August Needle

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Laying It On He doesn’t know what rhymes with “hug me,” but Robin Thicke has owned the summer anyway

by Gary Graff

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It’s been a decade since Robin Thicke released his debut album, the little-noticed A Beautiful World.

“Yeah, man, it’s been 10 years of blood, sweat and tears,” he says with a laugh over the phone—but his world as a recording artist has certainly become a little more beautiful during that interim.

After that modest debut, the son of actors Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring reeled off a series of three consecutive Top 10 albums, including 2006’s platinum The Evolution of Robin Thicke, along with a string of hits such as “Lost Without U,” “Can U Believe,” “Magic,” “The Sweetest Love” and “Sex Therapy.” And his latest outing, Blurred Lines, got off to a big start when the title track and first single gave Thicke his first-ever No. 1 entry on the Billboard Hot 100.

Photo by: Anthony Mandler

Blurred Lines is available now from Interscope

“Y’know, music is my life force and has been ever since I was a 12-year-old kid,” says Thicke, who’s now 35. “It’s my obsession, my best friend and my worst enemy— and everything in between. You’re always trying to dig deep and make something special—whatever special means.

“Half the time I feel like I’ve made great music and half the time I feel like I haven’t done anything yet. I think that’s kind of what an artist has to go through to appreciate the hard work and the stuff you’ve made—and then you have to go, ‘Man, I can do so much better...’”

Thicke certainly applied some elbow grease in making Blurred Lines. “I always write about 40 or 50 songs per album,” he acknowledges. “Most of them are just my musings of my life and my feelings and my problems—but that doesn’t mean they’re entertaining.” This time, however, he got a bit of quality control from his wife, Paula Patton, that gave Blurred Lines a much more upbeat feel.

“We would hang out at the end of the night, and I would play her the songs I was working on, and we would dance around and be so happy,” Thicke recalls. “And then some of my sadder and more depressing songs would come on, and we would always want to go back to the top and keep dancing and having a good time.

“So, I think I just ended up making an escape album. I never plan it, but I think I did my best to make my wife and I have a chance to escape every night, and I felt like that made for a great album.”

Thicke also expanded his roster of collaborators on Blurred Lines. He worked not only with longtime cohort Pharrell, but also made songs with Dr. Luke (“Give It 2 U,” featuring Kendrick Lamar), Timbaland (“Take It Easy on Me”) and will.i.am (“Go Stupid 4 U,” “Feel Good” and “Give It 2 U”).

“I’ve always kind of come from the band model,” Thicke says. “I’ve always tried to make records I could duplicate with a fouror five-piece band, so there’s still that kind of core feeling on some of the songs. But when you work with some of these other

producers, they’re about pushing the sonics forward and into the next realm and the next level. It inspires me in the way they can do things I wouldn’t even think to do.”

The track “Ain’t No Hat 4 That,” meanwhile, was co-written with his father.

“My dad was at my studio, and I was in the middle of writing a song, and he sat down with me and had some great lyric ideas,” Thicke says. “It’s the first song he and I have ever written together since I was a teenager. And my little three-yearold son’s voice starts the song, so there’s three generations of Thicke on that one, which is pretty cool.”

Thicke isn’t rushing to get on the road to promote Blurred Lines, however, although he’ll be making the rounds of TV and radio to make some noise about it, and then mount a tour in the new year. But he plans to keep his focus solidly on music, even after making his feature film debut in 2012’s Abby in the Summer and entering the reality TV world as a judge on ABC’s Duets.

“The TV show was just a summer fling, no repeat affair,” he says with a laugh. “The producers were amazing and everybody on the show was amazing, but it didn’t feel right to me. I tried to fit in, but I’m not meant for those kinds of things. It’s just not my bag. And now that I’m having some success, I would rather milk just being a singer–songwriter and performing rather than trying to be a TV personality or an actor. I would rather make music. I’m really not that comfortable with those other things.”

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/music

Young Guns fun. take their time crafting the follow-up to Some Nights

by Gary Graff fun. have surely been having some good times since early 2012.

The group’s second album, Some Nights, went platinum and launched the chart-topping single “We Are Young,” with Janelle Monae, as well as the hits “Carry On” and the album’s anthemic title track. fun. also scooped up Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Song of the Year and wound up headlining summer amphitheaters, as well as playing festivals in Europe Frontman Nate Ruess, who put fun. together with Jack Antonoff (Steel Train) and Andrew Dost (Anathallo) after breaking up his previous band, the Format, has found this level of success to be “weird. It’s crazy and as equally stressful as it is enjoyable. We had been expanding at a nice rate since we started, but then this whole thing happened and everything just changed drastically.

“I mean, we never thought we’d get nominated for a Grammy. I think playing Saturday Night Live felt like an attainable, ultimate goal. But having a No. 1 hit song or whatever else has come with it, none of that stuff ever felt attainable as a group of people who wanted to make music and do it in a realistic manner.”

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Now fun. face the challenge of doing it again. The trio plans to come off the road during the fall, and while Antonoff—who’s also written songs for Tegan and Sara and Sara Bareilles Some Nights is this year—says a few ideas are lurking, available now from fun. is not a band that tends to go into Fueled by Ramen a project with much of a head start.

“The way we work is pretty spontaneous and pretty quick,” he explains. “Some Nights was written and recorded in a two-month time period, and I think that’s one of the elements that made it successful as an album. It should be a documentation of a band in a moment, not a giant, three-year process.

“So, the next album will be the same thing. I assume some time [at] the beginning of next year, we’d like to be in the studio, but that all depends on when the feeling hits and when we have a concept that’s worthy. Until we have the parameters of what the album really is, it’s hard to hone in on them and work specifically on it, and we’re not there yet.”

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Method Of Mayhem Be it her films or her music, Soko struggles to keep her manic energy in check It was an unusually demanding film

script, physically. The first half called for its female lead to keep her right eye closed steadily, a feat that could only be accomplished by gluing her eyelashes together. The second half required her to open both eyes, but clench her left hand into a twisted claw, then writhe through paralytic spasms on the floor of a Belle Époque Parisian psychiatric hospital, while rarely speaking any lines of dialogue.

So, what on Earth about Alice Winocour’s new docudrama Augustine proved alluring to French actress/chanteuse Soko, who auditioned with more than 800 other contenders for the role of the titular maid who becomes a patient of famed neurologist Dr. Charcot (Vincent Lindon)?

“All of it!” she giddily exclaims. “And everything that is going to make me not look like me, to where I can’t even recognize myself when I look in the mirror? That’s what I wanted! For me, it was the most exciting thing.”

Soko—née one Bordeaux-born Stéphanie Sokolinski, who also just issued her lo-fi, Leon-

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ard-Cohen-cryptic, English-language debut, I Thought I Was An Alien (Community Music)— delighted in the method-acting process. As Augustine—first diagnosed with the thenpopular women’s condition of “hysteria”—is gradually cured of her seizures through Charcot’s Victorian-era hypnosis, her portrayer felt equally transformed.

“Every day I had an hour of makeup, just to glue my eyelashes, and it was definitely superweird,” she says. “And it gave me a whole new perspective through the character, because suddenly you have to look at the world a different way. You can’t see half of it, so I thought, ‘This is how she must have felt.’ But after the film?” She sighs. “You’re totally fucked, and you go into therapy and start taking pills just to feel better.”

Soko isn’t kidding. Even though she’s a silver-screen vet overseas, with more than a dozen movies to her credit (such as Didier Bourdon’s Madame Irma and Xavier Giannoli’s À l’origine, which earned her a 2010 César nomination for most promising actress), she

doesn’t consider herself much of a thespian.

“But I can’t do anything halfway—I’m always 1,000 percent into things, fully involved in everything I choose to do,” says Soko.

So, when Augustine repeatedly slapped or punched herself during filming, Soko came home bruised, as well, then fell into the rhythm of the abusive behavior. “I would punch myself in the face, like really hard,” she says. “And that kind of stayed with me afterwards—I was on tour at the time, and I would, out of the blue, just hit myself a lot. Augustine carried with me, and I just felt super-suicidal.”

On tour at the time, Soko began cancelling show after show. Eventually, she couldn’t leave her house, and just waking up each morning proved to be a Herculean task. Her brother finally insisted that she see a therapist and be prescribed some sort of medication.

“So, they gave me mild anti-anxiety pills, and after 10 days I felt better,” she says. “And I wouldn’t hit my face on the wall anymore and do other crazy things I’d been doing. But I’m already very hyperactive—I have crazy ADD,

photo by Curtis Kulig

and I’m always touching something with my hands. I just have weird gestures, I guess; I have issues. I’m in the studio right now, and I’m totally stressed out. I just don’t want to deal with real life.”

That same irrepressible, kinetic energy— which, granted, makes her appear rather daffy at times—is also Soko’s greatest strength.

She’s temporarily residing in Los Angeles, where she’s not only in the studio, but ready to leave it, with a completed sophomore album titled My Dreams Dictate My Reality.

“Because to me, reality is terrifying,” she says. “All I want to do during my day is write music and create things. And making music is more what I do now, and I’m very happy doing it, and I feel independent, and it brings me a lot of satisfaction to be able to it on my own. But everything that’s real life? Like booking plane tickets or booking shows, or making sure that your band is available? I’m just like, ‘No! I don’t want to know about it! I just want to write!’”

In actuality, Alien is more than a year old; it came out in 2012 overseas. And it’s difficult to gauge what lyrical part(s) Soko will be playing on the upcoming Dreams. But her first official release is a whimsical, often funereal wonder. You can almost picture it being sung by a spasmodic, straitjacketed Augustine in some places, like carpe-diem dirge “We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow,” gentle acoustic-plucked threat “Don’t You Touch

Me” and beatbox-metallic processional “Destruction Of The Disgusting Ugly Hate,” with its eerie observation “Scars on my heart can’t you see/What have you done to me/Scars on my arms can’t you see/Where I am sinking.”

The album closes with “Why Don’t You Eat Me Now You Can,” on which her charming, peaceand-love rasp chirps to some wayward lover, “Take a picture of me in your head when I’m dead/’Cause you won’t forget about me/I will scream in your dreams.” Nice way to end a relationship. But that’s part of Soko’s attraction, too; she’s Addams Family-creepy, and quite happily so.

It started a long time ago, the 27-year-old reckons. Her father died when she was only five, and family life just went downhill from there. “I was going through so much darkness throughout my childhood,” she says.

“First, I was having crazy nightmares when I was a kid. You know the whole thing about indigo children? It’s the wave of kids that were born in the ’80s that were really connected with higher powers somehow and had dreams come true and visions. When I was young, each time I was having nightmares, someone would die, so I thought that I was a witch and I was killing people. That made me go through a lot of therapy—I really thought that I was evil.”

The aspiring actress left home at 16 to study her craft in exotic Paris. “And I was learning life from then on, until I felt like ev-

erything that happened before I was 16 never happened—it felt like another life, like I was born at 16,” she says. She began composing, exorcising her demons in song, until she logged her first hit single in 2007, in Denmark, of all places, a little ditty dubbed “I’ll Kill Her.” By 2009, she’d announced via MySpace that her musical career was finished and that she herself was “dead.” A few months later, she resurrected herself with a new single, “I’m So Ready To Be A Good Man.” “I’d just moved to L.A. then, and I’d wanted to change my life,” she says. “But I was just overwhelmed, and I don’t think I had the right people around me— they weren’t very supportive.”

Now, Soko finds catharsis, even some selfhelp, through songwriting. “Death is probably the main thing that I write about—fearing it, or wanting to live my life as fast as I can because I’m petrified,” she says. “Every time I go to bed, I wonder if I’m ever going to wake up, because my dad actually died in bed. So, music has helped a lot. I want to do alchemy with music. I want to turn every dark thing that happened in my life into something creative.”

And the bubbly brunette understands one ADD irony—if she had been alive back in Augustine’s time, she would have been instantly misdiagnosed with hysteria and locked up, as well. “And I find that pretty funny,” she says. “I would have been right there in the asylum with her!” —Tom Lanham

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Through Being Cool Roots-rocker Tim Easton finds himself right at home in the fertile Nashville scene “This town is full of hardworking, talented

people,” Tim Easton says of his new hometown of Nashville. “I just got back from buying my morning coffee, and the guy behind the counter was a singer/songwriter. Everyone sitting in the café was jotting down lyrics or singing a melody into their iPhone. There’s something in the air that’s inspiring. When your neighbors are all artists, writers and musicians, that energy keeps you at the top of your game.”

Easton has been singing and writing songs since he was 14 years old. He never considered another career. “I used to write a lot of poetry,” he says. “One day, my older brother told me I could turn them into songs if I knew how to play guitar. I started playing music later that day, and I’ve never stopped.”

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After finishing college, Easton hit the road with his guitar and spent seven years singing and playing on European street corners.

“I rambled around without having to pay attention to anybody’s needs but my own,” he says. “It sharpened my performing and improvisational skills and helped me roll with the punches, no matter what the situation was. I was spoiled a bit by the absolute freedom, but I compiled journals full of experiences that I can draw on for my songs.”

When he got back to Ohio, Easton joined the Haynes Boys, a roots-rock outfit that made one album before breaking up. Free again, Easton picked up his guitar and returned to the road, touching down long enough to make nine albums that earned him a loyal following with their blend of gritty

roots-rock and heartfelt songwriting. Every LP took a slightly different approach and his latest, Not Cool, shows off his love of rockabilly and early R&B. “I want to make a record as fast as possible,” he says, “in the studio with a live band, sticking to the primal qualities of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Easton found the musicians who helped out on the album at Robert’s Western World, the venue that gave BR549 its start. “I saw these guys—J.D. Simo on guitar and drummer Jon Radford—playing there and hired them and their pals,” he says. “When you give them a three-chord R&B song, they tear into it.”

Easton encouraged the band to add its own ideas to the arrangements, and the result roars out of the speakers like a souped-up hot-rod Lincoln. “We made the album in five days,” says Easton. “There’s no fat on it, just 10 songs clocking in at about 30 minutes.”

The LP includes “Crazy Motherfucker From Shelby, Ohio” (a jaunty rockabilly rave-up), “Lickety Split” (a sly greasy rocker) and the title track (a ballad of loss and regret, featuring one of Easton’s most poignant vocals).

Not Cool is out on Easton’s own imprint, Campfire Propaganda. “Having your own label is another exciting and terrifying part of making a living as a musician,” he says. “But I’m not complaining. At this point, I feel like I have it made.” —j. poet

photo by Tyler McCay

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photo bY jeff hahn

The Unreal Life Ex-Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg starts over yet again with the restless, yearning Hebronix Rolling out of bed after making music until

four in the morning, Daniel Blumberg scans his schedule of interviews, finds my name and remembers the important part. “Is it Herbowitz?” he asks somewhere in Denver, where’s he about to record his second album as Hebronix.

“Almost. Berkowitz.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I saw that name, and I was like, ‘I bet he’s going to ask about the Jewishness of Hebronix.’ Because I thought, ‘Oh, God, that’s going to be the first question in every interview, and I’m not going to know how to answer it, and why did I decide on the name?’ But it hasn’t come up, and I’ve been happy it hasn’t come up. Then I saw your name, and I was like, ‘We’re going to have a nice conversation about Judaism.’”

So, we do—well, sort of—in between questions about Unreal (ATP), his first Hebronix album since leaving Yuck, the band he fronted from 2010 to 2012, when he quit “work on other things.” Now that it’s released, we can understand why he left. Produced by Neil Hagerty (Royal Trux, Howling Hex), Unreal isn’t Yuck, and it isn’t supposed to be.

The clouds of guitar noise that saturate the album are quieter, moodier, more unsettling; the singing wearier, stretched thin as an old E string; and the songs more introspective, turning inward with lines like, “I’ve got some things to do/Some private things to do” and “I’m thinking about things/I already know.”

It’s dark, swirling, cerebral music that’s inescapably lonely, restless, yearning, adrift in melancholy—in a word: Jewish. But Blumberg—who grew up attending cheder, the Jewish version of Sunday school (where he met Max Bloom), and visiting a kibbutz in Israel (where he met Jonny Rogoff)—says he doesn’t hear the connection, even though the album’s first video shows a group of Hasidic Jews driving a truckload of amplifiers through his neighborhood. “It’s weird, because I made it six months ago … so I’ve lived with it a bit … and I’m trying to remember what I was thinking at the time, but nothing is springing to mind,” he says, pausing to refill his first cup of coffee.

“Going into the studio with Neil, it’s difficult to gauge what the result is going to be.

That was the case with the album, especially because the songs are very long, and we were working quite fast, all in two and a half

weeks. We didn’t sit down beforehand and say, ‘Today, we’re going to do this.’ A player would start, and maybe the harmony would come first, on saxophone, so I wouldn’t initially recognize it, and then the guitar parts I’d written on the four-track would emerge, and the melody, and I wanted Neil to have the freedom to arrange and be instinctive, to feel like it was his record as well. And it was exciting, not knowing, not being in control.”

By Blumberg’s count, Unreal is his fifth consecutive debut album in the last six years.

First, there was Cajun Dance Party’s The Colourful Life (2008), begun while he and Bloom were 15 years old. (“It was absolutely terrible,” says Blumberg. “No, I think I’m just getting past the point of being embarrassed—I think it’s great.”) A year later, as Daniel In The Lion’s Den—an Old Testament reference he thinks is “very Christian”—he completed a self-titled album with members of Lambchop, but couldn’t escape his old recording contract. (“The album didn’t ever come out,” he says. “Well, by the time I managed to get it out in Japan—you know, legally—I just wasn’t interested anymore.”)

Next came 2010’s Yuck, arguably the best indie-rock album of the year. (“We were 19 when we started the band, and I was having lots of fun, you know, living at home, smoking weed, getting high,” he says. “Then I moved out and we started playing lots of shows … and going on tour for a very, very long time … and playing those songs over and over again … and then I came home.”) Between tours, Blumberg started a label, Boiled Egg, to distribute his drawings and musical side projects, including 2011’s piano-driven Forget, backed by his Lambchop friends and credited to Oupa, which is Afrikaans slang for “old man.” By then, after numberless performances of “Get Away” and the boredom that came with them, Blumberg was glad to get away from the band, and it was only a matter of time before Yuck formally announced its return to the studio without him.

“The idea of performing the same thing every night seems strange to me at the moment,” says Blumberg, who’s planning to play only a handful of shows in 2013, with the next one scheduled for November. “It’s a weird thing with music: the performance aspect and the writing aspect, and the fact that most artists play live, just by default. From the

business perspective, it’s quite clear—it’s a way for musicians to make money. But I’m not sure I quite understand it as a process at all; it seems a bit bizarre.”

He’d rather record something new, which is why he’s in Denver, staying at the home of Charles Ballas, who plays (uncredited) keyboards on Unreal and has been working on electronics for the upcoming sessions with Hagerty. He’d rather talk about something else, like the video he shot for “Viral” a few days earlier, when he ate “hundreds and hundreds of eggs” and watched Nastassja Kinski’s daughter dance around the director’s house. But mostly, he’d rather draw, which he calls “the most satisfying thing that I do.”

Blumberg draws every day, filling a new notebook every two or three days, when it becomes time to start another. He draws at home, he draws on the road, he draws in the studio; and one of the things he loves about drawing, and why it feels so meditative, is that “it doesn’t involve language. I mean, it is language in a way, but it doesn’t involve words.”

For the cover of Unreal, he’s chosen a drawing of two genderless naked figures, one sitting on a motorcycle, kind of, while the other— which only has half a body—floats in mid-air.

Or maybe it has a wheel instead of legs, and there’s a diagram of motorcycle handlebars in between, with arrows leading to the different parts. He wanted “some sort of machinery involved in the cover,” because that’s how the album feels to him, and because he felt the picture somehow fit the name Hebronix.

“I’m not that interested in the process of dissecting … I think it would … well, it’s always felt slightly unnecessary to … footnote the lyrics or the drawings,” says Blumberg, with the sound of birds singing in the background. “It’s weird with names, I’ve been doing this for eight years, since I was 15, and I’ve had quite a few different names. One of the big things for me was that Hebronix worked nicely with my drawings. I had it written next to one of my drawings, which is important to me because I use my drawings for my albums … So, there’s no real serious connection to Judaism. I guess it was a bit of an homage to Silver Jews, though that’s not a very interesting story about the name, unfortunately … It’s not something that I’ve thought about; it’s been more of … an experience, where I’m still learning. It still feels quite new, making records, and the ones I’ve made, I guess I’ve approached them with … curiosity.” —Kenny Berkowitz

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The Rediscovered American

Call him prolific, call him profound— just don’t call Van Dyke Parks complex

With Van Dyke Parks’ new Songs Cycled (Bella Union), the renowned composer, arranger and vocalist (in that order), not only releases his first album of originals since 1995’s Orange Crate Art (with Brian Wilson singing), but lends his usually complex creations a renewed sense of simplicity. The thoughts may be determinedly complicated and touched by the soul of social protest, but Parks’ music is deliciously direct, while remaining as elegant as anything he’s done for himself (à la 1968’s chamber-pop initiator Song Cycle) or others (the Beach Boys and Rufus Wainwright amongst them).

Yet, no matter what good you say about his genius, Parks has a self-deprecating remark at the ready. Tell him you’ve spoken previously, and he’s quick to respond with, “And you’re back for more?

What lie did I tell you?” When we discuss the vocals that playfully haunt several standards (“what I did to ‘Sassafras,’ I should be hung; it’s Spike Jones on a bad day”) or his own songs, Parks takes himself down. “I wish I had better chops, the voice I had before I started smoking,” he says. “I’m nostalgic about the time in my life when I had that falsetto break.”

Parks knows that critics hear an old-timey longing for the past in his music, but he disavows the accusation. Listening to Songs Cycled’s lyrics and the subjects tackled—9/11, Wall Street’s fall, Hurricane Katrina—there’s an immediacy of tone, a sound as bold as fresh ink on paper.

“You got that right,” he says with confident pride. “In every case, they were written within days of when, say, the Twin Towers fell or when Orleans Parish’s levee broke. It was spasmodic.

“Yet, I didn’t want to capitalize in any way on tragedy,” he continues, alluding to Neil Young’s instant call for retaliation in the wake of 9/11. “That was stupid. Ever hear of the idea of writing a letter when you first get angry, then putting it away for a minute? My parents taught me that.”

The intricacy of language and the complexity of thought are honed to a sharp point. As for the melodies and arrangements on Songs Cycled, there’s an accessibility that’s rarely witnessed in his catalog.

“It’s funny you say that,” says Parks. “It has to do with economy, certainly. And yet, there is a standard prejudice amongst pop critics that my work has always been too complex. Now I say, ‘In comparison to what?’ If you compare it what I listen to and adore, my stuff is pretty direct and simple. I’m far less complicated than early Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman or even Arnold Schoenberg, whose works I sang when I was 12. Then again, yes, compared to Arlo Guthrie, I’m complex.”

When I tell him that could be his epitaph—“less complex than Arnold Schoenberg, more complex than Arlo Guthrie”—Parks lets out a hearty laugh. He’s also quick to talk about the difficulties in releasing music at 70.

“You know, I went for 10 years hoping I’d get a call, someone begging to hear another record from me, which didn’t happen.” (He credits Bella Union with “validating” him by releasing Songs Cycled). “So many of my peers have been shunted aside at the peak of their powers. Like them, I have lots of songs in me. All I do, morning noon and night, is be engaged in music. It would be a kick to do this again.”

—A.D. Amorosi

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photo bY Henry Diltz

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All Blown Up You will know psych/punk upstart Destruction Unit by the trail of dead When shards of glass ricocheted off our

shins, we were sold. MAGNET had dispensed with any sense critical distance, abandoned our usual position at the back of the room and pushed all the way up front to see if Destruction Unit lived up to the name (and hype). One of our most trusted musical confidants had been telling us for weeks that this Tempe, Ariz., quintet was the “real deal,” that its live show was delivered with an intensity unrivaled on American stages in the year 2013. And when that broken glass began flying around— while we were in mid-spin trying to dodge the business end of a lunging Telecaster, mind you—we knew that this troop of psychedelic desert-punks were not fucking around.

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Built around frontman Ryan Rousseau (former Reatards member, associate of longrunning Memphis-based lo-fi empire Goner Records), Destruction Unit has evolved over the last decade from obscuro side project to a force to be reckoned with. On the eve of Deep Trip, its first proper studio album after years of independently produced cassettes and under-the-radar releases, the band is primed for a takeover, crafting a sound that’s as mind-bending as it is gut-kicking, as brutally hardcore as it is spaced out. Destruction Unit stands alone in the wasteland of American music, psychedelic warriors in a world where everybody has submitted to the boredom of benzodiazepines, when honest experience and cosmic soul-searching has been forsaken in favor of meme-ready motivational mantras. This is not music for idle listening or wistful nostalgia; this is the sound of your primal brain, that ape brain buried deep inside all of us, fighting its way through the fog of modern brain death.

“People who like it will come up and say, ‘Man that was fucking awesome. You guys are wild, thank you,’” says Rousseau after the show—which, it should be noted, was so loud that I was unable to hear anything but the steady hum of tinnitus for the next two days. “But nobody’s going to come up and say, ‘You fucking suck,’ ’cause they think we’ll get in their fucking face.”

“No, that definitely has happened before,” says guitarist and de facto tour manager Jes Aurelius, as we sit around smoking cigarettes on the front porch of the Stone Fox in Nashville.

“No, who?”

“Mostly people that work at the places we play.”

photo by Kaleb Marshall

“But they don’t come to up you face-toface and say, ‘Hey buddy, I don’t like what you’re doing,’” Rousseau insists.

“That has definitely happened,” Aurelius counters. “Dude, you almost got in a fight in Austin because the dude was like, ‘Fuck you, what are you guys doing?’”

“And I told him, ‘Fuck you, you wanna go out back?’ And he ran away.”

“They don’t ever do anything, but they confront you every night!”

“Well, fuck them,” Rousseau shrugs. “We’re here, we do our thing.”

It’s this attitude, this casually confrontational trouble-magnet vibe, that separates Destruction Unit from the rest of its peers in the underground rock world. The band refuses to scale back its sound to make it palatable for the uninitiated. It makes no overtures to the world of pop or the prevailing trends of indie rock, turning all the way up in a sonic middle finger to the mundane, milquetoast and meandering. Destruction Unit isn’t just running through the anti-authoritarian playbook, practicing the poses for a generation that confuses linkbait with activism—from the second its amps turn on until the moment the band takes them offstage, Destruction Unit is making a very profound attack on the nor-

mative and unimaginative.

Destruction Unit—on album, onstage—is a physical experience, a physical assault on the psyche, literally pummeling your sensory organs into submission, flaying them beyond recognition. The music veers between the ethereal and the visceral—Deep Trip evokes the catalogs of Hawkwind as much as ’80s hardcore punk like the Wipers or Process Of Weeding Out-era Black Flag. It’s propelled by Rousseau’s dark, distant incantations that feel like they are summoning forces from beyond the edge of the universe to shred the very fabric of space-time. This is not the hey-ho/handclap claptrap of rock radio, newage noodling or celebrity grandkids playing garage rock. This is apocalypse rock, entropy in action, the punk spirit slam-dancing in a cosmos-sized pit, our planet caught in the fray. Destruction Unit is not music for the faint of heart or weak of will—this will fuck you up.

“I’d drive trucks, but I don’t give a fuck about that; this is our passion,” says Rousseau. “When people see somebody up there not give a fuck about living or dying, they get scared for their lives and they like that ... it’s not about violence or whatever; it’s just about being alive.”

“People connect to people being real,” says Aurelius, “whether that’s someone getting onstage and fucking killing themselves or whether it’s just someone getting onstage legitimately spilling their emotions. If you’re being real, it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s all connected—I don’t know how shit works; it just works,” says Rousseau. “In my opinion, I know how the world operates, so I’m just going to go with the flow, do my thing.”

“It’s just about moving everything forward,” says Aurelius. “There are a lot of people that are hesitating, holding things back, and if you sound good, that’s cool. But the world needs folks to push it in the right direction.”

And on Deep Trip, Destruction Unit pushes hard. Songs like six-minute space ritual “The Bumpy Road” and out-of-phase post-punk onslaught “Control The Light” are a course-correction for an entire culture, a force so strong that it’s liable to knock your entire rock ‘n’ roll reality off its axis. This is a band that mutates nightly, each show poking and prodding into the darkest limits of its collective consciousness, hunting monsters in the wilderness of the human mind, leaving a wake of rubble and smoke wherever it goes. The high-frequency sludge-blasts and sweeping noisescapes of “Slow Death Sounds,” “God Trip” and “Night Loner” are like the cellar-dwelling offspring of Boris and Bauhaus.

This is heavy noise—physically, mentally, spiritually. It’s a counter-agent to false-positivism and backhanded politeness. This is a band with the intensity and velocity to warp time around you, the fluctuations of electromagnetism so forceful that you can feel them in your subcutaneous tissue, in your bones, in your brain. It is an experience unlike anything you’ll find in the passive, placid world of pop, unlike anything you’ll find in the navel-gazing corners of the underground. Destruction Unit is shards of broken glass flying into a crowd of complacency, jagged projectiles on a collision course with the square universe.

“You can live your life in a line and think about time, or you can just go fucking wild and unleash,” says Rousseau. “Unleash.” —Sean L. Maloney

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on the record

A Conversation With

Gogol Bordello’s

Eugene Hütz

When Eugene Hütz gets joyful, he doesn’t kid. The instigator/vocalist behind gypsy/punk/rock ensemble Gogol Bordello (and the actor whose crinkly visage graced 2005’s Everything Is Illuminated) is a bright man who has read holy literature since his childhood in the Ukraine (that is, when he wasn’t slamming the skins to Sex Pistols songs), considers himself a Daoist and keeps limber through studies in the martial arts. In the last several years, Hütz left his adopted residence in New York City to travel throughout Latin America, return to his homeland and report on all of his findings on Gogol’s new album, Pura Vida Conspiracy (ATO/Casa), a record whose title literally stands for “conspiring to pure joy.” —A.D. Amorosi

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You had three years between albums and dropped out of sight during that time. Once upon a time, between 2004 and 2010, you guys were everywhere. Did you pull back on purpose? Did you ever worry there might be too much of you out there?

[Laughs long and hard] Do you think that’s a worry I should have?

Dunno. Everyone can suffer the danger of being overexposed. It just looks as if you stepped back, left Manhattan and traveled.

I don’t often get concerned with schedules and such. I think there might just be the same amount of me on this planet as when I was 13, playing that self-made drum kit that I built in the Ukraine, trying to keep time to Sex Pistols records while keeping the whole building up that I lived in. The feeling of who I am and my place in the world is quite the same, I think.

photo by James Marcus Haney

You’re still trying to keep the building up.

Your actual astral body remains the same whether you are five or you are 80. Nothing changes. Your mind is the thing that’s doing the expanding.

If your body is so lucky.

And the ego, that too can expand, but then that can implode on you. I just don’t get caught up in all of that because of my biography. It laid out distinctions that have ruled my life long ago. I think what you’re talking about—as to me stepping back—is, in truth, that I spent the last five years in Latin America, learning Spanish and Portuguese and not speaking so much English. I also went back to the Ukraine, where I reconnected with the art circles that I was part of in my youth. I connected with my original Ukraine posse, who had their own level of progression. I organized a transcendental art collective, introducing people to each other, opening a venue, a new scene where all the rock and all the electronic Baltic musicians can meet face-to-face. Artists from Chile, Mexico, Argentina—they are meeting there, too.

So, you’re a facilitator, an ambassador.

I am. I am an ambassador. I feel as if I’m the only person who can get these disparate crowds together while flying back and forth. The music and art they make are my main draws of energy, what I return to.

I can imagine why you’d go home, but what drove you to Latin America—that and the Ukraine—at this point in your life?

We’re fire, man. Eastern Europe and Latin America. That is our natural element, and I needed to be there. There was nothing I could do about it. There is a massive resonance. It’s not so much just now.

I was really engaged for a long time in this dialogue between east and west, “east” meaning Eastern philosophy.

Of which there is plenty on the new album.

And “west” meaning technology and what pragmatic thought has to offer. So, I was really curious about the dialogue that is happening, say, between biochemists and the Dalai Lama. They’re writing books together. Scientists are testing out the works of Shelley. I’m on fire about all that. I was observing it all from New York City, which was cool, but it wasn’t like being there.

Being in NYC wasn’t important anymore.

No. Plus, there is another current going on between Eastern Europe and Latin America. These people are able to transmute chaos into beauty. From my point of view, they are particularly fertile places, music-wise, poetry-wise, art-wise. These are not countries that excel at organizational forms. These motherfuckers don’t know anything about it.

So, they’re not about organization and pragmatism. That’s what you bring.

Correct. What we do best is transform fire into beauty. We make the best of that. Chance is our natural element. Chaos is our border. I needed to continue my evolution by living in an element that is adventurous. Latin America was calling, and I went there. Naturally, I fell in love with the women there. [Laughs]

You’re laughing as you say that. OK, was religion in your life as a kid? Where was God for you in the Ukraine? Do you think you sought God out is some way in your stretch toward Eastern philosophy?

Yes, I was brought up Russian Orthodox. In my family, there were priests in my grandfather and my great-grandfather’s generations. That was not cool with the Soviet government; they were not welcoming to that. Yeah, man, that was a very heavy environment to live in. Ever since childhood, I had old evangelical books amongst my papers, from the 19th-century, just kicking around that I used to read from. That was another adventure of mine—into literature—and so very important. A lot of kids would skip school and go play soccer. I would skip school, come home and read these books and hang out in underground monasteries. We had a lot of them. Kiev was famous for having well-preserved, underground spots as such.

So, it was an underground activity in every way.

My perspective was that it was another dimension of information. The Soviet government only allowed so many old folk tales to be told. I gravitated to other kids who had those adventures in mind. Literature was forbidden in the Soviet Union, so together we were scraping together what we can from all these really obscure sources. It gave us a lot of roots, in a mythical sense, in terms of human potential. The way that the Soviets present the human potential is just fucked up. My main interest in life is that potential.

That’s why I push the envelope everywhere I go.

And when you left Russia, where was religion?

When I left and got to, say, a place such as New York City, which is a center of information, I came in contact with a lot of Eastern thought. It’s easily accessible there. And my martial arts, another of my earliest interests, drove me as well as well when I got to Manhattan. Martial arts were the easiest link to Eastern philosophy, Daoism in particular. Daoism is not an Apostolic school of thought, not something like Christianity and Hinduism. Not something that comes to you. It awaits you until you are ready to pursue it. My kung fu teacher listened to the new album, and he knew exactly where I was coming from, that my lyrics are takes and twists on Daosim, particularly on songs like “We Shall Sail.”

I’m impressed that you played your music for your kung fu teacher, probably before you played it for your record company.

I have a lot of fans in the martial arts world. Like very serious people who are approaching their 70s and 80s. Top masters who achieve such a level need to maintain high energy. They need music that’s like that to drive them. Even if you’re 100 years old, you need that.

I experience that backstage all the time—one of the top aikido masters in the world came to our show in New York and hung out.

It was just beautiful. Now, that’s full circle.

Where did you write “We Rise Again”? It talks so richly of borders in literal, figurative and metaphorical terms.

Cultures are fantastic, beautiful, cultivated masks. I love then all, some better than others. I will never consider myself just Ukrainian. It lacks human potential. Consequently, all attempts at separation, at creating borders, are weak ideas. They’re imbecilic. But they’re active. The human race is one family, one whole. That is all there is, with no division or demarcation. Having borders is like saying that the heart is separate from the liver. That we cannot have.

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Fire Rock With Them Pop/punk underclassmen Twin Peaks blaze toward the big time

George Bernard Shaw got it wrong: Youth

is not wasted on the young. The guys in Chicago quartet Twin Peaks just graduated high school last year, and they’ve already produced a definitive eight-song, 19-plus-minute coming-of-age song cycle about booze, drugs, pizza and endless summer nights. The sound on Sunken (Autumn Tone) is so warm and sophisticated that it’s hard to believe that it was recorded by a 19-year-old in his parents’ basement. Mom and dad must have high-paneled ceilings with good acoustics.

“I only had enough equipment to run two condenser mics into one channel in GarageBand, so everything was recorded with the same mics and the same shitty basement acoustics,” says vocalist/guitarist Cadien Lake James. “Things blended well, but I couldn’t remix the drum parts, so we just learned to live with what we had and embrace the dirt of the recording environment. Recording quickly was also a practical move: We want to keep up the momentum with touring, and we didn’t have

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anything to sell besides a few demos.”

Twin Peaks—not explicitly a David Lynch reference—had its genesis when childhood friends James and Jack Dolan began jamming together in sixth grade. Dolan’s pal Connor Brodner joined while they were in high school, and Twin Peaks found its final form when they enlisted Clay Frankel about six months before they recorded Sunken. Well, mostly. According to Dolan, the band has expanded and contracted its ranks a couple of times since it settled on the Twin Peaks moniker.

“We’ve had a couple of keyboardists, but I think we’re all feeling a little more comfortable working as a simple four-piece now,” he says.

“Drums, guitar, bass, rock ‘n’ roll.”

Jay Reatard’s pop/punk alchemy is a good starting point when assessing the teenage anthems on Sunken, and you can definitely hear his influence on tracks like “Boomers,” an unquestionably pretty song about a very bad trip on ’shrooms. But Twin Peaks is less cheeky and less aggressively self-aware, even

if they’re tapping into a similar musical vein.

“Fast Eddie” and “Stand In The Sand” sound like alternate-universe takes on Del Shannon, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and, especially, Freddy Cannon—iconic artists from the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll who paired a little bit of distortion with a whole lot of melody.

Up until this point, the internet has been crucial in getting the word out on Twin Peaks: The band’s label is an offshoot of music blog Aquarium Drunkard, and the Twin Peaks dudes have a pretty droll and amusing approach to Twitter/Facebook. “We did a DIY tour last summer, and booked a show in Missoula because the four-track demo we threw up on Bandcamp was in the top-five most-played albums at their college radio station,” says James. “I think the most important thing has just been playing a shit-ton of shows and connecting with the audience at an energetic level.”

“Getting to play SXSW was great exposure,” says Dolan. “But we’re basically in it for the free beer and pizza.” —Nick Green

photo by ryan ohm

Backstreet’s Back! with all 5 original Boys!

brand new album featuring the single in a world like this

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Winter’s Bane

Folktronica upstart Mree embraces melancholia, infinite sadness

Mree’s second self-produced album,

Winterwell, is a passionate blend of heartfelt acoustic folk and plush electronic textures, brought to life by her rich, multi-layered vocals. Mree’s lush harmonies float in and out of the mix like perfumed clouds, drawing you into a dizzying swirl of muted colors and ambiguous emotions.

“The songs are about being in two places the same time, that weird feeling you get when you’re not certain about your emotions,” says Mree. “I started writing the songs for this

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album last winter and tried to capture a bleak, empty feel by using a lot of reverb. By releasing it in summer, I hope to give you that same feeling of being slightly dislocated.”

Armed with a guitar and an effects pedal that allows her to loop her vocals into an ever-shifting collage of sound, Mree is able to reproduce most of the album when she plays live, but it took her a while to overcome her early stage fright. In fact, it was coming to terms with her stage fright that led to her commanding internet presence.

“I started out doing covers of songs and posting them on YouTube,” she says. “Looking at the camera was easier than facing an audience. The positive feedback I got helped me overcome my stage fright. I didn’t like performing live when I was in high school, but now that I’m a bit older and more experienced, I love it.”

The clips Mree put on the internet have gotten more than 7.3 million views in the last couple of years; 40,000 fans subscribe to her YouTube channel. Her debut album, Grow, rose to number 18 on iTunes’ singer/ songwriter chart in 2011.

“Grow was more acoustic,” she says. “This time I wanted to experiment with an ambient post-rock approach to see where it took me.

I use Pro Tools and my computer to record. I usually start with a melody or chord progression. Once I lay that down, I start adding layers.

Sometimes what comes out is exactly what I heard in my head; others times it goes in a completely different direction. That’s the great thing about the creative process. You don’t know where you’re going when you start, but then you come up with something beautiful.”

Winterwell plays like the seamless soundtrack to a long, melancholy day.

Muted acoustic guitar, spacey keyboards, subtle touches of percussion and the almost subliminal sounds of banjo, xylophone and electric guitar provide the foundation for restrained vocals that play with the lyrics, often drawing out syllables until they lose meaning and become another element in the overall sonic landscape.

“I was inspired by the way Jónsi and Sigur Rós write lyrics in Hopelandic,” she says.

“They use the sound of words like an instrument. I don’t want my vocals to be the focus of a song. I like to keep the lyrics ambiguous, so they can mean different things to every listener. There’s a freedom in that way of writing. I don’t think my lyrics should be any more constrained than my music.” —j. poet

photo by Shervin Lainez

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New Traditionalists Mandolin Orange both honors and revises Southern traditions on This Side Of Jordan

Hours after Barack Obama took his oath

of office on Jan. 20, 2009, Carrboro, N.C., burrito joint Armadillo Grill hosted an oldtime music jam. These sorts of events aren’t uncommon in artist-friendly Carrboro, a close neighbor to the more expensive Chapel Hill.

For all the left-leaning bumper stickers, it’s still North Carolina.

That night, Andrew Marlin, a self-taught guitarist, found a complement and foil in Emily Frantz, a well-studied fiddler. The collaboration that started then quickly adopted the name Mandolin Orange, and the duo’s debut, Quiet Little Room, arrived in 2010.

“We’ve always been inspired by the old stuff,” says Marlin. “Learning these old

photo by briana brough

tunes and playing these old tunes, they’ve been around for so long because the songs themselves are very strong. Lyrically, melodically, structurally speaking, they’re just strong tunes.”

That attention to craft was apparent early on in Mandolin Orange’s fusion of gospel, bluegrass, folk and country into elegant heartbreak ballads. In 2011, the band added a plugged-in rhythm section to half of its sophomore double album, Haste Make/Hard Hearted Stranger. Released together, but unquestionably distinct, Haste Make’s full-band approach is rife with energy, while Hard Hearted Stranger’s spare duo arrangements retain the first effort’s folksy intimacy.

But on its third album, the magnificent This Side Of Jordan (Yep Roc), Mandolin Orange offers both. It surges with a full band’s depth without sacrificing any of the front-porch closeness or weary sincerity. It’s no coincidence that it’s also Mandolin Orange’s most pointed album, lyrically.

“The subject matter will always be inspired by the times you happen to be a part of,” says Marlin. “You can’t write a tune just like you would write it a hundred years ago.”

To wit, This Side Of Jordan is littered with temporal signifiers, both personal and political. The acceptance of mortality on “Turtle Dove And The Crow” was inspired by Marlin’s brush with death after falling off a dam. With a line lifted from Lightnin’ Hopkins, Marlin accepts the inevitable, singing, “Life’s an old woodpecker/And I’m an old chunk of wood.” On “Hey Adam,” the duo—an offstage couple, as well—advocates for marriage equality through a Biblical lens. “Our Father loves you all ways,” Marlin and Frantz sing together.

In their progressive reinterpretations of the South’s traditions, Mandolin Orange is in good company. Mount Moriah and Hiss Golden Messenger have used their folk-rock variations as a vehicle for spiritual interrogation,

while North Carolina’s biggest stars, the Avett Brothers, have espoused an inclusive take on down-home sentimentality.

“I don’t know that we’re consciously trying to be part of a movement, but I’d love to hear that other people are doing that,” says Marlin.

“These are modern times ... I’d like to think that people are taking these old themes and making them work for this time.”

As America suffers a cultural identity crisis after electing its first minority president, as the South—North Carolina included—reels from radical, reactionary, conservative state government, it’s nice to hear that our artists are actively searching for ways to honor the past and reshape the future. —Bryan C. Reed

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story by hobart rowland • photos by shawn brackbill

Hüsker Dü’s Grant Hart comes clean on his volatile new double album, the vagaries of mortality and a 25th anniversary he’d apparently forgotten.

Man

I

on

n his 52 years on this earth, Grant Hart has had at least two brushes with death. There was an HIV scare in the AIDS-addled late-’80s, which sent the heroin addict reeling and was yet another nail in the coffin for Hüsker Dü, the peerless Minneapolis post-punk trio he cohelmed with Bob Mould. Less publicized was the ugly mid-’90s accident on Germany’s Autobahn that effectively dismembered his intermittently fruitful post-Dü band, Nova Mob. Hart responded to Nova Mob’s breakup by scaling back considerably, releasing just two albums of new material over 15 years, mostly touring alone by train or car. In 2011, fire scorched his home in South St. Paul while he was on the road, destroying two rooms and his beloved Gibson ES-125. At the time, he was also caught up in a protracted legal battle with a woman who’d embezzled money from his father while he was in her care at a nursing home.

Meanwhile, Hart hadn’t been heard from on record since 2009.

But he’s making up for it now with The Argument (Domino), a supremely unsettling soundtrack to a literary hell on earth sprawled across 20 tracks and almost 90 minutes. As double-disc concept albums go, it’s about as true-to-form as it gets—difficult, disjointed, theatrical, overreaching, even silly at times. It also contains some of Hart’s most coherent, ruggedly beautiful work since 1989’s Intolerance—by way of “Morningstar,” “I Will Never See My Home,” “Is The Sky The Limit?” and “Letting Me Out.” A run-in with the unpublished manuscript for William S. Burroughs’ Milton-inspired Lost Paradise prompted The Argument.

In Burroughs’ otherworldly interpretation, the fallen angels of Paradise Lost hail from distant planets, and God takes the form of Harry S. Truman. There was talk of a theatrical work, but ultimately, Hart set about putting his own songs to the story in the form of an ambitious solo release. Work on the often-complex lyrics began prior to his 2009 solo release, Hot Wax, and major musical overhauls continued well into 2012.

Speaking with MAGNET after finishing a brief U.K. tour to generate some overseas buzz prior to The Argument’s release, Hart, as usual, isn’t at a loss for words.

Fire

MAGNET: How did it go in Europe?

Hart: Actually, it was an Irish rehearsal tour. And with some exceptions, it was kind of disastrous. But time will tell.

How was it disastrous?

I don’t want to sound like an old fucker here, but sometimes when you’re dealing with young people … And these guys are shit-hot players who deserve the exposure. But they don’t see the exposure as being a benefit. Let’s just say that the level of entitlement and expectation was way out of bounds with reality. I’m trying to figure out a way to solve this situation and continue working with as many of them as possible.

What was Hüsker Dü’s relationship like with European fans?

There was that terrible video [1985’s Live From The Camden Palace] that gave people a false impression of who we were. That kind of tainted it a little bit. In most of England—and Europe in general—the fans reminded me of fans from the East Coast. It wasn’t a bunch of frat boys who heard you on college radio and decided to come and bash heads together.

Tell me about your accident on the Autobahn.

Oh, man, I still have to massage my left foot a few times a day.

What happened?

Nova Mob was on tour. It was a day off—July 4, 1992. We were on the road to Neuschwanstein, and it was one lane going one way and one lane going the other way. All of a sudden, there was this BMW coming toward us full speed, and why he was passing the entire queue of traffic is still a mystery. It was a Catholic priest with three mentally retarded kids who were coming back from Neuschwanstein. We saw them well before the impact, and so we were able to brace ourselves. Our truck was virtually stopped; we had a cargo vehicle with passenger seats.

The priest was killed instantly; our drummer, Marc Rettish, heroically pulled people from the burning vehicle. There were victims who would later succumb to their injuries, because, in Germany, they won’t put a mentally retarded person on life support. I can understand their logic, but I don’t understand their lack of compassion.

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Albert Speer was an artist/puppet who was acquainted with some despicable,

evil people. But his production ideas—his methodology in approaching a huge project—were what I borrowed. In my case, I’m working for myself; I’m not working for Adolf Hitler. So, there’s a little bit of slack. —Grant Hart How long was your recovery?

A little bit? [Laughs]

Four days. I was removed to a hospital, as was bass player Tom Merkl and our driver. My left foot was pretty much crushed. Tommy was bloodied up a little bit on the face, but nothing deep or cranial. Immediately, the local police impounded everything but what we had on our backs when we left the scene. They proceeded to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb trying to present some evidence that the band was responsible. They were unsuccessful in doing so. I was the most severely injured, and nobody would’ve been prevented from continuing the tour. But it was decided by the booking agency that, since the tour was insured, they’d eliminate all the expenses by canceling it. That had a lot to do with the killing of the momentum of Nova Mob.

Yeah, a little bit. The lyrics are taken care of last, so I have the most amount of time to change this nuance—especially with such a wordy inspiration as Paradise Lost. I gave myself every opportunity not to come off as an idiot, because the academics are already picking this thing apart.

Little has been written about that incident.

Yeah. I mean, I’m 47, so I think about it a lot.

People would rather ask, “When are you going to have a reunion with Hüsker Dü?”

So, you’re dying, too.

I started out making the dimensions of the rooms, which is laying down the rhythm tracks.

The rhythm tracks are your mathematics. That’s your grid, your parallel and your horizontal.

Mortality and the afterlife are popular themes in The Argument. Have they also been recurring themes in your own life lately?

My own mortality?

I’m assuming you don’t consider yourself a religious person?

The Argument. We’re talking about a five-year

I prefer spiritual, but in a very undefined way.

There’s a difference between knowing and believing. Let’s say that 500 years ago, what we now know as static electricity must have freaked out someone who was petting a cat in the wintertime. “My goodness, lightning is coming from this cat.”

Yeah, but keep in mind that I’m always jotting things down. It’s not something like, “Oh, I’ve got to hurry up and finish Hot Wax because I’ve got this bold vision.” What Hot Wax did do was cement the studio relationship between me and (Albatross Studio’s) Mike Wisti. I don’t think I’ll ever look for another studio in my life. What Mike and I have developed with our studio effectiveness is great. I cherish it.

How did you approach such ambitious subject matter in the studio?

The closest I can compare my overall production style is to the way Albert Speer built things for Hitler. When building the Brown House in Munich, he knew he had four years—half as much time an architect needed back then. He took everything that contributed to this building, figured out how much time it took to produce it, and then worked on the design for the stuff that would take the longest so that everything would dovetail toward the end. All the components would be ready at the time they were needed. I mean, he was an artist/puppet who was acquainted with some despicable, evil people. But his production ideas—his methodology in approaching a huge project—were what I borrowed. In my case, I’m working for myself; I’m not working for Adolf Hitler. So, there’s a little bit of slack, OK?

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What role has visual art played in your life of late?

Yeah, I would think.

That’s coming later. [Laughs] Let’s discuss project, right?

brother, who died. It was a means by which I could celebrate his life. And let’s not underestimate the power of the path of least resistance here. My folks made anything possible for me, as long as it involved playing the drums.

Why don’t we talk a little bit about the music on The Argument? I hear Bowie, I hear Vaudeville, I hear Buddy Holly …

I approached each song as its own entity. That allowed the highest form of expression, the most appropriate song style.

“Morningstar” is one of the catchiest things

I’d say that, in the last third of the ’90s—and for a big space of time in between Good News For Modern Man and Hot Wax—I focused on it more than music. Minnesota gets very cold in the winter, and I’d find myself doing a lot of photo montage and collage. I’d recycle a lot of found materials, and I ended up in the company of some people who had a really good pedigree.

And then I realized, “God, these people are like 50 years older than me. They’re doing it because they can’t move, and I’m doing it because it’s cold. It’s more reasonable for me to put on a sweater than to act like I’m 90.” With the exception of having seen more death, I don’t know if my relationship to mortality has really changed that much since the late ’80s.

That was when you had that run-in with HIV.

When it was proven false, I realized how much of what I thought were symptoms were really just psychosomatic. I’d feel my glands and say, “God, these do seem large.” I’d feel my achy joints and think, “Oh my God. I’m dying here.” After having a full set of blood work, the doctor came into the office, slapped the file onto the table and said, “I don’t know how you do it, but you have the lowest cholesterol of anybody I’ve ever seen.”

And I go, “Yeah, well, what else?” And he goes, “Well, what are you worried about?” And I’m like, “What about AIDS?” And he goes, “Nope, none of that.” Within an hour, my glands were the healthiest you’ve ever felt.

you’ve ever written.

Thank you. Part of the musical influence in the storytelling was Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf, where different instruments represent different characters. What these different musical lines do musically is set up a drone. Even though there’s more notes than a simple drone, they can be carried on through a shifting chord pattern, which is the closest thing to a musical signature that I’ve ever used in my work. Structuring everything around that constant is the closest thing I have to a style or a signature.

What’s your relationship been with the drums over the years?

My first drum set was inherited from my older

You had to live with this thing hanging over your head for …

Well, a year and a half. At the time, it was completely logical. My lover was also a drug user, and I just thought, “God, if there’s anybody in Minnesota, it’s gonna be me.” I’ve never been a very promiscuous person, but neither were 50 percent of the other victims. Bob (Mould) knew nothing about the diagnosis. But when we were working with Giorno Poetry Systems, it was, like, “OK, what do we do with our royalties from Giorno?” We decided to challenge the other royalty earners by contributing to an AIDS charity. Early on, it was a very successful campaign; it became known for a while as the

guys are the ones that try to fuck you.

If Hüsker Dü had made another record for Warner Bros., what do you think it would’ve sounded like?

That’s a very interesting question. The direction we were taking did not captivate me. There was an incident where I was of the understanding that a candidate to produce the next record was coming to Minneapolis. I just happened to call Bob’s house, and he said, “Oh, guess what?

So-and-so arrived three days early!” By the time I met this guy, he was already whistling tunes that had been demoed to him. I found that to be very, very much a violation. I think things really took a sad turn for Hüsker Dü when “Don’t Wanna Know If You Are Lonely” was chosen as the first Warner Bros. single. Then, to make things worse, another song of mine was chosen as the second attempt.

Which one?

That was “Sorry Somehow.” I think Bob was very challenged by that. It was the first time there was ever an outsider choosing between his music and my music. From that point on, he was determined that the results would never be the same.

Do you think the new music would have been even more conventional time signatures and pop hooks aplenty?

Stratocasters instead of the Flying V? [Laughs] That’s probably not an inaccurate hypothesis.

What’s your take on Every Everything, Gorman Bechard’s pending documentary on your life.

I’ve been interviewed for it, and I’ve supplied them with some materials, like old family photos and such. I was looking at an early edit of it, and there were some choices of photographs that I thought were unnecessarily … There was one shot where Bob had coughed—that, if it was of me, I wouldn’t want to be circulated. It was so, “Let’s pick on Bob.” It’s taking a cheap shot at someone who I can take a cheap shot at—but no outsider is going to pick on a member of any of my bands.

Hüsker Dü Project. The last straw was when Bob cancelled our appearance at a benefit for our own charity. Bob completely shit the bed— you know, his take on things in his book [See A Little Light] …

whereas I don’t recall any such observations about the 25th year after Zen Arcade, or the 25th anniversary of our fatal move to Warner Bros.

And I might add that Warner Bros. was not the reason, but just created the environment.

I’m about to read it. So, what do you think I

Why haven’t those classic albums been reis-

should believe?

sued yet?

So, there’s still that feeling of responsibility

I’d take all of it from the perspective that it’s meant to be a popular biography. I’ve had more people—publishers and fans alike—approaching me with the idea of writing a book.

But if I’m writing a book, it’s gonna be more of a sample of different stories than adhering to any kind of timeline.

Yeah, well, Bob and I are working together to expedite that. I’m trying to stay within the boundaries that have been described to us by the legal surveyors. We’re in the middle of a litigation process.

to the band and its legacy.

Since we’re sort of on the subject, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Hüsker Dü’s official breakup. Any thoughts on that?

How has the world endured? [Laughs] It’s wild that the breakup is the milestone here,

This is the earlier stuff, right?

Yeah, we’re talking about a California-based company (SST Records), now based in Texas.

It’s really tough to see how it has decayed into this really ugly situation. When we shifted record labels, we were told to expect some behaviors from the big guys. Then it turns out the little

Oh, yeah. I think I’ve prevented some very shabby things from happening to that legacy.

And I might say that the most important thing was preventing what would’ve been our final record. I know for a fact that we wouldn’t be as dearly remembered today if that had been made.

Who wants to see a picture of the leper once his face has fallen off?

That’s a good way to end the interview.

Yeah, it’s probably not the most attractive metaphor I’ve used. N

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top row

Christian Letts, Orpheo McCord, Stewart Cole, Jade Castrinos, Alex Ebert middle row

Nora Kirkpatrick, Mitchell Yoshida, Josh Collazo bottom row

Seth Ford-Young, Nico Aglietti, Mark Noseworthy, Christopher “Crash” Richard

gĂ˜dspell

Twenty-first-century ambassadors of peace and magic or dopey Christian hippie cult on wheels? We go to Bonnaroo

to find the answer and bears witness to the third coming of

Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros. story by jonathan valania • portraits by drew reynolds

Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

It’s a few clicks before

zero dark thirty backstage at Bonnaroo’s Which Stage, where Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros are about to perform before a massive afternoon crowd. Nobody here knows it yet, but something miraculous is about to happen. A walk-on-water moment. ¶ As per usual this time of year in Bonnarooville, it’s hotter than Georgia asphalt. Jesus-haired frontman Alex Ebert and his band of merry pranksters are taking refuge from that big ol’ Tennessee sun in the cool, crisper-like confines of a mobile home on cinder blocks that currently serves as their dressing room. There’s nearly a dozen of them milling around like ants in a box, warming up on their respective instruments, chatting or just chillin’ like Bob Dylan. They are all dressed in beatific smiles and various shades of nouveau hippie chic.

Everyone seems a little barefoot in the head, if you know what I mean.

The infinite sadness of the Beatles “Long, Long, Long” (a band favorite) blares from a boom box. Trumpeter Stewart Cole warms up with trills. Drummer Josh Collazo taps out a beat on the wall with a pair of sticks. Jade Castrinos, who plays psychedelic June Carter to Ebert’s hippie Johnny, touches up her mascara in the mirror. She’s dressed in a white, high-necked, knee-length prairie dress, the kind the Manson Family chicks wore to court appearances back in the day. Ebert, his long hair swept up in a makeshift updo in deference to the heat, is dressed in white linen pants and a droopy white sleeveless shirt. He has a dirty butt and a faraway look in his eyes. Very far away.

The tour manager ducks his head in the door and issues the two-minute warning. As per its pre-show ritual, the band files out into the heat and links arms in a perfect circle to form The Huddle. Ebert looks over at me watching from a distance and implores me to join The Huddle, which I do without hesitation. With his girlfriend at his side holding his newborn son, Ebert commences “pass the breath.” Inhaling deeply and holding it, he looks to his right and nods, and the person next him inhales and holds it and then turns to her right and nods, and so on until it circles back to Ebert, who then exhales and gives the nod, and one by one—like dominoes—everyone exhales.

He leans over and kisses his son on the head, smiling down at him and saying to no one in particular, “Raised in a cult.” Then he leads The Huddle into a sustained chant of “ohhhhmmmm.” As the chanting continues, Ebert looks skyward, his eyes rolling up in the back of his head. It’s an unsettling sight for the uninitiated, but there is no 36

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cause for concern. He is, he will explain later, just locating his third eye.

The band breaks The Huddle and ascends the stairs to the Which Stage, triggering an ecstatic roar from the assembled multitudes. There must be 20,000 people out here. The group launches into “40 Day Dream,” the celebratory sunburst processional that kicks off Up From Below, the 2009 album that made this unlikely band of refugees from the Island Of Misfit Toys an international sensation. The crowd sings along: It’s the magical mystery kind, must be a lie Bye bye to the too-good-to-be-true kind of love Oh no, I could die Oh, now I can die By mid-song Ebert, can’t be contained. He hops off the stage and, with a weird, gnarled leper gait, wades into the swooning crowd, handing out hugs and high fives and good vibrations. It’s only the first song and already he has the crowd eating Kumbaya out of his hands. You can almost see the love radiating off them like the distant shimmer of heat rising from a desert highway.

Right here, right now, it’s all peace, love and understanding; and from the looks of things, nobody in attendance thinks that’s remotely funny. The medics, always on the lookout for heat-stroke victims and drug casualties, wear T-shirts that say YES YOU CAN TELL US—NO JUDGMENTS. Even security—usually a profession populated by paid brutes who got into this business for the money, but stayed for the violence—wears shirts that say I AM HERE TO HELP. So, too, are Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros. You may scoff at all this—I know I

did at first, but that is to be expected. It’s wellknown by now that the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

Before we go on, I should point out that I have parachuted into this story with some reluctance and a backpackful of suspicion and skepticism about the whole Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros phenomenon. It all strikes me as a little too hippie-dippie precious, a little too Godspell for its own good. The band closes with a triumphant “Home,” the whistling psych-folk spaghetti-Western that’s the raison d’être of its burgeoning fame. Today, it will provide the soundtrack for Ebert’s walk-on-water moment.

His second, by my count.

The first was back in 2010 when the group performed at Coachella for the first time. Before he played a note, a nervous Ebert accidentally knocked his mic stand into the crowd, where it cut a deep gash into the forehead of an audience member. Blood poured down his face. All of this, mind you, was captured by the Jumbotron cameras and writ large for a crowd of 35,000, sending up a collective “Ohhhhhhh!” of alarm and concern. Ebert offered a heartfelt apology, kissed his hand, and then pressed it to the man’s cheek.

Then he literally gave the bleeding man the shirt off his back and wrapped it around his head as a bandage. The crowd went ballistic.

The Jesus-looking guy in the white suit just healed the sick!

OK, technically, he did make the guy “sick” in the first place, which is a little bit like a hospital selling you cigarettes and then treating you for lung cancer; but in 2013, if you want miracles—

and, of course, we all want miracles—it’s gonna take a little willing suspension of disbelief. You might have to squint a little bit to see it.

The second walk-on-water moment happens right before my very eyes. It goes down in the middle of “Home,” during “story time,” a longhonored tradition at Edward Sharpe concerts where the band quiets down and Ebert and Castrinos wade into the crowd, handing the mic to whoever has a story to share. Usually it’s something along the lines of, “My best friends Topaz and Saffron and I became best friends when we would lay in the sand at Venice Beach and look up at the sun and listen to your songs, and that was the best summer ever! So, thank you. You made me a happier person.”

Sometimes drunk people just shout semi-coherent variations on “Dude, you rule! No, dude, dude, dude, let me finish! I just want to say you fucking rule! Woooo!!!” Sometimes they pro-

live photos by (Left) david brendan hall (1) and (right) danny clinch (3)

pose marriage—that’s happened at least twice, and she said yes both times. But today is special.

Today, something wonderful is going to happen.

Having wandered about a hundred feet into the crowd, Ebert hands the mic to a frail figure, a pale boy with a pink mohawk. “About a year ago,” the boy says, “you guys visited me in my hospital room—remember? And I got a bone marrow transplant that day that saved my life!” Ebert literally leaps into the crowd and wraps the boy in the pink mohawk in a bear hug. Crowd goes ballistic. Tears roll down my cheeks.

We must be in heaven, man!

Later that night, after watching Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers close out Bonnaroo 2013 from the VIP section, the Edward Sharpe caravan heads to Chattanooga for a rare evening of rest in a hotel. They have the next day off and decide to throw a barbecue in the parking lot of Track 29, the venue they’re performing at the following night.

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Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

Gator, the tour bus driver—a pot-bellied Floridian with a white ZZ Top beard and a cowboy hat bedazzled with the teeth of an alligator he killed in the swamps with his bare hands—had gone to the butcher that morning and bought up 20 pounds of ribs; he’s been working them over with his secret dry rub and charcoal flame ever since. And despite the fact that many beers are cracked open to stave off the humid swelter of the high-noon sun, a family vibe pervades, with girlfriends, wives and newborns along for the ride on this leg of the tour.

There is a peaceful, easy feeling in the air. It’s here that I have a chance for a little one-on-one time with each of the Zeros. Let’s meet them:

got no rehearsal, no soundcheck. Played songs he never heard before. And he nailed it. Left to his own devices, he plays gypsy jazz. Cut his teeth with hardcore thrashers-in-the-rye Initial Reaction, who released one album, Saintly Values, back in 1987, with song titles like “Copkiller” and “Unite And Fight.”

Nora Kirkpatrick • accordion

Actress, perhaps best-known for a recurring role on the ninth season of The Office as Esther Bruegger, a neighboring farmer’s daughter who becomes Dwight’s girlfriend. Met Ebert and Castrinos at Burning Man, where Ebert tried, unsuccessfully, to sneak in without a ticket.

Jade Castrinos • co-lead singer

Born in Florida, grew up in California, playing Beatles and Zep covers with her dad’s one-manband. Her voice is the boldest color in the band’s rainbow sound. Really did fall out of the secondstory window of Ebert’s apartment, couldn’t walk for a week afterward, still has the medical bills to prove it. Has been secretly faking “pass the breath” in The Huddle all along. “Or else I might pass out,” she says laughing. “I just never got the hang of it, to be honest.” Recording a solo album at a studio in San Francisco owned by her friends Shawn Fanning of Napster fame and Sean Parker of Facebook fame. Heath Ledger turned her onto Nick Drake. Nick Drake changed her life.

Obsessed with Twin Peaks and “fucking loves” Rihanna. Often loses cell phones and shoes. When she smiles, the sun shines out of her eyes.

Christopher “Crash” Richard • celestial backing vocals

Blonde, drifty and handsome in a surfer-dude kind of way. If they made a movie about Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, Owen Wilson would play the part of Crash. A New Orleans native/Katrina evacuee exiled to Los Angeles, where he lived for a time in a cave behind Frank Zappa’s house in Laurel Canyon.

Stewart Cole • trumpet, keyboards

Talented trumpeter-for-hire, Cali born and bred. Back in 2007, Beck called him in to play mariachi trumpet on a White Stripes track he was recording in his living room called “Conquest.” He is the snarkiest—and possibly the smartest—member of the band. Jesse Eisenberg will play him in the movie.

Josh Collazo • drums

Monster drummer, world-champion swing dancer. Somewhere in between John Bonham and Gene Krupa. Recently a father, he is easily the most heavily—and impressively—tattooed band member. He seems lit from within. He could turn the world on with his smile.

Seth Ford-Young • bass

Used to play with Tom Waits. His first show, he 38

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Orpheo McCord •

percussionist

Named after Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. First met Ebert in a teepee set up in the back of the Zappa house in Laurel Canyon, where Ebert was living at the time. Dad was a professional mime named Merlin who was often backed up by the Grateful Dead back in the day. He was also one of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters (see: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).

Christian Letts • guitar

Brawny, mustachioed, born in England, grew up in L.A. with Ebert, and for a time was part of his crew, tagging walls around the city. The pair worked together on numerous (literally) odd jobs. One summer they worked at Suntans And Coffee To Go. He was the barista and Ebert’s job was to mop up the gigantic pools of sweat in the tanning beds. Years later, “Alex called and said, ‘Yo, I have this idea. Do you want to come to my studio apartment and help me lay down some things?’” says Letts. “So, I went there, and that was it. Writing a happy song that isn’t cheesy is fucking hard, but Alex was pulling that off, and that was really inspiring to me. I came home from that recording session and said to my then-girlfriend at the time, ‘I know what I’m doing with the rest of my life.’”

Mitchell Yoshida • piano

Half-Japanese Brookynite. His first gig was touring pianist for teen heartthrob Jesse McCartney, who was the opening act for the Backstreet Boys.

After that, he resolved to never again take a job playing music he didn’t respect. The newest member of the band, joined in September. Got the gig when the last piano player—a friend from college—jumped ship to become Grizzly Bear’s touring pianist. “Alex called me three weeks before the tour was starting, and I learned all the tunes and went to rehearsals kind of without having met anyone in the band before,” says Yoshida. “Instantly, everybody was really welcoming and warm, friendly and loving. It kind of took me aback at first at how many positive vibes were around. I had never really been around that

much positivity before. It’s nice to be somewhere where everyone is trying to be as positive as possible. Even before I joined, that’s something that I’d been trying to attain for a long time.”

Nico Aglietti • guitar

His father was Joe Cocker’s tour manager, and his godfather was an engineer at L.A.’s legendary Village Studios. Would curl up on the sofa behind the board and nap while Steely Dan recorded Aja and Dylan recorded Planet Waves and Clapton wailed God-like. “I just remember the sounds and the aroma of the studio,” says Aglietti. “So, it’s very nostalgic whenever I’m in there.”

Last but hardly least is Alexander Michael Tahquitz Ebert. To get away from the noise and distraction of the BBQ, we head over to the railroad tracks ringing the parking lot. We sit sideby-side on the rails and talk for literally three hours non-stop. Here’s what I learned: He was born May 12, 1978, to Michael Ebert, an ex-hippie and currently-practicing psychotherapist, and Lisa Richards, an actress. Trippy footage of his father chanting in the desert while hold-

ing Alex’s sister was used as the opening scene of the video for “Desert Song.” Since she got her start in the late ’60s, Ebert’s mother has clocked in more than 40 movie and TV appearances, including Fantasy Island, CHiPs, Family and Quincy, M.E. But perhaps her most memorable role was Dark Shadows’ Sabrina, whose hair turned white with fright when she accidentally witnessed her closet werewolf husband going lupine under a full moon. When Ebert was a teenager, his mother took him to classes at the Actors Studio, where he studied under acting guru Charles Laughton, a.k.a. Al Pacino’s mentor.

While listening to Beethoven with his father when he was five, Ebert had an awful epiphany: Sooner or later, he was going to die. “I remember drawing a picture of Sitting Bull, and this feeling coming over me brought on by the music,” he says. “I remember suddenly feeling this gigantic sort of sadness. I walked up to my dad and asked him if it was true, and he said, ‘Yeah.’ I’ll never forget it. After that, sunsets took on this added dimension of beauty because, like me, they were going to go away. And I started to savor the fleeting tragic beauty of life. I think that’s what so

“I was living in this tiny apartment where I wrote most of the first Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros album.

I got around on my bicycle. I had no phone, just had a notepad outside. People would come by and write me notes when they wanted to get in touch with me. That lasted about nine months–it was fucking awesome.” alex ebert much of my life has been centered around … attempting to solve the problem of death, or what some people call the predicament of life—which is death, really.”

At this point, a Mexican family of four—a husband, wife, boy and girl—approaches us on foot. The daughter is wearing an Edward Sharpe T-shirt, but it becomes clear immediately that all four are fans. Apparently, they walked all the way here from God knows where on the off chance Ebert would be hanging out in the parking lot the day before the concert. They tell Ebert that they saw the show two nights ago in Atlanta, and they want to come tomorrow night, but their daughter

isn’t old enough. Ebert tells them they’ll try to get her in somehow as he poses for a photo with her.

Judging by her expression, this is a Make-A-Wish Foundation-caliber moment. “You are humble,” the father says to Ebert with the gravitas of a spirit guide, before they all say their thank-yous and walk off.

We pick up where we left off. Obsessed with the film Boyz N The Hood, Ebert started rapping when he was nine. By the time he was 14, he was fronting a gangsta-rap outfit heavily influenced

by N.W.A. It didn’t last long. The first time he heard a recording of himself rapping, he was appalled at how bad he sounded and almost gave NEEDLE

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Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

up music altogether. Inspired by a report he did for school on Marlon Brando, Ebert traded rap for film. After high school, he tried to get into NYU film school, but was turned down, so he went to Emerson in Boston instead. There he majored in partying and, not surprisingly, only lasted one year.

“It got pretty bad—there was a lot of fucking drugs going around in that dorm,” he says. “There was the obvious stuff, like cocaine. There was a lot of these Quaaludes called ‘lemons’ and tons of mushrooms, which were definitely the highlight in some ways of the experience, and then the worst stuff was ecstasy.”

The drug-taking was a direct result of his obsession with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and the pursuit of bohemian authenticity and street cred. All great artists suffer, he thought, and his life was too safe and painless. So, he went looking for trouble—and sure enough, he found it.

“Growing up in an upper-middle-class situation, the only way to experience hardship was to manufacture it,” he says. “And one way to manufacture hardship is to go do a lot of drugs.

By the time I was 19 or 20, I started taking it much further and started to source out heroin. I was snorting and smoking it—took me about two years to get hooked. I was a very heavy user. You can only go so far, and I started shooting. The first time I did it, it’s the typical story, sitting in the parking lot of a Vons grocery store. I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ and of course someone’s playing the Velvet Underground.”

Back in L.A., Ebert formed Ima Robot, a glampunk outfit with songs so tight and catchy and clever that Beck’s Mutations-era rhythm section—bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and drummer Joey Waronker—jumped ship and joined.

For a time, Ima Robot enjoyed Next Big Thing status on the L.A. scene. All the best clubs wanted to book them, all the best bands wanted to open for them. Roman Coppola (son of Francis Ford, sister of Sofia) wanted to direct their videos. Virgin Records wanted to sign them.

But things went south fast. By 2006, Waronker and Meldal-Johnsen were gone, and Ima Robot’s Virgin debut stiffed. After a year in the soul-crushing limbo of major-label purgatory all underperforming new bands are consigned to, Ebert finally figured out what went wrong. Oddly enough, it was finally getting sober—after two rehab stays and repeated DIY attempts to kick— that fucked things up.

“I started fucking with the formula,” he says.

“Until then, we were making really soulful stuff, and once I got sober, I started getting a lot more cerebral and obnoxious. I wasn’t really into the whole obnoxious thing until I got sober, and I was really sort of pissed off. I started singing with a really nasal accent, and to me, that fucked with our formula and our music suffered.”

It was, he decided, time for a change. A complete and total change. “By the end, I had become 40

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very disillusioned, not just with Ima Robot, but with myself,” says Ebert. “I realized I was no longer following my instincts, just leaning on these institutions: AA, Virgin. To the point where I didn’t even know if I had any instincts anymore.

At that point, there were three options: I could kill myself, which I seriously considered, or I could just fall in line, which really wasn’t an option because I didn’t think I was capable of that.

And then there’s a third option, which was to try and somehow break out of it. I didn’t know what that would be other than that it would involve starting over in almost every area of my life: I had a girlfriend who I was with for about four years, and we had a house together, and I was in AA and all these things. I was in a life of institutions. So, I broke up with my girlfriend, I moved out of the house, threw away my cell phone. I quit AA, which was the scariest of all the decisions, because the entire culture of AA is based on the idea that if you stop going, you will become a fucking mess instantly. And guess what? It didn’t happen.”

Inspired by all the disruptive change he forced upon himself, he started working on a new project, a major change in direction from Ima Robot. “I was living in this tiny apartment where I wrote most of the first Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros album,” he says. “I got around on my bicycle. I had no phone, just had a notepad outside. People would come by and write me notes when they wanted to get in touch with me. That lasted about nine months—it was fucking awesome.”

The transformation was nothing short of astonishing. To get a clear picture of the amazing before-and-after, Google Roman Coppola’s video for Ima Robot’s “Dynomite.” Ebert looks like a refugee from Planet MTV circa 1983—jagged sideways haircut, new-wave tunic, snarly voice, robotic dance moves.

Then watch the video for “Home,” where he looks like one of the original cast members of Jesus Christ Superstar. Note how effectively and effortless-to-the-point-of-invisibility every element in the presentation of both personas is executed: the look, the song, the sound, the videos, the choreography. And while it should be noted that this is a man with formal training as an actor, there’s a nagging suspicion that the latter persona is closer to the real Alex Ebert. “(After Ima Robot), I was really getting into positivity and smiling,” he says. “With Ima Robot, I didn’t smile onstage for a long time, because that wasn’t punk rock. But eventually I came to realize that being joyful—as unhip as it was at the time—was actually far more ballsy and courageous than being a sullen rock star.”

If that joyfulness was mistaken for a messianic complex—and it often was—so be it. “I wouldn’t shy from those accusations, personally,” says Ebert. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a superhero.

And there were different superheroes that I was aware of while I was growing up. I wanted to be

Spider-Man starting at the age of five. But the greatest superhero I’d ever heard of was Christ.

As I got older, I found myself admiring the stories of and the powers of and the philosophy of Christ.

So, for me, that makes sense.”

Edward Sharpe is the hero of a novel Ebert was working on about a messiah who is sent to Earth to help people, but he keeps getting distracted by and falling in love with pretty girls. One day, while on his way to save the world, Ebert met and soon fell in love with a pretty girl named Jade Castrinos.

“She was such a free spirit,” he says. “We got to talking, and she had been sort of dealing with being sober since she was much younger. It was this really fantastic, exhilarating time for me— here was this girl who was completely wild. She let me read her journal, which was titled If You Are Reading This, I Have Driven Off A Cliff, Or Have I? We hung out every day after that. She didn’t have a cell phone either, so we communicated by pay phone. Meanwhile, I didn’t even know what a fuckin’ singer she was.”

He would find out soon enough. “‘Home’ was written after Alex and I had gone on an all-day walk through Elysian Park, and I lost my shoes, and he carried me on his back and we were laughing our asses off, just having a really great day,” says Castrinos. “And when we got back to his apartment, I was like, ‘Let’s write a song,’ and he was like, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ He had already had parts of ‘Home,’ but no lyrics and no melody, but he just set up his little Pro Tools computer, and we were sharing the microphone. I was like, ‘OK, you sing when I sing, while I sing when you sing, and we’ll sing together in the chorus.’ We just did it. We wrote it on the spot.”

Meanwhile, the paradigm of the L.A. music scene was shifting. Irony and snark were out. The new sincerity was in. The cheeky wags at Flaunt magazine declared this post-hipster zeitgeist to be the Age of the Hippiester.

“There was something bubbling up, man, in Echo Park and Silver Lake, when (Up From Below) was nearly completed and we were starting to play shows, and it was something we were a part of,” says Ebert. “Suddenly, everyone started wearing Mexican blankets and ponchos, and everyone’s hair was long, and everyone had a beard, and everyone was barefoot—and, yes, there were psychedelics and a lot of weed-smoking, but it was so far beyond being just that. It wasn’t drugbased; it was love-based. Suddenly, the hip thing was to be nice to people. It wasn’t about partying; it was about breaking bread with each other. It was this golden time that has slightly passed— Urban Outfitters kind of co-opted the look—but it really helped birth us.”

Around this time, Ebert and Castrinos fell in with a collective of artists, filmmakers and musicians that called itself The Masses. It was through this association that Castrinos and, especially, Ebert established a deep bond with Heath Ledger,

“I talked to Heath Ledger the night before–we talked about a movie we were going to make–so, yeah, I think his death was purely accidental. I was in a juice shop, and the way I heard the news was not cool, let’s just put it that way. I was so flabbergasted.

It was about 10 a.m., and I must have said, ‘What?!’ about 45 times. And then I fell on the floor.” alex ebert

who had begun underwriting The Masses activities with his movie-star money.

“They would have these big dinner parties in Laurel Canyon with a lot of wine and a lot of creative people making music and hanging out, and it was at one of those dinner parties that I met Heath,” says Ebert. “I remember we took a trip to Mexico, and Heath drove the whole way.

We camped on the beach and surfed for like 10 days. We would talk a lot. He really liked the band, and he flew us out to New York to perform at this concert to promote I’m Not There, with all these performers doing Dylan covers, and the Roots were the house band. We made this video that hasn’t come out yet with this girl named Grace covering Bowie’s ‘Quicksand.’ We also had plans to do a musical that he wanted to direct. It would be him and me as brothers. And, you know, we just had great plans.”

Ledger intended to establish film-production and record-company arms of The Masses. Office

space was secured, along with filmmaking gear.

The first album to be released by The Masses record company would be Up From Below, the debut album by Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, who had become the art collective’s de facto house band. And then, in 2008, tragedy struck.

“I talked to him the night before—we talked about a movie we were going to make—so, yeah, I think his death was purely accidental,” says Ebert. “I was in a juice shop with Jade, and the way I heard the news was not cool, let’s just put it that way. I was so flabbergasted. It was about 10 a.m., and I must have said, ‘What?!’ about 45 times. And then I fell on the floor. It rained that day, and it never rains in L.A., and we recorded (the final track on Up From Above) “Om Nashi Me” that day. And we recorded the rain. You can hear it at the beginning and the end of the song.

And then, a year later, it rained again on the anniversary of his death.”

Ledger’s family declined to continue fund-

ing The Masses, which left Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros in the lurch. At this point, I should mention something pretty major; something that, well, I will leave it up to the reader to decide how it colors everything I’ve told you so far: When Alex Ebert was 18 years old, he inherited a million dollars from his maternal grandfather, who was a prominent developer back in Raleigh, N.C. By the time Ebert turned 27, he had spent all but $80,000 of it—on drugs, group trips to Europe and Mexico, four-star hotels—and pretty much had nothing to show for it. Eventually, the executors of his grandfather’s will cut him off.

“They said, ‘You know what? That’s it, you’re done,’” says Ebert. “You know, they should have done it way fucking earlier. They said, ‘We can’t allow you to take any more money from this account.’ But I needed that money to finish (Up From Below), and so I sent a letter to the chief executor or whatever—the trustee or whatever— and I said, ‘Listen, I understand fully the implications of being out of money, and I’ll have to get a job, etc. I understand the implications of not having money, and what that means in this world.

Given that you now know that I understand that, please give me the money, because I believe in this project, and I believe in this band and this music, and if it doesn’t work, I’m OK with the consequences.’ And they said, ‘Fuck it, here you go.’ And they gave it to me.”

And the rest is, well, you know how it ends: He buys some magic beans and plants them in the ground and grows a beanstalk to heaven. And they all lived happily ever after.

Amen. N NEEDLE

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Man Man p. 44

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Harry Nilsson p. 46

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SUPERCHUNK p. 48

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Washed Out p. 50

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Weekend p. 51

Enter Sandman

clipped—as it happens, plenty. His voice wafting in as if from across some great, wide consciousness divide, y segall has squeezed a lengthy career’s worth of music out of he drapes heavy-lidded seductions and portending the past eight years, leaving in his wake a moldy breadcrumb trail of cautionary tales over several more than 50 warped recordings with at least as many bushwhackdecades of occultish folk, ing collaborators (Epsilons, Party Fowl, Traditional Fools, Sic Alps, Perverts, ritualistic rhythm and acousMikal Cronin). Just last year, splitting himself in thirds, he got faced with White tic blues, from Bron-Y-Aur Ty Segall Fence’s Tim Presley (Hair), mounted the freak-showboating Ty Segall Band stomps to paralyzed lullabies.

Much of Sleeper is built with (Slaughterhouse) and further loosened the bolts/tightened the screws on his a surrealistic dream logic, but seventh solo LP, Twins. The man has earned a siesta. But what demons may moments of stark lucidity peer D r ag C i t y come when the world’s most restless scuzz-rock firebrand dares to dream? through the blear. “The KeepSleeper awakens a whole new underside Man Man,” punctuated by a ers” oscillates between usof Segall to worship: the unplugged, peyoteand-them line drawings (“Let “woo!” lifted from San Fransmoke-ringed spirit animal. Maybe he got the cisco friends Thee Oh Sees, it’s like a chainsaw the keepers keep the time/Let the sleepers outbursts out of his system on those decibelfired up in a forest. More startling is that the dream so fine”) and inconvenient truths (“But bullied 2012 triplets, or maybe he’s saving his 50-second solo constitutes the only pickup we live here now, and it smells of death/And the hollow-point bullets for the debut of his latest on the album. youth is wasting the Earth’s last breath”), diseponymous-onomatopoeia power trio, Fuzz.

The nine remaining tracks generally solving into a graveyard whistle and cremated Either way, this is easily his quietest collecwouldn’t rouse a couch surfer in the next guitar. With pattering hand drums and a hithertion yet. When a vicious electric guitar lays room, and so we’re left with a taste of what and-yawn falsetto, “Come Outside” introduces into the Sugar Man strums of fourth cut “The a handicapped Segall can do with his wings the charming side of Segall’s Satan-in-space

Counting logs and sawing sheep with Ty Segall, the second cousin of death

T

Sleeper

photo by denee petracek

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reviews animus, reenacting a zero-gravity “Sympathy For The Devil.”

“Queen Lullabye” follows an aquarium diver to the bottom of the bottle and back, where he’s swallowed by a swarm of bees. And it sets in “The West,” a disarmingly vulnerable, harmonized sing-along that puts a lit match to Deer Tick. Typical rapid Ty movement: Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

Julianna Barwick

Nepenthe

Dead Oceans

Angels in Iceland

Over seven years and two cupped handfuls of blooming, decaying ambient releases, Julianna Barwick has moved from home-alone voice loops (EP sketches Sanguine and Florine) to almost touching the infinite (2011 spiritual The Magic Place) to flying to Iceland to record Nepenthe—following, presumably, the mermaid bloop signatures of sonic kin Alex Somers (of Jónsi & Alex), Amiina and Múm, each of whom collaborated.

For better or worse, the outside influences have little effect on Barwick’s sound. Her choirbuilding, endorphin-releasing swirl of vocals, synths and strings carries all the day-breaking, cloud-bursting power of an MDMA rush or a Shavasana drift; only the intelligible “One Half” and “Pyrrhic”—whose whale-call middle is so Sigur Rós—wouldn’t fall under prior spells. It’s all beautiful and entrancing, but what’s missing is a sense of discovery: If you’ve been to this magic place before, you’re forgiven for seeking another. —Noah Bonaparte Pais

Reigning Men A strangely conventional new Man Man album is also the Philly band’s most enjoyable

O

n its fifth full-length, Man Man has crafted

its most straightforward and accessible offering to date. But let’s take a step back here. This is a band On Oni Pond that, it’s commonly noted, draws heavily on the fever-dream surrealism of Captain Beefheart, the gravely throated oompah Antivibes of Tom Waits and a bit of Brechtian theatrics. Conventional by its standards is pretty dang strange by just about anybody else’s.

Still, On Oni Pond finds the Philadelphia art-rock ensemble seeming … not friendlier, exactly (singer Ryan “Honus Honus” Kattner opens the album by saying someone’s kiss “makes me feel like I’m in Guantanamo”), but more sonically inviting. The vocals wander melodic roads more than ever before, the arrangements are gentle and spacious. Drummer Chris “Pow Pow” Powell’s beats feel punchy, but not overly aggressive.

The lightly plucked violins on “Head On” sound lovely—he attempts to make them dissonant, but producer Mike Mogis is simply too good at recording strings—and the song evokes ’50s doo-wop and ’70s psychedelic Broadway on its “hold on to your heart” refrain. “Sparks” is similarly retro and jangly, while “Loot My Body” instead has some of that “old Man Man” bouncy ferocity.

Amid the ringing bossa-nova tones of “End Boss,” Kattner sings, “If you won’t reinvent yourself, you can’t circumvent yourself.” It’s like he’s saying change and refinement is necessary for growth. For Man Man, that growth has led the band to the most enjoyable weird record of its career. —John Vettese Man Man

Bitchin Bajas

Bitchitronics Drag City

Concentric eccentrics

Cooper Crain (also of Cave), Dan Quinlivan (ex-Mahjongg) and Rob Frye (Flux Bikes) have set their controls for the heart of the drone on Bitchitronics, whose title should alert the eagle-eyed to this music’s debt to Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. Although they’re practiced live performers, here they’ve devoted themselves over to tape, both as an instrument and as a recording medium.

First they played guitars, analog keyboards and flutes onto a pair of decks set up in a house studio with enough space for them to stretch tape loops out in the open air; then they fed those signals onto a third deck; and then they added more loops to that tapes. The result is music that undulates and bobs, never really going anywhere, but accumulating density.

They’ve named one piece “Turiya,” presumably after Alice Coltrane, but their consciousnessaltering properties feel more recreational than spiritual. —Bill Meyer

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photo by seÑor mcguire

Bombadil

Metrics Of Affection Ramseur

Welcome back, kind of …

Bombadil stalled after 2009’s ambitious Tarpits & Canyonlands, when, suffering from severe tendonitis in his hands, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Michalak was suddenly unable to play. If 2011’s All That The Rain Promises struck an uncharacteristically somber note, remember it might never have been made.

The ordeal seemed to have worn on the quartet, making Bombadil more stately, more subdued, yet somehow better. Songs of lost faith and broken dreams ceded only momentary indulgences to whimsy and bashful pop.

Now more or less stabilized, Bombadil reaches for its early playfulness, for better or worse, on its fourth album.

“Angeline” sports a gang-folk backing worthy of Edward Sharpe, while “Isn’t It Funny” trips into awkward rap, and “Boring Country Song” evokes Billy Joel. But then, “Learning To Let Go” is buoyant and subtly cynical, and “One More Ring” is a potent, poetic breakup song cast on spare twang. Ultimately, the record hits more than it misses, and it’s nice to see Bombadil having fun again. —Bryan C. Reed

Ken Camden

Space Mirror Kranky

This is how to fly

Guitarist Ken Camden is leaving Earth and wants to take us with him.

He’s sort of the Richard Branson of drone, except our guide here depicts the astral reaches with panoramic clarity for significantly less than it would cost to board a Virgin Galactic vessel. (The two experiences combined would be nothing if not majestic, of course.)

Space Mirror is Camden’s second solo LP for the venerable Kranky label, which also plays host to Implodes, the cavernous Chicagobased rock quartet in which Camden performs.

The record stretches and folds in on itself with a grace that at points feels absolutely terrifying, and at others like a joyful, slow-motion tumble down a hill of soft grass. Its seven instrumental passages are superbly textured and wide-eyed with wonder, yet never precious or naïve. On “Moon” and “Dominic Sunset,” in particular, Camden seems just as aware of celestial darkness as its billowing, beautiful light.

—Ryan Burleson

Glen Campbell

See You There Surfdog

So hard to say goodbye

Glen Campbell—quintessential ’60s L.A. session guitarist, essayer of lonely cowboy song/cosmopolitan pop, best

interpreter of the Jimmy Webb songbook—is in his twilight. Forget about the Alzheimer’s. He’s 77. Few artists have the stamina, the picking finesse and the voice Campbell had as late as 2012, when he played the world twice over on his farewell tour.

Still, he and his most recent collaborator, producer Dave Kaplan (the eerily brilliant Ghost On The Canvas), couldn’t resist tapping Campbell’s slightly ragged voice one more time for a series of takes on holy songs (“Waiting On The Comin’ Of My Lord”) and legendary hits that only add to the glory of his catalog. Plus, they make you miss Campbell’s potential that much more. The softly playful likes of “Gentle On My Mind” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and elegiac epics such as “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman” set a haunting stage in which to hear Campbell croon one more time. So sad. So beautiful. —A.D. Amorosi

Crocodiles

Crimes Of Passion Frenchkiss

Passion isn’t the crime here

The consummate incarnation of history being repeated by those who never knew it to begin with and the poster children for the cool-vapidity scene, Crocodiles have somehow been allowed, by some loophole in the laws of logic, to give the world another LP of public-domain shoegaze-lite. (Calling this band “noise-pop” is an insult to both noise and pop.)

Four full-lengths since 2009 might gain a designative term like “prolific” in less realistic (promotional) content, but four albums of nothing is either exactly that or proof that people who make bad art tend to have quite the work ethic. Crocodiles have attained some serious mileage out of a 2008 No Age shout-out, a member married to a Dum Dum Girl, some Wavves cross-marketing and “dark” song titles, but mediocrity this aggressive should cancel itself out at some point and leave the best-case hope that album number five will be comprised entirely of silence. —Andrew Earles

Decades

Decades

White Girl

Not just another new/old band

“I need your faith tonight” are the first words sung by vocalist Mike Kaminski on the self-titled debut by Toronto’s Decades. Guitarist Justin Lemaire and the rhythm section of bassist Greg Peters and drummer Peter Gosling motor along, matching Kaminski’s plaintive howls with their own sense of urgency. Decades occupies the same space as similar shining nouveau stars (Savages, Wymond Miles) when the moodiness of post-punk gets a dollop of bright new-wave guitar lines. If this were 1983, the band would be all over the radio already, and

rightfully so.

In 2013, it’s still compelling, as Decades add murky undertones à la House Of Love or Catherine Wheel. Kaminski’s voice is its own magic, sedating one second, near-hysterical the next.

Most of the best songs are the burners, and the band would do well to pump up the atmosphere by slowing things down. In the end, anyone who invests will find the faith Kaminski pleads for at the open. —Jill LaBrack

Adam Franklin & Bolts Of Melody

Black Horses Goodnight

Black horses couldn’t drive him away

Is it fair that everything Adam Franklin does is going to be lined up for comparison to his work in the mighty Swervedriver, more so now that Swervedriver is back in some form and fashion? Maybe. Maybe not. But it almost seems as if Franklin himself is resigned to the idea that the double whammy of subjectivity and popularity will always have the peanut gallery looking backward.

A song morosely entitled “I Used To Live For Music” will go a long way in conjuring up such assumptions, especially when it plods lifelessly. Black Horses has its downcast, almost lazy moments, where a couple acoustic layers and a reverbed-out vocal line are offered up as heartfelt expression, when in actuality, it’s the more powerfully pounding “Coda Code,” the progressive jangle of “Asha” and the soaring twang of “Boocat Leah” that make this record interesting and engaging. And if those songs just happen to be reminiscent of Swervedriver, then so be it. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Fuck Buttons

Slow Focus ATP

Base instincts

The only thing more surprising than the Fuck Buttons’ feature in last year’s bizarre, Danny Boyle-directed Summer Olympics opening ceremony was how seamlessly “Surf Solar” and (the, in retrospect, aptly named) “Olympians”—two highlights off of their stellar 2009 LP, Tarot Sport—fit in with all of the usual Olympic pomp and circumstance; the triumphant crests and guttural, droning lows that have come to typify the duo’s sound playing aural counterpoint to one of the most spectacular opening ceremonies to date.

But the Fuck Buttons’ third full-length sees them switch things up considerably. Where on previous efforts, the duo relied on driving, techno-minded rhythms for momentum, Slow Focus finds them instituting a newfound affinity for broken, off-kilter beats (most notably on ferocious cuts “Sentients” and “The Red Wing”), alongside their now-signature knack for teasing irresistible melodies out of chaotic, discordant noise. —Möhammad Choudhery

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reviews Gauntlet Hair

Stills

Dead Oceans

More human than certain humans—thankfully.

We’re sure it wasn’t only the MAGNET collective whose reproductive organs shriveled in fear when Gauntlet Hair drummer Craig Nice initially promoted the band’s second album by claiming that he and Andy Rauworth went back to the music of their youth for inspiration. “White Zombie, Marilyn Manson,” Nice said, with no irony or dry humor ambling over the horizon.

We’re glad to report that we don’t exactly know what the hell the Denver duo is talking about—or at least that its influences has been absorbed to the point that the band is virtually invisible. Stills is pure electro-pop with a quirky indie edge. Joy Division and INXS batter battering rams with Interpol and NIN on the jagged likes of “Simple” and the ’80s-style drum cheesiness of “Bad Apple.”

The album’s most obvious failing is the way in which the vocals are presented (too much, too layered and sometimes too out of key) and mixed (too prominently), though at least we’re not wading through a crap-pile of proto-nü-metal. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

The Cowboy’s Last Midnight Pop’s great almost-was Harry Nilsson proves exactly why he should have been

Grumbling Fur

Glynnaestra

Thrill Jockey

Nothing to grumble about

Mentioning the backgrounds of Grumbling Fur principals Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker seems like a stunt contrast. Their stints with Sunn O)))verlord Stephen O’Malley grant them more than ample noise and doom credentials, even before counting O’Sullivan’s work with Ulver, Tucker’s ghostly electro-acoustic wanderings or any of either’s many other collaborations and guises.

So, what are these guys doing making such intoxicating electronic pop, right? Glynnaestra is the duo’s second full-length, and a much more fully realized assemblage than its rangy debut, Furrier.

It also suggests that maybe its makers’ past work isn’t so unlikely after all. Bumping against a dizzying array of art-pop touchstones, from Brian Eno and Arthur Russell to Vangelis and Portishead, Glynnaestra moves with a patience and purposefulness rarely seen outside of long-form, abstract music. The songs are mostly concise, ranging from less than two minutes to more than seven, but their motorik propulsion and detailed, gradual builds add more subtle rewards beneath synthpop immediacy. —Bryan C. Reed

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Harry Nilsson

The RCA Albums Collection

W

hen John Lennon called his friend

behind this boxed set “my favorite group,” he wasn’t just taking the piss. Instead, the ex-Beatle was remarking on the schizophrenic nature of RCA/Legacy pop’s greatest enigma, the wittiest lyricist since Noel Coward, whose epic (yet unusually delicate) melodic base found him lodged halfway between Tin Pan Alley and McDougal Street, somewhere between the arch sadness of Fred Neil (whose “Everybody’s Talkin’” gave Nilsson his first hit) and the grand schmaltz of Phil Spector, yet stunningly and uniquely his own man, for better and worse.

Though longtime fans of Nilsson (who passed away in 1994) will welcome the chance to update their beat-up, halo-lined vinyl copies of his RCA and Buddha classics with finer sound and rarities, anyone who currently calls themselves fans of Randy Newman, the Magnetic Fields and Elliott Smith will revel in this 17-CD set’s delights.

Nilsson’s full albums are intact, from the wildly zippy and Beatles-like Pandemonium Shadow Show and Aerial Ballet—which the Fab Four adored—to the charmingly warped Harry and the bittersweet, nearly-guitar-less Knnillssonn, his final album for RCA. In between, there was idiosyncratic pre-art-pop (Nilsson Schmilsson, Son Of Schmilsson), alluringly childlike soundtracks (The Point!), worthwhile L.A.-sensationalist schlock both contagiously dynamic (Pussy Cats) and cornily tuneless, yet no less fascinating (Duit On Mon Dei), all riddled with his multi-octave voice and his devilish-yet-folksy lyrical charms. Beyond his original albums lies three newly cobbled CDs of magic realist pop and frisky showboating folk that are endlessly fascinating. Their breathlessly imaginative tunes will never be heard again. Not bloody likely. —A.D. Amorosi

photo by Jim Wright

Mayer Hawthorne

Where Does This Door Go?

Universal Republic

Open wide

As brilliant and uncanny as his earlier work’s spot-on Motown evocations were, Mayer Hawthorne is too savvy to get stuck in a revivalist rut. True to its venturesome title, the tux-rocking soulster’s third opus keeps pushing things forward, in a backward-looking sort of way: retaining his old-school suavity while blowing up the retro rulebook; mixing-and-matching the sort of blue-eyed Doobie Brothers yacht-soul broached on his previous album with smartly contemporary, hip-hop-edged production (complete with 2013’s most fun-having guest artist, Kendrick Lamar).

Another modernizing touch—a sprinkling of rap-style skits contextualizing the easy elision between debonair courtship and booze-fueled hook-up culture—offers a perhaps unfortunately retrograde wrinkle to Hawthorne’s dubiously chivalrous ladies-man persona. (See also: the man-eating anti-heroine of the deliciously grooving “The Innocent.”) But these are quibbles: Hawthorne’s songwriting, crisply appointed arrangements and effortlessly gratifying croon—especially that gleaming falsetto—feel more casually confident than ever, making This Door a third straight slam dunk. —K. Ross Hoffman

Julia Holter

Loud City Song Domino

Big time sensuality

Lemme drop some science. Actually, it might be pseudoscience.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (or ASMR) is the not-widely accepted term used to describe the way certain things—a light or a smell, maybe—can trigger a kind of twitchy, electric, quasi-orgasmic twinge that spiders across your scalp and down your neck. A lot of ASMRgonauts say it’s a tactile sound that sets it off: a hard-soled shoe on tile, fingernails sliding along glass. For those people, I wholeheartedly recommend the third full-length by L.A. singer/songwriter/scalp-chanteuse Julia Holter.

Loud City Song is a treasure trove of echoing breaths and hissing, slithering sibilance. It’s also mood-altering in the usual sense. Holter’s home-schooled ethereal sound can be coolly minimalist (“World”) a minute before getting all lush and Björky (“In The Green Wild”), a thoughtful pop aesthetic that few others even shoot for. Surely some will glean physical stimulation from such stormy ambience.

Have a nice scalpgasm, you beautiful weirdos.

—Patrick Rapa

Hunx & His Punx

Andy Kaufman

Hardly Art

Drag City

Gimme that old time punk ‘n’ roll

An intimate portrait for diehards only

Street Punk

Oakland, Calif., guitarist/songwriter Seth Bogart (a.k.a. Hunx) is a lipstick-wearing gay man who fronts a streetwise, tattooed, tough combo known as the Punx. After a recent move to L.A., he started writing with Shannon Shaw, leader of Shannon & The Clams.

Street Punk is their first studio effort, a blistering attack that drops 12 tunes in a little more than 20 minutes.

This is hardcore at its best, full of grinding guitars, pounding bass, supersonic drumming and vocals packed with sneering dark humor. “Bad Skin” is a lament any teen can relate to, the Latin-flavored, girl-group/badboy rocker “Mud In Your Eyes” has attitude to spare, and the guitar freakout on “Kill Elaine” amps up the song’s tongue-in-cheek anger.

“Born Blonde” strings together a bunch of blonde jokes with a proto-surf backbeat, while “You Think You’re Tuff” and “Everybody’s A Pussy (Fuck You Dude)” are the kind of jibes that used to echo through junior-high locker rooms. —j. poet

Andy And His Grandmother

Between 1977 and 1979, legendary “song and dance man” Andy Kaufman traveled almost everywhere with a tape recorder, documenting his life, along with anyone else who was around him. These hours and hours of tapes have been edited down by comedian and producer Vernon Chatman (of Wonder Showzen fame), along with Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s right-hand man, into an album of hodgepodge moments from the comic’s daily existence.

Those looking for Kaufman’s brand of gleefully absurd fun will surely be disappointed, as these tapes are strictly for completist diehards. Over the course of the album, there’s numerous phone-call fights with his ex-girlfriend, fights with a movie-theater employee, fights in a taxi cab (with Andy in Tony Clifton mode) and dozens of folks who plead with Kaufman to turn the goddamn recorder off. There’s some interesting bits here (like a conversation with Zmuda about faking his own death), but for a better look into Kaufman’s mind, a trip to YouTube would suffice. —Bryan Bierman

Joan Of Arc

Aidan Knight

Polyvinyl

Outside Music

Compensatory damages

Black holes and revelations

Testimonium Songs

This six-song set from Joan Of Arc was written to be performed with an experimental Chicago theater company’s piece based on poet Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, itself based on transcripts of criminal and workplace negligence cases between 1885 and 1915. I know what you’re thinking: “Does that make this more or less weird than what I’ve come to expect from JOA?” The answer is yes.

Album opener “Amelia,” which cribs from Reznikoff’s poem about a 14-year-old girl who’s scalped by a book-stitching machine, is the most reverential. Thereafter, Tim Kinsella and Co. wander the roads of inspiration.

“I’d Expect Babies Should Fly, If Not At Least Float Away,” its lyrics frequently unintelligible, is a mumblecore rumination on the ills of industry, while “The Bird’s Nest Wrapped Around The Security Camera” is a collection of twisted Zen koans. The closing a cappella “Jury Duty” bemoans that flipping the mirror upside has no similar effect on the world.

Which I think is a fitting sentiment on which to end this review. —Brian G. Howard

Small Reveal

This is the sophomore effort by what is both a Canadian singer/songwriter and the namesake of what bio content terms an “experimental folk band,” and the widescreen intimacy of Small Reveal suggests that we’re dealing with the latter here. Aidan Knight’s voice is a surgically precise culmination of Nick Drake as done by the last 15 to 20 years of indie-folksters, with Elliott Smith right up there at the top of the list.

Musically, there’s enough variety and songwriting skill to keep this from falling into the innocuous car- /bank-commercial abyss, not to mention some needed teeth (background noise and surprise tempo/structural changes), especially on the album’s top-shelf anchor track, “You Will See The Good In Everyone.” At its best, Small Reveal recalls the best past-decade achievements of the often peerless Cass McCombs, while its worst may be coming to a Verizon or Volkswagen advertisement near you. —Andrew Earles

Lumerians

The High Frontier Partisan

Space rock: the final frontier

Lumerians are clearly steeped in the lysergic legacy of krautrock, and seem equally enam-

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ored of Sonic Youth’s wall-of-melodicnoise ethic, but there are moments of pure ’60s psychedelic pop on the Oakland quartet’s third album in as many years. In fact, “The Bloom” incorporates all of that and more into its five-and-half-minute span, from Brian Eno-like aggressive ambience to Can-colored drone strikes to hallucinatory pop squalls that the Blues Magoos would have been proud to claim.

The title track (with its “The” surreptitiously removed) offers a similar mashup of eras and styles; the opening notes suggest a Ray Manzarek Doors demo, a lost Donovan track or an alternate score piece for Head, the Monkees’ unhinged film farewell. Luckily, Lumerians have no interest in retro revivalism—they create fresh sonic collages that reference past epochs rather than erect shrines to exalt them. —Brian Baker

Moderat

II

Mute

What’s in the name

Apparat and Modeselektor were never an intuitive match. The Teutonic troika’s 2009 self-titled fulllength sounded like a tug of war between the former’s inward-looking synthgaze and the latter duo’s twitchy, punch-drunk monkey business, with intriguingly wideranging—if somewhat inconclusive—results. This charming regrouping manages a truce, staking out a middle ground between dance floors and dreamscapes akin to the one Jon Hopkins established on his billowy Immunity.

There are still a lot of styles surveyed here, with the prevailing aesthetic core variably augmented by glitch, broken-beat, wobble-skank, whispery ambience and bouts of improbably po-faced pop soul.

(About that: Apparat has a surprisingly buttery croon for an avant-electro auteur, and while replacing the first album’s circus of guest vocalists is mostly a smart move, his filter-free turns on “Bad Kingdom” and “Damage Done” could be a bit jarring for some sensibilities.) If there’s a complaint to be leveled, it’s that the odd threesome might have smoothed out its differences a little too much. But it mostly works. —K. Ross Hoffman

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Fearless Loathing

Superchunk undergoes minor renovations and reinventions on the follow-up to a fine comeback

I

f 2010’s Majesty Shredding, Superchunk’s first

album in nearly a decade, was the band’s loud, raucous, let’s-do-shots welcome-back party, I Hate Music is the Superchunk reckoning for such wild abandon. It’s not that it’s a downer, I Hate Music but this is drawn from darker stuff than, say, Majesty’s jubilant “Learned To Surf.” More cynical in its worldview and with a Merge thread of loss running throughout, I Hate Music weds the North Carolina indie legends’ eternal penchant for grind-it-out power punk with the pensiveness and introspection that colored their late-’90s/early-aughts output.

“Overflows,” the album’s opening track, is a slow-starter that ruminates on the persistent heaviness of loss: “Oh yeah, you’re not around/But you are still the window we are looking out/A prism and a lens and a flood and a drought.” The short, sweet “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo” (a tribute to the late Skatalites co-founder) posits the LP’s titular statement, bemoaning music’s relative powerlessness against life’s larger forces. The anthemic “Out Of The Sun” uses a baseball metaphor to bat around the idea of being past one’s prime: “Now the infield’s green, but we’re all just in between/A short hop and the losing run.” Even the album’s blistering, minute-plus, pseudo-hardcore “Staying Home” reads like an homage to domesticity.

I Hate Music’s closing tracks, however, tip the band’s hand. This isn’t a portrait of decline and decay; it’s a celebration of a kind of rebirth. “FOH” (Front Of The House) is a strangely uplifting treatise on living vicariously when one is “tied to the timbers” of responsibility “and the ropes are stout.” And on “What Can We Do,” when “our little island might be sinking,” the solution is, “Let’s build something new.” On that front, Superchunk appears to be walking the walk. —Brian G. Howard

photo by jason arthurs

The Mother Hips

Behind Beyond Mother Hips

Still bearing fruit

The Mother Hips have been going their own way for 20 years, playing their own version of country-flavored, psychedelicjam-band Americana. This effort took more than a year to make, with the Bay Area group’s attention to detail showing up on every finely burnished track.

The brilliant guitar interplay between leaders Tim Bluhm and Greg Loiacono that gave the Hips their original heft is evident on dramatic historical epic “Jefferson Army,” the smooth cowboy R&B of “Rose Of Rainbows” and the pastoral funk of “Shape The Bell.” Bluhm’s vocals shine on “Song For JB” (a gentle, twang-heavy, pedal-steel-drenched eulogy to a departed friend) and “Freed From A Prison” (a salute to the healing power of music). On “Tuffy,” the Hips get in touch with California’s jazzy country roots on a tune that tips its hat to the work of the Grateful Dead. —j. poet

The Mountain Goats

All Hail West Texas Merge

Southern comfort

It’s right there in the press release: “remastered.” Giggle. Much of All Hail West Texas’ charm lies in the fact that this is the lowest of lo-fi recordings from John Darnielle, who legendarily played and sang the whole of the album into the condenser mic of a Panasonic boom box, with most of the songs recorded on the very day of their composition.

So, as far as sound quality goes, what’s here has been equalized and (most importantly) de-hissed, but that’s a moot point beside the prime consideration: This is the first wide release of one of Darnielle’s greatest sets of songs ever, straight from his head, more or less, into your speakers.

Since the 2002 Emperor Jones label release, lots of cuts from West Texas have entered the Mountain Goats pantheon, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” most prominently. But the album’s sleepers are equal to the better-known cuts, with the gentle “Riches And Wonders” coming out most improved for the moderate cleanup. Seven bonus cuts from the same project make it more than worth picking up even for those who’ve worn out the original. —Eric Waggoner

Sarah Neufeld

Hero Brother

Constellation

Locked in

Instrumental solo violin albums aren’t typically a huge sell in the indiemusic marketplace, although being a full-time member of Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre

ought to give Sarah Neufeld a considerable leg up. However they find their audience, the 11 gorgeous pieces making up Hero Brother richly deserve it.

These are nuanced, intrepid explorations of melody, texture and emotion that make just as much sense approached as “pop” as they do when apprehended as “modern classical,” drawing equally on post-rock, Reichian minimalism and the violin’s dual lineage as a vessel for both art music and folk tunes. Neufeld has toured with saxophonist Colin Stetson, which is fitting on numerous levels—the two musicians share a city (Montreal), label and an enviable side-person-to-the-indie-stars status—but especially so in musical terms. Her playing, while technically impressive, may not have quite Stetson’s jaw-dropping virtuosity, but her pieces have a highly comparable mesmeric, minimalist intensity. —K. Ross Hoffman

Van Dyke Parks

Songs Cycled Bella Union

Everything old is (mostly) new again

Though he’s best known for his (largely illfated) collaborations with Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks’ music is hardly “fun in the sun.” A cross between Aaron Copland’s traditionalism and Cole Porter’s grandiosity, Parks’ impressionistic approach to music and lyrics has been beguiling and frustrating listeners since the late ’60s.

Originally a contracted composer and arranger for Warner Bros., Parks spent long hours in the studio chasing a lofty muse. Even if it didn’t feature several reimagined versions of older tunes, Songs Cycled would still hearken back to those early Parks records in its sheer ambition. Fragmented prairie hymnals (“The Parting Hand”), cynical Caribbean calypsos (“Money Is King”) and celebrations in Frenchcolonized North Africa (“Wedding In Madagascar”) serve as Parks’ main touchstones.

Newcomers will undoubtedly find the collection overstuffed and scatterbrained, but longtime fans know that that’s been Parks’ M.O. for nearly 50 years. Songs Cycled completes Parks’ transformation from oddball torchbearer to full-on musical time capsule. —Eric Schuman

Pond

Hobo Rocket Modular

The million head collide

Not the same Pond! We know a couple of you old grungers out there just leapt out of your skin thinking the classic Sub Pop band was back, but we’re gonna have to let you down. It is, however, three dudes from current-day indie wunderkind Tame Impala making some of the most essential psychedelic rock around, which is rad no matter which way you slice it.

From fuzzed-out riffs to drifting electronic soundscapes, Pond manages to use just about every trick in the psych-rock playbook to create energetic, borderline-unstable earworms that bury themselves deep in your brain for days.

From the mumbled and rambling title track to the soaring pulse and drift of “Giant Tortoise” to the insanely hooky “Xan Man,” these Australians have all their freak-fuzz chakras aligned and radiating. —Sean L. Maloney

Pop. 1280

Imps Of Perversion Sacred Bones

Another damned day at the no-wave, pig-fuck office

If Kanye West really wanted to sock it to the squares, he’d leave Daft Punk to its retro devices and leverage the syphilitic nihilism that guitarist Ivan Lip and singer Chris Bug bring to bear as Pop. 1280. These Brooklynites—think Sightings and Pissed Jeans in a donnybrook— aren’t preemptive boys crying wolf. Rather than doomsaying a debased future, Pop. 1280 preaches that our apocalypse is now, dudes— a blown-out present that only knotty guitars, cross-eyed keyboards and depraved vocals about dungeons and internet porn binges can draw into focus.

On Imps Of Perversion, the pesticidecoated fruit doesn’t fall far from the rotted-out tree: the festering, slo-mo sear of “Nailhouse,” “Lights Out” creeping out of the speakers and up your forearm, “Do The Anglerfish” and “Human Probe” copping the wigged-out effects that colored 10,000 Maniacs’ “Planned Obsolescence.” Bug’s poetry remains the stuff of nightmares, but the band’s splayed-nerve shtick is wearing thin.

Closer “Riding Shotgun” suggests a promising new avenue: a clutch shuffling Parkinson’s textures and samples, echoing spoken word and guitar work that’s restrained, almost demure. —Raymond Cummings

Pretty Lights

A Color Map Of The Sun Pretty Lights Music

Can’t beat this heat

Coming down from the hiphop high of 2009’s Passing By Behind Your Eyes, Derek Vincent Smith decided to make A Color Map Of The Sun the old-fashioned way: composing music, recording live stereo sessions, pressing them onto vinyl, then sampling, flipping and reconstructing the results.

It’s still Pretty Lights, still funky as shit, still audacious. But the process has given these 13 tracks a depth we haven’t heard before, with a new dynamism to the space between acoustic and electric.

When Smith wants quiet, that’s what he gets, his solo piano in an echoing, empty room; and when he needs the crunch of Eric Krasno’s electric guitar, it’s enough to knock you off your

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reviews feet. Even when Smith’s vocals fail—which they do more often than they should—the beats remain irresistible, the settings rhapsodic, the melodies rich with possibility. It feels like the jazz/hip-hop album we’ve been waiting for, fulfilling Smith’s promise to deliver “a real substantial piece of music you can sink your teeth into.” —Kenny Berkowitz

Sly & The Family Stone

Higher!

Epic/Legacy

A whole reissued thing

Sylvester Stewart (a.k.a. Sly Stone) ranks with James Brown and George Clinton as one of the great architects of funk.

The seven core albums with his interracial band the Family Stone, from 1967’s A Whole New Thing to 1974’s Small Talk, were reissued with bonus tracks in 2007, but this four-CD set presents an alternate, more comprehensive history.

Using mostly original mono mixes, Higher! opens with a few early, pre-Family Stone singles that reveal Stone’s roots in Los Angeles garage pop, then intersperses iconic hits— “Stand,” “Hot Fun In The Summertime,” “Dance To The Music,” “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again)”—with album highlights and surprising diversions that dabble in country, doo-wop and psychedelic rock. Although the 17 unreleased tracks, alternate mixes and thorough annotations will lure hardcore fans, Higher!’s real value is in its depth: Stone needs four CDs to display his breadth, and this comp is full of funky fun. —Steve Klinge

Up In The Air

Washed Out’s neo-shoegaze stylings can’t quite conjure the genre’s greats

C

all it whatever you want: chillwave, shoe-

gaze, muzak. But Ernest Greene’s agenda is blurring every instrument, voice and rhythm toward Paracosm the same blinding horizon at the ocean’s edge. When people call this stuff “sun-soaked,” they’re not just making fancy Sub Pop metaphors; the out-of-focus, vague melodic connections, smoothed-out notes and endless waterfalls of echo and reverb are all designed to keep things out of view, obscured from earshot. It’s a neat trick that’s been done to death, though Greene wants to master it anyway. On his best record yet, he comes close.

Life Of Leisure’s crawling pace wouldn’t maintain over the long-term, and major-indie debut Within And Without tried too hard to be the Coldplay to My Bloody Valentine’s Radiohead, exhausting the sonic signature of chillwave’s detuned synth arpeggios. But Paracosm focuses on Greene’s voice, and the electronic stuff is pared down, from the glockenspiel on Slowdive-ish closer “All Over Now” to the title tune swaying with harp like something off the last Caribou album. His poppiest song ever, “All I Know,” makes disco from this mush, albeit disco that sounds like it’s blaring from the basement of a church cathedral. The one that strives most for angelic wall-of-voices windfall is called “Weightless,” of course.

Either way, Greene no longer sounds Washed Out; he sounds like someone determined to beat the post-laptop jinx that some indie-rockers unfortunately associate with having lofty musical ambitions. And for nine tracks in just 40 minutes, these are lighter than air and spry enough for your feet. —Dan Weiss Washed Out

Stereophonics

Graffiti On The Train Stylus

Chugging right along

Wales-bred/Cardiff-based Stereophonics are one of the most durable classic-alternative rock bands on the U.K. scene. Showcasing the voice and songwriting of guitarist Kelly Jones, the group’s sound is tight and dramatic, showcasing sometimesgrand arrangements and soulful, knowing vocals. Now, Jones has concocted a semi-structured concept album with its very own plotline based on a screenplay (also conceived by Jones), and the real question is whether you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Graffiti On The Train opener “We Share The Same Sun” isn’t connected to the story, but it is a sweeping piece of modern rock with magnificent production and dreamy, passionate singing. The title track begins the escapist-tragedy storyline in earnest, using a regal string arrangement and soaring guitar

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photo by shae detar

No Cursing

Everybody in Weekend is working (successfully) to avoid a sophomore slump

A

s much a tribute to vocalist/bassist/guitar-

ist Shaun Durkan’s father Tom, who sang in ’80s post-punk blips Half Church under the stage name Weekend Jinx, Weekend’s second album is a refining of the near-unharJinx nessed energy of its Sports debut. That’s not to say Jinx would be coughing on the metaphorical dust of its predecessor in a Slumberland comparative energy sweepstakes; it’s just that it’s an album that boils and broils differently.

Stylistically, Durkan, guitarist Kevin Johnson and drummer Abe Pedroza reference a common list of suspects: the Cure, Killing Joke, Depeche Mode and Joy Division. There are also nods to MBV, as well as not-as-cool-to-admit-they-might-be-influences like OMD, Thomas Dolby and a-ha. Touring and band life have instilled a new sense of economy in Weekend. Notes that are meant to be played are played, notes meant to be left out are left out (“Adelaide”), and the result—especially when combined with the stirring synth swells and restrained guitar warble—catapults potential mopey indie rock to grandiose heights. “Mirror,” “July” and “Rosaries” are examples of goth-tinged, post-punk mastery that should be held up in front of songwriters to illustrate how to go beyond aping your record collection, especially if the recently released Killing Joke singles collection is spinning in the background.

Occasionally, Weekend meanders away from the point and drops a subpar filler bit you’d expect from the difficult second-album phase (“Scream Queen”), but for the most part, the band has deftly added its own experiences and experience to the original template of its debut, and comes out gleaming on the other end. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

to complement Jones’ commanding wail. The LP’s slow-building peak moment is “Violins And Tambourines,” which is also dramatic and affected, no matter what Jones may actually be singing about. —Mitch Myers

Tedeschi Trucks Band

Made Up Mind

Sony Masterworks

Process of elimination

The talented husband-andwife team of guitarist Derek Trucks and singer/ guitarist Susan Tedeschi are at it again. Having integrated the personnel of their respective bands into one large touring ensemble and carrying on the family-style legacy of Trucks’ other working group, the Allman Brothers Band, the duo has all the makings of a long-term commitment. The component parts are first-rate, including Tedeschi’s gutsy voice, the empathic handpicked musicians and especially Trucks’ fevered guitar sound.

For those who love traditional song structures based on the blues, folk and rock music of heritage bands the land over, Made Up Mind will suit you fine; but if you’re looking for expansive, mind-bending jams heading off into uncharted territory with long guitar freakouts, you might be disappointed. Considering the improvisational skill, malleability and performing traditions of the sprawling group, this is just another solid recording on a long, strange evolutionary trip. —Mitch Myers

True Widow

Circumambulation Relapse

Float on

Curious what awaits you on the harrowing-by-way-of-sublime third fulllength from post-rock droners True Widow?

Imagine a sprawling soundtrack to a mashup of Easy Rider and The Road recorded by a musical collective comprised of members of Low, Red House Painters, Concrete Blonde and PJ Harvey’s band circa Rid Of Me, and you’ll be pretty warm, bordering on red hot.

Boasting a crazy apt title invoking the ceremonial circling of a sacred object, True Widow conjures a fervent, searching vibe here that frequently swells into gritty mysticism—a sound relentless in pursuit of foreboding atmospheres, yet leavened by the resplendent vocal interplay of guitarist Dan Phillips and bassist Nicole Estill to ultimately create something both menacing and ethereal, primordial and visionary. Circumambulation is a straight-up turn-the-lights-out-and-subsume-yourself type of record. It might not get the party started, but it’ll sure as hell get the freshly converted pilgrims ambling. —Shawn Macomber

photo by Jessica Chou

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Deadheads Living With The Walking Dead

by Emily Trace

If someone asked you “What’s The Walking Dead about?” you

might return the question by asking them if the rock they live under is nice this time of year, and then offhandedly respond that it’s about zombies. However, whatever the title may imply, the horror-drama based on the popular graphic novel of the same name is much more about life than it is about death. Many viewers started watching when the show premiered in 2010 because they quite understandably wanted to see some screaming suburbanites get swarmed by the living dead, but stuck with it through to the third season’s finale because of the relentlessly compelling ordeals and issues that the survivors go through… issues which are eerily familiar even to us preapocalyptic types. Though it might seem ironic at first that a show about the undead is so concerned with what it means to be alive, the show’s exploration of humanity accounts for its record-breaking success as much as its Emmy-award winning prosthetics department does.

With the release of The Walking Dead’s complete third season on DVD and Blu-ray this August 27, fans will either revisit or discover anew what makes this show unique.

Of all the zombie material produced since the genre began, Dead is perhaps the piece that most realistically illustrates what the first world would be like if this contagion were real, because rather than trying to show an entire nation responding to the threat, the audience sees it as they would actually experience it: through the eyes of an individual or small group cut off from anything beyond their own sightlines. The only answers that the characters ever get are ones they have to venture out into the dangerous world to find; no one can Google “home zombie-bite remedy”, or look up a map showing the quickest way to resources.

This isolation turns the group of survivors into a microcosm of the larger social chaos going on across the country, and one that we can immerse completely in.

Andrew Lincoln has the daunting task of taking this concentration one step further by playing police officer Rick Grimes, a reAMC’s The Walking Dead: Season Three, luctant leader in whose character one can available August 27th see thousands of years of cultural evolution struggle to remain intact, but slowly regress under the demands of survival. The second

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season witnessed this visceral arc as Rick is forced to re-evaluate what it means to be an effective leader once the world is no longer compatible with his moral code; his judgment is further complicated by his former partner, Shane, becoming a progressively more extreme example of the ruthlessness this dark world sometimes requires. It’s not easy to remain your own shoulder angel when the entire world and your best friend have become the proverbial devil luring you away from moral integrity. Coping with an injured son, an unfaithful wife, and a group that simultaneously demands and undermines his leadership, the audience can see Rick trading his moral precepts bit-by-bit for harsh, survivalist logic.

However, none of these experiences are exclusive to a world overrun by zombies; who doesn’t fear for their children, sometimes wonder about their spouse, or deal with maddening co-workers on a daily basis? Though the characters inhabit a world few can relate to, their struggles are unsettlingly relatable. And once the question of personhood is raised, The Walking Dead starts hitting us where it’s most personal, most uncomfortable: if you saw someone you loved change into a monster trying to rip you apart, could you pull the trigger? With Rick and Shane showing the transition away from old-world morals, the character of Hershel Greene brings something fresh to the mix, posing that “walkers” are just sick, and aren’t responsible for their actions. Insisting that he can treat them, and unwilling to shoot his own infected loved ones, the barn filled with walkers becomes a test of everyone’s humanity, empathy, and will to survive.

In the season about to be released, those themes are even more gut-wrenchingly confronted as we get into the actual science behind the epidemic, and into something even darker than living death. According to the Governor, a central new character, the world may have changed but the way people think has not. Enough time has passed in this universe that many of the uninfected have become more monstrous than the walkers they defend themselves from. At this point, everyone has put a steel pipe through a walker’s eye more times than they can count; some of the characters barely pay attention as they swing an axe into what used to be a human skull. The real threat at this point are the people who either let the cruelty of the new world change them, or only had their cruelty held back by civilization and are now free to indulge. After one of the most harrowing scenes the show has staged yet, Maggie remarks “All this time running from walkers—you forget what people do.”

We know zombies like to eat people; it’s not personal. But humanity’s savagery proves to be far more grisly as the third season takes us to the two parallel societies created by survivors. The first is a prison that once kept dangerous criminals away from civilians, and is now where Rick and his group barricade themselves to keep the danger out. It is in their cellblock where a side character observes what may be the thesis of the whole season: “Only getting worse out there. Dead everywhere. Only making the living less like the living.” And nowhere is this more apparent than in the second society we discover: the dis-

turbingly peaceful town of Woodbury. As its conspicuously generic name might suggest, this Stepford-esque community seems blithely unafraid of the threat outside their walls, though said walls seem to be made mostly out of old tires and corrugated metal.

Woodbury’s horror is more vicious because it lulls one into a rare sense of security with its clean sidewalks and grocery-shopping citizens. In a world where you get used to danger lunging at you rotting, growling, and biting, the more insidious dangers can be hard to detect—unless you’re katana-wielding Michonne, the third season’s breakout star. Immediately more on her guard in the deceptively safe town than she is surrounded by walkers in the wilderness, the term “strong female character” really doesn’t cover it. An enigma who shows up with two armless walkers on leashes, Michonne has instincts as sharp as her sword and she trusts them, comparable only to

fan-favourite Daryl Dixon. Her importance to the narrative becomes clear when she sees right through Woodbury’s too-smooth Governor, and hightails it ages before the town’s nauseating theatrics begin to surface. After witnessing their customs and fighting his way out of the town, Rick asks, “What kind of a sick mind does that?” and Hershel answers, “The kind this world creates.”

Though the walkers are easily the most thrilling and expensive part of the show, The Walking Dead is indisputably about life; the right to life, the defence of life, and the bravery and brutality that the living are capable of. With moments of crippling grief, salacious gore and startling humour, The Walking Dead makes it all too easy to imagine an apocalyptic world, but poses a difficult question to viewers, especially fans who say a zombie apocalypse would be fun, challenging us to honestly question who such a world would make us become.

Distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment, LLC. All program content © 2012, 2013 AMC Film Holdings LLC. All Rights Reserved. needle

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by Stan Michna

Love Hurts In writer/director Jeff Nichols’s Mud, love Daddy tells his conflicted son.) What’s more, hurts, all right—hurts and scars and wounds.

Ellis has fallen hard for the older May Pearl Not in a bombastic, one-punch-knockout (Bonnie Sturdivant) who will later humiliate Nazareth kind of way, but in a stabbing, longEllis and rip apart his young heart. And every ing, aching-‘til-the-day-you-die Gram Parman Ellis interacts with, including the orphan sons-Emmylou Harris kind of way.

Neckbone’s womanizing guardian uncle Galen Mud is a Hurtin’ Movie . . . but (Michael Shannon), offers advice on the ways of love (“Help Me Rhonda is not the kind you might think. about a guy getting over a girl who put Granted, its setting, rural Arkansas along the Mississippi one over on him,” is Galen’s cockamariver, land of junkyards, juke mie contribution.) joints, Piggly-Wigglys, po’ white After providing food and stealing parts to repair the boat, Ellis unwitfolks in pick-ups and where the tingly wades into the darker side of oblivin’ ain’t easy, suggests a series of obvious codes pointing to yet sessive love when he becomes Mud’s another movie about decent, go-between, surreptitiously passing put-upon women suffering at the notes to Juniper. Mud is a fugitive, ElAvailable on lis learns, because he killed the man hands of their no-account men.

DVD and Blu-ray August 27th from who impregnated Juniper and threw But that would be dead wrong.

Entertainment One her down a stairway to induce a misIn Mud, the hapless menfolk— of all ages—suffer heartache at the hands of carriage. And now the dead man’s ruthless (mostly) no-account, faithless women. father and brother (Joe Don Baker and Paul Sparks) assemble a redneck posse of killers to One of the legendary Preston Sturges’s rewipe out Mud. When Ellis searches out Junicurring themes was what undiminished saps per to tell her both the boat and Mud are ready men, all men, become when romantically into sweep her away, a dismayed Ellis discovers volved with women, the principle to which his delirious comedies were anchored. Mud is her canoodling with some lout in a biker bar.

What should be the denouement turns, no comedy, but there are echoes of Sturges’s guiding conviction here, and the reason why instead, into shoot-‘em-up adventure time.

Mud cannot be characterized—as so many Water-moccasin-bitten Ellis’s life saved by Mud, slaughter on Ellis’s houseboat (mostly thumbnail reviews already have—as a “coming-of-age” (whatever that means) movie. If

by Mud’s sniping surrogate father, Sam Shepard), Mud’s bittersweet final good-bye to Junigrown men cling to the same romantic delusions (however tinged with bitterness) they per and his “lighting out for Indian territory,” as Mark Twain might have put it. A sadder but held at age 14, “coming-of-age” is both meanwiser Ellis—or is he?—manfully adjusts to his ingless and a misnomer.

No doubt the affixed “coming-of-age” label new life while eyeing a couple of cuties across from his new apartment. is due to the film’s central character, 14-yearold Ellis (Tye Sheridan, in a performance There’s a lot packed into Mud, not least reminiscent of Christian Bale’s sensational its clear allusions to Twain’s Adventures Of portrayal in Empire Of The Sun) who, along Huckleberry Finn (and Tom Sawyer.) But with his pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), excontrary to the “coming-of-age” thesis, it isn’t Ellis but Mud who’s Huckleberry Finn. He’s plore a boat lodged in a tree (from an earlier flood) on a deserted river island. There they grown up in every way but emotionally, his adolescent fantasy of true love a harbinger of encounter a dishevelled, desperate-looking, pistol-packing hombre named Mud (Matmore sap-playing to come. thew McConaughey) who, we learn, intends Mud strays a little from true North on to salvage the boat and motor off into the its compass, but you’d be hard-pressed to sunset with his long-lost-and-found-andfind a more compelling paean to bitterlost-again true love, Juniper (a perfectly sweet love. The performances are without white-trashy Reese Witherspoon). Playing exception first-rate. Besides, how many Pip to Mud’s Magwitch, Ellis smuggles food to movies can you name—Sam Shepard’s the obsessed, love-struck Mud and ultimately Fool For Love would have been a better bonds with the older man because, as Ellis title—that explore the hurtin’ side of men? tells Neckbone, “He loves her.”

The immensely knowledgeable Stan Michna Love is a big deal to Ellis. His parents (Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson), who he beruns the DVD department at Sunrise Records, 336 Yonge Street in Toronto. Feel free to bring lieves love each other, are about to separate your DVD quest downtown. and divorce. (“You can’t trust love, Ellis,” his 54

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CRITERION

The Vanishing 1988 / Director

George Sluizer Why It’s Neglected: Is it a Dutch movie? A French movie? Apparently too deep a question for the high foreheads running the joint, The Vanishing was disqualified from competing for the Academy Awards and never received its international due.

The Theme: Not so much a theme as a living nightmare: the ease, precision and utterly nonchalant manner in which a true sociopath goes about his creepy business. Methodical evil isn’t just banal (to paraphrase Hannah Arendt), it’s virtually invisible.

What It’s About: Based on a Tim Krabbé novella, The Vanishing follows a Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, vacationing in France who stop at a busy rest station for gas and food— and Saskia doesn’t return to the car.

Meanwhile, we meet Raymond, a marriedwith-children, bland, respectable nobody who kidnapped Saskia (!) Flashbacks recount his meticulous, trial-anderror experiments in abduction. Three years later, amused

by Rex’s relentless, widely-publicized search for Saskia, Raymond introduces himself to Rex . . . and admits his crime in detail (!!) Pointing out that there’s no evidence linking him to the crime, Raymond invites Rex… And that’s all I’m telling you.

What You Get: Another early, extraless Criterion. But anyone familiar with The Fall, the acclaimed new British detective series, will grasp how influential and downright chilling The Vanishing is. It’ll give you the willies, even if you don’t watch it alone.

/ dvds

AUGUST 6 5 Souls Absence Across the Bridge Act Like You Love Me Adventures in Zambezia The Adventures of Charlotte and Henry Aftershock Age of Champions Age of Dinosaurs Amelia’s 25th Antiviral Auction Kings: Season One Berserk Golden Age Arc 2: Battle for Doldrey Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail Blue Water, White Death The Borgias: The Complete Series Pack The Borgias: The Final Season Born to Royalty Brick and Mortar and Love Bruce Lee Legacy Collection Care Bears: A Belly Badge for Wonderheart Carpool Charlie Chan Collection China on Film: The New Millennium The Chronicles of Riddick/ Pitch Black The Clearing Climbing High Cloth Cold Play Community: The Complete Fourth Season Cream: Farewell Concert Dick Dirty Pair: Original TV Series Part 2 Do Not Disturb Duck Dynasty: Season 3 Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal El Manzano Azul Fear Not Frankenstein Unbound 56

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AUG 13 A Band Called Death

Not to be confused with the late Chuck Schuldiner’s groundbreaking death metal project of the same name, this Death was a proto-punk unit from Detroit, and likewise well ahead of their time. [self-released]

Franklin: Reading Club Freaked Fridays: The Best Of Frontline: Outlawed in Pakistan Frostbite Gallowwalkers The Garden of Words Gunsmoke: The Ninth Season Vol. 1 Gunsmoke: The Ninth Season Vol. 2 Hauntings in America In Heaven There Is No Beer Ivan the Incredible/Freddy Frogface Jack the Reaper Jim Norton: Please Be Offended Kansas City Bomber The King of the Streets La Sirga Last Shop Standing: The Rise, Fall & Rebirth of the Independent Record Shop Lucas Magic Magic Mariachi Gringo Midsomer Murders Set 22 Mud My Amityville Horror My Little Pony: Equestria Girls Mythbusters: Collection 10 Nickelodeon Favorites: Rootin’ Tootin’ Wild West

Not Today Oblivion October Baby Oliver & Company ON the Road One Direction: All the Way to the Top Other People’s Money Paparazzi Paradise: Love The Path to Violence: Making Our Schools Safer Perfect Creature The Pick-Up Artist The Place Beyond the Pines Political Animals: The Complete Series Prelude to a Kiss Quicksilver Race for Glory Raising Izzie Rhinestone Ripcord: Season 1 Ripcord: Season 2 Robin Hood Room on the Broom The Sapphires Secrets of the Dead: Bones of the Buddha Shanghai Story Silver Streak Smash: Season Two The Spitfire Grill Storm Surfers The Story of Luke Strike Back: Cinemax Season Two Sugarfoot: Complete Season 1 Superboy: The Complete Third Season Sushi: The Global Catch Swamp Thing The Sword in the Stone Thick of It: Seasons 1-4 Thousand Kisses Deep To the Wonder Toby: Adventures With Jesus Tom & Jerry’s Giant Adventure

Tomboy Top Gear USA: The Complete Third Season Torn The Twilight Zone: Season 4 Victory at Sea Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Academy Award-Nominated Animation West of Memphis White Water Summer Wicked Tuna: Season 2 Wing Commander Wise Guys Without Limits The World Before her WWII Top Secret: Dieppe Uncovered Zero Effect Zombie Massacre AUGUST 13 3 Geezers Abominable Christmas The Adventures of Chuck & Friends: Bumpers up The Amazing World of Gumball: The Party Bad Parents A Band Called Death Battle for the Olympia 2012: Bodybuilding Competition Berenstain Bears: Beach Bound Bering Sea Gold The Big Wedding Bill Engvall: New All Stars of Country Comedy Set Bill Moyers: Faith & Reason Collection The Captains Close-Up With William Shatner Carrie Underwood: Blown Away Tour Live Casper’s Scare School: Season 2 Vol. 1 Cat. 8 Chihuahua Too!

AUG 13 The Company You Keep

Shia LaBeouf has designs on being the next Ryan Gosling—transitioning from mainstream popcorn fare to more esoteric, challenging work. This Redford-directed Weather Underground film is a good start. [SONY]

Children Make Terrible Pets & More Stories About Family Classic TV Westerns Combat: Complete Fifth Season

The Company You Keep Compulsion The Damned David Susskind Show: Dear Ann Landers David Susskind Show: Let’s Talk About It Dick Cavett David Susskind Show: the Geniuses of Chocolate Deadly Swarm Dear Dracula The Deep Depeche Mode: Industrial Revolution – The Ultimate Review Detour Dog Pound Dolls of Voodoo Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!

Dr. Who: The Green Death Dragon Ball Z: Rock the Dragon Dual Survival: Season 2 Emperor Enlightened: The Complete Second Season Errors of the Human Body The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec

Fall Out Boy: The Chicago Chronicles Family Ties: The Seventh and Final Season Fear of a Black Republican The Freedom of Silence From This Day Forward Gene Autry Movie Collection 3 Girls: The Complete Second Season Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff The Guillotines Hatchet III The Hot Flashes Hot Spot/Killing Me Softly The House of Seven Corpses House on Straw Hill I Killed My Mother The Isaacs: Up Close & Personal L.A. Complex: Seasons 1 & 2 Lost and Found in Armenia Magic School Bus: Planes/ Robots Michael Jr.: Laughing on Purpose Mindy Project Season 1 The Muppet Movie The Numbers Game Olympus Has Fallen Once Upon a Time: The Complete Second Season Perry Mason: Season Nine, Vol. 1 Perry Mason: The Complete Series Reality The Return of Joe Rich Rock Jocks Seconds Sexualist/Wendy’s Palace Shining Hearts Southland: The Complete Fifth and Final Season Super Eruption Super Storm Time Team: The Team’s Favorite Digs Totally Spies: Top Secret Missions

Totally Spies: Wild Style Trevor Noah: African American UFC: Ultimate Fighter Season 17 Ultra Q: The Complete Series Unsolved History: Legends Never Die A Werewolf Boy What Maisie Knew Wiggles: Taking Off Winx Club: Magical Adventure Without Warrant WWE: Money in the Bank 2013 AUGUST 20 88 Minutes The A-Team Season 1 The A-Team Season 2 The A-Team Season 3 The A-Team Season 4 The A-Team Season 5 Alvin & The Chipmunks: Driving Dave Crazier Alyce Kills An American Ghost Story Amour Asap Rocky: Where I’m From The Awful Dr. Orloff Basement Bashment Being Human: Season Five Best of Pawn Stars: The Greatest Stories Ever Sold The Best of Storage Wars: Life in the Locker Betty Boop Essential Collection Vol. 1 Big Bust Theory The Big City Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Third Season Catdog: The Final Season Chances Are Charulata The China Syndrome Classic US Combat

Aircraft of WWII: B-17 Flying Fortress Club Le Monde Club TV Darkest Night Dear Mr. Prohack Degenerate Desperate Measures Don’t Stop Believin’ Everyman’s Journey Donkey Kong Country Dragon City: Punk Rock in China The Dragon Pearl The DSK Story Evidence Fairy Tail: Part 6 Fangoria Presents Germ Z Fear the Forest The First Stars on MTV Flashdrive Flight Floating City Free Angela and All Political Prisoners Good Wife: The Fourth Season Happy Life Highland Park Hitting the Cycle Hunted Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp In God’s Hands International Bikini Babes Vol. 1 Isaiah Rises Jimmy Lilndsay & Rasuji: Rockpalast – Reggae Legends Vol. 1 Killing Season The Legend of Legendary Heroes: The Complete Series The Life of Muhammad Lost in Buenos Aires Lupin III: A Woman Called Fukiko Meet the WotWots Mickey Hart: Innovators in Music Miquel: The Art of Seduction NEEDLE

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/ dvds

Mike & Molly: The Complete Third Season The Mini Witch Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Part 1 Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Part 2 Monumental Naked Nerve Endings National Geographic Movie Collection NCIS Los Angeles The Fourth Season NCIS: The Tenth Season New Dominion Tank Police Nightmares Come at Night No One Lives No Place on Earth Nobody Can Cool Nova: Manhunt Boston Bombers Nura Rise of Yokai Clan Set 2 Orders Are Orders The Painted Stallion Parenthood Season 4 Peter Pan Pixie Hollow Games: Pixie Party Edition Post Tenebras Lux Princess Knight Part 1 Quick Fit Race War: The Remix Rapture-Palooza Peter Pan in Return to Never Land Revenge: The Complete Second Season Santana & McLaughlin: Invitation to Illumination Live at Montreux 2011 Saturday Morning Mystery Savages Crossing Scary Movie 5 Scooby-Doo: Stage Fright Shadow Dancer Showboys The Silencers Silent Cry Skull Forest Spooks, Hoods & JFK: The Shocking Truth

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AUG 27

The Great Gatsby

Bombastic Moulin Rouge auteur Baz Luhrmann brings his ostentatiously ornate aesthetic to the latest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s classic. Leonardo DiCaprio contributes some of his most gripping work in the title role.

[WARNER BROS}

Stag Starzinger: Movie Collection StreetDance Strippers From Another World Strong Language The Tailor of Panama There Goes the Bride They Called Him Amen This Is Martin Bonner Tortoise in Love Touch The Truth Game Tsuritama The Unseen Vampire A Virgin Among the Living Dead Ween: Live in Chicago Welcome to the Machine Who’s Watching the Kids?

Wither Wiz Khalifa & Amber Rose: Destination Forever After YMCMB: The Empire AUGUST 27 1939: Battle fo Westerplatte 2nd Serve 33 Postcards American Brawler Among Friends And Then There Were None

Are You Tougher Than a Boy Scout?

At Any Price Babies for Sale The Barbarians/The Norseman Barbie Mariposa & The Fairy Princess Barrendero

Best of Warner Bros: 25 Cartoon Collection DC Comics

Billy the Kid Brave Warrior Call Me Fitz: The Complete Third Season Camp Captain Battle: Legacy War Captain Harlock: Complete TV Series Charge Over You Collision Course A Company Man Damian Lewis Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder Elementary: The First Season The Evil Inside Flat Top Ghost Hunters International: The Final Season The Great Gatsby Grey’s Anatomy: Complete Ninth Season Guilty Crown: The Complete Series Part 1 Guilty Crown: The Complete Series Part 2 Hanging for Django Harriet Craig The Human Body Collection Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye Koch Kon-Tiki Life, Love, Soul The Lost Medallion: The Adventures of Billy Stone Lucky Express The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh Medaka Box Meddling Mom

Missions That Changed the War: Germany’s Last Ace

Monsuno: Combat Chaos NFL Greatest Games: 1987 AFC Championship NFL Greatest Games: The Comeback NYC Underground One Direction: Going Our Way Online Only the Valiant Pain & Gain The Painting Pawn Shop Chronicles Penny Serenade Pocoyo’s Circus The Reluctant Fundamentalist A Resurrection Richard III: Martyr or Monster?

Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow: Black Masquerade Ritual Sapphire & Steel: The Complete Series Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s Seasons of a Lifetime Seattle Superstorm A Soldier’s Tale Sons of Anarchy: Season Five

Sounds Stranded Super Buddies Tales of the City Tied To Be or Not to Be Trial & Retribution: Complete Collection UFC 160 Uncle Vanya: Chekhov Unit 7 The Walking Dead: The Complete Third Season What Katy Did The Whole Truth The Winged Serpent WWE: Best of MSG Yatterman After the End

/music/new_releases

AUGUST 6 Paul Allen & The Underthinkers Everywhere at Once Jake Bellows New Ocean The Civil Wars The Civil Wars The Vigil Chick Corea The Dangerous Summer Golden Record Dawn of Midi Dysnomia Brett Eldredge Bring You Back Kim Fowley Frankenstein and the All-Star Monster Band Balance Presents Guy J Guy J Richie Havens Alarm Clock Cody Karey Cody Karey Didn’t It Rain Hugh Laurie Little Radar Souvenirs The High Frontier Lumerians City of Sweat LX Sweat To the Happy Few Medicine John Mellencamp Icon: Nothing Like I Planned – Greatest Hits Vol. 3 Moderat II Pillbuster Pillbuster The Polyphonic Spree Yes, It’s True Elvis Presley Elvis at Stax: 40th Anniversary Pure Bathing Culture Moon Tides Carly Ritter Carly Ritter RocketNumberNine MeYouWeYou Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band Greatest Hits Amanda Shires Down Fell the Doves Wayman Tisdale Absolute Greatest Hits KT Tunstall Invisible Empire/ Crescent Moon

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Yellowcard

Ocean Avenue Acoustic

aug 13

It’s been a decade since the pop-punkers’ lone

(admittedly awesome) hit “Ocean Avenue,” so why not commemorate the good old [HOPELESS RECORDS]

Harry Nilsson Transitshop Trevante Various Artists

Various Artists Classic Banjo From Smithsonian Folkways Various Artists Now That’s What I Call Music 47 Andrew Lloyd Webber Icon The Wild Feathers The Wild Feathers

Washed Out Christa Wells Yellowcard

days with this acoustic adaptation?

AUGUST 13 38 Special

Special Delivery

Black Water Rising Pissed and Driven

Luke Bryan Crash My Party Glen Campbell See You There Kim Carnes Barking at Airplanes Kim Carnes Lighthouse Johnny Cash LIFE Unheard Eros & The Eschaton Home Address for Civil War Bela Fleck The Imposter Gogol Bordello Pura Vida Conspiracy Mickey Hart Band Superorganism I See Stars New Demons Valerie June Push Any Button The Riddle: Nik Kershaw Remastered Expanded Edition

Flash Harry Velocity I Am Trevante The South Side of Soul Street: The Minaret Soul Singles 1967-1976 Paracosm Feed Your Souls Ocean Avenue Acoustic

AUGUST 20 1 Girl Nation 1 Girl Nation Backstreet Boys The Essential Backstreet Boys Blue October Sway Kurt Braunohler How Do I Land Jimmy Buffett Songs From St. Somewhere Joseph Childress The Rebirths Crocodiles Crimes of Passion Destruction Unit Deep Trip Raheem DeVaughn A Place Called Loveland Lee DeWyze Frames Fleetwood Mac Then Play On: Deluxe Edition The Greencards Sweetheart of the Sun Jimi Hendrix Jimi Hendrix Experience Box Set

Belle & Sebastian The Third Eye Centre

aug 27

This comp features some of the Scottish indie-pop

legends’ greatest obscurities—“Last Trip,”

Julia Holter Loud City Song Pete Huttlinger McGuire’s Landing Kissaway Trail Breach Tracy Lawrence Headlights, Taillights and Radios Will Lee Love, Gratitude and Other Distractions Glenn Lewis Moment of Truth Sarah McLachlan The Essential Sarah McLachlan The Monkees Headquarters: The Deluxe Edition Nas The Essential Nas My Friends Paper Lions Porcelain Raft Permanent Signal The Essential Santana Santana Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby Cluck O’l Hen Soil Whole Superchunk I Hate Music Tedeschi Trucks Band Made Up Mind TGT 3 Kings Allen Toussaint Songbook Travis Where You Stand Typhoon White Lighter Laura Veirs Warp and Weft White Lies Big TV Bill Withers The Essential Bill Withers Tammy Wynette The Essential Tammy Wynette

“Suicide Girl,” “Desperation Made a Fool of Me”—as well as a few compelling remixes. [matador]

AUGUST 27 Original Album Series (box set) Avenged Sevenfold Hail to the King Barbez Bella Ciao The Beach Boys Made in California (box set) Belle and Sebastian The Third Eye Centre Black Joe Lewis Electric Slave Blackfield IV Booker T & the MG’s Soul Party Cactus Barely Contained: Studio Sessions Belinda Carlisle Heaven on Earth: Deluxe Edition Belinda Carlisle Live Your Life Be Free: Deluxe Edition Belinda Carlisle Real: Deluxe Edition Belinda Carlisle Runaway Horses: Deluxe Edition Disappears Era Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait 1969-1971 Roberto Fonseca Yo Franz Ferdinand Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action America

Gone Away Backward Daryl Hall & John Oates No Goodbyes Jars of Clay Inland Jo Jo Gunne The Asylum Recordings Vol. 1 Jo Jo Gunne The Asylum Recordings Vol. 2 King Krule 6 Feet Below the moon Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis Killer Country Jerry Lee Lewis When Two Worlds Collide Little River Band Cuts Like a Diamond Austin Lucas Stay Reckless Overcomer Mandisa Michael Monroe Horns and Halos Randy Newman Original Album Series (box set) Rank and File The Slash Years Can’t Get Enough The Rides David Sanborn Original Album Series (box set) Polly Scattergood Arrows Simply Red Original Album Series (box set) Sly & The Family Stone Higher Aaron Sprinkle Aaron Sprinkle Foy Vance Joy of Nothing Various Artists Dub Rockers Vol. 1 Ronnie Wood 1234 Robbie Fulks

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LAWN MOWER MAN

8.6.2013