Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Woman: Courtesy of Jagjaguwar The index finger on Patrick Flegel’s playing hand oozes blood from under a makeshift bandage of white masking tape. As he strums, the wound smears a widening trail of gore across the would-be pristine pick guard of his electric guitar. As the final chord of one song rings out, Pat takes a deep breath and pockets his pick: The next song in the set is a soft, finger-picked number. New York crowds can be tough on opening acts, but for one reason or another, the audience at Music Hall of Williamsburg maintains a cool hush. Whether it’s bated breath or respectful awe is hard to tell. The blood clots and thickens on the strings of Pat’s guitar, forming a silent disruption, maintaining an uneasy peace, a marred tranquility. The gore is inescapable, but Pat pays no heed. He keeps playing, even as the oozing gives way to streaking—as slow, red rivulets creep down his hand.

It’s only a matter of time before a member of the audience extends a compassionate hankie, which Pat accepts. “I cut my hand before,” he announces to the crowd. “It was a stupid accident.” He offers no further explanation, and makes no other mention of his injury. The show goes on.

published: September 11, 2009 in column: Feature Story

The Skygreen Leopards

The Skygreen Leopards
Gorgeous Johnny
(Jagjaguwar, 2009)

Myth is an important element in popular music. If it weren’t for tall tales, exaggeration, and/or outright fabrication, the American musical landscape might look a lot flatter. From folk to hip-hop, Paul Bunyan to Biggie, bragging, aggrandizing, and fabricating have a storied role in the crafting of memorable songs. Fiction is entertaining, and stretching the truth is good for a laugh. So it goes…

The Skygreen Leopards love a good deception, and they always deliver it with a wink. The stoned humor that heralded the release of their sleepy-bright, spiritually recumbent album, Disciples of California, claimed a few gullible reviewers back in 2006. Apparently, the music press bought the notion of weirdo San Franciscan folkies hiring a foreign ballet guru to align their rhythm chakras through a three-month regimen of modern dance. But despite the SGL’s harmonic balance, reports of Vaslav Treacy’s influence are greatly exaggerated.

published: July 31, 2009 in column: Reviews

Dinosaur Jr.

Dinosaur Jr.
Farm
(Jagjaguwar, 2009)

Guitar eaters: Dinner is served. This is one unrelenting smorgasbord of electric leads, rhythms, and solos, distortion-battered and dunked in the oil by a slack-voiced modern master with a little help from his friends. Early on, scorned/rejoined bassist Lou Barlow was touting this reunited outfit’s semi-sophomore effort (that is, the second since the original trio reunited—it’s the fifth album consisting of this particular lineup, and if we count the handful of fully Mascis-dominated LPs from group’s post-Barlow ’90s, Farm is the ninth album overall released under the Dinosaur Jr. name) as a big step up from the last one. “Right away I knew it was superior to Beyond,” Barlow told Spin back in March, because “it has an urgency.” Indeed, the band does sound like they’re crankin’ it out in a hurry, and it’s a pretty barebones arrangement—guitar, bass, guitar, drums, and guitar, although there’s only one guitarist, and if his dominance in the mix doesn’t make it obvious enough, it’s worth noting that J. Mascis is also the producer and central songwriter. Barlow does contribute two originals of his own, so it’s not entirely a one-man show, and the shifts in style between Mascis and Barlow are among the bigger differentiations on an otherwise very constant batch of rock. When the constant happens to be Dinosaur Jr., it’s tempting not to complain; however, when the album comes described as sounding “like the first three,” that’s not only a bit of a stretch, but it opens up a world of comparisons that obviously won’t work out in favor of the new stuff.

Lyrically, there’s the requisite insecurity, dread, and complacence that we’ve always loved about Dinosaur Jr., and it translates well enough out from the twisted Gen X angst of yore to new-millennial, near-midlife malaise. The differences are in the production values (which are decidedly “grown up,” despite the subtly strived-for aesthetic of scrappiness—these guys are just too comfortable in the studio at this point to dumb it down), and the melodies, which are just a little more frequently and poppily upbeat, and harbor just a few more classic-rock references. Barlow’s stated urgency may have kept things moving swiftly and saved them from over-thinking, but the tension that once tore them apart (to which many have attributed the excellence of their old melodies and structures) seems absent. Not only is there scarcely any evidence of the bass/guitar interplay that once held songs taut like the poles inside a tent, but really there’s hardly any noteworthy bass at all; certainly nothing like the backbone lead of You’re Living All Over Me’s “In a Jar” or the spry punk underline of Dinosaur’s “Does It Float.”

published: June 29, 2009 in column: Reviews

Sunset Rubdown

by: Marissa G. Muller

Sunset Rubdown
Dragonslayer
(Jagjaguwar, 2009)

Dragonslayer is a poor man’s spring break. Sunset Rubdown’s third full-band album eases the listener onto a plane headed one-way into the sun. Dragonslayer is a departure for the quintet that began as solo project for Spencer Krug, co-frontman of Wolf Parade. With a crew of Krug, Pony Up!’s Camilla Wynne Ingr, Jordan Robson-Cramer, Michael Doerksen, and newest member Mark Nicol, Sunset Rubdown tightens security on their newest album, making it damn hard for mediocre bands to hop on board the indie scene.

Krug and members must have taken the criticism on their previous albums into account when they brainstormed for the eight-song Dragonslayer. Krug’s over-dramatized, monochromatic voice has evolved into a 757 with the capacity to carry a myriad of notes. His vocals now span over a handful of octaves, unlike on Snake’s Got a Leg, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, and Random Spirit Lover, and even better, they welcome tourists into their experimental realm. The whole album presents circularity—with the most downtempo tracks, “Silver Moons” and “Dragon’s Lair”, placed at the beginning and end—that can only be reminiscent of takeoffs and landings.

by: Marissa G. Muller

published: June 25, 2009 in column: Reviews

1 comment

Pink Mountaintops

by: Lavinia Jones Wright

Pink Mountaintops
Outside Love
(Jagjaguwar, 2009)

There is a sticker on the front of my promo copy of Outside Love that reads “10 songs of love and hate that read like a Danielle Steele romance novel.” And sure enough, the cover of the gatefold shows a fat, pulpy hard-backed novel bearing the words “Pink Mountaintops, Outside Love.”

A Danielle Steele novel? From the man at the heart of Black Mountain? Luckily, it’s not exactly true. Or at least, it’s not what you would think a Danielle Steele novel would sound like—that I imagine to be more like Celine Dion over new age piano and sounds of the ocean. Outside Love, by comparison, is noisy and deadpan. The drama and pomp of the content is more what they meant by promoting it as a musical romance novel. And inside the gatefold, the book is pictured at the top of a stack of reading material on the tank of a toilet next to a box of old matches. That’s more like it.

by: Lavinia Jones Wright

published: May 11, 2009 in column: Reviews

Fatal Fidelity: Our Vinyl Reckoning

illustration by Mark Armstrong The recent resurgence in popularity of vinyl records carries with it a few healthy doses of irony. The most obvious is how, with all our major leaps in technology towards smaller and more portable things, the gradual degradation of sound quality has lead us back to this oldest, largest, and most stationary of media. Another more subtle coating is that, while the fusty format is prized for its intimacy and the physical nature of the relationship it enables between a listener and an album, it also requires a certain degree of effort on the part of the consumer, all of which runs somewhat counter to the usually noncommittal subset of people fueling the uptick, the kind of people whose trends are all too easily stereotyped as random, impersonal, cheap-n-easy gestures of fleeting, aesthetic detachment. Yet the most unfortunate bit of irony is how, in the midst of a generation so accustomed to embracing things less harmful to the environment—reusable shopping bags, organic food, hybrid cars, etc.—some of the most creative among us, for our love of music, are unconditionally resurrecting a direct culture-industrial dependence on one of the earth’s most toxic substances: Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which we call “vinyl” for short.

Yet before we get carried away with any Green Police finger pointing, it’s important to acknowledge the fourth most frustrating and frightening element of irony here—that CDs are actually worse. Compact discs are made of polycarbonate (PC), backed by a lacquered layer of aluminum. PC is at least recyclable, but still requires highly carcinogenic solvents for its production, and is really only slightly less toxic than PVC. Aluminum is also recyclable, and though it is nature’s most abundant metal, it’s still a non-renewable resource; once it’s gone, that’s it, there’s no more. Also, it doesn’t exactly occur freely in nature, meaning there are no giant aluminum deposits simply waiting to be scooped up and banged into Pepsi cans and White Stripes albums. It’s diffused throughout the earth’s crust as a chemical compound (aluminum silicate), and has to be extracted from clay, rocks, etc, then processed and manufactured for industrial use, all of which is an ordeal requiring monstrous amounts of fuel and electricity, belching out loads of greenhouse gases. The kicker is, once the aluminum and polycarbonate are stuck together, it’s damn hard to separate them, and so CDs are not recyclable by current conventional means. You can’t just toss your crappy Nickelback disc into the blue bin and think you’ve done a good deed, no matter how much you wish it had never existed in the first place. It has to be delivered or sent (usually at your own expense) to an e-waste recycler, which are still few and far between (see below for five links to places that can safely take Chinese Democracy off your hands). To top it all off, CDs almost always come packaged in plastic jewel cases and wrapped in shrinkwrap, both of which are made of—that’s right—PVC. And there are a heck of a lot more shrinkwrapped jewel cases coming into the world than there are sweet, adorable vinyl records.

So what’s so wrong with PVC records and jewel cases? In a nutshell: Dioxins. Dioxins are insane, unholy, super poisons, and PVC cannot be created or destroyed without unleashing them. As Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois told Congress in 2001, “According to the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health, dioxin is the ‘most toxic manmade chemical known.’ It is not just very toxic—extremely toxic—it is the most toxic chemical human beings know how to create.” It’s the stuff that makes Agent Orange a bit of a no-no. Remember Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian politician whose face was left scarred and pocked a few years back from an assassination attempt? That was dioxin poisoning (perhaps a near-fatal “wink” at his having lead the Orange Revolution, which had nothing to do with Agent Orange—but oh, those witty assassins!).

published: April 20, 2009 in column: The Smoke-Filled Room

2 comments

SXSW: Day Three

SXSW: Day Three, Friday Day
March 20th, Austin, Texas

Thursday night was a particularly awesome/awful night. First I saw great sets from bands residing on the Jagjaguwar/Dead Oceans label, specifically the frenzied, danceable set from These Are Powers (industrial/electronic/experimental cacophony), Women (lo-fi with plenty of static-infused dissonance), and then surprisingly and most righteously Dinosaur Jr (Mascis and Lou together again!), and I was filled with pure elation. But the night went from total revelry to talking to some random dude on the street afterwards who, in a moment of drunken confusion, got sucker punched by some aggro kid with a chip on his shoulder just looking for a fight (you’d be very proud of me, I pulled the crazy dude off of him), which led to hours spent talking to cops and cleaning up our new bloodied friend and providing him with as much vodka and comfort as was possible. It wasn’t until 5am when we returned home to go to bed. So, I was thankful that my Friday daytime events revolved around the Hot Freaks party at Mohawk, where I was able to chill out in the VIP section drinking water, eating free tacos, and taking in some of the least challenging, yet best indie, pop, and folk rock happening these days from a balcony, a safe distance from accidentally being bumped into and getting into some boozy altercation, of which I’m sure there were plenty throughout the course of the week.

It all started off with the Wrens, who have a wildly anticipated album coming out soon. I actually only listened from outside of the venue because I had to do a coffee run for a friend working the show, but I heard tracks from The Meadowlands, Silver, and Secaucus, along with what might be stuff from their new album. They sounded incredibly tight, as if tracks were simply playing straight from the albums. A little part of me died since I wasn’t inside to witness them on stage, but a friend in need, yada yada. I did make it back in time to catch Bishop Allen who is always a joy to see. They were energetic, bright-eyed, delivering songs old and new with all the ease of a well-practiced band. I will, however, continue to be somewhat baffled by Margaret Miller’s role aside from barely audible backup vocals, sparse taps on the xylophone, and otherwise existence as eye candy in signature short, white or ivory, billowy dresses. How many of those does she have, anyway?

published: March 24, 2009 in column: It Shows

SXSW: Day Two

Tweak Bird: photo courtesy of Tweak Bird's MySpace page

SXSW: Day Two
March 19th, Austin, Texas

Today, I embraced the fact that I have a bike with a lock at my disposal. I showered up early and sped off to the Convention Center for a panel called “Bloggers are in Charge.” Unlike probably 75 percent of the SXSW community these days, I actually like these things. You never know when you might run in to Michael Azzerad. Did I learn anything? Not really. But I got to sit next to a Scottish guy in a kilt who was furiously bouncing back and forth from his Twitter feed to his various news and music sources on his laptop. That’s the kind of people you want to experience at these panels. You may not know people like this, but they exist and are dope. So yeah, bloggers are the voice of the modern music generation. They write about what they like. They consider themselves to be the modern-day record store clerk. Yada yada. Unfortunately, there’s no panel in sight about how actual music magazines are finding their way in an online world, a much more confounding topic that could lend itself to some really interesting discourse. Baffling, but whatevers…

published: March 21, 2009 in column: It Shows

Julie Doiron

by: Jocelyn Hoppa

Julie Doiron
I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
(Jagjaguwar, 2009)

Julie Doiron has been making records consistently for awhile now, but after Eric’s Trip I kind of forgot about her. No good reason for that, it just happened. But then along came the Mount Eerie album with Doiron and Fred Squire, Lost Wisdom, which I spent a lot of time listening to as I watched the days of 2008 disappear in the rear-view mirror—a great record for processing the prevailing emptiness experienced when chasing after that mythical balance we’re all looking for. Much of the reason I enjoyed that record had to do with Doiron’s involvement, her unique voice a melodic timbre that seems one step away from cracking in despair but always managing to make it through, which says a lot about the content of her music as well. Heartbreaking, yet tenacious, I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day—a title that speaks to the supposed mundane nature of the themes contained within—pulls apart the typical happenings of any given day to find both a subversive security and uneasiness that’s always at work.

Set to lo-fi fuzz, melodic pop, sparse folk, and syrupy thick distortion, I Can Wonder hearkens back to Doiron’s days in Eric’s Trip, her early ’90s band that took up residence in an awesome land where Sebadoh, Neil Young, and Dinosaur Jr played freely. Surely this visit back to an older, more rock-oriented sound has something to do with the fact that it was recorded and produced in the studio of Rick White, her one time Eric’s Trip bandmate. Doiron sings about living the life of dreams, that it’s nice to come home, and that she loves the world and is glad to be alive. And, god, on the surface, these sorts of sentiments can easily come off as so insipid and grating, but in the hands of Doiron, the past, present, and future collide into daily meditations.

The album opens with a short, acoustic-strummed “The Life of Dreams” (“with good people and good things”), a straight-up ditty about appreciating what’s oftentimes right in front of her. It’s a nice sentiment, but this moves directly into the distorted mid-tempo rocker, “Spill Yer Lungs”, which results in a fatalistic outlook: “We’re gonna chase each other around this town for nothing.” “Tailor” is a rich track, layered in rollicking guitar and brushed drums, which name checks the roles one must take on, the things that mend together a relationship, stating “I wouldn’t mind taking my time.” It’s an elementary track on the surface that goes deeper to highlight how many things (such as a baker to bake the things he likes, and inanimate objects like a pen so he could hold her in his hand and draw straight lines) one person must be to another, and vice versa. This song sums up what Doiron does best.

One of the stronger tracks on I Can Wonder is “Consolation Prize”, a crunchy, catchy rocker reminiscent of Eric’s Trip, about friendship surviving a failed relationship where “people insisted on telling you what a great couple you had been.” Obviously, there’s a bit of bitterness contained within that there “prize.” “Borrowed Minivans” depicts Doiron’s dismay with drunken young girls in tank tops and knee high pants out looking for good times, herself dreaming of a way out to “do better things with her hands.” Doiron’s subdued voice over the track “Blue” relays the age-old womanly vow “never to love again… never to cry again.” It seems that the opening optimism that was so stark at the beginning has taken a backseat to the harsh reality found here. Closing the album is “Glad to Be Alive”, the sentiment more of a mantra than an actuality. It’s nice that the album is sandwiched with two simple acoustic songs about being happy—it’s just that the stuff in the middle relates that there’s much more to it.

Julie Doiron may not be struggling with the trials and tribulations of youth and coming of age, but she is certainly finding the intense uncertainties of leaving that all behind and what to really expect from the supposed comforts real adulthood advertises. Either way, I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day is a gorgeously human record that sees Doiron using lo-fi, distortion, and slight-of-hand wordplay as imaginatively as ever, writing songs containing profound happenings hidden within the banal minutiae of life.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Julie Doiron, Eric’s Trip, Jagjaguwar

Read more articles like this:

by: Jocelyn Hoppa

published: March 17, 2009 in column: Reviews