OMG!! Girl Talk @ The Orange Peel tonight!!!

Girl Talk (or Gregg Gillis) ain't just the king of mash-ups, Girl Talk is your wittiest friend who's gone through every item in the stockpile of pop-culture you call a memory, a musical mad scientist with a short attention span and the DJ that you've wished for at every dance party you've ever been to all rolled in to one. No seriously, I'm serious!! Also yes, he IS the king of mash ups.
To get me all hyped up to write this I've just listened to and am still listening to "Feed the Aninmals", Gillis' fourth album under the name Girl Talk. After 50 minutes and around 300 different samples I should be, by all rights, exhausted. The way Gillis builds, mixes and unfolds his compositions keeps the listener's energy up however. The elements switch up often, sometimes before you want them to to be honest, allowing the momentum ebb and flow while the beat keeps up a consistently brisk pace.
As with any good mash-up, most of the fun is in hearing a familiar song (or two or six) in a completely different context. It's just fun to hear Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike" playing on top of some dirty, dance club hip hop. No matter who you are there is at least one familiar element running through every second of "Feed the Animals". Be they snatched from classic rock, dirty south, top 40 pop or any era of R&B, Girl Talk's musical constructs always keep you guessing where they'll go next and pull you through deftly balanced juxtapositions that are anywhere from neat to exciting to fucking rad.
Tonight's sold out show at The Orange peel looks to be the dancinest event of the season. I feel bad for you poor sods who'll be on the outside come 9 O'Clock.

Unicycle Loves You

(2008 - High Wheel Records)

Without a doubt it's my biases from the 90's that make me think of Chicago's independant music community as a haven for for self-importantly dour experimentalism and stuffy artistes who'd rather have the critics call them "important" than create an enjoyable ditty of the toe-tapping variety. With all the major southeastern scenes undergoing such remarkable facelifts in the last few years I guess it's way past the time that I should dispose of my Shytown expectations especially given the upbeat bounciness created by bands like Unicycle Loves You.
Waiting a couple years to release a debut album is usually a good sign that the band in question is going to produce something that's worth your attention. Formed in 2006 by Jim Carrol (and no not THAT Jim Carrol), ULY have an eclectic yet well-defined sound. Every song on their self-titled debut takes its cues from a slightly different source, selecting musical elements from the last few decades of pop music in a way that compliments the arrangement without stretching the limits of ULY's overall style. Lovely vocal harmonies and catchy, guitar driven hooks ride with confidence over enegeticly upbeat percussion creating some of the most engaging power pop of 2008 so far.
The lyrics dance around subjects giving quick snatches of a half realized picture but never fully revealing their relevance to the casual listner. Even the male/female trade-off that occurs during "Under 18" incorporates the same juxtaposition of disseperate trains of thought rendering it an insular exorcise that refuses to give up its true meaning to anyone but the songwriter himself. Could be obviewscation. Could be stylization. Could just be that last wall between ego and audience that needs to come down before Carroll's full potential as a songwriter can be fully tapped.

Rocket Club! Tonight! EAR PWR! Love It!

This may or may not be the kids' last local show til after their big multi month national tour.

If you need some convining here's a link to my Mountain Xpress article about em

www.mountainx.com/ae/2008/041608earpwr

Silver Mt Zion @ The Grey Eagle Tonight!!!!!

Grey Eagle continues its run of bringing a respectable roster of national acts to town tonight with A Silver Mt Zion. Or Thee Silver Mt Zion, or even Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra La La Band.

Call them what you will, the Montreal collective seems to have finally outgrown the rather generic moniker of "Godspeed You Black Emperor sideproject". In fact, with Godspeed on what seems like permanent hiatus, both Silver Mt Zion as well as other offshoot bands like Do Make Say Think are evolving at something of a breakneck pace.

For someone like myself who missed the last couple SMZ releases, their new album "13 Blues for Thirteen Moons" is something of a radical departure from the band's earlier work. After multiple listens though it's not difficult to put to rest the spectre of expectation and embrace the new.

The most noticably different aspect SMZ's current incarnation is the emphasis on vocals and guitar riffage. The band previously specialized in densely complicated orchestral exorcises in tension and release which would often diverge into unexpected directions with minimal vocal chorus that was used sparingly and always in the background. We now get Efrim Menuck's jaggedly unpolished voice right up front delivering buzzsaw lamentations that cut right through the tension.
In some sense A Silver Mt Zion seems to have turned itself inside out. Instead of the repetitive elements anchoring the orchestra, the songs now build with layered deliberation becoming progressively more intense while the strings play and important backup role taking the main riffs to thrilling new heights.
With every song on the album breaking the 13 minute mark it's impossible to speak of Silver Mt Zion without using the words "epic" or "grand", but as breathtaking as these these songs may be they also posess a quality of introspection and more often than not, explosive episodes of quiet desperation.
With the upfront intimacy that a show at the Grey Eagle affords, this show could be not just a great performance but the emothional experiance of the season.

Cryptacize - Dig That Treasure

(2008 - Asthmatic Kitty)

The most musically refreshing thing to hear in this day and age is a band who's sound seems to be sired by the actual tasts and sensibilities of it's members. That's how you avoid sounding like generic band x with an adiquate but disposable presence and really make music worth remembering. The bay area trio Cryptacize are like that. Distinctive, individualistic, almost iconoclastic but still perfectly accessable for fans of low-key, melodic indie-pop.
Comprised of Chris Cohen (formerly of Deerhoof and The Curtains), Nedelle Torrisi (Kill Rock Stars solo artist and also formerly of The Curtains) and Michael Carreia on percussion, Cryptacize excell in intimately sparse pop music whose arrangements employ frequent changes in both rhythm and key. The every note in a Cryptacize song is given the space and attention to flourish and the chords allowed to ring out clearly and fully.
Their debut album "Dig That Treasure" finds the trio playing with structure and arrangement in a way that comes across as dramatic but never obtusely so. The melodies progress minimally and unobstructed, occasionally veering off into unexpected new territory as tempos and rhythms change seemingly on impulse. Without ever really raising the volume level Cryptacize constantly remind the listener that the dynamic possibilities of the 3 minute pop song are quite literally limitless.
Tonewise the music's shifts often (even within the songs themselves) from solemn and sparse as in "Water Witching Wishes" and "Stop Watch" to an airily spacious jangle in songs like "Heaven is Human" and "Say You Will". Thematically Cryptacize burn at both ends of the spectrum, from mournful lamentations on the unstoppable passage of time to plafully naive assertions that life is a "Cosmic Singalong".
Hopefully future releases will find Cryptacize exploring structure and arrangement with the same dramatic vigor. There's no reason to think that they won't considering how naturally they meld musically. With a sound that's as well-formed as it is malleable it'll definitely be interesting to see where they go from here.

Biirdie - Catherine Avenue

(2008 - Love Minus Zero/Drive-Thru Records)

It's somewhat condescending when writing about an artist to begin by referring to said artist as "charming". If we were doing free word association however, that would be my instinctual response for the Los Angeles based Biirdie. Fortunately, in this case, there is much more to say.
Comprised of idealistic wanderers from various corners of the U.S., Biirdie has a sound that is ditinctly American and specifically Southern Californian. Their group harmonies and homespun melodies often inspire the moniker of "indie rock's answer to Fleetwood Mac". A casual listen to their second release, Catherine Avenue, may leave the impression that these are innocent songs with simplistic arrangements. Closer inspection reveals a deeper layer of depth however, and lyrics that yearn to re-examine missed connections while lusting for geographical cures.
Biirdie has a flair for playing long songs that don't seem that long when you're listening to them. That's because they're constantly evolving, unfurling even. Songs often begin with an elegant simplicity before slyly adding instuments or subtly leading into increasingly grand new phrases. The changes come about so naturally and organically that it's easy to forget that these moments have to be orchestrated.
In other hands these songs could very well lead to dull pretense and stuffy self-importance. Refreshingly however, these players know the difference between engaging intensity and pointless high drama. They're also not above a bit of sillyness as eximplified by their Camper Van Beethoven-ish cover of The Texas Tornados' "Who Were You Thinking Of?" or "Estelle", Birdie's equivalent of The Beatles' "Don't Pass Me By". It's an unapologetically goofy singalong which suddenly comes into beauty in the closing minute or so.
Over and over again on Catherine Avenue Biirdie show that they don't just know what the musical conventions are, they also understand how those conventions work and how to use them effectively. It's an unassuming album that doesn't so much demand your attention as it does reward it, especially for us misanthropes who more often than not are mistaken for nice.

Zillionaire - The Street Lights Have Been Turned Down

(2008 - New Granada)

An album like The Street Lights Have Been Turned Down probably won't grab you on first listen and that's okay. It doesn't really want to. The band responsible, Tampa based indie quartet Zillionaire, doesn't deal in hooks and riffs anyway. Instead the emphasis is on nuance and sophistication. Zillionaire is also a band which bears the distinction of carrying on a tradition as opposed to revelling in a trend.
Zillionaire's sound combines the deliberation and intertwined guitars of mid-90's slowcore with elements of the more restrained indie acts of the same era (think Bedhead or Versus). The guitars are, for the most part, free of distortion with deep tones and clean chords that are permitted ro ring free.
One of the halmarks of a truly great album is that the strongest run of songs, the ones most distinctive of the band's identity, come in the middle. Though each of the tracks on Street Lights... have their individual merits, there is a sizeable chunk of the album from around "The Incident of the Water Heater" through "Turn It On" in which it becomes more apparent that the musicians have put a considerable amount of time and thought into these arrangements. These songs are something of a cornerstone for the album with gorgeous vocal couplings and entrancingly simple guitar lines that gracefully compliment eachother while building to a satisfactory release in the occasional noisy sections.
Zillionaire's overall mood may seem dour and gloomy but at times there is the spark of a wry sense of humor. I mean come on the lyrics to "No Contest" are almost entirely comprised of titles from Versus songs. Possibly a statement that they're aware of the occasions in which they put their 90's influences front and center? Zillionaire needn't feel self-conscious of sounding derivative, especially when they're picking up a torch that's been mostly cast aside for quite some time.

Utah Carol - Rodeo Queen

Utah Carol - Rodeo Queen
(2007, Stomping Ground)

It's apparent from the opening bars of "Rodeo Queen" that Chicago Husband/Wife duo Utah Carol know a thing or two about writing music that billows with a lonely loveliness and just a hint of twang. The knowledge that Grant Birkenbeul and Jija Davis have released a mere three albums in their 12 years of musical collaboration should clue you in on the laid-back pace that their songs follow. Having been satisfied up until this point with a local following in Chicago and a larger fandom in Europe, "Rodeo Queen" has the potential to finally bring these two to the attention of the U.S. indie community.
Let's get this straight right now, we are not talking about the dour downbeat drudgery that has invaded indie rock in the last few years. Utah Carol is way too sappy, and I mean that in a good way, to be completely lumped into the Americana genre. Their style falls somewhere between Iron & Wine and The Starlight Vocal Band mixed with a bit of Ida or Mojave 3. Nearly the entire album is sung in unison by both Birkenbeul and Davis with a smooth, breathy sweetness. While varying in both style and substance, the songs of "Rodeo Queen" are all draped with the same blanket of low-key dreaminess conjured by the lovers' dual warbling.
Despite Utah Carol's propensity for starry-eyed sentimentality, the lovey dovey schmaltz so rampant in some other couple bands is actually kept to a relative minimum. Don't get me wrong, that element IS present but most of the songs paint overly romanticized pictures of the love that got away and all the accompanying notions of regret, heartache, obsession and self-sabotage. With soft guitars and sweet melodies Birkenbeul and Davis often seem to be telling personal stories of other people's lives which is all well and good as long as they keep doing it with such a bleary-eyed, twinkling, coffee house kind of panache.

For your Idfest consideration

I know there's going to be alot to choose from this weekend in regards to aural pleasure in the Asheville area. One band in particular may elude you Idfest-going eye but is worthy of your precious attention.

Through the Sparks hail from Birmingham, Alabama. They play a paticularly easy going yet thoughtfully paced and structured brand of psych-pop. They're on the same page with bands like Big Star.
On May 1 they'll release "Lazarus Beach". It's an impressive enough collections of songs made all the more impressive with the knowledge that it's their first long player. With an other worldly musical camaraderie and tasteful sensibilities they maintain a perfect balance of grim playfulness, subtle depth and engrossing melody.

Through the Sparks will play the Wedge Gallery at 10:30 on Saturday April 28th as part of Idfest.

If you require more convincing then please feel free to peruse their Myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/throughthesparks

The Asteroid #4 - An Amazing Dream

The Asteroid #4 - An Amazing Dream
(2007 - Rainbow Quartz)

On these frosty overcast days of mid-winter I usually seek out the familiarity of simple melodies heavily blanketed in swirling reverb. Something airy yet grounded, melancholy but not self-indulgent and, most of all, something that can be at once expansive and sparse. These sounds are my aural comfort food. On their fourth album, An Amazing Dream, Philadelphia's The Asteroid #4 have delivered such an album.
Having never heard of The Asteroid #4 I'm thankfully spared the bias some critics have from the band's apparently awful preceding effort. All I know is that I love An Amazing Dream's billowing...um, dreaminess. Most of the songs are build around a strumming acoustic rhythm guitar peppered with the shimmering jangle of an ultra-effected electric. The ethereal airiness is kept firmly cemented by a grounded yet unassuming rhythm section. The drums and bass work together as an inseparable unit, keeping the momentum brisk and oak solid.
The album only has two real missteps. One is "Into the Meadow", a dismally white bread murder ballad that is very repetitive, very boring and very long. The other is tacked onto the end of the "Belong", the epic closing track. A few minutes after the song ends there is a two and a half minute session of pretentious ramblings about Alan Ginsberg, and yes it is as lame as it sounds.
The Asteroid #4 owes much of their sound and fashion to bands like The Trash Can Sinatras, The Ocean Blue and The Church. In fact An Amazing Dream contains a faithful rendition of The Church's "In Your Eyes". If this were released 17 years ago you'd probably Dave Kendall introducing a video for "Ask Me About Pittsburgh" or "Go Ahead" on 120 Minutes. And with that last reference I betray my age and will now take my leave, thank you and good night.

The British Army ... on LSD

Barton Carroll - Love & War

Barton Carroll - Love & War
(2006, Skybucket Records)

The first thing one hears on Love & War is Barton Carroll's mournful mountain warble as he vocalizes a traditional Appalachian lament. In the song a young man says goodbye to his lover as he must leave home. Although the reason for their separation is never stated outright, we can easily assume that there is a war and the boy must go into battle. Why? Well, there is the album's title for one. There is also the fact that the running theme of Love & War is the effect that battle has on the lives of civilians.

Carroll has one of those voices that pours emotion with a weary but steadfast honesty. His delivery may seem frail at times but Carroll's vocals are always front and center, breathing life into the otherwise sparse arrangements. The accompaniment doesn't disappoint either, this is after all the guy who played a truckload of various instruments for Crooked Fingers. The instrumentation, be it a bassoon, piano, violin, or the more traditional guitar/bass/drums combination, is gorgeously arranged but remains minimal, allowing the words to resonate with much more loneliness. Stylistically Carroll switches things up a bit, staying rooted in Appalachian/roots territory most of the time but manages to kick out a couple Tobin Sprout-style indie rock jams as well.

Most musicians, when taking on the subject of war, choose the political outrage/moral high ground road. Carroll would rather chronicle the situations of the individuals who have no choice. His lyricss are not about the politics of war but more about the basic humanity and inhumanity that happens in its midst. The fact that Love & War was recorded way back in August 2001, just before our current situations began, somehow adds to the timelessness of these songs.

So Many Dynamos - Flashlights

So Many Dynamos - Flashlights
(2006, Skroki Records)

Wow, what a difference a year and a half makes. When we first heard from So Many Dynamos they were a brimming pot full of potential. They were already a good band with a confident, well-defined sound. However they were also mired in hero worship for The Dismemberment Plan, a fact that hindered almost as much as it helped. Now they're back with Flashlights, an album that shows a band that's growing up in all the right ways while still retaining that essential spark of new-band energy.

The first album, When I Explode, had a tense precision about the proceedings. The songs themselves felt tightwound, almost suffocatingly so. A common byproduct of a new band over scrutinizing every detail with a need to impress right out of the gate. On Flashlights the band employ the same tight performances but with more of an openness that comes with virtuosity. They've always sounded confident but now they sound comfortable being confident.

Without pressure to immediately grab attention and "make a name" the songs can open up more, allowing for things like horns and vocal choirs. The guitars still snap with jarring dissonance or by contrast, interplay with mathy tenderness. Clayton Kunstel's drumming, while still precise, is more alive this time out, taking some jazzier excursions to find more of the rhythm between the accents.

It's clear that So Many Dynamos have no intention of divorcing themselves from their influences. It's also clear that they're not about to let their sound stagnate as a rehash of over traversed territory.

Ho-Ag - The News From Pluto

Ho-Ag - The News From Pluto
(2006, Hello Sir Records)

There are a few things we've come to expect from bands brought to us by Hello Sir Records. These include, but are not limited to, a blitz of guitar driven energy, time signatures that change on a dime, ass kicking riff/melodies and quite a bit of screamin' and yellin'. All of these elements are present and accounted for on The Word From Pluto, the new collection of recorded music from Boston's Ho-Ag.

Their sound lies somewhere in the badlands between the heavy riffage of NoMeansNo and the mathy kookiness of Devo. Drums pound and drive. Guitars nimbly rock the hell out. The occasianally obnoxious synthesizer is for the most part tastefully used and is rarely at the musics forefront.

Ho-Ag play with a vicious precision that rides the line between control and spastic entropy. The music continually threatens to collapse under the weight of its own energy but flashes off into a new direction before that happens. A tasteful dollop of melody and ear for off-kilter hooks distinguishes Ho-Ag from the other wannabe, art-punk mathnicks.

My new favorite web celebrity

This picture really makes me laugh....alot.

Go to Harvest Records to see people play music

Don't know much about The New Sound of Numbers but I must say that their show does look like a promising way to spend an evening.

The music happens tonight, October 29, 2006 at Harvest Records in Asheville

Here's their myspace page if you wanna know more http://myspace.com/thenewsoundofnumbers

The Theater Fire - Everybody Has a Dark Side

The Theater Fire - Everybody Has A Dark Side
(2006, Undeniable Records)

Hey look everybody, my choice for best new label of 2005 is back with a third release. Oh what fun! And yes this one is just as strong and memorable as the first two. Coolness!
The Theater Fire have been kicking around North Texas in some form or another since 2000. On their second album Everybody Has a Dark Side they've blossomed into a laid-back, unassumingly sublime outfit that is quite comfortable in its musical skin. As the thirteen presented tracks ramble through forty odd minutes of playing time, we hear yarns spun about lovers, loners, brothers, dusty strangers and guilt ridden survivors. These stories are set to music that consistently changes things around while avoiding most of the formulaic trappings of americana or roots music.
Things open up with "Kicking Up A Darkness", an account of an approaching stranger that could have been a transplant from a Lambchop or Leonard Coen album. It's the most formally arranged and studio polished song you'll hear. Things don't exactly go lo-fi, they just become sort of... let's say informal. "Fiddleback Weaver" throws in some mariachi horns resulting in a darkly festive border town drinking song. From there the styles jump from front porch sing-a-longs to love lorn soldier ballads to campfire stories to rollicking road tunes to... you get the picture.
Entirely recorded at home with analog technology, the songs on Everybody Has A Dark Side breathe with the laid back, organic energy of a sunny southwestern afternoon. They have the unguarded, casual intimacy of hanging out with old friends and playing songs you've known for years. Mostly sentimental, sometimes mournful and occasionally droll, Everybody... is a refreshingly unambitious late summer treat. It's not perfect, but then again good music should never have that as an aim in the first place.

All this time...

... and still, the number one search topic that leads people to this blog is "Amish Girls".

Black Fiction - Ghost Ride

Black Fiction - Ghost Ride
(2006 - Howells Transmitter)

More than anything, Black Fiction wants to be an old, beat-up cassette onto which your best friend has copied his or her eccentricly amateurish bedroom recording project. Every song on Ghost Ride goes out of it's way to be different from the last. The crazy thing is that it kind of works. The problem with Ghost Ride is that it spends too much time trying to convince you that it has been created by amateurs when it is obvious that the opposite is true. For the most part the songs are genuinely creative and well written like the stunning title track, there are however a few time wasters like the band's namesake.
This may be the next step into the SUPER-disaffected-self-aware arena of indie rock where artists go out of their way to include as many elements and genres as possible and at the same time go out of their way to sound like they are very bored and not trying very hard. The result is that Black Fiction is a good album when in fact it could've been a fantastic one. The experimental nature of pushing your limits in order to find your feet is the reason that many a band's first album is it's most memorable. But with Black Fiction it's hard to tell how much of that is genuine and how much is engineered to be odd and hip.
The songs are good enough, employing creative home recording techniques, incongruous instrumentation and darkly misanthropic lyrics. The vocals however are presented with a disaffected, hipster staleness that either attempts to emulate someone else's style or, when delving into more personal lyrical content, refuses any emotion or personality at all.
All gripes aside, Ghost Harvest is different from anything else I've heard this year and, as this shoegazer-packed summer finally winds down, different is what I desperately need right now.