PLAYING DETROIT: Fred Thomas Mourns Former Friendships With “Altar”

As the former leader of Saturday Looks Good To Me and bass player in His Name Is Alive, Fred Thomas might easily be considered Southeast Michigan’s godfather of indie rock. Ever prolific, his third solo record in four years, Aftering, is set to drop this Friday. Ahead of that comes a video for his single “Altar,” a visual representation of conflicting feelings – joy and isolation. Thomas says the song is a “remarkably personal” recount of a time where he felt ousted from a group of friends in a small town. The song’s cutting lyrics paired with the disorienting visual accurately capture the lonely state of not knowing where you belong.

“The song is about a situation where you feel ostracized by people that you know, people that you thought were your friends,” says Thomas. “Where things have switched from ‘everything’s cool, everybody’s my friend’ to ‘oh, everybody hates me.’” In the video, Thomas and his band – Anna Baghina (guitar), Erin Davis (bass), Stefan Krstovic (drums), Emily Roll (synths) – alternate between clean-cut euphoria and dirty catatonia. The scenes are meant to juxtapose that ecstatic time of belonging and community and the dull pain of estrangement. “Every attempt was made to hold on to that dislocated magic,” Thomas sings, acutely recalling what it’s like to hang on to the skeleton of a support system.

For anyone who has felt abandoned or burned by a friend (or multiple friends), this song hits close to home. Thomas’s penchant for conversational lyricism and poignant metaphor has the ability to draw out the deepest buried memories. “Those nights were spent/
Digesting the ashes of a dead friend/Putting barricades in place/Cultivating contradictions/Drinking whispers,” Thomas sings, listing all the necessary ingredients for a burned bridge.

But, however dark Thomas goes in his writing, he always intends to imbue his work with some levity, which the video makes obvious through the band’s outfits and awkward thrashing. “I want there to be humor and absurdity in everything I do,” he says.

Aftering comes out this Friday, September 14th via Polyvinyl. Check out his tour dates below.

09/16 – Austin, TX @ The Mohawk (Indoor) + [SOLD OUT]
09/17 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs) +
09/19 – Detroit, MI @ Outer Limits Lounge
09/20 – Detroit, MI @ Third Man Records (In-Store) *
10/10 – Cincinnati, OH @ MOTR #
10/11 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl #
10/13 – Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle #
10/14 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings #
10/16 – Norfolk, VA @ Charlie’s American Cafe #
10/17 – Washington DC @ Songbyrd #
10/19 – Philadelphia, PA @ Boot & Saddle #
10/20 – Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right #
10/21 – Portsmouth, NH @ Book & Bar #
10/23 – Montreal, QC @ La Vitrola #
10/24 – Toronto, ON @ Baby G #
10/25 – Ann Arbor, MI @ Blind Pig #
10/26 – Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle #
11/30 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza +
12/01 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios +
12/04 – Oakland, CA @ 1-2-3-4 Go! Records
12/05 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Hi Hat
+ w/ Owen
* w/ Kat Gardiner
# w/ Anna Burch & Common Holly

PLAYING DETROIT: Anna Burch Releases Debut LP “Quit the Curse”

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photo by Ebru Yildiz

Combine brutal self-awareness, melancholic love affairs, and a natural pop sensibility and you will arrive at Quit the Curse, Anna Burch’s debut album. The Detroit singer-songwriter has spent years paying her dues playing in bands like Frontier Ruckus and Failed Flowers, but seems most at home as a solo act, singing a collection of lost-love songs tinged with irony and infectious hooks.

On Quit the Curse, Burch intermingles quirky candidness with familiar clichés, offering a refreshing take on age-old breakup anthems. Despite their dim subject matter, the songs possess a weightlessness brought on by Burch’s bright chord progressions and the occasional pedal steel swell. This contrast makes the album feel like laying in the sand with a piña colada but also browsing through pictures of your ex and their new partner.

The record reaches its height of beachy-ness on “Belle Isle,” a gorgeous play on cookie-cutter 1960’s surf-pop (complete with time changes and irreverent one-liners) that name-drops Detroit’s much-beloved island park gem. Burch sings “I wish that you would hold me in your arms/Like the night we made out on Belle Isle,” in a sweetly deadpan voice atop sunny pedal steel; equally endearing and amusing, it feels like an inside joke that we’re all in on – one called modern romance.

But the album is not solely a list of sugar-coated grievances. In “What I Want,” Burch hones in on the importance of moving forward and gives herself and anyone else who’s listening some words to live by. “I won’t play the victim just because I can’t get what I want,” sings Burch, followed by “Self-destruction is so played out/So is self-pity and self-doubt,” offering some genuine self-reflection and taking a jab at the melodrama of heartbreak.

Burch’s matter-of-fact line delivery and decade blending instrumentation heed a laid-back listen that reflects the indecision, apathy, and confusion involved in most post-millennium love stories.

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PLAYING DETROIT: Anna Burch Keeps It Cool With Polyvinyl

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photo by Katie Nuemann

Few Detroit based singer-songwriters have hustled as hard as former Frontier Ruckus songstress Anna Burch, heartbreaker and sorceress of breathy lo-fi honesty. And as of last week, we aren’t the only ones to be enchanted by Burch’s brand of pretty pain and ennui. Polyvinyl Records (Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof and fellow Michigander Fred Thomas) announced Burch as the latest addition to their label last week after discovering her demo by word of mouth. The label celebrated by debuting Burch’s Noah Elliott Morrison directed video for her first single “2 Cool 2 Care.”

Exploring the impossible task of courting someone who is, well, too cool to care, Burch’s debut single shimmers with warmth despite detailing the lonesome effects of the cold shoulder and emotional ghosting. “2 Cool 2 Care” follows a restless Burch delicately trying to capture the attention of a passive lover, following him to his suburb, hula-hooping poolside with the confession “you scare me with your indifference/I like you best/when you’re a mess.” She effortlessly channels the likes of goddess Angel Olsen, but Burch is hardly following in anyone else’s footsteps.

Keep it cool and stay tuned for Burch’s debut LP, due out early 2018. For now, revisit summer vibes and shitty relationships with “2 Cool 2 Care” below:

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LIVE REVIEW: Xiu Xiu @ Glasslands

Xiu Xiu Glasslands

Xiu Xiu Glasslands

As the driving force behind experimental art rock outfit Xiu Xiu, Jamie Stewart has been known to push boundaries. Constantly reinventing himself (and his music), Stewart’s eccentric and sometimes violent themes are what ties the project together most readily, his fragile shout the crux of the band’s bursting, bloody heart. His line-up of touring musicians rotates regularly, so one never knows what to expect from a Xiu Xiu show, and given Stewart’s prolific output–which has included an album of Nina Simone covers, a collage of Caribbean folk songs and field recordings, a Record Store Day four-LP best-of comp, and Xiu Xiu’s ninth studio album Angel Guts: Red Classroom in just under a year–unpredictability is part of what makes the project so fascinating.

At Glasslands last Saturday, Stewart appeared with pioneering percussionist Shayna Dunkelman by his side. As a duo, the two performed assaultive selections from Angel Guts with an almost frightening intensity; the heightened confusion of “Cinthya’s Unisex,” the awkward desire of “Black Dick,” the almost danceable glitch of “Stupid in the Dark”–these tracks typify the aim of Xiu Xiu’s newest album.

Thematically, there’s the unwavering look at racialized fetishes, the intersections of death and sex, and the dissolution of gender identity that have often appeared throughout Xiu Xiu’s catalogue. Angel Guts is based on a 1979 Japanese film of the same title. Both the album and the movie hinge on unsettling aspects of eroticism and human sexuality, and Stewart’s always been a master of communicating society’s most twisted impulses in his own idiosyncratic manner.

Sonically, Angel Guts is a percussive tour de force, so it makes sense that Stewart would enlist Dunkelman’s unique talents. The Brooklyn-based musician isn’t a drummer in the traditional sense, and that worked out well in interpreting these songs for the stage. She bashes cymbals with kind of antagonistic joy, while the melodic tones from her xylosynth punctured the rapid-fire mish mash from her electronic kit. Stewart created the fuzz, bleeps, bloops, and other electronic miasma roiling like stormy waves under the prow of his characteristically quavering voice.

That Xiu Xiu has become a percussion-focused project as of late is not just an extension of Angel Guts but also of Stewart’s extracurricular activities. He spent September in NYC collaborating with conceptual artist Danh Vō on a series of performances entitled “Metal,” which featured Xiu Xiu’s percussion syncopating with the sound of Thai gold pounders creating the golf leaf Vō’s uses as a medium in real time. Vō and Xiu Xiu also worked together to present “Kling Klang” at the Dumbo Arts Festival, attaching 999 bright-pink vibrators to Vō’s copper We The People installation. The NYC appearance was their only US show before embarking on a European tour that will extend throughout November.

Finishing the set with crowd favorites “Sad Pony Guerilla Girl” and “I Luv the Valley OH!” Xiu Xiu was rushed off stage with no encore to make way for the ensuing dance party at Glasslands. In lieu of playing more songs, an apologetic Stewart told a long joke about a child who idolized clowns; if only it could’ve morphed into “Clowne Towne” the punchline would’ve been far more satisfying. Though songs from much of Xiu Xiu’s back catalogue were absent, it was one of the most inspired, kinetic Xiu Xiu sets I’ve seen, and the times I’ve made it a point to bask in Stewart’s disconcerting presence have been many, stretching all the way back to the early aughts. As challenging as Xiu Xiu can be for some to digest, Stewart remains one of the most extraordinary and important musicians of the last fifteen years, and though you never know what to expect from him, it’s safe to say he’ll be pushing boundaries well into the next decade.