February 2014 – Page 3

TRACK REVIEW: Ages and Ages “I See More”

If you’re in need of a soundtrack for your revolution, look no further than Divisionary, the sophomore album of Portland “folkadelic” seven-piece Ages and Ages. It’s part concept album, part inspirational how-to guide for disillusioned souls intent on bucking stale, prevailing attitudes. “The songs on our first album, Alright You Restless, described a group of people leaving a selfish, destructive society for a place safe from the madness… wanting to establish new rules and a language to put some distance between themselves and the noise outside.” explains bandleader Tim Perry. “As the group faces the struggles of actually making their community work, reality sets in and things get more complicated. Divisionary details the second phase of the journey.”

The album is out March 25th on Partisan Records, and so far the band (who consider themselves more of a musical “collective”) have released two singles. The latest of these is “I See More”, an infectious little ditty that could put a lift in nearly any downtrodden soul. Stomping percussion, lively acoustic strumming, and group harmonizing give the track a Satanic Panic In The Attic-era Of Montreal feel. If the tune is rousing, the lyrics are downright uplifting; while Perry sings “Spread out your losses / it’s part of the process / really it’s okay / I’ll be on your side” five other Ages players back him up harmonically and spiritually.

https://soundcloud.com/partisan-records/ages-and-ages-i-see-more

Though it’s certainly not overtly apparent (and never dogmatic), the band does have spiritual influences; Perry spent ten days on a silent meditation retreat during the conceptualization of the record. That calming influence is deeply felt on lead single and title track, “Divisionary (Do The Right Thing)”. Sonically, it typifies the band’s easy going but restless energy, with sweet strings and hand claps fleshing out the melody. The words are sung almost like a string of mantras: “Do the right thing, do the right thing / do it all the time, do it all the time / Make yourself right, never mind them / Don’t you know you’re not the only one suffering”.

https://soundcloud.com/partisan-records/ages-and-ages-divisionary-do

While the lyrical content is especially edifying, the messages here would be hard to parlay and might even sound heavy-handed if not delivered in such a carefully crafted, edifying song structure. Everything feels so organic, and it’s hard not to be moved by the folksy rhythms that underly Ages and Ages’ bold mission statements. Perry says it best – “These songs reflect optimism, but they don’t do so lightly or try to dodge the struggles we’re dealing with individually and as a band.” Divisionary is sure to be a complex but invigorating listen.

INTERVIEW: The Wild Feathers on musical process and their US tour

The Wild Feathers kicked off their 2014 tour in Texas. But they’ll soon be making their way up the East Coast to Washington D.C., New York, Boston and even Montreal. This “four-headed monster” of a southern rock band takes inspiration from all across the musical spectrum. They released their debut album The Wild Feathers in 2013. With four musicians who all at one time fronted their own bands, we were curious about The Wild Feathers’ musical process. We caught up with Joel King to discuss collaborating, tradition and the most interesting cities to perform in.

AF: I’ve heard your band described as very “American” – what does that mean to you? Is that something you strive for? Or is it an expectation you have to live up to?

JK: Well, it just really means the music, the style – blues, country, folk, these all started in America. I guess it’s just the style of music that we come from. It’s the way we were raised. It’s taking emotion from every style in America and putting it all together. We take from country songs with great stories and lyrics and from blues songs with great rhythm and feeling. I think that’s what American music is: the story of cultures coming together.

We’re just a product of where we come from. We didn’t really choose it or set out to write this kind of music. This is what came naturally to us and what feels good.

We have different voices, we each do our own thing in the band, and this is really the only way of bringing them together. I love a good blues song, but I also love a good, sad country song. So, we try to do a little bit of everything. Maybe that’s why it’s such “American” rock and roll.

AF: What’s the process behind the songwriting? Is it always combination effort or do you each get your “own” song on occasion?

JK: It comes together in a whole bunch of different ways. We really try to make the best sound possible. One of the best songs we have we all wrote together and that’s one of the real “Wild Feathers” songs. But there have been a few times where someone will bring a song and it’s totally done. That’s perfect. There’s nothing more to work on. Some of the best songs are also ones we come together with mutual feelings about. It’s always changing, though, always a little bit different.

We always try to go with what feels and sounds the best. We’re not like the Beach Boys, where we can do all these crazy harmonies, we’re more like the Beatles, you know, sometimes they’d just sing the same part, but it sounded really great.

The truth is we don’t sing harmonies very well at all. But we like singing together. If we actually land on a harmony then we’re real proud of it.

AF: Do you think that storytelling plays a part in your music? I know classic rock is an influence, but what about folk music?

JK: Lyrically, I would say it changes on a song by song basis. I still don’t know what “Free Falling” is about, but I fucking love that song. I mean there are songs like that, which are just images or overall premises where the words just fit with the music. Then, some are just straight up stories of heartbreak or something like that. But I really try to make the lyrics fit the song. If it’s really slow the words should make more obvious sense, but if it’s faster you can kind of say whatever you want. But most of the time we try to write to the music.

AF: Speaking of the classic rock influence, I’m really interested in this idea of “preservation” when it comes to the classic tradition. You guys mention it on facebook with the addendum of “evolution”. I definitely hear some contemporary quality to your music and I think that’s what makes it stand out. But the process of blending – preserving, while evolving – sounds really complicated..

JK: We don’t really know. We try to break it down for other people in interviews and things like this. But we love classic rock, we love jamming, and just doing what bands do. We have goals within the group to push ourselves, but as far as doing anything else I don’t know – we have to push ourselves to become better and anything, but we move wherever the music takes us. Who knows what the next record will sound like.

Right now, we sound the way we do because that’s who we are. We didn’t set out to bring anything back or set anything forward. But people say that all of the time. It’s just natural. We all play in certain ways and when it comes together it sounds different and new. We’ve all done our own solo projects and we knows what we can do on our own, not what we can do together.

AF: So maybe not that complicated. . Four of you were lead singers before coming together as The Wild Feathers – I’m not asking about egos, I know that you guys get along really well – but do you think having the four of you ensures that you’re pulled in different directions?

JK: Yeah. That’s why we did it. When we first played a few songs together we were like: “Oh my god, this is going to work out.” It was really new and none of us had ever done anything like it before. Sometimes you have to force it out when you’re working solo – I have to write a song, I have to do this or that. With the band it’s almost a sweet surprise. When you’re working on a tune and someone chimes in with something great, you’re always thoroughly excited and impressed.

After we first started jamming we realized this band might be fucking great! So, we just moved on it, trying to find a good label and management.

AF: I read that you got to hang out with Paul Simon a lot – that must have been really incredible!

JK: Yeah, that was our first really big tour. It was intimidating. But it was a blast. He sounds unbelievable. A lot of older guys sound different. We got to open for Bob Dylan which is a lifelong dream, but the difference between Dylan and Simon is Paul Simon always sounds spot on. Dylan is always morphing and evolving, I don’t know if he’s the same person he used to be, or even the same person he was two years ago. Paul Simon is pro all the way. His voice is amazing.

AF: What are some of your favorite contemporary artists?

JK: My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Jack White, the Black Keys, Kings of Leon, Band of Horses. I’m a big fan of just guitar, bass, and drum rock and roll. There’s also Foo Fighters. I still haven’t met Dave Grohl. That’s on the list.

AF: What are some of your favorite cities to play in? Do crowds receive you, specifically your music, differently in different parts of the US?

JK: In different parts of the country there are diverse crowds for us. As far as having fun: we’ve only played twice in the DC Area at the 930 Club, but that’s probably one of my favorite places. It’s great. DC is really a brand new one. I love that.

New York City’s always good, too. The shows are amazing. But just getting in and out of the city with all of our gear is a pain in the ass.

We’ve played Boston a few times. The whole East Coast is cool for us because we don’t get up there too often. Actually, both of the coasts are really fun. We’ve toured throughout the South and the Midwest, even with our old bands. So, when we get out West we love the scenery and the whole vibe out there. The East Coast is all new to us. We don’t know too many people on those coasts so we can really get involved, let loose, and have a good time.

The Wild Feathers are playing a sold out show, tonight at Mercury Lounge in NYC. Until then, Check out their video for “The Ceiling”, off their debut album:

ALBUM REVIEW: Yellow Ostrich “Cosmos”

Since beginning his solo project Yellow Ostrich, singer-guitarist Alex Schaaf has been making music prolifically and with fanatical focus. Within a couple of years of its inception, while Schaaf was still a college student, Yellow Ostrich had recorded two full-length albums and three EPs, each of which barreled with blinders on in a direction that had little in common with that of the previous release. In 2009, one of Yellow Ostrich’s earlier releases, The Serious Kids EP, consisted of a six-track foray into acousti-fied electronic dance music. The same month, a Morgan Freeman tribute EP surfaced on the group’s Bandcamp page. Suffice it to say that Schaaf doesn’t shy away from experimentation, nor the prospect of devoting an entire album to that experimentation.

Yellow Ostrich has grown since those days. Having added drummer Michael Tapper, and then, later on, bassist Zach Rose and Jared Van Fleet on keys, Schaaf remains the center of the band. Though as a solo artist, the sheer amount of sound Schaaf was able to orchestrate was impressive, it’s difficult now to imagine Yellow Ostrich without Tapper’s drum work. But though beefier instrumentation makes Schaaf’s penchant for big, unpredictable themes a bit less obvious, those deeply delved-into concept albums are by no means an outgrown phase for Yellow Ostrich.

By way of preparation, Schaaf moved into the band’s windowless Brooklyn practice space for nine months before writing the songs on Cosmos. There, he studied astronomy, and artificially recreated of the cycle of daylight and night in lieu of going outside. When he did start to write, the album developed an obsession with darkness and light. “Pull the shades down and never let go,” Schaaf intones on “Shades,” and then inverts the image in the following track with the wearily repeated line “hiding under the brightest light.” Less poppy and more violent than anything the group had so far put out, Schaaf’s vocals cycle over delicate electronics and heavy guitars like waves crashing unenthusiastically against a wooden dock at nighttime.

For all its well-researched complexities, Cosmos retains the element that’s been threaded through all of Yellow Ostrich’s deviations: it assumes, for lack of a better term, a sense of wonder in its audience. It’s easy to find sections of Schaaf’s vocal track precious, his looping melodies boring. The group has, in interviews, expressed preference for playing college campuses, and it’s easy to see why: the ideal Yellow Ostrich fan is deeply enthrall-able and eager to suspend disbelief. Even if the group’s grand, far-flung scope won’t appeal to all listeners, the prospect of being invited to dig deep in this album adds an allure to the deceptively catchy, pulsing echoes of Cosmos.

Walk, don’t fly, over to Facebook for more Yellow Ostrich. Listen to “Shades,” off Cosmos, below:

LIVE REVIEW: Weeknight @ Mercury Lounge

Darkwave, coldwave, new wave, no wave, disco-punk, dance-punk, synthpunk, post-punk. As the music industry strives to coin new terms that will effectively pigeonhole each and every grouping of human beings making sounds with instruments, these vague definitions start to sound like some twisted Dr. Seuss book. Enter Post-Everything; it’s not a genre, but a cleverly-titled record by emerging Brooklyn duo Weeknight, aimed at obliterating the lazy classifications so often used to explain what we think we’re hearing.

It’s not that Weeknight don’t fit in to any of the above-named genres; in fact, they borrow heavily from more than a few. They don’t seem particularly concerned with crafting a wholly original sound, nor are they attempting to reinvent any wheels. In the two years they’ve been bouncing around the Brooklyn music scene, they’ve established something much more compelling. With Post-Everything, Weeknight have crafted something bigger than genre itself; they have curated an entire atmosphere. This is music that takes on a life, splashing through wet neon reflections in gutters or echoing through misty caves rimed in crystal formations. Ethereal synth washes, hollow drumbeats, and distant, hazy guitars unfold layer by layer, revealing the dual voices of Holly and Andy (who have withheld their last names, perhaps in keeping an air of the mysterious about them). The two share a beautifully removed method of delivery, almost always singing in breathy unison. Andy’s voice is not unlike the somehow spacious deadpan of The National’s Matt Berninger, while Holly’s laconic, whispered counterparts are a bit more feathery and harder to pin down. The lyrics read like a nihilistic but earnest love letter – tragically cursed scrawlings inspired by fatally unrequited adoration, less desperate but more impatient.

Those dark elements are conveyed as successfully live as they are on the record, which comes out March 4th via Hand-Drawn Dracula subsidiary Artificial Records. In support of its release, Weeknight are heading out on a two-month tour that kicked off last night at Mercury Lounge. Moments of fuzzy ecstasy, like their rendition of “Tonight”, were tempered with lush comedowns like “Whale”, each track perfectly articulated by deft synth patches and taut movements. The band’s sultry first single, “Dark Night”, offered just the right kind of slow build, bathing the rapt audience in a swirl of bleary reverb. Andy and Holly have toured tirelessly in the time that it’s taken them to piece together their brooding tunes – both headlining and supporting acts like Phantogram and Besnard Snakes – and in so doing have honed a perfect choreography, a seamless give-and-take.

The band’s moody aesthetic extended to the bill’s supporting acts; sets from BK dream-pop duo Courtship Ritual (who invited black-clad belly dancers to the stage), the slithering glitch of Certain Creatures, and carefully culled goth gems from DJ Mar Bar of Rituals NYC, all longtime friends and collaborators with like-minded sensibilities who helped Weeknight celebrate the past year’s successes and transport Mercury Lounge into another world. It happened to be the 20th anniversary of the East Village venue but the party was solidly for Weeknight. Post-Everything is poised not just to become one of the most talked about albums of the year, but also to redefine the way we talk about music in the first place.

ALBUM REVIEW: True Love Kills the Fairy Tale

“It feels as though we found each other, when we reflect back on the myriad of minutia decisions that were made to cross paths at that exact point in time,” says Phaedra Greene of the fateful day when she and sister Elsa met producer/songwriter Ryan Graveface. The story goes that Ryan stumbled upon the sisters singing and playing autoharp under a tree in a park in Savannah, GA, and the trio have been collaborating as The Casket Girls for the two or so years since. Phaedra continues, “it begs the question, was it the first time we met?”

This mystic sensibility is what the group have become known for, to an extent, and it colors the sound of their upcoming sophomore album, True Love Kills the Fairy Tale, out Feb. 11th via Graveface Records. The ten-track record comes with its own bizarre backstory: allegedly, all of the lyrics were written in one night while the sisters were in some sort of semi-conscious dream state (“Elsa was sobbing and reciting poetry while Phaedra was just staring straight ahead and writing it all down, like catatonic,” according to Ryan) and they have no recollection of it at all. But despite these questionable origins, the final product is a rather focused and lush sounding album.

True Love Kills The Fairy Tale begins with a winking electronic beat and the sisters’ haunting, harmonious “oooh”s. As the album progresses, the production becomes ever more dense. “Day to Day,” for example, has a distinct shoegaze-y wall of sound quality to it and a slow tempo that lulls you into a haze. The title track features a lot of fuzz and some interesting instrumental work—acoustic guitar? banjo?—near its end, which is refreshing to hear midway through the electronically inclined album. “Holding You Back,” on the other hand, has a quintessentially pop sound to it, with ‘80s influences to boot. The lyrics, meanwhile, explore the tension and balance found in dichotomies (as in “Chemical Dizzy,” in which the girls sing “Opposites only exist with each other”) as well as more metaphysical themes (like the concept of “unrequited reality” from the first track, “Same Side”).

Though the album is pretty purely pop, it remains instrumentally grounded in Graveface’s mechanical blips. A straight-shot listen might make some of the tracks come off as repetitive, but The Casket Girls have a pretty specific sound which they do very well. Droning and entrancing, True Love Kills the Fairy Tale leaves you blissed out and bobbing your head along to the catchy riffs.

OP-ED: You Can’t Always Get What You Want: When Legacy Artists Return

The last year or so has seen a number of legacy bands returning, whether they were making new albums and EPs or just going on tour. The Pixies. Boards of Canada. Mazzy Star. My Bloody Valentine. David Bowie. Neutral Milk Hotel. The Breeders. Not even necessarily confined to indie rock, both Wu Tang Clan and Lauryn Hill returned to the forefront of the musical scene in some form. OutKast seems like the latest duo to join the ranks of reawakening and there’s more than I’ve even mentioned here. The return of these legendary acts felt exciting at first, then a little overwhelming, and finally, predictable. We watched them struggle to adapt to the digital world of Twitter and Youtube streams, festival headlining slots and internet backlash. It felt disorienting to see a band like The Pixies—who most already consider an established part of the indie rock canon—go through petty band changes and lackluster EPs. Certainly not all of the artists disappointed in their return, but often the question went deeper than whether the new album, song or tour was successful or not. Rather, the reemergence begs the question: why now? What is the intent? Do these artists really feel they are adding to their legacies, or are these returns based on financial concerns? In some cases, it seems that the latter might be the primary motivation.

Some music attains critical and commercial success in one fell swoop, setting a bar for the sound of an era, and decisively changing music itself. Artists like David Bowie and My Bloody Valentine certainly fit this mold, as do Wu Tang, The Pixies and Mazzy Star. It’s not just that these artists were great and beloved by their fans, it’s that their effects are being seen, felt and heard, even now a decade or more later. The impeachable nature of a band like My Bloody Valentine feels precarious when a new album comes out—will it hold up? Will they maintain the myth? The ways in which legacy artists challenge their own reputation by releasing new material is fascinating, especially given the factors that have changed the way we consume music. For example, mbv wasn’t eligible for the Mercury Prize because the group chose to put it out independently—James Blake’s album garnered the award. Or, how about the fact that David Bowie’s album elicited barely a scratch from critical pens, while Arcade Fire’s triumphant Reflektor can be found in the top tier of nearly every year-end list? When The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out, there was no Tink or Rapsody—and no Nicki Minaj or rhyme-spitting Yoncé either. These newer artists might just interest us more at this point, partially because they’ve built on the foundation that Hill herself laid. In a way, she’s fallen behind these emerging artists due to the doors she herself opened, and where newer artists have gone from there.

It says something, too, about our attention span that the news of these artists return often trumped our actual interaction with their art. How many people gave the new Mazzy Star album a proper chance? Did it even matter at this point? The artist who raised the most eyebrows in their return was probably The Pixies. Not only were their new EPs rather banal, but the fact that founding member Kim Deal wasn’t involved, and that they kicked their replacement bassist (also named Kim) out of the band created a situation fraught with drama and embarrassment. Was this really the band that helped shape the indie rock canon? It’s in situations like this that great bands sometimes tarnish their place in our hearts by trying to stretch their relevance into ungainly lengths. Or is it that we’d rather have the drama than the new music? The idea of a new David Bowie album interests us, but not the effort it takes to delved into it. We’ve been craving Neutral Milk Hotel’s return for what feels like eons, but when we get it, it feels more like a let down than a victory.

Seminal artists—and the art they make—have their place in a specific time and rarely can they make the jump forward to continue their legacy after so many years. As new artist build on the sonics and precepts of stalwarts like The Breeders and Boards of Canada, they do become more intriguing to us than their forerunners. And when legends come to life in our own time, sometimes their reality, their very humanity ruins the magic patina that age and our reverence have coated them with. Will hearing In the Aeroplane Over the Sea live really make me love it more, or will it ruin the larger-than-life presence that album had over my adolescence? So when OutKast goes on tour this year, I won’t be going to see them—I can’t fully believe they’re doing it for anything other than the money Same goes for The Pixies and Neutral Milk Hotel. I can’t take the chance that I’ll lose their magic, even if they have.

Besides, it’s 2014 and I’m more interested in watching Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa. It’s their time.

LIVE REVIEW: Yvette @ Death By Audio

Few things lure me from the warmth of libation and my couch on an icy weeknight. If a band can convince me to endure sub-freezing temperatures, the company of myself and a trek to the Williamsburg waterfront, they must be pretty damn good. Brooklyn duo Yvette were more than worth my wet boots when they played at Death By Audio last Tuesday. They weren’t headlining but they were the reason the show caught my attention in the first place. I had been scrolling through weeks of show listings and their name kept popping up, often highly recommended on some calendars. Typically skeptical of things suggested or not suggested, I suspended my suspicion and streamed some of their music . What I heard not only delighted but surprised me, as I don’t know of many current bands even walking the road Yvette is barreling down.

Their sound is a nod to 80s post-punk from London, gothic industrial via Berlin and the aggressive proto-punk of our very own New York City. Think Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Joy Division, Psychic T.V., Nurse With Wound, Death in June, and The Birthday Party, to name a few beats resonating from Yvette. Given that those are some of my all time favorite bands, it’s no shock that they excited me. It’s also nice to hear someone depart from the sunny folk revival and the pleasant ambient noise of late to bring a darker sound to the table. Yet despite Yvette’s aggressive and ominous feel, their presence didn’t determine the rest of the show.

If there was a common thread running through the lineup of the evening, it was far too thin to detect. First up was Rat Attack, a duo wielding only a laptop, microphone and effects pedals. I liked their sound, which was more aggressive and distorted than that of Yvette’s. It was their live presence, though, that I wasn’t so fond of. The music was perfectly jagged and malevolent but it was compromised by the ridiculous image of two dudes rocking out with a macbook pro. There was no interaction with the crowd and they may as well been in their own living room. I’d say Rat Attack would be best heard on headphones so the listener can pick up the intricacies of their mixing.

Second on the bill was Seven Teares, who embodied the most extreme outliers of the evening. Their sound is difficult to pin but consists of down tempo ballads with vocal harmonies reminiscent of medieval songs. The band’s members are all impressive vocalists and multi-instrumentalists. They were swapping basses for guitars, accordions for microphones, and drums for what looked like a xylophone. Most bewildering was a strange wooden instrument on top of one member’s knee that looked like a organ-accordion hybrid and everybody in the crowd was trying to figure out what it was. Fortunately I could employ my acclaimed eavesdropping skills as the man standing next to me explained to his date that it was a portative organ. These herald back to the 12^th century and were typically used for recreational music. Somehow the band trumped their own oddness when the drummer whipped out a violin bow and a chunk of Styrofoam, a foe far worse than nails on a chalkboard. The only thing they were missing was a lute.

Finally Yvette came on, and they put on one hell of a show. Despite their music being heavily reliant on digital embellishments and effects pedals, they consist of a guitarist/vocalist and an energetic drummer who supplied the vitality desired at a live performance. This was not two dudes and a laptop, but two very capable musicians who are exploring sonic possibilities beyond the traditional scope of their respective instruments. There was an interaction between the duo that seemed enthusiastic and concentrated.

The headlining band was Aa (a nod to Crass pronounced Big A, little a), who were releasing their record that evening. Consisting of three drummers and one vocalist/keyboardist, the bands sound is simultaneously soothing and aggressive. They are considered post-punk on a critical level, but tout influences reaching back to prog-rock.

I hope and expect to hear more from Yvette and Aa in the coming future. Maybe when it’s warmer out.

Check out Yvette’s “With Fangs”below:

VIDEO REVIEW: Together Pangea “Offer”

Together PANGEA just released this music video to promote their new album Badillac and kicked off their tour around the US. They created it in the spirit of friendship it would seem. That is: it was created with their friends to be watched by others and their friends.

A sense of community is apparent from the opening scene of an energetic crowd chanting “One more song!”. The music begins mildly and the close shots of people’s faces bathed in colorful light syncs really well. These scenes change quickly into more lively interactions and the color gains some lens flares and blinking disco lights. We see friends partying together – laughing, drinking, dancing – in private, in public, and, of course, at a Together PANGEA show. There’s boob-flashing, shotgunning of beers, a dark shot of a Del Taco, and a dude blowing beautiful smoke as two people make out in the background. It’s a very active video, but in tiny spurts that draw attention to a larger lifestyle, and the California they are attempting to capture. What stuck out to me the most was the sense of affection that bleeds through every clip, whether people are shooting beer into each others’ mouths or making funny faces as they rock out. This isn’t just a showcase of debauchery and silliness. It’s a showcase of togetherness. We see a man and a woman hungrily kissing each other, until a guy steps in, drags the man away, and proceeds to hungrily kiss him. Love is just in the air.

You can infer that it is the music and California itself that brings all these people into this drunken, stumbling, potent fun. As the words “Get wasted / And lose best friends” are sung, we see two people clearly enamored with each other. Crowd-surfing. Panties. A gorgeous view of Los Angeles at night from above. The lively, low-fi music and William Keegan’s nasal, scratchy vocals were made to accompany a video like this one. These are scenes and feelings we can all recognize and, more so associate with this band.

Together Pangea goes on tour February 1st. They’ll be at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on February 14th. Until then, peep the video here:

TRACK REVIEW: MT WARNING “Midnight Dawn”

“How would a song sound from a man sinking into the ocean?”

This is the question that prompted MT WARNING’s Mikey Bee and Taylor Steele to write the story of life, from beginning to end, into all of their music. They put particular care and thought into making songs emotive – relaying the sweetness of youth and the disillusions of growing old – and engaging – through intimate moments Mikey shares with his audience.

MT WARNING’s new track “Midnight Dawn” begins with a soft, potent twang out of an Old Western. When the guitar and drums kick in they pick the song up out of its ambience. But its the vocals that really transform it into a delicate, but relentless chant (even when Mikey is just “ooh”-ing). There’s some nature imagery that keeps the Old Western feeling fresh. “We don’t know where we’re goin’ / But we know where we’ll end up” is the line that’s repeated. This has the double effect of seeming positive (in that this journey “we” are on is difficult and confusing, but we have a place to be, which is comforting and satisfying), but also incredibly dark (well, we’re all going to end up dead, aren’t we?). At three and a half minutes in a female singer enters, crooning gently, only for the lead vocals to return fiercely with a strain, an overwhelming ache that provides it an emotional context that catches the listener off guard. At four minutes and some seconds the vocals slowly trail off into echoes.

I’m not a big fan of anthems or epic songs (especially after F.U.N.’s boom), but, though this song is dynamic in a fairly obvious way, there’s an emotional quality to its turns that is very endearing. There’s a delicateness, a rawness underlying everything that goes back to MT WARNING’s original idea of sinking into the ocean. With some knowledge of that in mind, this song is equal parts lovely and daunting.

Listen to “Midnight Dawn” off of MT WARNING’s debut album Midnight Set, to be released this March:

LIVE REVIEW: Kim Gordon closes out Mike Kelley’s Retrospective at MoMA PS1

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Mike Kelley Kim Gordon — Mike Kelley & Kim Gordon in August 1985, shot by John Harnois

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Kim Gordon Jutta Koether — Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether

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Sometimes the most provocative art is that which is pieced together from various, unusual mediums and outcasted found objects, speaking as it does to obsolescence, alienation, and a crush of cultural detritus. This can apply to music as well as visual art very easily in the right hands, where signals are mixed and symbols are meshed to examine the tenuous relationships we have to the things and people that inhabit our lives.

Nothing proved that better than the Mike Kelley retrospective at MoMA PS1, the largest single-artist exhibition the museum has ever curated. Collecting video works, installations, sculpture, drawings, paintings, and assemblages spanning Kelley’s entire career as a visual artist, the show opened in October and closed yesterday with a thought-provoking set from Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether.

The performance took place inside a dome centered within the courtyard, surrounded by the former school’s various galleries. An image of two tanks, one blue and one red, both swirling with bubbles, was projected behind the stage; the imagery was borrowed from Kelley’s more recent Kandor series in which he used varying representations of the Krypton city from Superman comics to explore feelings of disconnectedness. Though the hermetically sealed contents of the tanks highlighted separation, it also suggested a synergy, a transfer of materials. This conclusion might have been drawn in part to the connection that Gordon and Koether formed during the performance, as well as Gordon’s connections to Kelley himself.

Before Gordon founded Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, she studied visual art and worked in SoHo galleries, curating shows of Kelley’s work. Kelley had been in a no-wave band called Destroy All Monsters, making the kind of music that would later inform Gordon’s. In 1985, Sonic Youth composed a live score for Kelley’s performance Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile. The bashful orange doll from 1992 Sonic Youth album Dirty is one of Kelley’s hand-knit creations, included in his photography series Ahhhhh, Youth!. When Kelley committed suicide in 2012, Gordon eulogized him in a moving piece for Artforum, providing a tender look at the decades of collaboration, mutual admiration and friendship between the two.

For the bulk of the performance, Koether and Gordon chose to reinterpret selections and ideas Kelley presented in his 1996 album Poetics. Between washes of Gordon’s guitar noise, looped sounds from a small boombox (a nod perhaps, to the visual cues that appear in several of Kelley’s works) and Koether’s nebulous synths, the two women read excerpts of a conversation that Kelley and Gordon had in Interview shortly after “Kool Thing” had been released as a single; the interview discusses at length Gordon’s transformation from librarian/art nerd into rock star/sex symbol as well as identifying racial appropriation in the the video that sounded particularly prescient in light of last year’s most criticized music videos. Gordon initially read Kelley’s questions with Koether responding as 90’s-era Gordon; halfway through the set they flipped identities again. After each of these intervals, the pair would recite a passage from Kelley’s ’93 fax-essay PSY-CHIC in unison describing a woman’s profile, crescendoing with the phrase “The sideward glance that says FUCK YOU.” At one point, Koether tossed handfuls of xeroxed copies into the audience.

Kim Gordon Mike Kelley MoMA PS1 — Kim Gordon performing at Mike Kelley’s MoMA PS1 retrospective, shot by Laura Wyant (@MsLDubbs)

In this way, Gordon used Kelley’s methods of raking the flotsam from the surrounding world, imbuing it with meaning, and repurposing it through a completely different medium. She blended text with noise much the same way that Kelley often used words in his visual works to create a contextual anchor. The cassette tapes Gordon played from her tinny boombox stood in for the stuffed animals or yearbook photos that Kelley used in various installations. The approach was mirrored brilliantly, and both uncovered awkward truths about art-making, identity, and sexuality. For Kelley, that meant exploring the perverse and the grotesque and the repressed; for Gordon that meant reconciling her responses to questions answered over twenty years ago with the woman and artist she’s become. How fitting that she was able to do so while paying tribute to a dear friend whose work grows more prolific and seductive with each passing year, whose work we have barely begun to cherish for the melange of half-truths and false memories and rejected consumerism and offbeat language that it is.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

TRACK OF THE WEEK: Chad VanGaalen’s “Where Are You”

Alberta, Canada’s Chad VanGaalen is set to return with his fifth studio album, Shrink Dust (his first solo release since the 2011 record, Diaper Island) on April 29 via Sub Pop Records. “Where Are You” is the second track on the upcoming record. The song is lo-fi and a bit bizarre, as per VanGaalen’s usual work, placing us in sci-fi territory with spaced out sound effects layered over VanGaalen’s near-yell of “Where are you.” It’s an extremely interesting listen—catchy in the least obvious way possible.

Listen to the track on Soundcloud, or watch the accompanying video below, with amazingly weird animations galore!

ALBUM REVIEW: Kins

Thomas Savage’s anxious tenor takes center stage on Kins‘ eponymous album’s opener, “Pale Faced Fear.” Channeling both the chilliness and unhindered expression of Radiohead’s frontman, a fellow Thom, Savage saunters over the track, his voice cascading over all its low beats and lingering echoes. That spaciness gives Kins the feel of an album made someplace dark and cold, and in fact, it was: the sometimes-quartet relocated, in the winter of 2012, from its Australian home base to a basement apartment by the water in Brighton, England to record Kins.

As idyllic as the Brighton seaside may sound, the album has a lot of bleakness to it. Savage’s voice recedes from the forefront as Kins wears on, never again to be as clearly in focus as it is on “Pale Faced Fear.” Instead, the vocals become part of a backdrop of smudged harmonies, swirling bass and keys. The impressionistic layering of the instrumentals conjures a pretty sound, but though its foundation is solid, Kins develops into an album that never really settles on a focal point.

Which seems like an easy conclusion to come to, given that the band has a track called “Aimless” on here. In fact, that song is one of the more driven on Kins. “Aimless” makes a bid for the return of a strong vocal line, adhering to a conventional song structure more so than the preceding tracks. Then, “Under The Radar” pairs voice with understated, bubbling instrumentals that—more than anywhere else on the album—draw the group’s rhythmic complexity into a balanced arrangement.

It’s clear that Kins’ focus is on subverting the ear’s expectations, stretching out phrases and avoiding easy rhythmic progressions. But, in this case, that intent leads somewhere uninspiring. While the album can be beautiful, it is just as often boring, and the complex evocation created by Kins’ orchestration ultimately amounts to backdrop—a painstakingly created stage set with an unclaimed microphone in the center.

Head over to Kins’ Facebook page, and listen to “Under The Radar,” off Kins, below!

ALBUM REVIEW: Roman Remains, “Zeal”

Zeal may not be the most dynamic album released this year, but despite any misgivings, Roman Remains’ debut full length (out March 4th on H.O.T Records Ltd) beckons us into an immersive, dissonant world. Not to mention it’s catchy, synth-filled fun. Liela Moss and Toby Butler, of The Duke Spirit, set out with this electronic side project to create something “playful, but never dumb”. Though some of the bass lines and melodies echo The Duke Spirit, Roman Remains has a disparate vibe. Butler switches from bass riffs to potent downbeats and Moss from english rock band to powerful femme fatale. The strong female vocals and atmospheric musical backdrop lends depth and menace to an otherwise less notable album. While Moss has a voice like Bjork, Roman Remains is more reminiscent of Ladytron or Portishead – propulsive beats and seemingly sweet, but commanding lyrics. With this album they’ve captured grungy, otherworldly sensations with simple words and sounds.

The titles range from pastoral (“Agrimony”, “Gazebo”) to more dangerous (“Apoidea”, “Tachycardia”, “Vulture Beat”) to narrative (“Nest In Your Room”, “Thursty As A Truck”). Most of the songs are quite similar in structure: a simple, often slower opening that jettisons into the club-like, laden with heavy bass. While they could definitely benefit from some variation between songs, the narrative is what really pulls the listener in. The lyrics, while simple and often repetitive, lend to the powerful atmosphere. They can be very visual – “Looking at the people / Moving in the space between”, “Hard to see early evening stars” – as if looking through the eyes of the narrator. There are many possible interpretations. Personally, I see that narrator in some shadowy, cyberpunk club. She speaks strongly but effortlessly of power plays, melancholy, and anger. Simple images evoke all of these sensations, and as a result it’s difficult not to be drawn into the mood.

Track ten, “Vulture Beat”, has one of the more interesting openings – dreamy, and environmental. But it moves into familiar territory with the chorus, which presents yet another catchy, repetitive melody. The words are great, though, direct and sensual: “Help me / Help you / To pleasure”, “Help me / Help you / More”. Tack nine, “Animals”, also has a unique start. The sounds aren’t quite dissonant, but they’re strong and harsh with vocals leading in. Moss commands: “Back off”, “Keep / Keep / Watching this”, leading into the simplest chorus: “Oh Woah / Animals / Oh Woah / Oh no”.

Tracks seven and eight are more visual and speak towards the narrative. “Gazebo” is a bit melancholy. The beat is obvious, but softer than many of the other songs. The vocals are blended, and a bit hazy. Moss pulls the listener in when she sings “One hundred ways to watch / The shadows lose their light,” and manages to sound both earthy and soft. “Influence and Atlas” is more menacing. It begins with a thumping beat and words that construct a vague setting: “Looking at the people there / Moving in the space between”. Then, they build a vague relationship: “I didn’t know if you would influence it / I didn’t know if you would ever try” with a bit of “Oh / Oh / Oh” in between. It was easy for me to lose myself to this space, ambiguous, perhaps even slippery, but distinct.

Roman Remains plays with dissonance and juxtaposition. They’ve succeeded in making an album full of dark, urging energy and a powerful, yet fairly intangible story. There’s simplicity and there’s intensity. I felt empowered and emotional after I listened, a little weary, too, but more so compelled. Perhaps the next release will be more well-rounded and try a few experiments with genre and composition.

Check out the album’s first track, “This Stone Is Starting To Bleed”, below.

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LIVE REVIEW: The Everymen @ Glasslands

The greatest live shows are put on by bands that love performing more than they love anything else, and The Everymen is a prime example. This New Jersey outfit’s live energy is so strong that it’s palpable on their recordings, which actually suffer for their boisterousness—the ragged vocals and heavy distortion that feels distracting on their studio albums is custom built for live shows. They’ve always made a point of having fun on their albums, and in person, the band emanates the vibe of a punk rock, boozy, fun-loving soul party.

At Glasslands last Tuesday, The Everymen brought a grab-bag of musical styles on stage with them: using a smattering of instruments in pursuit of their rollicking cause, the band put on the rowdiest show of the evening. The week-night crowd was sparse but engaged, an odd mix of attendees to match the odd mix of acts. Later in the evening, bass-drum duo Nømads played a set that was the near-opposite of The Everymen’s. With only a crackling noisiness in common, the pair played a series of isolated, stripped-down songs that further impressed on me their predecessor’s all-inclusiveness. The set’s glorious messiness, its singalong hooks and unceremonious mashing together of styles came together in a way that felt particular to the spontaneity of live performance. In the style of other bands best seen live despite impressive studio releases, The Everymen create a special energy onstage.

Month: February 2014