September Needle by Gary Hammerschlag

/music Cross-Examination: Puppetmaster Hetfield delivers the hits

Some Kind of Blockbuster There’s nothing embarrassing about Metallica’s latest reel life adventure by Gary Graff 2

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When bassist Robert Trujillo joined Metallica

back in 2003, he remembers that “there was talk about doing something like this.” A decade later, Metallica: Through the Never is a reality. The 3D film, opening September 27 in IMAX and October 4 in general theaters, stars Dane DeHaan (Chronicle, Lawless, HBO’s In Treatment) as a crew member named Trip who’s sent out on a special—and apparently dangerous—mission to get something for Metallica while the group plays a concert. Directed by Nimród Antal (Predators, Armored), Metallica: Through the Never blends performance footage (filmed during August 2012 in Vancouver) with Trip’s travels and travails for a project frontman James Hetfield acknowledges is “pretty complex. It’s like three movies in one. There’s a lot of different dynamics happening with this movie. It’s pretty scary.”

Photo by: Ross Halfin

Post-Apocalypse Now: Never star Dane Dehaan, through the looking glass

And, according to guitarist Kirk Hammett, it’s hardly approached like a conventional film or music documentary “There’s not gonna be, like, footage of us backstage or interviews or anything,” Hammett explains. “It’s going to be strictly live footage and a storyline that weaves in and out of the film, and that’s something we’re all really excited about. It’s really, really an intense sort of thing because it’s storytelling, but there’s no real dialogue.” Antal says that working with Metallica was “kind of a no-brainer for me. I was a fan of theirs growing up and have listened to their music throughout my whole life.” So, he was all ears when he was first approached to do the film, and welcomed the challenge when he was presented with the band’s “incredibly strange concept.” “It felt like a completely original, different thing,” Antal recalls. “I’d never seen or heard of anything like it, so I was immediately intrigued.” The director says his script was inspired by Paulo Coelho’s 1988 novel The Alchemist as well as the Occupy movement that was raging across the U.S. while he was working on it. He also worked closely with the band before the concerts and says Metallica was willing to “manipulate” their set list to accommodate the script’s needs. “They’ve been super-supportive,” Antal says. “To work with the band is a big deal, but as artists, they are completely aware of the artistic process, and they were very giving

in that regard.” Metallica previewed parts of Through The Hetfield, however, says the group was Never at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in somewhat surprised by the expense involved France and at its Orion Music + More Festival in producing the project. “Every time we go in June—where the group played a surprise and see it we tweak it here and there—it’s set under the name DeHaan as a nod to the like putting a song together, only it’s a little movie’s star. The group also attended this more expensive,” he says with a laugh. Het- year’s Comic-Con in San Diego for a panel field also says Through the Never has also discussion and performance to drum up supimpeded progress on Metallica’s next album, port for the film. the follow-up to 2008’s Death A soundtrack album is also due Magnetic. out on September 24. And while “Yeah, this movie is keepMetallica are champing at the bit ing us pretty busy at this point, to finally get it out for fans to see, and it’s taking a lot of our time the group is also braced for a poand effort—and touring,” he exlarized reaction. plains. “We’re trying to pay for “I think if I have learned anythis movie, so we’re having to thing, it is to sort of stop the go make some money, and we’re whole expecting thing,” says going out and playing some drummer Lars Ulrich. “Trying to more obscure places, and that’s show control where things take keeping us from getting in there you and how people perceive it, and finishing a record. Hopefulit’s just a fucking lost cause. I ly, we can break even with this understand that people are taken and make it something that’s Metallica Through aback by the idea. I understand historical and unique and be- The Never will be that people get taken aback by released September 27, come kind of a cult classic.” some of the things we do. I underfrom Picturehouse That’s Trujillo’s goal as well stand that people get taken aback “I’m one of those guys back in the day that by the result of some of the things that we do. used to go see Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii at “But I just wish they would understand midnight at the local theater, the local movie that they always start in the most innocent house,” he notes. “Or The Song Remains the of places. I mean, what do they expect from Same, y’know, Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young us—the same record every two years? I think and Crazy Horse. So, for us to do something we made it known about 28 years ago that similar, I think it’s very exciting.” that was not us, y’know?”

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/music

Fully Exposed Maroon 5 ponder the darkness as they prepare a new batch of hits by Gary Graff

Maroon 5 weren’t exactly Overexp osed by their last

album—at least not compared to, say, 2002’s Songs About Jane. But it certainly logged a good run. The Adam Levine-fronted group’s fourth studio set went platinum and spawned three Top 10 hits, including the chart-topping “One More Night” and a team-up with Wiz Khalifa on “Payphone.”

“We’re very happy with the way everything went,” says guitarist James Valentine. “Starting with ‘Moves Like Jagger,’ which was really part of the record before [2010’s Hands All Over] and through this string of singles, it feels like this sort of second wave in the overall arc of our career. That’s been really exciting.”

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Maroon 5 will continue supporting Overexposed through the year while Levine is gearing up for his fourth season as a judge on NBC’s The Voice, but the group is already at work on their next album. Valentine says the set—which will see the return of keyboardist Jesse Carmichael after a sabbatical during the Overexposed cycle—is “still sort of in the early stages, but we definitely have a couple of amazing songs that will definitely be on the record.” That said, he’s hesitant to predict an overall direction he expects the album will take. “I thought I had a handle on that, but it kind of keeps changing,” Valentine says with a laugh. “There was a first batch of songs that seemed like they were darker and maybe a little more organicsounding, but now there’s some other songs that... well, it’s hard to describe. “But it’s going to be a while before the record comes out, so maybe some of the stuff we’re doing now will fall by the wayside by the time we actually put it out. But we’ve got some great stuff started, and we’re all very excited.”

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Disdain Sustain Superchunk hates planning ahead, discussing its legacy far more than music When you name your band’s latest record I

Hate Music, you’ve got to expect the question, as banal as it may be. The answer from Superchunk frontman/Merge Records mogul/father of two Mac McCaughan is, no, he doesn’t really despise the art form. It’s just that some of it makes him sleepy. “There’s such an abundance—a deluge, a glut—of music everywhere, and I don’t see that as an objectively bad or good thing, but it’s certainly a thing, and it’s kind of exhaust-

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ing,” McCaughan, 45, says from Merge’s Durham, N.C., office. “I listen to a lot of music. Much of it is music I choose to listen to, but then there’s music I check out because I’ve read about it or it’s super-popular or everyone is talking about it. Many times I hear it, and I’m like, ‘If this is what music is now, I don’t like it.’ And then I have to take a nap.” (And no, Replacements acolytes, the title has nothing to do with the Mats song of the same name, but rather the line “I hate music,

what is it worth?/Can’t bring anyone back to this earth” from the new LP’s jaunty second track, “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo.” But McCaughan, a Mats fan himself, is OK with anyone making the connection.) I Hate Music arrives relatively soon after 2010’s Majesty Shredding, which followed, sort of, 2001’s Here’s To Shutting Up. Somewhat burned out and definitely bummed out after Shutting Up’s desultory tour, Superchunk took an unofficial, near decade-long

photo by Jason Arthurs

hiatus as a full-time concern, while playing the occasional gig and issuing a tune here or there. After being pleased with how Majesty Shredding turned out (rightfully so) and enjoying the shows supporting it, McCaughan quickly began to write and demo material for another platter. Hoping to release the results this year, he convened his longtime cohorts—bassist/coMerge mogul/mother of one Laura Ballance, 45; drummer/Twitter star/denim enthusiast Jon Wurster, “46 years punk”; and guitarist/ part-time bookstore employee/onstage wine drinker Jim Wilbur, 46—when scheduling windows opened. Much of I Hate Music was tracked in short sessions spread out over six months, and McCaughan wrote “Overflows” and “What Can We Do,” the album’s bookends, after half of the LP was done. It may lack flat-out catchy hits like Majesty Shredding’s “Digging For Something” or “Learned To Surf” (though the careening “FOH” comes close), but I Hate Music is surely as good and may be even more consistent. Lyrically, McCaughan seems to be addressing themes of aging while rocking, domesticity, the joys of leisure

and, most of all, love—romantic and, yes, musical. Though the staunch liberal would probably rather vote Republican than discuss his words, he politely fields a chump’s analysis, even if he doesn’t agree with all of it. “It’s not so much, ‘Are we too old to rock?’ but more like what is the relationship to music, both ours and the music we grew up with, and trying to take nostalgia out of it, though not completely,” says McCaughan. “Our concessions to age these days—like I have a smaller amp partially so I don’t fuck up my back, which I had surgery on five years ago— aren’t really the kinds of things you want to write songs about.” “Staying Home” may be considered an exception. Probably the speediest, punkiest number in the Superchunk catalog, it’s about, as the title implies, not wanting to leave the house: “I’m staying home … I’m so old!” Evidently the band didn’t require oxygen breaks, even after multiple takes. “It took several passes, mainly because we were laughing so hard,” says Wurster from London on yet another stop on the seemingly unending Bob Mould Band tour. Adds Ballance, “We can play some damn hardcore when we want to.” When Superchunk hits the road behind I Hate Music, Ballance unfortunately will not be playing anything, as she’s sitting out the tour due to ongoing issues with hearing loss and ringing in her ears. (Wurster’s Bob Mould/Robert Pollard sidekick, Chicago Bulls fan Jason Narducy, 42, will ably fill in.) The problem, which she’s had for years, is now to the point of affecting her daily life—she has to avoid loud noises and make sure she can see people’s mouths when they’re speaking. Stepping aside pains her, but Ballance’s decision was ultimately easy. “When we were touring for Majesty Shredding, after a certain point I declared that I could no longer play at small clubs because the space was too small and the sound was too trapped,” she says. “I was hoping that if we played all big stages and outside that I would more easily be able to get out of the blast zone. Turns out, I was wrong about that, so I had to end it. I don’t want to be deaf. I want to be able to hear my daughter and my grandchildren, when and if that time comes.” It’s only natural to wonder, then, if Ballance will have to permanently leave the band. While she’s given the possibility some thought, she hopes to continue making Superchunk records. None of the other members would directly address the prospect of continuing to do so without her, but reticence isn’t the reason for the lack of answers—this trailblazing band merely avoids planning.

“It’s an old saying, but it’s true in most cases: ‘You’ll know more next month than you know this week.’ Why make plans if you don’t need to?” Wilbur says while making dinner at his Durham home. “The longevity of the band is due to our not ever having had unrealistic expectations—or, really, I guess, expectations. Life is short. Why do you want to give yourself ultimatums?” “We never made long-range plans, and I think that’s what has allowed us to keep going so long—that and there’s almost no chance of us ever getting dropped by our label,” says Wurster. “I don’t worry about (the future) because I honestly haven’t worried about Superchunk for the last 10 years. I love doing it when we do it, but when we aren’t doing it, I don’t think about it. We all have other things going on, and Superchunk is something nice to come back to every once in a while. If we don’t do anything again after this record, that’s OK.” So, let’s say I Hate Music is the last we hear from Superchunk. We can write the band’s story of indie-rock prominence and sonic excellence without much difficulty, but what do they think of their own importance, their legacy? Wilbur jokes, “I only hope people still want the reissues years from now,” but Wurster reiterates what he said in 2009’s Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records: “I think we’ll be remembered more for the way we did things than for our actual music. Superchunk’s made a lot of great music, but the fact that we basically did it ourselves most of the time, and that two founding members went on to form one of the most successful independent record labels of the last 25 years is what we’ll most be remembered for.” “I don’t find it terribly productive to sit back and think about legacy or the big picture,” says McCaughan. “And I think if you do, it may actually hinder whatever art you might be able to make if you’re just trying as much as possible to be in the moment.” But he does counter Wurster by saying, “I don’t mind being remembered for Merge as well, but I’d like to make records that people keep coming back to, and that people who weren’t born when we started can come to and still find something lasting there to listen to. We’re still trying to do that with each record—make an album that is someone’s favorite record even years later.” Ballance feels like this is already happening. “We don’t have a huge audience, but it keeps growing,” she says. “We have older fans and teenage fans. Some people are very emotional about Superchunk. We’ve gotten a lot of people through some rough times, from what they’ve told me. We have fans who found out about us from their parents. We have 10-yearold fans who found us on their own. It keeps on rolling.” —Matt Hickey

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The Player Retires

Wesley Stace has loved and lost both women and his stage name

It’s difficult to imagine anyone left on

the face of the planet (already familiar with the man’s work, that is) who isn’t aware that singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding and critically acclaimed novelist Wesley Stace are one and the same. Henceforth, he has announced that he will record under the name Wesley Stace, and hopefully never again be asked why he assumed the name of a 1967 Bob Dylan album, misspelling and all. “It’s like what happens at the end of a Spider-Man or a Batman movie,” says Stace. “When the superhero reveals his true identity to his girlfriend.” “Girlfriend” may be the operative word on Stace’s new album, Self-Titled (Yep Roc), in which a 47-year-old man, now comfortably married and living in Philadelphia, reflects back over the loves of his younger life. The first LP to appear under his birth name is a quiet, reflective session, produced by old San Francisco pal Chris Von Sneidern, cut mostly with a string quartet, piano, guitar,

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bass and drums. “Although some of my songs had autobiographical moments, I’ve never really done anything like this before,” says Stace. “I wanted the feeling of intimacy, with me whispering secrets, something like those old Colin Blunstone records I’ve always loved. I wanted to sing without having to strain, and these songs are very easy to sing, very few chords.” Stace has been asked, at various gatherings, to play some of his new material. “I’ve never been very comfortable doing that, just grabbing my guitar and digging in,” he says. “I really don’t think my songs go down in that kind of atmosphere.” He might change his mind if anyone ever requests a rendition of “We Will Always Have New York,” a rousing tale of a different girl in a different time. “We were both falling in love with each other and with New York at the same time,” says Stace. Add a familiar skim-coat of piano and Hammond organ, and it’s something Gary Brooker might have turned into a smash with Procol Harum.

“A Canterbury Kiss” reveals a tender moment with Stace and a young girl sitting in a park in England’s majestic cathedral city. “All I wanted to do was give her a kiss, and all she wanted to do was talk about Jimi Hendrix,” he laughs. A pair of songs from a recent collaboration with Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger (”When I Knew” and “Stare At The Sun”) are distilled by Stace into real break-up downers. “Eleanor’s versions of those two, from her new album, are much more upbeat,” he says. More dramatic than any of the encounters detailed on the new LP was one that Stace remembers as “a complete disaster,” something that was not memorialized in song. He was standing in the queue outside a Hastings cinema, he recalls, when a girl in a striking, aquamarine mohawk asked him for a cigarette. “I leaned over to give her a light,” he says. “And her entire mohawk caught on fire, and it spread like wildfire. Fortunately, she just laughed it off.” —Jud Cost

photo bY Ebet Roberts

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photo bY Zackery michael

Icicle Works Lovers and exes—their charms and their hexes—abound on Arctic Monkeys’ fifth LP Arctic Monkeys frontman and resident

tunesmith Alex Turner has never shied away from using the salvaged bits and pieces of his private life to inform the band’s growing catalogue of somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs. From texts sent to himself at o’dark thirty documenting the more absurd aspects of U.K. nightlife to spontaneous mix ‘n’ match four-track-cassette recordings, very little has escaped Turner’s ear for a well-turned phrase, marking him as one of the sharper observers of pop culture of the past decade. On AM (Domino), the quartet’s fifth LP since forming 11 years ago in Sheffield, Turner has managed to pull off a nifty trick: penning an entire record of heart-churning stories that aren’t exactly specific (there’s heartbreak, jealousy, giddiness and suspicion by the pound, but it isn’t always clear if Turner is writing about himself, some character, or just capturing the flotsam and jetsam of romance washing by in the slipstream), but nevertheless convey the hard-headed notion that love is kicking our collective asses. Hard. “It seems like it always does one way or another, dunnit?” Turner laughs in his inimitable northern accent from somewhere on the road in France. “You can wrap yourself up in knots about it. There’s songs on this one about love and the usual shit that we touch upon. But there’s also songs inspired by certain situations after midnight that you find yourself in sometimes—that moment in the night when the genie turns ’round and decides that he’s not gonna grant you three wishes after all, and you’re stuck in the corner with this icy twilight, sun comin’ up, the time when people get fucked up and earnest, really mean what they say, man. One tune (‘One For The Road’) compares the bottom of someone’s heart to the bottom of the league in football, where three teams are relegated every year. It’s become more of an internal battle, maybe.”

The inner emotional warfare Turner speaks of plays out over and over again on the band’s latest work, asking tough question after tough question (a quick scan of the album’s first three singles bears this out: “R U Mine?”, “Do I Wanna Know?”, “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?”) about the notions of fidelity, and coming up empty more often than not. “It’s about asking the question, ‘Are you mine?’ And the answer is obvious: No,” says Turner. “It’s not about getting cheated on or summat. It’s not as simple as that.” As it happens, AM (its title interpolated from the Velvet Underground complication VU) didn’t really begin as an album, per se. Arctic Monkeys have a lengthy history of off-cycle one-offs and EPs, and the LP’s first single (12 million YouTube views and counting) emerged as more of a stopgap than a centerpiece. “‘R U Mine?’ was a sort of go-between single kind of thing,” says Turner. “We’d been touring Suck It And See for a little more than a year by the time that came around. We said we could use some new material, a new tune to freshen things up. So, we recorded a couple of songs, and one of ’em was ‘R U Mine?’ And that turned out to be, in our opinion and seemingly everyone else’s, the best thing we’d done in ages. We went on to tour with Black Keys for the rest of the year, and when it came down to making a proper record, it was just, ‘Let’s make an album that surrounds “R U Mine?”’ That was the impetus for it.” As was the case with its predecessor, AM was recorded primarily in southern California with old hand James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco and producer of Arctic Monkeys’ last three records, as well as Turner’s crafty side project with Miles Kane, the Last Shadow Puppets) and relative newcomer Ross Orton (a drummer by trade whose production and songwriting work has included M.I.A., the Fall and Roots Manuva) behind the boards. The album leans in hard to its stylistic twists and turns, veering from slinky Chic-like funk to Black Sabbath scrunge over the course of a mere three minutes (“Arabella,” which could pass for Girl Talk, what with its “War Pigs” guitars and “Low Rider” funky bass), and then just as abruptly, takes a sharp left into the kind of falsetto vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on a Prince record (“I Want It All,” replete with a lyrical couplet pinched from the Glimmer Twins circa 1967) only to land on the darkly romantic square occupied by the likes of Richard Hawley (“No. 1 Party Anthem,” whose slow-dance sway is anything but). Featuring guest turns from Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas, ex-Coral guitarist Bill

Ryder-Jones and Queens Of The Stone Age homeboy Josh Homme (whose subtle contribution to “Knee Socks” provides one of the album’s sexier sonic moments), AM somehow manages to seamlessly distill the morning after the night before. “‘Knee Socks’ came from a bunch of songs about summers of love, summer flings,” says Turner. “I just wanted to write about a winter fling. An interesting area; the cold an’ that. Based upon something that may, or may not, have happened in me life. But that’s kind of beside the point.” For all its genre-mash sensibilities, AM is a far cry from pastiche. “It’s easy to dream up these schemes for albums, but actually executing it is much more of a delicate chemical reaction,” says Turner. “You keep borrowing these different elements from various corners of the musical universe: high vocals like some cosmic R&B, Jurassic-scale guitars, a bit of sea shanty. Then they react together. It’s like a chemistry set: too much of one thing in the wrong test tube and you don’t get the cold smoke you’re looking for. Our last record was written almost singer/songwriter style, with just me and an acoustic guitar, then applying to each tune the lyrics we felt were necessary. This time it’s a bit of a different thing: more sessions, lots of demos, almost created like jigsaw pieces to try to fit together later down the line. I think it’s the most original thing we’ve ever done. I’ve not heard this album before, by anybody. There’s something very 2013 about it. The way I’d put it is this: Ross can bang bones together and detonate shit, and James sort of does the rest. That relationship kind of works.” One might go so far as to suggest that it’s Arctic Monkeys’ “L.A. album,” given the fact that the Sheffield natives have been living there for more than a year (when they’re not existing out of suitcases) and that Turner has been linked to—and evidently cohabitating with—actress Arielle Vandenberg for longer still. But it’s hard to take the Sheffield out of the boy. “We can ride our motorbikes there year ’round, which is something we can’t do back in England,” says Turner. “There are certain things that are harder to adjust to, though. People in Los Angeles have a different perception of how long 15 minutes is. ‘Just down the street’ is a bit like that SNL skit ‘The Californians’— the extreme version of it. I thought people in New York loved giving directions, but people in L.A. top it. It’s rubbed off on me! Someone asks for something, I’m like, ‘Fuckin’ hell, you see Zankou Chicken, make a left there … ’” —Corey duBrowa

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Who They Are White Hills’ identity crisis ends on a Jim Jarmusch-approved stoner/psych odyssey Dave W. had a plan for how to get an au-

dience for White Hills: Get noticed in Europe first. After finding their footing overseas, they’d shift focus to the States. “It was definitely a very calculated move on my part based on what I was experiencing in New York at the time and trying to get something going,” says the band’s singer/guitarist. “People would just laugh at me and say I was a fool for wanting to start a space-rock band.” Krautrock-infused psychedelic sprawl of Hawkwind-ian proportions didn’t seem as foolish away from home, and W. says he found a receptive audience after first impressing Julian Cope, who released They’ve Got Blood Like We’ve Got Blood on his Fuck Off & Di imprint in 2006. “It’s just a whole different culture in what the music means, what art means and how people support those things,” says W. “I think America gets kind of lazy in a lot of ways about a lot of stuff.” Not that the band is uprooting anytime soon. While W. played every instrument on White Hills’ debut, he found a kindred spirit in bassist Ego Sensation, and that core duo has employed a revolving cast of musicians to fry the brains of anyone who’s let the slowburn riffs sear their ear holes. “I like working with different people,” W. says of the band’s ever-changing lineup. “I like to see what different people bring into it

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and how I react to that, and how that makes me shape the vision of what I’m looking for.” But if it doesn’t work out, W. isn’t sentimental. “Some don’t want to tour as much as we tour,” he says. “Sometimes I just got sick of how that person was playing and wanted something new and different.” Playing in bands before White Hills taught W. that there’s no democratic process in music—someone has to take control. “You really need someone who is in a way dictating, whether that be the musical direction or a business direction,” he says. “One of the reasons I’ve had the most success with this band is because I took the wheel from the beginning and have directed what it is and where it goes.” Put another way: “If other people are on board, great,” he says. “If not, you can leave. No one’s holding the knife to your throat.” With So You Are … So You’ll Be (the band’s fourth full-length in four years for Thrill Jockey), W. sees his foolishness getting more attention stateside: “I think that we’re a band that you love or you hate. I don’t necessarily think that the indie world has taken to what we do, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t people who are into indie music who are into us. I don’t think of us as a metal band, but we seem to be fairly well liked in metal circles. It’s basically rock music, but it’s weird, so it’ll

appeal to someone who’s into something a bit more on the fringe side.” That might explain White Hills’ appeal to filmmaker and fellow weirdo Jim Jarmusch, who asked the band to play an All Tomorrow’s Parties bill he curated in 2010. “At the time, we had no idea that he was a fan of our music,” says W. Next, the band was asked to perform for a scene in Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a love story involving a vampire who’s also an underground musician. But aside from increasing the band’s domestic profile, W. sees So You Are as a way to right the ship after what he thinks were missteps on last year’s Frying On This Rock. “I was focused on trying to make something that was really cohesive and embraced all the different elements that we’ve touched on through the years—really honing those elements in and making them strong, compact and powerful things,” he says. “I think I was getting close to it on (2011’s) H-p1. I think on Frying On This Rock, I kind of lost it, and I wanted to bring it back and hone it in even more.” Not that White Hills is offering any radiofriendly singles anytime soon: “It’s funny,” says W. “I say that I want this compact and tighter thing, but more compact and tighter for us is having songs that average eight minutes.” —Matt Sullivan

photo by ALAN HUNTER

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The Nonconformist Julia Holter tries to wed accessibility to avant garde on her newest concept album

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photo by LUKE GILFORD

High-minded concepts can stifle albums

by foregrounding their pretensions at the expense of the music itself. Witness the Decemberists’ The Hazards Of Love or countless prog-rock atrocities. Over the course of her three albums, Julia Holter has managed to sidestep that problem; in part by letting the concepts be jumping-off points, but not rigid structures; in part by paying as much attention to atmosphere as melody; in part by letting the narrative connections be just one of several layers to discover if a listener chooses to dig or think deeply. After releasing scattered songs on compilations, the Los Angeles composer with a degree in electronic music from CalArts debuted in 2011 with Tragedy, a song cycle based loosely on Euripedes’ play Hippolytus. The album opened with “Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art,” a staccato track that brought to mind both Laurie Anderson and Jane Siberry, and hinted at a credo for Holter’s brand of avant-garde music—she can talk of algorithms and isorhythms within compositions—with indie-rock underpinnings. It was full of layers of melody: Holter’s songs have as many passages of wordless coos and sighs as they do lyrics, and their beautiful, choral qualities call to mind the Cocteau Twins or Julianna Barwick. Ekstasis followed swiftly in 2012; she had worked on it simultaneously with Tragedy. The album title comes from the Greek word for ecstasy, as in a mystical, spiritual state in which introspection leads to transcendence. The songs explored ways of looking inward in order to move outside oneself, although often the most immediately striking things were the hook-filled melodies of tracks such as “In The Same Room.” After those seemingly highbrow sources, the concept behind Loud City Song (Domino) is surprising: It’s inspired, although not directly based on, the 1958 musical Gigi, the Vincente Minnelli film with songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Fredrick Loewe, which in turn was based on a 1944 novella by Colette. (A footnote: The movie soundtrack album appears on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma.) As Hippolytus was to Tragedy, Gigi is to Loud City Song. “When I was a little girl, I would sing the songs from the musical, so it’s really deeply embedded in my subconscious,” says Holter, whose grandmother introduced her to Gigi. “This character—it’s Hollywood, of course— she’s supposed to be this free-spirited individual, and it’s a coming-of-age thing. She’s being pushed into all these things her fam-

ily and society wants, which in this case is to become the mistress of rich men. It’s easy to work with a story like that because it’s so familiar, not specifically because you have to become the mistress of rich men, but that you have to conform to something that the world wants you to, and just deal with general alienation with society, and our society is very celebrity-focused.” The project began with a song she originally wrote for Ekstasis. “Maxim’s Two” is a percussive, orchestral track that’s Loud City Song’s most theatrical and noisy. With a conclusion that approaches free jazz, it makes full use of the band that Holter assembled for the record: trombone, saxophone, violin, drums and cello, in addition to Holter’s piano and electronics. It’s hard to imagine it fitting on the more introspective Ekstasis, which, like Tragedy, was primarily a solo recording. It’s more akin to a late-period Björk track, fearlessly mixing tempos and voices and dissonances. “It was like that from the beginning,” says Holter. “The world of that song is recreating a scene from the musical Gigi where she walks into a restaurant, Maxim’s, and everyone stops to talk about her. There’s a kind of voyeuristic audience thing, where people are watching her and talking about her. That to me had intriguing dynamics that I really hadn’t explored before. I was doing more introspective stuff, whereas this is kind of a social situation, kind of creating the characters of that situation. All the songs on this record explore these dynamics between the individual and society. The individual doesn’t understand the society and tries to escape it, or tries to work within it and still be an individual.” Loud City Song doesn’t adhere to a straightforward narrative, and only a few of the tracks have direct analogues in the film. Holter describes it more as an exploration of ideas, and songs sometimes present options. “Into The Green Wild” and “This Is A True Heart” are “sister songs,” for instance, although Holter says that was more important for her when she was composing than it is for the listener to focus on. “No one has to know this,” she says, adding that these concepts are mainly catalysts to her imaginative process. Lyrically, the songs are paired opposites. “They were two ways of dealing with alienation from society,” she says. “You could run away from society or you could embrace it and, despite the issues, try to have fun in it. Different paths taken.” “Into The Green Wild” rides a jazzy walking acoustic bass line behind talky vocals that are insistent and edgy: The arrangement gets

denser as it progresses, the strings veering into improvisational dissonances. “This Is A True Heart” balances a perky melody that Holter sings in her lovely high register with strings and a smooth sax solo that could be found on a Steely Dan album or Destroyer’s Kaputt. Most of the songs Holter wrote after finishing Ekstasis, but a lone cover comes from much earlier, and it was serendipity that it fits with Loud City Song’s themes. Holter grew up hearing Barbara Lewis’ 1963 doo-wop hit “Hello Stranger” from a compilation her mother owned, and she “just covered it one day randomly for fun, a long time ago,” she says. “The reason I used it on this record is that there’s a song in the musical Gigi called ‘I Remember It Well,’ and there’s this old guy and old woman, and they’re both remembering. It’s a reunion, and they haven’t spent time together since they had this fling many years ago. So, they’re recalling the past, and they’re doing it pretty badly. One of them can’t really remember it right; he says he remembers it well, even though he doesn’t, and it’s kind of a funny thing. So, basically, ‘Hello Stranger,’ the Barbara Lewis song, the lyrics are very vague and mysterious, and so is this other one, even though it’s in a comical way. I saw the connection there, and it seemed like a good excuse to put that cover there.” Holter removes the shoo-bop shoo-bops of the original, and slows the song down to an eerie crawl. Her version is soulful, wistful and whispery, more like a Laura Nyro tune, or maybe Antony And The Johnsons, and it shows some influence of folk singer Linda Perhacs, who Holter worked with for a time. Lest all this talk of Hollywood musicals and narrative connections seem heavy-handed or contrived, rest assured that Loud City Song doesn’t sound like musical theater or like songs in search of story. It’s ambitious, artful and eclectic—some songs lock into place with pop melodies while others drift into improvisation; some songs are gauzy and restrained, as if made for a concert recital hall, while others are percussive and extroverted enough for a rock festival. (And when Holter tours, she ends up in both those settings.) The songs reveal their depths gradually. They’re textural and layered, carefully crafted, but intuitive, and the album is all the better for not being strictly plotted. “I thought of each song as a very separate thing, so stylistically, I didn’t have a strong sense of what I was doing,” says Holter. “Musically, I really just trusted that it was all going to work.” Her trust was well-placed. —Steve Klinge

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Escape Artist With Surrounded, Richard Buckner looks to break free from a remarkable string of bad luck, disheartening misfortune and ominous weirdness Disclaimer number one: Richard Buckner is not a killer. But apparently the men in blue who patrol his hometown of Kingston, N.Y., weren’t so sure after they found a body near his home. “When the cops came to my door, they said, ‘Yeah, that road around the corner is a really popular place for dumping bodies.’ And I’m like, ‘Really?’” says Buckner. “I was brought down to the police station, and they asked me some questions. But that went away somehow.” Buckner has lived in a lot of places— among them San Francisco, Alberta, Atlanta and, most recently, Brooklyn’s gruff BedStuy neighborhood. But the way it’s coming across, the Hudson Valley hamlet he finds himself in now may be the most sinister place of them all. “This small town is somehow more dangerous than one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn,” says the willfully literate singer/songwriter, who attributes his latest relocation to his girlfriend, who took a job at a local sheep farm. “A bunch of stuff has happened to me here that hasn’t happened to me in large cities—my house getting robbed, the murders … Even my girlfriend is like, ‘Hehheh, you’re not serial killer, right?’ I move to upstate New York’s fuckin’ Mayberry R.F.D., and that’s when things go horribly wrong.” Perhaps his paranoia is justified. Shortly after the release of 2006’s Meadow, Buckner was swept along in a cascading tumult of unfortunate events. First came a score for a film

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that never came to be—and he may not see the publishing rights to the music he wrote for years. “It’s the nature of the game,” says Buckner. “You’re hanging out with jackals.” Still focused, he started work on Meadow’s follow-up, only to have his tape machine implode. Then a laptop storing all his mixes was pinched. Largely by necessity, Buckner wound up playing most of the instruments himself on the powerfully elegiac Our Blood, which was finally released in 2011. As with Our Blood, Buckner originally had a full-band studio album in mind for the new Surrounded (Merge), but this time he was thwarted by budgetary constraints. So, he pumped out demos fairly rapidly at home, then handed them over to Grammy-nominated producer Tucker Martine for finishing. “It’s not the record I wanted to make, but it’s the record I made,” Buckner deadpans. Surrounded’s thematic springboard is an aborted series of short stories—prose that’s as artfully impenetrable as it is sparsely poetic. With five movements expressed over nine tracks, the quizzically impressionistic themes appear to be rooted in the search for life’s answers while beating back the numbing repetition and self-imposed melodramas of daily life. The CD’s liner notes offer the full text, which Buckner picked over for the songs’ lyrics. But given his penchant for evasiveness, you’re unlikely to come any closer to solving the puzzle by reading them. Disclaimer number two: Richard Buckner

has never been treated for narcolepsy. But he’s convinced that has own voice puts him to sleep. “I can’t listen to any of my albums after they’re made, unless I have to learn a song for a tour,” says Buckner. “It’s a painful experience.” There is a certain somnolent quality that informs both Our Blood and Surrounded. But these are lullabies for the jaded and spiritually undermined—soothing sonic panaceas laced with loneliness, detachment and dread. “About a month ago, I put on Surrounded, and it was weird—I didn’t hate it,” says Buckner. “Usually, by then I’m, like, vomiting when I hear it.” Buckner continues to traverse much of the same unnerving emotional real estate covered as far back as his revelatory late-’90s releases, Devotion + Doubt and Since, only now he’s further inter-

photo by RICHARD A. SMITH

nalized his angst—and the results are poignant, if not exactly revelatory. “There was turning point where I started getting more home-recording equipment, and I started being able to work on more ideas alone before I went into the studio with them,” says Buckner. “It’s really allowed me to go deeper inside my own brain cage.” For Surrounded’s basic tracks, Buckner stoked his imagination with a few unfamiliar tools: an electronic autoharp and an Electro-Harmonix POG2 guitar pedal. “You only have so many tricks,” he says. “So, you really have to try and move on to new things.” Disclaimer number three: Richard Buckner’s cat does not have a thing for speaker wire. When Buckner received the test pressing for Surrounded on vinyl, he convinced himself he had to listen to it one more time. “I said, ‘Do it, man. Get brave.’ So, I went over to my turntable, put it on, put my chair down right in front of the

speakers, got my coffee and … no sound,” he says. “We got this new feral cat about a year ago, and his specialty is chewing on electrical cords—but not speaker wire. He only goes for the cords that are hardwired into the most expensive equipment you have.” Buckner has been spending a lot of time with his cats of late. After all, it sure beats the alternative. “Surrounded is how I’ve felt lately,” he says. “Something weird happens every time I leave the house in this small town.” It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that Buckner is uneasy when too many things go right. “When I was making the record,” he says, “the songs were coming out easily and the machines weren’t breaking down, and I was thinking, ‘Uh-oh. This is going really smoothly—maybe I’ve worn off my voodoo?’” Then, as he was making some final tweaks before sending the tracks to get mixed, there was a knock on the door. “It was a cop,” says Buckner. “He says, ‘Yeah, two doors down, there was a murder last night.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ Really? Every time I finish a record there’s gonna be a murder and a cop at my house? Man, I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve been a real dick before in my life. I’ve done shit I’m ashamed of. Maybe I deserved this … But I’m not a murderer.” — Hobart Rowland

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The Future Of What Is Now Unwound gets the well-deserved deluxe reissue treatment—just don’t expect a reunion Some of you will say, “Damn! It’s been

11 years. It’s about time!” The collectors amongst you—like Blonde Redhead vocalist/guitarist Kazu Makino and Young Widows guitarist/vocalist Evan Patterson—will be thankful, because, as they respectively relate to MAGNET, “All my Unwound albums are so overplayed, wrecked and misplaced—I really need this,” and, “Here I am, on July 4 at 2:52 a.m., wishing that 13 years ago I bought the double LP rather than the double CD.” A few of you might even be like, “Who?” The occasion of this faux-cliffhanger is the Numero Group’s forthcoming four-box reissue of Unwound’s recorded history, including all seven albums backed up by a variety of chronologically ordered odds and ends. “The LPs are essentially being broken up into eras and released in boxes that represent them,” says drummer Sara Lund, relating the news that’ll have equal numbers of you excitedly jumping out of seats as remaining seated, mired in a combination of ennui and confusion. “This was primarily the brainchild of the folks at Numero,” she says. “The first one (Kid Is Gone) is everything that was recorded with the original drummer, Brandt Sandeno. Although he was only a part of Unwound for about a year, basically three albums of material was written and recorded. After that comes the first albums I was on, Fake Train and New Plastic Ideas, with a third LP of extras ... and so on and so forth until we’ve covered the whole catalogue. Each box will contain at least one album’s worth of extra material, be it seven-inches, comp tracks, demos, unreleased or live material. And each set will include very extensive liner notes covering the era represented by the recordings. By the end, there will essentially have been a book written about us. And yes, there will be photos. Have you ever seen Numero Group records? Those guys go all-out. We are getting the full Numero treatment.” Formed in 1991 in western Washington, Unwound not only broke ground and barriers with its amalgamation of punk, noise rock, indie and D.C. hardcore, all loosely basted together with barbed wire and thick-gauge fishing line (“Unwound was strange,” says Helms Alee guitarist Ben Verellen. “Despite being a completely unique and bizarre sum of its parts, it seems like it appealed to a wide faction of the underground music world. Weird to

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think I had Unwound’s angular, melodic, punktinged records cherished right alongside my Undertow and Sick Of It All albums”), but the band maintained a hard-line philosophy of playing all-ages shows. Unwound graced christening releases for Kill Rock Stars, Gravity and Troubleman United, and, in Lund, inadvertently bridged part of the ’90s battle of the sexes via her exhibition of prodigious skill and hard-as-fuck-ness. Ask her about the time she played a show the same night a van door was slammed shut and locked on her hand. “The first time we saw Unwound was at a club in L.A., when they were soundchecking,” gushes Blonde Redhead’s Makino. “I remember not understanding it, yet I knew it was something to die for. Also, they seemed so knowing and experienced; the way they played, the way they talked and the way they drank all seemed completely unique and different from anything I knew. Rarely do you hear music that is so beyond you that you have no idea how it works. It takes you like a storm, you surrender to it, and you have different beliefs after that. It’s only happened to me a couple of times. This was one of them.” Historically, Unwound has been loosely tagged as screamo. There might have been some accuracy to that description some 20-plus years ago, when screamo meant something completely different than it does now, but beyond nomenclature and tags, the trio possessed a broad appeal. There were people attracted to its irreverent angularity, its adventurous songwriting and steadfast independence. The band tantalized musical factions from the hardest of the hardcore to the most in-touch-with-his-sensitivity alt/ indie whiner with bold, dynamic soft/loud excursions. Unwound provided a welcoming home for listeners of all stripes. With music’s cyclical nature and the internet’s ability to offer an additional 15 minutes of fame and staying power to those willing to grasp it, Lund, guitarist/vocalist Justin Trosper and bassist Vern Rumsey have, like many long-dissolved outfits, found people from across generational boards taking notice of their blood, sweat, tears and beers. “I started realizing it only a few years ago when, living in Portland, I would walk into coffee shops where 20-something baristas would be listening to Unwound,” says Lund. “I still don’t have a handle on how far or wide we stretch. I feel like half the people I meet have

either heard of us and assume I’m a wealthy rock star, and the other half have never heard of us and are like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m in a band, too!’ Who isn’t?” “I guess one thing that was both positive and negative was how fiercely independent we were,” says Trosper. “We took cues from the SST and Dischord playbook and did it to death. We usually made decisions based on principle and not finances, which isn’t always a good idea. But I really have no regrets, as I consider myself a pretty success-

ful 20-something; not very many people have lived the life I did then—or since, for that matter. I had a conversation with a professor when I went back to school that expressed some lack of confidence in what I was doing at the time. He was like, ‘Dude, you traveled the world in a van and played punk rock for a decade— that’s way more rewarding than an academic career. You are doing just fine.’ I’m stoked for everything going on now even though it is a happy/sad bittersweet kind of deal.” The occasion is also bittersweet for old fans looking to rekindle their relationship with the band’s energetic live show, as well as recent converted looking to experience Unwound for

the first time, as there are no plans for reunion shows, tours or records. Everyone is busy with their own thing (Lund with Hungry Ghost, Trosper with Survival Knife and Lumsey with various bands, studio work and parenthood). The trio is willing to take a celebratory look back, but not pick up where anything was left off. “This is about the legacy, not reunions,” Lund curtly states. “I figured/hoped at some point we would have some sort of narrative someday based on the volume of work we did,” says Trosper. “After all, we had a relatively long history for a punk band. This was, and is, the idea with the archive site (www.unwoundarchive.com).

The Numero thing was not expected, and it is rad, I must say. I think what I understand better now is that when you make music, it takes on a life of its own and ultimately outlives you, especially if you have the opportunity to do something like this. I’m proud of what we did, but there was a feeling of not really being done. Now I know we can put this thing to bed. I kind of thought I would be living in a fishing village at age 67 and someone from Mojo would track me down for a half-page blurb on the origins of screamo or something. Now I’m pretty sure I will at least be playing at the cafe in the fishing village and a maybe a festival here and there until I croak!” —Kevin Stewart-Panko

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on the record

A Conversation With

David Lynch

i t ’ s n o t a s i f f i l m m a k e r dav i d ly n c h hadn’t made his mark in sound and

melody before 2011’s Crazy Clown Time. Since 1977’s Eraserhead, Lynch has composed music and sonically designed much of his work, including the staging of Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Brokenhearted, co-composed with Angelo Badalamenti (his primary inspiration). He’s recorded solo soundscapes and collaborated with John Neff (2001’s BlueBob), Marek Zebrowski (2008’s Polish Night Music) and Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse (2010’s Dark Night Of The Soul). Yet with the airy, spooky Crazy Clown Time and his new dirty-blues album, The Big Dream (Sunday Best), Lynch has found himself with as much product in the music bins (or something like that) as he has cinematic sales racks. Lynch was also the most amazing part of Louie, Louis C.K.’s dark comic series on FX, and his fingerprints are spread across projects ranging from club design and directing videos for Nine Inch Nails, to saving the world through Transcendental Meditation (TM). —A.D. Amorosi

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What interested you about designing that Paris nightclub, Silencio? I know its basis is Mulholland Drive, but I have a funny feeling you’ll contradict that. You’re right. It has nothing to do with Mulholland Drive other than the name. I got involved because I love designing: furniture, sets, you name it. They offered, and I jumped at the chance. And I have been in there since I did the work, several times. They got the best craftsmen and did a beautiful job. Do you enjoy going to clubs? No. I hate going to clubs. I like to stay home and work. But, when I was at the club, it had a very good feeling.

photo by Dean Hurley

There’s one aspect of your foundation for consciousness-based education and peace that I wasn’t aware of: its dedication toward at-risk populations. What do you know about TM’s relaxing anxiety levels when it comes to HIV and AIDS patients? TM is an ancient mental technique, brought back for this time by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that allows any human being to dive within and experience the unbounded eternal level of life; oceans of pure consciousness, creativity, intelligence, love, happiness, energy and peace open up. Whenever someone experiences that, and transcends in that, life gets better. Anxiety is part of negativity. Negativity starts lifting when you get more of that beautiful consciousness expanding in yourself. Those who are suffering most seem to feel relief quickly once they do this. It transforms their lives. I doubt that you read your critics, but there was a lot of unbridled love given over to the last album, Crazy Clown Time. Surprised? It’s such a beautiful thing. I’ve said this before, but Angelo Badalamenti brought me into this world of music. I love this world. I entered it in a weird way, through sound effects for film, so I’m not a musician. I was so happy that people appreciated what Big Dean Hurley and I did together. It’s not Katy Perry, but people seem to like it.

of the previous effort? It is tighter. It is, to me, a definitive step above. The record holds together as one unit. There are a lot of effects on your vocals on Dream. Going into the jamming/writing process, were you hearing your effects-driven voice and lyrics as part of the whole? Did you hear the echo through the gallop of “Star Dream Girl,” “Last Call” or “Wishing Well”? I’m hearing the effect in my head, absolutely, 100 percent, as we’re writing What would be the circumstance where you would want to sing these things straight, or at least unadorned by effects? One great example: “The Line, It Curves.” It’s almost done dry. Almost. That’s pretty adorned, too. If I had to sing these songs out on a stage, I think I’d rather shoot myself. I guess what it is, too, is that “The Line, It Curves” is the most naked of songs in terms of its emotional outcome. The voice, for me, is like any other instrument. You have to get it just-so to make it fit within the arrangement, the concept of the song, the track. A lot of songs that I hear, the voices are really good, but they don’t fit in with the music. The music and the voice feel too separate. I think what you’re hearing is that we really successfully married the voice to the track.

Dern, Naomi Watts—you seem more generous with female collaborators in your work. Why? It depends on the ideas that come along. It’s true that I haven’t been working with so many guys who want to come in and sing, but there’s just something about these women. The fondness for that spacey girl-group sound you and Badalamenti used with Julee Cruise comes through on “Cold Wind Blowing.” What was the attraction to that sound? It could be a country song, played in bars. It also has a ’50s feel; I love the ’50s and the whole birth-of-rock-‘n’-roll period. Julee Cruise had all that, but she also had that angelic thing. She would do six tracks, perfect overdubs, to her voice and that became like cellophane angels. Set that sound upon a ’50s feel, and you’ve got something. Speaking of characters, who is “Hollis Brown” to you, and what does he look like? Whoa. He’s unfortunately a beaten-down guy from the Dust Bowl. He looks like one of those black-and-white photos of the pre-Depression era in my mind. He’s got not a whole lot going on, save for a little shack house and his hardtack ground outside.

“Say It” and “Are You Sure”—the lyrics seem to have a message of peace about them, your message, via TM. I was surprised. “Are You Sure” could have a cosmic-love feel. “Say It,” though, is a little more specific than it is universal. The guy in that song wants his girl to tell him that she loves him so that he won’t be with so many other girls.

There is a line that Dylan uses in that song to describe financial circumstance: “There’s so little money that his children can’t even smile.” I don’t want to stretch his thought here, but can you equate his lack of cash for his children with the lack of cash that the film industry has for independent filmmakers? The film industry, you’re right—it’s going through huge changes, and the Hollywood blockbusters are ruling the world. Alternative cinema is having a very difficult time.

Is there an intentional uplifting arc to the record? You end it on such a positive note. The sequencing was very important, and you work until a thing feels correct. That sequence felt good.

Laura Dern mentioned to the Los Angeles Times back in January that she and you were coming along with a new film project, your first in a minute. Still true? No. I think she was drunk during that interview.

… pops? Yes.

Who is the lowered octave voice on “Sun Can’t Be Seen Anymore”? It doesn’t sound like your voice at all. It’s me, but that’s a character who came through because of the manipulation of the voice. Characters can get born, and when it does, the character comes out singing in a certain way, it’s very beautiful. It put me into a Southern thing, like bringing a kid from Memphis to sing up in Hollywood. And my son Riley plays lead guitar on the track.

What attracted you to Louis C.K. and the role of a talk-show troubleshooter? Louis offered me the role, and I did not want to do it. The reason I did it was that he wrote me two or three really beautiful letters—this guy can write—and I was so impressed that I gave in. I will leave my house, learn all of these lines, fly across the country, stay in a hotel and do this. I’m really glad that I did.

This record is busier and more cluttered than the last one, less open and ethereal. Is that noise geared toward the lyric or the melody, or is it a reaction to the sparseness

Chrysta Bell, Lykke Li, Karen O: You’ve worked with these female singers on your albums. With your willingness to create multidimensional roles for women—Laura

Whether or not you consider yourself a musician, you’re getting closer. Was there a different division of labor between you and Big Dean on The Big Dream? I say that about not being a musician because there are truly great musicians out there. I have immense respect for them. I love to be in their world as much as I can. I might be singing more on this record than I did the last one. Most of the songs start with a jam, and we build from that. Is it fair to say Big Dean is responsible for the grit, the guitars, and that you tend to most everything else? Or are all lines blurred? We blur them, I think. The grit of the electric guitar is truly one of the most exciting elements to me. We also love the idea of the blues and taking off in our own directions with that. Once you find something in a jam, more ideas comes to finesse it. I think it’s a process. A lot of times, Dean will play on top of something and bring out another incredible element. It is an experiment of action and reaction until the whole thing just….

Your albums are released closer together than your films ever were. Do you see this continuing, that you’ll continue to make music somewhat quickly? Oh, yes. It will continue. Not necessarily on any type of timetable, but we’ll do them.

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Flare For The Dramatic

Psychedelic dreams come true for the Bowie superfans in Capsula

Martin Guevara and Coni Duchess, the

singing and songwriting duo that fronts psychedelic Argentinian power trio Capsula, have been listening to the music of David Bowie as long as they can remember. “I learned English listening to rock songs,” says Duchess. “I didn’t know what they were saying, but the energy and the power of the music made me want to be a rock ‘n’ roll musician.” It was their mutual love of Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop that first brought them together, as a couple and as bandleaders. The music from that trio of icons still informs their sound, a dark mix of hard rock, glam, blues and psychedelia that stands proud with one foot in the past and one in the future. Capsula has distilled those influences down to a fine essence on its latest album, Solar Secrets (Krian), a set produced by Bowie henchman Tony Visconti. “I always imagined that Tony Visconti would produce an album of ours some day,” says Guevara. “Actually working with him on

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Solar Secrets was like living a dream. We did pre-production on the songs at his studio in New York and hung out with him. We got know him as a person, not just a super-professional record guy. By the time we started to record the album, we were friends. He encouraged us to experiment and try new things on our arrangements.” Visconti brought along the 1968 Fender bass he played on the sessions for Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World. Duchess fell in love with its sound and used it on most of the tracks on Solar Secrets. They recorded the album in six days at Saint Claire Recording Company in Kentucky, setting up in a huge room that allowed the band—Guevara (guitar, vocals), Duchess (bass, vocals) and Ignacio Villarejo (drums)—to play together in real time. “The most important thing for us is what we do in a live show,” says Guevara. “Tony captured that ‘onstage’ sound. The reference vocals were done while we played together, just like on a live album.”

Most of the lead vocals made it onto the album, some fattened up by multiple layers of overdubs. “Sometimes the vocals are upfront, but some are treated and distorted so they sound like another guitar,” says Guevara. “Martin likes to sing,” says Duchess. “I like adding textures and odd harmonies to give the songs a surreal, dreamlike quality.” At the band’s first meeting with Visconti, Capsula played him its latest album, a reinvention of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. The group was nervous about doing so, but Visconti liked its louder, harder take on the music. He was especially complimentary of the way Guevara was able to recreate the album’s orchestrations on a single guitar. “He loves feedback, and so do I,” says Guevara. “He showed me how to get different tones and effects on electric and acoustic guitars,” says Duchess. “He taught us some interesting recording techniques, but we’re not going to give away any of his secrets.” —j. poet

photo by inigo de amescua

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The Writer

Amanda Shires’ haunted new album represents a bold step in her young career

Say what you will about Nashville’s sim-

plicity—its tear-in-my-beer tropes, its buxom, golden-haired darlings—but do so conservatively: There is always more going on in Music City than meets the eye. Amanda Shires powerfully embodies this maxim of life in Tennessee’s capital city. She’s just given a presentation on James Joyce at Sewanee when I reach her on the phone, so naturally I assume it’s a bad time, that she’d rather wind down. Instead, with what I recognize in hindsight as characteristic charm, Shires assures me that I’m wrong before we spend an hour covering: her fine new record, Down Fell The Doves (Lightning Rod); her transition from Texas-reared, fiddle-wielding side player to one of Nashville’s most arresting songwriters; the power of Wu-Tang Clan; her new marriage to ex-Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell; and the philosophical qualities of birds, which show up frequently in her work. “Birds have the mastery of the ground and the air, something that we don’t have,” she says. “They can wonder around on the plane that we’re on, but they also have the gift of being able to ascend everything.” Shires, who was raised in Lubbock and Mineral Wells, speaks freely and excitedly in a West Texas lilt, and navigates the poetry of Philip Larkin and Method Man freestyles with similar aplomb. (We didn’t chat about the freestyles; Shires literally spit rhymes over the phone.) However, her conversational style belies the demure, focused, affected voice we hear on Down Fell The Doves, a record—her fourth, though she doesn’t count her mostly instrumental debut—featuring the literature and poetry student’s most poignant songwriting yet. Recorded in Athens, Ga., with Andy LeMaster (Bright Eyes, R.E.M.), Shires’ new effort is haunted and austere, and it pricks you from the start. Indeed, opener “Look Like A Bird” establishes two things immediately. First, that, entering the studio, Shires had a clear vision for how the record’s reverb-rich production should match the ghosts of her vivid stories. Second, that she was ready to explore the love lost and grief experienced since releasing Carrying Lightning, Shires’ breakout effort, which landed her on NPR, the cover of Texas Monthly and the stage of the Grand Ole

photo By eRICA sHIRES

Opry two years ago. “I’m not a dark person, but I’m definitely drawn to it,” she says. “What’s that Townes Van Zandt line? ‘You either play the blues or “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”’ I’m never one of those ‘Zip-ADee-Doo-Dah’ people ... The record is a little dark, but life is like that.” Shires doesn’t despair ad infinitum. Amid moving portraits of heartbreak and suicide, she also points to the light of new romance and endearingly fantasizes about taking Leonard Cohen out for a drink. (Shires has two Cohen tattoos.) Even the record’s bleaker moments are all part of the “ruining and rebuilding,” she says. “It takes a while to write a song—to organize your thoughts,” she says. “Or, if you’re going through something, to have the eyes to look back, to be able to write about it or talk about it or decide if it’s worthy or not.” Shires has learned how to edit herself, in other words—to tell her story and those of her characters with greater impact. And the people and images that stuck with her in between records, those “worthy” of exploring, are given a gripping and laser-sharp focus on Down Fell The Doves. She may’ve made her name as a side player for the likes of Justin Townes Earle, Todd Snider and Jason Isbell, but now she’s doing all the talking. —Ryan Burleson

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Rainbow Bright

Eclectic, daring popster Rainbow Chan hurls the kitchen sink from her closet

Taking a break from tracking her debut

album, Rainbow Chan traveled to Iceland, where she played her first overseas shows, sampled field recordings, befriended Björk’s personal harp-maker and tasted a delicacy called hákarl (rotten shark). Returning to Sydney after a stopover in Hong Kong, where she’d lived as a girl, she scrapped the 15 songs she’d already recorded and wrote a new one, “Skinny Dipping,” about the wildest thing she’d ever done. “I was getting a bit sick of myself, so I went back to my roots in pop music,” says Chan, who’d released 120 copies of a handmade, four-song EP the previous year. “‘Skinny Dipping’ completely changed the game for me, because it sounded so far removed from everything else I’d written. I wanted to not be so singer/songwriter-ish, so experimental. To write something different, something about youth and life, something upbeat. I wanted to use the sounds of my childhood, when I had this really old-school, imitation Casio keyboard and preset beats. I wanted to recreate that sound using samples to create my own loops, following that vein of classic pop songwriting, but doing it in a twisted, left-field kind of way.” The chirpy little keyboard that launches “Skinny Dipping” sounds like moonlight, with a sky full of stars twinkling on Cronulla Beach, then builds into a delicately multilayered, spritely poptronic party, as Chan celebrates a friend’s 21st birthday, dancing in the water and wondering “where those boys and girls have gone/fading with the waves on the shore.” It’s as sweet as summer gets, the centerpiece of Long Vacation (Silo Arts), a sixsong EP filled with the sounds that have been bouncing around her head for years: glockenspiels and music boxes, Frédéric Chopin and Steve Reich, girl groups and electronica, Hong Kong pop, Shanghai jazz, American rhythm ‘n’ blues and Japanese television theme songs. Once the new direction arrived, the rest of Long Vacation was easy, recorded solo inside Chan’s closet over a six-month period that began in fall 2012. “It’s very DIY, very genuine, very intimate, literally done in a cupboard among the clothes and shoes,” says Chan, who performs solo with a handful of instruments and a Roland sampler. “Whenever I felt I was ready, or whenever I got the inspiration, I just did it then. I was so fresh, the songs came together really quickly, and I spent most of the time deconstructing them afterwards,

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taking away layers, refining, revising and reshaping the sounds the way I wanted them.” Classically trained in piano, saxophone and voice, Chan moved to Sydney at six years old, growing up in the suburbs, studying Mandarin on the weekends and listening to mix tapes compiled by her grandmother in Hong Kong. Those tapes, segueing from Del Shannon to Chinese folk songs to Skeeter Davis, are still the sounds that drive her, and after years of composing pieces about heartbreak, she’s tickled to write about the everyday epiphanies of getting a new haircut listening to pillow talk or swimming after midnight. “I love the immediacy of pop,” says Chan, who next plans to start a pop band with her sister, focusing on ’60s Japanese rock ‘n’ roll. “I’m a sucker for really nice melodies and harmonies, and I’ve gotten to the stage where I have to be honest and true, to go back into myself and write pieces from within. At first, I was a bit unsure, asking myself, ‘Is that a little too cheesy, too corny?’ But I decided that’s OK if it’s too cheesy, too corny. Because that’s me.” —Kenny Berkowitz

photo By Nicholas Shearer

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Bachelor Party Promised Land Sound vows to do Nashville garage/country proud

“Oh, dude, they’re both huge!”

It’s high noon on the first day of summer, and MAGNET is in a Nashville parking lot eating tacos with Promised Land Sound when guitarist/vocalist Sean Thompson calls attention to the roid-raging brohams at the gas pumps. This is the neighborhood where Thompson grew up, where the band first coalesced, and nobody—not Thompson, nor brothers Joey (bass) and Evan Scala (drums)—is surprised to see tempers flare and spill into our conversation. This is a band steeped in the weirdness of Music City, and it shines through on the rambling, jangling garage/country of its self-titled debut album on the Paradise Of Bachelors label. “We never said we were going to start this band,” says Thompson. “It was just a series of loose jams that turned into really good things.” Formed a little more than a year ago, Promised Land Sound is an outlier in the Nashville underground. More rugged than their Americana peers, more country than the house-show punks the band members cut

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their teeth with—Joey Scala and Thompson were both members of Saddle Creek band Pujol—the Sound made an instantaneous impact and conjured the sort of immediate buzz that hadn’t been seen since the Alabama Shakes first hit town. Within months of their live debut, they were cutting a single for Jack White’s Third Man Records and preparing to record with their “spiritual guides,” William Tyler (Hiss Golden Messenger) and Jem Cohen (Ettes). The resulting recordings are some of the most visceral to emerge from Music City in recent memory. Their debut is a dusty, drawling, half-drunk exercise in soul-driven country-stomp, drenched in humidity and fuzz. The sonic cues evoke Link Wray (his early instrumental work and ’70s backwoods funk) and Doug Sahm (the early freakbeat of Sir Douglas Quintet and laid-back Southern grooves of His Band) while managing to sound more like contemporaries than acolytes. The members of Promised Land Sound aren’t just fans of these legends, but fellow travelers, riders on

the same long forgotten highways and back country roads. As they prepare for their record release, they have recognized their own restlessness, and are also wary of falling into the traps of their forefathers. “An important thing is not road-doggin’ it too hard, ’cause we don’t want to burn ourselves out on the material,” says Evan Scala. “Being home is good for writing. We don’t want to just write songs about being on the road.” “There’s a time and a place for that, though,” says Joey Scala. “Trucker songs, man.” As the band laughs at the prospect of selling its albums exclusively at truck stops, it becomes clear that the pathos and warmth of Promised Land Sound is not a facade. That these young men understand the music—the power and the pitfalls—so readily and naturally is a bit amazing. While most of their peers in Music City make calculated careerist moves that have little to do with actual music, PLS is just sauntering along brightening the future with loose jams and dusty grooves. —Sean L. Maloney

photo by Alysse Gafkjen

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Sugar Rush

Cute is not necessarily what upstart pop duo Mean Lady aims for

Mean Lady’s path to its first album starts

as a very Web 2.0 music-business story. The young Delaware duo of Katie Dill and Sam Noble posts quirky, charming songs on Bandcamp for pay-as-you-like, and some people do pay. A college-age music blogger in Chicago pays attention and starts spreading the word. Blogger becomes A&R guy for a small label. Band pitches album to label, but label owner decides he’d rather manage Dill and Noble and pitch them to larger labels. He books them to perform at New York’s CMJ Music Marathon, and then Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records (home to rural blues artists as well as a vibrant roster of young bands like Youth Lagoon and Smith Westerns) signs them. Love Now mixes bouncy, singsong melodies and eclectic samples, simple acoustic guitars and jolly pianos, handclap beats and reggae rhythms, and youthful optimism and wistful longings. It’s a little twee and a lot charming. Bands like the Bird & The Bee, the Avalanches or, more obscurely, Kitty Craft come to mind, but none of them has a singer like Dill, whose

clear voice sounds both effortless and controlled; like Jenny Lewis, she can be intimate and expansive. Although the songs use lots of samples, Noble avoids employing anything recognizable, or anything that would create copyright issues. “I find them from super-old recordings or field recordings from all over the world,” he says. “I work to find little snippets that are small enough to take and adapt into our music.” “It kind of feels like science after a while,” says Dill, “like we’re in a lab trying to make a concoction. It’s very fun and refreshing.” There’s nothing mean-sounding about Mean Lady. The band name comes from a song with a chorus that’s a little playground chant: “Mean Lady” is the response to “Why D’ya Haftabee Sucha.” Dill says the name is, in part, a pun. “What we’re sort of aiming for is more of a pop sound, sort of like something comparable to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry,” she says. “We also really like She & Him, so we thought you could say ‘Me And Lady,’ as in Sam and

me. The little jingle that turned into the song originated from a dog named Lady that was kind of misbehaving.” “Jingle” is a good word to describe many of Mean Lady’s melodies. In weaker hands, these songs could be cloying, annoying earworms or overly cute. “A lot of that depends on lyrics, the cute part,” says Dill. “So, I guess I might be to blame for some of the cuteness. You know, I think about pop music and some of the kids on my swim team. I was a lifeguard and a swim coach for five or six years, and that was a big part of my life. We couldn’t play any songs at the pool that had any cuss words on them, so it was a little limiting. Sometimes these really young girls, like five or six years old, would come up to you and sing Pussycat Dolls lyrics. I think there’s a lot of too-adult things in pop music, and the audience for pop music really is five-year-old girls—and us. So, I always thought it would be nice to have something more innocent, but you can still say things you want to say in a creative way.” —Steve Klinge

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Five Finger Discount Two new Five Finger Death Punch albums double down on the heavy stuff by Gary Graff 28

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hanks to a “perfect storm,” Five Finger Death Punch wound up with not one but two new albums this year. ¶ The Wrong Side of Heaven and the Righteous Side of Hell, Volume 1 came out this summer, while the group was in the midst of this year’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival tour, and debuted at a career-high No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Rock Albums chart. Even better for fans, a second volume is coming November 9.

The Wrong Side of Heaven and the Righteous Side of Hell, Volume 1 is available now from Prospect Park

“We’re really a well-oiled machine, so to speak,” says guitarist Zoltan Bathory, the Hungarian-born guitarist and former member of U.P.O., who co-founded FFDP in 2005. “We travel with a portable studio, so this time we already had a jump start. Even though we didn’t write full songs, there were some skeletons of songs already when we got into the studio. “Everybody was just in a mindset of, ‘Let’s do this shit!’ We just started to pound out song after song and things were getting better and better. Before we knew it, we had 20-something songs, all of them great. We were looking at a body of material that was like, ‘You know what? This is the best shit

we ever wrote.’” It was so good, in fact, that Bathory and his bandmates—frontman Ivan Moody, guitarist Jason Hook, bassist Chris Kael and drummer Jeremy Spencer—didn’t want to put any in the vaults. They initially proposed a double album, but when their record company balked, FFDP called the bluff. “We said, ‘OK, we’ll send you the 24 songs and you pick what’s good,’” Bathory recalls with a laugh. “They called back a week or so later: ‘OK, we see your point. You can have your two records.’ “The compromise was two separate volumes, not unlike what fellow headbangers Stone Sour had recently done with their House of Gold & Bones releases. “When it comes down to it, 24 songs is a lot of material to give the fans to digest,” the guitarist acknowledges. “I personally take about two or three months to digest a new record. So, we decided to stagger the [releases] so that people get to spend some time with the first record before they get to the second one.” But, as Bathory promises, the second volume is not in any way comprised of secondtier material. “To tell you the truth, some of my favorite songs are actually on the second volume,” he explains. “It was very important that if you give someone record one and record two, they can’t decide which one is better. That was kind of the goal when we were putting these together.” The second volume will also feature an as-

sortment of famous friends joining FFDP, just as on the first volume. “Lift Me Up” with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, was a No. 1 rock hit for several weeks’ running, while Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed, Max Cavalera of Soulfly, Maria Brink of In This Moment and rapper Tech N9ne appear on other tracks—the latter on a remake of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” “It was an afterthought; we didn’t come into the studio thinking, ‘Hey, let’s do this collaboration record,’” Bathory says. “We had so much fun with [Halford], and it was so cool, it was like, ‘Let’s do a couple more,’ and we started reaching out to friends and it was just a fun process. It wasn’t like we needed them as a crutch or something, or a gimmick, but once we got this itch we were ready to scratch it, and it really worked out well.” And, Bathory adds, fans can expect to hear more of the sonic and stylistic experiments that mark The Wrong Side of Heaven’s first volume, which he says is the result of having the latitude to create so much material. “It’s nice; in 24 songs we can afford to go six, even eight songs into some sort of place where we can experiment and do things on the edge,” Bathory explains. “If we had only 11 [songs] on one record, then we would have to stick to our guns and our core sound much more. But doing the two records, we could venture away from that a little bit and do some new things, and hopefully people will like it.”

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story by eric waggoner • photos by shervin lainez

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk? She does.

But “luck” isn’t quite the word, and Kathleen Hanna went way beyond punk years ago. Here’s the how and the why of the Julie Ruin’s Run Fast.

used to happen to her with some regularity. She’d be

out in the world doing something mundane and ordinary, like grocery shopping. And suddenly some asshole would be up in her face, yelling—actually yelling—that she was a shitty singer, or conceited, or a man-hater, or otherwise somehow personally repellant to this random loudmouth, who’d decided to get belligerent with her in public for no reason. This was Olympia, Wash., in the early 1990s. Kathleen Hanna—the woman who’d given Kurt Cobain the phrase “smells like teen spirit” when she scribbled it on his wall after a long night’s debauch, the woman who’d later be seen mugging it up marvelously in Sonic Youth’s “Bull In The Heather” video—didn’t consider herself a singer at all. What she was, as the front-mouth for feminist punks Bikini Kill, was a kind of champion performance artist, working out her articulation of sociopolitical ideas in a hardcorepunk context. It was Kathy Acker, one of the great American experimental writers of the 20th century and an icon of queer art and activism, who first told Hanna she ought to start a band instead

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of write poetry. But that context, bizarrely, was what brought these kinds of public shitstorms down on Hanna for speaking her mind in the first place. For a musical movement that openly fetishized the romantic notion of artists railing against the status quo, misogyny always was hardcore punk’s big blind spot. And macho punks not only didn’t understand subtlety, they didn’t get their own irony even when whacked over the head with it every time Bikini Kill performed. When Hanna, bassist Kathi Wilcox, drummer Tobi Vail and guitarist Billy Karren stepped up not only to enact the feminist revolution, but to give it a loud, danceable soundtrack, the backlash was vicious and personal. All this is a story that’s been told multiple

times over the past 20-plus years—most recently and capably in The Punk Singer, director Sini Anderson’s excellent documentary about Hanna that emerged from this year’s festival circuit a darling of both Sundance and SXSW. And anyway, Hanna’s not that kid anymore. The woman she is today is a little older, a lot tougher and leagues more savvy. And even if she’s kept her immediately recognizable voice, a voice that keens and growls and sails and wails on each song as it needs to, Hanna’s earned the kind of long-view critical awareness that only comes to artists with a long enough timeline. Hanna realizes that at least part of the story of the Julie Ruin is going to focus on that long-view. But having made peace with her past, she’s most interested in talking about the present. “Here’s a 40-year-old woman who’s mainly known for doing stuff in the ’90s,” she says, “but I can’t worry about that. I don’t want to go on a revival tour. I have to make the kind of stuff I want to make, and hang out with the people I want to hang out with. And when you’re working with people who you also really respect … ” Hanna trails off for a second, sounding at a loss for words. But when she comes back, she comes back twice as loud: “How awesome is that?!”

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was the title of Hanna’s pseudonymous 1997 solo album, produced during a break from Bikini Kill, and recorded more or less on her own, in her apartment, on DIY equipment. Now frustratingly out of print, Julie Ruin is the kind of LP that a singular artist produces when cut free from the influence of the studio and label system. It’s filled with small technical fuck-ups, erratic performances and slightly off notes, but it also careens confidently in several stylistic directions at once, as if the jittery guitars and drum machines are Hanna’s medium for exploring every feel, every style she can. Her voice, by turns jubilant and furious, is usually low in the mix, making for a muted but still arresting collection. “I’m kind of a control jerk,” says Hanna. “It had gotten to the point where there was so much

ulie Ruin”

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hatred directed towards Bikini Kill. I thought, I can’t deal with this anymore, but I still want to be creative.” The Julie Ruin project gave Hanna a space wherein she could experiment with making music, and learn about the process of making music, using what amounted to a character persona. (“Pre-dating Beyoncé and Clint Black,” she adds cheekily.) At the time, Hanna had begun dating the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz—they married in 2006—and she’d become deeply interested in the possibilities of sampling and hip-hop aesthetics. As a result, as much as Julie Ruin is a hodgepodge of sounds and approaches, it also documents a young musician’s first attempts to put her own vision down on the tracks, in as distilled a form as possible. Following the album’s release, the plan was to

get a band together to learn the songs and take them on the road. But early formulations of that project went in another direction entirely, namely Le Tigre, Hanna’s sample-inspired “new-new-wave” trio, which released three impressive albums between 1999 and 2004. Le Tigre took off, touring and releasing records under that name, and “Julie Ruin” as both a sobriquet and an approach fell by the wayside. “People sometimes tell me now how much they love that solo album,” she says. “And I think, ‘Yeah, you and four other people.’” After Le Tigre, Hanna found a sidelong career speaking at colleges and universities on her experiences in the music business, and what it means to be a third-wave feminist and a working musician in an era where we often tell ourselves we’re post-anything-complex-or-

“I’d rather be honest and have people say I’m an asshole than not say anything. The stuff that I’m most embarrassed about in my music is the stuff that sounds totally flawless.” —Kathleen Hanna uncomfortable. Here, in an academic setting, Hanna was reminded once again of the electrical jolt of direct self-expression, and how badly most audiences want to feel it. “People don’t want me to stand up and just give statistics on sexism at those lectures,” she says. “When I started off doing that, you could hear the snores. I eventually realized those places could get anyone else to come speak, you know? They could get lots of women to come and talk about music. But they asked me—they want me to be myself, to talk the way I talk. People don’t want to hear me trying to be what I might think they want me to be, some imitation of some screwed-up person. People want to hear personal stories. That’s what hooks them into the stuff that’s really important to you, the things you really want to share.” So, in 2010, when Hanna began thinking about revisiting the Julie Ruin project, she went to people she trusted, people she’d shared the important stuff with before. Three years later, now that the Julie Ruin has dropped Run Fast (TJR) and will follow up with a support tour, Hanna is surrounded by musicians from both her venerable past and her grown-up present. Indeed, as she said: How awesome is that?

athleen tricked me into the Julie Ruin,” laughs Kenny Mellman. “She’s very good at things like that.” Actually, the story goes, Hanna first approached Mellman, an accomplished keyboard player and one-half of indescribably delightful drag-club act Kiki And Herb, about writing music to sell to Nashville song factories. Mellman reports this as if a feminist punk and a gay cabaret pianist had a mortal prayer of cracking that market in the first place; but as it turned out, Hanna soon expressed doubt about that original idea, and suggested that Mellman simply join her new act instead. Drummer Carmine Covelli, who’d worked as a video tech for Le Tigre’s live tours between 2004 and 2006, was recruited for the Julie Ruin at Hanna’s birthday party. “I’d worked on the video synch for the live shows,” says Covelli. “I’d also helped put together the live DVD (2011’s outstanding Who Took The Bomp?: Le Tigre On Tour). And she comes up to me at the party and says, ‘Hey, I’m putting this band together, and I wanted to know if you wanted to play drums?’ Um, yeah. I loved Kathleen; I never got to see Bikini Kill live, but I loved those records. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone screech that high. And it wasn’t just a screech—

it was guttural. You knew she wasn’t playing around, but yet there was a kind of playfulness to it. Those are the things that stick with you for a long time. I thought she was an amazing force. And slightly terrifying.” As in the days following the initial release, the goal for the Julie Ruin reboot was to learn the album catalog as a band, and then go on tour. The first part went as planned. But then Hanna dropped another piece of information, rather nonchalantly: She’d asked former Bikini Kill bandmate Wilcox whether she’d be interested in joining, once Wilcox finished her planned move from D.C. to New York. By the time the full fivepiece had assembled in one place, the Julie Ruin’s practice sessions had morphed into sporadic freeform writing sessions. Hanna would come in with a set of verses, other members would come in with melodies, music would generate in the space with Hanna vocalizing notes, and gradually the Julie Ruin built an album’s worth of new material. “So after Kathi shows up, there we all are,” says Covelli. “I come out of a hardcore/metal background, there’s Kathi, there’s Kenny on cabaret piano, and there’s Sara (Landau, of the Brooklyn Guitar & Drum Studio For Women And Girls, whom Hanna had met while mentoring at the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls program) who plays this really high-end, surfguitar style. And I thought, ‘What the hell is this going to sound like?’” What Run Fast sounds like is exactly what Covelli is describing: a dizzying amalgam of influences connected to very little that’s happening in pop music currently. Aesthetically, the record bears little resemblance to its namesake predecessor except in Hanna’s keen interest in avoiding genre pigeonholing. Drag-show lounge punk? Cabaret surf? All of that, maybe. Or, maybe, forget it: The Julie Ruin’s inaugural album is a strange arrangement that goes in no other direction than the one marked by its members’ primary strengths. It’s the sound of five people Hanna collected primarily because she loves what they do, and what they do is so strikingly different from one another. “Maybe that’s the genius behind Kathleen’s gathering all of us together,” says Covelli. “‘I’ll put all of these people I love together in a room and see what happens.’ Which is a great way to approach art in general, and a really interesting way to approach music.” There are touchstones, of course: traces of Devo’s goofy mid-period keyboard workouts on “Ha Ha Ha” or the fuzz-crusted raw pop of lead-

off single “Oh Come On” or Mellman’s streetpreacher oration on “South Coast Plaza” (a vocal he recorded in bed, as a demo, for someone else to sing, but which Hanna demanded they use for album inclusion). Though it whipsaws between raucous workouts and more controlled performances, like the arresting “Just My Kind,” the consistency inheres in the way Run Fast serves as both an overview of Hanna’s careerlong stylistic obsessions and a testament to her faith in her collaborators. “I wanted just to be in a room with these people,” she says. “It was great to not know where we were going. It was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. There’d be days where I’d come in and say, ‘OK, I have this idea, but I don’t know where it goes from here.’ And Kenny would listen and say, ‘Oh. It goes here.’ So, thank god I’m not the only person who has to make the decision; I have these four other people in the band who are really good at it. Sometimes I wanted to go back and rerecord a vocal one more time, and someone would say, ‘No, no, it’s fucked up, it’s great, you have to leave it!’ “I mean, I know how to do 20 takes, and how to hear whether or not something’s going in a good direction, you know? But sometimes I get really lost in the weeds. Even now. It’s like for the film (The Punk Singer): I watch the Bikini Kill stuff, and I’m like, ‘That’s what I sound like? I sound like a squirrel.’ I didn’t even feel particularly physically energetic at the time. Today I still feel divorced from that kind of energy, in a way, but I feel very much into it when I’m performing. I watch footage, or hear the records, and I think, ‘Wow, I can sing? At all? That’s amazing.’ Outside of the moment, it feels so separate from me. It’s like watching someone else.” She laughs and wonders aloud whether this all sounds a little schizophrenic. But the idea of leaving your daily self to enter the creative space is an old one—one that actually sounds riskier, on balance, than the sort of directly focused energy you expend in your flaming youth, mostly because you’ve got a body full of electricity and nowhere much to put it. On a long enough timeline, what might seem like a loss in intensity turns out to be a gain in stamina and self-awareness, and a different sort of intensity altogether, one that allows you to forgive yourself for fucking up as long as you’re following your own lights. “OK,” she says, “that’s good. I like that. Anyway, I’d rather be honest and have people say I’m an asshole than not say anything. The stuff that I’m most embarrassed about in my music is the stuff that sounds totally flawless.” N

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Eight Miles

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High

In The Land Down Under In the last year, Tame Impala auteur Kevin Parker has gone from trippy bedroom lonerist to beloved global psych savant. NEEDLE journeys to the Land of Oz to press an ear up to his inner speaker. story by jonathan valania | photos by tungsten

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evin parker, the one-man-band psych/rock wunderkind

who records under the name Tame Impala, lives across the street from a professional magician (and sword swallower) in a quaint cul-de-sac of houses ringed with lemon trees in Fremantle, a charming seaside town of 25,000 in Western Australia. He shares a granny flat with Melody Prochet, his beautiful and cool French girlfriend, who is the singer/songwriter behind Melodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Echo Chamber, which is also cool and beautiful and French.

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His possessions are few: a navy blue hooded peacoat with toggle buttons, a drum kit and a collection of vintage oscilloscopes. His favorite band is Supertramp. He knows this bothers a lot of people. He doesn’t care. “I think he lives on another planet sometimes,” Prochet muses, sitting on the porch in the slim shade of a lemon tree. “I really think that 97 percent of the time he’s thinking about music and sound and creating new kinds of sounds and new kinds of ways of making music. He’s completely

obsessed with it. He’s dedicating his whole life to that.” Parker has been all over the world many times, and lived for a spell in Paris, but he’s decided to come back home—for a while at least. The city’s molasses pace and Lilliputian scale suits him. Staying here is the path of least resistance, and the 27-year-old Parker is, by his own admission, a lazy man. Despite its brief history as a British penal colony in the early part of the 19th century, Fremantle is better-known in certain circles as the town where Bon Scott grew up. Until he choked to death on his own vomit in 1980 after an epic night of binge drinking, Scott was the original singer of AC/DC, which, in the ensuing 33 years has set the standard for rock ‘n’ roll badassery. There is an appropriately cheesy statue erected in his honor in Esplanade Park, Fremantle’s de facto main square, that portrays the legendarily leather-lunged singer standing atop a guitar amplifier, screaming into a microphone, decked out in his trademark sleeveless denim jacket. Parker is resetting the aesthetic standards of what constitutes a statue-worthy local boy who grew up to become a famous musician. Sonically speaking, Tame Impala is as far away from AC/ DC as Australia is from Jupiter. Plus, Parker is tall enough that they won’t have to perch him on a speaker when they make his statue. All he has to do is die. Fremantle, like Australia itself, is far away from just about everything. It was a 35-hour Homeric odyssey, spanning 11,000 miles, three oceans and 12 time zones to get here from Philadelphia. Everything about Australia seems the exact opposite of pretty much everywhere else. For starters, it’s a summery 70 degrees right now, even though it’s the dead of winter here. Everyone is very nice and without exception white— barring the aborigines, who are largely invisible and (like Native Americans) have been herded into remote and desolate reservations, almost completely decimated by alcoholism. There are no discernible signs of poverty, no homeless, no ghettos. Nick Cave songs are found in tourism ads instead of hipster iPods. News of the demise of the newspaper industry has not yet arrived on these shores. The Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian, which is sort of the right-tilting USA

Today of the land down under, was a whopping 133 pages on a recent Wednesday. The Progressive Insurance ad gal is named Kitty instead of Flo, and speaks with an Aussie accent, but same beehive hairdo and white uniform. Contrary to the TV ads in the states, Foster’s is not “Australian for beer, mate.” In Australia, like pretty much everywhere else, they just call it “beer.” The only real downside I could see is that it’s really, really fucking expensive. At the Norfolk Hotel in Fremantle, where Parker asked me to meet him tonight, a pint of cheap domestic beer will set you back a princely $12, a pack of cigarettes costs $18 (and is emblazoned with horrendous pictures of mouth cancer and shriveled fetuses). A personal pizza—the cheapest thing on the menu—is $24. Parker apologizes for the inflationary cost of living in his hometown. He blames it on the thriving mining industry—coal, gold, diamonds, iron, copper and uranium that’s sent to places like China, Iran and Iraq via an endless parade of massive freighters on the horizon. “It’s a rich place; Fremantle is a really expensive city, and that’s why a lot of young people leave,” he says. “Especially for bummy musos, it’s strangling. I kind of just grit though it because I’m really lazy. It’s the mining. There’s so much money in the mining industry. I did it for a while. It was part of my university degree. People make $100,000 a year just for holding a stop sign.” Not that he’s been here much as of late. Thanks to the constant touring Tame Impala has done in the wake of the still-swelling success of Lonerism, released 11 months ago, this is only the second full week he’s been home in 2013. Next month Parker and his live band—guitarist Dominic Simper, keyboardist Jay Watson, bassist Cam Avery and drummer Julien Barbagallo—will return to the U.S., for the 10th time this year, to co-headline an East Coast tour with the Flaming Lips. It should be noted here that the first album Parker ever bought with his own money was the soundtrack to 1995’s Batman Forever, which features the Flaming Lips. Parker was 11 years old. Not that the Lips made much of an impact at the time. It wasn’t until five years ago, when Parker saw the Lips perform—in all their mirror-ball/confetti/bubble-walking, psychotropic, brain-melting glory (in Japan, on acid no less)—

“This sounds very selfish and egotistical, but I’m thinking about music so much that to actually put on someone else’s music would mean that I’m out of ideas; it would mean I don’t have anything to think about.” NEEDLE

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that he became a disciple of the Okie space cadets. “I wasn’t really much of a fan,” says Parker. “But then they all come onstage through a giant, pulsating vagina. Then Wayne comes out in his big, inflatable bubble. I was like, ‘What the fuck!’ Then they burst into ‘Race For The Prize,’ and it was the most amazing live-music experience of my life. Halfway through the set, I was like, ‘This is insane!’ During ‘Do You Realize,’ I turned around and saw 60,000 Japanese people crying. I was like, ‘This is too much!’” The next time Parker saw them play, he was onstage with them, dressed up like a gecko and dancing merrily along with all the others in gecko and Santa Claus costumes. It takes a lot for new bands to get on Parker’s radar these days; he rarely listens to other people’s music. Though he describes himself as a huge My Bloody Valentine fan, and even saw the reactivated band perform twice in recent months, he has yet to listen to its new album the world has been waiting to hear for, like, 22 years. Likewise, he hasn’t heard more than the first 10 seconds of the Kanye West/Tame Impala mashup (“Black Skinhead”/“Elephant”) that surfaced back in July. “This sounds very selfish and egotistical, but I’m thinking about music so much that to actually put on someone else’s music would mean that I’m out of ideas; it would mean I don’t have anything to think about,” he says. “I always have something to think about, so it’s kind of just background noise. If we’re driving somewhere and no one’s put on the radio, I’ll probably think of a melody just in that car trip. I’ll be building it up and trying to think of a bass line to go with it. If someone puts on the radio, I’ll lose it and it’ll be gone forever. It happens almost every day.” For as long as Parker can remember, he’s made up a new song every day. “I try to make rough demo as quick as I can,” he says. “If it’s strong enough, I’ll remember it anyway. If I forget it, I figure it was probably pretty forgettable. I have a Dictaphone with like 200 ideas on it. The problem is that when I think of them, they’re so vivid in my mind; I’ve been doing it for so many years that I’m good at imagining what a song would sound like. I can almost hear it. If I try to pick up a guitar and write a song, it’s going to be terrible because my hands are doing the thinking. My hands are doing the writing and my hands aren’t as good as my brain. It’s not as original because it’s just muscles (doing the creating).” The constant touring has taken its toll on Parker’s songwriting, or the lack of it, in the past year. There are currently zero songs in the can for a new album. When Innerspeaker came out in 2010, he was already writing and recording songs for the next album. He’s not even sure he wants to make another LP. The ideas still come every day, but Parker has limited access to recording gear or the time and space it takes him to gestate new material. “I’m very rarely around a drum kit and very rarely 40

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around the instruments that I need,” he says. “I just have my laptop or my Dictaphone, so the best thing I could do on tour is tap out the melody on the keyboard of my laptop, which is even worse because then it turns into this tacky laptop/keyboard melody.” He doesn’t want to burden his bandmates on the road with the painstaking task of working out new songs during soundcheck. Besides, there’s only three people who write Tame Impala songs beginning to end: me, myself and I. “I love the idea of collaborating,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing making music together, but it doesn’t work as well as making music on your own, with 100 percent creative freedom. I guess it’s just because

“Back in the day when we’d play gigs, it was more about us. We weren’t the kind of guys who went out to clubs, so playing a gig was a night out for us.” I grew up that way. If I was a lot more open about my creativity when I was younger, I probably would have learned to communicate my ideas to other people and maybe would have started thinking my ideas are strong enough for people to care about sooner. That came very late in my life. It was only a couple years ago. Until then, I thought that it wasn’t worth anyone else’s time.” The world would beg to differ.

he next day, parker picks me up at my hotel in a borrowed car. His own ride, a 1987 Holden Astra, was towed and cubed while Parker was away on tour. Probably all for the best. You had to hold the passenger side door shut when you went around curves or it would fly open and expel occupants and other contents. Parker is taking me on a tour of places around Fremantle that figure prominently in the Tame Impala narrative. He pops Liquid Swords, the iconic 1995 solo album from Wu-Tang Clansman GZA, in the CD player—triggering the death of God knows how many new Tame Impala songs that might have

been born on this day—turns up the volume, and we’re off. “My brother was a massive Wu-Tang fan,” he says. “I used to always hear it rumbling from his bedroom. I would listen to anything my brothers listened to.” It occurs to me that Tame Impala is kind of the psych/rock Wu-Tang Clan. Avery has the Growl, his howling Waits-ian blues thing. Watson is in Pond, which just released its fifth album, Hobo Rocket. (Think early Pink Floyd on cheap biker meth.) Both Avery and Parker play drums for Pond in the studio. And Parker constantly invents new bands that do one-off shows for special occasions, like Kevin Spacy, a disco/ funk band he put together with Avery for a recent benefit for a longtime Perth scenester who had her car stolen. Or Relation Longue Distance, with Barbagallo, which debuted at Silencio, David Lynch’s club in Paris. Or Space Lime Peacock, his now- defunct psychedelic/funk band that lasted one gig and one recording session. Our first stop is Mojos, a lovably dingy, stickyfloored live-music-venue-cum-watering-hole bedecked with eye-popping psychedelic murals and the sickly scent of spilled beer fermenting into something harder in the midday heat. It was here that Parker would rock out with Mink Mussel Creek, a shambling, perpetually under-rehearsed space-rock collective of drinking/drug buddies, and the Dee Dee Dums, a blues/psych trio heavily influenced by Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age and other stateside stoner-rockers from the deserts of the American west that proved so influential to Parker and his pals at the time. “I couldn’t tell you how many gigs we’ve done here,” says Parker as we trundle through the club. “Usually someone had a car and we’d fill it up to the top with all our gear in there, and then squeeze in wherever we could find a few inches. We’d usually get a six-pack of Melbourne Bitter for the ride, and we’d just get as pissed as we could and play a gig. That’s the thing—back in the day when we’d play gigs, it was more about us. It was more like an outing for us. We weren’t the kind of guys who went out to clubs, so playing a gig was a night out for us. The fact that we were playing a gig was like a side feature. This was more with Mink Mussel Creek, which was by far the loosest of our bands because we didn’t even know who was going to be playing that night. It used to be called the Electric Blue Acid Dogs before I joined. They then changed the name because they played this community thing and they couldn’t have ‘Acid’ in the name. So, anyway, we’d play a gig and get drunk and then smoke spliffs out the front. And then we’d go skinny-dipping (in the ocean).” Next stop: said ocean. As we tool along the coast, the sun glittering like diamonds on the infinite expanse of the Indian Ocean, Parker ejects Liquid Swords and pops in the first Queens Of The Stone Age album. Talk turns to the stoner-rock scene of the early ’90s and its purported impact

on Parker and his musician pals. “It was a phase,” he says. “To be honest, I was never super into Kyuss. I remember I was playing this stoner blues riff music, and someone said, “Hey, by the sound of your music, you’d like Kyuss.” Someone said I must like Kyuss, and I was like, “No,” and he was like, “Oh, well, you sound like them.” But I was into Queens Of The Stone Age. They were, by far, a bigger influence on me. I actually met Josh Homme for the first time the other day.” NEEDLE: Where at?

Parker: At a festival in Europe. They were headlining. Belgium? No. I couldn’t tell you where we were. Actually, I didn’t realize how surreal it was when I met Josh Homme the other day. NEEDLE: How did it go?

Parker: Good. NEEDLE: Was he aware of Tame Impala?

Parker: I don’t know. I think so. He didn’t tell me that he liked us. He’s one of those guys where they’ve become so iconic in the alternative world that they’re in character all the time. It was slightly disappointing, but at the same time it was cool for me because I got to experience it. He always makes sure that people get the Josh Homme experience. NEEDLE: Which is what?

Parker: Which is extremely witty and funny. He’s a super funny guy, but he doesn’t listen. It’s the same kind of thing as Wayne Coyne. When you’re in their presence, it’s about them. NEEDLE: Yeah, Wayne has the gift of gab.

Parker: Yeah. Whether there’s a camera on or not. Josh Homme was like that. They like to feed the machine, and I guess it helps to not become a boring artist. Whenever I get close to weaving a story, I just say, “What the fuck am I doing?” and pull back.

just bite them?

Parker: Ken Crew got his leg bitten off, and then he bled to death on the beach. Some people, all they found are their swimsuit. Some people have never been seen again. There were like three last summer. I still go swimming, but I don’t go out as far as I used to. My whole philosophy is: If you’re going to get eaten, you’re going to get eaten. It’s difficult to keep your imagination at bay when you dive under the water. My mind just creates a picture of a massive fucking shark. They had helicopters coming over every five minutes to spot them. Sometimes you hear a siren and everyone gets out. It only happened once when I was down here. Everyone fucking barrels out.

evin parker was borne of a transcontinental pedigree some 27 years ago. His father, who passed away in 2008 from skin cancer, was born in Zimbabwe. His mother is from South Africa. He was conceived in Bahrain, but born in Australia, where his parents had emigrated in the pursuit of better economic prospects. “I have a brother,” says Parker. “My whole family is a bit complicated because there are lots of divorces and I have a lot of half-brothers and halfsisters and pretend brothers and sisters. I have one full blood brother and I have a half-brother, a half-sister, a pretend sister.” NEEDLE: What’s a pretend sister?

Parker: Well, my dad went away to war and his wife cheated on him while he was gone and she had a baby, but he thought it was his kid, and when she was 11, they found out it wasn’t my dad’s kid, but they kept on pretending it was. NEEDLE: What war are you talking about?

Parker: It was some guerilla war in Africa. NEEDLE: Who did he fight for?

We pull up to Cottesloe Beach. Parker grew up nearby, and he’s been swimming there ever since. At the edge of the sand, there’s a large bronzeand-stone memorial to one Kenneth James Crew, who was killed by a shark here in 2000. “Yeah, a lot of people were taken by sharks,” says Parker. “Last summer I think three people were taken.” NEEDLE: What do you mean “taken”?

Parker: Eaten. There are some horror stories. Someone just got munched diagonally across their body. My brother went out with the daughter of a guy who got eaten. This beach I literally grew up on. People still swim there, but they’re paranoid. It’s my favorite beach in the world. NEEDLE: Do the sharks actually eat people or

Parker: I think he fought for the government. Parker’s parents split when he was three or four years old, and for most of his childhood he lived with his father, who studied accounting and went on to have a lucrative career as the chief financial officer of various mining companies. We’re back in the car and heading toward the house where Parker grew up. “We’re in a pretty rich area, truth be told,” says Parker, as we tool past a long string of sleek and stylish multi-million-dollar oceanfront homes. ”My dad had a load of money—well, more money than my mom. He liked to live according to how much money he had. That’s right there, the purple one.” Parker points to a plum-tinted, onefloor, ranch-style house. This trip back in time triggers some painful, long-buried memories.

Parker: There was this weird thing that happened with my mom and my dad when I was about 15. They decided to get back together after about 12 years of being divorced and remarried. They barely spoke in 12 years. So, one day my mom just asked my dad if he wanted to get back together, and he said yes, so they ditched their respective husbands and wives and got back together as a family. It was a super intense time for me. NEEDLE: Wouldn’t having your divorced parents reuniting be like a dream come true for most kids?

Parker: I couldn’t get into it. I never knew what it was like for them to be together. They split up when I was so young. I’d never known them to be two humans that even talked to each other. It was so weird for me and my brother to call them “mom” and “dad.” We never said “mom” and “dad” in our lives because it’s usually mom and Tony or dad and Rhonda. So, they got back together, and it lasted about a month and fell to shit. Then they hated each other even more than they ever did. NEEDLE: What about their remarries? Did they take them back?

Parker: They did. I think we had said some things to (my stepmother) and our relationship had gone to shit as well. So, me and my brother went to live with my mom, but she really couldn’t afford to have us. So, we ended up living in this shed by mom’s house. My sister was living in mom’s house and there was no room for us, so we had to live in the shed. I couldn’t even go inside ... um, I’m not going to talk about that. It was the worst year of my life. We pull up on a wooded hill overlooking the sprawling campus of the middle/high school that Parker attended. “There’s actually a mental institution right across the road,” says Parker, pointing off in the distance at a warren of grimlooking buildings. Some are walled off and have bars on the windows. “It’s called Graylands. My stepbrother went there, actually. He’s paranoid schizophrenic from weed and acid and crystal meth. Actually, my stepmother blames the drugs, but I think it would have happened anyway. He started acting more and more peculiar and slipping into these super violent rages. His mom was the one person he took all his anger out on. He started kicking down doors and going mental, and then it became apparent that he was falling down a mental chasm. My brother was locked up in the Smith Ward, which is apparently the worst. It was really sad, the transition between him being a fun-loving, rebellious, pot-smoking teenager to a mental institute. I saw the whole thing.” Next stop: Troy Terrace, the boho flophouse where Parker lived commune-style with a revolving cast of musicians, artists and assorted ne’erNEEDLE

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do-wells—many of them members of Mink Mussel Creek, which was, by this point, morphing into Pond. Supporting himself by manning the cash register at a nearby liquor store, Parker lived here because his father told him he couldn’t live at home if he wasn’t going to college. The reason he stopped going to college—where he majored in astronomy, still a passion—is that he got a phone call one day while he walking across campus to take a test he was woefully unprepared for. The phone call was from Modular Records, which is sort of the Sub Pop/Matador/Merge of Australia, asking if he’d like to record an album for them. Yes, of course, he said. Electing to blow off the test, he turned on his heels and walked home. Kevin Parker was officially a college dropout. It was amidst the dope-fueled creativity and chaos at Troy Terrace that he wrote all the songs for Innerspeaker. They grew pot plants in the back garden and would jam on the roof Beatles-style, which is somewhat hard to believe given that the house is smack-dab in the middle of a row of respectable-looking homes with respectablelooking people who one can’t imagine cottoned to marijuana patches and stoned longhairs kicking out the jams—and maybe a few shingles as well—on their ceiling. “In those days, we were so absorbed in what we were doing,” says Parker. “The idea of the world going on around us was just this foreign and irrelevant cycle of life. We’d be up until dawn, and get up whenever or just stay awake forever and grow weed plants and make music. There’s this 24-hour shop that sold all sorts of munchies food, so we’d get super blazed and it’d be an absolute fucking journey, when in reality it was 200 meters away. We’d see people walking by in suit and ties and we’d be like, ‘Oh, it must be a weekday.’” Modular wanted to fly Parker to America hook him up with a name producer. Parker wanted to record the album by himself in his bedroom. A number of high-profile names were floated: Dave Sitek (TV On The Radio), Chris Goss (the Steve Albini of stoner rock), Dave Sardy (Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, Oasis). “I just didn’t want to do that,” says Parker. “These guys are all such big names that their rep would overshadow the album, which just seemed wrong.” A compromise was struck: Parker would hire Tim Holmes from Death In Vegas to engineer and record at Wave House, a mansion-cum-recording studio overlooking the ocean four hours south of Perth, and Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT, Mercury Rev) would mix it. “Recording that album was hilarious,” says Parker. “Tim was setting up pre-amps the first day, and I think the rest of the time he was there, he just went fishing and read books and drank cups of tea and smoked cigarettes. The work ethic was abysmal. I’d usually record, get up in the morning, listen to what I did the night before, and I think by mid-day I’d start recording something. The weather was good and the scenery was 42

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unbelievable. There were whales coming up and spouting. I’d start recording something—I’d record like 30 seconds of a song, but I’d do every instrument for 30 seconds—and I’d put it on loops, and we’d think it was so amazing because the scenery was so amazing. Anything I played was like heaven because the sun was beating down on what looked like the entire Indian Ocean. So, we’d just sit out on the balcony and listen to the loop for the entire afternoon. Then at about 9 p.m., we’d be like, ‘Shit, we haven’t done anything,’ so we’d have to seriously record the song.” Three months later, a pretty damn great debut album emerged from this seaside den of slack. Parker decided to call it Innerspeaker. “It was a way of me trying to explain in one word how or why I do music,” says Parker. “Everyone thought we were this psych/rock jam band. They had heard the EP and thought it was a whole band collaborative thing. It was like, Tame Impala: three-piece psych/rock trio. I realized everyone got it wrong because these recordings I had done by myself were being mistaken for band jam sessions. Then (critics) would get confused. They’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, so you played everything on the EP?’ I remember them being sort of shocked that I was hogging this process. It just made me feel like a bit of a hog. They don’t really understand the way we do it—or the way I do it, more importantly. It got me questioning myself, like, ‘Why am I doing this by myself?’ The word ‘innerspeaker’ means sound coming from within. I just thought it was fitting. For me, that’s what a lot of the music is. It’s just me expelling sound from myself.” Turns out people like hearing him expel: The reviews were glowing, sales were strong like bull, and much globe-trotting joy to the world ensued. The psych/rock torch had been officially passed to a new generation.

Parker: I was obsessed. I’d wake up between mid-day and 2 p.m. and walk into my studio and eat something at some time in the evening. Then I’d start drinking wine somewhere around 6 p.m. and keep going until 4 a.m., and that was about every day.

Parker: I thought I was going to die. I just thought something is wrong with me. I actually thought it was linked to how much I was working on the album. So, I thought I had to do something because I was going crazy, so I started getting the fish sushi instead of the vegetarian sushi at the sushi restaurant, and that’s what started it.

t was during breaks from touring Innerspeaker that Lonerism was written and recorded. Note to anybody who has never been on tour: In the battle of Man vs. Touring, the latter always wins. Always. Sooner or later, it will destroy you. It’s why musicians become hopeless junkies or terminal alcoholics or both, why marriages crumble into dust, children become strangers and great bands die like dogs every day. Going on tour as a respite from a grueling recording project is like running the Boston Marathon to rest up from the New York Marathon. Not surprisingly, it damn near killed Parker. NEEDLE: How long did that take, beginning to end, to record Lonerism?

Parker: About two years. It was intense. It was really intense. I’m never going to do something that intensive again. NEEDLE: Why was it so intense?

NEEDLE: Two years straight or was there touring or breaks?

Parker: Going on tour was a break. On tour I’d have my laptop, so I’d be in the process. I wasn’t very social in those two years. I’ve never been so focused and so obsessed in my life by anything. NEEDLE: Why would you never do that again?

Parker: Right at the end, it started to take its toll. I got this really bad insomnia, and I couldn’t sleep until the next day. I’d go to bed at 5 a.m. and just lie there until 10 a.m. and get up and take a shower. I guess I didn’t need to sleep. Then I’d fall asleep at 11 a.m. and wake up in the evening and start recording. My health was weird. I kept getting vertigo and thinking I was going to fall over when I stood up. NEEDLE: What was that all about?

Parker: I don’t know. I was still vegetarian. I started eating meat during that. NEEDLE: When did you become a vegetarian?

Parker: Around the time my dad died. I think it was my way of coping. I had these weird questions of death and what it means to die, so my way of proving to myself that I knew what death was, was to not be a part of the death industry. NEEDLE: So, you started eating meat again. What spurred that? You thought the vertigo was part of that?

NEEDLE: And eventually you went back to full meat?

Parker: Yeah, eventually. It felt so weird to do it. It was around the time my dad died, and I started taking acid. I had this weird questioning about eating meat—that I care so much about a family member dying, but not the life of another creature. It took me a long time to get over that. The first time I bit into another animal, it took me a while to get over, but I convinced myself it wasn’t wrong. NEEDLE: Because?

Parker: I don’t know. Because it’s just what people do. It’s what happens. I’ve never been a big advocate of animal rights or that health-

conscious, but for some reason I couldn’t bear the idea of sinking my teeth into an animal. I’ve stopped being so caring. NEEDLE: Lonerism—you coined that term?

Parker: I guess so. I guess for me, now that I think about it and analyze it, because I didn’t analyze it back then, it was just kind of a word that made sense. It’s a feeling, basically. It’s a feeling that can be an instantaneous thing, but also something that stays with you your whole life—that you’re in some way separate from the whole world. The world is going on and you’re operating on your own. NEEDLE: Does this go back to the LSD experience and your father dying?

Parker: I think it’s separate. It’s just you and the rest of the world, and they seem to be two separate entities. NEEDLE: And that’s everyone’s experience or just yours?

Parker: I guess other people must experience it,

and that’s why the album connects with people. At that stage, I didn’t know if people were going to know exactly what I meant, and I just had to go with it. That word just seemed to wrap everything up. The whole album, it seems like it’s someone singing about how much they love being a loner, but it’s really opposite; it’s about someone trying to be a part of the world and realizing that the world just keeps spitting them back out. As the giant orange sun dips below the horizon, we call it a day. I fly home in the morning. Parker has to work on the new Melody’s Echo Chamber album tonight because Prochet flies back to Paris tomorrow. Plus, he has to come up with a song for the closing credits of Ender’s Game, the fall’s big sci-fi blockbuster starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley, based on the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card, who’s stirred up a lot of controversy in recent weeks for his toxic remarks about homosexuals and comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. The studio wanted to hear something by yesterday, but so far he has come up dry.

Somewhere over the South Pacific, some 15 hours into my journey home, I email him to find out if he ever came up with a song for the movie. Three days later, he writes back from Hong Kong International, on a layover from his 30-hour flight to Oslo. “I gave that Ender’s Game song a red hot crack, but I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it,” he writes. “I ended up using this demo I started in Japan the other morning, but as soon as I started thinking about it as a ‘job,’ it sounded so naff. Anyway, I’ll see if I can grit my teeth and send it in. Not sure if it’s their cup of tea anyway.” A few weeks later, I email his manager to find out if the Ender’s Game closing credits song was still a go. Turns out the track never materialized, lost in translation and the fog of jet lag and selfsabotage. Of lonerism. She wrote back: Well, he emailed me a couple of weeks ago saying he had something to send—then he didn’t send anything! So we missed the deadline ... I am flying tonight to meet up with Kev in the U.K. and will see if he actually has anything to send and if we still have time, but I have a feeling that ship may have sailed ... N

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reviews Neko Case p. 46

Franz Ferdinand p. 48

NO Age p. 50

Okkervil River p. 52

Sebadoh p. 53

You Say You Want A Revolution?

into your sad and lonely life. In which case Sound System could well be a life-changer, containing, as it does, the collected works of hands-down the greatest rock ‘n’ roll outfit Sure, it’s a crass cash-in, but the new Clash the U.K. has produced in the boxed set is also absolutely incredible last four decades. (Stop arguing in the back—this has been The Clash reat. Just what the world needs: yet another ludiproven by science.) What’s Sound System crously expensive, super-deluxe boxed set with all the shiny especially amazing, looking over this collection as a whole, bells and whistles you never realized you needed—until now! is just how insanely prolific L egac y OK, so it’s a superbly assembled set featuring practically everything the they were, how they were utClash ever released, and as such, has some of the most life affirming rock terly unafraid to take chances ‘n’ roll ever recorded. ¶ Designed by Paul Simonon, it comes in an old(and at times fall flat on their school boom box and contains all of the band’s studio albums (minus ’85’s execrable Cut The faces) and how jaw-droppingly meteoric their Crap), three discs’ worth of singles, b-sides, demos and fragrant rarities, a DVD of promos career trajectory was. In five short years, they and Super 8 footage, plus fanzine reproductions, dog tags, stickers, an owner’s manual and a went from amphetamine-fueled dole anthems (The Clash) to polished rock (Give ’Em Enough life-size, solid platinum statue of the late Joe Strummer in a suitably Christ-like pose. Rope), genre-hopping brilliance (London CallAll right, so I made the last bit up, but you there’s precious little that hasn’t been fea- ing), an album’s worth of spliffed-up dub craget the point—it’s a ridiculous beast of a boxed tured elsewhere. (See Clash On Broadway or ziness (Sandinista) and rubber-limbed funk/ set aimed squarely at the obsessive Clash fan Super Black Market Clash.) meditative madness with Allen Ginsberg (Comwith more money than sense. And if you’re one But let’s just assume that you’re one of bat Rock). Five years. These days, even the of these people, then this collection is beyond those poor unfortunates who has yet to ac- most half-assed indie combos take about that reproach. For the rest of us lesser mortals, cept the redemptive powers of the Clash amount of time just to get one album together.

photo by Adrian Boot

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reviews Not only that, but the Clash banged out a consistent run of some of the greatest slices of seven-inch vinyl this side of the glory days of the Stones, Who and Kinks. (Indeed, “Complete Control,” with its deranged, needle-inthe-red production, just might be the most exciting three minutes ever.) Above all, Sound System reminds us that the members of the Clash were a huge mess of contradictions— art-school romantics, political dilettantes— who wore their passions on their (beautifully designed) sleeves. They were heroic and heartfelt, endlessly inventive, occasionally ridiculous, always stylish and never less than human. To paraphrase John Lydon, “They meant it, maaaan.” And for that, we should all give thanks. —Neil Ferguson

Arctic Monkeys

Domino

We’re (still not) an American band

Like musical Zeligs, the Arctic Monkeys tend to change their style to mimic any nearby bands. Their debut ushered in a generation of paranoid-yet-literate Brits, while more recent efforts feature heavier arrangements influenced by American desert rock. No longer the leather-jacket-clad hellcats of 2011’s Suck It And See, the Arctic Monkeys return with their fifth album. Following a world tour supporting the Black Keys, AM is, in turn, heavily indebted to that duo’s post-Brothers output. Thumping grooves and echo-laden falsetto vocals on “Do I Wanna Know?” and “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High” underscore Alex Turner’s tangled string of lyrics. There’s also a bit of a retreat to the Monkeys’ own Humbug, with “R U Mine?” (previously a standalone single) being a counterpart to “Crying Lightning.” The best song, though, is the subdued “Mad Sounds,” which plays like a Britpop take on the Velvet Underground. AM’s wheel-spinning is a bit of a letdown, but a handful of tracks keep it from being a total throwaway. —Eric Schuman

Love Is A Battlefield Nobody’s ignoring Neko Case, but she keeps getting closer— to the perfect album

eko Case has used that tempest-in-a-tallboy

voice to deliver some beautifully strange things over the years. There was “this tornado loves you.” And “a demon holds my place on earth ’til I die,” of The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, course. Oh, and let’s not forget every single word in “Letter The Harder I Fight, From An Occupant.” The More I Love You That’s why it’s so marvelous, so spit-takingly intriguing, to hear how plainspoken and direct she gets on The Worse Things AntiGet, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. “He died because I murdered him,” she shrugs on “Bracing For Sunday,” with the weather-worn swagger of a veteran gunfighter. If this record’s got a mission statement, you might find it on hard-charging rock song “Man.” “I’m a man,” she asserts with sinister snark. “You’ll deal with me directly.” Or maybe waltzing torcher “Night Still Comes” says the most about where this celebrated songwriter is, career-wise: “If I puked up some sonnets, would you call me a miracle?” Case has never been one to fuck around, but there’s an extra urgency here, a clenchedjaw desire to control the narrative. It’s not all bluntness and bravado— and some lines, like “staring rosary holes in my ceiling,” would fit anywhere in her discography—but almost every inch of The Worse Things Get is stout and strong-willed, from the moody, Aesopian “Wild Creatures” to the resilient, starry-eyed “Ragtime.” Even “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” is a punch to the heart, despite being kinda freeform, a bit artsy and mostly a cappella. Album of the year? Neko’s in it to win it. —Patrick Rapa Neko Case

Au Revoir Simone

Move In Spectrums

Moshi Moshi/Instant

Stay awhile

After a four-year absence, Au Revoir Simone’s fourth non-remix collection finds the dream-pop trio as focused as ever. What sets the band apart from countless ’80s-obsessed synth-pop acts is that the emphasis is always on the songs and less about the neon gimmicks. Like everyone from Young Marble Giants to Stereolab, less is always more with ARS, making every choice more deliberate and powerful.

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photo by Neko Case

Move In Spectrums’ ethereal opening track, “Boiling Point,” sets the tone, with its refrain “take me to another place” like a new-wave Calgon ad. When singing about love, lust, loss and other under-the-disco-ball confessionals, the women of ARS embody grace under pressure: from the love-as-amusement-park-ride metaphor of “Gravitron” to the spare setting and melancholy harmonies of “Love You Don’t Know Me” (where the repeated title speaks volumes) and the moody come-on of “More Than.” “Crazy” is where things get interesting, a perky take on difficult female friendships, a topic often unexplored in pop music. —Sara Sherr

quarters and swamps a gaggle of Gordons in a flood of enervating distortions. On “Ain’t,” it’s as though she’s being waterboarded. But “Last Mistress” is where Coming Apart goes for broke, all ice-pick strum, barely controlled amplifiers, vicious canine imagery; it’s a disdainful indictment that for some will be harder to revisit, in its way, than Angel Haze’s cover of Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My Closet.” —Raymond Cummings

Ane Brun

Songs 2003-2013 Balloon Ranger

Belle And Sebastian

The Third Eye Centre Matador

Rare breeds

Is it insane to resent a compilation album? It’s not that The Third Eye Centre—the Scottish indie-pop legends’ latest collection of rarities—isn’t great; it’s just that we’re prone to some of indie rock’s worst habits. Chief among those habits is misplacing our anger when other people get access to long-cherished obscurities. This album totally diminishes the awesomeness of the Belle & Sebastian mixtapes we’ve made. Damn. Ah, well, at least the double-heavyweight vinyl won’t get eaten by our shitty car stereo. Rife with gems like “Last Trip” and “Suicide Girl” (bonus tracks from the U.K.-only version of Write About Love) and the so-true-it-hurts “Desperation Made A Fool Of Me,” Third Eye Centre is a wonderful addendum to the band’s prolific and enchanting catalog. The remixes of “Your Cover’s Blown” and “I Didn’t See It Coming” seem a bit extraneous, but we felt that way the first time around. —Sean L. Maloney

Decade of decadence

A major star in her native Norway—and gaining substantial traction in her adopted homebase of Sweden—warbly voiced folk/pop songbird Ane Brun offers this abundant retrospective of her first decade; equal parts victory lap and crash course for newcomers. Across the pond, with less context, it makes a somewhat unwieldy introduction—in either event, one could question the necessity of a 32-track career-spanner from an artist with only four proper LPs under her belt. (She’s also issued two live albums, one record of demos and another of reworked duets, all amply represented here.) But while a leaner set might’ve been more forceful, everything here is still emphatically worth hearing. If the smattering of duets (with Peter Gabriel and José Gonzalez, among others) and covers (PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, Arcade Fire, a particularly magical take on Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors”) break the spell ever so slightly, it’s merely a testament to the power of Brun’s own creations, and the haunting expressiveness of her singular voice. —K. Ross Hoffman

Body/Head

Califone

Matador

Dead Oceans

Vengeance as noise, abrasion as self-therapy

Threads of fate

Coming Apart

The first song on Body/Head’s Matador debut is, ironically, a breathy curveball named “Abstract.” Why? First, “Abstract” is coherent relative to the rest of Coming Apart, with Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s dual-guitar compositions dissipating, over time, into out-and-out arsenic Slurpee-suck over 68 minutes; second, Gordon is palpably and justifiably incensed, and no Elle subscriber need ask why. There’s a seemingly symbolic tendency to cut tracks short so abruptly here that Disconnection Notice might have been a better title. Vocally, Gordon is reborn, baptized in fire: On “Actress,” she distends syllables to imply ecstatic agony, while “Everything Left” draws,

Stitches

Pull them hard enough and no stitches can hold. Stitches is—to the extent that any Califone record is ever about anything—about life after things come apart. After a run as one of the great improvising rock bands of the century, Califone is back to being singer Tim Rutili plus a loose circle of occasional collaborators stirring a mix of rustic guitars, Lennon-esque piano and pasttheir-warranty electronics. His voice, redolent of cigarettes and sadness, is right up front, spinning out images of old-testament personages, modern-day folk too old to start growing up and cast-off technology that imply the impermanence of all save the end without giving too many specif-

ics away. Rutili is also a filmmaker, so it’s best to take each line as a scene, each song an onslaught of images, but embedded indelibly into your brain by hooks that won’t quit. —Bill Meyer

Bill Callahan

Dream River Drag City

Beer? Thank you

Ever since he started recording under his own name, rather than Smog, Bill Callahan has settled into a groove, and it’s a good one. The songs are often long, the pace is slow, his voice is low and up front in the mix. He intones in measured, deliberate phrases, giving everything a sense of weighty purpose. The instrumentation is textured and moody, built around a steady guitar vamp and often anchored in folk/rock traditions. On Dream River, Callahan dwells on seasons (“Spring,” “Summer Painter,” “Winter Road”), travel (flying a plane with a lover, feeling anonymous in a hotel bar) and dreams, both sleeping and waking. The songs can be funny: “The only words I said today are ‘beer’ and ‘thank you,’” he sings, before repeating “beer” and “thank you” several times, a pregnant pause between each. Their scope isn’t quite as broad as 2011’s Apocalypse or as emotionally complex as 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, but they are full of sharp observations and wit. —Steve Klinge

Elvis Costello And The Roots

Wise Up Ghost Blue Note

Logical bedfellows Since Elvis Costello has been living in NYC lately, and the Roots have made Manhattan their base of operations via working with Jimmy Fallon, does that make Wise Up Ghost a New York album? And does the aesthetic collision of Elvis Costello and ?uestlove—two of the biggest musical hustlers working today—make this project an artistic sum greater than its composite parts? In a world where it’s all about getting ahead of the narrative, let’s hope so. Churning out product prodigiously is a way of life for both these guys, but no one can take anything away from them musically. Costello’s songwriting voice is certainly strong enough to stand up to rock/hip hop/neo-soul of the Roots, and he’s able to take modern chances here that he wouldn’t risk with buddies like T Bone Burnett. And in ?uest’s world, what’s the difference between working with Elvis or Nicki Minaj? This could have been Costello’s urban album, or his funk album, or his black album—but instead, it’s simply his new album. —Mitch Myers

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reviews The Dead C

Armed Courage Ba Da Bing

Two great, big scraping sounds

Truly, the Dead C bleats uneasily and eternally forth: Robbie Yeats’ busted-id beats, Bruce Russell’s groaning bass, Michael Morley’s epileptic squalls of feedback. Almost three decades along, these New Zealanders’ jams tend, increasingly, to embrace their quintessential improvisatory nature. In practical terms, that makes Armed Courage an inevitability in a debatable “evolution”: two 20-minute lava baths as opposed to 10 sickly whorls on 1992’s Harsh 70s Reality or a scant four on 2008’s Secret Earth. “Armed” distresses and graffitis silence with a brackish gusto and no vocals, yet again pulling the uncanny trick of imbuing sonic anti-matter with a wicked-if-warped groove. On the slow-cohering “Courage” (spindling streaks of piano, feedback sprays, sound effects set to manageable chaos), Morley deigns to sing, warblewhisper portents at the outset. Then he clams up as his band adroitly dodges anything approaching sound compositional footing, revolving blindly until it winds up lost in a haunted wilderness of its own daft design. Get lost with them. —Raymond Cummings

Deer Tick

Negativity

Two Rights Don’t Make A Wrong Franz Ferdinand’s fourth LP could have it so much worse

or a band that’s had a hell of a time getting

all three angles to converge, Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action is either a wickedly self-aware title or accidental irony of the highest order. (This from the guys who called their sophomore letdown You Could Have It Domino So Much Better.) Their greater curse, it turns out, was hitting pay dirt on the first pull, and in trying to survive the depraved dance-punk glory of Franz Ferdinand the album, Franz Ferdinand the band had gotten all out of sorts: reponymous 2009 reboot Tonight: Franz Ferdinand stabbing blindly in the dark of the matinee, hitting synthesizer textures, faux-Afro-beats and eight-minute Hot Chippy dips. This fourth outing puts to bed both Tonight’s frantic lonerism as well as any notion of a second night out with Alex Kapranos’ equal-opportunity, Jacqueline-and-Michael seducer. “Don’t play pop music/You know I hate pop music,” Kapranos bluff-purrs on last-call closer “Goodbye Lovers And Friends,” yet the rightest thoughts and actions still belong to two lighthearted, mid-album pop songs: “Stand On The Horizon” (a proud apology buoyed by Kapranos’ trellis-climbing hooks and Bob Hardy’s hot-footed bass line) and “Fresh Strawberries” (which blossoms from a Franz Ferdinand brooder to a Burt Bacharach swooner, overcoming fruity metaphors like “We are fresh strawberries/ Fresh burst of red strawberries/Ripe turning riper in the bowl”). In the right words of another misunderstood lover, two out of three ain’t bad. —Noah Bonaparte Pais Franz Ferdinand

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action

Partisan

Someone put on some coffee

Those intoxicated by the booze-soaked exuberance and fairly overt Replacements worship of Divine Providence, Deer Tick’s 2011 outing (I’ll drink to that!) may find this follow-up a bit sobering, at least initially. Where Divine Providence was the “it’s fun to get hammered” record, the band’s fifth effort is the “I don’t feel so great” (emotionally as well as physically) LP. After openers “The Rock” and “The Curtain,” Negativity slinks into hung-over drowsiness, with the exception of “Mirror Walls,” the closest thing to an up-tempo moment. This isn’t to say the downcast mood isn’t eventually enthralling—frontman John McCauley’s tunes are rife with memorable melodies—but even the late burst of loud energy, “Pot Of Gold,” provides is a slow-burning one. (And I personally could do without “In Our Time,” a folksy duet with Vanessa Carlton.) Negativity is well worth a shot (get it?), but there may be times you’ll end up sleeping it off. —Matt Hickey

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photo by andy knowles

Dodos

Carrier Polyvinyl

Fools gold

Dodos seemed to learn a simple-yet-valuable lesson on 2011 return-todeform No Color: less Phil Ek-orchestrated law and order, more red-and-purple fretboard and drum-kit abuse. The San Francisco band’s resurgent energy, sapped from the comely, idling Time To Die, made the addition of Neko Case as the most overqualified backup singer on earth into something of an afterthought. Case misses Carrier, and it her; Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s cyclonic mojo is back to momentary. Single “Confidence,” whose ideal ratio is two parts gorgeous warm-up to three parts full-tilt sprint (“Don’t slow down!”), proves a con. “Transformer” and “Substance” are more accurate readings: technically perfected guitar pop that doesn’t do much to raise the temperature. When the latter sheds its chorus (“And you will forget/And I will remember”), revealing a sculpted acoustic figure, it’s hard to fault, but harder to care. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

Arnold Dreyblatt Megafaun

Appalachian Excitation Northern Spy

Social climbers Expatriate American minimalist composer meets liberally bearded roots-rock combo—it’s such an odd couple pairing that you even know who’s Oscar and who’s Felix. But in practice, this combination works pretty well. Megafaun’s own records reveal a deep engagement with its chosen genre, and here the band places itself completely at Dreyblatt’s service. He uses carefully calculated tunings to obtain matrices of bright, resonant tones that make you want to jump and trance out at the same time. He had already successfully integrated rock beats into his practice without dilution, most notably on the excellent Animal Magnetism. Megafaun just gives him a few new options. The band’s fat feedback and heavy-booted grooves, which toggle between stark timekeeping and square-dance giddiness, blend immaculately with his radiant string drones and caffeinated cadences. My one complaint is that they don’t go far enough in exploring the titular Appalachian sonorities. —Bill Meyer

Explosions In The Sky & David Wingo

Prince Avalanche: An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Temporary Residence Ltd.

Here comes the (occasional) boom

Explosions In The Sky hones a specific aes-

thetic brand that its listeners take very seriously. And for good reason: The quartet’s triumphant post-rock instrumentals cut deep. If its collaboration with fellow Austinite and composer David Wingo (Ola Podrida) on the Prince Avalanche soundtrack is any indication, however, that brand is due for an update. The latest from David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, All The Real Girls), Prince Avalanche is a scenic, intimate comedy starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch that seems deserving of an equally intimate score. Which is what it got. Dramatic tension exists throughout, but in ways Explosions fans aren’t used to hearing from the band. Instead, with Wingo’s help, the group paints with a subtler, sparer palette: Harmonium, slowly picked acoustic guitar, upright bass, piano and the occasional ambient wash comprise the lion’s share of the ingredients here. The score can be redundant in places, but ultimately it works as it should, giving us a glimpse of Explosions’ potential outside the framework we’ve historically known them by. —Ryan Burleson

Robbie Fulks

Gone Away Backward Bloodshot

All killer, all business

Something happened in the eight years since Robbie Fulks released his last album of new material, and whatever it was, it wasn’t funny. There’s still plenty of cleverness on Gone Away Backward—like the panhandling narrator of “I’ll Trade You Money For Wine,” the hopeful drunk of “When You Get To The Bottom” and the small-town nowheresville of “Where I Fell”—but no jokes, which turns out to be a good thing. It’s made the pain in these songs much more poignant, its stories of losers and loss much more profound, its scope broad enough to include anyone who’s ever followed their compass south. The songs here are pure, classic country, halfway between Hank and Woody, played with the all-acoustic, front-porch feel of a guitar, fiddle and banjo—the perfect soundtrack for the new depression. It’s the best album Fulks has ever made, period, and even if you can’t quite make out the twister that swept away all that old anger, it’s easy to hear the sweet, sad emptiness it left behind. —Kenny Berkowitz

Goldfrapp

Tales Of Us Mute

Personable people

After more than a decade of sonic adventures in dance, glam rock, folk and more, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are movie-soundtrack naturals. Each song (named for a different character) on Tales Of Us is written with an accompanying short film in mind. At press time, the clip for “Drew” is mak-

ing the rounds, a sleek black-and-white piece of erotica starring the duo’s frontwoman and namesake running, dancing and flying model planes with two nude men and a woman around a deserted mansion and its fertile grounds. Musically, it’s their most ambitious release, with full orchestras and mysterious meditations on reality and fantasy—or what obvious influence Kate Bush would call “The Sensual World.” Like Seventh Tree, it’s an album that requires time, lacking the instant gratification of previous work. With the exception of the woozy electronics of “Thea,” there’s very little variety in mood or rhythm, resulting in a snooze for fans accustomed to more. —Sara Sherr

John Wizards

John Wizards Planet Mu

Superior to Washington Wizards

By day, John Withers makes music for TV commercials. In a totally uncynical way, that feels directly relevant to the 25-year-old Cape Town native’s remarkable debut LP, if only because, like the stuff of ad-man fantasies, this is music that’s instantly, wordlessly evocative (of summertime, adventure, first love, you name it ... ) while also invitingly open-ended. It’s one big happy kaleidoscope of sounds that, on paper, seems impossibly frantic: a hydra-headed hybrid of disco, reggae, bliss pop, synth funk, jazz fusion, tropicalia, township jive, Shangaan electro and playfully abstract, organic house. Withers’ wizardry is in spinning that pan-continental patchwork into a dreamy, infectious and hugely melodic whole. Given the (curiously understated) presence of Rwandan vocalist Emmanuel Nzaramba, it’s tempting to take this as a chillwavier variant of Swedento-Malawi globalists the Very Best, but a better comparison is to preternaturally summery sample-meisters Javelin—though it’s hard to imagine that cheeky duo coming up with anything as earnestly pretty. —K. Ross Hoffman

kandodo

k2o

Thrill Jockey

Keep it off my wave

With more than a couple decades of fuzzed-out psych rock under his belt with British band the Heads, Simon Price has gotten a little more plaintive the past couple years on his solo project. Kandodo is named after a supermarket chain in Malawi (Price grew up in Zambia and Malawi), and its previous selftitled record was meant to be a reflection on home. While k2o might be a little more abstract than its predecessor, the tones and textures are more fleshed out this time around, losing some of the bedroom-recording aesthetic and gaining a broader sonic palette. The six tracks are built around simple mo-

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reviews tifs—often Earth-esque lines blanketed in effects, with little movements taking up the spaces in between. Field recordings occupy some of that space, though the songs would probably be better without them, like the cheesy ocean sounds on “Waves” and “Swim Into The Sun.” But the rest of the 22-minute mind-trip that is “Swim Into The Sun” makes it that a minor quibble. —Matt Sullivan

King Khan & The Shrines

Idle No More Merge

A polished-up sliceof garage rock

It’s kind of strange that Nuggets, a 1972 compilation of obscure garage-rock singles from the ’60s, has had such a lasting influence. Most of its songs were regional hits, but were destined to fade into the darkness if not for the boxed set. More than 40 years later, there’s still a whole genre of groups attempting to replicate that sound, though out of all of those bands, King Khan & The Shrines has been one of the best. 2008 collection The Supreme Genius Of... uses that backdrop while adding the band’s own unique intensity to it. On Idle No More, Khan polishes up its sound, but still keeps the Nuggets spirit. “Bite My Tongue” replicates the simple riffs of that era, adding a fuller palette of horns, percussion and acoustic guitar, though it’s the hooks that make it memorable. There’s plenty of upbeat rockers (“Luckiest Man,” “Thorn In Her Pride”), but a bulk of the record is made up of ballads and slower jams. Because garage bands have feelings, too. —Bryan Bierman

Mark Lanegan

Imitations Vagrant

Not so pale

“You only live twice—or so it seems,” Mark Lanegan sings, his trademark sandpaper croon imbuing a gritty elegance into Nancy Sinatra’s 1967 Bond soundtrack classic. “One life for yourself and one for your dreams.” The sentiment is apropos: Lanegan’s eclectic, stirring covers collection feels like nothing so much as an album peculiar to the exScreaming Trees frontman’s second life—an existence wherein hard-won experience and cachet borne of relentless artistic derring-do can conjure a dreamscape in which Andy Williams, Bobby Darin and John Cale find themselves (magnificently, improbably, unpredictably) reinterpreted alongside Chelsea Wolfe, Nick Cave and Greg Dulli.

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Short Sharp Shocker No Age’s curiously brusque left turn never fails to fascinate

hen No Age titled its fourth album An

Object, the band wasn’t kidding. Clocking in at less than a half hour, with the least amount of detail poking up from the blunt-force drive, Randy Randall No Age and Dean Spunt wanted to make something you that could An Object pick up to bean someone in the head. Track four is perfectly emblematic of this: “Defector/ed” is a one-note song over a boiling hiss, with very little going on besides its palm-muted Sub Pop tension. It leads into the delicate, Notwist-like “An Impression,” which has only slightly more shades of gray in its narrow melodicism, despite the kudzu of violins that grows over the finish. What doesn’t make sense about An Object is that it’s not the loudest No Age record. So, it’s slight, dimly produced and contains far fewer layers than the band’s previous three albums, and the first couple songs cut off abruptly with a convincing nihilism; opener “No Ground” ceases to exist once the duo asks, “Does anybody really care?” Much like Spoon’s transitional Transference, the songs are sticking out of the granular soil. The catchy “Running From A-Go-Go” tweets from a distance. Only the Joey Ramone-esque “Lock Box” comes together on the first few listens. But even the twosome’s weakest album has undeniable substance in its slow burn. Don’t call them Yes Age just yet. —Dan Weiss Lanegan’s stamp here is reverent-yet-indelible—think Mark Kozelek channeling AC/DC— and the organic sonic approach is an especially intriguing left turn following the electro buzz ‘n’ thrum of last year’s resplendent Blues Funeral. If such acts of divergent brilliance are but successive reincarnations, may Lanegan and his dreams live, pace Nancy, one thousand times over. —Shawn Macomber

Little Big League

These Are Good People Tiny Engines

Not quite out of the park

This punk-rooted Philly fourpiece hearkens back to the indie luminaries of the ’90s on its debut LP. Note the Built To Spill twinkle on its interlocking guitar lines, the

photo by No Age

Slint sense of meditative drone, the hooks like Pavement. Opener “Lindsey” is a soaring ode to coveted comfort, while “My Very Own You” hammers out seductive, sensual allusions (“Show me every inch they couldn’t reach”) to a pop beat. As a lyricist, Michelle Zauner skews minimal, but evocatively so—her songs take you on vivid twists and turns, like you’re driving through the “New England fall in the family classic car” mentioned on the Death Cabesque “Brackish Water.” By all indicators, this album should be great. But it feels rushed. “Dark Matter” is sloppy, perhaps purposely so—Zauner’s voice turns brittle, breaking down in the second half, while Kevin O’Halloran’s guitar lines come across jarring and flubbed. It’s clear that this is a solid band—the good moments are many, and undeniably winning. But its rough edges, on this outing anyway, are more unkempt than charming. —John Vettese

Dent May

Warm Blanket Paw Tracks

Bedroom pop from a haunted house

Dent May recorded his latest one-man-band extravaganza in a haunted house in Florida, and there are plenty of ghosts in evidence, but they’re all the ghosts of Pop Tunes Past. Like his first two outings, Warm Blanket is full of swooning Beach Boys harmonies, bright Beatlesque arrangements, light R&B crooning and even laid-back country tune “Summer Is Over,” an oblique love song that sounds like Jonathan Richman pining over a girl he hopes to connect with. May’s singing is the unifying thread, a balmy, melancholy-drenched tenor that brings a touch of sunshine to every word uttered, even on tongue-in-cheek ode to mortality “I’m Ready To Be Old” and the aching unrequited passions of “Endlessly.” “Corner Piece” is equally wistful, a song that shows us what might have happened if Brian Wilson had decided to drop a little bit of softcore funk into the mix. —j. poet

Múm

Smilewound Morr

All these beautiful bitemarks

There’s something about the sixth full-length from this Icelandic experimental electronic outfit that feels like exciting new territory— and something about it that feels like home. The home part could be the return to the fold of Gyða Valtýsdóttir (with twin sister Kristín Anna, she co-founded the band with Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason back in 1997); her childlike vocals on tracks like

“Underwater Snow” and “One Smile” recall the group’s weirdo-sprite heyday. The groundbreaking part could be the clubby grooves of tracks like “When Girls Collide” and “The Colorful Stabwound” (which provides the album’s title imagery), as eminently danceable as anything the band’s recorded. Of course, this is what happens when you start hanging out with Aussie pop priestess Kylie Minogue, who shows up on bonus track “Whistle” (singing, bewitchingly, “I bleed like a pig, chew like a cannibal”), playing as much to Múm’s strengths as the band to hers. —Brian G. Howard

Obits

Bed & Bugs Sub Pop

Surfin’ USA

Three albums in and we still exclaim, “No shit, Sherlock!” when Obits’ jittery tunes are played in conjunction with their priors, which include Hot Snakes, Drive Like Jehu, Pitchfork and Edsel. They call Brooklyn home these days, but Bed & Bugs sure as hell doesn’t sound like it. If we didn’t know better, we’d assume they high-tailed it cross-country and have spent most of their collective waking moments since previous album Moody, Standard And Poor catching waves at San Diego’s Black’s Beach. Then, after the mid-morning tide recedes, the quartet repairs to its combination autobody shop/barbeque hotspot for beer-battered everything as the Wipers, Dick Dale, Burning Brides and crankshafts spin in the background. The press material warned us against referring to Bed & Bugs as “surf-garage.” It’s kind of hard to take that advice seriously when that’s exactly what Obits are doing. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band

Take Me To The Land Of Hell Chimera

Caps rock

In her time, Yoko Ono has made four-on-thefloor disco, glossily ossified rock and brittle new wave. Yet, a career of being an acquired taste has given Ono a musical freedom rooted in her past as part of the Fluxus art group and its continual abstraction. With that, she has rarely sounded better (though her previous album, Between My Head And The Sky, is her best) and more open than she does on Take Me To The Land Of Hell. Produced by Ono, Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda, with guests such as tUnE-yArDs, ?uestlove and Nels Cline, the album is singularly that of Ono’s deliciously odd aesthetic. Though she presents herself fleetingly as the Widow

Lennon on songs such as “LITTLE BOY BLUE your daddy’s gone” in her signature rasp-andsqueak, the rest of the LP opens itself to electronically induced adventures of the mind (a surprisingly humorous “BAD DANCER”), home (“N.Y. NOODLE TOWN”), soul (“TABETAI”), heart (“MOONBEAMS”) and the spirit of invention itself (“CHESHIRE CAT CRY”). —A.D. Amorosi

Placebo

Loud Like Love RAK Studios

Lewder than love

Loud Like Love sings of a familiar theme: the age of technology’s effect on genuine interpersonal relationships. With deep, metaphysical spoken words atop subdued guitars giving way to quite basic— albeit intense—synthesized instrumentation that runs circles around the heavy drum and bass, songs like “Hold Onto Me” and “Too Many Friends” verge on edgy, but each track gains on a more unique sound that’s never fully reached. The sentiments are clear and the mood is resonant more often than not, but singer Brian Molko has admittedly—as confessed on “A Million Little Pieces”—lost his spark for lyricism. “My computer thinks I’m gay/I threw that piece of junk away” is an example that takes away from the more serious message and makes the weight of this album seem unbalanced. Passion still exists in Molko’s vocals, but overall, this still feels very much on the level Placebo was at with 1999 single “Every You Every Me,” minus more artfully constructed, impressive instrumental compositions and lyricism. —Brittany Thomas

Johnathan Rice

Good Graces SQE Music

Swimming in the fleet tide of the ’70s

1970s AM-radio pop songs never really left us. Johnathan Rice is another of the many trying to keep the movement alive. On his latest longplayer, the effort is commendable. More than half of the record soars, with the music reaching for complexity while shrouded in simplicity, and the words telling tales of love, but also of casual drug use as an opposition to a solid (and stolid) middle-class existence. But Good Graces falls just a tad flat. A couple songs end abruptly, sounding incomplete. The closer, a cover of Jonathan Richman’s effortlessly pretty “That Summer Feeling,” is brought down to a folk-lounge tune, a fate that should never have befallen such a great song. Good Graces is very good, but it could have been more. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday Rice releases something exceptional; for now, this will do. —Jill LaBrack

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reviews

The Smashing Pumpkins

The Aeroplane Flies High Virgin

Before the Zwan dive

Considering how overblown in scope Billy Corgan’s entire musical output has been, it’s no surprise that his overindulgent streak extends even to the ongoing Smashing Pumpkins rerelase campaign. Case in point: the very deluxe five-CD/90-track reissue treatment that their opus Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness was afforded last year. The Aeroplane Flies High—itself a compilation of tracks left over from the Mellon Collie sessions—gets an even more extensive overhaul, reboxed here as 91 b-sides, unreleased tracks, alternate mixes and live versions spread out over six CDs. While the abundance of previously unreleased rarities makes this must-have fare for any self-respecting Pumpkins fan, Aeroplane does little but highlight how far past his prime Corgan is; even as he and his band of new recruits continue to churn out driveling albums-within-albums, there was a time when even Smashing Pumpkins’ b-side compilations went platinum. —Möhammad Choudhery

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

Jumping For Joy

The past is prologue on Okkervil River’s lively foray into nostalgia

ill Sheff started Okkervil River

in 1998 with two of his high-school friends. Since then, he has worked with an everevolving cast, but the backstory is relevant because on The Okkervil River Silver Gymnasium, the sixth Okkervil LP (not counting 2010’s The Silver Gymnasium collaboration with Roky Erickson), Sheff uses his childhood ATO as inspiration—specifically 1986, when he was about 10 years old. But this is no kids’ album; it’s full of Sheff’s word-dense songs and of rollicking, rich rock ‘n’ roll. The autobiographical details—references to VCRs, Walkmans and Ataris; to friends’ names and geographic landmarks—make the songs vivid and the album coherent. And original member Zachary Thomas, who left after 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, drops in to play mandolin. In another period touch, John Agnello produced the album: In the mid-’80s, he worked with folks like the Hooters, the Outfield, Tommy Keene and Rosanne Cash. The vintage synth sounds that slip into many of these songs seem part of the concept. That’s all well and good, but the period specificity doesn’t weigh down this buoyant album. After 2011’s sometimes overwrought I Am Very Far, The Silver Gymnasium returns to the enthusiasm and immediacy that made 2008’s The Stand Ins so much fun, and the jaunty, piano-led “It Was My Season,” the rousing, insistent “Down, Down The Deep River” and the tender-yet-unsettling “Black Nemo” rank with Sheff ’s best. The Silver Gymnasium’s sometimes cryptic narratives may not be as emotionally complex as those of the Tim Hardin-inspired Black Sheep Boy or as engrossingly self-referential as The Stage Names, but Sheff and Co. turn nostalgic memories into vivacious rock ‘n’ roll. —Steve Klinge

Fly By Wire Polyvinyl

Not broken, not fixed Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, four albums deep in its career, is how consistently pleasant its catalog remains. The genial Midwestern indie-pop band caught internet ears with 2005 debut Broom, leading to that album’s subsequent re-release on Polyvinyl the next year, and a timely sync on that blog-pop benchmark, Fox’s primetime drama The O.C. But that was the better part of a decade ago, and somehow SSLYBY hasn’t shed an ounce of charm. Its first studio album in three years, Fly By Wire follows 2011’s rangy and (relatively) raw odds ‘n’ sods comp Tape Club with a return to form. Buoyant, unassumingly ornate and gently urgent, the band’s done little to change the format. A few power-chord bursts (see: brimming lead single “Nightwater Girlfriend”) and some glowing keyboards (see: ’80s-baby opener “Harrison Ford”) give the record enough force to register impact. But, as ever, SSLYBY thrives most on its unyielding pleasantness. —Bryan C. Reed

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photo by Alexandra Valenti

The Suburbs

Si Sauvage

self-released

Not exactly replacement-level

Natural Ones

Sebadoh is back on the attack on a surprisingly vital comeback album

Toad The Wet Sprocket

New Constellation Abe’s

ey man, have you heard? Music is cycli-

cal! Whatever’s old will eventually become new again! Having wrapped that cliché in subjective fact, who wants to join me in my underground bunker around the time nü-metal makes its inevitable comeback? I’m taking names on a first-come, first-saved basis. For now, let’s all revel in Sebadoh’s return. Not just any old return, but the band members’ return to doing shit the way they know best: by Sebadoh Defend Yourself themselves and away from prying eyes. If you want something done right, do it yourself. Another cliché. Awesome. Joyful Noise Speaking of awesome, how about the leadoff track to the band’s first album in 14 years? “I Will” weaves folksy verses with a bridge and chorus Baroness would be proud of. And just like that, Sebadoh has sucked us in. Luckily for everyone—from the peach-fuzz hipsters who claim to have witnessed the original incarnation of the band in the flesh, to those who actually did— Defend Yourself is virtually filler-less, unlike so many filler-hiding-behind-one-goodsong returns. “Inquiries” is the sonic equivalent of dipping Jane’s Addiction in Cajun hot sauce. “Once” may start off kind of clunky, but revels in spirited, wiry guitars, as does the twangy and brilliantly titled “Calves Of Champions.” There are occasional sightings of edge-less guitar jangle and moaning vocals, but after a decade and a half, the members of Sebadoh beefed up and tapped into their 40ish selves to get there. And if you’re flabbergasted by that last sentence, stay the hell away from my anti-nü-metal paradise. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

photo by jens nordstrom

The pioneering Minneapolis new-wavers have an impressive résumé. From recording for Twin/Tone to scoring an MTV anthem with “Love Is The Law,” they ran the gamut from danceable Talking Heads grooves to Roxy Music broods to power pop with an absurdist sense of humor. Si Sauvage is their first, Kickstarted effort in 27 years, with three of the original members: keyboardist/vocalist Chan Poling, guitarist/vocalist Beej Chaney and drummer Hugo Klaers. Poling’s Ferry-esque croon is bittersweet, grappling with nostalgia on “Turn The Radio On” or a fading relationship on “I Liked It Better When You Loved Me,” and downright caustic on “Dumb Ass Kids,” a message from one former Dumb Ass Kid to another that aging rockers are always best at. They find their groove on “Where It Is!”— as well as their sense of humor with the old record-nerd mating call on the title track (“What an interesting record collection you have”/“You’re stupid”). But much of Si Sauvage is marred by Reagan-era musical and lyrical cliches, making them sound like Rob Lowe’s band in St. Elmo’s Fire instead of First Avenue legends. —Sara Sherr

Amphibians rise The opening salvos off Toad The Wet Sprocket’s first album in 16 years might stoke fears in longtime fans’ hearts of an actual dad-rock record from a band perpetually mislabeled during its initial run as something akin to dad-rock, despite regularly smuggling some of the most elegant, soulful, dark rock onto mainstream airwaves, like, ever. Well, fear not and persevere, friends: Once past the perhaps unavoidable checkout-our-spreading-wings, uncharacteristicthough-admittedly-hella-catchy, pep-peppeppy title-track pop and nu-country-ish “California Wasted,” the remainder of New Constellation offers a much closer approximation of the old-school Toad that (sensible, discerning) rock fans surely desire. Though nostalgia, lightning in a bottle theory and the fleeting carte blanche license afforded by youthful swagger/inexperience ensure this reunion effort will not eclipse the seminal trio of 1991’s fear, 1994’s Dulcinea and 1997’s Coil, the album is nevertheless a vivifying, rousing reminder of the empyrean aural beauty lost in this iconoclastic band’s absence. —Shawn Macomber

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/movies

by Stan Michna

Junkyard Nazis

The last thing an army wants is a fair fight. It a variegated Red Army reconnaissance patrol embracing, among others, an Asian and a Pole? craves overwhelming numbers and firepower Nikogda, Comrade. to destroy the enemy’s will and capacity to (Speaking of “Never,” since when would make war. In June, 1944, a calamitous Wagnerian Russian grunts speak to each other in Englishshadow, Operation Bagration, descended on with-a-Russian-accent? Everybody knows the Third Reich, when a two-million-strong Russians and Germans—see Enemy At the Gates, The Desert Fox, Night Of The Red Army annihilated not just divisions and corps, but entire armies. Generals—spoke with British accents History teaches that the Nain World War II.) zis’ will and capacity to make war, For another, the de rigueur foundfootage meme—it worked once, with though diminished, was not yet destroyed, prolonging the agony anothThe Blair Witch Project—is a distracer year before the fat lady galloped tion, drawing attention from the story and repeatedly disrupting the viewer’s into Götterdämmerung. Movie history teaches otherwise. engagement. The camera’s whirring, jerking and abrupt cutting merely Evidently, the Nazi war machine refracture narrative unity. If anything, mains operative today, humming Available on “found-footage” has become code for three-shifts-a-day to achieve superi- DVD and Blu-ray ority not in modern armour, missiles September 10th from “too-lazy-to-sweat-over-scene-toor aircraft but…zombies. Who knew? Entertainment One scene-transitions.” As the patrol ambles across deserted counThe movie-making machine, that’s who: The last five years alone have favoured us with at tryside toward the heart of Frankenstein-ian least a dozen Der Zombie Liebstandarte Adolf darkness, improbably infrequent engagements with the enemy yield clues the tovaritches Hitler features. Common to most—including those from earlier eras—are deranged Gersomehow miss. Little things, like zombie solman scientists, an unsettling reminder of the diers refusing to die and borg-like defenders perverted science so critical to Nazi statewith gardening tools for hands. (No trouble sanctioned killing. sniffing out a hidden stash of schnapps and die Fräulein in a deserted village, though.) And if ever there existed a German, fictional or otherwise, infamous for perverting science Frankenstein’s Army’s climax isn’t so much climactic as extended music-videoby tampering with matters God had not intendwithout-music. When the squad penetrates ed man to tamper with—you know: digging up the source of the monstrous fusion of flesh corpses, stuffing curdled brains into their skulls and hydraulics—a forbidding, labyrinthine facand blasting the carcasses to life with electrical charges—it would be Viktor Frankenstein. tory/lab that looks like your weird Uncle Roy’s Or, in Frankenstein’s Army, his doublyworkshop—the film screams for a Duran Duderanged Nazi grandson, also named Viktor. ran soundtrack. (Out Of My Mind, Dirty Great (A magnificent Karel Roden, whose portrayal Monster, Undergoing Treatment and Union Of The Snake, for starters.) Why? Because of crackpot rationality—“My father said men will be more efficient if they have hammers and Frankenstein’s Army is actually a mordantly screwdrivers instead of fingers”—out-Kinskis surreal comedy trapped frustratingly inside a Klaus Kinski.) hapless horror thingamadoodle. Director/co-writer/”visualiser” Richard The frantic finale is crammed with the most fantastically preposterous living-dead Nazis. Raaphorst’s first feature is a realism/WWIISoviet-infantry-squad-on-a-secret-mission/ Once past—among other Joseph Mengelemeets-Transformers grotesqueries—airfound-footage/mad-Nazi-scientist/Grand plane-propeller- or narwhal-headed rotting Guignol jumbo gumbo without a distinctive flavour. (Roden is the blistering Tabasco.) torsos clanking around on hedge-clipper legs, You’d expect at least one of the writers—five we get to join (w-a-a-y too briefly) crazy Viktor screenwriters is never a good omen—to shed for a zombieklatsch in his sanctum sanctorum. the surly shackles of insipid cliché, or crack After capturing and constraining the camera open dedushka’s regimental history. operator (an NKVD officer charged by Stalin For one thing—small, yet irritating—Frank‑ to commandeer Viktor’s “talents” for Russia!), enstein’s Army attempts to establish veriViktor gets down to serious science. (The husimilitude by introducing a Soviet version of man head grafted to a teddy bear, and Buñuel‑ WWII-era Hollywood flag-wavers (a guy from ian cauldron scampering around on a pair of Milwaukee, another from Texas and so on, alltiny legs, are hobbies.) in-it-together-despite-their-differences). But Sawing open the head of the conscious 56

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NEGLECTED

CRITERION

3 Penny Opera 1931 / Director

G.W. Pabst

Why It’s Neglected: Who races to watch a

zombie-less, 1931 German socialist musical critique of capitalism based on a 1728 John Gay ballad opera? Or remembers Bobby Darin’s Mack The Knife? Now you know. The Theme: Succinct and dismayingly current. As Polly Peachum, wife of underworld kingpin Meckie “Mack the Knife” Messer, puts it to the directors of the bank the criminals now control: “Gentlemen of the Board: One can rob a bank, or one can use a bank to rob others.” What It’s About: A one-man chorus punctuates this brutally cynical Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht musical tale—source of Mack The Knife and Pirate Jenny—of charming criminal chieftain Meckie Messer’s rise to the top of the social and economic ladder by variously: marrying the rabble-rousing Beggar King’s clever daughter; bribing the Police Chief; and ultimately figuring out that the Establishment is the biggest, most lucrative, racket of them all. What You Get: An outstanding, substantive (2-disc) package ranking among Criterion’s best: beautiful, high-definition transfer; brainy commentary track by a pair of Ivy-league illuminati; the French version—shot simultaneously—of the same film; a visual comparison of the two; firstrate stage-play-to-film documentary; stills gallery; charming archival interviews; and a handy prefatory booklet. Superb.

Pole and a maimed German soldier—“My father tried to have me locked up, but I injected him”—Viktor graphically demonstrates how to smoosh together half a commie brain with half a fascist brain. “You’re sick!” howls the cameraman. “Everyone’s sick,” replies Viktor reasonably. “Nazis. Comrades. Capitalists. . . .The sickness must be cured. Cut out of them!” Just before the credits roll, a surviving Russian guns down Viktor, and the Pole begins devouring the NKVD cameraman’s head. That’s right . . . Hungry Like The Wolf.

The immensely knowledgeable Stan Michna runs the DVD department at Sunrise Records, 336 Yonge Street in Toronto. Feel free to bring your DVD quest downtown.

/ dvds

SEPTEMBER 3 4 Frightful Films Collection 4-Movie Horror Unleashed Collection 4-Movies Western 5-Movie Kids Action Aftermath: An Inspector Banks Mystery AKB0048: The Complete First Season Aleksandr’s Price Ancient Aliens: Season 5, Volume 1 Angry Planet: Seasons 1 & 2 Arthur Newman The Battle of Algeirs: Criterion Collection Bela Lugosi’s Classic Horror Extravaganza Best of the Dick Van Dyke Show Best of Warner Bros.: 20 Film Collection Thrillers Beyond the Walls Blancanieves Blandings: Series 1 Bomb Girls: Season 1 Cake Boss: Season 5 Cockneys vs. Zombies Combat Classics Criminal Minds: Season 8 Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest Da Vinci’s Demons: The Complete First Season Dancing With the Stars: Sizzle & Groove Latin Dance Date Night Collection Elfen Lied Complete Collection Empire State The English Teacher Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie Extracted Feed Five Dolls for an August Moon Football Life: Barry Sanders Football Life: Bill Belichick Football Life: Mike Ditka Football Life: Season 2 The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert Friday the Thirteenth From Up on Poppy Hill Frontline: Rape in the Fields Frosty the Snowman Fun Size Ghost Hunters: Fan Favorites Good Companions Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild Haven: The Complete Third Season Hell’s Angels on Wheels Her Majesty Hideaway The High Bright Sun Hoarding Buried Alive Hoops & Yoyo’s Haunted Halloween 58

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SEP 3 Bomb Girls: Season 1

Modern title, old-school saga: Meg Tilly is among a talented cabal of actresses playing women who worked in munitions factories for the Allied forces in WWII Europe. [Muse Entertainment]

Hope for Love House Party Collection Vol. 3 I Do The Iceman Irresponsible Captain Tylor TV Series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Complete Season 8 Jesse Stone: The Complete Collection The Jungle Book: Return 2 the Jungle Lala-Oopsies: A Sew Magical Tale Leading Men Collection The League: Complete Season Four Lessons With the Hudson Greats The Lords of Salem Madonna:: Goddess of Pop The Man From Toronto Mike the Knight: Magical Mishaps MLB: 25 Greatest Postseason Home Runs Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space Most Wanted Westerns Vol. 1 Most Wanted Westerns Vol. 2 Movies 4 You: More Sci-Fi Classics Movies 4 You: Sci-Fi Classics Mulan: Rise of a Warrior Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie New Orleans Jazz Festival 1969 NFL Greatest Games: Seattle Seahawks Best of 2012 Now You See Me The Office: Season 9 One Piece Season 5 Voyage Two Parks & Recreation: Season Five Person of Interest: The Complete Second Season Petunia Pocoyo: Boo! Power Rangers Megaforce: Ultimate Team Power Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys R.L. Stine’s Haunting Hour Vol. 5 R.L. Stine’s Haunting Hour Vol. 6 Regular Show: Fright Pack Revolution: Complete First Season Rick James: Super Freak 1982 Rick Ross: King of Hustlin’

Road to Avonlea: Complete Series Route 66: Complete First Season Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reinideer Samuel L. Jackson Multi-Feature Santa Claus Is Coming to Town Scandal: Complete Second Season Scared Shrekless Scavengers Secret Disco Revolution Shyarknado The Shield: The Complete Series Sinbad: Complete First Season Slacker: Criterion Collection Slightly Single in L.A. Song of the South: Duane Allman & The Rise of the Allman Brothers Band Spark People Boot Camp Spartacus: War of the Damned – The Complete Second Season Stories We Tell The Stranger Within Top Cat: The Movie A Touch of Frost: Complete Series Tupac: Aftermath Tupac: Conspiracy The Twilight Zone: Season 5 Underground The Vampire Diaries: The Complete Fourth Season Violeta Went to Heaven The Wiggles: Wiggly Halloween Wild Kratts: Wildest Animal Adventures Wind at My Back: The Complete Series The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss: The Cat’s Adventures The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss: There Is Nothing to Fear in Here

SEPTEMBER 10 100 Family Cartoons 15-Film Christmas Collector’s Set Afro Ninja Air Power: Luftwaffe American Gangster Collection Animal Adventures Family Collection Army Wives: The Complete Seventh Season Astronaut: The Last Push Auto B Good: Blazing the Trail Auto B Good: Driving It Home Bad Kitties Best of Mama’s Family: Season 1 Best of Mama’s Family: Season 2 Best of One Step Beyond: 20 Tales Best of One Step Beyond: 40 Tales Best of TV Comedy Collection The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Sixth Season Bird With the Crystal Plumage The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond Bleach Box Set 18 Blood

Blood Thirst/Thirsty Dead Blue Bloods: The Third Season Blue Dream The Boondock Saints Boy Band Boys and Girls Cannubi: A Vineyard Kissed by God Castle: Complete Fifth Season Chasing Ice Chicago Fire: Season One Clunkers The Contractor The Count of Monte Cristo/Man Friday The Covenant: The Story of My People Dark Canvas The Day of the Dead and More Halloween Tales Death Force/Vampire Hookers Digimon Adventure Set Vol. 4 Digimon Frontier: The Complete Fourth Season Doll Squad/Mission: Killfast Dora the Explorer: Dora’s Great Roller Skate Adventure Eden Finding God’s Angel The Fly Frankenhooker Frankenstein’s Army From D-Day to Paris Gamera: War of Monsters Collection Great Comedy Teams Collection The Halloween Stories Collection Hammer of the Gods Haunted House: Demon Poltergeist Attack Haunted: Season 2 Holiday Collector’s Set Vol. 18 Homeland: The Complete Second Season Hostage Game House on Straw Hill Houseless How Sweet It Is How to Be the Lie of the Party Jesus Christ Superstar: Live Arena Tour

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox Kaboom: Birthday Celebrations La Cage Aux Folles: Criterion Collection Last Exile Fam: Season 2 Part One Last Exile Fam: Season 2 Part Two The Last Keepers Learn to Bellydance Lizzie Lone Ranger Legends Collection Love Is All You Need Lust of the Dead Luther 3 Madonna: MDNA World Tour Magic Puppy Manhunter The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis Season 1

SEP 17 Bates Motel: Season 1 Vera Farmiga (The Departed) is the teeth-gnashing highlight of this bizarre-butfun modern-day series about Psycho psycho Norman Bates’ teenage years. [A&E Television]

Marvel Knights: Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk Mediterranean Campaign The Moleman of Belmont Avenue Mother Riley Meets the Vampire My Refuge National Geographic: War Collection New World Order North African Campaign North Woods Law: Season 1 Occupant The Omen One Love Our Wild Hearts Papa Francisco: Nuestro Papa Parade’s End Patlabor TV Collection Two Peeples Ping Pong Pokemon Black & White Rival Destinies Set 1 Psychopaths & Maniacs Puppy in My Pocket: The Friendship Ceremony Reality Terror Night Revelation Road 2: The Sea of Glass and Fire Roger Corman: Monsters Rooster Teeth: Best Fails of the Weak Scanners II: The New Order/ Scanners III: The Takeover Scooby-Doo: 13 Spooky Tales Run for Your Rife! Screaming Skull Collection Secret Millionaires Club Vol. 2 The Shepherd: Border Patrol The Silence of the Lambs Sisters & Brothers Slip & Fall The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol The Smurfs: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Spookley the Square Pumpkin Star Trek Generations Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Star Trek Into Darkness Star Trek III: The Search for Spock/ Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier/Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Star Trek: Generations/Star Trek: First Contact Star Trek: Insurrection Star Trek: Insurrection/Star Trek: Nemesis Star Trek: Nemesis Star Trek: Stardate Collection Star Trek: The Motion Picture Star Trek: The Motion Picture/Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Stephen King Collector’s Set Story of White Coat: Indecent Acts Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season Tales From the Cryptkeeper: Myth Conception Tales From the Cryptkeeper: Transylvania Express Three Worlds Tickety Toc: Chime Time Adventures Twins of Evil Two Men in Manhattan Violet & Daisy War Witch A Waste of Shame We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks Wish You Were Here The Witness WWE: Legends of Mid-South Wrestling The X-Files: Fight the Future Yes, Virginia Yu-Gi-Oh Classic Season 1 Zombie Madness: The Ultimate Collection Zombies Exs

SEPTEMBER 17 1st Night Aberration Adventure Time: Jake the Dad Vol. 5 After All These years All’s Fair in Love & Advertising American Lowrider Ancient Earth Collection And Now a Word From Our Sponsor Anjelah Johnson: Homecoming Show Arrow: Complete First Season Arthritis Rx Ashamed Augustine Autumn Sonata: Criterion Collection Backyardigans: Christmas With the Backyardigans The Backyardigans: Snow Fort Bank Roll Barney: Most Huggable Moments Bates Motel: Season One Bedford Springs The Bees Behind the Candleabra Bernadette

Big Love Story Bless Me, Ultima The Bling Ring Bloodlust:: Director’s Cut Blue’s Clues: Blue’s First Holiday Blue’s Room: Holiday Wishes Brainwave Breakout Broken Code Bruce Lee Legacy Collection Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey/ Pursuit of the Dragon The Bystander Theory Call Me Kuchu Captive Beauty The Corrupted Crossroad Crying Dead CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – The Thirteenth Season CSI: Seasons 1-13 Cybornetics: Urban Cyborg Daddy, I’m a Zombie Dalziel & Pascoe: Season 8 Determinism Disconnect Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited 5-8 Doctor Who: The Ice Warriors The East Easy Rider: The Ride Back Electric Man Eyes of the Woods Fear Files: Horrific Tales of Hauntings, Vampires and Halloween Flushed Away/Shark Tale Frontline: Two American Families Future Diary: Part One Future Diary: Part Two Generation Now: Director’s Cut Gimme the Loot Go Diego Go: Diego Saves Christmas Go diego Go: Diego’s Arctic Rescue God’s Precious Jewels Golgo 13: The Complete Collection Green Acres: The Complete Third Season Grimm: Season Two Halloween Home Haunts Halloween Thrillers Vol. 1 Harbor Command Season 1 The Haunting of Helena Heartland: Complete Third Season Hidden in the Woods High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange: Season 3 The Hollow Crown: The Complete Series Horror Set Vol. 1 How to Train Your Dragon/Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon Iin the Fog Jackie Chan Beginnings: Snake & Crown Arts of Shaolin Java Heat Jeff Foxworthy’s Comedy Classics

The Jonas Project Joseph King of Dreams/Prince of Egypt Set Kung Fu Panda Kung Fu Panda/Secrets of the Furious Five Kung Fu Panda 2 Kyokushinkai: Kata Bunkai Vol. 3 The Lackey The Last Tycoon Leverage: The Fifth Season Lionhead Lost Tapes: Season 3 Lou Ragland & Hot Chocolate: Live Machete Language Madagascar Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Match Point Megamind/Megamind: Button of Doom The Mentalist: The Complete Fifth Season Michiko to Hatchin: Complete Series Part 1 & 2 Mr. Sophistication Muirhouse My Boo Naruto Shippuden the Movie: The Lost Tower Nashville: The Complete First Season National Geographic Eternal Enemies & Jewels of the Caribbean Sea National Geographic Sex – How It Works Nick Picks: Holiday Nickelodeon Favorites: Merry Christmas Nicktoons: Christmas Olivia: Merry Christmas, Olivia Over the Hedge Paranormal Aslyum Peter Gabriel: Live in Athens 1987 Play Harrison The Possession of Sophie Love Puss in Boots/Puss in Boots: The Three Diablos The Railways of Southern Germany Rolling Samuel Goldwyn 6-Film Collection Scare zone Scenic Route Self Storage Serial Buddies Shanghai Calling Shark Tale Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven Shrek Shrek Forever After/Donkey’s Christmas Shrek Simon Killer Sinbad/Road to El Dorado Slugterra: Slug Power Sofia the First: Ready to Be a Princess Spongebob Squarepants: Christmas

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Static: Volume 1 Suddenly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Enter Shredder Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rise of the Turtles Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles Forever Theatrical Horror Collection This Boy Caught a Merman Thomas & Friends: King of the Railway – The Movie Top Gear: The Worst Car in the History of the World The Trade off UFC 161 Unsolved Vault of Terror Vegas: The Complete Series Waking the Dead: The Complete Season Eight Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit/Chicken Run War of the Buttons The We and the i Wicked, Wicked Wild Things With Dominic Monaghan: Creepie Crawlers Wild Things With Dominic Monaghan: Deadliest Critters The Wind and the Long Black Scarf Wonder Pets: Save the Nutcracker Wonder Pets: Save the Reindeer World War Z WWE Summerslam 2013 Zero Hour: Complete First Season

SEPTEMBER 24 1/2 Revolution 2 Broke Girls: The Complete Second Season 21st Century Serial Killers Against the Ropes Ambush at Cimarron Pass American Dad: Volume 8 The Americano Angkor for Sale: Art Theft in Cambodia Anything Is Possible Apartment 1303 Arise of the Snake Woman Arizona Flats Ashes Ask the Dust Asylum Bang the Drum Slowly Barabbas Better Luck Tomorrow Betty Boop: The Essential Collection Vol. 2 The Big Combo Biker Boyz

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Sep 17 Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven

This ludicrously titled sequel to the ’90s camp classic pays “outrageous homage to the Showgirls legacy” by… sucking on purpose? Glenn Plummer of the original returns. [Rena Riffel Films}

Black Eye Black Label Society: Unblackened Blaise Brooks Clean Comedy on Dirty Sunset Blood of Redemption Bloody Homecoming The Book of Daniel Bopha Bryan Ferry: Live in Lyon Bug C.G. Jung: Wisdom of the Dream Captain America: The First Avenger Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter Carriers Casshern Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away Clockstoppers Cody the Robosapien Conversation With Chuck Smith Cousins Critical Condition Dark Girls David Bowie: The Man Who Wasn’t There DC Super Villains Superman: Worlds at War Dean Martin Celebrity Roast Dear Mom, Love Cher Dino Dan: Dino 4 Pack Doctor Who: The Complete Seventh Series Down to Earth Elaine Stritch at Liberty Euro Trapped Family Guy Vol. 11 Fear Strikes Out The Fighting Kentuckian Fill the Void Football Life: Immaculate Reception Football Life: Tim Tebow Football Life: Tom Landry Football Life: Tom Landry & Jimmy Johnson Football Life: Walter Peyton Foyle’s War Set 7 Gene Simmons Family Jewels: The Final Season

Genesis 7: The Complete Series Geronimo Stilton: Operation Shufongfong Get Rich or Die Tryin’ Ghost Hunters International: The Final Season Giants: Hometown Heroics Good Burger Greetings From Tim Buckley Guest Wife Hannibal: The Complete First Season Hawaii Five-O: The Third Season (2010) He’s Way More Famous Than You The Honeymooners How She Move I Spit on Your Grave 2 I.Q. In & Out In the Footsteps of Van Gogh In the House Iron Man 2 Iron Man 3 Is This a Zombie: Season 2 Jay Z: Fade to Black Kaijudo Rise of the Duelmasters: Darkness of Heart The Kings of Summer Ladybugs Law & Order Special Victims Unit: Year 14 Leaving Limbo Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit Losing Isaiah Lost & Found: American Treasures From the New Zealand Film Archive Made in Cartagena Part 1 Marci X Margot Fonteyn: A Portrait Maria Callas: Living and Dying for Art & Love Martin Lawrence Live: RunTelDat Marvel Comics Megadeth: Countdown to Extinction Live Modern Family: The Complete Fourth Season Movies 4 You: Timeless Military My Bloody Valentine My Brother the Devil National Geographic: Brain Games Season 2 Necessary Roughness The Neighbors: The Complete First Season Neil Young’s Western Heroes Neil Young: Heart of Gold Nelson Mandela: Accused Number 1 New Tricks: Collection Series 1-5 Night Falls on Manhattan Nirvana: Live and Loud

Nyan Koi Complete Collection One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das Paranormal Ghost Hauntings at the Turn of the Century The Perfect Score Plunder Road Pokemon: Lucario & The Mystery of Mew The Power of Love Power Rangers: Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers Prince fo Darkness Psycho II Psycho III Queens Blade Rebellion: Collection Raw Report: BMF Raw Report: Young Jeezy Red Reign Redemption Ringu 0 Ringu 2 Rio: Rainbow Gate Roberto Rossellini 3-Film Collection: Criterion Collection Room 237 Rudolf Nurveyev: A Portrait The Saint Savannah School Ties Scooby-Doo: 13 Spooky Tales RuhRoh Robot Sesame Street: C Is for Cooking Shack Out on 101 Sidewalks of New York Silent But Deadly The Smashing Punpkins: Oceania Live in NYC Soapdish Somebody Up There Likes Me Something in the Air South Park: The Complete Sixteenth Season Sparrow Strawberry Shortcake: Berry Bitty Mysteries Tam Lin Thor Tintin: Inside Herge’s Cartoon Archives Trekkies Two and a Half Men: The Complete Tenth Season Unfinished Song V/H/S/2 The Virgin Suicides Voyage of the Damned War & Peace Waterberry Tears What God Hath Wrought WWE: Triple H

/music/new_releases

SEPTEMBER 3 Acoustic Syndicate Rooftop Garden Ashanti Braveheart Bastille Bad Blood Tamar Braxton Love and War Califone Stitches JoAnn Campbell All the Hits: Her Complete Cameo Recordings Neko Case The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight… Raheem DeVaughn A Place Called Loveland Glasvegas Later… When the TV Turns to Static The Grahams Riverman’s Daughter Ariana Grande Yours Truly Grooms Infinity Caller Holograms Forever Holy Ghost Dynamics Stonewall Jackson Original Greatest Hits Jackson & His Computerband Glow Jaheim Appreciation Day Jefferson Starship Live in Central Park NYC May 12, 1975 John Legend Love in the Future Claudia Lennear Phew! Glenn Lewis Moment of Truth Mutiny Funk Road Mythos Grand Prix Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks North Mississippi Allstars World Boogie Is Coming Okkervil River The Silver Gymnasium Over the Rhine Meet Me at the Edge of the World Pepper Pepper Ponderosa Twins Plus One 2+2+1=Ponderosa Twins Plus One Roman Holliday Fire Me Up Ed Rowland & The Sweet Tea Project Devils n Darlins Royal Canoe Today We’re Believers Saliva In It to Win It The Smashing Pumpkins Oceania: Live in NYC

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Ministry

From Beer to Eternity

Sep 10

Just when you thought industrial-metal legend Al

Jourgensen was gonna call it quits, here comes this surprisingly inspired comeback (replete with the usual awful titular pun). [afm RECORDS]

Joanie Sommers Come Alive! The Complete Columbia Recordings Soundtrack Songs From Scandal: Music for Gladiators Stereophonics Graffiti on the Train Rod Stewart Rarities The Tubes Now/Young and Rich UB40 Getting Over the Storm Volcano Choir Repave White Poppy White Poppy Chelsea Wolfe Pain Is Beauty

SEPTEMBER 10 The Albertans Dangerous Anything Arctic Monkeys AM Booker T & The MG’s Soul Party Bowling for Soup Lunch. Drunk. Love Cactus Barely Contained: Studio Sessions Cactus Fully Unleashed: Live Gigs Vol. 1 The Clash Sound System (box set) The Clash The Clash Hits Back Covenant Leaving Babylon Sheryl Crow Feels Like Home Voo Davis Vicious Things Earth, Wind & Fire Now, Then & Forever Gloria Estefan The Standards Forest Fire Screens Gemini Syndrome LUX Gipsy Kings Savor Flamenco Goldfrapp Tales of Us Daryl Hall & John Oates No Goodbyes Hipsway Hipsway Infinity Shred Sanctuary

The Asylum Recordings Vol. 1 Jo Jo Gunne The Asylum Recordings Vol. 2 George Jones Amazing Grace Kaskade Atmosphere Mark Knopfler Privateering The Letter Black The Letter Black Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis Killer Country Jerry Lee Lewis When Two Worlds Collide MiniBoone MiniBoone Ministry From Beer to Eternity Janelle Monae The Electric Lady Elliott Murphy Lost Generation & Night Lights: The RCA Years Newsboys Restart Oh No Fiasco No One’s Gotta Know Rank and File The Slash Years Jeannie C. Riley Harper Valley PTA: Best of the Plantation Years The Rubens The Rubens The Silencers Rock N Roll Enforcers Steep Canyon Rangers Tell the Ones I Love Thievery Corporation Saudade Emiliana Torrini Tookah Toy Soldiers The Maybe Boys Trombone Shorty Say That to Say This UK Decay New Hope for the Dead Keith Urban Fuse Various Artists I Fall to Pieces: Gems From the Brunswick UK Vaults 1959-1962 Various Artists Love Me or Leave Me: The Bethlehem Records Story 19581962 Various Artists Music for the Millions: Gems From Bell Records USA 19561960 Various Artists The History of Blue Beat: The Birth of Ska Various Artists War Paint: The Gone Records Story 19571962 Jo Jo Gunne

Nirvana Turn Around, Look at Me J. Roddy Walston & The Business Essential Tremors Steve Wariner It Aint’ All Bad The Weeknd Kiss Land Ronnie Wood 1234 Brian Wright Rattle Their Chain The Vogues

SEPTEMBER 17 Birds Above Guitarland TRUE Live at the Academy of Music 1971: The Rock of Ages Concerts (box set) Berlin Animal The Blackbyrds Walking in Rhythm: The Essential Selection 1973-1980 The Bloody Beetroots Hide BlouseImperium Cloud Control Dream Cave Elvis Costello & The Roots Wise Up Ghost Billy Currington We Are Tonight Deaf Havana Old Souls The Devil Wears Prada 8:18 Mike Doughty Circles JD Eicher & The Goodnights Into Place Roky Erickson Don’t Slander Me Roky Erickson Gremlins Have Pictures Eve to Adam Locked & Loaded Five for Fighting Bookmarks Renee Fleming Guilty Pleasures Grateful Dead Sunshine Daydream Grouplove Spreading Rumours Islands Ski Mask Garland Jeffreys Truth Serum Jack Johnson From Here to Now to You Mark Lanegan Imitations Johnny Lang Fight for My Soul Lori Lieberman Bricks Against the Glass Pete Anderson Avicii The Band

SEPTEMBER 24

In Utero (20th Anniversary Deluxe Ed.)

sep 24

A decent amount of (already available, but good) b-sides

and live cuts are padded onto Kurt and co.’s outstanding final effort. Teenage angst still pays off well. [Geffen Records]

Manic Street Preachers Rewind the Film Tift Merritt Traveling Companion MGMT MGMT Mum Smilewound The Naked and Famous In Rolling Waves Tom Odell Long Way Down Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band Take Me to the Land of Hell Alan Parsons Project I Robot: Legacy Edition Placebo Loud Like Love Pleasure Glide: The Essential Selection 1975-1982 Potty Mouth Hell Bent Johnathan Rice Good Graces Lucy Rose Like I Used To The Sadies Internal Sounds Said the Whale Hawaii San Fermin San Fermin Sebadoh Defend Yourself Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin Fly by Wire Sponge Stop the Bleeding Wesley Stace Self-Titled Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas Loveless Fascination Tantric 37 Channels Us3 Hand on the Torch: 20th Anniversary Edition Various Artists Rick Ross Presents Self Made Vol. 3 Tony Joe White Hoodoo Windhand Soma Yip Deceiver Medallius Chris Young A.M. Zendaya Zendaya

The Last Waltz (box set) Rosemary Butler Rose Cher Closer to the Truth Chvrches The Bones of What You Believe Clanaad Nadur Deer Tick Negativity Dream Theater Dream Theater Matthew Good Arrows of Desire Gov’t Mule Shout! Ha Ha Tonka Lessons Sammy Hagar Sammy Hagar & Friends Shawn Holt & The Teardrops Daddy Told Me Icona Pop This Is Icona Pop Into it. Over It Intersections Alan Jackson The Bluegrass Album Tiff Jimber The Foundation Elton John The Diving Board Kings of Leon Mechanical Bull Kneebody The Line Lenny Kravitz Are You Gonna Go My Way (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) Krewella Get Wet Larleighblu Forget Me Not Mazzy Star Seasons of Your Day Neal McCoy Prode: A Tribute to Charley Pride Metallica Metallica Through the Never Willie Nelson To All the Girls… Nirvana In Utero: 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Oh Land Wish Bone R5 Louder Frankie Rose Herein Wild Sting The Last Ship Roosevelt Sykes The Original Honeydripper Allen Toussaint Songbook Various Artists Woodstock: 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur’s Farm (box set) The Waitresses Just Desserts: The Complete Waitresses The Band

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! S I H T R E V DISCO ums You Need… Five New Alb

Bastille Bad Blood

the 1975 thE 1975

Bad Blood the #1 UK debut album from Bastille featuring the singles: ‘PoMPEII,’ ‘laURa PalMER’ & ‘FlaWS’

the long awaited debut album featuring the singles ‘SEX,’ ‘ChoColatE’ & ‘thE CItY’

Don’t miss BASTILLE LIVE in Toronto at the Opera House September 25th.

availaBle Now

Don’t miss THE 1975 LIVE in Toronto at the Mod Club October 13th.

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Black Joe JF RoBitaille lewis RIval hEaRtS ElECtRIC SlavE Recorded at house of Black Joe lewis’ new album, Electric Slave, is available august 27th via vagrant/Universal Music Canada. Most of Electric Slave was produced by GRaMMY award winner Stuart Sikes (White Stripes, Cat Power, Modest Mouse).

availaBle aUGUst 27

GoldFRapp talES oF US

Miracles, a legendary studio faithfully utilized by hidden Cameras and Royal City, Rival Hearts was produced by andy Magoffin (The Constantines, Great lake Swimmers). on Rival Hearts, Robitaille’s true charm as a born storyteller emerges. Robitaille’s sanguine yearning feels almost like leonard Cohen covering lou Reed’s Transformer, or Robyn hitchcock fronting Modern lovers. It’s timeless. Personal. Universal.

their sixth album, Tales Of Us is written and produced by band members alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, and was recorded at their studio in the English countryside. a sumptuous body of work, Tales Of Us has been two years in the crafting and is their most narrative, cinematic and intimate recording to date. Nothing in their accomplished back catalogue has hinted at the new lyrical breadth that the band have introduced to Tales Of Us.

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