as deluxe editions, each featuring one or more albums’ worth of bonus material in the form of outtakes, remixes by the likes of Perry Farrell, Nobukazu Takemura and Mr. Oizo, and, as with the Abbey Road-recorded Scale, full orchestral versions. Most intriguing is two discs’ worth of Early Herbert, 27 tracks originally released on ’90s dance labels that had never before been available digitally. Immi-

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photo by Kyle Johnson

nently danceable and endlessly curious, if one could muster a complaint, it’s that the good stuff is just too voluminous. —Brian G. Howard

The Howling Hex

The Best Of The Howling Hex Drag City

Still Duchampian after all these years

Musician, novelist, filmmaker, blogger, folk anthropologist—no matter what hat the Howling Hex’s only real member wears at any given moment, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s using it as a screen for one or more complex conceptual frameworks grounded in strategies only Neil Michael Hagerty himself could explain barring weeks of study. The rest of us either sink or swim.

On his 13th album under the HH aegis, the Royal Trux and Pussy Galore veteran lobs at least a couple easy ones our way. One: Despite its title, the album isn’t a retrospective.

Two: Hagerty spurns the drumless, rambling approach he favored on his last couple regular releases in favor of short, tight polkas and waltzes (with a march or two thrown in for variety’s sake). While it lacks the narrative sweep of 2011’s extraordinary Victory Chimp, TBOTHH easily pushes psychedelic wedding music forward a good 25 years. —Rod Smith

Ivan & Alyosha

All The Times We Had Missing Piece/Dualtone

Shiny happy people

If you’re looking for more of the sweet, sweet Seattle indie-roots sound that heavy hitters like the Head And The Heart are putting out these days, look no further than Ivan & Alyosha. With All The Times We Had, they’ve nailed the harmony-drenched, foottapping folk/rock of the Seattle sound.

Surprisingly, this is their first full-length, but a long series of EPs and singles have given them the confidence that is this album’s hallmark. You’ll likely find yourself singing along happily to “Easy To Love” or “Don’t Wanna Die Anymore,” which is as fine a compliment as I can muster for their music. There are certainly plenty of grumpy indie-rock curmudgeons who’ll moan about the unbridled sincerity and the heart-on-my-sleeve lyrics of All The Times We Had, but fuck ’em. This is a tough world we’re living in these days, and we could all use a little more folksy sunshine in our lives.

—Devon Leger

Lady

Lady

Truth & Soul

Rehashing in the deep

Amy Winehouse and Adele have a lot to answer for, dead or alive. Nothing against retro-soul: It easily hits a nostalgic

sweet spot, and it’s a great palate-cleanser to today’s Auto-Tuned, digital hegemony. On the other hand, it’s a high mountain to climb to make something distinctive enough that the pleasure comes not only from the genre recreation, but from the specific songs and performances.

Case in point: Lady. Nicole Wray and Terri Walker had solo careers before pairing for this project. Atlanta’s Wray is a Missy Elliott protégé who sang on the Black Keys’ Brothers; Walker had hit albums in her native U.K., her first garnering a Mercury Prize nomination.

Their voices mingle seamlessly; they both have a bit of urban grit, although neither is a powerhouse. Lady gets high marks for nostalgic soul—with all the trappings of horns and strings—but ultimately the album recalls everything that was great about ’60s soul, pasttense. —Steve Klinge

Johnny Marr

The Messenger Sire/ADA

Coming in loud and clear

Johnny Marr has been a journeyman guitarist for decades now. He’s lent his guitar slinging talents to the Pretenders and The The, to Electronic and the Cribs, to Modest Mouse and a little band called the Smiths, where he got his start some 30 years ago. He calls The Messenger his first solo album, sidestepping 2003’s Johnny Marr & The Healers LP as a band project.

Marr is one of the most important, inventive guitarists of his generation, and his eagerness to play with other bands reflects his desire not to repeat himself. That said, one of The Messenger’s biggest pleasures is hearing Marr slip into Smiths-like riffs on “New Town Velocity,” the title track and others. For a few dozen seconds at the start of some songs, one half expects Morrissey to start crooning. But no, it’s Marr, and he’s perfectly adequate as a singer and melody-writer, but he doesn’t have the indelible personality of a Morrissey or an Isaac Brock. Still, guitar fans will love The Messenger for its crunchy Brit-psych riffs and its jangly, familiar hooks. —Steve Klinge

The Mary Onettes

Evil Coast

Labrador

Sounds of future past

A few years ago, The Onion ran a feature headlined “U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out Of Past.’” The gist of the story was that things get recycled so quickly that the past was merging with the present. That’s especially true in the world of music, where bands often recycle the sounds they grew up with without a lot of thought put into how they’re going to differentiate themselves.

The Mary Onettes have spent a lifetime listening to all the Cure, New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen albums in their collection. Their music is marked by the same kind of thick, at-

mospheric melancholy of those bands, including the prominent use of driving bass and kick drum. Philip Ekström’s vocals echo the tortured moan of Robert Smith with a trace of Ian McCulloch’s attitude, but he never manages to find his own voice. Except for the implied reggae pulse on “Blues,” neither does the band.

—j. poet

The Mavericks

In Time

Thirty Tigers

All over again

Pardon the pun, but this record came out just in time. We were honestly contemplating dousing the next Americana album that crossed our transom with moonshine and letting the whole thing burn. Not that we have anything against Americana, per se.

This country has a long and exalted musical history that should be mined for inspiration in our modern world; it’s just that all of these nümericana bands sound like neutered versions of the Kingston Trio, and that makes us want to set fires.

The Mavericks, who, one could argue, helped kick-start the whole Americana thing, return from their seven-year hiatus with a rousing, energetic exploration of the Roy Orbison-influenced rock ‘n’ roll, classic country and Latin influences—plus some killer Tejano-ska!—that blows all of the damn mall-folk clogging up our inbox out of the goddamn water. —Sean L. Maloney

The Men

New Moon Sacred Bones

If you believe they put the Men on the moon

The Men is a pretty generic band name, so you’d be forgiven if you put on New Moon and thought it wasn’t the same group that made Leave Home. Wilco-y, country-rockin’ lead track “Open The Door” is a world away from the doomy destruction on Leave Home’s “L.A.D.O.C.H.” And while the band’s Open Your Heart was one of my favorite records last year, that album’s loping “Candy” felt more like an outlier than a new jumping-off point. But here we are.

For a group that’s built a reputation on mining punk, metal, krautrock, surf rock and hardcore, eclecticism is nothing new. But unlike a lot of bands that mix things up for variety’s sake alone, the Men aren’t just trotting out tropes—they take genre conventions and flip them inside out. An easy criticism would be that the Men are too reference-y, but they’ve paid too much attention to the common threads that run through wildly different styles to be accused of simply aping. That said, anyone who was disappointed that Open Your Heart was self-consciously more accessible than prior Men records might be disappointed again. —Matt Sullivan

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reviews Mount Moriah

Miracle Temple Merge

A curious climb

I’m not entirely sure which Mount Moriah this North Carolina duo is named after—the area in the eastern Nevada wilderness or the Biblical mountain where God asked Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Fittingly, Heather McEntire (of experimental postpunks Bellafea) and Jenks Miller (of psych/ metal one-man-band Horseback) toe the line between bucolic naturalism and forlorn heartache on Miracle Temple.

The up-tempo spark of “Bright Light” contrasts with the mopey theatricality of “I Build A House,” while “Miracle Temple Holiness” summons something greater than the prevalent darkness. McEntire’s bird-like voice is sweet like Dolly Parton’s, but with Edie Brickell’s quirk.

What stands out most on the Americana-saturated Miracle Temple is the way the band shuffles and tweaks country music and gospel/folk elements, yet still sounds very traditional, for better or worse. —Jeanne Fury

NEXT Collective

Cover Art

Concord Jazz

Down But Never Out Steve Earle manages to find resonant light at the end of the tunnel

S

teve Earle has had an eclectic career, writing

and performing songs that mash up the sounds of country, folk and rock into his own unique style. He Steve Earle sings love songs and political songs with equal fervor, and over & The Dukes the past decade or so, he’s made country, rock, bluegrass and (& Duchesses) The Low Road folk albums. This time out, he brings all his influences together into an LP that may be his most musically diverse offering yet.

New West The arrangements include folksy acoustic ballads and tough rockers, as well as excursions into swing and Cajun territory.

Earle’s lyrics continue to explore the real America, unafraid to confront the nation’s dark secrets, but with an abiding faith in the country’s ordinary people that makes even his darkest tunes glimmer with hope. “Calico County” is a Stonesinfluenced country rocker that crams the birth-to-death details of working-class life into three minutes of exuberant power-chord mayhem. Earle croons “Love’s Gonna Blow My Way,” a breezy, acoustic ragtime tune, in a manner that suggests Fred Astaire fronting the Texas Playboys. “That All You Got” is a jaunty, zydeco-influenced rocker sung as a duet

by Earle and Allison Moorer as a salute to the spirit of New Orleans, featuring Moorer’s accordion and Eleanor Whitmore’s nimble fiddling.

Earle closes with “Remember Me,” the song of an aging parent urging his child to keep walking toward the light. The hushed vocal and sighing steel guitar make it one of the most poignant songs he’s ever written. —j. poet

An institute you can’t disparage

My wife really likes this album, so what am I supposed to say? That it’s too smooth? That it’s nowhere near as interesting as the original tunes? Forget it.

If there’s gonna be peace in this house, I need to stay positive, like saying, “Hey! It’s got a great concept! Take eight incredibly talented, up-and-coming jazz musicians: Kris Bowers (keyboards), Gerald Clayton (keyboards), Logan Richardson (alto sax), Christian Scott (trumpet), Walter Smith III (tenor sax), Matthew Stevens (guitar), Ben Williams (bass) and Jamire Williams (drums). Give ’em an incredibly unlikely set of covers, from Pearl Jam and Kanye West to Dido and Meshell Ndegeocello, with a little bit of Bon Iver, Drake and Stereolab thrown in for fun. Then sit back, pour yourself a drink, turn down the lights and see what happens!” You know, positive.

So what if most of it feels like background music? Zip it. Because even if these hotshots don’t do the trick for me, they do it for my wife, and that’s at least as important, or probably more. —Kenny Berkowitz

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Benoit Pioulard

Rhye

Caitlin Rose

Kranky

Loma Vista

ATO

Got to pray just to make it today

Soul to squeeze

Sinful wishing well

Hymnal

Can you capture an inspiration a little too well?

Thomas Meluch, the Michigan-raised Anglophone who records under the name Benoit Pioulard, wrote this record during a year that he lived in England and visited continental Europe.

He’s never been much of a churchgoer, but it’s hard to be a tourist over there without hitting some cathedrals, and he found himself mulling over the pervasive influence of an experience he does not share.

Sometimes an outsider’s perspective sheds light, but Monsieur P seems not to have found the necessary angle. Instead, his breathy voice and cantering acoustic guitar— which feels not so much played as pressed into the music’s muted synthetic underpinnings—represents an appealing surface without showing you anything inside. The instrumentals, which mix grainy field recordings with more forthright electronic melodies, assert a strong presence, but not enough to rescue Hymnal from a state of irresolute inbetween-ness. —Bill Meyer

Purling Hiss

Water On Mars

Woman

The music that Los Angeles residents Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal make together as Rhye isn’t worlds away from what each has crafted separately before—the former (as Milosh) on three solo albums of electronics-infused bedroom songwriting, the latter on a string of excellent, mostly one-off avant-R&B projects, including Quadron and the sumptuously quirky Owusu & Hannibal.

But there’s a purity of purpose, a subtle, stirring potency to what they have achieved together on this calmly wondrous debut, which sets it apart, marking theirs as a rare, richly fruitful collaboration.

Maybe it has to do with communication; there’s a refreshing sense of directness in the sound of the music, which, for all its abundant, unabashed prettiness and orchestral elegance, maintains a stripped-down, unaffectedly human scope. Simply said: This, here, is soul—not the backward-looking stylistic cul-de-sac of retro signifiers and disclamatory prefixes, but the living breathing music that seemed to get sidelined decades ago in favor of the more technical but nowhere near as expressive “R&B”—as though that word somehow just started sounding a bit too real.

—K. Ross Hoffman

Drag City

Shredding mixes best with hooks

Some would tell you Mike Polizze’s strength is playing guitar. And true, dude can shred—see “Almost Washed My Hair” from Purling Hiss’s defiantly lo-fi, self-titled 2009 album. But he’s also an understated master of the rock ‘n’ roll hook, an equally important trait. With big and booming Superfuzz Bigmuff-style production cleaning up the band’s Drag City debut, that distinction becomes clearer.

The nervy “Lolita” tears out the gate in a wash of feedback, but “Rat Race” might be the one that gets stuck on repeat, its ’70sguitar licks blending with Keil Everett’s overblown bass and Michael Sneeringer’s thumping drums. “Mercury Retrograde” works in the same catchy manner; “Dead Again” is more subdued à la Lou Barlow or K Records Beck, but a snappy respite. “Face Down,” on the other hand, is a whole lot of instrumental bombast without much to keep non-players engaged.

Curiously, the title track begins like that, but over seven minutes builds into the album’s ultimate rager—brutally heavy, but with an unexpected pop sensibility. —John Vettese

Josh Ritter

The Beast In Its Tracks Pytheas

One sweet sacrifice

Put special emphasis on “writer” when describing Josh Ritter as a “singer/songwriter.” Alongside a decade’s worth of recordings, the boisterous leader of the Royal City Band published a novel in 2011, and has won critical acclaim for his literary referencefilled songs. On The Beast In Its Tracks, Ritter ropes in a few historical and fantastical figures, but only to gently frame a song cycle about breakup and divorce.

A troubadour at heart, Ritter reflects on his loss by penning a song for just about every emotional stage. There’s spite on “New Lover,” redemption on “Hopeful” and outside perspective (from a Greek chorus-like cadre) on “Evil Eye.” Musically, The Beast In Its Tracks finds Ritter returning to his earlier days as a solo performer. You can even hear the clinking of inattentive coffeehouse patrons’ glasses on “The Appleblossom Rag.” Breakups can be ugly, and while Ritter doesn’t attempt to doll his up, there is much to admire in the trademark plaintiveness and honesty on his seventh album. —Eric Schuman

The Stand-In

We swore to ourselves that we wouldn’t mention Nashville in this review of the ATO debut of Nashville’s Caitlin Rose, but here we are again, breaking our promises.

Like the soap, The Stand-In is, well, a fantasy version of Music City—it’s all gorgeous arrangements, soul-wrenching songwriting and heartbreaking stories, inhabiting a space that’s both rock and country, indie and folk, without pandering to the lowest common denominator.

In reality—and we hate to ruin the illusion— Rose is an outlier, the farthest thing from your typical Nashville music schlep. For starters, she doesn’t have a single song about flip-flops and Mexican beer. She’ll never make it on Music Row! Which is fine, as Music Row has an amazing ability to suck the soul out of everything, and songs like “Pink Champagne,” “Everywhere I Go” and “Menagerie” have so much soul they would break the whole damn corporate-country machine. —Sean L. Maloney

Sally Shapiro

Somewhere Else Paper Bag

A real human being?

Four years after a sophomore set, My Guilty Pleasure, that made for a safe, sterile follow-up to an utterly delightful debut, Sally Shapiro is ready for some variety. As advertised, Somewhere Else finds the pseudonymous Swedish chanteuse and producer/counterpart Johan Agebjörn inching (further) away from their studiously reverential, deliberately faceless Italo-disco reenactment, toward a more generically faceless, broadly ’80s-influenced electro-pop.

Not that things have changed all that much.

Shapiro’s singing is as wispy and wafer-thin as ever, her limp, lovelorn lamentations just as piteously plaintive. Your call whether that’s charming or cloying, but it’s not exactly the most versatile approach, functioning similarly whether paired with thumping electro-house, elevator smooth-jazz or vague bucolia. The standouts tend to have a bit more spunk—see the Annie-ish “This City’s Local Italo Disco DJ Has A Crush On Me” (which still can’t live up to its several-ways-wishful title).

Shapiro’s notoriously shy, retiring ways notwithstanding, she’s gotten downright social; teaming with Drive soundtrack stars Electric Youth for the fun (if decidedly sub-Bowie) “Starman,” and, er, Drive soundtrack cash-in tour stars Anoraak for a spot of uncharacteristically warm-blooded, Phoenix-ish lite-funk.

—K. Ross Hoffman

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reviews Shout Out Louds

Optica Merge

Swede emotion

Shout Out Louds have done a bit of everything as a band: the sprightly underdog debut (Howl Howl Gaff Gaff), the sophomore brooder (Our Ill Wills), the reinvented follow-up with a name producer (Work and Phil Ek) and, now, the self-produced, for-us-by-us statement record.

As such, Optica could be worse. It boasts Wembley-sized sound and a few huge singles that aspire to confuse Stockholm for a U.K. colony; the composed, disposable “Blue Ice” in particular sounds poised to inflict James Blunt trauma on the English adult-alternative charts. The filler delivers more: “Burn,” a wouldbe bridge between hits, is the one instance of actual heat between co-vocalists Adam Olenius and Bebban Stenborg, and “Glasgow” rocks a perpetuating Simple Minds synth riff before progging out for three minutes. Great Scots? Considering the Knife, Jens Lekman, the Radio Dept., et al., try lesser Swedes. — Noah Bonaparte Pais

Harper Simon

Division Street

Play It Again Sam

No one-trick pony

First things first: Harper Simon is Paul Simon’s son. With his 2009 self-titled debut, that was an important point to make, since he sounded just like his dad.

Same soft, folk-influenced vocals, same love for acoustic guitar and great songwriting. With his new LP, the kid is flexing his muscles and trying to make a case for his music as “psychedelic folk/rock.” It succeeds, but perhaps a little too well.

Yes, it sounds like classic ’70s psychedelia, but also like he’s copying this sound, rather than incorporating specific elements to make a larger statement. Also, Division Street brings up an interesting point: Has Simon moved his music too far in a new direction? His new sound is interesting and may find its own fans, but it’s such a strong departure from his last album that it will likely leave his current admirers scratching their heads. —Devon Leger

Marnie Stern

The Chronicles Of Marnia Kill Rock Stars

Tapping into greatness

Marnie Stern—indie-rock goddess, guitar shredder, endlessly entertaining video interviewee—just keeps evolving. Hers is a sound that calls for the metaphor

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Heart Of Darkness Sixty and surly, Robyn Hitchcock tells an unsettling Love story

A

ll of the glory, none of the real hard labor/

It’s been wonderful,” Robyn Hitchcock declares in the middle of “End Of Time,” the apocalypseminded closer of Love From London. The song, a steady stomp Robyn Hitchcock thick with acoustic guitars, shimmery keyboards and strings, is Love From London death-obsessed: “Sunrise doesn’t give a damn about who I am or what I’m doing anywhere,” sings the 60-year-old Hitchcock.

Yep Roc Love From London does indeed focus on matters of the heart, although these matters aren’t conventionally romantic: Hitchcock’s love songs include threatening admonishments to “be still—let the darkness fall on you” (on cello-driven ditty “Be Still”) and bitter accusations of conflicted priorities (“Got that terrifying feeling you don’t love me anymore/You want to get high, but you don’t know just why,” he sings on “Stupefied”). While “I Love You” seems a sincere declaration, the imagery is weirdly obsessive (“I stand beside you, honey, naked and uncooked”), and the music, a darkly psychedelic, vaguely bluesy electric romp, is more unsettling than reassuring.

None of this is new for Hitchcock, who has been a master of non sequitur-laden surrealism since his glory years in the late ’70s with the Soft Boys and later with backing band the Egyptians. He made Love From London with Paul Noble, who produced the album and played most of the instruments aside from that cello, and who doesn’t stray far from Hitchcock’s familiar styles, including the Byrds-y folk rock of the song that names the album’s twinned themes: “Death And Love.” Hitchcock is certainly still worth giving a damn about, but Love From London could use more of those surprising or insightfully startling juxtapositions that define his best labors. —Steve Klinge

photo by Michéle Noach

Not Pumped

Nathan Williams plays 98-pound weakling on Wavves’ disappointing latest

P

roof that the indie-rock era is as

sexist as any other swath of rock history: Best Coast’s gorgeous country/surf/soul Wavves is castigated for monosyllabic and supplicant lyrics, Afraid Of Heights while her boyfriend Nathan Williams gets away with Mom + Pop “No hope and no future/Will die the same loser” for three albums now relatively untarnished. The above lyric mines the same territory his “No Hope Kids” blew speakers with four years ago. And he hasn’t picked up a joke or a lick since.

Tagged pop/punk with 2010’s critically acclaimed King Of The Beach because of his Tom DeLonge-esque whine, Williams actually wrote tunes catchy enough to please crowds on the following year’s excellent Life Sux, with a little help from friends like Fucked Up and, yup, Best Coast. But over a full-length album, he’s as annoying as ever.

Whether rivaling his girlfriend as the doormat (“Still I’ll be your dog” he sings on “Dog”) or moaning “everything is my fault” over a four-and-half minute dirge of the same name, Williams rarely gets pithier than “I’m ugly, you’re boring/I can’t act like I care.” The hooks meant to justify this infantilism never surface, except on the Magnetic Fields-style cello-and-bass interplay of “Cop,” which climaxes in a parade of whistling. But when Williams sings, “Woke up and found Jesus” in the exact syntax of Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” on “Afraid Of Heights,” you won’t just hear “Things are good or so I hear” following, but you’ll switch records entirely to ensure you do. —Dan Weiss

of the peeling onion, each layer providing a new pungent sound. The Chronicles Of Marnia gives the listener not only Stern’s fiery guitar rock, but also an imprint of classic/prog-rock mannerisms with a shuffling, experimental undertow (drums courtesy of the amazing Kid Millions).

What’s most impressive is how she takes uneasy composition and builds a clear, catchy structure. Stern continues to be our best existentialist rocker. Her lyrical phrasings parallel her musical ones, searching and questioning life’s details with—as the title would indicate— a sense of humor.

There’s no one out there doing exactly what Stern is doing. This is a record that fans of

Juliana Hatfield, Lightning Bolt or King Crimson could fall in love with without compromise.

—Jill LaBrack

Stubborn Heart

Stubborn Heart

One Little Indian

Don’t it make you feel like dancin’? Nope.

Looking down their noses at the world of dubstep and chill-out/trance electronica, British duo Stubborn Heart claims that ’60s soul and ’80s pop spins its propeller hardest. All those blippy video-game sounds, blooping presets, mechanical drums, keytar-worthy chord pro-

gressions and faux-brooding via soulless vocals are just a modern-day means to an inconclusive end, they probably wouldn’t say.

But that’s what we’re saying, and how we’re describing this poor pastiche of Aphex Twin, Spandau Ballet and Gary Numan.

The best parts are the ominous-sounding, Terminator-styled swells on “Two Times A Maybe” and “Interpol,” but you could just as easily pop in the DVD—which you do own, don’t you?—and have your post-apocalyptic soundscapes accompanied by fantastical car chases and gun fights, as opposed to a couple of British dudes who think they’re cyborg reincarnations of their home nation’s ’60s Northern soul scene. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

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/movies

NEGLECTED

CRITERION

Film’s Silver Thread

essay by

Stan Michna

An intriguing development in the history of irrespective of the degree of yearning to belong film is how rapidly, soon after its birth circa to someone or something, real life for many re1900, the novelty expired. And paradoxically, mains bleakly open-ended. how equally rapidly a wised-up public emSet in immediate post-WWII America, The braced the new art form and clamoured for Master stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie more.

Quell, a shell-shocked, sex-obsessed, alcoholViewers who once fainted or fled in terror ic Navy vet drifting toward oblivion (conveyed from images of galloping horses or trains pull- with beautiful economy: from guzzling indusing into stations quickly grew dissatisfied with trial alcohol drained from torpedoes to a hilariflickering replications of what most saw every ous Rorschach test in a naval hospital). day. The last thing diversion-starved masses Discharged from the hospital, fired from sought were reminders of their dreary lives. his job and adrift in a haze of paint-thinnerThe nascent industry soon obliged, and based booze, Quell one night staggers onto a within a decade discovered the thematic and yacht owned by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seynarrative sweet spot propelling and lubricat- mour Hoffman), charismatic founder/leader ing feature filmmaking to this day: the Chase of a “philosophical” movement known as “The or the Race.

Cause.” When Dodd discovers him next mornFrom the Keystone Kops to Skyfall, the ing, he takes an inexplicable shine to Quell (osChase/Race (to mix metaphors) is the golden tensibly because of Quell’s gift for concocting thread woven throughout the history of film’s skin-tingling moonshine). What ensues, and tapestry. In every genre from westforms the heart of the movie, is erns to musicals, whether chasing— the peculiar relationship—varior being chased by—bad guys, good ously paternal, fraternal and inguys, the past, money, love; or racing, cipiently homoerotic—between in one form or another (usually anthe two until, at the instigation of nihilation), against time, the golden his wife (Amy Adams), Dodd gives thread, like The Dude, abides.

Quell the final brush-off.

But running parallel to the golden Of course, no discussion of The thread (representing thematic and Master can ignore accusations narrative unity) is a silver one repthat the film is a transparently resenting meaning and motive. And L. Ron Hubbard and Scientolthe meaning and motive underlyogy. The focal point is Quell, not The Master will be available on DVD ing the Chase/Race is a desperate Dodd—so, No. But Yes, because and Blu-ray Combo yearning to belong to family, comScientology’s touchstones—esMarch 5 from munity or society. pecially the dead-on “Processing” Entertainment One. In four early Chase/Race landprobe (see Beyond Belief, the book marks—Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation (a “race” by the apostate niece of Scientology’s current film in another way, too), Chaplin’s The Kid, head)—are in plain sight.

Gance’s La Roue and Keaton’s The General— The Scientology angle, though, is merely a the breathless chase/race sequences are driven, framework for Anderson’s curiosity. Like his respectively, to: a) preserve ante-bellum soci- mentor Robert Altman, Anderson’s preferred ety; b) re-unite and re-create a nuclear family; milieu is the expansive human canvas where c) restore a tragically broken family; and d) re- there is no right or wrong answer, and no overestablish a soiled reputation in the community. arching philosophy with which to wrap human The silver thread is the “why?” to the golden behaviour into a cute bow. thread’s “how?”

The film features three performances to die In a year when critical favour heaved toward for: Adams’s suspicious, protective wife; Hoffsilver thread films—Silver (ha!) Linings Play- man’s electro-magnetism (if Hoffman ever book, Sessions, L’Amour, Lincoln (a rejoin- started a cult, you’d join); and Phoenix’s eccender, finally, to Birth Of A Nation) and argu- tric Quell. (Rake-handle thin, and a face that ably, Skyfall—writer/director P.T. Anderson’s looks ploughed into furrows and photographed The Master is the most troubling. Troubling by Walker Evans.) because neither history, nor nature, nor facile But Anderson’s great, daring achievement happy endings endows The Master with what here, is an engrossing film featuring characters is misleadingly known as “closure.” It is bleakly about whom you don’t care, a risk only a true open-ended. More troubling is recognizing that auteur in command of his material would take.

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Rules of the Game 1939 / Director

Jean Renoir Why It’s Neglected: A 75 year-old film rarely seen and largely forgotten except in France, graduate film studies seminars and directors’ guild banquets; perforce neglected.

The Theme: Shot between the Munich Agreement and the outbreak of WWII, the film presciently foreshadows France’s capitulation and collaboration.

The principal characters, descendants of the pre-Revolutionary ruling aristocrats, are oblivious, effete ninnies, clinging to an infantile and outdated sense of protocol and privilege—like their forebears prior to the 1789 deluge.

When the film was released, France’s elites howled in outrage. Twelve months later, the Wehrmacht rolled over France.

What It’s About: Subtitled “A Whimsical Drama,” the film focuses on the (mostly adulterous) shenanigans of eight people, part of a group invited to a weekend retreat at a country chateau.

What at first appears to be an oh-sosophisticated bedroom farce among the haute bourgeoisie—husbands and wives each have lovers; delicacy and protocols of politesse ensure that no one’s feelings are hurt—descends into something more disturbing: the famous hunting scene (the slaughter is graphic); the complicity of the household staff with their amoral employers; and finally, the outrageously cavalier dismissal of the murder of the only heroic character in the film.

What You Get: What Criterions are made for: a two-disc set that includes a striking, director-approved print (the film was believed destroyed); comprehensive commentary track; a generous booklet; and a second disc packed with the great Jean Renoir: a BFI documentary, biography, interviews, reminiscences—in short, an Elysian field of delight.

/ dvds

march 5 Abducted: The Carlina White Story

Adventure Collection Featuring Chuck Norris in Forest Warrior America’s Favorite Country Stars Barney: Play With Barney Baseball: The Golden Age of America’s Game The Bay Bodacious Space Pirates Volume 2 Collection 2 Boundless Potential Bruce Springsteen: Glory Days California Solo Capsulas Care Bears: Totally Sweet Adventures Chloe’s Closet: Outdoor Explorer Collaborator Comedy Family Favorites Crocodile Dundee/Crocodile Dundee II Dalziel & Pascoe: Season 7 Daniel Barenboim: 70th Anniversary Concert A Dark Truth Death Comes in 3’s The Distracted Mind With Dr. Adam Gazzaley Duck Dynasty: Season 2 Volume 1 An Easter Bunny Puppy Eaters Elfie Hopkins: Cannibal Hunter Foolishness Garbage Grave Encounters 2 Great Spy Chase Guardians of the Lost Code 3D Gun Hill Road H2O Just Add Water: Season 1 H2O Just Add Water Season 2 H2O Just Add Water Season 3 Harry O: The Complete Second Season Heleno Hello Kitty 3 Collection Hello Kitty 5 Collection Hidden Hit & Miss House Hunting House of Payne Volume 10 Interview With a Hitman The Intouchables Iron Doors Je’Caryous Johnson’s Marriage Material John Wayne: Tribute to an American Icon Lay the Favorite Leading Ladies Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinijitzu Season Two Lifetime Movies for TV The Marine 3: Homefront The Mayo Clinic Diet Mind Body Bootcamp: repurpose MLB Superstars: Impact 56

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mar 12 Hitchcock

Audiences preferred “Daniel Day-Lewis is… Lincoln” to “Anthony Hopkins is…Hitchcock.”

Maybe home viewers will be more forgiving to this making-of-

Thomas & Friends: Go Go Thomas!

Thorne Timothy Spall Somewhere at Sea: The Complete Series Tom & Jerry: Pint-Sized Pals True Grit/Hondo TV Classic Westerns Vol.4 Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie Unconditional Unexceptional Love Wagon Train: The Complete Sixth Season War of the Worlds/Minority Report Will Hay: The Rank Collection Wreck-It Ralph WWE: Bret “The Hit Man” Hart Dungeon Collection

Psycho biopic.

[Montecito Picture Company]

Players Moomin & Midsummer Madness Muay Thai Warrior Murdoch Mysteries: Series 1-4 Murdoch Mysteries: Series 5 My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding Seasons 1 & 2 & Specials Nazis at the Center of the Earth/Abraham Lincoln vs.

Zombies Norman Wisdom: The Rank Collection Vol. 4 Nova: Hurricane Sandy – Inside the Megastorm Off White Lies Peter Gunn Season 1 Philo Vance Murder Case Collection Playing for Keeps Power Rangers: Clash of the Red Rangers – The Movie Radio Unameable Red Dawn Regular Show: Party Pack Vol. 3 Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc The Saddle Club Collection Scavenger Hunt: An Unlikely Union Seven Hear Hitch Sigur Ros: Valtari Film Experiment Sofia the First: Once Upon a Princess Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Strawberry Shortcake: Berry Friends Forever The Stray Striking Truth Super 8/Eagle Eye Super Bowl XLVII Champions Teddy Bear Club Volume 1

march 12 110% 33 Great Cities of Europe 4 Film Favorites: Ben Stiller 4 Film Favorites: Eddie Murphy 4 Film Favorites: John Grisham 4 Film Favorites: John Travolta 4 Film Favorites: Leslie Nielsen 4 Film Favorites: Meryl Streep 4 Film Favorites: Richard Gere 4 Film Favorites: Robert Redford

7 Greatest Bathrooms in L.A. Airplane!/Airplane II: The Sequel All the President’s Men/3 Days of the Condor Amazing Racer American Experience: Silicon Valley Amos Lee: Live From the Artist’s Den Angelina Ballerina: The Mousling Mysteries Annie & The Gypsy Aquarius: Living Beneath the Sea Ben Hur/The Ten Commandments Between Kings and Queens Big Top Pee Wee/Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure Black Eagle Bleach: Box Set 16 Bloodwine Braveheart/Gladiator Casablanca/The African Queen Casting Couch Christina Aguilera Collection Cinderella Closer to God: Jessica’s Journey Connected: An Autobiography About Love, Death & Technology Crimson Curandero: Dawn of the Demon Curious George: Swings Into Spring

Dear Hunter: Spectrum Live The Devil’s in the Details Doc & Merle Watson: Doc & Merle Dragon Ball Z Kai: Season 4 Duke Eastern Front 1941-1945 Expectations/Confessions Extreme Dinosaurs Failure to Launch/How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Fairy in a Cage Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series Father Dowling Mysteries: The Third Season The First Time The Flat Four Course Meal Foyle’s War: Sets 1-6 The Home Front Files From the Back of the Room From the National Geographic Archives: My Life With Chimpanzees & America’s Lost Mustang Greatest Western Heroes Gypsy/South Pacific Heartlines Hitchcock Hotel for Dogs/Best in Show Hysteria Icons of Action In Their Skin Jack the Giant Killer Jay and Silent Bob Get Irish: The Swearing o’ the Green Kiss the Girls/Along Came a Spider Kumare Larry Carlton & Robben Ford: Unplugged The Last Gladiators Law & Order: Criminal Intent – Season 10 The Letter Writer Life of Pi Lincoln Chronicles The Longest Yard (1974)/The Longest Yard (2005) Looney Tunes Super Stars: Sylvester & Hippety Hopper The Lost Archives of Candid Camera Max & Ruby: A Bunny for Every Season Collection Menace II Society/Juice The Mind of a Chef Season 1 Miss Dial The Mob Doctor: First Season Monster Motorway Mystikal National Geographic Classics: Biblical Mysteries Nova: Doomsday Volcanoes The Out-of-Towners (1970)/ The Out-of-Towners (1999) Pat Metheny Group: We Live Here

Penguindrum Collection 2 Petticoat Junction: Return to

This Must Be the Place Tom & Jerry’s Musical Mayhem Unaware Vampire Boys 2: New Brood Wedding Crashers/The Wedding Singer

march 19

mar 19 Bachelorette Hurt badly by Bridesmaids

arriving first, Bachelorette is a considerably more caustic examination of evolving female friendships. If you’re likewise caustic, you’ll laugh your ass off.

[Creative Artists Agency]

Hooterville

Pioneers of Television Season 3

Predator Dinosaurs Pressed A Previous Engagement Punch Raggs: Laugh Out Loud With Raggs Ramstein: Videos 1995-2012 The Real Vikings Collection Red Skelton: Farewell Specials Revelation Road Ripper Street Rise of the Guardians The Rugrats Movie/Rugrats Go Wild Satan’s Angel: Queen of the Fire Tassels Savage Water/Death by Invitation Saving the Ocean Season 1 Scooby-Doo & The Circus Monsters Secrets of Highclere Castle Shaman Healer Sage Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness The Sins of Deacon Whytes Smashed

Smurfs: The Best of Seasons 1 & 2

Sound City Sparkle/Dreamgirls Spiders Spongebob Squarepants: The Complete Eighth Season Storage 24 TCM Greatest Classic Legends: Judy Garland TCM Greatest Classic Legends: Natalie Wood TCM Greatest Classic Legends: Sidney Poitier This Is Not a Film

23 Minutes to Sunrise 24-Hour Love 4 Minutes Adventures in Appletown Alien Invasion: Are You Ready?

All Together Angus Buchan’s Ordinary People The Athlete Bachelorette The Big Picture Bill Wyman: Let the Good Times Roll Chance in a Million: Complete Collection Creepy Creature Double Feature Vol. 1: Monster From the Ocean Floor/Serpent Island Creepy Creature Double Feature Vol. 2: The Crawling Hand/The Slime People Cyber Stalker Daniel Day-Lewis Triple Feature Dark Feed Driving by Braille Face to Face Falling Uphill Fate/Stay Night TV Collection 2

Frat House Frontline: The Education of Michelle Rhee Ghost Hunters: Season 7 Part 1 Ghost Storm The Great Magician Hellgate Helmel

Jersey Shore: The Complete Series

Jersey Shore: The Uncensored Final Season Les Miserables Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home Love for Levon: A Benefit to Save the Barn A Mind to Kill: Complete Collection Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries Series 1 My Brother Jonathan My Mexican Shivah New Hurricane Polymar No Job for a Lady: The Complete Collection Nova: Decoding Neanderthals One Piece Season 4: Voyage Four The Other Son Outlaw Pack Pokemon Black & White Set 3 Price Check Quincy M.E. Season 5 The Return of Johnny V

Riot in a Women’s Prison Samuel Bleak The Secret Caribbean With Trevor McDonald Secret Millionaires Club Vol. 1 Sesame Street: Best of Friends Shadow People Smithsonian Channel: The Hunt for Bin Laden Soul Food Junkies Straight A’s Strange Frame Suicide Forecast Supercyclone Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer Time of y Life Toriko: Part 3 Vampire Princess Miyu TV Collection Victor K Mar II WWE: Elimination Chamber 2013 Zero Dark Thirty

march 26 Les Miserable This Is 40 420 Triple Feature Vol. 2: Contact High Abducted All American Zombie Drugs Alois Nebel Amagami SS: The Complete Collection Angel in the House Bad Meat Bangkok Revenge Because I Love You Behind the Wall Big Gusher Bled White Bloodline: Vengeance From Beyond Bob’s New Suit The Borgias: The Second Season The Carol Burnett Show: This Time Together Cheerful Weather for the Wedding The Comedy Confessions From the Grassy Knoll: The Shocking Truth Continuum: Season One The Darkest Corner of Paradise Dartworth Day of the Falcon Dead in France Death From Above Death Goes North

Digimon Adventure Set Season 2

Discipline Dose of Reality Easy Money Either Way Fetish The Frankenstein Theory Frontline: Inside Obama’s Presidency Gerardo Ortiz: Sold Out Deide El Nokia Theatre LA Live GLOW: The Story of the

Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling Healed by Grace Hong Kong Confidential House Arrest Hush Your Mouth I Shot JFK: The Shocking Truth IMAX: Earth’s Oceans Triple Feature IMAX: Incredible Places Triple Feature IMAX: World of Wonder Triple Feature Joe Bonamassa: An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House Johnny Sokko & His Flying Robot: The Complete Series Kill the Ugly TV Killing Them Softly Larnelle Harris: Larnelle Live Last Caress Late Bloomers

Lawbreaker: The Complete Series

Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out Life on Fire: Wildlife on the Volcano’s Edge Long Island Medium MADtv: Season 2 The Man Who Will Come Men at Work: Season 1 Midsomer Murders: Tom Barnaby’s Last Cases Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXVI New Order No Way Out But One One Last Game Parental Guidance Party of Five: The Complete Fourth Season Pawn Shop The Phant Father Population 2 RIngo Starr & His All Starr Band 2012: Ringo at the Ryman A Royal Affair

Sebastian Bach: Abachalypse Now

Sexually Frank Shakespeare Uncovered

Southwest Championship Wrestling: Best of the ‘80s Vol. 1

Stagnight of the Dead Stand Off Tatsumi Titanic: The Shocking Truth To Live and Die in Hollywood To the Arctic Tokyo Noir Tom Green: Live UFC: The Best of 2012 UFO Chronicles: What the President Doesn’t Know Union Square Veep: The Complete First Season Virtual Weapon Wishmakers Womb Worst-Case Scenario: Season 1 Zombie Ed Zombie Genocide: Legion of the Damned

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/ dvds

by Andrew b onazelli

shorts Red Dawn

The fear-mongering ’80s original imagined a Rockwellian middle American landscape totally obliterated by a tag team of Soviets, Cubans and Nicaraguans. It was a laugh riot orgy of graphic violence, jingoism and xenophobia, rivaled in awesomeness only by the similar Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion U.S.A. This reboot subs in North Koreans for Russkies; much like the original, it is deeply confused about geopolitics, but still hilariously, stupidly watchable. [FilmDistrict]

This Is 40

The Bad Guy Wins

Disney satisfies the kids and the gamers with the inspired Wreck-It Ralph

The rampage arcade game premiered in 1986, and has rightly ascertained cult classic status over a quartercentury later. Players assumed the role of either a Godzilla or a King Kong knock-off, climbed buildings in various cityscapes, and beat the living shit out of them. Simple pleasures are the best, right? Well, writer-director Rich Moore (and at least three more collaborators with story and screenplay credits) clearly has fond memories of those crumbling skyscrapers—the creative team somehow transformed the dinky but charming 8-bit Rampage aesthetic into Wreck-It Ralph, a gorgeously animated, nearly $200 million-grossing Disney tentpole.

Ralph’s eponymous protagonist (voiced by John C. Reilly) is the human equivalent of those building-scaling monsters, pulverizing bricks and mortar with his massive fists while uttering his signature catchphrase, “I’m gonna wreck it!” The genius in Moore’s story is that Ralph is tired of the thankless villain role. He attends a support group for video game antagonists (featuring sharp cameos from Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Pac-Man, etc. baddies), then actually does something about his plight, embarking on a quest through other gamescapes to find his identity. There’s a staggering amount of insider references for gamers, but Wreck-It works just as well as feel-good kids’ fare.

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Judd Apatow’s wife and kids have starred in everything he’s directed since The 40-YearOld Virgin. America’s yawning, dude. This “sort-of sequel” to Knocked Up earns the “sort of” by not exploring the dubious future of Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s characters, but her intense sister and lackadaisical brother-in-law, played

by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The title’s self-explanatory: a 133-minute sometimes-funny sermon on parenting, trust, sex and aging. [Universal Pictures]

Killing Them Softly

For sure the most inexplicably, frustratingly underseen movie of 2012. Which sucks for director Andrew Dominik, who also earned that title in 2007 with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and might not get many more chances.

This one also stars Brad Pitt, as a Bostonbased hitman circa the 2008 election charged with cleaning up a messy underground poker robbery. Don’t read much more about it—just give a talented writerdirector your money for once.

[Weinstein Company]

THREE HOT THREESOMES FROM

FAST GIRLS

AND IF WE ALL LIVED TOGETHER?

STAND OFF

$11.99 or 2/$18

Good Night And Good Luck

The Pianist (3x DVD Pack)

$4.99 each

Mulholland Dr.

Porky’s

Quantities limited. Sale prices in effect until March 30, 2013.

Une société de Québecor Média

Fifty Dead Men Walking

Battle For Terra

/music/new_releases

MARCH 5 David Arkenstone & Charlee Brooks Loveren Olof Arnalds Sudden Elevation Autechre Exai Bajofondo Presente Bajofondo Presente Juliana Barwick Pacing Raquel Bitton Rhythm of the Heart Blanche Blanche Blanche Wooden Ball Tom Browne Rockin’ Radio Luke Bryan Spring Break… Here to Party Marcus Canty This Is… Marcus Canty The Cave Singers Naomi Chelsea Light Moving Chelsea Light Moving Charlotte Church Two Cloud Cult Love Conejo Welcome to Southland The Cribs Payola: Deluxe Edition Andre Cymone AC: Expanded Edition Drew Davidsen True Drew Dead Leaf Echo Thought & Language The Demigodz Killmatic Walter Egan Fundamental Roll Walter Egan Not Shy Mattias Eklundh Freak Guitar: Smorgasbord Enforcer Death by Fire Gnod Chaudelande Hardreams Unbroken Promises Hatchet Dawn of the End Jimi Hendrix People, Hell and Angels Hey Marseilles Lines We Trace Hiromi Move Robyn Hitchcock Love From London Hollis Brown Ride on the Train How to Destroy Angels Welcome Oblivion The Howling Brothers Howl

Icona Pop Iconic Javelin Hi Beams Jelly Roll Big Sal Story Jozif Balance Presents Jozif Krokus Dirty Dynamite Last Bison Inheritance Lifeforms Multimdimensional Lonesome Wyatt & The Holy Spooks Ghost Ballads Long Tail Teb Raise Your hands Making Movies A La Deriva Mano Le Tough Changing Days Men New Moon Modestep Evolution Theory Ashley Monroe Like a Rose Tom Morgan Orange Syringe Gurf Morlix Gurf Morlix Finds the Present Tense John Murry The Graceless Age Kate Nash Girl Talk

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MARCH 12

Biffy Clyro Opposites

mar 12

Basically the Scottish Foo Fighters, except way more

adventurous—often to their own detriment.

This double album offers plenty of catchy should-be rock radio staples. [14th Floor]

Neaera Ours Is the Storm The New Amsterdams Outroduction Old Man Markley Down Side Up Omnium Gatherum Beyond Madeleine Peyroux The Blue Room Raekwon The Tonight Show RED Who We Are: The RED Anthology Otis Redding Lonely & Blue: The Deepest Soul of Otis Redding Reverend and the Makers @Reverend Makers Rhye Woman Josh Ritter The Beast in Its Tracks Caitlin Rose The Stand-In Rotting Christ Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy Boz Scaggs Memphis Jenny Simmons The Becoming Soilwork The Living Infinite Son Volt Honky Tonk Soundtrack Side Effects Soundtrack Snitch Soundtrack Tomb Raider Stubborn Heart Stubborn Heart Suns Images Du Futur Superhuman Happiness Hands They Might Be Giants Nanobots

The Tossers Toxic Rose Ulfur Various Artists Various Artists Various Artists Vreid Brooke Waggoner Warrior Soul Waxahatchee Edgar Winter Wisdom Young Dreams Youth Lagoon Youth Lagoon

The Emerald City Toxic Rose White Mountain Larry Kirwan’s Invasion Shake It Up: I <3 Dance This Is Dubstep 2013 Welcome Farewell Originator Stiff Middle Finger Cerulean Salt They Only Come Out at Night Full Spectrum Between Places Wondrous Bughouse Wondrous Bughouse

38 Special Special Deliver Above & Beyond Anjunabeats 10 Adrenaline Mob Coverta Aina Haina Aina Haina The Andrews Sisters Greatest Hits in Stereo/ Great Golden Hits Audio Adrenaline Kings & Queens Devendra Banhart Mala Alan Bibey & Wayne Benson Mandolin Chronicles Biffy Clyro Opposites Bon Jovi What About Now David Bowie The Next Day Capital Kings Capital Kings Larry Carlton Unplugged The Cash Box Kings Black Toppin’ Philip Catherine Cote Jardin Eric Clapton Old Sock Commander Cody & His Modern Day Airmen From the Island Jamie N Commons Rumble and Sway Larry Corryell Lift Jason Crabb Love Is Stronger Spencer Day The Mystery of You Ronnie Dio & The Prophets The Early Years Kyle Eastwood The View From Here Edge of Attack Edge of Attack Sena Ehrhardt All In Dean Evenson Dream Space Family Force 5 The Third Matthew Good Old fighters Amy Grant Icon Megan Hilty It Happens All the Time Daniel Hope Spheres Jellyfish Stack-a-Tracks Shooter Jennings The Other Life The Louvin Brothers Christian Life: The Definitive Louvin Brothers Story Doug Macleod There’s a Time C.K. Mann Funky Highlife The Mary Onettes Hit the Waves Rod McKeun Listen to the Warm (Deluxe edition) Rod McKeun Sold Out at Carnegie Hall Ethel Merman Merman… Her Greatest Mindless Behavior All Around the World Mostar Diving Club Triumph of Hope Off With Their Heads Home Orianthi Heaven in This Hell Passion Let the Future Begin BJ Putnam More and More Redbone The Witch Queen of New Orleans

Heatstroke/The Wind and the War The Beach Boys Icon Pat Benatar Icons The Black Crowes Wiser for the Time Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Specter at the Feast Blink-182 Icon Billy Bragg Tooth & Nail Brandt Brauer Frick Miami Chris Cagle Icons Glen Campbell Icons Captain & Tennille Icon Belinda Carlisle Icon Clutch Earth Rocker John Coltrane Sun Ship: The Complete Sessions Della Mae This World Oft Can Be Dépêche Mode Delta Machine Fats Domino Live From Austin TX Everclear Icon The Fabulous Thunderbirds On the Verge Ella Fitzgerald Best of the BBC Vaults (CD/DVD) Fol Chen The False Alarms Merle Haggard Live From Austin TX Heidi Happy On the Hills Kerli Utopia Patrick Krief Hundred Thousand Pieces Kris Kristofferson Live From Austin TX Jerry Lee Lewis Live From Austin TX Liberace Icon Lordi To Beast or Not to Beast Lotus Build Low The Invisible Way Kacey Musgraves Same Trailer Different Park New Found Glory Icon Sam Page Breach Poison Icons Elvis Presley Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite (Legacy Edition) Otis Redding The Complete Stax/Volt Singles (box set) Thomas Rhett On the Verge Andre Rieu Icon Rival Sons Head Down Josh Rouse The Happiness Waltz Six Feet Under Unborn Smoochknob Drive by High Five The Staves Dead & Born & Grown Marnie Sterm The Chronicles of Marnia Tecla We Are the Lucky Ones Rich Thompson Less Is More Justin Timberlake The 20/20 Experience William Tyler Impossible Truth Various Artists The Music Is You: A Tribute to John Denver Kail Baxley

Depeche Mode Delta Machine

mar 19

Accompanying press predictably compares

this to Violator, but we’re probably in for another dignified, if unspectacular collection, just like the last five Mode albums. [Columbia]

Paul Revere & The Raiders Here They Come/Just Like Us/Midnight Ride Paul Roland Bates Motel Savoy Brown Train to Nowhere Seventh Day Slumber Love & Worship

Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice The Story of the Day That I Died Soundtrack Sound City: Real to Reel Soundtrack Spring Breakers Southern Hospitality Easy Livin’

Alexis Spight L.O.L. James Taylor Dad Loves His Work James Taylor Flag James Taylor JT Tine Thing Helseth Tine Sandi Thorn Flesh and Blood Various Artists Above & Beyond: Anjunabeats Vol. 10 Various Artists Folk Legends Various Artists Motown: The Musical Various Artists Stars for a Summer Night Vesta Seven The Virgins Strike gently The Virgins Strike Gently Bart Walker Waiting on Daylight Wild Belle Isles Jay Willie New York Minute The Woggles The Big Beat Rachel Zeffira The Deserters

MARCH 19 Icon Icon Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective Alpha Rev Bloom And So I Watch You From Afar All Hail Bright Futures Anthrax Anthem Bobby Bare The Real Thing/I Hate Goodbyes/Ride Me Down Easy Trace Adkins Alien Ant Farm Duane Allman

Divine: Jazz Albums 1954-1958 (box set) Walk Off the Earth R.E.V.O. Will.i.am #willpower Sarah Vaughan

MARCH 26 Along Comes Tandyn No Matter How Far BraveHeart Runaway Freeway Blues Bon Jovi Icon Joe Bonamassa An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House Crystal Bowersox All That for This Caravels Lacuna Dido Girl Who Got Away The Doors Morrison Hotel Steve Forbert Alive on Arrival/ Jackrabbit Slim Fuzztones Snake Oil I am Empire Anchors Isbells Stoalin Alan Jackson Precious Memories Volume II Julian Lynch Lines The Manhattan Transfer The Best of the Manhattan Transfer The Milk Carton Kids The Ash & Clay OneRepublic Native Pretty Maids Motherland A Rocket to the Moon Wild & Free Maggie Rose Cut to Impress Sade X2: Diamond Life/ Soldier of Love Senses Fail Renacer Sevendust Black Out the Sun Blake Shelton Based on a True Story Smoke Fairies Blood Speaks Stephen Stills Carry On (box set) Streetlight Manifesto The Hands That Thieve The Strokes Comedown Machine Stryper Second Coming Thompson Square Just Feels Good Twinstar The Sound of Leaving Van Halen The Studio Albums 1978-1984 (box set) Various Artists Putumayo Presents a Jewish Celebration Warm Soda Someone for You The Waterboys An Appointment With Mr. Yeats Waves Afraid of Heights Wire Change Becomes Us Yard of Blondes Murderology Tandyn Almer David Archuleta Ashanti The Black Lillies

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