"it should be said" -xo publicity

Moody love stories

2012-02-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

Beneath Wind and Waves “Non-etre”

http://roctoberreviews.blogspot.com/2012/02/beneath-wind-and-waves-non-etre.html

(www.shawnlawsonfreeman.com) Moody love stories that don’t sound like Goth at all but all seem to be gothic in their moodiness and drama.

Bombshell Music News - Rags & Ribbons

2012-02-09T04:10:00.000-08:00

underneath techno’s pulsating efficiency, there’s room for humanity: some skin, some sweat, some blood

2012-02-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.metrospirit.com/index.php?cat=1993101070394080&ShowArticle_ID=11011101110948215

Gunslinger

Early Volumes 1

Blitz Music

Available Now

Thelastgunslinger.com

Reviewing what’s essentially an album full of X-laced club music is, for me, a tricky task. I’m familiar with artists that draw on the genre for inspiration and eclecticism—Crystal Castles, Fuck Buttons, etc—but I’m not a club scene regular; my idea of a wild time is drinking a pot of coffee, strapping on padded headphones and trying to pick out the unintentional tempo lags in an Electric Wizard song. The last time I was in a club, I was carrying three Jack and Cokes at one time and punched a guy for asking me if I was “triple-fisting.”

So I’m not an authority. But I’ve spent enough time with Homestarrunner.com and action movies set in Russia to know the crappy version of this stuff when I hear it, and Gunslinger ain’t it. Sure, the songs are rife with tried-and-true genre templates—sternum-rattling digital bass thumps, high-pitched laser beam wankery—but there’s actual structure here. Tracks rise, fall, and swell with purpose rather than simply service the timing of a doubled strobe rate, and the whole thing is rounded out rather nicely with some surprisingly slick space-age fuzz melodies (“Words”) and cyber-soul vocals.

Look, this kind of thing is generally an easy target, and if you don’t already dig cage dancers and deejays with flashlights attached to their temples, Gunslinger isn’t going to coax you to the dark side. Then again, this isn’t meant for you. It’s meant for those of us who want to believe that, underneath techno’s pulsating efficiency, there’s room for humanity: some skin, some sweat, some blood. Believe.

Radio Free MP3: “The Solution” by The Winebirds

2012-02-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.themidnightcafe.org/?p=2585

“The Solution”
By the Winebirds
From the album Seance Hill
I used to have this dream: I’d be the bass player in some great alt-rock band. We’d tour the country, just under the radar but with a fan base that puts the ‘atic’ in Fanatic. Gorgeous college girls would follow our every song. Incredibly cool guys would dream of being us. I’d be the mysterious guy in the back, knocking out insanely infectious beats, yet kind of aloof - not the gregarious front man, or the obscure drummer but the guy both making things happen and yet not sparking all the attention.

It never did happen. I never even learned to play an instrument. Yet I still dig a driving bass line like one finds in “The Solution.” Man, everything about that song is straight out of my teenage fantasy, except for the part where its me on the stage and not some kids I’ve never heard of from Portland.

The bass curls and furls and drives infectiousness home, the long way. The song bounces and trounces and creates a dream pop bubble of deliciousness. Its the kind of song the WB would play in their quirky, hilarious, incredibly brilliant show about college aged music lovers if the WB made shows worth watching. Its the kind of song that would knock the walls down off of my rent house if I played it at a party, that is if I actually threw parties. Its dynamite fun, fit for the whole family, if your family consists of me, and my dog.
You can hear more of the Winebirds frantic, audaciousness at their Myspace page, or their official website.

If you enjoy the sounds of one-man bands like Ben Prestage or Richard Johnston...

2012-02-06T09:57:00.000-08:00

http://cascadeblues.org/joomla/index.php/bluesnotes-online/cd-reviews/1126-qburn-downq

Burn Down"

Poor Boy’s Soul

Self Produced

If you enjoy the sounds of one-man bands like Ben Prestage or Richard Johnston, you’re more than likely going to like this album from Poor Boy’s Soul. It’s full of that energetic beat so much associated with these type of performers who work kicking a drum with tambourine and steady, often hard-hitting guitar that requires a good deal of coordination and skill to come across correctly. Trevor Jones, who is Poor Boy’s Soul, can certainly rip up some tasty slide guitar that can come across either mournful or genuinely heartfelt. He can show a bit of attitude as well. His bio on his website makes it bluntly clear he is not out to become the next rock sensation, so he has nothing to lose or gain by telling you exactly how he feels. “I finally pulled my head out of the sand, that’s when I finally learned to take my stand,” as he informs us in the song “Nails In The Pine.”
Based out of Portland, fans of local artists like Hillstomp or Rollie Tussing (who recently moved to Michigan) will find Poor Boy’s Soul exactly what they’re after. Jones played metal, thrash and punk music and worked with the band Biketramp before taking on his solo route. He’s also fond of hopping freight trains across country living the somewhat itinerant life-style of so many musicians before him. By practicing this he found it was easier to carry an inexpensive acoustic guitar with him, allowing him to play with and learn from musicians he encountered.
The songs on Burn Down are pretty basic and the playing is downright raw, but it is because of this that makes it so authentic sounding. It’s also very personal. He tells you his views on peoples’ religious beliefs in “Throwin’ Stones,” “You say I'm gonna burn in hell, ‘cause I wont bow to no throne, one thing that I know well, you shouldn't be throwing stones.” The title track, “Burn Down” with its mournful slide guitar uses the visage of the old house as a metaphor for social problems facing us all today. Jones believes in using music as a social outlet and he should as its been a common and useful means of expressing thoughts and ideas for eons. On “54 Ways” the old train sound approach is used, but it’s not really so much a train song as it is a profession of love that’s real.
All of the tracks use the one-man band format save for the final number, “Annalisa,” which is a moving ballad he wrote for his sister. From the lyrics you gather she has lived a rough life, but he looks up to his older sister and let’s her know, “you’re stronger than those demons in your head.”
Although the album is very short, the feel and the emotion are laid bare before you. It comes from within as all really good blues (or any for that matter) music originates. A strong album from an artist to keep your eyes on.

Total Time: 32:21
Burn Down / Movin’ To The City / Nails In The Pine / Throwin’ Stones / Ain’t Comin’ Back No More / 54 Ways / Annalisa
Reviewed by Greg Johnson

Introducing…Beneath Wind And Waves

2012-02-05T15:07:00.001-08:00

Americana, Electronic, Folk, Indie, Music
Tags: Beneath Wind And Waves
http://madmackerel.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/introducing-beneath-wind-and-waves/

Beneath Wind and Waves is Portland-based singer/songwriter Shawn Lawson Freeman recording with Jim Walker.
Recently released long-player Non-etre is a cunningly crafted, mindfully performed, extended moment of clarity in the face of the unknown. Dark love, missed chances, inner silences, and joyful trials are delicately delineated in its shrewdly scribed lyrics, delivered with Freeman’s sweetly pleasuring vocals upon a classy bed of acoustic and electronic instrumentation.
Most of Non-etre sounds like floating out on a wave, where you’re never sure what you might hear or have to think about next – a wash of light noise or the grace of dusky beach nights. Try for yourself with the delightfully seductive Loop Me In

Download Beneath Wind And Waves – Loop Me In mp3 (from Non-etre)

Beats Antique LIVE REVIEW 12/27/12 Crystal Ballroom Portland OR

2012-02-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

credit sequoia emmanuelle

The mood was chaotic at the Crystal Ballroom last Saturday (12/27/12) night. Beats Antique played to a sold-out crowd of all-age kids. The opener, Filistine, a two piece composed of cello ran through myriad effects and electronic beats set of the night with Arabian influenced sounds backed by projections of 16mm film footage. A packed Crystal Ballroom began to bounce once Beats Antique hit the stage, opening with hits such as "Dope Krunk" and "Caterpillar", from their Collide album. Of course they had the usual crew of belly dancers only this time one of them appeared to be 8 months pregnant.

credit sequoia emmanuelle

The band stuck to their favored material, playing very little new songs from the repertoire. I was hoping to hear more from “Elektrafone” since it seems to have taken a different musical direction than their previous releases. I personally snuck out before the final encore in hopes of hitting the fresh air before the stampede of underage glitter bunnies. Even though the stage performance was predictable the music was delivered in a way that never disappoints. Looking forward to Beats Antique's return to Portland just hoping they choose another venue or rather have a show just for the 21+

Blake McIntosh

http://www.beatsantique.com/
http://www.beatsantique.com/ba_product/elektrafone-cd/
www.facebook.com/beatsantiquefans
www.myspace.com/beatsantique
www.twitter.com/beatsantique

The Washover Fans winning me over with YARN, DORITOS, RAVELRY and one of my favorite albums this year "That Habit Suits You"

2012-02-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

interview with the washover fans by xo kaytea

Anyone that finds a stars and stripes truck has my attention. If only this was their touring truck! I might change my job to roadie! This up and coming Seattle folk americana, roots, alt. country 4 piece is killing it in my ears! When I get music I tend to push through the stacks, when this one came to me...let’s just say I burned a disc for my car and um I already know the lyrics to every song!

The next best thing after having a wonderful album is to have a group that cracks my shit up. Read this interview and I bet you will fall in love with them as much as I did. "That Habit Suits You" is one of the most cohesively put together americana releases I have had on my desk in years!

* I leave you with my favorite line on the whole album (HONEYS) "images of women when I’m finished eating.... I’ll consume them to" anyone that can sing about mountain dew and lucky charms and end with a line like that GOOOOOODDDDD DAMMMMMMNNNNNN check out this interview! See where they hang out in Seattle and STALK them like I am going to!

It says you all come from different backgrounds? Do share your individual influences?
Seth- I grew up listening to and playing roots/americana/folk music with my father and then went on to study jazz in high school and college and played mainly guitar and mandolin during this time. I spent a lot of time going to Phish shows and catching jazz/funk/hip hop shows in NYC. When I first moved to Seattle I played in a funk/soul band and was still focusing primarily on playing electric. I then got back into playing more acoustic music when I met Gillian a few years ago and then picked up the clawhammer banjo a little bit after that. I owe my exposure to and love for roots music to my dad. My biggest musical influences are The Band, Dickey Betts, Jerry Garcia, Soulive, Grant Green, Keith Jarrett, Stevie Wonder and my father. I listen to almost everything. While I have been typing this I went from the Pointer Sisters to John Hartford to Too Short to David Bazan. That’s ridiculous and would make an awful mixtape, but I have loved every second of it.

Gillian- My parents played really great music around me growing up. A lot of Neil Young, Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. I also got really into the Beatles in middle school. In high school I was really into the contemporary folk scene - Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplanski, etc. I drew on a lot of those influences when I started playing guitar and writing. I was really lucky to have parents that appreciated good music (and played good music themselves), and over all would say their musical influence was the greatest. I share some of those influences with the guys, but it’s beneficial that we all draw on pretty individualized tastes.

David- I grew up around a lot of bad music honestly - my parents listen to nothing but that dentists-office station that plays Wilson Phillips, etc., and I participated in choirs and orchestras that generally didn’t pick very interesting things to play. My one big carryover from those days is old church music, hymns etc., and it’s still a huge influence in the way I write for The Washover Fans. These days my favorite bands are rock and folk minimalists I guess you could say - Low, The New Year/Bedhead, Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Dave Bazan/Headphones/Pedro the Lion, Cat Power

Colin-My folks played a lot of their favorite classic records around the house when I was growing up including Bob Dylan, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, CSNY, James Taylor, The Band, Phoebe Snow, Cat Stevens, Eric Clapton, and the Beatles. I grew up playing classical cello too, so I listened to and played all kinds of solo cello, symphonic and broadway (theater pit orchestra) styles. I’ve always been a little slow to jump on the most current music, but the mid-to-late 90s hit me hard. I listened to a lot of Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G., Radiohead and Metallica, as well as Hendrix, the Who and more Clapton. By the time was in my early 20s I got really hooked on Wilco, Ryan Adams and Kathleen Edwards, all of whom are huge songwriting influences on me.

Can you remember first album that you ever got (purchased or received as a gift)? Do you still listen to the band or music like it?
Seth- Received as a gift= Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or the single “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel, not sure. First I purchased with my own money was Poison’s “Open Up and Say Aah.” I remember the transaction like it was yesterday. I still listen to Michael Jackson.

Gillian- I had a bunch of tapes, but I think my first CD was actually the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. I took a sharpie to track 11 on the CD itself so I wouldn’t get in trouble with my dad.

David- Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl, which I of course still listen to, start to finish, as a morning meditation, and then again right before bed.

Colin- MC Hammer “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em” - best 9th birthday present ever.

My favorite tracks are “A Ways” and “Light Sweet Crude” (best opening line EVER!) would you please tell me about these songs and their meaning?

David- A Ways was written in the depths of a guilty hangover. I sort of have a complex about being an irresponsible person - I have to work so hard to remember that stuff I scheduled, mail whoever that check, etc., and most of the time it feels like it’ll never get any easier and the people I care about will have to pick up the slack for me forever.

Colin- In the past few years I’ve been working on songwriting as fiction. I definitely can say that some of the emotions written into Light Sweet Crude are real, but the situation I’m trying to show is completely fabricated. The song tells the story someone talking with a friend and very directly calling them out about some sort of hypocrisy. Its the kind of thing I wish I had the stones to do.

Seattle is not specifically known for its Americana roots? What influences in Seattle do you draw from?
Seth- Seattle is actually growing a quality roots scene and it is exciting to be a part of it, but I don’t feel like I personally draw from the Seattle scene. I feel like you really need to spend time listening to, absorbing, and playing the the roots music from where it originated. It’s like immersing yourself in a language (wow, that sounds like a cliche). That being said, Cahalen Morrison and Eli West are a local group that I absolutely love and secretly envy their musicianship.

Gillian- Seattle is a hip place in general and you can always count on good music being played wherever you go - whether at live shows or an eclectic mix played at the local businesses.

Colin- Oh yeah, roots is the new grunge, baby. But local (Seattle/Portland) musicians like Dave Bazan/Pedro the Lion, Damien Jurado, and Laura Viers have definitely shaped my style over the past 10 years. Also, I have to mention the work of The Fleet Foxes, The Maldives, Grand Hallway, The Globes, Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground, Rosie Thomas, J. Tillman, and the Head and the Heart, all of whom have shaped my(our) sounds, as well as that of many other musicians in town.

Where can I find you in Seattle on a typical day? Favorite spots (eats, drinks, music, shopping)
Seth- Chocolati coffee shop in Wallingford, Dusty Strings acoustic shop in Fremont, Easy Street or Neptune Records, and when things get weird late night, Golden City.

Gillian- I like to get work done at Fremont Coffee shop or Chocolati (but only when I know Seth won’t be there). My favorite hole in the wall bar is Al’s on 45th in Wallingford. I like checking out the sale bins at the Weaving Works and Bad Woman Yarn, or taking a craft class. On special occasions, we end up funking it up at Seamonster. Apparently I don’t get out of my own neighborhood much....

David- I live in Greenwood and it is the best neighborhood on earth for just kind of wandering around with headphones. For bars I love Pony and Naked City.

Colin-I live in Greenwood too, and I love Naked City and the Gainsbourg. But when I’m looking to catch a local show I’ll head to the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill, or the Sunset or the Tractor in Ballard. If I’m hanging out with Seth and getting weird, probably Ed’s Kort Haus.

How did you come up w/ band name & album title?
Gillian- The band name just came to me one day. I was a geology minor in college and drew from that vocabulary. Really, I just mentioned it to the guys one day and eventually it stuck.

Colin-The album title comes from a line in Light Sweet Crude - “but that habit suits you well...”

What kind of touring are you doing now and in the future?
Seth- We are in the process of booking a west coast tour this summer. Seattle to San Diego and back.

Gillian- I’m secretly working on a North Carolina tour, but don’t tell the guys.

Dream tour co-headliner? Dream tour vehicle? Dream tour rider?

Seth- Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. The A-team van. The rider would include real New York pizza (Enough for everyone to have as much as they want. Not just a slice or two. That’s not fair).

Gillian- Bon Iver (really I just have a crush on Justin Vernon); any tour vehicle is fine, as long as I never have to drive it; and the rider would certainly include an espresso machine.

David- Dave Bazan, bus with rooftop hot tub (duh), and the rider would have Elijah Craig on it somewhere.

Colin- Kathleen Edwards and Bon Iver. I've been a fan of both for a long time, and their new collaborations are incredible. I would love tour with them. And I would FILL the rooftop hot tub with Elijah Craig. Actually that’s kinda gross.

Biggest indulgence in your daily life?
Seth- vinyl, electric and acoustic instruments, and going to expensive Seattle restaurants I can’t afford with my girlfriend and sister.

Gillian- yarn and coffee

David- I know it’s trendy right now but I’m really into the craft cocktail thing. It’s taken a year but I’ve finally got a big enough liquor shelf that I can hang. I don’t do all the DIY liquors and stuff but I love mixing.

Greatest invention of the modern world?
Seth- Doritos.

Gillian- Ravelry.

David- This is not cool to say I don’t think but I can’t tell you how much better my life is with Pro Tools in it.

Colin-its so hard to choose, we basically live in the future. And I love the future.

What was the last thing that made you smile?

Seth- Portlandia. David singing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and killing it at a Chinese restaurant karaoke session LATE on last Tuesday night.

Gillian- I’ve been snowed in with my boyfriend for three days. He’s still making me smile, but I think we need to leave the house tomorrow.

David- Portlandia! Except sometimes it’s too much like me. Back off the craft cocktail thing, you two. There’s nothing weird about chard ice.

Colin- This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy5SVL8PFmo who the hell are those girls? “cause I pay my own bills, have a lot left over for savory thrills” Love it.

What would you like people to know about you & your bandmates?
Seth- David leaves everything everywhere and has the best ear of anyone I know. Colin is cool as a cucumber and the voice of reason. Gillian is too sensitive and also probably the most funny-by-accident person I know. One time when I asked her why she finished her bloody mary so quickly she said, “because it reminds me of steak and I am really hungry.”

Gillian- Seth is really supportive (except when he’s being really mean...) and he’s always there for me, David has the most awesome Georgia accent that reminds me of home, plus he is the best harmonizer in the world, and Colin never gets mad when I call or text him all hours of the night to come out and do karaoke with us even when I know he has to work in the morning...at least I think he doesn’t. Also, I’m not really that sensitive, Seth is.

David- Seth is the only reason we get any shows, complete any recording, have any money or leave the house wearing clothes in the morning. Seriously if you like what we do thank him. Gillian begins a new knitting project on average every 30 minutes, and if you put an instrument in Colin’s hands for more than a second or two, he will play a song. There is no telling what that song will be, but it’ll be from the 90s, and you will for example be like, “Hey is that... the theme from Jurassic Park?!?”

Colin- Its Davids fault that I always whip out 90s jams on any instrument in the room. I don’t know why, but it is. Also, whatever cocktails he’s mixing they surely have soda water in them - he’s hooked on that stuff. Seth is our main manager and he’s always keeping us on task, also if there are vinyl records at your house, don’t plan on having a conversation when Seth comes over. Gillian has been on our case for years to have a band writing/whiskey retreat in the woods of Washington and we’re finally gonna do it! It will be a great chance to get together new material for our next record.

upcoming shows

- Friday, February 3rd at the Tractor in Seattle

www.thewashoverfans.com
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Washover-Fans/103675449682886
https://twitter.com/#!/thewashoverfans
http://www.reverbnation.com/thewashoverfans
http://www.flickr.com/photos/70096347@N06/
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWashoverFans

Buy the album here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/that-habit-suits-you/id434445832
http://thewashoverfans.bandcamp.com/
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/washoverfans

electro/dance trinity of synthesized splendor - PORTLAND OR BAND to watch!

2012-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

Music | Strength — Mind-Reader

Dylan
http://thatsglitchy.com/2012/01/27/strength-mind-reader/

Take a seat kidos. Let’s play a game of truth or dare; I’ll go first. I dare you to listen to this new band called Strength without falling victim to a sudden, uncontrollable urge to dance your face off. Can’t do it? I suspected as much…

Out of Portland, Oregon, this electro/dance trinity of synthesized splendor has followed-up their first record with another consummate dance album that will surely have the most devout wallflower fist pumping and foot stomping. Comprised of Bailey Winters on vocals, John Zeigler on keyboards/programming, and Patrick Morris on guitar/drum machine and bass, Strength delivers a sound truly unique to this high-energy, attention-deficit generation of ours.
07 Overheat
“There’s not much time,” declares Winters on the title track Blood, and he’s right. Before long, his resounding vocals, blasting like an explosion of licentious fervor, convincingly dispels our moral convictions for unknown desires, while just behind his provocative verses comes the heavy synthesized melodies of Zeigler on keys. By this time it is too late, for now your body has already betrayed your shyness and begun synchronizing itself to the intoxicating rhythms of Morris’ energized beats.
When asked: what does Strength sound like?, no doubt, one would have to conclude that they’re somewhere between Ghostland Observatory, Daft Punk, and The Rolling Stones.

Indie folksters Winebirds herald from Portland, Oregon

2012-02-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

The Winebirds - Seance Hill

Indie folksters Winebirds herald from Portland, Oregon and are made up of two girls and three guys and make the most of this line-up vocally with male and female vocals. The female vocals dominate and at times bring to mind the strenth of the harmonies are reminiscent ofThe Corrs.

It's not all female vocals though there's a Mick Jagger style rasping at the forefront on "The Solution" and "Out in The Van which the accompanying female voice softens. Upbeat chirpy female voice lend "Hit Machine" a happy indie pop feel. "Tideman" sways in and out with searching melacholic undertones. That one song is titled "Cassandra" offers a clue as "Vanity" travels back from modern folk to the sixties courtesy of Mamas and The Papas. To say that Jagger style vocals take the role of Nancy Sinatra's boots and walk all over the song is understating it.

While the switch between female and vocals often doesn't work for me and the band's direction is uncertain. Possibly this is simply because "Seance Hill" doesn't really fit with my usual listening diet so I can't identify find a bad song on it. It'll be interesting to see which direction this band go in the future.

3/5

The Winebirds on myspace.

http://smalltakeover.blogspot.com/2010/11/winebirds-seance-hill.html

Raw underground fuzzy guitar rock/pop with balls... girl band SASSY!

2012-01-31T13:57:00.000-08:00

Sassy - Diggin' Deep (Independently released CD-R, Pop/rock)

Raw underground fuzzy guitar rock/pop with balls. Sassy is the duo comprised
of Lynda Mandolyn and Christa Dibiase. These ladies write and record loud
ballsy pop that recalls many classic underground artists from the United
States in the 1990s. The promo sticker appropriate compares the duo's music
to The Muffs, The Gossip, and The Kills. None of that phony processed cheese
slop/pop here...these girls make loud rock music that's genuine and real.
Super loud guitars combine with driving rhythms and nifty dual vocals to
create a musical universe that's impossible to ignore. Thirteen kickass cuts
including "Honey Bee," "Wild Summer" (an exceptional track), "She's A Liar,"
and "Blink Once." Totally cool loud stuff with GUTS.

http://www.babysue.com/2011-April-LMNOP-Reviews.html#anchor295822

overall happy and rollicking

2012-01-30T04:54:00.000-08:00

w.h. Walker, Suds (Boogie Creek Records)
Every once in awhile, I get a disc that is just a fun listen, through and through. That’s what this Portland, Oregon, based band is delivering with Suds—pure fun. Formed by guitarist/vocalist Devin Clark (of The Soda Pop Kids, a band I adored), the music is reminiscent of Atlanta’s Gentleman Jesse & His Men but with a soul tinge, while the vocals veer from Paul Westerberg to Jack White, two of my favorites.

The title track “Suds” is a song about getting clean, and is power pop at it's finest. Love the handclaps, shouting and full chorus, with a refrain like: “I cut rug like a rubber duckie / I get squeaky clean, yeah!” More straight-ahead rock, “As the Night Goes” is a track from an upcoming single with the Clorox Girls. It has good “whoa-oohs,” distorted vocals, and plenty of interesting beats. Really like the vocal treatment here—the seemingly easy and melodic screams.
“Saying Every Secret” is a bit jazzy, with erratic beats. This is the track where the vocals remind me so much of The Replacements. A super amped up vintage crooner, “Watch Your Step” is sure to put an instant spring in your own. “The Untold Death of Grady Jones” has a bit of a Latin flavor, with castanets, and what sounds like a Hammond B-3. It really gives a 70’s Styx or Led Zeppelin feel, but for just under a minute.

Another power pop-esque number, “Don't Let Me Go” is sassy and has good handclaps, cute lyrics and disjointed (but in a good way) beats. It reminds me of The Knack. Last tune “Second Hand Store” recalls a lighter version of Iggy’s “Lust for Life” or even Jet’s rip off song, and is an overall happy and rollicking number. You can check out the tunes here.

—RZO
http://hardcorenorfolk.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=200%3Awh-walker&Itemid=82

Gunslinger = Infected Mushroom + Juno Reactor + Tiesto

2012-01-29T13:52:00.000-08:00

Gunslinger
Early Volumes 1
Last Gang Labels
Gunslinger = Infected Mushroom + Juno Reactor + Tiesto
Psychedelic Trance (or Psytrance), the modifier-heavy version of house that is nearly impossible to distinguish from the thousands of similar modifier-heavy versions of house, is the genre where LA beatmaker Gunslinger most often gets pigeonholed. His high BPM, repetitive rhythms and association with Infected Mushroom make a case for this; however, Gunslinger’s background playing in rock bands is clearly his most distinguishing feature. Instead of letting his psytrance beats play on ad nauseam, he channels them nicely into actual songs with verse-chorus arrangements. Early Volumes 1 features the stadium-packing hooks of an electronic Muse for the Ibeza crowd and enough hypertrance breaks for the hardcore techno fan. –Ryan Hall

http://www.slugmag.com/article.php?id=2542&page=3

Wish people would change their influences these days to reflect the sounds of Jodi Miller

2012-01-28T10:36:00.000-08:00

Complete Epic Hits - Jodi Miller

All my 35 and under readers take note this was what was going on before you were born! This is REAL pioneering country-pop crossover. Not what you are all use to in Taylor Swift. I would like to thank Real Gone Music, a reissue label for bringing back the hits we all missed. A forgotten singer songwriter that I am now a huge fan of. There is something about listening to "love songs" that I hate and often turn off BUT Jodi's love songs I play over and over again! Check out "If You Think I Love You Now". The songs you do know... check out "Be My Baby" yes from Dirty Dancing but Jodi sings it better than the The Ronettes and who doesn’t love "The House of the Rising Sun".

This album has 25 songs that have never appeared on CD before. Other stand out tracks "Darling, You Can Always Come Back Home", the harmonies are beautifully done. Well worth the $13.98. I want this on vinyl to play at dinner parties! Right after I play Olivia Newton-John, Anne Murray and Linda Ronstadt. I sincerely wish people would change their influences these days to reflect the sounds of Jodi Miller.

Record Label: Real Gone Music www.realgonemusic.com

Hometown: Phoenix, AZ

Genres: Country, Folk, Rock, Pop

BLACK PUSSY live show review @ doug fir

2012-01-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

January 21, 2012
http://www.yearoftheshow.com/concertreviews/the-pack-a-d-the-doug-fir-lounge-portland-or/

pics by ChrisT

Our aural fixation with the The Pack a.d. took a brief hiatus last year. If they hit PDX in support of 2010′s we kill computers, we missed it. This year’s recorded release, Unpersons, is straight up heat. The kind of hook laden garage-blues-punk-blahblah hybrid that one listen through made me jones for the live show. Glad we made it.

The Doug Fir. Always a quality hang. Set times are posted. Always nice. 10:30 for The Pack a.d. And the opening act is a band called Black Pussy. With that kid of name it has to be hot or flat out gong show. Anything in between would be a waste.
Frankly, the name Black Pussy combined with the appropriate amount of liquor and immaturity is a conversational goldmine.

“You ready to go down for Black Pussy?”
“I’m just here for Black Pussy”
And on it goes. You can imagine.
So. Black Pussy. Let’s get into it.

This band was hella fun. 6 band members that at first glance look like the smartest kid in my high school physics class, or the kids who dealt that kid weed. Songs like “Marijuana” don’t dissuade my initial impressions. All in all, I was pretty taken by Black Pussy (see, it never gets old for me). They were loud enough to pin my eyes in their sockets and left me telling ChrisT he can stay up front all he wants, I was going to hide in the back. Wicked fun. I’d go see them again. Hell, I’ve paid alot more for alot worse.
The Pack a.d. Here’s the deal. 3/4th’s of their recorded output get me crazy. I’m not sitting through this show with a notepad or hitting a set list into my phone like some kind of wanker. These are they type of shows I use to go back 20 years in age and shave a couple more years off of proper liver function.

As usual, Maya (drums) is engaging, funny, and just plain rock n roll. Becky Black (guitar/vocals) is always on it. I’d like to see her unwound on stage and getting violent. One can dream. In the end, my memories are mainly of my vision shaking and grainy as I enjoyed the show with the rest of the cool kids (cause if you were there, you are). I pretty much know what Boris Yeltsin felt like at vodka tasting, state dinners, and well after breakfast. But, here are some highlights from the new album
“Positronic”
“Haunt You”
“Sirens”
“Lights”
“Rid Of Me”
Totally hope The Pack a.d. catches a little heat. They make my life better.
The woman screaming for “Blackout” during the encore should run for mayor. As usual, that song live is fire. Soundtrack for bad decision making and failed drug tests.

Great. Two bands and a venue that brought it. Thanks.

Bradley Wik: "impressive for a new artist"

2012-01-26T14:42:00.000-08:00

http://reportermag.com/article/01-20-2012/album-review-burn-what-you-can-bury-the-rest-by-bradley-wik-and-the-charlatans

Not Unknown Anymore:: INTERVIEW with THE GREAT UNKNOWNS

2012-01-25T07:01:00.000-08:00

Was greatly surprised to find this DC band in my inbox last week. This never happens… my first impressions sent me searching and googling this band known as The Great Unknowns. Why is it that brilliant albums comes from such heartache and sorrow? Read below this wonderful interview with the lovely Becky Warren. And yes a band can pick up where they left off The Great Unknowns proved this!

xo kaytea

Would love to start by getting all your personal influences?

Genres: Americana - "alt-country, AAA, rock"

Most Telling Tracks - Lexington, Homefront, I Wish I Was The Girl I Was

For Fans Of - Lucinda Williams, Kathleen Edwards, Amy Ray

If I made a list of all the great artists that have influenced me it would go on for pages, but the artists I listened to most often for inspiration when I was writing this album include Lucinda Williams, Bruce Springsteen, Kathleen Edwards, and Steve Earle.

Thinking back to early childhood, what was your first experience with music for the first time like? What song do you remember most as a child?

I remember singing from the time I was very small, and the earliest songs I remember writing were inspired by the dog I got when I was nine years old. The first songs I remember are the ones my mom sang to me when I was really small, especially “Love Potion Number Nine”.

What made you first realize you wanted to pursue a career in music?

In high school, I began to realize that listening to and playing and writing music felt so much better to me than anything else, so I looked for a college in a good music town. That’s how I ended up in Boston. I was really lucky to meet a lot of incredibly talented musicians in Boston, including the other Great Unknowns, and the fun of playing with them made me want to continue to pursue music after college.

I notice you took a long break? Tell me about what you all did in this “break” time. And who pushed the first let’s do this again…..

I moved from Boston to south Georgia and then again to Washington, DC. I got married and then my marriage fell apart. Altay (bass) moved out to San Francisco and got involved in the startup world. Andy (drums) finished a PhD, got married, and moved to London for a great job. When my marriage ended, I started writing again, and I started talking to Altay and Andy about whether they’d want to try to get together and record another album if I wrote an album-worth of new songs.

Many would say you all had success as a band and yet you were able to walk away. Would love to hear from you on what defines SUCCESS.

Yes, I definitely have some regrets about walking away! Music really occupies an important place in my life; there are a lot of songs that have been really good friends to me at difficult times in my life. Success to me would be writing some songs of my own that can do that for me and for other people.

Why Washington DC how did you all end up there?

Actually, we didn’t all end up here; we’re still a little spread out. I moved up to DC because I liked the city and it had a lot of good jobs for my then-husband. As I was writing songs for the record, it became clear that Mike, who played guitar on our first record, wouldn’t have time to play with us on a second record (he was working on Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary). So our friend Avril was the obvious choice to join the band on guitar, both because she’s a phenomenal musician and someone we already loved spending time with, but also because she lived in DC too, which had the benefit of putting half the band in the same town, finally. Andy is still in London and Altay is still in San Francisco. We’ll have to find a new drummer soon (unfortunately!) and we’re looking for someone local to DC.

How did you settle on the album name “Homefront”?

I mentioned earlier that my marriage fell apart during the band’s “break”—this was because my husband returned from Iraq with PTSD and it put an enormous strain on our relationship. A lot of the album is about that experience. And the thing is, what happened to us is unfortunately not at all unusual. It’s happening to thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan vets and their families. So I knew I wanted to write a song that wasn’t about my personal experience, but about the experience of a solider I don’t know returning from Iraq and struggling with reintegrating into a country that often doesn’t feel like it’s at war. In that song, the veteran realizes that there’s no real homefront for him, and asks his wife to be the homefront that he needs. I don’t think it’s fair that we’re often leaving it to families to play that role for our country. That’s where the title comes from.

Did you get to record with all the equipment you wanted? Any wish lists on gear?

We had a fantastic recording experience. We recorded at Bias Studios in Springfield, Virginia (http://www.biasstudios.com/). I guess if we had the money to afford it we might have recorded on tape instead of digitally but I really don’t have many regrets about the recording process. Except that I wish we had more accordion. I always wish we had more accordion and I always get outvoted by the other guys in the band.

Any tour plans? If so what can people expect to see at your live performance?

We’d really love to tour and I hope we’re able to. We’re a totally DIY band right now and the process of getting the record out the door and to radio stations and bloggers and other people has been really time-consuming and expensive. So we can’t afford to tour right now in a way that loses money and unfortunately, it’s hard to string together a tour that makes money if you’re a band the size we are! Hopefully we can hook up with a larger band or get enough interest off of radio play to book some dates in venues that will cover our touring expenses.

Who would be your dream tour co-headliner? Dream tour vehicle? Dream tour rider?

Hm. I guess because of the subject matter of the album, a dream gig would be a USO tour of Afghanistan so the dream tour vehicle would be a C-130. But I’m not sure how easy it would be to talk the rest of the guys into this.

What is the wildest story with the group?

Maybe this is going to ruin our street rep but we’re not that wild. For sure the most surreal and amazing thing that’s ever happened to us was getting to tour with the Indigo Girls. Their fans are phenomenal and so supportive and we got to play in some ridiculously great venues.

upcoming shows:

Fri Jan 27th

Rockville, MD

The Mansion at Strathmore

Fri Mar 9th

Alexandria, VA

Telegraph Station

United States

http://www.facebook.com/greatunknowns

http://www.youtube.com/user/unknownbecky

https://twitter.com/greatunknowns

http://www.greatunknowns.com/

http://www.daemonrecords.com/

Buy music:

http://greatunknowns.com/store/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006V5CHAY/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/homefront/id485353009

Bradley Wik (like Ryan Adams and once upon a time Paul Westerberg)

2012-01-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.campuscircle.com/review.cfm?r=14555

Bradley Wik (like Ryan Adams and once upon a time Paul Westerberg) finds comfort and familiarity with the working-class Americana and rock typified by Bob Seger, Springsteen, Tom Petty and John (Cougar) Mellencamp.
Wik was born and raised where Chevy’s still rule and anthemic rock fills jukeboxes and ear buds. It is obvious Wik shares the introspective and world-weary sentiments of the aforementioned influences on Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest… , the self-released debut from Wik and his backing band, the Charlatans. His gravelly, raw and countrified voice works well on slowly-searing character sketches like “This Old House” and the slice-of-life, Mellencamp-esque “Midwest Winters,” as well as mid-tempo heartland rockers such as “Friday Night Is for the Drinkers.”
Wik saves the best for last on epic closer “Just like Jon Fickes,” about a woman searching for someone else’s song to sing: the track is a showcase for Wik’s storytelling and narrative talents (which evoke Dylan circa 1979) as well as the Charlatans’ Soul Asylum-like prowess.

Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest... is now available.

Grade: B

Influences are front and center for stoner rockers Black Pussy

2012-01-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

Black Pussy: On Blonde

(Made in China)

By Doug Simpson

Influences are front and center for stoner rockers Black Pussy. The band’s half-hour, debut long-player, On Blonde, is dedicated to Brant Bjork (Kyuss and Fu Manchu), and it’s clear Dustin Hill (who also plays in likeminded White Orange) and his cohorts worship the ‘90s hard-rock template Bjork helped to create.
Post-Sabbath riffs with psychedelic overtones abound from openly anthemic “Marijuana,” (with appropriate bong hit sound affects), to the four-on-the-floor beats and fuzzy guitar, which populate “When All the Indians Are Gone Who Will Bury the Chiefs?.”
The prerequisite wah-wah that wafts through the weaving “Swim,” and the pedal-to-the-metal drive of “Blow Some Steam Off” evokes Queens of the Stone Age’s first album. Not everything is golden as special brownies, though, as the overly-baked but undercooked “Indiana” goes on far too long: more hedonism and less meditative groove might have been an improvement (the Bevis Frond never sounded this lethargic, for instance).
On Blonde is currently available.

Grade: B

Meet the Cheesemakers Night in downtown Winters! (Turkovich Family Wines)

2012-01-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

Turkovich Family Wines, Berryessa Gap Winery and Rootstock Tasting Room will be having a Meet the Cheesemakers event on Friday 1/27 from 4pm to 7pm. Come into the tasting room to meet with Danny and Sacha, sample cheeses, and ask any cheese making questions you have!

Danny in the Cheese Cave

Then continue on down the street to Berryessa Gap where they will have Tim Pedrozo, from Pedrozo Dairy and Rootstock Tasting Room that will be featuring Spring Hill Jersey Cheese.

Hope to see you next Friday night!

Turkovich Family

http://turkovichwines.com/

Rags & Ribbons on KINK fm

2012-01-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

specialize heartland rock and roll

2012-01-20T05:59:00.000-08:00

BRADLEY WIK AND THE CHARLATANS | BURN WHAT YOU CAN, BURY THE REST

SELF-RELEASED

Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest is the debut of Bradley Wik and The Charlatans, the Portland, OR based quintet who specialize heartland rock and roll. Frontman Wik – a native son of the Midwest – is a songwriter who has extensively toured across the country for the past four years, laying down an acoustic set of alt-country strings wherever crowds welcome him. Wik’s knack for compelling storytelling and realistically rendered blue collar characters along the lines of Bruce Springsteen make for a great rock record. Standouts among the eight tracks include “This Old House” with Brianne Kathleen on backing vocals and the 8+ minute album closer about Wik’s close friend and bandmember, “Just Like Jon Fickes.” – Written by JFelton

Portland’s Rags & Ribbons will celebrate the release of their latest album with performances at Music Millennium Jan. 19 and Doug Fir Lounge Jan. 20.

2012-01-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

http://portlandtribune.com/features/story.php?story_id=132692795642347700

Live Music!
By Rob Cullivan
The Portland Tribune,

Jan. 19, 20
Mellow dramatic
Some rock bands like to play with a smirk, others a sneer and then some play with their hearts not only on their sleeves, but also ripped open and beating for everyone to see. Portland’s Rags & Ribbons (formerly Galaxy Farm) is decidedly in the third category, performing classically based art rock that would make anybody who’s ever been in a school choir or a tumultuous relationship with an unrepentant drunk quite happy. Pianist Jon Hicks, guitarist Ben Weyerhaeuser and drummer Chris Neff are masters of their respective instruments and still believe in the power of rock music to move an audience, even one not old enough to remember over-the-top bands like Queen or ELP but curious enough to surf the Web to find out who they were. Rags & Ribbons is releasing its newest CD “The Glass Masses” this month, and you have two chances to hear them this week.

Rags & Ribbons, 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 19, Music Millennium, 3158 E. Burnside St. Free. All ages. Info: 503-231-8926, http://www.musicmillennium.com/; Rags & Ribbons, Water & Bodies, Fox And the Law, 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 20, Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E. Burnside St. $8 advance, $10 day of show. Info: 503-231-WOOD, http://www.dougfirlounge.com/.

Viveca from THE MEMORIALS

2012-01-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

http://luvaffrwthxos.com/post/15555998214/viveca-hawkins-interview

I feel it appropriate to preface this glorious Q&A with the ever lovely Ms. Viveca Hawkins that I recently scored (score!) with this clip rather than the actual music video for The Memorials smash single “West Coast” because, well wow, the whole band is just so charismatic you can’t help but crave seeing them perform this tune live. Here’s to hoping 2012 brings big things for the band, as they enter the adventure of recording a second album, and that they also wash up on Australian shores some time REAL soon to promote it. Woot woot!
CH: The video for “West Coast” is pretty notorious! Seems like you guys really enjoy a good night rage or two. How’s the life of a rockstart treating you?
VH: Lol indeed! We like to party! We work hard though. That vid was cut from one rockin party/rehearsal and a few gigs we did! All were big fun and meticulously planned. I’m still workin on my rock star status. Life is good though. I’m constantly working on being a better me.
CH: Is there a climate for creativity in the music scene in Cali at the moment? What other scenes on your tour circuit really set you on fire?
VH: Home is where the heart is… I put it all into the music. I can write just about anywhere though. There is inspiration everywhere. I love Texas! We always have great shows there!!
CH: How are the kids responding to your live performances? Which songs have really been setting them off?
VH: The crowd really varies from place to place. Many people show up looking for the Mars volta and, or have no idea what they are about to witness. They often stand there in awe and then burst into applause at the end of the song. Others come and know all my lyrics and sing along! I’ve started a mosh or two even! Lol GTFOMF, Why Me, and Fluorescence get the party Crackin! ;)
CH: What’s your favorite song to perform live and why?
VH: I love singing GTFOMF because it has such brilliant range. The ups and downs take me on an emotional rollercoaster ride. Depending on my mood it can even bring a tear to my eye.
CH: You say you did a stint at Berklee School of Music with not much else but a few suitcases and handful of cash… What was that experience like and how did it shape you as a musician?
VH: Yea, when I went to Berklee I was totally winging it. I had never really studied music outside of voice classes and that didn’t require much theory or anything. It made 8 classes that much more difficult in my freshman year. I found out so much more about myself than anything else. My musical education brought me closer to Thomas and I think that’s the most valuable thing I took from it. Networking is key.
CH: When Thomas approached you to form The Memorials, what was his sales pitch? How well had you guys known each other before then and had you already built up some trust?
VH: When TP hit me up about the band I was working at a pretty awesome job living in the matrix. He offered me the pills… I swallowed… (pause) lol. He asked if I wanted to take a shot at Rock? He told me it would be a chance for me to get away from all the stereotypes of R&B artists and be myself. He told me I could be as weird as I wanted to be and that made me feel comfy! We absolutely had built up a fair amount of trust by then. We had known each other for over 10 years by then. We met in church and as I see it there has always been some sort of divine connection between us. Blessed to find…
CH: Thomas tends to play some pretty funky time signatures. As the bands singer, what has the writing process been like for you?
VH: Thomas is surely one of the most complex drummers on the planet. I have really had to take my time with these songs. He’s always complaining about how long it takes me to write our records, but it’s really hard!!! I feel like I first have to really internalize the rhythms. I have to feel the music because I can’t begin to count it. Then I like to listen for what the song is saying to me because the music speaks to me. I always try and go where it takes me. There is a lot of writing and rewriting… Sometimes I will take direction and sometimes I have to stick to my guns, but I always try and ask for input from the rest of the band. I want all of us to be able to be proud of these songs.

CH: What’s the inspiration behind your solo album, CHIPS? Are you a gamblin’ type of women yourself?
VH: I titled Chips after my song “Chips” because I love that song and I was really taking a gamble putting the record out the way I did… It was super guerilla style and I wasn’t sure how it would all work out. I have never been one to gamble much. Never had the $$$ to waste. As TP says “I like to keep my $$ in my pocket.”
CH: What bands did you grow up listening to? Who’s been your biggest influence?
VH: I began singing in church when I was a little girl. Gospel music was a huge part of my vocal development. I’ve been told that I am a child of New Jack Swing. I was jamming out to bands like “Tony, Toni, Tone” and “Mint Condition”! I also always loved bands like “Foo Fighters” “No Doubt” and “Greenday”. Then there was my soulful Donny Hathaway and Nina Simone. Or Funky Sly and his fam. Then who can leave out my divas like Whitney, Chaka, Tina, Aretha and Mariah! I could go on and on…
CH: Who are you listening to now?
VH: I had a gig the other day and I was listening to Cage the Elephant in the car on the way. I like them. I find myself often listening to Fela. I also have been listening to a crap load of The Memorials because we are in the process of mixing our second album!!!
CH: See any bands live recently who gave you the chills?
VH: A few months back I went to see Jordan Ferreira at Elixir on Mute show with some friends and Jon Reshard was playing bass with him! They were going nuts on stage and all I could think about was the fact that I was soon gonna be on stage with them!! It was sooooo exciting! Totally gave me the willies J
CH: And lastly, what’s next for you? With your fingers in all sorts of fun projects, including your own, how will your time be divided?
VH: Our second record is well in the works and we are hoping to get back on the road by 4/20/2012! I am getting into my conditioning mode because when we make these songs I don’t really know them. I have to learn them all over again after we finish and I have to be able to run around the stage while I’m singing them! I’ll be working out, shopping for new gear for the road, singing a lot, and preparing our merch for the road! Yea that’s right!! I’m making T shirts Kids!!! How many artists really make their own merch!!? Weeeeeeeeeeee!!
CH: How’s a trip to Australia sound, if we can manage it??
VH: I have been to Australia twice now. Both times I loved it!! I came on tour with Blackalicious in like 08/09!! I can’t wait to get back out there!!! As soon as you all can manage WE ARE THERE!!!! Can’t wait to see you!!! Thanks for hitting me up!!

NO Depression interview w/ bradley wik

2012-01-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans / Burn What You Can And Bury The Rest

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' Burn What You Can And Bury The Rest (1/17/12) proves that rock and roll is not dead but it is in fact alive and well. Bucking the recent trend of popular bands that don't rock Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, The Decemberists, etc. Wik saw the (his) future of rock and roll and yes, as Jon Landau predicted, it was Bruce Springsteen. Wik delivers eight straightforward, somewhere between Born to Run and Nebraska era, Bruce influenced and inspired tracks. Bradley paints moody rural scenes of snowplows, cars, girls, beers and dreams. No cowboy hats, pickups or whiskey, Burn What You Can, doesn't pretend to be anything it is not. Yeah, there is a touch of alt-country/Americana but a better description might be blue-collar rock. Wik is a talented songwriter mining the same thematic workingman's highway as Springsteen and Tom Petty (and before that the Stones and Chuck Berry) . If this disc was available on eight-track these eight tracks of guitar, bass, organ and drums would sound just right blasting out of the speakers of your " '66 Chevelle" on your drive home from the factory on a Friday night. Follow the links and you can stream "The Old House" with Brianne Kathleen and you can download "Midwest Winters" (courtesy of XO publicity). Although it is only January, I'll predict Burn What You Can and Bury The Rest will be my pick for debut disc of the year and it should be a contender for a Top Ten Discs of 2012 when December rolls around. The album is currently available at CDBaby.
____________________________________________________________________________
HB-Congratulations on a great disc Bradley! It almost made my Top Ten of 2011 until I realized it won't be officially released until January 17, 2012. It look at it as you've got a running start towards my NoDepression best of 2012 list!
BW-Thank you...

HB-You can't write "You can hear the plows at 2:30 in the morning" without having experiencing it. What was your experience with snowplows and "Midwest Winters"?
BW-Yeah, I wrote this song while I was living in New York but the song comes from when I was eighteen, still in High School and working at the factory. The place almost exclusively manufactured chrome accessories for Harley Davidson, so needless to say, I thought it was such a cool place to work. Except very soon I realized what hard work really was. It was a great learning experience for me. And even though I was only supposed to work a certain number of hours since I was still in school, they didn't care at all. They just paid me cash for any time I worked over the legal limit, so I worked there a lot.
That whole first verse is just me talking about working those days (some of which I skipped school to do) in the winter when we started at six in the morning and ended at five at night. Those plow companies must have made a fortune cause they were always working, and all night if need be. But it only took an hour or two and everything was immaculately white once again, so needless to say they had their work cut out for them. But I wasted so many days driving in the snow only to catch a glimpse of the sun before getting to work and, like the song says, it was gone by the time we were done. I remember those days as a big turning point in my life. I exclusively worked and hung out and lived in a world so much older than my days. I lost touch with my High School peers as they seemed so immature and naive as far as I saw it. Some of those mornings, heading out, I felt torn. I knew, on one hand, that I was still in school and mostly still a child so I shouldn't be sweating such a tough job. But I also knew I was on the cusp of adulthood and very quickly moving towards it. I wanted to be carefree and irresponsible but there were other people(co-workers) who depended on me to show up and do my thing. It was a ball-busting work but I wouldn't trade it for anything. We had a lot of good times too though, as those guys liked to party hard and brought me along to a lot of things I, in retrospect, probably shouldn't have been doing. Well, so it goes...

HB-I've never heard of your guest vocalist Brianne Kathleen? She adds a nice touch to the two tracks she sings on.
BW-That actually came about quite randomly, as it were. She had recently moved back to the west coast, as I had, and was singing in my guitar players’ band, Jettison Bend. He had invited her out to one of my shows and she obliged. Needless to say, she liked the show, since they are always a fun, rockin' affair.
Well, fast forward to a few months later, I was in the middle of recording my album and I had always wanted to have a girl sing on "I am not Afraid" sort of a duet type deal. She happened to be free that day and she came in and sang. I have to say I was so blown away by her performance, as she had never heard the song before, that I had her sing on "This Old House" as well. If I can say so, and I can since it’s my interview, she is just as beautiful as her voice, and I'm still in awe of both her performance and her. Brianne also just recently released her debut album entitled "Blue Heron Grey" and I had the pleasure of being a part of it, both in singing and mixing the record.

HB-Could you name a few albums/artists that have inspired you? Obviously Springsteen but maybe a few surprises?
BW-Well, AC/DC(Bon Scott era) is a huge influence on me, though you may not always be able to hear it. "Love at First Feel" "Big Balls" the whole High Voltage album I mean, come on. "Rock 'N' Roll Singer" is my anthem, my whole inspiration for rocking practically. Led Zep, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, CCR, Christ I could talk music all day. I am huge Hold Steady fan. I've seen them so many times, especially since I used to live in Brooklyn. Mountain Goats, Neutral Milk Hotel. Possibly surprising is Linda Ronstadt. Her album Heart Like a Wheel is so well produced, the sounds on it are amazing. And the song selection, I love it, Little Feat, hell yeah. She was the first Lady of Rock N' Roll, touring stadiums and whatnot but that album is by far her best..
One of the biggest influences on me, most of my favorite music, is old R&B. I'm talking Motown, Smokey Robinson, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye and Martha Reeves topping that list, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, I could go on. I love all of it. But by far the first and biggest influence on my was Michael Jackson. He was the first musician/performer I really loved. I used to go up and down the aisles at the Piggly Wiggly singing "Bad" and embarrassing my mom when I was six and seven years old and have never lost interest in that amazing record or Michael. If it weren't for him I don't know where I would be, probably still working in that factory...

HB- Weirdest gig?
BW-This would definitely have to be a show I played whilst I was living up in Seattle. I worked with this guy who was well connected in the music scene of Seattle. He was kind of a hipster right when hipsters were gaining strength as a people. He was the kind of guy who on his company insurance questionnaire said he drank at least 12 alcoholic drinks a week. So he wasn't very smart but he liked to party so thats what appealed to me. Anyways, he invited me out to this music venue which was new and cool but I couldn't go for whatever reason. But I figured I'd book a show there because back then I was a folk singer and played anywhere they'd let me bring my harmonicas and play a few tunes. So I got a show there, without ever seeing it, and was quite excited about it to boot.
So the day of the show I set out to the venue and I can't find it. It has an address which doesn't seem to exist. Finally I knock on the door of what looks to be an abandoned building which is within the street address of where I'm supposed to be. After a few minutes of knocking, someone comes to the door and says "Who are you?" I say "I'm Bradley Wik I'm supposed to play tonight but I'm not sure where" I explain what's going on and he says I'm at the right place. I walked in and it looked like, no was, an abandoned warehouse. There was shelving full of shit and debris everywhere. I again told him I was scheduled to perform that night and he directed me to the "backstage area" which was outside behind the warehouse. All there was out there was a couch, which looked like it had been found on the curb, and a fridge, outside mind you. The fridge was full of beer so I didn't complain. Even weirder was the fact that the guy I was playing with was from Wisconsin as well. Somehow we had both found the shittiest venue with a fully stocked beer fridge. It almost seemed fitting. The stage was a piece of concrete that had fallen off the wall and there were speakers somehow, and very precariously, hanging from the ceiling. We got hammered and played the show. There was a surprising amount of people who were there just hanging out and drinking. It ended up not being too bad. I sold some cd's and got drunk... Can't ask for much more.

HB-Wik's recs: You really need to check out ________ if you haven't heard them.
BW-I love talking about music but I'll keep it fairly short. One, the Joy Formidable. Their debut record is awesome, full of hard rocking and noise and wonderful pop melodies. The aforementioned AC/DC record High Voltage which is unbelievable in its awesomeness. Ryan Adams new record Ashes and Fire is so amazing, the production of that record rivals anything he's ever done. Also, his voice just continues to get better and better. I just saw him live and its even better than the album. Brianne Kathleen's debut record Blue Heron Grey is phenomenal, and not just cause I got a chance to work on it. It was always amazing and I am lucky she let me help her with it. If somehow you haven't heard Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, get a clue and make it happen. His version of "Way Over There" is one of my favorite songs ever.

HB-Thank you and best of luck in 2012 with Burn What You Can, Bury The Rest!
BW-Thanks again...

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans

(Left to right) Nick Kostenborder:Drums, Brian Bergstrom:Lead Guitar, Bradley Wik:Lead Vocals, Guitar and Sasha Shybut: Bass

RAGS & RIBBONS cd release this friday!!! @ DOUG FIR

2012-01-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

Rags & Ribbons interview w/kzme dj jason

2012-01-16T19:34:00.001-08:00

Eastern Surf Magazine on Poor Boy's Soul

2012-01-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

Listen if you like: Raw blues, Appalachian folk, punked-up bluegrass, Bloodshot Bill, Devil Makes Three, Hillstomp, an acoustic, stripped-down The Black Keys.

First impressions: A one-man band fronted by Portland, OR, native Trevor Jones, Poor Boy’s Soul kicks out some of the meanest, grittiest blues and folk jams known to man. The music is simple, but the simmering power of the opening title track quickly gives way to the raucous, throat-shredding insanity of “Movin’ To The City.” Inspired by Jones’ time spent hopping trains around the United States, the song delivers a unique vision of America that could have been made in 1931 or 2011.

The nitty-gritty: Since I’ve never seen him live, I can’t speculate how Poor Boy’s Soul would measure up with Canadian one-man band phenom Bloodshot Bill, who I caught in Orlando back in November. But suffice to say that the intensity of one man shredding a slide guitar while stomping out beats on a rudimentary drum kit is best enjoyed in person. Take “Nails In The Pine,” for instance; the enormous skill required to play a song that fast while playing two instruments and singing sounds impressive on record. But the sweat and spit and hellfire doesn’t come flying at you from computer speakers. In addition, that short track, along with the brief but swaying “Throwing Stones,” are nice contrasts to the five-minute-plus openers.

Other recommended tracks: “Ain’t Comin’ Back Any More” creeps and crawls like a snake in the grass, while “54 Ways” injects a bit of down-home melody into Burn Down’s otherwise gaunt, sparse 30-minute running time. Yet the seven-minute “Annalisa” is the most impressive and the most confounding offering from Poor Boy’s Soul: a slow-moving, fingerpicked ballad that lacks most of Burn Down’s early energy while still proving that Trevor Jones has more than just roughshod blues chop up his sleeve.

East Coast tour dates? None as of yet; stay tuned to www.PoorBoysSoul.com for updates on when Trevor Jones is riding the rails to the Rightside. –NM

http://www.easternsurf.com/vitalreverb/010512/

slightly drunken Ryan Adams

2012-01-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

Shawn Lawson Freeman, Non-etre (Self-released)

http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/reviews-yukon-blonde-touch-people-people-get-ready

For Shawn Lawson Freeman, the most obvious, prominent immediate, visceral comparison that emerges on his album is found on “Loop Me In,” which is like a Lou Barlow/Sebadoh/Sentridoh side project of some kind, and that’s something to proud of, for sure, but the other, slightly less prominent, comparison is Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas on “To Be Special,” and that drags this down a few notches. The rest of the album strikes a balance. “Angry Love” is good, with piano and vocals by guest Amy Seeley, and the echoey piano and bass are effective “I Am You” introduces more flexibility. “God Said” is strong, and captures more of what I gather he’s after, which in this instance appears to be a slightly drunken Ryan Adams.

Non-etre is an interesting creation torn between two personalities.

2012-01-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

http://targetaudiencemagazine.com/2011/12/beneath-wind-and-waves-non-etre-cd-review/

Beneath Wind and Waves: Non-etre CD Review

by ellen

Non-etre is an interesting creation torn between two personalities. The folk-pop mix is a difficult endeavor that when done well can be quite enjoyable, but it is much harder to achieve than most realize. Beneath Wind and Waves certainly strives for this balance, succeeding at times, yet falling short more often. Lyrically, the album expresses a search for self during and after a serious, identity-defining relationship. So it fits that its musical counterpart seems to also be searching for an identity, caught between the rhythms and harmonies of folk and the melodies of pop –a battle which finds neither an ultimate victor nor armistice. There are moments of musical creativity and lyrical depth, however these are sparse, and their simultaneous existence is fleeting. Shawn Lawson Freeman, lyricist, digs for truth and clarity in the chaos of self-searching, and reaches for insightful introspection, opening up to the audience in the third track, “To Be Special,” with lines such as “you’re not much, but you’re all you think about; the eyes see, but they never see themselves,” but then immediately takes away from its poignancy and hides behind walls of clichés with lines like “the ears hear, but they never hear themselves.” Freeman is grasping for clever poetry and poignancy but only manages to scratch the surface. This album has its strong moments, but is overall a struggle for inventiveness and ingenuity, obscured by familiarity and clichés.

Review by Caroline Wuertz

FEATURING :: Mr. Hands bring on the vintage equipment!

2012-01-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

Want to introduce you to someone I stumbled upon that I greatly enjoyed... Mr. Hands. For me they channeled a Beach Boy's meets The Strokes. Thinking some surfers here on the west coast would be into this album weird hands and all!

Hometown: New York

Genres: Rock - "melancholie pop"

Who are your biggest influences?

Clemens: Sibylle Baier, The Band, George Harrison, Os Mutantes
Dan Stern: NRBQ, George Harrison, Todd Rundgren
Josh Hahn: Harry Nilsson, Skip Spence, Juergen Knieper, Mississippi John Hurt, The Band
Aaron Green: Steely Dan, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, Wilco, of Montreal

Being you speak German on track 3 “Du Wirst Schon Seh'n” does the rest of the band even know what you are singing about? How do you write melodies and parts for a song that you don’t know what the lyrics are.... FOR EXAMPLE (you could be saying super super pop uplifting things and writing riffs and guitar parts for a dark slow gloomy song....)

Clemens: We briefly talked about what the song is about, but I never translated it for them. My father wrote this song back in the 60’s with his friend Michael Baier, and for some reason it never needed an explanation. I grew up speaking German and was surrounded by songs in English, but me not understanding any of the words never kept me from “getting” the music. I suppose I trust that music itself can portrait a mood and feeling. I think that this recording solidified that idea since both my dad and I agree with the reflected feeling of the “new” version Mr. Hands made.

Mr. Hands - Hands' EP - 03 Du Wirst Schon Seh'n by xopublicity

Josh: When Clemens sings in German I hear it as a kind of texture in the music. Clemens is a very expressive singer, and as he performs, no matter what language he is singing in, he sets the tone of the music. It really tickles me to hear what is known to be a very rough and brutish tongue, as something that is actually quite sweet and musical. I like it so much, that upon hearing a new demo Clemens recorded, I suggested that he should sing some of the verses in German.

Aaron: Writing a part involves focusing in on what fits the song and the musical mood we want to convey. As far as striking a discord with lyrics, I’m all for it. A song or arrangement that seems to “not fit” with its lyrical content can work brilliantly. There are many examples. Gram Parson’s “Still Feeling Blue.” The Smiths? The Magnetic Fields’ “I Don’t Want To Get Over You” is a catchy pop song about struggling with a breakup. Why not? The tension works. For the record, I still have no idea what “Du Wirst Schon Seh'n” is about.

Dan: I enjoy good lyrics, but when I start figuring a song out with Clemens or anyone, one of the last things I think about is sticking to what the words would suggest. In the case of Clemens’ father’s song we had advantage of a recording to work from, giving us a really clear framework. Normally, one of us comes in with a vague concept and we play until it makes sense to everyone. Most of these songs have been played in totally different and unrecognizable ways and could change still. You can make anything work.

What is the biggest difference as a musician in Germany versus America?

I didn’t really start playing or writing songs until I left Berlin in 2004. I come from a very musical family and that somehow distanced me from making music for a long time. When I came to Massachusetts to live with Sibylle Baier, I realized that I am very much missing that ingredient in my life, so I asked her to teach me some guitar and we started writing songs together. Her lightness and wisdom have been the key to my music. When I go back to Germany, i don’t feel as distant from music as i used to.

What is the story with your band name Mr. Hands

collective response: we plead the fifth... but also, clemens has scary alien hands.

This album being recorded w/ vintage equipment... Do you have a dream piece you would love to record with for next record?

We didn’t expect to be able to geek out in this interview. Our dream pieces are probably a Fairchild 670 compressor and a Studer 8-track Reel-To-Reel. Those would be nice things to have and use.

Who would be your dream tour co-headliner? Dream tour vehicle? Dream tour rider?

If this is a full on dream tour then we would probably be travelling with the Beatles, our live-engineer would be Geoff Emerick (we d’ trust him to drive too), and the vehicle would be an intergalactic spaceship that would allow us to travel at the speed of light. It’d be nice to hear what things sound like on other planets, we ‘re all just stardust after all. An alternative would be to tour with The Minutemen FEAT. Robert Johnson through South America. Our vehicle is roller blades and birds would carry our gear.

Biggest compliment a fan ever gave you? Biggest insult?

When we opened for the band She Keeps Bees, Jessica Larrabee said that our music was strangely familiar yet unexpected... it made her feel at home. That was certainly the biggest compliment we have gotten. Though, some people have told us that we are just another band that loves the Beatles, which we do.

What do you want listeners to feel when they hear your record?

Well everyone should have their own relationship with the Hands’ EP, so let’s not list any adjectives here...

Can you remember first album that you ever got (purchased or received as a gift)? Do you still listen to the band or music like it?

Clemens: I remember buying Happy Nation by Ace of Base when it came out, but I haven’t put it on in years.

Dan: I was given Let it Be with a CD player when I was four, I think, but I certainly wouldn’t have bought that myself. I bought Dookie and a Spice Girls album at a Staples at some point. That’s far more significant.

Josh: When I was a toddler we used to have a box of cassettes in the car. One of the cassettes was Bob Marley’s Legends, a greatest hits album. Our car was broken into, and all of our tapes were stolen. I begged my father to replace that tape, and he bought it for me for Channukka. I was about four or five.

Aaron: I grew up with Steely Dan, who are still my favorite. A lot of Steely Dan and Sting and Bonnie Raitt and stuff. The first music I wanted that wasn’t my parents’ was soundtrack to Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet. This was around the third grade. I wanted it mostly because Everclear’s “Local God” had some cursing in it. Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” is on the same soundtrack. I really liked that song. Coincidentally, it also has some profanity. Later that year I made my grandpa buy me Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I love Radiohead, and I still think that “Local God” is a pretty good song.

What can my readers expect from you in 2012 (any touring, music videos, new records?)

We have a decent collection of demos that we ‘re currently fooling around with, so you can expect another record soon. Also, we are currently working on a music video for one of the songs on the EP and we will be playing a few shows on the east coast this summer.

Find more on this band here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mr-Hands/328213580531593

Even better news their album is FREE! http://mrhands.bandcamp.com/

Portland, Oregon's Black Pussy is comically titled On Blonde

2012-01-12T13:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.rockstarweekly.com/cd-review-black-pussy-on-blonde.html

CD Review: Black Pussy - On Blonde

Written by Dan Savoie

The debut CD from Portland, Oregon's Black Pussy is comically titled On Blonde, but that’s pretty much where the humour ends. The punchy six-track release is heavily influenced by several 70s hard rockers and sounds a bit like the Ace Frehley KISS solo album mixed with The Ramones Rocket To Russia, but with a bit of extra crunch along the lines of Nirvana Nevermind. The band went through some changes in 2010, including a new musical direction, which has resulted in an authentic and daring album.
The first track, Marijuana, kicks off the album much like Rip It Out leads off the KISS guitarist's first LP, with a big beat, distorted guitar and familiar sounding chorus. The repetitive track is a tribute to the mysterious plant that seems to influence the band and most of the rock music coming out in the 70s. Further down on the album is the standout track Swim, which sounds more Nirvana-like. Driven by a relentless cowbell, Swim gives the retro album a more grungy feel, dipping into Kurt Cobainish songwriting structures.
For lack of a better description, Ain’t Talkin’ About Love is a dinosaur rocker. The song is big and sluggish, but very tuned into the retro sound the band is trying to re-create, while the album closer Indiana, is a slow guitar-driven jam that seems like it could have fit on Nirvana’s Unplugged album.
Black Pussy reminds me of Buckcherry without the glam, gimmicks and party-rock - basically Black Pussy is Buckcherry, had Buckcherry had the balls to create something less commercial. The band is very rooted, full of attitude and extremely indie, making them an exciting band to watch out for in the future. On Blonde is a great first effort.

Read more: CD Review: Black Pussy - On Blonde | RockStar Weekly http://www.rockstarweekly.com/cd-review-black-pussy-on-blonde.html#ixzz1iWgOwOJB

Just remember to snuff those butts out; basements can burn up.

2012-01-11T14:51:00.000-08:00

White Orange — White Orange

http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/contentcdreview/2011jul/white-orange

{8.3}

buy it!

{Made In China Records}

It's no surprise that Portland, OR band's White Orange is fronted/fully finessed by a hands-on studio owner and full-time acid-axe victim. Adam Pike sits in the corner of Pac NW's rock dungeon basement, egg-shell sheets all over the incense-drenched walls, orange crates of the most lysergic-infused hallucination-crunch hard psyche LPs near his feet, as he plays with some gimmicks box and weird tuning and drops long cigarette ashes into the denim cuff of his greasy jeans.
His self-titled nine track White Orange album easily shows why his Toadhouse Recording House skills are in such frenetic demand: Any raunch riff-based band (for example, Red Fang, Norska, Rabbits) would crave to sound this futurist and primitive-brutal all at once. Pike is a Sinatra of the dummy-headed bad-trip existential vocal, spinning turgid journeys through The Sword and Nebula style virtual reality doom stomp. Contemporary artists of this style often have the licks, but don't have the bottom end; White Orange cranks and throbs deep inside the crust of the lurch-groove ("Middle Of The Riddle"), then sprightly trills into pure cosmic pop pleasuring ("Dinosaur Bones").
The tempo from box-cutter opening "Where" to drain-dirge "Sigourney Weaver" features changes which aren't break neck, and often the layering of simple rhythms with basic chords beneath it all shows Pike knows his "rock" as much as his "art." Every element is clever, like with Queens Of The Stone Age, but sounding more 19 and life to go than mass-expressive vets. That's the thing: It's somehow both post-grunge, with a more innocent transgressive vocal style (almost but not quite 1970), and pre-pomp irony. It evades those excesses by glorying in its own.
A confession: The album's gorgeous/grotesque cover at first kept me from examining the sounds within -- I wanted to frame it more than play it. That was a big mistake, as this isn't the sort of experimental psyche-outs better left out to freak out the non-heads, and much more the kind of incredibly catchy showcase for a real songwriter set lose with self-created playfulness. This isn't an album to own to feel cool -- it just looks like it. It's more an album to play over and over again, before passing out on that filthy couch alongside your also-tripping heavy rocking comrade. Just remember to snuff those butts out; basements can burn up.

BLACK PUSSY: a six pack of poppy mixture of hard rock and punk

2012-01-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Black Pussy: On Blonde
http://www.seaoftranquility.org/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=11927

Upon reading on the slipcase that: "If Hendrix had lived, he probably would have ended up recording Black Pussy's On Blonde", I found this band pretentious and overly self-confident. I mean, Jimi Hendrix, the man recently voted the best guitar player, doing this type of music is more than unlikely. Besides, any band with the pussy in it is not what I would call a very serious act in my book.

Anyways, here on this 31 minutes album, the Black Pussy has written a six pack of poppy mixture of hard rock and punk. If you look at these guys, you know they would come up with something down and dirty. In general, their compositions are made of distorted riffs, clean vocals, moderate tempos, loud basses and repetitiveness. They have thrown in bits and pieces of variation in the shape of electronics, female backing vocals, bike samplings as well as psychedelic tones. I found their best track being on position # 5, "Aint Talkin About Love". Although still repetitive, they have incorporated more sound experimentation in their writing by using keyboards, fuzzy guitar solo and a cool psychedelic edge.
On Blonde is not bad as such, but this is far from being an essential piece for your collection. Something Hendrix would have done... please!!!
Track listing:
1- Marijuana
2- Cant Take Anymore (Who buries the chiefs when all the Indians are gone)
3- Swim (~A~)
4- Blow Some Steam Off
5- Aint Talking About Love
6- Indiana

Added: December 4th 2011
Reviewer: Denis Brunelle
Score:
Related Link: More Information
Hits: 211
Language: english

MAGNUSON interview

2012-01-09T14:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.sugarbuzzmagazine.com/bands/magnuson/magnuson.html

Magnuson

Interview with……

By Christopher Duda
(Sugarbuzzin' Bear Country)

SugarBuzz Magazine

Hello Brothers and Sisters .Come down from the mountain and settle in with the real folk. Roll Dem Bones and scrape the shit off your shoes. Relax and settle in with the space age jet set sounds of Magnuson….and remember we heard of them before you did………………
Introductions are boring.. Listen to the music-discover for yourself. First and only clue-they are a two piece...
1. What are your backgrounds musically? - We both grew up in musical households and had a love of learning how to play different instruments. Greg’s mother was an opera singer, Kyrsten’s mother played keyboard in cover bands. Music was always around and it just felt natural to start playing as well.
2. Seems that because you are a two piece people like to compare you to The White Stripes although your music is quite different. How do you feel about the comparison? - We get this comparison frequently, but it is definitely a compliment. Jack White is a brilliant writer & musician and Meg’s almost childlike approach to the drums just fits in perfectly. They had something different and special and they’ve definitely changed the way people perceive a two piece band in general, not to mention the fact that it was a guy/girl two piece!
3. Was there ever consideration to have more people in the band? - We actually started as a 5 piece and played for many years as a 3 piece. While we enjoyed those configurations, it was time for something new. We both love playing drums and guitar and always dreamt of playing in a band where we could switch off, so we decided to give it a try. We have so much fun and get such a great response as a 2 piece; I don't think we'll ever add more members. Plus now we only have to take one car!
4. Who are some people that have influenced you musically? - Muse, Porcupine Tree, Death From Above 1979, Dead Kennedys, The Smiths, Kent, Opeth, Meshuggah, Radiohead, The Beach Boys
5. Another frequent comparison is to Black Sabbath. Do you think this comparison is accurate? - I see what people mean, but we only nod our hats to them on a few songs. Other influences come through in other songs, but we appreciate the comparison! Sabbath was a game changing band.
6. How has the band evolved over the years? - Initially, Greg started this project as a solo acoustic act. Then, other members were added to fill out the songs. Kyrsten joined as rhythm guitar initially and then made herself indispensible with her vocal skills. After experimenting with different lineups (including about 8 different drummers), we finally decided less was more and stuck with the duo.
7. What are the next steps for Magnuson both in the recorded sense and touring? - Well, the first step is the official release of our debut duo album "Crash of Cassini" on July 16th. After that, we'll be touring locally with a focus of expanding our territory. Greg has been in Sweden for a month working on a reality show that will air in September and the album has gotten some amazing feedback there. Depending on how things go, a Swedish/European tour will follow next spring. Then, we'll hopefully begin recording the next album!
8. A question that seems to come up often. Are you related? - Or is this one of those world secrets guarded my evil midget minions? Well, it’s kind of funny because that's another one of those White Stripes things. For the record, we are not brother and sister, we're married. But that won't stop people from their speculating. ;)
9. Are you familiar with other two piece bands from the past –The Flat Duo Jets or The Leather Uppers? - We haven’t heard of those bands, but we’ll have to check them out! Our current favorite duos are Death From Above 1979, Blood Red Shoes, The Black Keys and Middle Class Rut. They all have such a great full sound for only having two people and we definitely look up to them.
10. What have been your most memorable shows? - The Troubadour in West Hollywood is definitely our favorite show thus far. So much history and energy...it was magical. Besides that, Payette, Idaho was the best tour show. We played our set twice because the crowd couldn't get enough and a lady started stripping on the dance floor. So crazy!
11. Do you have groupies and do you exploit them for alcohol, drugs and sex? - We are each other’s groupies…but we make excellent wingmen for our friends & fans!
12. Are there any current bands you would like to share the stage with? - Opeth, Muse, Dirty Projectors, Givers, Passion Pit, DFA1979, Foo Fighters...
13. Would you consider doing a Sonny and Cher type variety show if offered? - This would be the best thing ever. We'd do it in a heartbeat.
14. Where do you see Magnuson in ten years? - Hopefully enjoying the success of several world tours as well as having a catalogue of numerous film soundtracks and possibly an art film based on our music. I'd also guess we'd be starting to add the next generation of little Magnusons to the band at that point…Partridge Family style.
15. What guitars/amps/gear do you use? - Randall 50 guitar amps and Eden bass gear. We play Brian Moore guitars which we run through a Roland guitar synth and various other pedals. For drums, we have a prized 2 piece DW kit with a custom snare, DW hardware, Zildjian and Paiste cymbals. Mics are Sure beta 58s.
16. Would there be anything about the current release you would like to change? - This album was particularly a challenge because it was our first duo album. We wanted to make sure everything sounded the same on the album as we play it live, so lots of changing little parts here and there to make sure it sounded nice and full. We also cut a few songs for the sake of the "album", but maybe those will resurface as bonus tracks one day. As it is though, we’re really happy with what we were able to put out on such a limited budget and can’t wait to record the next one!

www.magnusonband.com www.myspace.com/magnuson

WHITE ORANGE - morphing their Kyuss-grounded fuzz jams.

2012-01-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

Album Review: White Orange - s/t

White Orange - s/t
2011 Made in China Records
Ray Van Horn, Jr.

http://rayvanhornjr.blogspot.com/2011/07/album-review-white-orange-st.html

While everyone in their mother in the sludge underground has been riding the rails Josh Homme has dropped on his way as a would-be anti-hipster, the Kyuss-worshipping acolytes out there the past few years have brought a mixed bag of results. Repetition is not necessarily the purest form of flattery.

At least some bands, like Portland's White Orange, remember to twist the scheme with other variables to their trippy, mucky form of psych rock. Try a little shake of Hawkwind with dabs of The White Stripes, Mudhoney and the Melvins, and you're getting close to what White Orange's capabilities are in morphing their Kyuss-grounded fuzz jams.

Pretty considerable, when you catch a ticking vibe out the gate on "Where" that transitions into a tasty bob 'n nod jam, while "Middle of the Riddle" might be a demonstrative replication of where Josh Homme was swimming mentally before starting Queens of the Stone Age. Somewhere in that song is a wallowy portal where distortion and transluence meet. Ditto for "Dinosaur Bones," which rides its mid-tempo crash on the spook of a curious alt haunt. Here is where White Orange seeks to distance themselves from comparison. "Dinosaur Bones" is and is what you think it's going to be, and once it takes its own leap of faith into a pool of distortion, White Orange does so in explorative manner. Better yet, they remember to quickly step back into the foundation of the song instead of drowning in ersatz.

White Orange does get pretty danged weird (i.e. "Wonderful," "Sunspots" and "Kill the Kids"), but if you've spent any time at all around the Sub Pop, Enigma and SST labels, you're well-acclimated to the experimental droning, chunky riffs and milky vocal swerves of Dustin Hill. Hill's gurgling huffs are sometimes akin to cutting loose in front of a floor fan, and they suit White Orange's spaced-out lunacy. They may not sound like they know what they're doing at times, but most assuredly they do. The wah-filled soloing on "Kill the Kids" and "Sunspots" is proof enough.

Still, White Orange isn't necessarily for everyone. While they know how to grab an ear with some volume and some well-grounded hooks, these later serve more as groundwork to tinker about overtop the longer this album grinds on. White Orange has an appreciable knack for decorating the obvious. As the album continues on its unknown (from the listener's POV) path, Kyuss meets Sonic Youth (i.e. "Sunspots" and "Save Me") and happily jumps into Hawkwind's mystical space toaster. You'll either be baking with White Orange or you'll be asking for the next shuttle out of their zero-g nebula.

Not a slam on this band whatsoever. White Orange is a rather creative unit who offers their audience far more than the usual nod to "Turbo Blimp Jumbo" and "50 Million Year Trip (Downside Up)." It helps to spin Kyuss' Blues For the Red Sun before coming to White Orange, just so you have the proper mindset. Their swampy yet astral "Sigourney Weaver" is more inventive than implied, particularly if you throw yourself somewhere between Aliens and Gorillas in the Mist. Only someone who's subjected himself to Kyuss every afternoon before band practice could come up with something so bold.

Rating: ***1/2

Rags & Ribbons - Even Matter

2012-01-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

NEW ARTIST DISCOVERY! : Mark W. Lennon w/ "Home of the Wheel"

2012-01-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

Been listening to Mr. Lennon's first full length"Home of the Wheel" think it is worth mentioning for you to check out! Hoping that LA doesnt spoil his North Carolina twang. When listening to the 11 tracks I never once forwarded skipped or all together turned off the player. That being said I really enjoyed the genre mixing. Americana, Folk, Country, Bluegrass, and do i dare say POP!

A perfect album for my tea and rainy days in portland. You won't feel uplifted but you well feel safe and warm. His lyrics are very honest. Most telling track on the album "HOME OF THE WHEEL". I am a sucker for anything channeling Woody Guthri.

Mark W. Lennon - Home of the Wheel - Home Of The Wheel by xopublicity

I know I mentioned the mixing genres through out this album but, i am also wondering if this crooner could do one album focusing on each style I would buy them all. Sometimes I am just not ready to switch to Pop or Country “California Calling” on a given day. I don't want to take away from this album I do enjoy it! Producer Marvin Etzioni. A former member of Lone Justice, Etizoni (Steve Earle, Counting Crows and Lucinda Williams) did a bang up job!

Hoping to see some tour dates for this guy. Sure others are too! I did find a video that will keep you at bay till he hits your watering hole.

California Calling from Mark W. Lennon on Vimeo.

TOP 10 of 2011

2012-01-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

10. The Weeknd: House of Balloons [self-released]

MP3: The Weeknd: "House of Balloons"

When the Weeknd magically appeared from the internet ether, there was something truly total about it all: they had the visual aesthetic down, immaculate production, and in Abel Tesfaye, one of the year's most distinctive new talents. House of Balloons takes the NyQuil tint of recent efforts by artists like Drake and The-Dream to a place of uncomfortably photorealistic, gritty darkness: that it's sung with a cherubic voice so clear and sweet only makes it more unsettling. Moving beyond the usual tropes of drugs and excess, House of Balloons presents a world of overdose, withdrawal, chemically-paralyzed sex and vaguely violent seduction, with Tesfaye rendering hip-hop's celebratory narcissism into something downright detestable.

And yet this mysterious entity manages to pull it all off with music that embodies the self-indulgent nature of its own Dionysian decadence, sprawl and all. Seven-minute epics like "The Party & the After Party" and "Loft Music" perfectly reflect the rapidly unraveling personality on display, while "What You Need" infuses up-to-date production values into the best Sade ballad in years, oozing silk even as it bleeds itself out. Yet no matter how conceited the Weeknd becomes, through the faux-psychedelic swirl of follow-up Thursday and pretentious conceptual videos, they've never been anything less than captivating. Inventive, frightening, and dangerously accessible, House of Balloons is an album whose licentious charms are impossible to resist, its uncensored visions of nocturnal saturnalia soothing and disturbing in equal measure. --Andrew Ryce

09. Real Estate: Days [Domino]
Real Estate's sophomore set is another slab of sleepy suburban sprawl, wasted miles, and those long teenage hours spent hammering out what's real and shrugging off what isn't. Frontman Martin Courtney casts a wistful (but not too wistful) gaze back to his more guileless years, nodding to something like a lost innocence, letting a few phrases say so much. There's a grace and understatement to everything Courtney and company muster that seems to slow everything down just a bit, like they're out a little past curfew and don't want to arouse any suspicion. With slowhand Matt Mondanile's guitar cruising along at about 25 MPH, Days plays like a townie's guided tour through the very same localities they charted on their debut, offering back-of-my-hand stops at all the highlights.
It's not a record that smacks of ambition, exactly, but it gathers its strength in seeming incredibly comfortable with where it's from and what it's doing there, even if it's not too far from where they've been all along. Somewhere in the languid byways of "Municipality", I can hear these Jersey guys tottering around Ridgewood or doing donuts in Montclair, gulping down Frostys as friends talk shit in the backseat. A careless lifestyle? Perhaps. But, the way Real Estate tell it, not so unwise. --Paul Thompson

08. Drake: Take Care [Cash Money/Young Money/Universal Republic]
"Weezy and Stunna my only role models/ Hef and Jordan my only role models." On "Lord Knows", Drake toasts to four absurdly rich and successful assholes who are by all accounts manipulative, emotionally unavailable, and altogether miserable human beings. So while they might be Drake's peer group, they are not the men he aspires to be on Take Care. Boasting more complex songwriting, vastly improved mic skills, and an astounding curatorial ear, Drake opened himself up to pretty much everything the human condition has to offer.
With partners Noah "40" Shebib and the Weeknd in tow, Take Care integrates dubstep, house, blaring Young Money boasts, New York City thunder, quiet storm, and cloud rap to form the dark center of 2011's pop universe. And yeah, "I blew six million on myself and it felt amazing" isn't something any of us will relate to any time soon, but the elemental sensations underpinning the mood swings connecting the title track's wounded heart, the stunning emotional bottom of "Marvins Room", and the earned triumph of "Underground Kings"-- intoxication, depression, friendship, hatred, jealousy, empathy, lust, loneliness, ego, doubt-- make Drake's experience no more contradictory and complex than our own. In fact, the only emotion that might be missing from Take Care is contentment-- closer "The Ride" might sound like a victory lap for his sophomore album, but then Drake promises "my junior and senior will only get meaner-- take care." So what do you give the man who has it all? The gift of thinking he doesn't. --Ian Cohen

Photo by Anna M. Campbell
07. tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l [4AD]

MP3: tUnE-yArDs: "Bizness"

Though Merrill Garbus' percussive w h o k i l l pulls from a variety of genres and cultures, when listening to it I kept coming back to Walt Whitman. The two fearlessly gleeful weirdos share a penchant for celebrating real live flesh, and they also have a thing for rewriting national anthems in their own, scribbled hands. w h o k i l l's opening salvo is a killer: "My country, 'tis of thee/ Sweet land of liberty/ How come I cannot see my future within your arms?"

If ever there were a year that needed songs asking questions like that one, it was 2011. True to its times, w h o k i l l is a hand-rendered map of a shrunken country: fractured in the face of economic inequality, dwindling natural resources, and seemingly insurmountable political and social divides. "With my eyes open, how can I be happy?" Garbus shouts midway through "My Country", but the bravery and the genius of w h o k i l l is in how it never once closes its eyes, undaunted by ugliness, internal struggles (Garbus sometimes uses vocal loops in such a way that it sounds like she's having a heated argument with herself), or even the most complex revelations. In "Riotriot", the sheer full-throated power of her voice turns a squirmy confession into something strangely liberating: "There is a freedom in violence that I don't understand/ And like I've never felt before!"

w h o k i l l's 10 songs-of-self are testaments to the power of an idiosyncratic voice, and they're also reminders of the deceptively simple human demands that unite us. In mid-October, a few miles from her country's capitol building and a few more from the city's branch of the Occupation, I saw Garbus open a sold-out show with the call-and-response chant she's opening all her sets with these days. "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE?" she asked the audience. The unanimous roar that followed was as inevitable as it was affirming: YEAH! --Lindsay Zoladz

06. Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica [Mexican Summer/Software]
MP3: Oneohtrix Point Never: "Sleep Dealer"
In the two years since Daniel Lopatin collected the best of his limited-run output as the 2xCD Rifts, his Oneohtrix Point Never project has become one of the new synth-music underground's most reliable purveyors of trippy, arpeggio-heavy psychedelia. Last year's Returnal marked an intensification of his method and an amplification of his range-- from pure noise to breathtaking lyricism-- but it didn't significantly break with his established mode. Replica does. For one thing, it's the first time that sampling has become central to OPN's music. While Lopatin hasn't retired his trusty Roland Juno 60, it plays a supporting role, adding color and texture to loops sourced from bootleg DVDs of old television ads.
Knowing the backstory supports the techno-nostalgia at play in all Lopatin's music, but it's not necessary to appreciate the sonics themselves, which are severed from any obvious referent-- there's nothing kitschy or crassly retro here. Instead, the new sounds and textures have the effect of breaking open what, until now, had felt like a hermetically sealed world. The smeared mush of frequencies that characterized previous records falls away, revealing lilting cartoon xylophones, quizzical hiccups, and delicate percussive loops that crunch like boots in snow. "Up" employs tribal drum machines of a type unimaginable on an OPN record until now-- and in 7/4 time, at that-- while "Child Soldier" features reconfigured R&B voices over lasers and dentist drills. Lopatin even indulges in stately piano melodies, proving that last year's unlikely collaboration with Antony wasn't as out of character as it seemed at the time.
It's an immaculately paced album, veering from placid ambient interludes to quietly chaotic constellations of found sound; Replica's subjects are media, memory, and the space-time continuum, but the mind/heart dichotomy is the axis around which it revolves. --Philip Sherburne

Photo by Sandy Kim
05. Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost [True Panther]

MP3: Girls: "Vomit"

As its title indicated, Girls' 2009 debut, Album, was a triumph of simplicity, from its familiar 50s-rock references to all the songs about Lauras and Lauren Maries to the way "Hellhole Ratrace" copped the "Hey Jude" trick of repeating the same refrain over and over again to create an instant sing-along anthem. But anyone who's read a single article about Girls knows that leader Christopher Owens' life hasn't been all pizzas and bottles of wine, and this darker subtext came to the fore on the band's second full-length.

This is a heavy record-- and not just because Girls try to flex some surprising Black Sabbath muscle on "Die". For an album that begins with Owens' self-deprecatingly acknowledging his "bony body" and "dirty hair," Father, Son, Holy Ghost is brimming with confidence and fearlessness, as Girls tackle tough subject matters-- fading romance, spiritual emptiness, reconciling with family-- with the weightiness they deserve, by eschewing Album's ramshackle scrappiness for the classic-rock-radio sophistication of Billy Preston-era Beatles and early-70s Pink Floyd. (Should you not have a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon handy, the gospelized climax of "Vomit" would no doubt match up really well with the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz.) And where Album frontloaded its most immediately engaging songs, everything on Father, Son, Holy Ghost feels like a steady build-up to the late-act stunner "Forgiveness", eight minutes of understated devastation that feels like we're eavesdropping in on the most difficult conversation of Owens' life. Girls were too quick to name their debut record-- even more so than its predecessor, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is a capital-A Album. --Stuart Berman

04. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake [Vagrant/Island Def Jam]
PJ Harvey: "The Words That Maketh Murder":

"How is our glorious country sown?" That question, or some strain of it, faulty premise and all, was at the root of pretty much every important thing that happened in 2011. Whether Occupy Wall Street, the London Riots, or the Arab Spring, this year's dominant political ideology was the kind of upheaval that can only be sparked when pat answers to elemental questions-- What do we believe in? What do we deserve?-- no longer satisfy.
And although Let England Shake-- a rickety den of ghost-war stories, tremulous pastoralism and good old fashioned muckraking-- was one of PJ Harvey's most critically adored records, it also spawned its fair share of haters. Amongst detractors, the infamous bugle call that rips clumsily through "The Glorious Land" became a talisman of Let England Shake's supposed heavy-handedness. But when I hear that Reveille, I don't hear finger-wagging; I hear Harvey antagonizing us with war's blinking single-mindedness. I hear Harvey saying that war is (tone)deaf, dumb, and mute, and that the only way to stop something with no sense is with an equal and opposing act of visceral destruction. "How is our glorious country sown-- not with wheat and corn." The notion that humanity is not at the heart of progress is hardly a new one, but it rang rawer than usual this year, and no other record even came close to capturing that. --Mark Pytlik

Photo by Anouk
03. M83: Hurry Up, We're Dreaming [Mute]
M83 [ft. Zola Jesus]: "Intro":

Anthony Gonzalez set expectations stratospherically high in interviews leading up to Hurry Up We're Dreaming, name-checking such totems of feverish excess and emotional overload as Smashing Pumpkins' Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Beatles' White Album, and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. But what he eventually unveiled-- 22 tracks of horizon-spanning, unabashedly epic synth rock, a double album without a wasted moment (yes, even including that five-year-old's monologue about magic frogs)-- still managed to confound those expectations. It's hard to think of anyone in indie rock in 2011 who aimed higher, and hit that aim more squarely, than Gonzalez.
His working formula for this audacious feat seemed to be Steal All the Good Parts: If a sound has ever made you break out into a foolish, cheesed-out grin you couldn't suppress, it's probably here. String orchestras, glacial expanses of synthesizers, children's choirs, ringing rounds of mandolin, screaming woolly saxophone-- Hurry Up We're Dreaming doesn't just draw liberally from the spirit of the massive rock albums Gonzalez name-checked, it practically swallows them whole, regurgitating and redistributing them into something listeners from every corner of the music universe can hear a piece of their lives in. --Jayson Greene

02. Destroyer: Kaputt [Merge]
MP3: Destroyer: "Chinatown"
The cover of Destroyer's Kaputt finds Dan Bejar in front of the picturesque lookout point in Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Park. Walk a few steps away from that spot in the park, and you'll find another view with a charmingly meta bronze sculpture called "The Photo Session" in the middle of it. The 1984 piece is made up of four life-size people, one photographer and his three American-tourist subjects, and the idea is for actual sightseers to mingle with their metal counterparts, creating a peculiar mix of old and new, breathing and bronze. It turns the typical cheese-ball vacation photo into something weirder and self-reflexive.
That same uncanny effect goes gauzy all through Kaputt, which has Bejar soaking up some of his favorite high-fidelity records-- Roxy Music's Avalon, Steely Dan's Aja-- and filtering their reverbed, horn-spouting sounds through his own unique, free-associative consciousness. The languid music constantly flirts with bad taste stalwarts like lite jazz and soft rock and, in doing so, jumbles our own preconceptions. The result is disorienting-- and wholly pleasurable.
And it turns out these open-ended instrumentals are the perfect foil for Bejar, who abandons his characteristically stuffed and manic lyrical style for something more relaxed. Indeed, he recalled recording some of the album's vocals "while lying down on the couch." After 15 years, this is where Bejar stops worrying about being the cleverest indie rock writer around, which is OK because he's been doing this so long that the smarts simply flow out of his brain anyhow.
Kaputt is an album of mantras about uncomfortable truths made comforting by Bejar's impossibly casual delivery: He's been there, he's seen death and drugs and evaporated dreams, and he wouldn't trade in one spec. On what may be the record's most beatific-sounding hook, on "Song for America", he duets with guest singer Sibel Thrasher: "Winter, spring, summer, and fall/ Animals crawl toward death's embrace." It's a sing-along, Bejar-style. His understated humor is intact, but Kaputt is no joke. It would be far too easy for Bejar to simply poke fun at so many swishy synths, lounge-lizard inflections, and cruise-ship bass lines, but he does something much tougher here. He redeems them. --Ryan Dombal

Photo by D.L. Anderson
01. Bon Iver: Bon Iver [Jagjaguwar]

MP3: Bon Iver: "Calgary"

Bon Iver might be the record that frees Bon Iver from the myth of Bon Iver: from the endlessly repeated creation saga (cabin, heartbreak, Wisconsin), from the detailed evocations of his beard, from the loaded allusions to his partnership with Kanye West. Bon Iver opens with six long seconds of silence, a clearing. Keep this in mind.

Unlike 2008's For Emma, Forever Ago, which operated mostly within established folk idioms, Bon Iver is unfamiliar, expansive, and searching. Here, spread over shimmery soft rock, Justin Vernon's falsetto is imbued with a childlike longing-- not for a person or a place, but for meaning. He pushes that voice to exigent altitudes, manipulating it in a way that feels both generous and self-effacing; it melts onto the surface of these songs, becoming another strata, a texture, an easy analogue to all the keyboards and sax blows and effects-laden guitar. Talking about the album's copious layers-- and there are dozens, stacked like bricks-- without employing dopey language (even Vernon has referred to these songs as "soundscapes") or barely graspable metaphors has proved a bit of a critical challenge. Ultimately, it feels sufficient just to say that Bon Iver is masterfully assembled-- an ambitious, occasionally devastating exercise in arranged sound.

There's also the album's hazy narrative arc. Songs are titled after real places ("Lisbon, OH", "Calgary") and fake places ("Hinnom, TX", "Minnesota, WI"), but there's no significant difference between the actual and the imagined. So much of Bon Iver concerns memory-- how the passage of time affects our bodies and the way we love, how we reckon with old mistakes, how we abandon prior versions of ourselves-- and to that end, Vernon is a deceptively sharp linguist, mixing nonsensical phrases ("Armor let it through, borne the arboretic truth") with deliberately specific references ("3rd and Lake, it burnt away/ The hallway was where we learned to celebrate"). It's dream-logic, the way memory works. And while listeners might be tasked with supplying the connective tissue, Vernon and his backers provide ample support, a rubric for introspection. Eventually, these songs start to play like emotional Mad-Libs, and a declaration like "I was not magnificent," with its excruciating combination of hubris and humility, becomes an undeniable prompt, a blank to fill in. A cue for whatever kind of self-examination 2011 might have wrought. --Amanda Petrusich

TOP 20 albums of 2011 from pitchfork!

2012-01-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

20. Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise [Circus Company]
MP3: Nicolas Jaar: "Keep Me There"

Nicolas Jaar borrows his sense of structure from techno-- rhythmic, repetitive, linear-- but Space Is Only Noise isn't dance music. What it is, I'm not sure, but Space's musical amphibiousness-- the exploratory, inconclusive way it straddles so many different sounds-- is also what made me keep revisiting it: While this album is not unfriendly or difficult to listen to, it never really gets up to shake your hand, either.

Jaar's source material is either acoustic or has a frizzed, old-shoe texture: movie dialogue, water, Ray Charles, children. The tracks are hitched to melodies and generally last between three and five minutes, but they don't feel like songs. On the few occasions when Jaar opens his mouth, he chants cosmic nonsense in a low, strange voice. In nearly every case, he errs on the side of telling you too little instead of too much. Part of the experience, then, is making constellations out of what's left in the mix. Several minutes into "Keep Me There", for example, we hear the sound of a couple giggling quietly, followed by the eruption of horns. Think about it. Get R-rated. There's something alluring-- sexy, even-- about patience. --Mike Powell

19. Danny Brown: XXX [Fool's Gold]
MP3: Danny Brown: "Monopoly"
Fueled by Danny Brown's complex, oddball personality, XXX is a careening ride with its own kind of nervy logic. "I Will" is a lewd, kinda sensitive ode to performing oral sex that recalls Lil Wayne's transgressive mixtape days; "Scrap or Die" is a totally un-snarky corrective to Young Jeezy's "Trap or Die", cleverly unveiling a side of poverty connected to the small-stakes sale of scrap metal to junkyards. "Bruiser Brigade" is pretty much a hardcore song complete with crew vocals, and whoa--"Adderall Admiral" samples This Heat's "Horizontal Hold" and Hawkwind?!
And then, on the absolutely devastating second half of the record, the other shoe drops and all the drinking and drugging finally catches up with Danny. So he projects his neuroses onto pill-popping college girls, traces the roots of his vices to a fucked-up family, and speaks on the damn near post-apocalyptic climate of his Detroit hometown until all the pain comes rushing right back on album closer "30", a victory rap lap with a drunken horn beat, tugged along by a swaggering celebration of success and a nagging death wish. Danny Brown is loads of fun to listen to because he raps like a maniac, hilariously and tragically, about any and everything, but XXX stays on your iPod thanks to its precarious balance between being wildly unhinged and conceptually sound. --Brandon Soderberg

18. Atlas Sound: Parallax [4AD]

MP3: Atlas Sound: "Te Amo"

Bradford Cox is hardly the first artist to maintain a primary band and solo career concurrently. But where most performers in that position maintain an oppositional relationship between the two gigs (take, for example, Thurston Moore's work within and without Sonic Youth), in Cox's case, each new release represents the next stage in an ongoing dialogue between his projects. And with his latest one-two tandem of Deerhunter's 2010 release Halcyon Digest and this year's Atlas Sound LP, Parallax, he's hit a new high watermark of mutually inspired activity.

Where it was once a receptacle for Cox's most outré ideas, Atlas Sound has now become a reservoir for some of his most accessible songs, as Halcyon Digest's flirtations with AM-radio gold sounds ("Don't Cry", "Revival", "Memory Boy") are furthered refined into Parallax's pristine "Mona Lisa" and "Angel Is Broken", while the baroque flourishes of Halcyon's epic closer "He Would Have Laughed" are compacted into the wondrous "Te Amo". But if Parallax suggests Cox is becoming ever more comfortable with the idea of being a pop singer-- or at least playing the role of one on the Mick Rock-shot cover-- he still applies enough textural disorientation to lend these instantly familiar "Modern Aquatic Nightsongs" an alien, isolated quality. Parallax is a desert-island disc in every sense of the term: even the most radiant moments emit the desolate ambience of a life spent alone among the wind and the waves. --Stuart Berman

Photo by Loren Wohl
17. Clams Casino: Instrumentals [self-released]
MP3: Clams Casino: "Numb"
There's a startling moment on Clams Casino's debut mixtape when a phlegm-soaked scream rises above the gorgeous murk before quickly being subsumed once again. It sounds like the last gasp of all the East Coast rap this New Jersey producer grew up on-- Dipset, Wu Tang, Mobb Deep-- making its presence known, handing the beat down. When I interviewed Clams (real name Mike Volpe) in March, his claim to fame was working with internet concern Lil B; by year's end, he had production credits on a No. 1 album as well as the debut from the hottest-tipped new hip-hop star around, A$AP Rocky. Not bad for a guy who was soliciting random rappers on MySpace not so long ago.
And even though he's deservedly gaining notice and collaborators for his slow-moving tracks-- which combine Houston's screwed pace and New York's punchy bap and some supremely chillaxed ambient muzak you might hear during a massage-- this tape shows that the Clams Casino sound is best heard on its own. It's heavy, like each track is carrying a medicine ball on its back. It's soothing-- bird chirps and wave crashes can be heard across the tape. And it's completely faded, with each track instantly puffing up its own druggy cloud. Volpe doesn't only represent a new era sonically, but creatively as well.
Instead of digging in dusty basements for apt obscurity like instrumental rap forebears DJ Shadow or RJD2, this beatmaker finds his sources randomly online: "To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word-- like 'blue' or 'cold'-- into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results," he told me. "I had no idea who the artists were or anything." This modern technique sounds like one of Brian Eno's oblique strategies, a way to spur inspiration while making music. But it's also the only way Volpe knows. He's not seeking out muses in scratchy vinyl. He's seeking out feelings, words, whims, and then letting the sounds come to him. --Ryan Dombal

16. Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring For My Halo [Matador]
MP3: Kurt Vile: "Jesus Fever"
For such a skilled and prolific artist, Kurt Vile sings an awful lot about being lazy. Virtually every track on his masterful fourth album speaks to a desire for rest, sloth, or some form of quiet solace. "I don't want to work but I don't want to sit around all day frowning," he sings. This apparent longing for inactivity, combined with the album's enveloping, melancholic sound, serves to reinforce the impression that these songs are things that somehow just happen, as though Vile himself would be powerless to stop them, even if he wanted to.
But by all evidence Vile's slacker fantasy is, for now, purely aspirational. On Smoke Ring For My Halo and its attendant follow-up EP, So Outta Reach, each track is filled with finely-wrought lyrical and instrumental detail, displaying a level of craftsmanship that belies Vile's nonchalant delivery. Particularly entrancing are acoustic tracks like "Runner Ups" and "Peeping Tomboy", where Vile's delicate fingerpicked guitars can summon the spirit of his late, lamented compatriot Jack Rose. On "Jesus Fever" and "Society Is My Friend", he displays an admirable knack for offhanded melodic hooks that can embed themselves seamlessly into memory, ready to slink into the hum of daily life at a moment's notice. And though Vile's slippery drawl sounds ideally suited to deliver such self-deprecating nuggets as "My whole life's been one long running gag," this hangdog appearance can be deceptive. It's hard work making music this easy. --Matthew Murphy

15. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues [Sub Pop]

MP3: Fleet Foxes: "Grown Ocean"

In early 2009, Robin Pecknold rented a house about 50 miles north of Seattle to start work on Fleet Foxes' sophomore album. The folk-rockers' self-titled 2008 debut had already sold more than a half-million copies worldwide and topped various year-end lists (including Pitchfork's). Majestically updating age-old American folk music with well-chosen patches from Brian Wilson's ornate orchestral pop and the windswept contemporary indie rock of My Morning Jacket or Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes was a tough act to follow.

It took two years of obsessive tinkering, and at least temporarily cost Pecknold his girlfriend, but Helplessness Blues succeeds on an Ansel Adams scale. Musically, Fleet Foxes stay true to sun-dappled acoustic guitars and dewy choirboy harmonies, adding 1960s British psych-folk nuances and even a flurry of free-jazz skronk; fans of Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or Van Morrison's Astral Weeks should be on familiar ground. Where the debut's lyrics were timeless and impressionistic, however, Helplessness Blues' concerns are specific and of-the-moment. Out of a generation and an upbringing that insists on the unique specialness of every single person, Pecknold asks whether freedom might not, after all, be about more than rugged individualism.

Borrowing and stealing from a rich musical tradition, Helplessness Blues reminds us what's ours. In the process, it joins the pantheon of source material for some other young searcher to take and make new. As his earnest and idealistic narrator envisions at the end of the title track, Pecknold has become "like the man on the screen." --Marc Hogan

14. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up [Sub Pop]

MP3: Shabazz Palaces: "Swerve... The Reeping of All That Is Worthwhile (Noir Not Withstanding)"

Every generation gets the MF Doom it deserves. And the mercurial Metal Faced Villain, whose up-from-the-tombs resurrection re-wrote the template for enigmatic abstraction in hip-hop, has lain dormant long enough to create a vacuum for the role of veteran rap Lazarus.

Enter Shabazz Palaces, a Seattle duo whose creation myth invokes a totally different testament. They are led by the 40-ish Ishmael Butler, who was once known as Butterfly in Digable Planets, architects of eccentric smoke-wreathed cellar jazz. Currently, he's creating a cosmology rife with Nation of Islam imagery, old-time anarchistic Pacific Northwest politics, and an aesthetic as dense, dark, and drugged as tar opium.

Black Up expands upon Shabazz's interstellar EPs from 2009. Some song titles read like Dave Eggers conceiving imaginary chapters of Where the Wild Things Are: "The Kings New Clothes Were Made By His Own Hands", "An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum", "A treatise dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)". "Youlogy" ignores the last half-decade of backpack backlash by taking direct aim at the corporate machines and rappers in $700 Alexander McQueen jeans. Self-produced, the beats are wobbling and wind-lashed-- doom sounds over sulfurous rants worthy of W.E.B. Dubois. Shabazz Palaces snarl with the obverse image; the older gods reminding us that not only the young can lead rebellions. --Jeff Weiss

13. EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints [Souterrian Transmissions]
MP3: EMA: "Milkman"
Erika M. Anderson comes across as an artist out there on her own, difficult to lump into a scene, movement, or sound. Yes, she covered Nirvana, and her songs have the druggy, blues-tinged spiritual heaviness of grunge; yes, she sang about how bodies can hold harrowing memories, which rightly reminded some people of Courtney Love; and OK, the tone of her voice, direct and tough and confident but also tinged with sweetness and vulnerability, reminded some of Liz Phair. But Past Life resonated so deeply with what can fairly be described as a growing cult because there seemed to be so little standing between us and the music. The line of transmission seemed a little shorter, the narrative surrounding its creation a little less essential. EMA's debut didn't stand for anything, it just was.
Past Life may have been cathartic to make, but it felt less like a personal statement and more like an acknowledgment of shared understanding. Anderson's songs have blood and viscera and ache but they never feel like exhibitionism because we've felt these things, too. In "Red Star", the narrator evokes the cosmos as a relationship disintegrates, and the song builds and builds until the "like a red star" refrain becomes "like a blue scar." And then the album comes to an abrupt end. Blue scars are the ones that hurt, and the movement from infinite scale down into this small, private pain-- the absurdity of that juxtaposition-- is partly what gives Past Life its power. Ultimately, it's an album about exploration, and as a blur of faces and scenery moves by, the woman at the center struggles to figure out her place. And as we listen to her struggle, she helps us figure out ours. --Mark Richardson

Photo by Dan Wilton
12. James Blake: James Blake [A&M/Atlas]
James Blake: "Limit to Your Love":

What if someone had told you, in 2010, that James Blake would make one of the most commanding songwriter albums of 2011? At the time, Blake was known to us only as a mercurial young Londoner with a knack for fitting incompatible parts into elegant contraptions. Whether crafting liquid-crystal dubstep, phantasmal R&B, or introverted Teutonic techno, he could make broken-down mechanisms whir like Swiss clockwork. Still, we had no cause to suspect that Blake would be the one to pull ahead and give the emergent movement of moon-eyed electronic music a superlative statement.

In hindsight, though, you can see exactly how he got to his fierce debut LP: cautiously, by degrees of addition and subtraction, and in plain view. Once the authorial voice and piano crept in on his Klavierwerke EP, it was simply a matter of shifting the proportions, throwing big shadows across the wall. On this album, Blake did the one thing we didn't expect, giving it an aura of fearless exposure: He carefully extracted most of the dubstep and R&B, leaving behind cavities of space that he filled with his voice. But the unexpected breadth and eerie absences of Blake’s breakthrough were part of its magic, but only part. After the element of shock wore off, an uncanny aesthetic remained to be reckoned with. All year, the album lurked on the edge of my mind. It ceased to be an idea and became a place, where a single voice, falling, without direction or scale, became indistinguishable from the one in my own head. --Brian Howe

Photo by Tina Tyrell
11. St. Vincent: Strange Mercy [4AD]

MP3: St. Vincent: "Surgeon"

On her first two albums as St. Vincent, Annie Clark's signature instrument was her strong, clear, and expressive voice. Never indulging technical or emotional fireworks, she sang more from the brain than the gut, which made her pristinely orchestrated art-pop even more cerebral. But Strange Mercy finds St. Vincent paring down to a straightforward rock lineup in the studio, ditching the involved arrangements, and spotlighting the chaos of Clark's guitar: the choppy riffs of "Cruel", the sneaky punctuation of "Neutered Fruit", the solos that don't sound quite like solos, the themes that mushroom into uncomfortable shapes. "Chasing an abstraction," she called it earlier this year.

Her guitar doesn't upstage her voice so much as it becomes a slightly antagonistic duet partner, often taunting or contradicting her lyrics. Strange Mercy is always on its toes, always toying with some new idea, always building toward the oddly satisfying payoff. The song might be a narrative or an uncomfortable explication of the life of an indie rock artist, and the ambiguity, not to mention the ambivalence, stings. By totally embracing that off-kilter danger, Clark opened up a raw and brave new vocabulary. --Stephen Deusner

pitchfork continued...

2012-01-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

30. Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972
[Kranky]

Every year, the residents of Baker House, a dormitory near the Charles River on the MIT campus (officially Building W7), push a non-functioning, beyond-repair piano off the roof of the building. It falls six stories and lands near the tennis courts. The first Baker House Piano Drop, done in 1972, is captured in the photo on the cover of Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972. There's actually a unit of volume, the Bruno, named after the racket made by the impact.

Hecker chose the image because it reminded him of "digital garbage," and he set out to make an album that decayed right in front of the listener but never disappeared entirely. The basis for the album is a day's worth of organ recordings made in a Reykjavik cathedral; Hecker uses processors, synths, effects, and production techniques to encrust the pure tones of the organ in a prismatic swirl of crackling noise. These pieces have real body and movement, the organ piercing the noise like points of sun through a dense canopy. Hecker never gives us a literal recording of the piano drop, but you get the sense that this is what it would sound like, slowed down and stretched over fifty minutes, each splinter breaking free and wire snapping, leaving behind only the purest echo. --Joe Tangari
MP3: Tim Hecker: "The Piano Drop"

29. DJ Quik
The Book of David
[Mad Science]
"I don't give a fuck about you, you, her, him, that bitch, that nigga, y'all them," hisses DJ Quik on the very first line of his eighth album. To be fair, not many rappers will cop to "giving a fuck," but Quik is able to stay truer to his word than most. As the lone luminary of classic Compton who isn't off producing TBS sitcoms or spinning Dr. Pepper cans on his finger, Quik has both an audience and total autonomy.
That freedom is a rare, valuable commodity these days, and where last year he used it to release an album with fellow MC Kurupt that was as rewarding as it was experimental, in 2011 Quik rediscovered the comfort zone from where he produced a number of classic party albums, and from a listener's perspective that's a very good place for him to be. And though the backbone of The Book of David is those patented funky party records, it's when Quik lashes out at his doubters, his family, and Pharrell (!) on tracks like "Fire and Brimstone" and "Ghetto Rendezvous" that the album most comes alive. Rap will always be a young man's game, but this year the hardest and most fun rap album of the year came from a guy who is turning 42 in January. --Jordan Sargent

28. Cut Copy
Zonoscope
[Modular]
Relative to Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, the reaction to Zonoscope was muted. As good as the transcendent build-and-release of "Need You Now" was, when compared with the former LP's lead singles, it felt like a sidestep instead of a leap forward. But even if it didn't carry the shock of its predecessor, Zonoscope won out on the strength of Cut Copy's craftsmanship, showing just how skilled they are at adapting their influences and making them their own. So we got well-rendered moments: the Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac sheen of "Take Me Over" and the sunshine pop harmonies of "Where I'm Going" interlaced with songs full of sharp hooks, patient builds, and choruses that grew more ingratiating with every spin. And when Cut Copy experimented with songwriting structure, as on "Pharaohs & Pyramids", which mixed Chicago house with the group's new wave feel for melody, they were even better. Above all, Cut Copy showed that they know how to weave new songs from familiar touch-points and that they have the songwriting chops to make the patchwork feel of a piece. --David Drake
Cut Copy: "Need You Now":

27. Beyoncé
4
[Columbia]
If you're one of the most successful and talented people in the world and are married to another one of the most successful and talented people in the world, there's danger in releasing an album about how awesome your relationship is. But 4 works thematically because Beyoncé isn't bragging; she's singing about how she feels happy, at ease, and loved. Since that's all anybody really wants, who could be mad at it? Beyond that, the record is a showcase of what Mrs. Carter-Knowles does so well, which is collecting great beats, singing her lungs out over top of them, and offering something for everybody along the way. You've got the so-thumping-it's-almost-silly club banger ("Countdown"), the even-your-mom-loves-it tearjerker ("1+1"), the empowerment jam ("Best Thing I Never Had"), and a few more heaters. Personal contentment, it seems, has done wonders for her artistic restlessness. --Joe Colly

26. The Field
Looping State of Mind
[Kompakt]
To say the Field has only one trick is to miss the point. Yes, Axel Willner plies a very specific, idiosyncratic sound, spinning discreet micro-samples into fluffy ambient techno clouds. But not only is it an aesthetic worthy of repetition, it's also proven surprisingly pliable and expressive three albums on. Looping State of Mind can't recreate the surprise of From Here We Go Sublime, but it manages the considerable feat of synthesizing that album's cohesion of mood with the more opened-up sound and fleshed-out live instrumentation of Yesterday & Today, from the deep bassline that drops into the mid-tempo drift of "Is This Power" to the Matthew Dear-like vocal mumbles of "Burned Out". And while much of the album is content with gorgeous reiteration (centerpiece "Arpeggiated Love" is like the ur-Field song), it also sees Willner stretching his sound to some new limits: "Then It's White", with its patient, melancholy piano line, is possibly the softest thing the Field's ever done, which is saying a lot. Big change-ups are flashy, but in his career as in his tracks, the Field finds great potential in repetition, subtly varied. --Eric Grandy
MP3: The Field: "Then It's White"

25. Gang Gang Dance
Eye Contact
[4AD]
On 2008's Saint Dymphna, Gang Gang Dance made their most succinct set of statements to date. Their desire to sift a broad range of pan-global signifiers through concise pop frameworks continued on this year's Eye Contact, but it also found them building bridges to their past. The sprawling opener "Glass Jar" felt like a half step back to the spliced-up experimentation of 2005's Hillulah, where the rich seam of inspiration they were dipping into needed a greater expanse of time to properly come to fruition. But those echoes didn't prevent this relentlessly forward thinking group from evolving, particularly in the treatment of Lizzi Bougatsos' vocals, which were given more clarity than ever before. On tracks like the infectious "MindKilla", that brighter approach opened up the possibility of Gang Gang Dance functioning as an off-kilter pop act, ready to court a wider audience than the one they've patiently built over the past decade. It's something they haven't achieved yet, but judging from the manic joy of their live shows this year, in which Bougatsos fully embraced her frontwoman role, it stands to reason that the next album could push them further in that direction. --Nick Neyland
MP3: Gang Gang Dance: "Mindkilla"

24. Julianna Barwick
The Magic Place
[Asthmatic Kitty]
In the last decade, what's long been categorized as indie rock has metastasized toward the mainstream, a process that's been abetted by placement in soundtracks for bands from Bon Iver and Broken Social Scene to Iron & Wine and Imogen Heap. There are a dozen reasons for the incorporation of such artists into major motion pictures, not least of which is their collective feel for texture: As concerned with the song's surroundings as they are with the songs themselves, these bands engender atmosphere.
Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place seems like a natural fit for scores and such; the nine largely a cappella and generally wordless tracks of her second LP create five-minute windows into seemingly infinite worlds of sound, where one little melody bobs to strange rhythms. Indeed, music this pretty often runs the risk of being confined to scores, functioning more to affirm an on-screen moment's importance or majesty than to create it. But Barwick's correlated senses of timing, restraint, melody, and momentum shape their own drama. This is rare music for making even pedestrian gestures seem significant, for making the humdrum resonate newly with wonder. --Grayson Currin
MP3: Julianna Barwick: "The Magic Place"

23. Bill Callahan
Apocalypse
[Drag City]
"I watch 'David Letterman'… in Australia!" Bill Callahan has often written and sung about the distances between us, people and places and times in our life. He has not done so in a funnier or a truer way than on "America!", a song written from the throes of an international tour, where a late-night talk show is the only thing that can make you feel closer to home. But "America!" shapeshifts, from a lonely hotel room night cry into a spiraling self-examination of patriotism and military service. Callahan names names: Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Mickey Newbury, among others, by their rank and title, before muttering "I never served my country." The song, until then a gentle acoustic stroll, spiders out into distorted, unconstructed riffs. It's a damned strange and wonderful song, one that is both searching and goofy, violent and interior, incisive and oblique. So, you know, a Bill Callahan song.
After 14 albums, Apocalypse marks a great moment of clarity for Callahan-- he's never sung better or with more strength, his wobbly voice now a tough, controlled baritone. Apocalypse-- a title that seems as much about the incineration of the world around us as it does a cruel joke about overusing that word to describe things that aren't so bad-- has just seven songs. But there is gravitas, a heaviness in each of them, even when things get dependably strange-- flutes! whistling! whimsical punctuation!-- as on the hepcat gambol "Free's". That song is followed by the heaviest of all, "One Fine Morning", a hall of fame Callahan number (few else could get away with the grandiosity of imagery) that's nearly nine minutes long. It finds him singing, optimistically, "We're gonna ride out in a country kind of silence." --Sean Fennessey
Bill Callahan: "Riding For the Feeling":

22. The Caretaker
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
[History Always Favours the Winners]
Can the simple addition of vinyl crackle turn a jaunty tune into a melancholy listen? How long can you repeat a snatch of melody before the happiness drains away and it turns faintly unnerving? Is it possible to create a sense of something's-not-right-here eeriness through the kind of music that once got your great-grandparents slow dancing? Leyland Kirby's Caretaker project sets out to answer these questions.
Inspired by both the mental disintegration of Alzheimer's disease and the ballroom sequences in Kubrick's version of The Shining, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World evokes haunted heads more than haunted houses. Kirby uses the simplest materials-- short samples taken from literally warped LPs of romantic standards and static-ridden 78s of 1920s dance band music-- to create music that carries an almost unbearable sense of loss. And the surface fuzz becomes an inadvertent instrument in its own right. Foregrounding it, Kirby adds texture and variety to those brief instrumental phrases, and as with artists like Philip Jeck, he realizes that vinyl noise now carries its own unique emotional charge. Combined with Kirby's evocative song titles, Empty Bliss conjure an elderly listener replaying the same old favorite, over and over, as they struggle to get back to the joy they felt hearing it for the first time. --Jess Harvell
MP3: The Caretaker: "Tiny Gradiations of Loss"

21. Jay-Z / Kanye West
Watch the Throne
[Def Jam/Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation]

At a time when economic disparity seems to bisect every cultural and political paradigm, the least sensitive thing you could possibly do-- aside from declare pizza a vegetable-- would be to release a record that often reads like a Kardashian sister's letter to Santa tucked into a gold-embossed Riccardo Tisci envelope. But remember, we're dealing with two professionals here, both smart enough to know that rap as reality is as important as rap as escapism. Watch the Throne may have felt wretchedly excessive at times, but as anyone who can attest to getting down to "Niggas in Paris" seven or eight or nine (or ten!) times in a row can tell you, it's sure fun to play dress-up to. Maybe there was something in the more relatable elements presented here-- ruminations on the price of fame, fatherhood, and race-- that lead us to take momentary respite from this embarrassment of riches and try to grasp the bigger picture. Maybe not: For these guys, overblown excess is a rewarding means unto itself. --Zach Kelly

more of the best of 2011

2012-01-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

40. AraabMuzik
Electronic Dream
[Duke]
One of the predominant themes in the electronic music of 2011 was the incorporation of previously unfashionable, even unthinkable elements and styles into existent genres. But no one took a more literal stab at it than Dipset-affiliated producer AraabMuzik and his album Electronic Dream, which throws his memorable MPC antics right on top of entire trance songs. Kaskade, Jam & Spoon, Ian van Dahl: this is the real stuff, not just slyly winking hints.
There was a precedent for this, particularly the Dipset Trance Party mixtapes, but Electronic Dream exhibits a new level of directness, calling modern hip-hop's dance-obsessed bluff. The effect of Araab's MPC demolition is more hazy than rousing, the anxious, palpitating heartbeat at the center of it all, manipulating trance's preoccupation with ecstasy and pitching songs down wholesale. Kaskade's "Streetz Tonight" is rendered a burnt-out lullaby, and the jittery coke high of "Lift Off" is the farthest thing from trance's usual warm and fuzzy embrace. A lot of artists tried to make cotton-candy riffs and fist-pumping melodies acceptable in 2011, and AraabMuzik did it transparently enough to make even the staunchest of snobs reconsider aversions to the big and obvious stuff. --Andrew Ryce
AraabMuzik: "I Remember":

39. The War on Drugs
Slave Ambient
[Secretly Canadian]
Slave Ambient is both an organic, flowing record born from experimentation and an album where individual tunes can stand alone as anthems. So atmospheric interludes like "Original Slave" and "The Animator" bump against songs like "Brothers" and "Baby Missiles", which have more structured melodies and well-defined verses. The result is a big album that's lined with subtle tinges of percussion and noise that give it shape. And then there are the expansive tracks that grow and bleed into each other until they reach moments like the "Come to the City" suite, where War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel drawls out the album's thesis statement: "I've been ramblin'." --Evan Minsker
MP3: The War on Drugs: "Baby Missiles"

38. Sandro Perri
Impossible Spaces
[Constellation]
Toronto-based Sandro Perri has been following his whims for a decade now, from the addled drones of Polmo Polpo to the hairy disco of Glissandro 70. He once released an album as a tribute to an Arthur Russell side project (Dinosaur L), while a solo EP, Plays Polmo Polpo, re-imagined his own work. Perri, it seems, is an artist for whom identity is a state of flux, not a resting place. Impossible Spaces teases out the whimsy, contentment, and anxiety of that instability. He prods with buzzing, precise orchestration, and a guitar that sounds cleansed by a Brita filter. Honey-voiced like the Sea and Cake's Sam Prekop, nervously poetic like Russell, Perri is a sober, Sunday crooner. He spends a 10-minute song empathizing with a "wolfman," which is perfect: Perri is constantly on the verge of crisis, an experience he is likely to find pleasantly challenging. Near the end of the ascendant "How Will I?" he centers himself: "Ah, I get closer to the flame/ And panning out in all directions I seem to want to come back to a simple refrain... How will I give?" The message, from an artist as open and warm as Perri, stings: Plausible spaces can be just as taxing as the impossible ones. --Andrew Gaerig
Sandro Perry: "Changes":

37. Iceage
New Brigade
[What's Your Rupture?]
The early buzz around Iceage focused on the age of the band members, the lack of information about the group, and the fact that folks tend to leave their shows with bloody noses. These Danes are teenagers, sure, but anyone who went to high school after the guitar was invented shouldn't be surprised to learn that 18- and 19-year-olds are making dark, nihilistic music. The blood? That's what happens at punk shows. And there was a time, not long ago, when you didn't know everything about a band before they'd even released a 7".
The most important thing to know about Iceage is that they gave us this near-perfect, 12-song, 24-minute debut LP, a collection that nails the blasted, chaotic energy of UK post-punk and the midnight ambiance of 1980s goth and California death rock and adds no-wave wrapped hooks delivered by baby-faced, vacant-eyed frontman Elias Rønnenfelt, a guy who basically wandered out of some early Dennis Cooper novel. Rather than telling us about Iceage, the talk surrounding the band only highlighted what had been missing in underground music as of late, and New Brigade helped fill that void. --Brandon Stosuy
MP3: Iceage: "New Brigade"

36. Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
[Anti-/Fish People]

50 Words for Snow begins with a thirty-five minute triptych of never-quite-resolving piano figures, barely-there percussion, and Kate Bush's warm, generous middle-register vocals disappearing into the landscape that provides this album's thematic and sonic framework. She communes with a snowflake, watches a ghost in Lake Tahoe, and makes love to a snowman, but the oddity of these scenarios recedes before the sensuousness of the performances, less like the falling of snow than the slow undulation of water. Compared to these mysterious pinnacles, Bush seems less comfortable in the once familiar terrain of relationship melodrama or the delight of language. It's as if, having now crossed over into the world of nature that she began to explore on her previous album, Aerial, the human has become a foreign country. But if she never comes back, then this self-loss is our gain: The further Kate Bush drifts into pared-back, elemental simplicity, the clearer it becomes that there is no one else in popular music like her. --Tim Finney

35. Frank Ocean
Nostalgia, Ultra.
[self-released]
Chris Breaux, who goes by Frank Ocean, is a male R&B singer with male R&B contradictions: As much as he wants to listen to his heart, he can't completely ignore his dick. He covers a Coldplay ballad about childhood with absolute dedication but ends it with the rude sound of an alarm clock: The dream is over. A minute later, he's back in a mutually destructive relationship, and has the guts to remind himself that he got what he wanted. The cover of the album features a striking orange 1980s BMW, but on "Swim Good", he's stuck driving a Lincoln Town Car over a cliff. In a skit called "Bitches Talkin'", the ladies tell him to cut it out with the damn Radiohead; in "Songs For Women", he obliges-- he's an indie kid when it comes to alienation but a pragmatist when it comes to sex. The boy in him wails, the adult wins out. The victory-- if you can call it that-- is bittersweet. --Mike Powell
MP3: Frank Ocean: "Songs For Women"

34. Katy B
On a Mission
[Columbia/Rinse]
The club has been the preferred setting of pop for a while now. Not any specific club, you understand: "the club" in the abstract-- a virtual territory where almost-real avatars of our stars can pose, brag, flirt, and fuck. So the first reason to love Katy B is that she makes clubbing suddenly real again, writing songs like "Katy on a Mission" and "Lights On" that are warmly observed miniatures of how wonderful, funny, and occasionally sad going out can be. Their easy candor carries over into her songs about relationships. She is fascinated by liminal moments-- the anticipation at the start of a night; the points where attraction and danger meet-- and has a light, lilting voice far better suited to nuance than grandstanding. And she's a tour guide for London nightlife, from the bubblegum dubstep of "Perfect Stranger" to the brisk UK funky of "Why You Always Here" and the jazzy soul of closer "Hard To Get". Katy B went to the same stage school as Adele, and like her 21, On a Mission mixes the artful and the personal-- but it's as proudly modernist as Adele is soaked in tradition. --Tom Ewing

33. Fucked Up
David Comes to Life
[Matador]
You can think of Canadian bomb squad Fucked Up as legal masterminds, finding one loophole after another in the draconian protocols of hardcore punk: You never said we couldn't write a metafictional rock opera. You never said we couldn't overdub Rubber Soul-type twelve-string lead guitar. You never said we couldn't use extra voices that sing harmonies instead of screaming. You never said... Or you can just give yourself over to the riffs of this massive project, and the way they send maniacal singer Pink Eyes hurtling toward its involuted plot like a huge, bald Angry Bird. Named after a song that's been in their repertoire for years, David's conceptual hyper-abundance spills over beyond the album itself to the delightful David's Town LP (a compilation of "early-80s British D.I.Y. bands" in various modes, all of whom are Fucked Up themselves) and a string of related singles (in the course of which they smash David's fourth wall). And anyway, they seem to like their draconian protocols just fine: Note that every song on David has a three-word title. You never said the old rules had to be the only ones. --Douglas Wolk
MP3: Fucked Up: "The Other Shoe"

32. Panda Bear
Tomboy
[Paw Tracks]
Hymns are designed to unite a crowd of people in praise, aiming for a communal religious trance through the power of group vocalization. On Tomboy, Noah Lennox tests whether a congregational spirit can still be achieved by a single voice slathered with enough multi-tracked harmonies and reverb, a chorus of one worshipping secular matters.
Reviving the compact confessions of Young Prayer and filtering-- and filtering, and filtering-- them through the textures of Person Pitch, Lennox limits his psychedelic excursions to the borders of the home this time around. Overlapping layers of voices and hand-claps try to drown out the dark burbles and rhythmic undercurrents that nibble at each song's foundation. Instead of the pagan freak-out of his other band, Tomboy is a humanist hymnal, full of self-motivating mantras and introspection about growing old and distant from the world. Taking direct instructions for life-- "you can count on me," "got to do what you've got to do"-- and magnifying them with cathedral acoustics gives them a secular spirituality, finding God in the details of everyday life, leaning on echo to feel less alone. --Rob Mitchum
Panda Bear: "Afterburner":

31. Ty Segall
Goodbye Bread
[Drag City]
Volume has long been Ty Segall's thing, but craftsmanship? Eh, not so much. But on his Drag City debut, Goodbye Bread, the San Francisco-based garage rocker dials back his pop-destructive impulses and shows off his softer side. As singer-songwriters go, Segall is closer to Alex Chilton than Bob Dylan. These are lurching and cacophonous tunes that place a premium on psychedelic gristle, but Goodbye Bread's best moments are possessed of an emotional breadth that has, up until now, been lacking in Segall's oeuvre. The falsetto-driven title track drips with the sweetness of a faded T. Rex record, while the record's heavier excursions, like "The Floor", could have slipped onto the B-side of Nirvana's Bleach. Goodbye Bread is where we learned that, in addition to being a cathartic rocker, Segall is a skilled purveyor of sludgy grooves and stoner romance. --Aaron Leitko
Ty Segall: "Goodbye Bread":

The Top 50 Albums of 2011 PITCHFORK

2012-01-02T12:23:00.001-08:00

The Top 50 Albums of 2011

We count down our favorite records of the year.

By Pitchfork

Our year in music coverage continues with our Top 50 Albums of the year. The full list, including nos. 20-1, is up today.
Be sure to check out yesterday's list of Honorable Mentions. Beyond that, we've had the Top 100 Tracks, The Year in Photos, The Best of Pitchfork.tv, The Worst Album Covers, and The Top Music Videos.
We won't have any record reviews in the next two weeks but we will be updating with Guest List: Best of 2011, The Year in News, The Pitchfork Guide to New Year's Eve, and other features, news, tracks, and videos.
Thanks for reading Pitchfork this year and we'll return to reviews and regular updates on January 3rd.

50. Youth Lagoon
The Year of Hibernation
[Fat Possum/Lefse]
At first, you feel kind of embarrassed for Trevor Powers: Sure, he's just a kid from Boise, but doesn't he realize what he's up against in 2011? A record called The Year of Hibernation from an act called Youth Lagoon is the sort of thing cynics will surely bury alive if they don't ignore it first, especially if it's filled with warbling synths, faraway vocals, and cover art that purchased the essence of 1983 from the App Store. But at the risk of praising The Year of Hibernation as a triumph of naivety, Powers' debut LP made a real and lasting connection like few other records in the past 12 months. It's half an hour of nothing but heart: explosive crescendos straining against the limitations of its production budget, melodies and guitar scribbles drawn in permanent ink but smudged by reverb, overwhelming feelings about escape and heartbreak rendered with simplicity and warmth when most of his peers were content to sing about nothing much at all. The lesson here: Never underestimate the power of emo. --Ian Cohen
MP3: Youth Lagoon : "July"

49. Wild Flag
Wild Flag
[Merge]
In the continual 1990s Memory Lane cruise that was 2011, Wild Flag managed to sidestep the pitfalls of nostalgia. It was no small feat for a group that pulls all four of its members from some of that decade's best guitar bands: Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony of Helium and Autoclave, and Rebecca Cole of the Minders. But rather than looking back, Wild Flag aims for something timeless. It's a record of passion, liberation, and friendship that fuses 70s punk and careful hints of new wave, full of jagged riffs and psychedelic keys, alternating between Brownstein's fiery howls and Timony's cool drawl. Even with saccharine lifer anthems like "Romance", the album's brightest moments come when you'd least expect them. Timony's mid-tempo rocker "Something Came Over Me" is full of wah-wah riffs and resonant lines ("I feel faint but never weak") while the Brownstein-led "Future Crimes" is urgent and forward-moving, full of repetitive, angular minor chords and ferocious 4/4 beatkeeping that build to a definitive final line: "If you're gonna give up on the fight, then I'm gonna call you a liar!" Words to believe in, especially this year. --Jenn Pelly

48. Toro Y Moi
Underneath the Pine
[Carpark]
If you're a promising young artist partly responsible for turning a Hipster Runoff punchline into a viable (but still often maligned) subgenre, what do you do in order to stand out? Do you chart a course in a different direction, or hope that the wheat will eventually separate from the chaff? Chaz Bundick escaped the increasingly long shadow of chillwave by getting a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and (temporarily) throwing his computer out of the window. Anchored by live drums and Bundick's knack for rhythm, Underneath the Pine fuses disco and breezy soft rock with springtime warmth and blooming psychedelic flourishes. With its lively performances and arrangements brimming with color, the album shows that Bundick's musical talent is as strong as his ear for production-- a pleasant surprise for whoever thought his style was destined to go the way of electroclash. --Martin Douglas

47. Sepalcure
Sepalcure
[Hotflush]
In an interview with The Guardian last month, Hotflush boss Scuba named "Outside", the closing song from bass music duo Sepalcure's self-titled debut LP, as the song he would want to open his next DJ set with. It's a strange choice for a set opener-- "Outside" is beatless, essentially four minutes of drone and clipped voices-- but then again, not much about Sepalcure makes sense in the constant forward-thinking climate of bass music circa 2011. As an album, it doesn't really do anything new, and a few of the signifiers that Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma plunder on Sepalcure were, to some, reaching their expiration dates-- specifically, the use of pitched vocals that Stewart liberally splayed on his album this year as Machinedrum, Room(s). Part of what makes Sepalcure such a deeply enjoyable listen is how familiar it all is, pogoing between juke-derived textures, IDM's click-clack machinery, misty pastoral ambience, and house music's 4/4 insistence while weaving a web of shivering romance that still manages to move bodies. Above all else, Sepalcure offers a necessary reminder that, yeah, change is good, but elegant, refined perfection also has its place. --Larry Fitzmaurice
MP3: Sepalcure: "I'm Alright"

46. Cults
Cults
[In the Name Of/Columbia]

It's not hard to see why detractors might have underestimated Cults. Young bands with a catchy tune or two aren't exactly rare, and it's only natural to assume the appeal of a sugary-sweet pop song won't last longer than your average rush. The presence of sampled audio from actual cult leaders could understandably strike some critics as gimmicky, too. But still! Even on early internet hits "Go Outside" and "Oh My God", Cults' songs were more multi-faceted than skeptics acknowledged, their hooks barbed with alternate meanings, their core sound enriched by unexpected influences.

The self-titled debut from the New York-via-San Diego duo of Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion confidently underscored their subtle complexity, balancing 1960s girl-group winsomeness with the darker impulses that lay beneath the best songs from that world, fleshed out with elements from shoegaze, post-punk, and contemporary pop. Best of all, each song was a potential sleeper hit in its own right, from kidnapping fable "Abducted" to break-up back-and-forth "Bumper". A recent remix with Freddie Gibbs even showed all Cults' talk about loving hip-hop was for real, while at the same time reinforcing the album's theme about the inherent danger of escapism-- whether into a cult or into pop music. --Marc Hogan
MP3: Cults: "Go Outside"

45. Kendrick Lamar
Section.80
[Top Dawg]
Whether due to the encroaching influence of indie and punk or the ascendance of Tumblr culture, amateurism in hip-hop was often hailed as a virtue this year. But Kendrick Lamar ran counter to this trend. It isn't just that he's a technically skilled rapper, although he can certainly hold his own in that department; it's that experience and technique allowed his personality to shine through. Much like other artists in his Black Hippy crew, Lamar's skills feel like byproducts of the discovery of his own voice, and they've allowed him to make things work that might have-- and often did-- fall apart in other rapper's hands. From the slowed, space-y Drake-like production of "A.D.H.D." to the stoned sing-song of "Chapter Six" to "Rigamortus"'s throwback jazzy horn loop, he had an overarching vision and the deftness of ability to pull it off. --David Drake

44. Colin Stetson
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
[Constellation]
For indie rock fans, it was almost impossible to avoid seeing Colin Stetson wielding his gigantic bass saxophone at some point during 2011. It felt like he was in more than one place at one time, either guesting with LCD Soundsystem, Bon Iver, and Arcade Fire, or heading out on his own to bring the blacked-out beauty of Judges to life. This album felt like a haven for Stetson to retreat into, a place of sanctuary away from the mass audience his sax-for-hire reputation brought him. His ability to be everywhere at once is matched by the alchemical nature of his craft, where it frequently sounds like he's blowing great lumps of iron ore out of his instrument. The desolate nature of the music on Judges makes it feel like he's the loneliest guy in the world, assembling a great wall of machine noise as a buffer from some untold real-life tribulations. Stetson is a runner who finds elation in the pain physical exercise brings, and his music functions in a similar manner-- if you listen up-close to this album you can hear him huffing and puffing away, creating a taxing whirl of intensity that never lets up. --Nick Neyland
MP3: Colin Stetson: "Fear of the Unknown and the Blazing Sun [ft. Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden]"

43. Lykke Li
Wounded Rhymes
[Atlantic/LL]
In the three years since she released her debut-- 2008's searching and peculiar Youth Novels-- Swedish songwriter Lykke Li got tougher, more commanding: Wounded Rhymes is an aggressive, sometimes brutal meditation on sex and love and the complicated ways they intersect. Li traded in any lingering coyness ("I think I'm a little bit in love with you," she once chirped) for force: "Like a shotgun/ Needs an outcome/ I'm your prostitute/ You gon' get some," she intones here, her voice unapologetic. Wounded Rhymes is deliberate and rhythmic where Youth Novels was moony-eyed, and Li wears her newfound confidence well, bolstering it with heavy drums and big choruses. Her vocals are deep and grainy, even when she's confessing her devotion. Somehow, Li manages to make lyrical declarations like "Sadness is my boyfriend" and "My love is unrequited" sound perfectly self-possessed. --Amanda Petrusich
Lykke Li: "I Follow Rivers":

42. SBTRKT
SBTRKT
[Young Turks]
Bass music continued to mutate in a million different directions in 2011-- perhaps the surest sign of its unpredictability is the fact that no one has come up with a better term than "bass music" to describe the broader spectrum of dubstep and its discontents. No album better captured this world's sense of possibility than the self-titled debut album from SBTRKT, a journeyman producer and remixer who found his voice by combining lithe grooves grounded in dubstep, garage, and UK funky with economical pop melodies.
Just 43 minutes long, it's a modest record. There's no gatefold sprawl, none of the progressive pyrotechnics that often accompany British underground sounds aimed at crossing over. In fact, it's more coherent than it should be, given the number of vocalists it employs: Roses Gabor, Jessie Ware, Sampha, and Yukimi Nagano and her bandmates from Little Dragon. But from Nagano's squeakily sultry soul to Sampha's smoky James Blake-isms, SBTRKT excels at fusing his singers' idiosyncrasies with his own variable sound-world, by turns lush and jagged. There was no shortage of strong singles, either, from "Wildfire"-- which Drake anointed with his own remix-- to "Right Thing to Do", a perfect example of UK garage that went far beyond mere revivalism. --Philip Sherburne
MP3: SBTRKT: "Wildfire [ft. Little Dragon]"

41. Liturgy
Aesthethica
[Thrill Jockey]

In the last two years, detractors have been all over Liturgy founder and frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. Especially after making Aesthethica, the year's most debated and arguably most redemptive metal album, he's been ridiculed as the epitome of a Brooklyn metal hipster and blasted as a self-aggrandizing loudmouth. Liturgy is indeed comprised of musicians who look like people working at your favorite neighborhood bar. And Hunt-Hendrix published his theories on the advancement of black metal, first presented as a lecture, as a short book subtitled "A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism" earlier this year.

But Aesthethica thrives on that kind of conviction. The tidal drum-and-guitar swell at the close of "Returner", the automatic rage of "Generation", the blissful build of the album's stoner metal aberration, "Veins of God"-- when they're happening, Liturgy makes these moments feel like the most important things in the world, as if rock'n'roll itself has been waiting since its inception to be played with such belief. Hunt-Hendrix isn't an especially great black metal vocalist. Here, though, he hurls his words with the mania of a revolutionary and the spirit of a rebel. Time will tell if he's either; Aesthethica at least stands any test of now. --Grayson Currin
MP3: Liturgy: "Generation"

Quick Spins from Marquee Magazine

2012-01-02T12:18:00.001-08:00

Quick Spins – January, 2012

Marquee Magazine

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans
Burn What You Can, Bury The Rest…
Independent
4 out of 5 stars
All of the artists that have struggled and toiled to release their debut album must hate Bradley Wik and the Charlatans, because their debut, due out mid-month, sounds like an effortless undertaking.
Burn What You Can, Bury The Rest… has the feeling of a seasoned group putting out an album so strong that it must have had years of road testing behind it. Falling somewhere between Whiskeytown and Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Wik and his Charlatans have wonderfully blended alt country and ’70s rock with Midwest storytelling. The album is sincere, warm, and lush and sets the stage for the group to do wonders from this great starting point.

alt-country movement !!!! yes!

2011-12-26T22:09:00.000-08:00

http://smalltakeover.blogspot.com/2011/11/bradley-wik-and-charlatans-burn-what.html

I admit that I know near to nothing about the alt-country movement and wasn't even sure if I should use a hyphen or a full stop in the sub-genre's abbreviated name. My knowledge starts with John Doe and ends right at Drag The River. Uncle Tupelo and Wilco have largely gone ignored by this writer due to personal taste defining most of it as just plain boring.

Both of my ears pricked up when I heard Bradley Wik and The Charlatans and it wasn't just because I thought the UK indie band had immigrated to the states. There's an attention grabbing gravelly raw country in the voice which melodically emotes "The Dark Lovely". Just try listening to "66 Chevelle" without thinking of Springsteen, the Boss comes through in both Bradley's voice and the lyrics which resonate with fond remembrance of long gone younger days.
And many Night/s I’ve tried to go back to our younger days/
Listenin’ to the Stones in her daddy’s car/ Out on some Lost Highway
And we’d just pull that car off to the side of the road/
And we’d drink and we’d kiss and we’d talk about the future.

Bradley Wik represents the average working man from first hand knowledge in "Friday Night is for the Drinkers" It's hard to fathom many who can't relate to the last lines even if it was many years ago:

Friday Night is for the Drinkers trying to shake off the
week/And Saturday Night is for all the Boys and Girls trying to
find someplace new to sleep.

"This Old House" and "I am Not Afraid" use the backing vocals of Brianne Kathleen effectively as the two voices interlock but it's still clear exactly who is the main player. There's a soul completely stripped naked in "Just Like John Fickes" demonstrating song-writing, which is capable of storytelling without getting lost in narrative and losing the song part.

I have been depriving myself if this is anything like what Uncle Tupelo and Wilco sound like and those punk bands I've heard who want to sound like Springsteen should listen to this and take notes. Though I would suggest changing the name of the band but that's only because I have prior knowledge of the UK indie rockers. This album will strongly appeal to fans of Steve Earle and Bruce Springsteen plus a lot of alt.country fans. See, I'm still not sure about the sub-genre's shortened form.

4/5

There's a sneak peak of the album on this site.

Gunslinger will be taking its live show to the Avalon this Saturday Dec. 24th w/ Infected Mushroom

2011-12-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Gunslinger will be taking its live show to the Avalon this Saturday Dec. 24th along with friends Infected Mushroom and DJ Wolfie. Its the only game in town Christmas Eve so put grandma to bed early and get down there! Reply back to have your name on the discount list before 11pm

“As electronica evolves, groundbreaking dance acts such as Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, and Deadmau5 have all shifted gears by including singers and song structure in their most recent releases. Gunslinger approaches the evolution edgeways, first writing the songs on guitar, then producing electronically, and ultimately telling a deeper story. Anthem, Vidal, and CwhitE — aka Gunslinger — is electronica 2012: epic melodies, ethereal lyrics, and enough kick-and-bass to keep everyone dancing till sunrise. Christmas Eve, the critically-acclaimed musicians perform songs from their most recent Last Gang release, Early Volumes 1, alongside Infected Mushroom.”
And a little press from the hipsters doesn't hurt either ;) http://flavorpill.com/losangeles/events/2011/12/24/gunslinger

Like, love, hate, share @ http://www.facebook.com/L.A.Gunslinger

Julian Hooper, Flavorpill

Note:

North Texas’ top five albums of 2011

2011-12-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

We believe that musical albums are like books: Each song is a chapter, and many of those chapters need to speak to each other -- to tell a story or stir some sort of emotion. A great album is intriguing from start to finish. Here are five such albums, plus two bonus discs that you should know about:

YouTube

St. Vincent in the video "Cruel"

5. Strange Mercy by St. Vincent: Annie Clark has been a celebrated musician in the underground indie scene for quite some time, and the release of her third album has further cemented that appreciation. Clark seemingly knows what she wants and is willing to wait for it, explaining the two-year gap between records. The almost muffled style she creates is hypnotic. Standout tracks are “Surgeon” and “Cheerleader.”

4. Between the Two by The O’s: The DFW area has come to know and love these two witty musicians who put on as much of a show between songs as they do while playing. Their newest record continues the contagiously sunny mindset John Pedigo and Taylor Young display regularly. Multiple tracks speak of good times and good friends, bringing a brighter day to anyone listening. And the accompanying videos for tracks like “In Numbers We Survive” and “We’ll Go Walkin” add an extra flair to the strong album.

3. Black Waxy by Oil Boom: In its simplest form, Black Waxy is sexy. Lead singer Ryan Taylor’s voice drips with passion, and behind him, you hear buzzing guitar licks, Dugan Conners' heavy drum beats, and Steve Steward’s provocative bass lines.
The album is like a night of dirty doings on the town -- like an alluring woman who is wrong in all the right ways and you just can’t help yourself. Black Waxy is our guilty pleasure, and it should be yours too.

Seryn

2. This Is Where We Are by Seryn: The soft melodies and sweeping harmonies start quietly, curiously leading you in to a warm, safe place, but when the choruses soar to beautiful heights, that is when Seryn's album This Is Where We Are will have you hooked. We've been ensnarled in the band's acoustically pleasing music ever since. From the moment the first track begins to the last note on the final song, you will be left in a peaceful fog.

Burning Hotels' new album, Burning Hotels

1. Burning Hotels by Burning Hotels: The Fort Worth duo re-created themselves while writing and recording the sophomore album, adding depth and altered instrumentation to the self-titled record. This re-invention took a year and a half to fully manifest, proving that Chance Morgan and Matt Mooty’s dedication was right where it needed to be. The result is a stunning display of thought-out lines and glittering melodies that continue to grab the listener throughout the short, eight-song record. This album is a must-have.
Honorable mentions:

emilyriddle.bandcamp.com

Emily Riddle

To the album you haven't heard of: Let it Shine by Emily Riddle: This sweet 19-year old will connect with you through her soft, ukulele-driven tunes. Riddle has already released two albums in her young age, and her sophomore album Let it Shine came out in October. It’s amazing how easy it is for Riddle to paint vibrant portraits with the calmest of tempos and almost whispered words. Surprisingly, most of the hearty tracks are cheerful in nature despite their melancholy delivery. With only a few years under her belt, it will be great to see what more Riddle has in store.

Fishboy

To the album with the best story: Classic Creeps by Fishboy: 2011 saw one of Denton’s most creative entities produce his best work to date. Classic Creeps combines the two great passions of Eric Michener, curator of Fishboy. The album is a collection of pop gems set to the intermingled story of 10 “Creeps” through a harrowing tale of kidnapping and time travel. And of course, since he is the creature of a delightful and true-to-life comic series, Michener made a full storyboard to go along with the album.

The Janks “Hands of Time”

2011-12-21T22:01:00.001-08:00

Sprouted Records

Certainly unique

The Janks have ambition in spades. They have great ability, and they have imagination. This epic is an attempt to step beyond the norms and incorporate some new influences into that pleasant, harmonic Fleet Foxes kind of Americana.
And so it takes inspiration predominantly from two giants of late 60s/ early 70s music: the Californian sound of harmonic country-pop and the growlier, and less fashionable sound of prog. Both styles were rather good at the pursuit of “money and sex”, as ‘Rat Racers’ would have it, and both also vulnerable to moments of self indulgence. But in other respects, they’re not natural bedfellows. The Janks make a really good effort to create something from these, and other parts, and the ambition is laudable.
Stand out tracks are the weighty ‘Dead Man’, a bit of Californian grunge-folk, but at times, the record drags: as the first half ends, there’s a ballad too many before they kick out again. The desire for story-telling starts to wear by the end of the record so it’s hard to treat tracks like ‘child prodigy’ as serious rather than comic.
It feels like a stricter, meaner producer might have done some weeding, for the greater good of the record. This is not the finished product, but the next album by The Janks would be one to look out for.
Lynne Pettinger

8/10

cool gift for music friend! a pick punch!

2011-12-20T12:21:00.001-08:00

http://coolmaterial.com/accessories/pick-punch/

Pick Punch

Every guy picks up a guitar for the first time with the sole purpose of getting girls. It starts in a dorm room somewhere, as you awkwardly try to make your way through Stairway to Heaven, and, for those with enough determination, it ends on a huge stage with scores women waiting for you to finish your set. Whether you’re a pro or you’re still putting calluses on your fingertips, you’re most likely going through bucket-loads of picks. With the Pick Punch, you’ve got a new pick waiting for you just about anywhere. The Pick Punch looks like a hole punch, but instead of punching little tiny holes in loose-leaf that somehow wind up all over your clothes, it punches new guitar picks. Old bus pass? That’s a pick. Soda bottle? That’s a pick too. Shoe-obsessed girlfriend’s credit card? Definite pick. $25

Magnuson – Crash of Cassini 2011

2011-12-20T12:17:00.000-08:00

Magnuson – Crash of Cassini 2011
http://figgzillamusic.com/?p=527

1. Dark Reality
2. Real Control
3. Blame
4. Dying To See
5. Somewhere
6. Stars Collide
7. Let Me Go
8. The Scout
9. Never Know
10. Forever Saturday
11. Fear & Deception
12. Vibration Girl
13. Here & Now
14. Strange Lights

Finally, music weird people can dance to. Its a very haunting, spacy, eclectic, to start off with the song Dark Reality when the rest of the album is so much more in your face and rockin. I thought that track would set the tone for the whole album but luckily I was wrong, it gets frickin down, immediately. Very unique, hard to classify, lovingly creepy music. The band is a TWO piece, yet fills the room like a 6 pack. Its an album I wished I had on vinyl, its just that type of rough-clean I like in my progressive, experimental, indie rock. I like it, but its not for everyone, as its different, and different is good people. And if you can catch them live, do it, they are amazing.
RATING: 4 of 5

Rags and Ribbons have a real ace up their sleeve, and that's sheer musical talent

2011-12-18T13:14:00.000-08:00

Rags & Ribbons' The Glass Masses on CD

http://thevinylanachronist.blogspot.com/2011/12/rags-ribbons-glass-masses-on-cd.html

Over the last few years I've been deliberate and thorough in my search for new music, resisting that "filling-in-holes-in-my-collection" mentality that comes from getting on in years and becoming locked in the rather misguided view that when it comes to rock, there's absolutely nothing new under the sun. Certainly my first instinct on a first listen to an unknown performer is to find the specific musical genre that fits, mostly so I can introduce a "RIYL" to my reasders, but I'm so tired of that type of thinking. In the last year or so I've noticed that the truly great new performers aren't reinventing the wheel of rock and roll, but devising an alchemy where familiar sounds are combined in a way that's absolutely novel. Think about Fleet Foxes or, even better, the Black Keys.

These thoughts sprinted through my mind about ten minutes into Rags & Ribbon's new CD, The Glass Masses. I couldn't quite resist playing a quick round of "Who does this remind me of?" when I heard this ambitious, theatrical and downright fun album, and I came up with Muse first, and maybe Queen second. The decidedly melodramatic vocals, delivered mostly in harmonies between keyboardist Jonathan Hicks and guitarist Ben Weyerhauser, have that same sort of sad Russian-esque folk strains of the latter while maintaining a fluid litany of Classical-strength piano runs as Freddie Mercury at his most deranged. (Drummer Chris Neff fleshes out the expansive sound of this far-reaching trio.) Yet this exciting sound is evocative of a time than derivative of a style, and it's probably been at least a couple of decades since you heard this all before. In other words, it's a cop-out to call these complex yet accessible songs anything but original.

Where Rags & Ribbons diverges from neo-glam is their earnestness, which in lesser hands can be a curse more than a strength in 2011 (see Coldplay's last three albums, which were truly awful). The vocals in the opening track, "Even Matter," do evoke Chris Martin's repertoire with their unsubtle emotional pleas despite the fact that the music is incredibly layered and ornate and therefore much more compelling. That feeling of hyper-sensitivity and forced poetry will pass once you realize that the second song, "Liar," reveals the boys can rock and weave intricate musical ideas at the same time, much like Muse and Queen. You might even feel a genuine wave of nostalgia when you hear a bit of Big Country in Weyerhauser's guitar yelps in "Abacus Kids," one of the stand-out tracks of the album. By that time you're just being silly, and you just need to drop the comparisons so you can sit back and enjoy this album.

With a few more albums, that earnestness might be replaced with a bit more confidence that might even be viewed as sexy--something Mercury and Matthew Bellamy had (and have) down pat. Despite that minor misgiving, Rags and Ribbons have a real ace up their sleeve, and that's sheer musical talent. It's rare to see young musicians have such mastery of both their instruments and their instincts this early in the game. I can't guess whether this trio will become huge in the coming months, but I won't be surprised if they do. The Glass Masses is an impressive debut, both unexpected and exhilarating in its success at just being different...in a very old-fashioned way.

Christmas Time video - PINEY GIR

2011-12-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

grab the free song and comp : http://www.xopublicity.com/xofortheholidays4.html

Rags & Ribbons – The Glass Masses (Self-released) IMPOSE MAGAZINE review

2011-12-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/reviews-the-portraits-rags--ribbons-the-lower-48

How to describe this? Exceptional quasi-orchestral, pop-ish, indie art-rock, that doesn’t overdo things, perhaps? Rags & Ribbons is Mr. Jonathan Hicks on vocals and keyboards, Mr. Ben Weyerhaeuser on vocals and guitar and Mr. Chris Neff on percussion, and they exist somewhere between the dramatic and dire most of the time, and they have some killer songs in them, a case in point being “Even Matter,” which kicks things off with a bang on this album. It’s a slam dunk right from the first chorus. On “Liar” they really take off as well, and Hicks sounds more than a little bit like Lizard from Earwig. And “Abacus Kids” is fucking awesome, with a crazy vocal hook that doesn’t let go once it gets a hold of you. More songs like that, please! I particularly appreciate the ringing sustain on the guitars. This is a far sight better than a giant icicle in your earhole, and a record that will be hanging around the stereo at our house for a while.

THE JANKS: Defined

2011-12-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

http://oregonmusicnews.com/2011/12/15/the-janks-defined/

by Ana Ammann on December 15, 2011

The Janks. From left, Garth Herberg, Dylan Zmed and Zachary Zmed. Photo by Megan J Carroll

Win a pair of passes to the show, leave a comment below!

1) Definition of Jank:
a) Adjective
i) Generally displeasing. “This party is jank.”
b) Noun
i) Someone or something that is “janky” (displeasing). “I’m not dealing with that jank.”
ii) A replacement word for an unnamed object or thing. “You bringing that jank to the party tonight?”
c) Verb – transitive
i) To hit. “I just got janked in the head.”
ii) To steal. “I am going to jank that french fry.”
2) The slang term “jank” can be a noun, verb or adjective all at the same time. It is everything described here and more. Truly, this is the most versatile word in our language. (According to the Online Slang Dictionary.)

For LA-based trio, The Janks, the name could not be more fitting or more ironic. Their debut album “Hands of Time” is an eclectic, Indie-pop dream that defies convention and definition, but can hardly be considered displeasing considering the attention it is garnering. The band is collaboration between brothers Zachary and Dylan Zmed, and best friend Garth Herberg, and their musical styles are uniquely versatile with comparisons ranging from Neil Young and Queen, to Fleet Foxes and The Beatles.

Watch: ”Don’t Hide Your Eyes” by The Janks

“It’s tough to find the name of a band that you like the meaning of that doesn’t sound ridiculous,” shared twenty-nine year-old songwriter and lead singer, Zack Zmed. “When I think of a band called The Janks, I imagine a group of teenagers running around and up to no good. One thing I ended up liking about The Janks is it continues that tradition of names of bands that I wish I could be a part of – The Kinks, The Beatles, The Zombies. When you find out what the word means, that it can mean anything, the whole poor quality thing, it’s silly and we like that. Once we tried it on, it fit phonetically and was easy to remember. In the end, it doesn’t really matter that much, it is the music that matters.”
It’s not often that a band will make an attempt to work elements of musical theatre into an album – orchestrating the progression of songs to correspond with a theme or storyline. The Decemberists did successfully it with The Crane Wife, Green Day with American Idiot and Sufjan Stevens with Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel the Illinoise, to name just a few; and that is just what The Janks set out to do.

The band went into the studio with thirty songs and came out with thirteen tracks tied loosely to a universal coming of age theme. Zmed talked through the decision to make this a type of concept/musical theatre album: “It is our first attempt at creating a story out of our music and it was a bit of an after thought. We were thinking that we have all these songs and a lot of them deal with coming of age, some of it is lighter some darker, how can we make all this flow? It became a loose narrative about a kid who is growing up and his parents get divorced and there is this loss of love in the home. As he is growing up and coming of age, a large part of him is trying to find that love again – either within himself or outside himself.”

“The first half develops the plot of a young boy who comes from a broken home, while the second reflects the visceral intensity of growing up from separated roots. At the end, we see there’s possibility for change.”

Adrian Zmed and William Shatner in TJ Hooker

The Zmed brothers are no strangers to musical theatre. If the name sounds familiar, you likely came of age in the 80’s and either you or your sister had a poster of Zack and Dylan’s dad on your bedroom wall. Adrian Zmed is best known for his roles in Grease 2, Bachelor Party and TJ Hooker, but as Zack will tell you, most of us only saw a fraction of his father’s talent in those roles. “What people don’t know about him is that he started on Broadway and is a triple threat – he can sing, dance and act,” declared Zmed.
Being part of an artistic household certainly had an influence on the type of artist Zmed chose to become, but it is clear that he and younger brother Dylan are looking to forge their own path in the world of music and performance. It was while fooling around and singing vocal warm-ups with their father as youngsters that they became aware that they too possessed vocal talent. “Dylan and I would play our dad’s warm-up tapes and joke around singing them with him, going up octaves on ridiculous syllables. We were making fun of him, but we were singing on key and realized as kids that we could actually sing. I think just being around musical theatre, even though I’m not extremely into musicals, had a huge effect on me. I love the themes and the stories. I tend to prefer opera and drama over musicals, musicals get a little too campy to me, but the spirit is there. I enjoy writing from different characters’ perspective rather than, ‘I’m a singer songwriter just writing songs about myself.’”

The Janks

As if The Janks weren’t busy enough promoting “Hands of Time,” (co-produced and engineered by Paul Inderson of Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead) and setting up a 2012 U.S. Tour with Sophie Barker of Zero 7; the boys are preparing for a Spring European Tour with X-ray in the UK (managing tours for Coldplay, Modest Mouse, Black Eyed Peas and Gorillaz), planning their next album, AND are in the midst of a joint initiative with the Silverlake Ballet Company. “We are working on an opera of our music right now where we are actually writing the story first and then the songs to conform to the story, it’s very fun. We are really close with the dancers in the Silverlake Ballet Company and the head of the company who loves our music. We decided to go into business together with this opera we are writing and the ballet will be involved. It’s exciting but kind of daunting. We really like the story; it is a basic love story with a few twists and turns. It will still be The Janks music – alternative and Indie rock – but the instrumentation is going to include an orchestra and a chorus as well. Garth will be conducting the orchestra, he studied composition at CSUN (California State University, Northridge) and has composed his own music with strings and brass before, so this is a nice outlet for him. We hope to play the first shows in late summer, 2012. We are just trying to finish the music right now and are making an EP of the major character themes, then we are going to try to get a grant so we can pay everyone.”

Watch: The Janks sing “Echo Whispers” Live at Ashland’s Tidings Cafe

With such a broad range of theatre-based, musical interests, it is somewhat surprising that Zmed chose the rock and roll path as his main outlet. “I never did the theatre thing in high school, but a lot of my friends were thespians. Dylan is much more the outward performer type, I’m more introspective. I can definitely get silly and ridiculous among close friends, but I don’t want to be the center of attention.” An odd thing to hear from a lead singer, right? “Actually, a lot of lead singers bother me. For me, I’m a musician. It’s about writing songs. It’s about the song and not me. I’ve gotten better at being outward, but it’s definitely a challenge.” Instead, Zmed focuses on cultivating the band’s sound. “When Dylan joined the band two years ago, I thought, we are two brothers in a band together and we have the same voice, let’s try and cultivate the Everly Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel vibe into whatever we are doing, whether it is heavy or soft.”

The Janks at Multnomah Falls

When it comes to vibes, The Janks dig Oregon’s and have said they want to move here. They have ventured to Ashland on multiple occasions to shoot three music videos with director Gary Lundgren (Calvin Marshall).
In terms of what Zmed hopes the future holds for him and The Janks, he says, “Dylan and I have been talking a lot more about how much we want to incorporate our European heritage into our songwriting. Whether that’s studying old folk tunes and incorporating those sounds or just going there someday, visiting the countries and writing songs based on our experiences out there, there definitely is this element of tradition that I love in music in general, and something that I absolutely want to keep bringing into what I am doing. It is really important for me to grasp the past, grasp the future and the present and bring all of it into what I am doing. I wouldn’t just recreate or play old folk tunes, and I would not want to make music that is completely devoid of history, I want to bring it all together – have a song that lives in today’s world that may have a melody with a connection to the past.”
“A lot of music that is being made nowadays by youthful bands in their teens, twenties and even thirties, doesn’t have a sense of history. Hopefully we can achieve that in what we do, not just with my heritage, but incorporating music from all over the world into our alternative pop songs. Ultimately, my hope is that for each project I do, the door opens to another project. As long as I can keep doing this, I will be happy. I would love to make a solid living and support a family, and if I can make something comparable to what my mother makes teaching second grade, I’ll be happy.”

See The Janks perform tonight at Kelly’s Olympian. For a chance to win a pair of passes to the show, leave a comment below!

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest...on CD

2011-12-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest...on CD

http://thevinylanachronist.blogspot.com/2011/11/bradley-wik-and-charlatans-burn-what.html

Do you remember rock and roll?

No, I'm not paraphrasing "American Pie." I'm asking fellow boomers if the music they used to call "rock and roll" is still alive and burrowing between all the fragmented genres that exist in the music scene today. The overexposed musical quagmire that's flippantly referred to as Americana certainly brushes against rock and roll's shirttails every so often, but the straightforward stuff is gone. Do we miss it? Did we need something more? Or do we still secretly listen to our rock and roll albums when no one else is around?

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' debut album, Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest gives me the same feeling of comfort as when I see a teenager, in 2011, wearing an old Zep or DSOTM t-shirt. It's no secret that the latest generation of musicians is finding solace in Springsteen and Petty and Mellencamp--Ryan Adams certainly backed up his asphalt mixer to that particular stretch of the road a decade ago--and Wik and his band have been staying up late at night, studying these songs, digging around, and finding the emotional core. They're intent on bringing rock back...not the wild, raucous and jubilant type but the introspective, weary and gently redeeming rock that we'd listen to back in the '70s just before it was time to stop partying and go home.

As someone who is bringing up the rear of the Boomer generation, I'm certainly responding to this music differently than someone more typical of Wik's audience: it's not nostalgia I'm feeling as much as comfort, familiarity and a long-neglected urge to light one up. There's an old-fashioned feeling to these songs that permeates every guitar riff, every drum fill, every bit of over-saturated reverb coming from the amps. This filters down to the lyrics, where that always tumultuous marriage of old-time religion and rock makes an appearance or two--when Wik announces on the album's opener, "The Dark Lovely," that the "heavenly choir is singing dirges," you might think of an album such as Slow Train Coming. It certainly takes you back to a place that was, in retrospect, pretty nice.

Wik's songs, propelled by the rough melancholia in his voice, all express a certain level of tired relief. It's not a feeling of giving up or giving in, but rather the break someone takes before they pack up and move on to the next adventure. Bradley Wik and the Charlatans may continue to mine this pure rock and roll for a few more albums, attracting his generation as well as their parents. Then again he could step outside of his very comfortable comfort zone and fall in with his brethren and do something else, something weird or different. But he'd be leaving a very empty room behind, the room where we used to slap on our headphones, light up a joint, sit in our denim beanbag chairs and think about the life ahead.

The Strange Ones: Interview with Campfire OK

2011-12-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.careersingear.com/trucking-news/General_Interests/The_Strange_Ones_Interview_With_Campfire_OK

The Strange Ones: Interview with Campfire OK By Andrea Rizzo

This Seattle-based sextet is one of those bands that do not fit neatly into a specific genre. Campfire OK dabbles in folk, rock, indie and pop, creating a sound that is entirely their own. Lead vocalist Mychael took some time to answer a few questions for Careersingear.com. Learn more about how they create their musical concoctions, the band’s penchant for a multitude of instruments, and where the rest of the year will lead them.
1. How is your newest release, Strange Like We Are, being received?
We have had a great response so far. I'm very, very pleased with the amount of people who contact us because they have a friend that got the album and recommended them to buy it. It is a very good feeling.
2. Tell us how you create your folky-pop songs.
A magician never reveals his secrets. Kidding. This question implies that I have a certain process of writing all of the songs and truth be told, I don't. Most songs are written in their basic form by me, at my house either half asleep or wired on coffee. Then I take that shell of a song to the band and we start to add all additional instrumentation.
3. Your band is heavy on utilizing many different instruments, but not as focused on the guitar as other bands. How does this work with your sound?
I think it works wonderfully, how do you think it works? Our songs don't have much guitar simply because I write on piano most of the time. We don't try to avoid the guitar and we don't try to write music with a specific sound. We just like to play music and this ends up being how it comes out. It's very happenstance.
4. Who, or what, are some of your biggest influences?
Our influences range greatly, anywhere from western classical to Brit pop, to acid jazz, or American dance pop or rock music from the 70's and 90's. So with that in mind, it is quite difficult to pinpoint our main influences. I feel that fact is evident in the music we write too. We are never able to say, that song sounds like Nirvana or Bob Dylan.
5. What are your plans for the remainder of the year?
We plan on traveling as much as possible, play as much as possible at festivals, and track another album.

You can also check out the official Campfire OK website at http://www.campfireok.com/ to preview songs, watch videos, find news, tour information and more.

Meaning idiot in Gaelic, this band is anything but idiotic

2011-12-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

Amadan (United States)

www.NewBandDaily.com

Meaning idiot in Gaelic, this band is anything but idiotic. They've got a fresh mix of Gaelic inspired violin and flute filled moments with a punk rock drum, and an American twangy rock voice.
Reminiscent of Dispatch and OAR at times, with a harder beat and a nod to old Ireland, Amadan somehow isn't confused. Who knew punk rock, Gaelic, and folk could come together to sound not only interesting, but also fantastic?
Apparently the Pacific Northwest of the USA has been keeping these boys a secret these past ten years. Wait, is that a didgeridoo we hear? Oh yes it is. And with three hour concerts, you might just have to get on over to Oregon and catch them live, with a beer in hand and your dancing shoes ready.
Songs we recommend y! ou listen to: "Not Your Man" and "Used to Know".

Click here to visit this band’s website.

…And This Is Why I Speak To You In Parables 12”

2011-12-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

White Orange
…And This Is Why I Speak To You In Parables 12”
Made In China; 2011

The strength of this two-song 12” picture disc rests first in the formatting and then in its high production quality. Notice that I didn’t say quantity, as this project is truly a study in restraint, especially when compared to the endless noodling of most psych-prog bands. What White Orange brings to the table is the sort of epic, ‘70s-influenced blues rock that fans of Deep Purple and Mastodon will certainly enjoy, but they have done so with great focus and artistic integrity. Specifically, the group has brought its impressive talent to bear on both the music and the packaging for this slab of wax. …And This Is Why I Speak To You In Parables is recorded to heavy-duty 180-gram vinyl, and is then festooned with intricate artwork on both sides of the record that is enchantingly creepy and trippy, complete with the sort of pagan-inspired imagery that is a deliberate homage to the group’s stylistic forebears.

While the A-side does clock in at just over thirteen minutes, as my friend Bob Ham declares, it’s a journey that’s well worth your efforts. A singularly strong riff anchors this glorious stomp of a track, and it allows the lead guitar to wail and explore scales at length, while providing the melodic space for the bass and drums to work their own magic.
The B-side, entitled “Middle Of The Riddle,” is a five-minute, truncated version of the A-side, as it boils down the extended version down to its primal, rocking essence. The extraneous filler – the vocal samples, lengthy intro passage, and the spacier sections – have been removed, and what remains is a relatively lean prog rock track that would probably have been very well received on radio stations back in the ‘70s.
Yet, for all of the musical majesty on display, I found myself smiling every time the song’s lyrical tagline – “Sometimes less is more” – was sung. Indeed, White Orange has presented a cogent case for the power of the vinyl single: give me your best song, and give it to me in a format where I can listen to it over and over again to maximum effect. While I am curious as to how this song will fit into the large picture that is the band’s upcoming 2011 full-length, …And This Is Why I Speak To You In Parables presents a booming song that serves as a welcome introduction to anyone interested in the misunderstood genre that is prog rock.

Thomas Pridgen’s drumming accolades

2011-12-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Thomas Pridgen’s drumming accolades—like winning the Guitar Center Drum-Off at age 9, getting sponsored by Zildjian at age 10, and receiving a full scholarship to the Berklee College Of Music at age 15—should help you prepare for his live show. But they won’t. And when the former Mars Volta drummer starts his set with his new band, The Memorials, your jaw will be on the fucking floor. His precise intensity and technical proficiency—combined with Nick Brewer’s guitar easily handling the changes, and singer Viveca Hawkins’ presence scorching your eyebrows off—on the band’s debut full-length makes the group’s music worth the pummeling it doles out.

The time-honored tradition of rhythmic pop

2011-12-09T19:53:00.000-08:00

The Winebirds- Seance Hill

http://www.adequacy.net/2010/11/the-winebirds-seance-hill/

The time-honored tradition of rhythmic pop! The Winebirds are winding through much treaded territory on their new album, Seance Hill. This, however, isn’t a bad thing. We can forgive genre replicators if their hearts are in the right place, or if the music is good enough. In this case, The Winebirds make good enough music to make it worth your while.
The arrangement is simple; the band forms around a rhythmically strummed acoustic chord progression, time-keeping percussion, and nondescript bass. Their flare comes from the male/female harmonies, piano riffs, and synth/organ accents. The deciding factor in whether this album is listenable or not? The melody. It all falls directly on the melody’s head, which is always a slippery slope. For Seance Hill, some songs really work thanks to the melody and other songs are largely forgettable due to the lack of melody. The first five songs come out like gangbusters, using melodies that descend or have a slight hitch in them, which gives them the interesting angle this band needs. You all know how singing a line a different way can totally change a song, and on the first few here, all the little patterns they sing work. Then, as the melody gets bland, so does the music, and it all starts sounding like a hippie Americana band jamming out their “good time” but lackluster songs. When the music is backed against the wall like it is, where they get reduced to faceless progressions, it’s hard to maintain steam for an entire album.
“I Obscenity in My Mother’s Milk,” “The Solution,” and “Hit Machine” probably earn the honor of being the best songs, and they start the album in order. It’s not usually my favorite thing to have the best songs front-loaded, but then again, most albums fail to have multiple good songs, so I can’t come down on it too hard. The Winebirds aren’t trailblazing a new genre or anything very mind blowing, they just sunshine their way through an album and a few good songs pop out. It works, if not spectacularly.

"Suds! All over me! Suds! I want to be clean!"

2011-12-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

http://thevinylanachronist.blogspot.com/

W. H. Walker - Suds!

"Suds! All over me! Suds! I want to be clean!"

Okay, now that this song is totally stuck in my head and won't come out, I guess it's time to tell you about coolest party album of the year--W. H. Walker's Suds!. This six-song EP, which is culled from a forthcoming split 7" LP with Clorox Girls, hasn't a moody, reflective moment on it. This self-described "doo-wop boogie pop" is all about (Suds!) raw exuberance, a lo-fi party vibe and an overall sound that jumps cleanly between The Who circa 1965 and perhaps The Jam circa 1979.

W. H. Walker, which isn't a guy but a group, stands for Welcome Home Walker. This Portland-based band rose from the (Suds!) ashes of the Soda Pop Kids, a very different sounding band that broke up in 2007, and they take such musical heroes as Smokey Robinson, Berry Gordy and the Rubinoos and turn them into something that's 10% nostalgia and 90% sheer hyper energy.

While the doo-wop influences are (Suds!) obvious, the rawness of W. H. Walker seems to rise from the punk scene that emerged a good fifteen or twenty years later, especially in more manic songs such as "As the Night Goes." Throw in a cover tune from a Venice, California busker ("Watch Your Step") and a genuine soul ballad ("The Untold Death of Grady Jones") and the non-stop rush of sound and beat starts to ebb and flow and show a surprising amount of (Suds!) depth amid the cigarette smoke and the spilled gin.

So, Suds! is a whole lot of fun, a slight dirty EP that smells like the wrong but much more interesting side of town, the one where you have the time of your life before you run home and try to forget what you've done the night before. A bathtub full of Suds! will do the trick, I suspect.

Midwest Winters, Bradley Wik and the Charlatans

2011-12-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

http://twangville.com/8953/mayers-playlist-for-octnov-2011-part-1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Twangville+%28Twangville%29

THE PLAYLIST
Midwest Winters, Bradley Wik and the Charlatans (from the forthcoming release Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest…)
“Those midwest winters will suck your soul away,” sings Wik on this song that starts off melodic and brooding before exploding into a cathartic guitar fury. Although he now resides in Oregon, these songs were born from growing up in the Midwest and have the hearty rock feel of that region. Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest… is filled with this heartland rock and roll, rich with tales of hard-working, well-intentioned characters.

Audio Download: Bradley Wik and the Charlatans, “Midwest Winters”

"it should be said" -xo publicity

Moody love stories

Beneath Wind and Waves “Non-etre”

Bombshell Music News - Rags & Ribbons

underneath techno’s pulsating efficiency, there’s room for humanity: some skin, some sweat, some blood

Radio Free MP3: “The Solution” by The Winebirds

If you enjoy the sounds of one-man bands like Ben Prestage or Richard Johnston...

Poor Boy’s Soul

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Beats Antique LIVE REVIEW 12/27/12 Crystal Ballroom Portland OR

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electro/dance trinity of synthesized splendor - PORTLAND OR BAND to watch!

Music | Strength — Mind-Reader

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The Winebirds - Seance Hill

Raw underground fuzzy guitar rock/pop with balls... girl band SASSY!

overall happy and rollicking

Gunslinger = Infected Mushroom + Juno Reactor + Tiesto

Wish people would change their influences these days to reflect the sounds of Jodi Miller

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Not Unknown Anymore:: INTERVIEW with THE GREAT UNKNOWNS

Bradley Wik (like Ryan Adams and once upon a time Paul Westerberg)

Influences are front and center for stoner rockers Black Pussy

Black Pussy: On Blonde

Meet the Cheesemakers Night in downtown Winters! (Turkovich Family Wines)

Rags & Ribbons on KINK fm

specialize heartland rock and roll

BRADLEY WIK AND THE CHARLATANS | BURN WHAT YOU CAN, BURY THE REST

Portland’s Rags & Ribbons will celebrate the release of their latest album with performances at Music Millennium Jan. 19 and Doug Fir Lounge Jan. 20.

Viveca from THE MEMORIALS

NO Depression interview w/ bradley wik

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans / Burn What You Can And Bury The Rest

RAGS & RIBBONS cd release this friday!!! @ DOUG FIR

Rags & Ribbons interview w/kzme dj jason

Eastern Surf Magazine on Poor Boy's Soul

slightly drunken Ryan Adams

Shawn Lawson Freeman, Non-etre (Self-released)

Non-etre­ is an interesting creation torn between two personalities.

Beneath Wind and Waves: Non-etre CD Review

FEATURING :: Mr. Hands bring on the vintage equipment!

Portland, Oregon's Black Pussy is comically titled On Blonde

CD Review: Black Pussy - On Blonde

Just remember to snuff those butts out; basements can burn up.

White Orange — White Orange

BLACK PUSSY: a six pack of poppy mixture of hard rock and punk

MAGNUSON interview

Magnuson

Interview with……

By Christopher Duda(Sugarbuzzin' Bear Country)

SugarBuzz Magazine

WHITE ORANGE - morphing their Kyuss-grounded fuzz jams.

Album Review: White Orange - s/t

Rags & Ribbons - Even Matter

NEW ARTIST DISCOVERY! : Mark W. Lennon w/ "Home of the Wheel"

TOP 10 of 2011

TOP 20 albums of 2011 from pitchfork!

pitchfork continued...

more of the best of 2011

The Top 50 Albums of 2011 PITCHFORK

The Top 50 Albums of 2011

We count down our favorite records of the year.

Quick Spins from Marquee Magazine

Quick Spins – January, 2012

alt-country movement !!!! yes!

Gunslinger will be taking its live show to the Avalon this Saturday Dec. 24th w/ Infected Mushroom

North Texas’ top five albums of 2011

The Janks “Hands of Time”

cool gift for music friend! a pick punch!

Pick Punch

Magnuson – Crash of Cassini 2011

Rags and Ribbons have a real ace up their sleeve, and that's sheer musical talent

Rags & Ribbons' The Glass Masses on CD

Christmas Time video - PINEY GIR

Rags & Ribbons – The Glass Masses (Self-released) IMPOSE MAGAZINE review

THE JANKS: Defined

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest...on CD

Bradley Wik and the Charlatans' Burn What You Can, Bury the Rest...on CD

The Strange Ones: Interview with Campfire OK

Non-etre is an interesting creation torn between two personalities.

By Christopher Duda
(Sugarbuzzin' Bear Country)