Shuffle Magazine, Issue #4

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02 | CONTENTS

Publisher Brian Cullinan bcullinan@leftturnmusic.com Editor In Chief John Schacht jschacht1@carolina.rr.com Assistant Editor Bryan Reed bryan.c.reed@gmail.com

CONTENTS

Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

FEATURES

NEWS TO PERUSE Troika Music Festival, The Milestone Documentary and more/pg. 4

Art Director Blake Raynor blakeraynor@mac.com Design Ben Jack Brandon Wade Oxendine Marketing / Sales CJ Toscano toscano.chris@gmail.com Contributors Tyler Baum, Emily A. Benton, Scott Bilby, Erika Blatnik, Reuben Bloom, Michael C. Cole, Grayson Currin, Timothy C. Davis, Eric Deines, Donald Doolittle, Hank Garfield, Allie Goolrick, Jenny Hanson, Jordan Lawrence, Eric Shepherd Martin, Brian McKinney, J.G. Mellor, Fred Mills, William Morris, Allie Mullin, Jonathan Truesdale, Enid Valu, Patrick Wall, Jamie Williams Intern Sucharat Limsitthickaikoon Submissions: Send CDs, records, writing samples, photographs, love letters, hate mail, gifts, monetary donations, and whatever else you’ve got to the following: Shuffle Magazine 2401 Seth Thomas Road Charlotte NC, 28210 Disclaimer: Shuffle takes no responnsibility for the opinions expressed herein. Your beef is with the writer of the article that made you mad.

Copyright: All contents are copyright (c) 2008 by Shuffle Magazine, and are protected by all applicable laws. So unless you’ve got express, written consent of the publisher, don’t steal our stuff, jerk.

REGULARS

ROUND TABLE. . . . . . . . . . . .14

Four top-shelf regional producers discuss the art of record making

SNAPSHOTS Anakrid, The Curtains of Night, The Love Language, The Sammies and more/pg. 6 HOT SPOT Filthybird’s Renee Mendoza goes over the Gate City/Jamie Williams pg. 20 CAUGHT IN THE ACT Our camera crews shoot recent regional shows/pg. 28

REPTILIAN DESIRES. . . . . . . . .18 Plucking heart strings with The Physics of Meaning’s Daniel Hart/John Schacht

CONCERT REVIEW Little Brother charms a Crown Town crowd/ Bryan Reed pg. 33 CLICK ON THIS Our staff recommends some acts you really oughta hear/pg. 36

COVER STORY. . . . . . . . . . . .22

On their fourth LP, The Rosebuds find inspiration in the backyard/Bryan Reed

EXPATS

Ben Folds, Chapel Hill reunited and it feels okay/ Grayson Currin pg.45 ROCK ODDITIES Getting vain at Charleston’s open mics/Tyler Baum pg. 46

MOUNTAIN GURU. . . . . . . . . . .30 Sparklehorse’s elusive figurehead Mark Linkous talks gear, shotgun art/John Schacht

WAVE MAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 The legacy of instrument guru Bob Moog lives on in the charity foundation bearing his name/Allie Goolrick

Cover photo by Scott Bilby

shufflezine.tv SHUFFLEZINE.TV

NEWS TO IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

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TROIKA MUSIC FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES SCHEDULE Durham’s annual Troika Music Festival kicks off Thursday, Nov. 6 and lasts until the house lights go on Nov. 8. From the festivals origin in 2002 as The Durham Music Festival, the goal has always been to highlight not only the finest in local music, but also to provide an opportunity for Durham’s downtown to throw up a “We’re here” by opening the doors to many of its music-friendly establishments.

“Everyone involved believes in Durham as a city,” says Festival organizer Kyle Miller. “The festival is an opportunity to show people some of what makes Durham great” In total, 11 venues are participating this year, from the Duke Coffeehouse and Durham’s Central Park to the James Joyce pub and Broad Street Café. And adding to the local-centric vibes, Troika 2008 boasts a headlining show at the Carolina Theatre with but one act from outside North Carolina: Kimya Dawson, of K Records, Moldy Peaches and “Juno” fame. Dawson plays third on a fourband bill that also features The Rosebuds, The Old Ceremony and Bellafea. Elsewhere, on Thursday and Saturday nights, marquee local bands fill venues all over Durham. Thursday boasts sets from The Future Kings of Nowhere, Red Collar, Paleface, Sorry About Dresden and Lost In The Trees (and more).

Saturday claims Hammer No More The Fingers, The Dry Heathens, Tooth, Midtown Dickens, The Curtains of Night and Schooner (and more). Multivenue passes for Thursday and Saturday are available for $5 each. Friday’s showcase at the Carolina Theatre will set you back $15. Additionally, tickets that provide entry to any and all of the festival’s events are available for $20. Ticket orders and more information are available at troikamusicfestival.org.

04 | NEWS TO PERUSE

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Former Flat Duo Jets frontman and Bloodshot Records signee Dexter Romweber made his acting debut in “Lake City.” Lately, he and sister Sara have been prepping the new Dexter Romweber Duo LP with all-star guests, including Cat Power, Neko Case and Exene Cervenka.

Ari Picker’s Project Symphony debuted Nov. 1 at UNC-CH’s Hill Hall Auditorium with Lost In The Trees and Megafaun’s Phil Cook.

Rock legend David Byrne brings “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” to three more Carolinas venues: Raleigh’s Meymandi Concert Hall, Dec. 8, North Charleston Performing Arts Center, Dec. 9, and Charlotte’s Ovens Auditorium Dec. 10. Tickets on sale now.

“Toot Blues” a documentary film about the Pittsboro, N.C.-based Music Maker Relief Foundation debuted at the New Orleans Film Festival.

Double Negative chosen to play ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas, curated by Mike Patton and The Melvins.

Asheville’s Seth Kauffman now operating under the name Floating Action. New album on the horizon.

R.I.P. The Young Sons (Charlotte), Sex Tapes (Charlotte), Baumer (Columbia) and Love Craft (Winston-Salem).

MERGE BOX SET AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER The pivotal Merge Records, a Triangle monument for 20 years, announced a celebratory box set to mark the stalwart label’s china anniversary.

Titled SCORE!, the 16-CD set is a subscription service, limited to the number of subscribers who enroll before the first two volumes are shipped in January. Pre-orders are open now, at $179 before Nov. 8 and $199 between Nov. 8 and January 1, 2009.

Of the 16 discs, 14 are compilations spanning the Merge catalog, individually curated and designed by the likes of Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Amy Poehler (SNL), David Byrne, Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo) and Zach Galifianakis. Disc 15 is a covers album, featuring non-Merge artists like The National and Ryan Adams covering songs by Merge artists, and No. 16 is a remix album featuring re-imaginings from Battles and Four Tet, among others. (HG)

UP NOW AT SHUFFLEZINE.TV •

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SECRET ALTAR SEEKING OFFERINGS Since 1969, when Charlotte’s The Milestone Club opened its Tuckaseegee Road doors, the list of acts that have played its cramped, graffiti-splattered room is daunting: from Bo Diddley, John Cale, the Circle Jerks and The Replacements to Nirvana, R.E.M., The Flaming Lips and Fugazi. The room’s 80s heyday was so fertile it became a must-play Southeast stop — something Crown Town’s not really noted for. But the club fell off the radar during the late-90s/early 00s, and remained essentially fallow until new ownership took over day-to-day operations in October of 2004. Since then, Neal Harper and friends have poured new life and old soul into the room, again making it a relevant stop for all manner of exciting acts. Filmmaker Evan Knotek and executive producer Brian McKinney (also a Shuffle contributor) were so inspired they’ve been working on a full-length documentary called The Secret Altar (an early trailer’s up on YouTube). The documentary features footage and interviews with key players past and present, but the makers are still on the lookout for material (especially live footage), particularly from the 70s, 80s and 90s. If anyone has photos, gig flyers, video, or audio, they’re encouraged to reach McKinney at brian@1uppr.com.

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Calendar: Any registered user at shfflezine.tv can post events to Shuffle’s moderated concert calendar. Promote your band or just let the world know what shows you’re planning to see. Spread the word.

Daily News Blog: Check the Web site’s front page daily for updates on music news across the Carolinas — and even the occasional mp3 download.

HD Video: Check videos of some of the area’s hottest bands doing what they do best in a live setting. Interview footage, HD concert videos and more await you at shufflezine.tv.

Much More: We are constantly updating and adding features to the site to keep it engaging for our readers. Registration is free and gives you access to submit content. Keep checking the site to see what’s next from Shuffle.

Background photo by Jenny Hanson

PERUSE

WERE YOU THERE? SHUFFLE PARTY 3 You should’ve been. Shuffle’s recent Equinox Party at the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte drew over 800 music lovers for a six-act bill that started hot and never let up: Matthew Paul Butler played a haunting solo set for his new hometown; Durham bands The Dry Heathens and Red Collar brought the bar rock and punk ‘tude to their explosive sets; Greensboro’s Giant delivered instrumentals that left the packed house in slackjawed bliss; the young Yardwork army showed why Charlotte’s music scene is brimming with new ideas and talent; and hometown hero Benji Hughes did what he does best and crooned the pants off everyone.

The party, our second one to pack its venue, proved what we all suspected when we started this venture: the Carolinas’ music scene is as fertile and exciting as any in America. It’s our hope that those of you seeking to tap into this growing scene will want to advertise with Shuffle, helping us to put on more shows, expand our on-line and video presence (check out the Giant clip from the Equinox gig at www.shufflezine.tv), and continue delivering a magazine filled with riveting stories and eye-popping design.

CJ Toscano at toscano.chris@gmail.com for ad rates.

Photo: Bryan Reed

CURTAINS OF NIGHT

RAZING REFERENCES

WHEN THIS PARAGRAPH ENDS, there will be no more mention of the gender of the members of the two-woman Carrboro duo, The Curtains of Night. Socially, it may be significant that an all-female Southern metal act exists and, even more, gets respect. But, sonically, I could give a good god damn if this band was two dudes wearing assless chaps, two polar bears with savant tendencies, or — as it actually is — guitarist Nora Rogers and drummer Lauren Fitzpatrick, who formed The Curtains of Night after teaching together at a rock ’n’ roll camp for girls. This isn’t special interest metal or an affirmative action quota: This band — stretched riffs and staggers caked in feedback, shocked from below by bruised snares and slapped cymbals — plays big and bad enough to make post-metal-patriarchy predictions seem a little late-breaking.

What matters most is the perfect promise of Lost Houses, the band’s debut LP for Holidays for Quince Records and (given Caltrop’s World Class) the new label’s second strong metal showing this year.

Lost Houses splits 30 minutes over six tracks, letting them spill into one another like viscous mud between shallow Piedmont trenches.

Lost Houses respects and razes references, at once recalling Shellac splitting its seams, the Melvins on an angry morning, Sleep with its time running out, Des Ark at the gates. It’s stormy and dramatic and magnetic, the sort of volatile record that stunts complacence and snaps expectations. Even Fitzpatrick hears that.

“Vocals are usually like the thing that can totally break a band for me. It will break a band before it makes a band. I usually hate … just the sound of them,” she says, smiling to Rogers across a circular table at Orange County’s blood-red-walled, our-floor-is-a-stage-too bar, The Reservoir. “But with Nora, I don’t feel that way. The shit she sang is so cool, all mystical, weird stuff. It doesn’t seem to be relating to life as we know it.”

06 | SNAPSHOTS

Indeed, Lost Houses lives and dies in its own steadfast ideology.

For a 30-minute debut, it’s a tad monolithic, perhaps too even(if delightfully heavy)-handed. Aside from the thrashy break during “The Letter Four,” Lost Houses suggests different directions without pursuing them: “Golden Arrows” always threatens to — but ultimately refuses to — sharpen its riffs. “Lost Houses,” which immediately follows, charges in the same direction. The flip side, though, is that what the band does well — mid-pace heaviness that’s thick and sharp — consumes most of these 30 minutes. Luckily, listening to Rogers explain her songwriting, one assumes new directions will follow naturally.

“The whole thing is about contrast, or seeing beauty in something other people don’t see as beautiful. When it’s heavy and loud and when I play my guitar when I have it tuned a certain way, it’s satisfying and beautiful to me,” she says. “It’s us trying to make that contrast work.”

Rogers and Fitzpatrick certainly have résumés built on contrast: Rogers has been in Triangle bands since she was in high school, including a straight-edge hardcore band (with the current drummer of stoner metal heavies OM) and Bevel, minor guitar pop with Teen Beatstyle skitters and edges. Fitzpatrick played with Chicago’s Russian, a heavy two-guitar band that included Challenger and Auxes member Pete Wagner. Those reference points don’t necessarily equal The Curtains of Night, but neither does Rogers’ alternate musical backstory on its surface.

“Both of my parents play old-time music. I grew up around banjo and fiddle and guitar and went to fiddlers conventions through most of my youth,” she says, grinning. “At a certain point, it was embarrassing. In my 20s, I learned banjo.”

Actually, that’s a clear roadmap for Rogers. Running her guitars through her self-built amp, Rogers uses several alternate tunings, often incorporating a drone string, much like the banjo’s fifth string. And her guitar and Fitzpatrick’s drums move against each other in unexpected ways, a product of both old-time music’s syncopation and its proclivity for instruments carrying the melody and rhythm differently.

You won’t hear Rogers or Fitzpatrick play most of these songs the same way twice, either.

“With playing different variations, you’re leaving it up to chance — that sometimes you’re going to make something so much better, and other times you’re not going to have it,” says Rogers. “My ultimate goal, though, is to have that excitement when you first write something and you’re so on it together. You feel that change together.”

If that’s the ultimate goal, Lost Houses is a fitful act of fulfillment.

Grayson Currin

ALL GE T OU TAS LOUD AS...

Courtesy of All Get Out

THERE’S A LOT ABOUT All Get Out that you might immediately glean from their recorded music. And, from what lead singer Nathan Hussey says, you’d probably be wrong.

Consider the religious themes woven into the band’s eight recorded songs. Titles include “Water and God” and “Jesus Burns,” while the group’s lyrics rely on life-as-crucifixion metaphors on more than one occasion. “But we‘re not a Christian band,” says Hussey, whose upper-range voice is barely audible over the rush of the Charleston, S.C. traffic. “We are all Christians, but we’re all in the Bible Belt, so it kind of comes naturally.”

The four men of All Get Out met in the midst of various projects.

The band was begun by Hussey as a side project from his other band at the time, the Beach Boys-inspired Explorers Club. Hussey claims drummer Gordon Keiter as a fellow founding member (they both began recording in each other’s homemade studios). Guitarist Mel Washington and bassist Mike Rogers came along to solidify the lineup in the summer of 2007.

“Our songs are about what’s going on in our lives,” says Hussey.

“What’s happening, and what’s not happening. The good, and the bad.” That much is evident from in their brief catalog, which still spans the emotional and sonic spectrum. “Wasting All My Breath,” easily the group’s most dynamic work, is Hussey’s personal “truth” campaign against smoking. “We’re all gonna die … the hallelujah, the by-and-by, will all fly away in time,” he croons to a melody recalling a less lethargic Pedro the Lion.

“At the time I was a smoker, but I finally quit. I’ve lasted 100 days,” Hussey says. “The song is about my grandfather. He had lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. I guess it sounds ironic, because I used to smoke cigarettes, even though he almost died from them.”

“Water and God,” on the other hand, is more of your standard bar-rock fare, with a Rentals-esque keyboard hook tethered to the tune for added pop sensibility. Much like daily life in the South, religion is never far away, even if it isn’t always a topic of discussion. All Get Out use it as a framing device. “(‘Jesus Burns’) is meant to play as a kind of sarcastic twist on popularity,” Hussey says. “It’s about a church from where I’m from. It’s a huge church, and they kind of exclude everybody there. They’re effectively running a popularity contest. In that case, fuck it, I’m not a believer, I don’t want to believe with those people.”

The band’s intensity and volume tend to fluctuate, and most of the tunes by All Get Out (a named ripped from the southern idiom “loud as all get out”) are not as loud as the name might suggest. An upcoming re-release of the band’s self-titled EP contains two acoustic beauties (“The Reason You‘re Still Alive” and “Your Girl My Gun Her Ghost”), and the guitar line in the romantic “Come My Way” plays like the melodic sister of Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.” There’s even more similarity once Hussey’s tenor wail creeps in, which itself bears a resemblance to Buckley.

“It’s pretty common to see some people cry at our shows,” Hussey says. “And if we can make people feel something that intensely, that’s a pretty great thing.” But, he says, any fledging band hoping to make itself known has to make itself heard, and tracks like “Water and God” and the percussion-heavy “Like a Child” seem crafted to make the All Get Out moniker legitimate.

“We have a theory, because we’re a newer band,” he says. “If we’re playing out of the region, then we figure, ‘if you’re playing loudly, they have to hear you.’ And in concert, well … we’ve just been known to be loud.”

Considering All Get Out formed just a little more than a year ago, Hussey’s not complaining about their touring schedule. Currently the band has a show booked for almost every day until the end of December, at venues stretching from Maryland to Texas. He says much of the credit goes to band-mate Washington, who’s taking care of the business side.

And with any luck, he hopes the band’s bombastic live shows will send sound waves across the nation. “We know our sound hasn’t carried too far West just yet, but we don’t consider ourselves regional,” Hussey says. “The songs are just about our lives and what’s going on.

With any luck, people will just get into that.” Eric Shepherd Martin

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

Photo: Scott Bilby

ANAKRID

THERE’S AN OLD LAOTIAN PROVERB that reads thusly: “If you like things easy, you’ll have difficulties; if you like problems, you’ll succeed.”

The same goes for Anakrid, the avant-garde soundscape project of one-man wrecking crew Chris Bickel. (The name Anakrid comes from an ex-girlfriend’s mangled pronunciation of arachnid, which Bickel found ironically amusing given the ex’s need to “bring out a fifty-cent word for everything, especially when she didn’t really need it,” he says.) Make no mistake: When Bickel tells you the music he makes under his Anakrid moniker is difficult, he means it. And that’s exactly how he intended it.

“I think difficult listening is the best [descriptor],” Bickel says. “It means you’re going to be challenged, but if you’re up to the challenge, you might get something out of it.”

Challenging music is nothing new to Bickel. He fronted legendary Columbia punk outfits In/Humanity and Guyana Punch Line, two groups noted for pushing the boundaries of hardcore, before letting his esoteric side run rampant. Still, Anakrid is far from an excuse for Bickel to wank; it is meticulously composed and arranged, eschewing traditional instruments for home-made noisemakers — “mostly just junk off the side of the road,” Bickel says — found sounds and cassette scraps.

“For me, it’s about experimenting and exploring,” he says. “I’m really just trying to play around with tonalities and the juxtaposition of things to create a world.”

Indeed, Bickel paints Anakrid’s difficult musical canvas with broad strokes, cutting a swath of destruction through the mathematical complexity of modernist composers like Stockhausen and Messian, the abrasive textures of Throbbing Gristle, and the abstract surrealism of fellow experimentalists (and fellow Beta-Lactam Ring Records labelmates) Nurse with Wound and Current 93. The result is an eclectic body of work, veering from deliciously devious, drowned-insound drone (Rapture of the Deep) to menacing ambient atmospheres (Joyfear) to primal, other-worldly gamelan (Banishment Rituals of the Disenlightened) to sheer sonic pandemonium (Pos Load Nihilsur-

08 | SNAPSHOTS

NO WANKING ALLOWED

realisme). Indeed, his latest opus, FeverDreamFever, hits on all of the above, invoking a feeling of sheer dread and terror akin to the soundtrack to The Shining — not surprisingly, one of Bickel’s biggest Anakrid influences.

But despite the sheer sonic density of Anakrid’s final products, the method behind Bickel’s madness is actually quite simple. “[I]t’s all about just taking sound and things that create sound and just completely deconstructing them and then finding a way to put them back together,” he says.

“But the one difficult things is that you don’t want to be masturbatory,” Bickel continues. “You want to be sure that what you’re doing has something to it and it’s moving and it paints a picture. Because a lot of this kind of music is completely masturbatory and pointless.

And that’s the one thing I never want to do.”

So if the ultimate goal isn’t self-gratification, what, then, is the prize for conquering Anakrid’s challenges?

“I think it could be very rewarding as far as just being able to listen to something that doesn’t follow a traditional form and being able to use your imagination to figure out what’s going on,” Bickel says.

“It’s maybe similar to looking at a surrealist painting or impressionism where you’re having to pull stuff out of your mind to put into the work.

“When I was a kid, my favorite record in the world was Walt Disney’s Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House,” he adds. “I had other records, but that was the record I would listen to over and over and over again because I could just sit there and close my eyes and imagine these scenes taking place to these sound effects. And that’s what I try to get at with what I do now, is just to present this sonic field that would allow you to close your eyes and imagine what’s going on. You’re pretty well-defined as far as what you’re going to see when you listen to a Ted Nugent album — you’re going to picture Ted Nugent. You might picture him shooting a deer or something, but you’re not going to get too far out of it. Unless you’re on a lot of good drugs. But I like to make music that you don’t necessarily need drugs to listen to. Although it sometimes helps.”

True, Anakrid might indeed be harder to access than Fort Knox; but like the fabled vault, the reward is priceless. Patrick Wall

THE LOVE LANGUAGE SWASHBUCKLING SOUL

By Jordan Lawrence

THE LOVE SWASHBUCKLING SOUL

LANGUAGE

Courtesy of The Love Language

THOUGH THEY’RE NOT IN THE HABIT of using stage names, brothers Stuart and Jordan McLamb of Wilmington’s lo-fi pop-soul explosion, The Love Language, were forced to don monikers for a Labor Day weekend gig. Strapping on pirate paraphernalia and dubbing themselves Captain Jo Jo and Shipwreck Stu, the two helmed a luau-themed birthday party for a one-year-old.

“I have to be Shipwreck Stu because I really didn’t have a decent pair of pants,” Stuart says. “I just had these ripped, shitty-looking gym shorts. So we rigged up this ripped striped shirt I’m going to wear.”

So, having learned such standards as Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” and the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” and “Surfer Girl,” the two headed to the performance that Stuart found on Craigslist while looking for ways to make extra cash.

The gig is also indicative of the crossroads at which the band finds itself. Recent signees to Portland, Ore.-based Bladen County Records, they were invited to perform at the label’s MusicFest NW showcase in Portland, an opportunity for more exposure then they have yet had.

The only problem was getting there. The luau wing-ding was part of the effort to raise enough money for the cross-country journey.

And maybe piracy isn’t such a bad metaphor for the band, which has been together for about a year-and-a-half. Plundering elements of pop, soul and lo-fi indie, and then combining them into an adventurous, romantic sound all its own, The Love Language steers toward something as accessible and familiar as it is weirdly off-kilter and fresh-sounding. And wielding a voice as smooth as calm seas, Stuart leads the group with the swagger of big-band leaders of old.

He says the intention of the group is to just make the best no-frills pop music it can. “It’s not supposed to be nostalgic, but it just kind of comes out that way,” he says. “We listen to a lot of music. I think we just want to make enjoyable pop music and not really over-think it too much.”

And it’s starting to take off. Not only did The Love Language perform at MusicFest NW, but they also had their single “Lalita” — built on sharp guitar, lo-fi fuzz and Stuart’s boozy croon — placed on the event’s promotional compilation next to tracks by indie It-bands No Age and Fleet Foxes. It’s a fitting placement, since The Love Language blends No Age’s noisy lo-fi affectations with Fleet Foxes’ earthy folk melodicism. Stuart, who produced the band’s forthcoming record, slated for an early-2009 release, says that the band’s lo-fi aesthetic was just a happy accident. “It was all recorded on a VoS 864 system.

It’s just a little 8-track I got off Craigslist a while back,” he says. “We didn’t really intend on doing an album on it, but we just started recording some songs.”

And while he believes the econo-class equipment gives the band a certain charm, he makes clear that there’s more going on in his songs than just a back-to-basics gimmick. “There’s definitely things maxing out and flaws in the production, but you can tell that it’s not supposed to sound like a little demo,” he says.

For The Love Language, the chance to step up to the next (national) level couldn’t be more opportune. With members spread across the state in Greensboro, Raleigh and Wilmington, it’s become difficult to bring all the members together, and “shows are a little bit of a hassle,” he says. But they’re determined to make it work: “We’re all spread out, but we’re really tight,” he says. “We’re not just musicians playing together. We’re really close friends.”

Stuart says he’s ready for the group to take off. He’s tired of working normal day jobs, a motivation that seeps into the music he writes.

“I’ve just always been a little stressed financially,” he says. “I think subconsciously I wrote songs that could potentially be something. Just pop tunes. There’s a comfort in the songs.”

He’s hoping that comfortable feeling can translate into enough money so that the Love Language can be his only endeavor. “I suck at everything else,” he says. “Especially waiting tables, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past six years.” Jordan Lawrence

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

Courtesy of Trekky Records

LOSTINTHETREES OVERGROWTH OF IDEAS “I’M NOT WRITING SONGS ANYMORE,” says Ari Picker between sips of coffee, two weeks before the release of All Alone In An Empty House, his third and most accomplished effort as leader of the symphonic pop outfit Lost In The Trees. “This is the first time ever that I’ve finished a record and I haven’t thought about the next record at all.”

Far from falling into a creative dry spell, though, Picker has merely shifted his focus. There’s a lot left to be said, just maybe not in song form. Writing orchestral pop songs has, of late, been usurped by finishing his first symphony — which debuts Nov. 1 in Chapel Hill. He’s also been preparing to tour behind All Alone, and for the symphony’s premiere — which will also be the inaugural event of Picker’s Project Symphony, an organization he founded to promote orchestral music in the community and raise money for charities. And all this between semesters at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“It’s more stressful being out of school because there’s no structure,” he laughs. “That puts more pressure on me. I can’t just do what I’m told.”

Picker’s passion for classical music was born out of his early taste for pop music with symphonic flourishes. “I was really into that texture,” he says. From those influences, among them Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, he dove into film scores and from there entered the realm of classical music, inspired by works like French composer Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

The progression informs Picker’s discography. From his days in The B-Sides (which later evolved into The Never), when Picker helped form the band’s lush pop songs with strings and Brian Wilson harmonies, to his first album as Lost In The Trees — an eponymous 2004 LP that marries The Never’s wide-eyed pop with instrumental passages teetering between silent-movie melodrama and Tim Burton’s ghoulish whimsy — his attention to orchestral texture was obvious.

Then came the fully symphonic Time Taunts Me, in many ways an updated version of the first Lost In The Trees record. Lyric passages are reprised, and the sense of loss and loneliness is built more solidly into Picker’s arrangements. It was a step forward from the self-titled LP, brimming with a clear view of Picker’s developing range as an instrumental composer.

10 | SNAPSHOTS

And with All Alone, Picker finally finds his voice, fusing elements of Appalachian folk with lush orchestral passages. Here, he fits the role of a lone troubadour, head filled with music, singing to anyone who cares to listen. Orchestral stabs come as quickly and abruptly as thoughts or passing fantasies. The album’s classical interludes also serve as samples of the recently-finished symphony.

“I wanted to put some very simple strophic folk songs next to these big orchestral pieces and somehow intertwine them in a way that they were separate, yet complemented each other and people could notice the similarities between the two styles,” Picker says.

“I want Lost In The Trees to be kind of the same bridge that other music was to me for classical music.”

He might well serve that function. Though the stylistic variance he toys with on All Alone is vast, nothing feels out of place — turns at folk, pop and classical work together to propel Picker’s reedy voice.

Lyrically, the focus is inward, as he wrestles with strained relationships and tries to make peace with past pain. “That’s the only thing I could really sing about and feel like I was being true to myself and to the songs,” he says. “I’m not a poet. I can’t write about a tree and make it sound good.”

He can, however, stitch together classical music’s dynamic vibrancy, folk’s intimacy and pop’s accessibility to drive home a clear personal statement in the course of All Alone’s nine cuts.

Part of his aesthetic blend, though, must develop in the live presentation of the music. In years past, Lost In The Trees has been a bit of a black sheep at rock clubs, often opting for more earthy — often outdoor — venues and an all-acoustic setup. “I wasn’t really interested in putting on a performance, you know,” says Picker. “I was like, ‘we’ll stand there and play our music.’” But, he adds, seeing Superchunk and Arcade Fire play at a Barack Obama support rally in Carrboro earlier this year inspired him to focus more on his live performance.

Just one more thing to add to Picker’s already busy schedule.

Bryan Reed

DEATH BECOMES EVENTHEMAIDEN FLIP THIS BAND (OVER)

Photo: Enid Valu

YOU’D BE HARD-PRESSED TO FIND a recording format that demands attention like a 7-inch. The physical limitations of a 7-inch platter necessitate brevity. Crammed to the gills, the format still only holds a mere handful of songs. Good or bad, the point gets made quickly.

Besides, EPs are much easier to crank out at warp speed than their long-playing cousins; they create their own sense of urgency.

That’s what makes the format so perfectly suited to the frantic aggro-pop of Columbia trio Death Becomes Even The Maiden — which pulled its name from the deliberately confrontational title of a friend’s art installation.

W. Heyward Sims, the band’s guitarist and keyboardist, embraces the small format’s ability to capture a brief moment in his band’s evolution. Now three years and as many EPs into their existence, Sims says DBETM is still evolving, still searching for a unique sound. “I think we’re just sort of putting out (music that documents) where we are at that time,” he says of the EPs, two of which, including this year’s The Pink EP, are pressed on vinyl singles.

Judging by The Pink EP, though, where DBETM is now is well on its way to finding that sound — or sounds, since the two tracks couldn’t be more different from each other. The two-sided format showcases both sides of the band, a split personality that makes the transition from A to B an unexpected change in tone. “We wanted people to be like ‘what the fuck?’ when they played side A and then side B,” says bassist/singer Eric Greenwood.

The A-side, “The Chop,” drives a Joy Division bass-guitar gallop through a mist of goth-pop synth chords — you half expect to hear Ian Curtis’ ghostly croon — until Greenwood steps up to the mic and the song changes tone completely, Sims bashing the guitar behind Greenwood’s wiry vocal melody as the band bursts into the verse.

But like much of DBETM’s nine-song catalog, it’s more catchy than confrontational — and much more catchy than its flipside, “The Only Thing I Feel For You Is The Recoil.” The B-side starts with ear-splitting feedback before charging into a hell-bent punk riff, Greenwood’s vocals hurtling into lacerating, but well-utilized, screams. “I hate hearing screaming when it sounds just for the sake of it, (or) when it sounds like it doesn’t really fit the song,” says Greenwood. “I think the screaming should be saved for when it suits the song.” Here, it

does. The dynamic in Greenwood’s voice increases the songs’ sense of urgency — an old trick he’s not shy about attributing to The Pixies.

And there’s still enough hook to the riff to make the song stick in a listener’s ear.

“It’s surprised me how catchy it’s been,” Greenwood says of his band, and it’s especially surprising given the roots of DBETM. Greenwood, who cites the Columbia hardcore band Assfactor 4 as a primary influence, formed DBETM with Sims after leaving the Joy Division-referencing, post-punk band From Safety To Where. Sims, meanwhile, had been playing in the mathy post-rock band Bolt, and drummer Chris Powell was in the indie rock trio Haunted Bulldozer.

So everybody contributes something to the sound.

“Chris is a wild, animalistic drummer,” says Greenwood. “You can’t teach him to sound the way he does. And we wouldn’t sound the way we do without him. Heyward is very technical and Chris sort of balances that out…I sort of play bass a weird way so that sort of contrasts with the way Heyward plays guitar.”

Sims adds, “We’re sort of learning our sound in and out of the studio at the same time. I think you’ve just gotta get in the studio because you hear things that you don’t hear when you’re in a noisy show.”

Lately, the band has been logging studio hours laying down new songs for what could become the trio’s first full-length. But the new songs could just as likely be dealt out on EPs. “We like releasing these small releases. It seems like it’s faster to get stuff out,” says Greenwood.

No matter the format, though, the songs are all treated as equals, Sims says. Having “Recoil” on the B-side and “The Chop” on the Aside says nothing of their merit, because “we’re just trying to come up with creative ways to present them.”

He continues, “Economically and logistically, vinyl is probably a pretty stupid idea as far as getting your name out there…(but) it’s more endearing in some sort of weird way.” Bryan Reed

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

Courtesy of The Sammies

THESAMMIES

ONE WITH EVERYTHING WHEN THEY EXITED the humid musical wilds of Wadesboro, N.C. a few years back, The Sammies (Brothers Frank Backgammon, guitar and vocals; Donnie Yale, drums and vocals) enjoyed a rare free pass in a town, Charlotte, known for its tight-knit, cliquish music scene. Early on, a few in the local media praised their long-simmered, hot-saucespiked live show — “a little garage, a little post-punk, and a little un-ironic Southern Rock, all tied up with Malcolm McLaren’s bondage straps” wrote one wag — and the band’s ‘aw-shucks,’ gentlemanly demeanor. But they also worried that the hard-partying, shit-talking hipster set might eat them alive before they had a chance to grow into (or out of, as the case may be) their sound. The Sammies were so new their dang ears squeaked.

After the band’s 2006 self-titled debut inspired some purplish prose both locally and nationally, charted with CMJ, and kept the quartet on the road whenever they weren’t finishing their studies at UNC-Charlotte, things got more complicated for the band whose largest hassle theretofore was making sure they had a place to watch their beloved Carolina Panthers come game day.

Around this time, the band lost two founding members, bassist Gymmy Thunderbird and guitarist Murphy Upshaw, and added two new nom-de-plumed peacocks from the local talent pool, bassist Conrad Vacation and guitarist/keyboardist Bobby Freedom. Thanks to the iron-clad harmonies (and sheer sonic skronk) of the bookend brother act, the newly punched-up sound, while different, didn’t suffer. In fact, if anything, it began to swing.

Which brings us to Sandwich, the Sams’ sophomore disc. It’s got that same straight-outta-Athens-circa-81 country-peppered/garage jangle quality — and, indeed, some of it was recorded and mixed there — as their debut, but it doesn’t mumble the punch line. Or, if you will, speak with its mouth full.

12 | SNAPSHOTS

“(The idea to call the record Sandwich) started when people kept asking if The Sammies meant sandwiches,” says Backgammon (nee William Huntley). “Hell no. But, once we thought about it, we thought maybe it did hold some water. Our music is a sandwich of sorts, taking from various things and putting it all between two slices of bread, however we wish to do it at the time. Sometimes you want a plain turkey, sometimes a meatball, sometimes Italian, sometimes a veggie, but when we throw it all together, it’s our sound. So the dumb sandwich joke actually became very pertinent to the band and our music.”

Backgammon says this sandwich gained depth of flavor by spending more time in the kitchen: specifically, months at Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium and at Athens’ Chase Park Transduction. Sandwich sounds mature, both musically and otherwise. After what Backgammon calls “real world stuff” — growing wiser, finishing school, starting or ending relationships, professional or otherwise — he and the band literally regrouped, and found that the music they were playing wasn’t always the music they heard in their head.

“Instead of playing so many guitars all the time, we substituted keys and other instruments,” he says. “We had more time to record, and more space to do it, so that probably comes across. It’s got a confidence about it.”

Money-strapped as they are — as most young bands are — Backgammon says simple word of mouth isn’t enough these days, even in an era of rampant music blogs and social networking sites: someone needs to vouch for it, preferably someone with cool and clout in equal reserve. “I remember trying to sell people on Wilco back in the day,” he says. “I couldn’t even find someone to go see them with me! It’s not a problem now, of course. It took them several great albums to win support; and we’re just on number two.”

In a recent interview, Backgammon says that if Sandwich fails to gain the foothold he expects, the band might have to rethink its current trajectory — perhaps only releasing music only online, or otherwise changing course. Mind you, he acknowledges this as the worst-case scenario. (Actually, he says the worst-case scenario is playing to the Wednesday night crowd at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Mooresville.)

But the best case?

“It’s all we can do to sleep,” he says. “The European Tour was a drain, but well worth it. The highlight has to be rocking on top of Mt. Olympus to 250,000, all people wearing nothing at all. I am growing a wee bit tired of not being able to go out on my own without attracting a huge crowd, but we’re just thrilled with the success.” Timothy C. Davis

BLACK CONGONC

NOT JUST JUNGLE ROCK

Photo: Enid Valu

AT ERIC DEINES’ HOME — a.k.a. Chalet 2000, of Charlotte house show fame — the six members who make up Black Congo North Carolina (and two guests) are wedged into a bedroom for Wednesday night practice. Equipment is everywhere: amplifiers sit on the bed and atop overturned milk crates, the drum set is tucked into a corner, keyboard and sampler stands leg-wrestle for space, and the center of the room is a tangle of mic stands, electrical wires, and 12-packs of PBR. “Let’s do this for Jerry Reed!” the 27-year-old Deines (pronounced ‘Dynas’) half-jokes. But instead of a twangy homage to the justdeceased author of “Misery Loves Company,” BCNC launches into its gorgeous “Persimmon Valley,” pulling the song’s afro-beat rhythms and gentle refrains into all manner of intriguing shapes: spidery benga guitar lines bumping into blunt, stop/start Barre chords, sampled vocal sibilants morphing into baritone-sax skronk. Deines goes from coos and croons to yelps and hollers, pounding his sandaled feet to the shifting tempos while the song morphs into something furiously ecstatic. It’s a BCNC template, but only in so much as it’s the same freewheeling aesthetic they apply to everything.

Tonight, Tenspeed’s Ben Kennedy is sitting in on cello, getting up to speed for a guest appearance, so the song takes on a refreshing ‘work in progress’ feel — something that can also be said for BCNC’s brief-but-momentum-gathering history. Started by Deines in the summer of 2005 while he was attending Purdue University and interning at indie stalwart Secretly Canadian, Black Congo Indiana — as it was known then — consisted of Deines’ self-described “weird-ass folk songs” (influenced by early Devendra Banhart) and a record storecolleague’s aviary field recordings of exotic birds sampled over them.

Deines moved to Charlotte later that year, and soon met local music fixture Ryan Miller, who added keys and processed beats and convinced Deines to put the music up on MySpace under the new BCNC moniker. A week later Miller suggested they play a Milestone show opening for the Late BP Helium and ex-Guided By Voices’ axe-man Doug Gillard, and after a one-day writing-and-practicing marathon,

BCNC debuted live with a five-song set.

“That really determined the whole ethos of the band,” says Deines, who is also a Shuffle contributor.

Calabi Yau and Yardwork guitarist Bo White was there to witness, and while he wasn’t bowled over, he says he definitely found it “interesting.” Shortly after, White and BCNC crossed paths again when they both played a house show, White noting marked improvement; at their next house show White wound up sitting in on bass by the end of the night. He’s been a member ever since, though the bass is gone in favor of a two-guitar line-up.

With Miller again playing matchmaker, drummer and recent Detroit emigrant Michael Houseman was next to join, bringing his passion for Fela Kuti, among others, to the mix. That proved decisive in nurturing BCNC’s afro-beat tendencies and turning the band from the “electro-pop” direction White says they were headed in.

“Michael said it right away when he heard us, ‘you guys aren’t tight at all, it’s a jazz feel, like you’re floating around each other with your parts,” says Deines.

Next in was Casey Malone, a sampler maestro recording as Bob Fields, who incorporated his “animal wrangling” — sampled jungle sounds (both concrete and tropical) — while sitting in for White, while he toured out West with Calabi Yau earlier this year.

“I think of us as one guitar, so it kinds of fucks me up when I can’t hear Bo’s parts,” says Deines, “so I needed something to fill the air and I thought, ‘Bob Fields is so good, and he has all these great samples, and has a super good ear for finding the spot in a song where they fit.’”

The most recent piece of the puzzle — probably no point in calling it final — is reeds-man Brent Bagwell, who sat in on BCNC’s opening slot at a recent Extra Golden gig and, following the general trend, has decided to hang around.

“Eric’s songs are great — quirky and melodic, without shying away from real beauty,” says Bagwell, who’s usually blowing free-form with his bands Tenspeed and Eastern Seaboard. “He lets the group move and breathe — we all just jump in and mix it together.”

As dazzling as the group’s live shows have become, they feel that energy has yet to translate to record through two EPs. Even the most recent recording session — the first featuring Bagwell — still finds Deines and White (who engineered) dissatisfied. But the session did yield the upcoming 7-inch, James Brown Day Parade, set for release on KinniKinnik this November. If that song is the yardstick, then BCNC is close — very close — to blowing many more minds.

John Schacht

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

n o C e h T

e i l g si

From knob-twiddler and gatekeeper to sounding board and babysitter, the role of the record producer hasn’t changed much even if the technology has...

14 | ROUNDTABLE

i r e

IN

this era of Pro Tools, long-distance zip-file collaborations, and lo-fi bedroom recordings, the record producer doesn’t occupy the same exalted role they once did, when a Phil Spector or Eno strode the sonic landscape like titans. Still, having Dave Fridmann or Steve Albini produce your record comes with a certain cachet, as well as a certain sound.

But it all seems weird: Friends form a tight-knit band united by a similar music aesthetic, write some songs, practice them endlessly, build them into a live following – then give a total stranger an equal voice in arrangements, instrumentation, and other key decision-making elements. They can be facilitators or dictators, anal-retentive control freaks or laissez-faire back-slappers, but while that band’s in studio, those producers are part of the band.

In Shuffle’s on-going series of virtual roundtables, we sat down with four Carolinas’ producers to get their take on the gig. Here we run excerpts from their interviews; the unexpurgated version is available on-line at www.shufflezine.tv.

How’d you get into the producer racket?

MITCH EASTER (ME): I got my studio going in July 1980. I never thought about being a ‘producer,’ I just wanted to make recordings. My recording heroes were people like Roy Wood (of the Move and co-founder of ELO), who did the whole thing — wrote songs, performed them, and were deeply involved in the recording. By the time I was in high school the idea of constructing tracks in the studio was really appealing to me. When David Bowie’s Low came out I loved the way it sounded and the fact that it was such a ‘studio’ creation. It was still people playing instruments, but there was so much freedom in the approach. That was the sort of session I imagined would be great fun…

GREG ELKINS (GE): I got into it simply because I became very interested in multi-track recording. I was in a band in the early 90s called Vanilla Trainwreck that was signed to Mammoth Records. The more that we recorded, the more I became interested in the details of the process. I had been 4-tracking for years but there was so much more to it than I had access to. A local studio owner was kind enough to make me a key and let me learn on his equipment. He knew that I knew lots of musicians so he figured it would be a good trade that would bring more business his way and I got to spend every available minute learning all that I could about recording on equipment that I would not have access to otherwise. The funny thing is that I started being called a ‘producer’ before I really had any idea what the term meant.

CHRIS STAMEY Studio: Modern Recording, Chapel Hill, N.C. Records: A Man Under the Influence (Alejandro Escovedo), The Wee Hours Revue (Roman Candle), Stranger’s Almanac, deluxe edition (Whiskeytown)

GREG ELKINS (Photo by Raymond Goodman) Studio: Desolation Row, Raleigh, N.C. Records: The Bible and the Bottle (American Aquarium), Dollar Movie (Goner), and Plays Well With Others (Utah!)

SCOTT SOLTER Studio: Baucom Road, Unionville, N.C. Records: All Together (Pattern Is Movement), Heretic Pride (Mountain Goats), Pixel Revolt (John Vanderslice)

MITCH EASTER Studio: Fidelitorium, Kernersville, N.C. Records: Murmur (R.E.M.), Brighten the Corners (Pavement) and Outer Upper Inner (Birds of Avalon)

SCOTT SOLTER (SS): One day in 1999 I was listening to a record that I really admired (The Cocteau Twins’ Aikea-Guinea EP) and just had this thought: This is what some grown-ups do for a living, this is their day job, they make records. So I just proposed it to a friend a day or so later and from there, in about two months, I’d taken out a lease on a space in an industrial building and we just started building a studio. I had no idea what that meant, I was doing it backwards and really foolishly. So I agreed to do gigs and bought the console and read through the manual and told bands that I knew what I was doing when I was totally lying to them. I ended up making records for small bands that were on sort of cool record labels, like Temporary Residence or Absolutely Kosher or 4AD. CHRIS STAMEY (CS): I would haul my reel-to-reel machines around to clubs in junior high and record bands. Then Mitch Easter and I started a 4-track studio and learned by making all the mistakes we could, producing ourselves. I apprenticed with Don Dixon and later with Alex Chilton and Scott Litt (who was my most intense mentor), also studied composition and orchestration with Roger Hannay. The first real work as a producer (where I got paid for doing that) was Pylon’s Chomp album.

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

How helpful was being on the performer’s side of the glass first?

ME: Some people can direct and act and some musicians can do the ‘overview’ thing and some can’t, or aren’t interested. So many successful record producers don’t play anything, so that pretty much proves that what it’s really about is having some kind of taste and opinions and the ability to communicate this usefully during the session. It seems to me that it’s a lot easier if you can say ‘try it like this’ — and then play it, or talk about it in vaguely technical music terms. But there are loads of ways to be useful in the studio.

CS: It’s always been helpful to remember how difficult it is to step up to the mic and commit your dreams to solid form. I am told I’m good with singers; I think this is a big part of it, I know what that it feels like to don headphones — it is like stepping into a space capsule and orbiting the earth.

Analog or Digital?

ME: Ah, it doesn’t matter. I do think the sound coming back off a properly aligned pro tape machine is better for most kinds of pop music, but all technical considerations are way secondary to the musical and performance aspects. The possibilities with the digital gear are wonderful but these have also bred an entire generation of ‘fixeverything people,’ and this obsessiveness has ruined people’s confidence. They start out knowing everything must be/will be tweaked in some way, and players seem less confident these days. I wonder where is the gumption from the musicians to say ‘that’s how I play, leave it alone!’ — I hardly ever hear that. The idea that everything can be fixed, and therefore should be, is a drag.

GE: I’m the analog purist who became the Pro Tools guy over time.

These days excellent sound is possible with either medium and that’s what matters to me. I love the sound, smell, and feel of tape but honestly I think that one of its biggest benefits is the imposition of limitations that it brings. When you work strictly in the analog realm you have to make critical decisions as you go. Digital recording allows for endless tracking and cataloging of performances. This can be a great luxury but it can also quickly turn to poison. Weeding through fifty takes looking for perfection can steal the life right out of the recording process.

SS: One problem I’ve had with digital is that the commerce of digital has tried to sell itself as being as ‘hip’ as analog, and it uses analog vernacular to legitimize itself, and I always felt that was kind of pathetic — why doesn’t the digital media just embrace what it is and stop using terms like ‘warm’ and ‘old school?’

CS: I prefer digital unless it is 2-inch eight-track or 1-inch four-track, and even then it’s going to end up on a hard-drive pretty quickly. If it will make a psychological difference to the artist and they can afford it, tape is fine. I actually really like tape with Dolby A, but that’s a retro-ism of mine that I don’t expect many to share.

Do you prefer working with a wide variety of different sounding bands?

ME: One of the worst things about the way people view recording these days is the prevalence of typecasting. In the old days, recording engineers recorded everything that came through the doors, and now it’s viewed as this highly-specialized thing. In fact, you do tend to do the same kinds of things, maybe because it’s what you understand, but there is a sort of self-selecting mechanism where you record a band and people who like that band think you did a good job, and instantly it is declared: that’s the kind of band you’re good at recording! This can be useful for business but it’s a really simplistic way to think. I daresay a really good metal engineer could do a fine job on a jazz piano trio.

Unfortunately, the opportunity rarely arises once you’re associated with anything.

GE: I like variety. Over the last couple of months I’ve worked with the usual rockers, indie rockers, and y’all-ternative types, but I’ve also had bluegrass, hip-hop and spoken word sessions. The variety helps to keep things fresh and each genre presents its own set of challenges that will hopefully expand and deepen my skill level.

How would you rate technical knowledge vs. feel on the important-to-producer scale?

GE: For me, knowing how to interface with the equipment is very important and building a lot of my own gear has helped greatly with technical understanding. Nothing can ruin a moment quicker than technical problems or operator error. I know that there are plenty of excellent producers out there that never touch a fader or knob and I can see how it might possibly be an advantage to only interact in a purely musical fashion, but for me, it just isn’t the reality that I work in.

SS: I’m sure some people get into it that aren’t people-oriented, and awkward or whatever, but they’re really technically savvy. Then there are some people who are super touchy-feely, and don’t know anything about the technology but are really imaginative. The ideal is that you have a combination of them all. If you’re going to provide a service like this, and make records for people, you have to really put your mind to a technical understanding of it so that you can get the most of out of the gear — you’d never want to do this and have a Luddite attitude.

CS: It’s all important. Everyone who does this has strengths and weaknesses; ideally, you are aware of your weaknesses and hire others to fill in the blanks. I used to have others tune drums for me; I’ve just recently taken time to figure this out a bit myself — it’s really fun!

How much of the job is ego-balancing?

ME: I think people love the idea of wild ’n’ crazy sessions and stars who have tantrums, but mostly people just want to get their record done.

And therefore I rarely find this sort of thing to be a problem. Maybe I just have a calming effect...

GE: Well, the ego that I need to be concerned about most is my own.

The point isn’t for me to be right, it’s for us to do the best work that we can do together. My job is to facilitate teamwork and make my experience and intuition available to the situation. I try hard to stay focused on the task rather than the personalities involved. I can’t think of any time that an adversarial position is an advantage, even if I disagree strongly with an idea or just simply don’t care for someone’s outlook.

16 | ROUNDTABLE

SS: It’s not super easy to go into a studio and decide you’re going to make this record that you hear in your head. And because it’s not, you have to ensure that everyone’s in an environment that allows for the creative chaos that eventually gets you where you need to go. On a scale of 1 to 10, you could be gently guiding and keeping people’s water glasses filled, all the way to 10 where you’re aggressively letting people know that performances are not working — even replacing musicians.

As someone once said, ‘I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to make a record.’

CS: I will say that working with Ryan Adams prepared me to be a dad in some ways! Working with R.A. also made me a better musician and better songwriter, in other ways, so I guess it was win-win.

Any memorable melt-downs you’ve witnessed on either side of the console?

GE: Are you kidding? All of the melt-downs that I’ve witnessed have been memorable! Unfortunately for your readers I feel strongly that part of what I’m paid for is my discretion so I can’t tell any of those stories here.

SS: The hardest thing is the non-communicative artist who’s acting like a poet or a painter or a writer, and doesn’t understand that they’re not in their own studio painting on their own easel, but in fact there’s a drummer and an engineer and a guitar player, just other people around them.

Any tricks of the trade you employ to avoid conflict?

ME: There is the occasional session where people are completely unrealistic about what they are doing, or are capable of doing, and in that case I have to figure out a solution or steer things in a direction which will work before anybody gets too frustrated. That’s not really conflict, that’s just adaptation. As far as bands having big internal squabbles, I rarely see it, but people are bound to get irritable now and then and mostly I just kind of let it play itself out while steering them onto something we need to get done, but which is no big deal: ‘Time for the tambourine overdubs!’

GE: If someone is asking me to be the sole producer of their project we usually enter into a preliminary ongoing conversation weeks or months before any actual recording occurs. Hopefully pre-production is involved as well. This preliminary process helps to ensure that we are in reasonable agreement about our approaches and that there won’t be any major conflicts while working together once it’s time to actually start recording. Beyond that, I try not to sweat the small stuff and to remember that it’s all small stuff. It’s also always good for me to remember that my job isn’t to be right, it’s to be helpful.

CS: Conflict isn’t necessarily bad for making art.

When is it time for the producer to cede to the client, no matter how disagreeable the idea?

ME: This is tough because you are forced to look at the project overall. If I was doing a session which had true commercial resources behind it, I’d be a lot more insistent on things because I’d be trying to be really objective and realistic about the result we need, which would probably be: mass appeal, radio play, etc. But the fact is, many sessions are vanity sessions, and there’s no reason to make somebody miserable over some notion that really does not apply to what the session is about. I’m always happy to go with the band’s opinion unless I think it’s just incredibly misguided, and no matter what the session is, I feel like I have a bit of a duty to express opinions which I think will help the outcome. But there are many completely acceptable ways to do most songs.

GE: The artist’s name goes on the front of the album artwork in large letters while mine, if I’m lucky, will show up on the back or on the inside in much smaller letters. I believe that this proportion is appropriate. It’s their record, they’ve hired me to work on it. Having said that, of course there are times when the artist has an idea that I’m less than

enthusiastic about. Experience has taught me that it’s almost always a good idea to indulge the artist in that sort of scenario. Time and again I’ve been shown how right someone can be about their own music.

Sometimes, even after giving it a chance, the idea will still seem like a bad one to me and in this case I try hard to focus on the positives of an alternate approach rather than being overly critical of the idea at hand.

CS: You plead your case and move on, but avoid ultimatums that might make it hard for them to change their minds. I always try to remember that I might be wrong, the beginner’s mind thing. In a mix, I’ll make an alternate version that I like, if they change their minds, it’s done; if they don’t, I can make a disk of it for myself at least.

Whose production work do you admire?

ME: There are so many great recording practitioners: Shadow Morton, Bob Crewe, Joe Meek, Steve Barri, Shel Talmy, Tom Dowd, Chas Chandler, Gary Usher, Lee Hazelwood, Joe Boyd, Tony Visconti, Mutt Lange, Tchad Blake, Glyn Johns, Roy Thomas Baker... I mean this goes on and on... In this list you’ve got your ‘auteurs,’ like Shadow Morton, and (I’m guessing) people who just recognized talent and generally helped bring it to the listeners, like maybe Chas Chandler, and people who are known for the ‘total control’ thing but also have worked in a more lighthanded way, like Mutt Lange — and all this is legit under the heading of ‘producer!’

GE: Well, I listen to records, not producers but, having said that, I seem to always enjoy listening to the recordings that Nigel Godrich and Dave Fridmann are associated with just because they are fun to listen to.

Lately I’ve been flipping over how good the early 70s Captain Beefheart records sound which were produced by Ted Templeman. Future Days

by Can blows my mind and they produced it themselves. There are so many and these are just the ones that come to mind today. The common theme for me is that I would always rather hear a great artist with a mediocre producer than the other way around. It all starts with the song and the players.

Some producers are known for a certain sound you have one, how would you describe it?

— if

ME: I love gear, but I feel stupid getting hung up on it. Once the equipment is of a certain reasonable quality, you should be able to wring something useful out of it. In general I suppose I like the sound of good performances which contain a bit of randomness, so there may be that really odd drum fill which catches my ear and may not even be in time but I just think it ‘works’ on an instinctive level. This sort of thing is usually given lip service but is actually tossed out of 99 percent of commercial rock.

GE: I’m certainly not trying to have ‘a sound.’ My goal is to work with the artist to achieve the most flattering representation of what they’re about. I’m trying to bring out the best of their sound. In my mind if I’m concerned about purveying a particular sound I should take that to my own musical projects rather than trying to impose it on others.

SS: Everyone’s got a sound, however neutral or invasive you are in the project. At some point if you keep using methods that work for you, you will have a style whether you ask for it or not.

Favorite moment when producing a record?

ME: When it starts sounding like something, that moment when you can say you’re making a ‘real record,’ is always satisfying. This may not happen immediately, so the early part of a session can be a bit hairy until it starts to come into focus.

GE: I love it all. I find it especially gratifying to watch things start to come together for someone who’s young and talented.

CS: I like it when the unexpected happens, when everyone gets chills and remembers why they signed up for this kind of work in the first place. Last days or first days of tracking are good for this.

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A SER PENT’S TALE

New Physics of Meaning explores destiny and desire, led

by Daniel Hart’s charming violin

By John Schacht

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SNAKE CHARMING: »» The practice was outlawed in India by the 1972 Indian Wildlife Act, though it continues largely unabated today. »» Snake charming is passed down from generation to generation among lower castes in India. »» The snakes, typically hooded cobras, often have their venom glands removed first. »» The reptiles aren’t charmed so much as frightened; standing erect and extending the hood is an instinctual defensive maneuver. Nor do they dance to the tune of the charmer’s flute (or pungi) — snakes lack external ears or eardrums. »» The snake’s perspective on all this has been, at best, an afterthought.

But not to Daniel Hart. The leader of Chapel Hill’s Physics of Meaning was inspired enough by a 2006 study abroad stint in India that he decided his band’s new record would be a metaphorical look at life, desire, and destiny from both snake and snake charmer’s points of view (this despite never seeing any snake charmers while he was there). In this fabulist tale,

18 | PHYSICS OF MEANING

Hart’s snake is charmed by his captor’s song to such a degree that he longs to be human and escapes in search of a magical wishing well to effect his transformation; the snake charmer fulfills his family obligation by collecting as many snakes as possible, especially this rogue reptile.

A dramatic conceit, but then Snake Charmer and Destiny At the Stroke of Midnight began life as a planned novella. The songs, with completesentence titles like “Why Can’t We Fall In Love Forever? (Anything Is Possible)” and “In Dreams, We Return to Ourselves, Empty and Honest,” were intended as chapter titles as well. Hart fully plans to finish the novella, only the songs came quicker.

“At one time I was hoping it would all come out at the same time,” the 32-year-old Hart chuckles, “but I got a lot further with the songs than the novella.”

If you’re not familiar with Hart’s loose collective of a chamber rock band, there’s a good chance you know his work as the violinist/guitarist for a host of acts including the Polyphonic Spree, St. Vincent and John Vanderslice. Or maybe you’d recognize his contributions to albums by local heavyweights like Annuals or David Karsten Daniels. And if not from there, perhaps as a familiar face on your Chapel Hill bus route — when he’s not out on the road with Physics, St. Vincent or Vanderslice, he’s a sort of “substitute bus driver” for that town’s Transit Authority.

Hart may drive a mean “J” route, but music is his obvious calling. The son of two choir directors and church organists, he began playing violin at the age of three. His parents took turns serving as his recital accompanists,

Courtesy of Trekky Records

though he insists there was none of the insidious pressure associated with some classical-loving parents living vicariously through their children; his, instead, “were there for the whole thing — scratchy, squeaky, just terrible sounds — so I really appreciate their patience.”

Hart eventually made it to the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra for a few years, where he met Maria Jeffers, who preceded him as principal string player in the Polyphonic Spree and now plays cello for Sufjan Stevens. Hart currently plays a William Harris Lee violin of recent vintage (1997) and, in a familiar refrain from contented string players, says it’s “been exciting to hear the sound of the instrument change as I play it and it blossoms.”

Hart plays guitar in his various incarnations, too, but all this violin ephemera is pertinent because, unlike Physics’ self-titled 2005 debut on which the instrument was more of a prominent accent than featured star, Snake Charmer makes a bold musical statement from its opening track. “In Dreams We Discover Ourselves, Broken and Yearning” is a towering violin solo — recorded at the University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill — with the melodic variations typical of a classical Bach chaconne. The next track, “Destiny Reveals an Unbelievable Truth,” has Zeppelin-“Kashmir” overtones built equally on staccato violin and chunky six-string, and includes a lengthy rock-flavored violin solo.

Those different elements — classical and classic rock, as viewed through an indie rock lens — characterize much of the record, and Hart’s instrument is front-and-center; he even says he can now actually write songs on violin rather than just the guitar. On her blog, touring and recording partner Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, recently declared Hart’s playing one of her favorite things, listing at No. 1 “Daniel Hart tracking mad violins on his 32nd birthday; that’s like a birthday present to all of us.” So as much as Snake Charmer’s story is about divergent destinies, its music is about reconciled musical disciplines.

“At first I wasn’t actually intending to include violin solos that had this classical feel to them,” says Hart, who even quit playing violin in college briefly when he decided not to continue his classical music studies. “But as I started working on the record they came out organically. I felt like things had come back around to a place where I could reconcile the things that excited me as an adult about playing the violin in a rock & roll world, and then the things that helped me to learn how to play the violin as a kid — violin solos.”

If Physics’ debut read like various related branches of indie rock — Neutral Milk Hotel’s lush, barely-on-the-rails indie rock; Mice Parade percussion thunder; intimate, Adem-like processed beats mixed with organic acoustics — Snake Charmer’s sonic tree would seem to have fewer limbs. But perhaps because they’re further apart, the contrast makes for a higher level of drama. The songs mix subdued stringsand-woodwinds vignettes — Hart wrote out all the parts for those sections — and intimate male-female duets (Ami Saraiya of Radiant Darling guests) with theatrical rockers buffeted by full-choral choruses and prog-rock elements.

Putting the songs together was mostly a question of logistics and co-coordinating the 20-plus member band; recording took place from Feb. to Nov. 2007 during rare schedule harmonies with primary producer and Bowerbirds member Mark Paulson. (Hart’s former roommate, Alex Lazara, co-produced the first Physics record and gets a production co-credit here as well.) As proof of the Triangle’s resurgent music scene, the record’s rich tapestry comes courtesy of guests from throughout the region, or those with ties to it, including Clark, Paulson, Lazara, Daniels, Des Ark’s Aimee Argote, and Perry Wright, as well as members of Megafaun, Annuals, (the late) Sweater Weather, the Strugglers, and others from the Trekky Records stable.

“I moved to North Carolina (in 2001) because of the music scene here in the 90s,” says Hart, citing Polvo, Ben Folds Five, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Superchunk as audio lures. “But when I got to town it didn’t feel like that at all; a lot of that had to do with not knowing anybody, and some of that can be attributed to a little bit of a lull in the local scene. But a year later, or about five years ago, all these bands emerged from the woodwork…so it just feels like it’s getting better and better.”

You can count Hart and his violin — as well as his reptilian inspiration — among those improvements.

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SPOT

GREENSBORO

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eople forget that Greensboro is a college town. Maybe it doesn’t resonate to the extent more renowned collegiate communities like Chapel Hill or Boone do, but between UNC-Greensboro, and Guilford and Greensboro Colleges, there are plenty of students running around.

An alumna of Guilford College, Renee Mendoza was once one of those students. And even though her library and finals days are over, she stuck around to front the effortlessly soulful Americana of Filthybird. And what a band it is, combining Mendoza’s rich voice with sometimes frantic, always gorgeous instrumentation in music that’s uniquely Southern. With Mendoza’s voice providing the lift, Filthybird more than earned its wings with 2007’s Southern Skies, an album that serves as the pitch-perfect tour guide for an oppressively humid Southern existence. Yes, it will make you sweat.

So who better to guide us through her hometown haunts than Mendoza? While she admits she doesn’t want to stay in Greensboro forever, she found plenty to talk about when discussing her favorite spots around town to see a show, grab some grub or a coffee, or buy a record.

By Jamie Williams

San Luis Mexican Restaurant Finding the good stuff in any city usually requires a diversion from the beaten path. Mendoza admits that despite a potentially dubious locale, the empanada-style Mexican food keeps her coming back. “Man, it’s just incredible. It’s not super fancy and it’s in a strange part of town but the food is just so authentic.” She says she knew she was in the right place the first time she walked in and didn’t hear any English.

“When you’re looking for good Mexican food, that’s usually a good thing.” 1503 W Lee St Greensboro, NC 27403 or (336) 851-2158

Pho Hien Vuong Restaurant Mendoza recommends this Vietnamese Pho restaurant for the traditional soup. She says the biggest draw, at least for her meat-averse friends, is the restaurant’s vegetarian-friendly offerings. “So many of my friends are vegetarian,” she says, “and whenever I go out with them, a lot of them want to go eat at this little soup place called Pho Hien Vuong.” 4109-A Spring Garden St. Greensboro, NC 27407

Square One

Green Bean

College Hill Sundries

Remember When Records

Mendoza says Filthybird’s draw in Greensboro mostly comes from smaller bars and coffee shops.

But she gets excited talking about Square One, the type of DIY space that pops up in a town with a lack of venues. “Square One was started as sort of this little practice space that bands could use. Then at some point they decided they wanted to start having shows at night and on the weekends.” She continues, “It reminds me of the places where I used to go and see punk shows back when I was in school.”

She describes the place with the passion of someone who cares deeply for a space beyond just bricks and mortar; maybe it isn’t pristine, maybe the floor isn’t always mopped, but it’s home. “It’s just this tiny space in a shitty strip mall right in the middle of a pretty shady neighborhood, but we really love it.” And in proper punk fashion, no address is listed on the venue’s sparse MySpace page, just a landmark. Talk about underground. 01 - 03.

As any caffeine connoisseur knows, a good coffee shop isn’t just about the java, it’s also about the people and the environment.

In Greensboro, Mendoza says, this is the place to go. “It really is just excellent coffee compared to other places.” Add that to the fact that it’s locally owned and the coffee is all fair trade, and she says you’ve got the recipe for a great spot to hang out and chat with friends, listen to music (maybe Filthybird) or read a good book. “They also have these locally baked vegan muffins that are always delicious.” 04 - 05.

Located between UNC-G and Greensboro College, College Hill Sundries isn’t Mendoza’s favorite bar in town. “I don’t like how loud it is,” she says. “But if you want to see some things and be entertained, that’s where you go.” The bar’s MySpace page claims it as home of the “best jukebox in town” and also boasts some damn good drink specials.

“It’s just a pretty typical smelly bar,” Mendoza says. “But stick around all night because before it’s over someone will start a fight.” (Background Photo)

Assuming you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, you know the local independent record store has practically been downloaded out of existence. Ask Mendoza about record shopping in her hometown and she sighs. “There really isn’t anywhere to go anymore.

The last one shut down. If you want to buy the new Beach House record or something I guess you’d have to see if they carry it at Best Buy, or buy it off the internet or something.” The remaining independent record stores are often staying afloat on the sale of vinyl, new and used.

And, Mendoza says, record collectors definitely have a place to spend their money in Greensboro at Remember When Records.

With racks full of rare vinyl in mint condition, Mendoza calls it heaven for finding long-lost gems. “It’s such a great place for collectors. All the stuff is in great condition, there are just racks and racks of vinyl.” 06 - 07.

Corner Glenwood and Grove near Florida St or myspace.com/ theflyinganvil

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341 S Elm St Greensboro, NC 27401 or (336) 691-9990

900 Spring Garden St Greensboro, NC 27403 or (336) 370-1372

2901 High Point Rd Greensboro, NC 27403 or (336) 297-1999

Photos by Kim Nguyen, except #04 by Allie Mullin

HOT

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By Bryan Reed PORTRAITS BY SCOTT BILBY LIVE SHOTS BY ALLIE MULLIN

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I

van Howard and Kelly Crisp are foils. Ivan is tall. His well-oversix-foot frame belies a soft-spoken shyness and good-ol’-boy smirk. He’s dressed in muted colors—a light blue button-down over a gray T-shirt, jeans and the vintage cab driver’s cap he calls his “life hat.”

Kelly, though petite, is outgoing, and like Ivan, is dressed to match her personality. Her brightly-colored tank top and pink Chucks, in tandem with her platinum blonde hair, splash color and light against the shaded greens and browns of the shore of Lake Johnson where we’ve met.

ny Background Photos: Jen

Hanson

Lake Johnson itself is an idyllic 150-acre expanse of green water nestled among the woods in the Southwest corner of Raleigh’s city limits. Green-headed mallard ducks and their dun female counterparts snooze or waddle on its sandy shores, mingling with a handful of unfriendly Canada geese. Crickets chirp. Occasionally, a ducks splashes as it dabbles in the shallows. The sounds of nature are interrupted only by stray cars breezing down Avent Ferry Road, the soft pad of runners’ feet hitting the sandy gravel trail, or the murmur of conversation as small groups of people amble along the shady pathways.

We sit on a bench tucked into a clearing looking into the water, between tall grasses and spindly tree trunks, as the late-afternoon sun flickers on the lake’s ripples. Kelly takes a seat and leans into the tape recorder when she speaks. As the band’s de facto spokeswoman, she’s used to this. Ivan moseys along nearby fiddling with the branches and charming the ducks that waddle by. Animals love him, Kelly says. He’s tuned into the surroundings and offers concise, bulls-eye comments.

Summer is drawing to a close, so the sun, sinking slowly into the late afternoon, begins to bruise the sky a pastel purple by the time we part ways. Autumn, like the release of Life Like, the band’s fourth fulllength for Merge Records, is fast approaching. This setting, it seems, is as good as home for The Rosebuds, the band Ivan and Kelly formed together in 2001, and whose songs are intrinsically tied to the land and water of North Carolina.

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ou cannot separate yourself from who you are,” says Kelly, “and I don’t think you can separate who you are from your very specific geography.

And both of us grew up in North Carolina and it informs and colors every creative choice that we’ve ever made.” Not only did they both grow up in North Carolina, but both have native ancestors: Kelly’s lineage includes two tribes of North Carolina Indians, Ivan’s includes one. “All of our family, for like generations, is here,” says Ivan. “I mean, Kelly’s part of the lost colony,” he adds with a laugh, smirking such that it’s hard to tell if he’s joking or not.

“It doesn’t get much older than that.”

Both attended UNC-Wilmington, where they met and The Rosebuds began, almost by accident. The story goes that on that fateful afternoon in 2001, a friend called Ivan in need of a last-second opening band. With a handful of rough compositions and a Sears drum machine, the duo worked out five songs in as many hours and performed that night to glowing response. They were invited to play another show, so they did. It wasn’t long before the band began to grow into its own entity.

“Everybody loved it,” says Kelly. “We just kept getting show offers and so we kept writing more songs and people in the town just got behind it and made us think we could move to Raleigh and get signed to Merge.” Two months after their first show, The Rosebuds moved to Raleigh, where the band has been based ever since. They recorded a demo in a friend’s bedroom, put out two split 7-inches and sent the demo to Merge Records.

“A band that’s on Merge is legitimate because they sign bands they like,” says Kelly.

In the meantime, Ivan worked as a land surveyor — a job he says afforded “a lot of time to think, just walking through the woods humming to myself” — while Kelly taught English at Wake Technical Community College. She even considered getting a Ph.D. from UNCChapel Hill in comparative literature, but opted instead to pursue the band as a full-time venture. “Having The Rosebuds gave me this new dimension and this new exciting creative thing to do, and I just felt like I wanted to do that with Ivan as a real thing,” she says. “And that might’ve been really naïve, but it worked out.” Two years after deciding to set up camp in Raleigh, The Rosebuds’ met their goal. Merge liked The Rosebuds, and in 2003 their first album, The Rosebuds Make Out, found its way to record store shelves bearing the imprint of the stalwart Durham-based label.

24 | ROSEBUDS

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he record introduced listeners to The Rosebuds’ brand of breezy indie pop. The album’s warm-toned cover art depicting a lone horse is as innocuous as the music inside.

Simple structures give the songs an easy-going character.

When, alongside a laid-back drumbeat from Billy Alphin, now of Schooner, Ivan’s guitar jangles here and there, it sounds almost twee.

And, playing as small vignettes to the lives of characters accustomed to being the subject of rock ’n’ roll songs — lovers, girls, drunkards and music fans — the bulk of the tracks on Make Out shine for their joviality more than their originality. Album closer “Make Out Song,” trades the uptempo pop of its predecessors for a languid, reverbdrenched shuffle that finds Ivan singing gingerly, “Enough with the makeup, let’s see your eyes/Your heartbeat is so sweet when you’re by my side,” to an unnamed lover most assumed was Kelly. (The two were married in 2001).

Upon the album’s release, the music press lazily lumped The Rosebuds in with couple-based bands like Mates of State. They still haven’t been able to shake the association, even as reviewers began to discuss their later albums. A review in Pitchfork by Eric Harvey of 2007’s Night of the Furies begins by settling The Rosebuds “within the small-but-noisy couplecore movement, situating the duo amongst Mates of State, Quasi, the White Stripes, and later, Matt & Kim.” That’s kept The Rosebuds in the same breath as those bands, much to the chagrin of The Rosebuds. To this day, Ivan and Kelly are reluctant to discuss their personal relationship outside of the band. Given the amount of ink wasted on largely irrelevant gossip, it’s hard to blame them.

Released mere months after 2005’s The Rosebuds Unwind EP, which found the band mining vintage pop sounds — note swing rhythms on “You Better Get Ready,” and bossa nova bass on the title track — Birds

Make Good Neighbors, was to be The Rosebuds defining album. The sophomore LP expanded the band’s sonic palate and began to tap into the duo’s Tar Heel background. “I think it really started with Birds Make Good Neighbors,” says Kelly. “It came in heavy in that record, and cut through all of the other things we thought we were doing. What we ended up doing was creating a North Carolina-sounding record.”

Of the songs that give the album its distinct Tar Heel character is “Leaves Do Fall,” which draws its inspiration from North Carolina history and mythology. “When I grew up on the Outer Banks, I remember that story of The Lost Colony,” says Kelly, explaining the song’s long-gestating muse. On the song, Kelly takes her first turn as lead singer, adopting the role of a frightened desperate colonist. “I’ve shouted ‘where?’/Out at the sea/’Cause you’re my love, my family,” she sings. With a driving drumbeat provided by Lee Waters, the song might well be the most urgent the album has to offer.

“It’s interesting for me to listen to music that has a narrative, and we draw a lot of our narratives from real or imagined history,” Kelly says.

But whether the stories The Rosebuds tell happened exactly as they say, or even at all, the emotions behind them are real.

Lyrically, the record draws more from nature than previous efforts.

In “Blue Bird,” “Nature’s radio plays music in our home.” “Shake Our Tree” is a love song from the perspective of a pair of birds. The tempo is slowed, creating a more atmospheric style for The Rosebuds.

Kelly’s keyboards sustain their chords, settling into the arrangement like the fog that comes after a day of rain. Ivan’s guitar comes draped in reverb, swirling around the songs, leaving Waters’ drums and the vocal melodies to provide most of the propulsion. It sounds less like an album born of record collections and more like one spawned from songwriters in touch with their surroundings. “I just kinda feel like I’m part of the land sometimes,” says Ivan, “I’ve spent so much time in it. It’s like osmosis.”

For both Ivan and Kelly, a rural upbringing proved pivotal to their musical development. Ivan learned to sing by entertaining himself while working on his family’s farm. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I used to drive a tractor all day long, and you can sing really loud on a tractor and nobody ever hears you,” he says. For Kelly, it was a stint living on the Outer Banks, where she and her family fished for subsistence. “I remember being on the island and coming up with shows,” she says. “I was out in the water by myself just picking up clams and doing these voices.”

Those purely organic expressions — lone voices floating in the breeze — eventually evolved into Night Of The Furies, which proved to be a major departure for the band. It’s The Rosebuds’ darkest album to date, delving deeper into the emotional confliction Birds Make Good Neighbors began to reveal.

Here, Kelly’s synthesizers take the fore. The bass guitar carries melodies. The drumming picks up deeper grooves, pulsing with rhythms lifted from dance music. Ivan’s voice shifts tone from a Morrissey croon to a deeper Dave Gahan-inspired tone. Kelly sings more, too, giving her songs a distant, detached delivery. It proved a challenge for the band when it came time to tour. “We didn’t play those songs live

before we recorded the record,” says Ivan, “then we recorded, and I was like, ‘Man, now we have a show, how are these songs gonna fit together?’” But, as Kelly adds, “It’s like making a mixtape. Good differences make it work out.”

Even with a more synthesized sound, the songwriting still bears a familiar voice. When finding images for their lyrics, The Rosebuds still couldn’t shake loose their ties to the environment of their home state. In “Silence By The Lakeside,” Ivan gently sings of “lights from the fireflies” and on “Get Up Get Out,” he promises, “we’ll sing from the branches of sweet gum trees.”

“I think that we operate along the boundaries of our limitations, but within the formula that we’ve created,” Kelly says. “All of our songs were able to do that and still sound like The Rosebuds’ nuanced pop music.” If any loose ends are left over, though, their latest, Life Like, will take care of that.

A

nd really, significant stylistic shifts are The Rosebuds’ M.O. Always have been. Since day one, Ivan and Kelly have considered their band an art project.

Not an art project in the sense of highfalutin concept with a listenability quotient of nil, but providing a means of exploring creative abilities and ideas. “We write with instinct more than we write against instinct,” says Kelly. Ivan adds, “I’d rather spend a lot of time on a strong melody than I would deconstructing a song so that it doesn’t have that melody on purpose.”

For The Rosebuds, albums are like gallery shows: look for the common thread in a collection of works, and draw them together with that thread. “We’re not trained … to care about what we’re doing with our instruments so much as we care about the mood that we’re creating,” says Kelly. “We don’t get so caught up in the medium and making sure that we’re the best musicians we can be. We really don’t care about that at all.” The mood reigns supreme. It’s audible in the happy-goluckiness of Make Out, the shoegazing mystique of Birds Make Good Neighbors and the detached new-wave of Night of the Furies. “We’re

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lucky enough to not get hung up on how we sound too much, so that we write all the time,” says Kelly. There are songs, she says, that will never see a proper release, just due to the sheer volume of songs they write.

It’s a good problem to have, and one that Ivan and Kelly are likely to attribute to something supernatural. “There’s a psychic connection that we have, so that I’ll have an idea and not know how to communicate it completely, but I’ll start something and he can finish it,” says Kelly.

Ivan adds, “To a stranger, it’d be impossible.” That artistic alchemy is also responsible for Life Like, The Rosebuds’ newest, which draws together the disparate elements of the band’s entire catalog. In many ways, it’s a study of the band’s evolution. It also points to the future.

And it’s the album most entrenched in the imagery of North Carolina.

On “Cape Fear,” snappy dance-rock drums meet a driving bassline and synth-haze as Kelly sings about a man-eating catfish. Ivan depicts a real-life fox he found dead in the backyard on “Nice Fox,” and warns it, “Don’t tease the neighbor’s dog,” and “Don’t scratch at my old screen door.” A choir of friends with Kelly at the lead chimes in, “And it don’t mean nothing at all,” giving the song the mournful resignation that makes it so powerful. Conflicted Southern morality infiltrates the songs, too, as on “Bow To The Middle,” in which Ivan croons “If you dance to the devil’s voice/You’re the devil, too.” He confronts those same religious notions on “In The Backyard,” where a preacher digs up a Ouija board to put on the porch — “Like it came back to life” — scaring the speaker from using it again. “Some folks say it’s just a toy/But that board game can take your soul away/I heard my mother say/It’s a gateway to the underworld/My old Baptist preacher swore/As he took our family’s tithes away.”

As well as being the band’s most lyrically-bound to North Carolina, it’s also the lushest record in the catalog. There’s a spaciousness and an ease to the record that makes it feel almost alive. Kelly sings more than ever and with

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a newfound confidence that allows her to carry the upbeat “Cape Fear” with the same finesse as the moody, downtempo “Black Hole.” “Now I’m kind of a monster and I want to sing all the songs,” she chuckles. There’s even an instrumental, “Hello Darling,” a delightful whistle-led jaunt that’s something like My Morning Jacket touring Mayberry. It opens with a recorded snippet of Ivan’s grandfather — a message sent home from WWII. Says Ivan, “This record’s really cool to me because of all the melodies and backing vocals and everything.

It’s just like a step above everything we ever did.”

ress materials for the new album claim that after touring behind 2007’s Night of the Furies, Ivan and Kelly were ready to focus on other endeavors, to take a break for a while, but before long had returned to making music as a means to entertain themselves and — almost by accident — ended up compiling enough songs for a whole new album. That, they say is how Life Like was born. Coincidentally, it also proved to be the band’s return to a more acoustic-oriented sound and a heightened attention to their natural surroundings. Real or imagined, it’s the stuff of a publicist’s fantasy.

“I thought that this record is really terrestrial, and so I would like to start thinking of myself as the kind of person who has a connection to geography,” says Kelly — looking at the record with the benefit of hindsight, as she explains why we’ve met at Lake Johnson. But making a “terrestrial record” was hardly a mission statement for Life Like. In fact, it, like all the other albums, grew organically. “I definitely feel like I’m attached to the nostalgia of time and geography of my favorite records. Maybe more than the records that we record because those happen for us over time, and not at a time.”

Life Like was largely stitched together with pieces of old songs, so the overall sound is a mingling of the band’s catalog. Their songs tend to reflect the instrument on which it was written, but the latest betrays no singular source.

Kelly adds, “Some of it’s totally new and some of it’s been around for a while and it never got fully developed because we’ve got so much material.” So Life Like didn’t just happen overnight. It wasn’t an extemporaneous jam session turned to gold. But it certainly has that air about it. The looseness about the album makes it seem as though the recording was done with a more leisurely, front-porch pacing, taking pressure off the band and giving The Rosebuds the elbow room to reach into older ideas, as well as into newer ones.

But it still seems The Rosebuds certainly could have used some time off.

Before embarking on his musical endeavors, Ivan was a star athlete at

UNC-W, looking to play in the NBA until he shattered both wrists and his bigleague dreams. But eventually the bones healed, and that’s when he decided to pick up a guitar. He still plays ball, even in spite of recent ACL surgery. And he still has hoop dreams. In a post on The Rosebuds’ blog, dated June 30, 2007, Kelly recounts a chance encounter at a Whole Foods in Houston, Tex. where Ivan bumped into NBA legend Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon. She goes on to quote Ivan as saying, “Meeting him in there made me realize something... I could have dominated in the NBA.” Outside of blogging and the band, Kelly splits her time between Raleigh and New York, working on a second career as a stand-up comic. The night of our interview, she’s performing at Carrboro’s DSI Comedy Theatre, a tiny venue against the back wall of Carr Mill Mall by the train tracks, and across the street from the Cat’s Cradle — where The Rosebuds perform the next night to a packed house between Birds of Avalon and Superchunk. As she took the stage at the back of the narrow theatre, faced the small, but receptive crowd, Kelly swung into a set of jokes both political (“If the Republicans promise to keep abortions legal, we’ll stop having them for fun”) and personal (“After seven years, I get written up in a magazine called Under The Radar. Maybe if I’m lucky in a few more years I’ll be in Merely A Blip.”). She’s been doing comedy longer than she’s been a Rosebud. It shows.

Having time off also lets Ivan and Kelly remember that they’re also music fans.

Neither is an uncommon sight at shows in Raleigh. Ivan reminisces about back-in-the-day shows where the audience was involved and active, but professes his respect for Raleigh bands The Loners and Birds of Avalon. Kelly’s a fan of Bon Iver (whose figurehead, Justin Vernon, was The Rosebuds’ guitarist for the Night of the Furies tour). “We’ll claim him,” she says of the former Raleigh-resident. She loves Bowerbirds, too, and admits to shedding tears the first time she saw them play. “I get overwhelmed a lot by music,” she says. “But you should. You should have some kind of reaction.” The Rosebuds take that fan’s philosophy to heart every time they take the stage. They shake hands and greet the front rows as they set up equipment. It’s not uncommon for a Rosebuds show to end up with the stage flooded by dancing crowd members. Kelly says that eliciting a physical response from an audience is among the highest compliments she could receive.

B

ut with Kelly splitting her time between N.Y. and N.C., how can the Rosebuds stay in touch with the surroundings that inspire them?

“You can move but you don’t have to make that a permanent thing.”

Kelly says. “I like spending time in New York, but I don’t think I could ever see myself as a New Yorker, and we get so much done creatively when we’re here in North Carolina. It’s just so easy to live here.” Maybe Ivan’s idea of osmosis holds some truth. “You never really leave anything behind,” he says, echoing a sentiment that’s been expressed before with a straight-faced sincerity that gives gravity to his words.

Back on that tree-shaded bench, looking out on the green water of Lake Johnson, Kelly talks about her “art project.” “I think that it’s not as high-concept, maybe,” she says. And we don’t care about getting caught up on stuff like that as much as we don’t care about being incredible musicians. We’d rather create something that has its own values.” Something with its own values, not just lip-service to some nebulous idea of “home.” It starts to make sense. As much as The Rosebuds draw from their surroundings, they let the images ooze into evocation. Memory and imagination are just as important in making songs that have values of their own. History, real or imagined, right? North Carolina is intrinsically attached to The Rosebuds’ music because it’s attached to their memories. It seemed outrageous at first, but maybe there’s some truth there when Kelly says, “We could live anywhere if we had to.”

For now, though, they’ve chosen North Carolina.

Background Photos: Jenny Hanson

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

CAUGHT INTHEACT

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01. Maple Stave - Jonathan Truesdale Bull City Headquarters Durham, NC

02. Kaze - Jonathan Truesdale Cats Cradle Carborro, NC

03. Pinback - Michael G Cole The Neighborhood Theatre Charlotte, NC

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04. Silver Jews - Reuben Bloom The Grey Eagle Asheville, NC

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05. Hammer No More The Fingers Allie Mullin

Cat’s Cradle

Carborro, NC

06. Sex Tapes - Donald Doolittle Snug Harbor Charlotte, NC

07. Superchunk - Allie Mullin Cat’s Cradle

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Carborro, NC

08. Brother Reade - Reuben Bloom Black Sheep Charlotte, NC

09 Mosadi Music - Jonathan Truesdale Cats Cradle Carborro, NC

10. Tooth - Allie Mullin This Thing We Did Festival Sanford, NC

11. Lemming Malloy - Allie Mullin Local 506

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Carborro, NC

12. Birds of Avalon - Allie Mullin Cat’s Cradle Carborro, NC

13. Caverns - Jonathan Truesdale Cats Cradle Carborro, NC

14. Giant - Donald Doolittle The Werehouse Winston - Salem , NC

15. Monotonix - Reuben Bloom The Grey Eagle 16. Xiu Xiu - Reuben Bloom The Milestone Charlotte, NC

17. Autopassion - Donald Doolittle The Werehouse Winston-Salem, NC

Background Photo: Jenny Hanson

Asheville, NC

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SHUFFLEZINE.TV

By John Schacht

Born of thrift store instruments, jerryrigged components and Mark Linkous’ fecund imagination, Sparklehorse turns entropy into sonic bliss

30 | SPARKLEHORSE

Years ago, when Sparklehorse was just a foal in Mark Linkous’ imagination, he sometimes turned to folk art to help make ends meet.

“I’d make whirligigs out of wood and old pieces of tin,” he says almost sheepishly.

Then he’d take a sawed-off shotgun to them and Sharpie the remains with random data — “the date it was shot and the wind-speed and the temperature” — before selling his doodads to “snooty people” who thought they were buying collectible folk art. “Instead, it was just some dumbass with a shotgun and a hammer.”

This is the point on the page where you’d expect to see the analogy made that Linkous’ music is similarly constructed from random bits of musical detritus that’s been shot gunned and hammered into quixotic sonic shapes. But not here, and not this time, because there’s not much left to chance in the carefully crafted art of Sparklehorse music.

Loyalists — including some rather prominent musicians — will swear by it: There’s just something about the blend of fuzzy rockers and summer-haze twang, meandering guitars and tape-looped cicadas, wheezing pump organs and swirly synths, bruised vocals and haunted-farm vignettes, that makes Linkous’ scattered releases treasured items.

The former Virginian, who’s lived secluded the last five years in the Smoky Mountains of Southwest North Carolina, is the kind of musician who finds other musicians practically campaigning to be on his records. Previous Sparklehorse record guest-spots have included the likes of Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Nina Persson and Vic Chesnutt, and Linkous has been invited to tour or record with Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Portishead, Christian Fennesz, David Lowery, and, on 2006’s Dreamt for Light Years In the Belly of A Mountain, with Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley fame.

The appeal? Linkous forges his music in the crucible between sadness and wonder, destruction and renewal, and seems closer than most to the effects of the process. Those polarities mirror the author’s own emotional tenor, but it’s also culled from the natural world that Linkous, his wife Teresa, and their menagerie of pets and farm animals

encounter in the woodlands surrounding their mountain home. Through Four Elementsmetaphor and zoomorphic imagery, Linkous creates a fantastical tableau where decay and rebirth haunt the same space where the spirits of old horses roam and crows have “old souls,” June bugs are “gods” and fireflies are “dying stars,” and we’re all “born to return back to clay.”

Tuning in to those often stygian frequencies for inspiration can exact a steep emotional toll. But unlike the creativity-killing depression and addiction that resulted in five years of songwriting silence between 2001’s It’s A Wonderful Life and Dreamt for Light Years…, Linkous has kept busy since his last release.

In addition to his own recent trio-tour in Europe he just wrapped a summer Euro-jaunt with Daniel Johnston, and was joined in Johnston’s backing band by Scout Niblett, Yo La Tengo’s James McNew, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, and Jad Fair of Half-Japanese. (Linkous produced Johnson’s 2003 disc, Fear Yourself, and curated a 2004 tribute to the lo-fi hero, The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered.)

Linkous is also writing and arranging material for the next Sparklehorse record. He calls the new songs “Buddy Holly-like” with “simpler chord progressions and lots of cool noises,” and has compared them elsewhere to “suicide probes that send back as much information as they can before crashing into the sun.” Unlike his last two releases, this time Linkous is trying to streamline rather than obsess over the dozens of snippet-filled micro-cassette tapes that he collects in the process of songwriting.

“I always thought that I was just a conduit, that something was coming through me and I was making music out of it,” he says in his hushed Virginia drawl. “It seems like that got harder and harder to do, so I’m trying to do that again by simplifying things. The songs are not quite as clever, and I’m not laboring forever over every line, every lyric.”

He’s also producing twangy songwriter and Macon County neighbor Angela Martin to “keep my studio chops up,” he says, adding Waits-like “Bone Machine twists” to the singer’s clever narratives. And his muchanticipated collaboration with Danger Mouse

THE GEARHORSE

Mark Linkous shares some stories behind a few of his favorite musical play pals:

MODIFIED CIRCUIT-BENT CASIO SK1 “It’s a teeny little keyboard and you wouldn’t know how deep it is by just looking at it. You can sample on it and you can totally change the wave forms. I then had one circuit bent by this guy in Asheville – I don’t know what they do, they just get in there and do their thing with the circuitry, and it sort of turns it into a modular synthesizer.

It’ll be on the next album.”

HARMONY MASTER ARCH-TOP GUITAR “It’s like a 40s arch-top f-hole, with this old DeArmand pickup that slides on a rail. I bought that for $200 in the parking lot of a Fuddruckers – I was up in Asheville, I forget where the guy selling it was at, but he said ‘I’ll meet you in the parking lot of Fuddruckers.’ The guitar was in one of those shitty, generic chipboard cases and he said, ‘You know, that’s a vintage case and it’s worth $200 by itself.’ I said, ‘I’ll give you $200 for the guitar and you keep the fucking case.’ And he says, ‘Well, all right.’ I go to hand him back the case and he says, ‘Tell ya what, you can have it. I’ll throw that in too.’”

1950S GIBSON J-50 FLAT-TOP ACOUSTIC “They have this thing on the radio down here called a party line, basically people trying to buy and sell stuff, everything from land to chickens.

The host has been there for years, so half the time it’s just him talking to local people that he knows about the price of hay, who’s sick, who died, who’s got a new gal, god knows what, and I call in occasionally, maybe three times a year, and I ask if anybody has got any old guitars, American guitars, or valve/tube electronic gear, and somebody always calls me….this one guy had this 1950s J-50 flat-top Gibson acoustic, the back was cracked and it’d been played so much that the first two or three frets had deep craters in ’em that somebody had filled in with house putty, or glue, or gum, or something. But it’d been so long ago it totally solidified and was fine. I got it for $300 and then got a luthier I knew to fix it for $150, so I got this beautiful Gibson 50s flat-top – it’s like the sister guitar to my J-45. I’ve been writing on that a lot recently.”

HARMONY ROCKET: 60S JAPANESE ELECTRIC ACCORDION “In the next town over from mine, there’s this gas station-slash-music store-slash-cowboy Christian church sing-along auditorium-thing that this guy built. The first time I walked in there I freaked out, because believe it or not he had this old Gretsch White Falcon and a bunch of other great, great stuff just hanging on the walls. Most of it isn’t for sale, but occasionally cool stuff would come in that he would sell, like a Harmony Rocket with one pickup on it. He also had a Japanese electric accordion from the 60s, which looked way more like a synthesizer, and I assumed would sound more like a synthesizer than of course any accordion because it didn’t have a bellows. But he didn’t have the adapter for it, so I just chanced it, and got the Harmony and the electric accordion for $300. I ended up playing that single pick-up Harmony for at least one tour, exclusively – something about the inferior plywood, or the wood of a Silvertone kind of guitar, run through a Vox amplifier is a really nice matchup. And the electric accordion ended up being really great – the bass buttons, that you would play with your left hand, they’re just super cool as hell, like sub-bass, and all the controls up on the keys are like a cheesy, 60s synth.”

– John Schacht

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

— tentatively titled Dangerhorse — is finally getting mixed for a 2009 release. The track-list includes guest spots from the Flaming Lips, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, the Cardigans’ Persson, and ex-Granddaddy guru Jason Lytle, among a host of others. Also in the can is a joint effort with laptop wizard Fennesz for the In the Fishtank series — though Konkurrent, the Dutch label that’s recorded and released the previous 14 imaginative pairings, hasn’t released one in over two years after typically dropping two a year.

Linkous’ music may inspire, but his release-luck hasn’t: after his seminal 1995 debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, won him his cult following, 1998’s Good Morning Spider chronicled a London hotel room overdose-and-collapse that briefly stopped his heart and left him in a wheelchair for six months (he still wears leg braces today).

It’s a Wonderful Life was released a week before Sept. 11, 2001, and essentially died on the vine despite all the heavyweight guests and critical accolades; one week after Dreamt for Light Years… came out, the EMI merger begat a Night of the Long Knives bloodletting, and any Capitol/Parlophone/Astralwerks artist that didn’t sell at least 500,000 records, Linkous says he was told, was dropped “no questions asked.”

“The last couple of albums,” he sighs, “have been sort of cursed.”

Still, sale numbers don’t reflect his records’ impact (Authors’ note: In a decade of interviewing musicians, few peer-artists have invoked more geeky-fan-like reverence when their name comes up). Much of the credit for the Sparklehorse sound goes to Linkous’ fascination with vintage gear and audio. But his isn’t a collector’s dilettantism; like any audio hound, it’s all about sound. When he visited the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, Linkous was disappointed his tour didn’t include the fabled subterranean echo chambers Les Paul built beneath the parking lot, where early Beatles’ recordings deemed sonically unsuited for the U.S. market went for equalization and soundbrightening.

Linkous seems mildly embarrassed by the geeky nature of gear-talk,

32 | SPARKLEHORSE

and concedes he isn’t mechanically inclined at all. Yet he has fallen victim to the siren-like satisfaction of trying to build shit yourself.

While in Virginia, the self-confessed “carpentry retard” once tried to build garage doors for the 150-year-old farmhouse he lived in, but miscalculated the actual width and length of the wood, leaving a two-foot-wide gap when he shut the doors he’d slaved over. “Two-byfours and one-by-sixes aren’t two-by-four and one-by-six at all, and I didn’t know that,” he laughs. “I mean, where the fuck is the Bureau of Weights and Measures?”

Maybe it’s his admiration for those who are craftsmen that draws him magnet-like to any rare or odd-ball instrument that might yield new and fantastic sounds. The stories behind how he acquired them, too, seem to infuse the instruments’ personalities: haunting regional thrift stores and coming away with a $100 church organ or a rare Japanese electric accordion; buying a classic old guitar in a Fuddruckers parking lot from some sketchy dude; calling in to rural AM-radio party lines seeking — and typically finding — vintage fare for sale (see the sidebar for more details). His home studio, Static King, is practically a repository for the stuff, from the 60s Fleckinger console through all manner of jerry-rigged components, banks of keyboards, and the requisite quiver of acoustic and electric stringed instruments.

Yet Linkous is just as likely to insist that “sometimes you don’t need any of that shit” and can accomplish what you have to “with just a 4-track.” And that gets to the heart of Linkous’ skill set anyway; more than this instrumental coterie, it’s the care and thought that goes into his musical alchemy — knowing when to a let a melody breathe on its own, or when to shotgun the bejesus out of it with distortion, feedback or synth debris — that defines Sparklehorse music. As long as that sonic aesthetic is intact and his instincts remain true, Linkous will likely never lack for admirers.

LIVE REVIEW

LITTLE BROTHER

Little Brother Sept. 20 – Amos’ Southend, Charlotte To see Little Brother is to believe in Little Brother—and in hip-hop, and in North Carolina. The Durham-bred duo has seen its share of hardships lately. Atlantic dropped the perennial next-bigthing. 9th Wonder, Little Brother’s longtime producer and one of N.C. hip-hop’s most recognizable figures, also bid the group farewell. Yet the now-duo of MCs Phonte and Big Pooh soldiered on, back to the underground, angry but reaffirmed. It was enough to make 2007’s Getback a great record. But live, playing at the moderately-sized Amos’ Southend in Charlotte to a crowd that despite its fervor couldn’t fill the room, Little Brother demanded attention worthy of blockbuster acts—even without arena-sized spectacle, backup dancers or a light show.

But that wouldn’t have matched Little Brother’s everyman charm, anyway. Phonte wore a black T-shirt and a ballcap. Rapper Big Pooh shed his polo for a white V-neck. Both were quickly soaked in sweat. “There are two rules at the Little Brother show,” declared Phonte. “Number one, it’s a motherfuckin’ party at the Little Brother show. And rule number two, it’s a motherfuckin’ party at the Little Brother show.” And a party it was. The duo earned its headlining slot with amped-up versions of standout songs like “Good Clothes, “Sirens,” and “After The Party” (all from Getback) that hoisted hundreds of hands into the air, bouncing along to the beat. Infused with Southern soul from the samples, melodic hooks, and the appearance of guest vocalist Carlitta Durand on “Sirens” and “After The Party,” there is no doubt that Little Brother’s music is born of the Carolinas. But the duo’s greatest strength is in their ability to relate to the audience.

Little Brother doesn’t offer escapism from the real world because they’re right there with us: getting frustrated at work, blowing off steam at a party, and trying—and often failing—to pick up chicks. And true to their affable nature, between songs, Phonte and Big Pooh joked with the audience, poked fun at themselves and poured champagne (Harris Teeter’s finest 1994 Korbel, announced Phonte) into plastic cups. They had a lot to live up to after a slew of inspired opening sets from a Carolinian cast including Inflowential, Median, Kooley High and Jozeemo, but the Durham duo rose above expectations, proving that hip-hop is alive and well in N.C., and that Little Brother isn’t just surviving, but thriving—even without 9th Wonder.

Words by Bryan Reed. Photo by Allie Mullin.

T

o see Little Brother is to believe in Little Brother — and in hip-hop, and in North Carolina. The Durham-bred duo has seen its share of hardships lately. Atlantic dropped the perennial next-big-thing. 9th Wonder, Little Brother’s longtime producer and one of N.C. hip-hop’s most recognizable figures, also bid the group farewell. Yet the now-duo of MCs Phonte and Big Pooh soldiered on, back to the underground, angry but reaffirmed. It was enough to make 2007’s Getback a great record. But live, playing at the moderately-sized Amos’ Southend in Charlotte to a crowd that despite its fervor couldn’t fill the room, Little Brother demanded attention worthy of blockbuster acts — even without arena-sized spectacle, backup dancers or a light show.

But that wouldn’t have matched Little Brother’s everyman charm, anyway. Phonte wore a black T-shirt and a ballcap. Rapper Big Pooh shed his polo for a white V-neck. Both were quickly soaked in sweat.

“There are two rules at the Little Brother show,” declared Phonte.

“Number one, it’s a motherfuckin’ party at the Little Brother show.

And rule number two, it’s a motherfuckin’ party at the Little Brother show.” And a party it was. The duo earned its headlining slot with

amped-up versions of standout songs like “Good Clothes, “Sirens,” and “After The Party” (all from Getback) that hoisted hundreds of hands into the air, bouncing along to the beat. Infused with Southern soul from the samples, melodic hooks, and the appearance of guest vocalist Carlitta Durand on “Sirens” and “After The Party,” there is no doubt that Little Brother’s music is born of the Carolinas. But the duo’s greatest strength is in their ability to relate to the audience.

Little Brother doesn’t offer escapism from the real world because they’re right there with us: getting frustrated at work, blowing off steam at a party, and trying — and often failing — to pick up chicks. And true to their affable nature, between songs, Phonte and Big Pooh joked with the audience, poked fun at themselves and poured champagne (Harris Teeter’s finest 1994 Korbel, announced Phonte) into plastic cups. They had a lot to live up to after a slew of inspired opening sets from a Carolinian cast including Inflowential, Median, Kooley High and Jozeemo, but the Durham duo rose above expectations, proving that hip-hop is alive and well in N.C., and that Little Brother isn’t just surviving, but thriving — even without 9th Wonder.

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

BY

When Dr. Robert Moog died suddenly of a brain tumor in 2005, the world lost one of electronic music’s greatest innovators. Moog was known for building ground-breaking instruments that tore down the barriers between natural musicianship and technology — pioneering the synthesizer and bringing the theremin to mainstream popularity. For many, the loss of Moog was the loss of a hero.

“Immediately following Dad’s passing, thousands of people around the world paid tribute to the effect that Dad had on their lives, both through his instruments and through his warm, humble spirit,” says Moog’s daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa.

Though best known for his Moog synthesizer, what originally got Bob Moog interested in making instruments was a bizarre little instrument called the theremin. Picture this: a musician stands in front of a rectangular box, waving his or her hands around in front of two antennas. The result is a sound somewhere between banshees screaming and UFOs landing.

034| MOOG 34 | CONTENTS

It may sound like a strange instrument to become fascinated with, but technology like the theremin was right up Bob Moog’s alley. At 19, the budding innovator founded his first company, the R.A. Moog Co., to manufacture the instrument. It was long after that Moog invented the first synthesizer, which he patented and began selling through his fledgling company later renamed Moog Music, based in Asheville. These days, Moog Music has grown into a full-scale manufacturing company selling everything from analog synthesizers to complex effects pedals — and is one of the most recognizable names in the music tech world.

But what Moog created was more than just an electronic instrument business. In his lifetime, Dr. Robert Moog had created an incredible body of original work — but his legacy of ingenuity in electronic music was about to be lost. After the passing of her father, Moog-Koussa opened up a storage shed to find stacks upon stacks of dusty boxes and trash bags filled with her father’s archives. Covered in a thin layer of mold were thousands of items: vintage instruments and equipment including the last of the Minimoog synthesizers, prototypes, master recordings from 60s and 70s electronic musicians like Keith Emerson, copious schematics, articles and photos, and a huge amount of memorabilia.

Moog-Koussa knew immediately that the archives needed to be restored. She was sitting on a goldmine — a history of electronic music production from one of its greatest supporters. So she founded the Bob Moog Foundation to fund the project to preserve the archives — with the intention of eventually opening a Bob Moog Museum.

Her plight was heard by the musical community. Musicians eager to support Moog-Koussa’s effort were soon volunteering to help out however they could. In the two years since its inception, The Moog Foundation has hosted Asheville bands in showcases that served as fundraisers for the Foundation. Many of those bands even donated tracks to the Mooged Out compilation CD. And it wasn’t just local musicians who heeded the call to perpetuate the work of Bob Moog. After the Smashing Pumpkins’ nine-day run in Asheville, NC in 2007 — Billy Corgan became interested in the project, donating money and writing letters on behalf of the Foundation.

“I strongly believe many people all over the world would benefit from being able to interact with the thoughts, ideas, inventions, and life of Dr. Moog,” says Corgan in a message on the Moog Foundation Web site, moogfoundation.org.

Moog-Koussa was touched by the outpouring of support for her cause.

“While we knew that Dad was well-known and highly accomplished, the family never realized how he had inspired and touched people by giving them a new way to express their creativity,” says Moog-Koussa.

“We founded the foundation to carry on this legacy of both technical brilliance and creative warmth.”

The archives are only a fraction of what the non-profit Foundation is doing to preserve Moog’s legacy. The non-profit released its CD, Mooged Out: Asheville, in 2007 — comprised entirely of songs that use Moog gear. The Foundation is present at numerous music festivals and events with all sort of Moog gear from theremins to the “little phatty” synthesizer for people to try. The group, which was also represented at this year’s National Association of Music Merchants Show (NAMM), has held community events in the Asheville area and even anticipates a series of benefit concerts with nationally recognized musicians. Bob Moog himself has become a local icon — a cartoon version of him anyway. His characteristic white hair and oval glasses have become recognizable as the Moog Foundation t-shirt logo — his presence a reminder of a person who “made waves” in the music industry.

The Moog Foundation also strives to support music education outreach programs, especially in support of disadvantaged children in the United States. Plans are in the works to set up scholarships in Moog’s name at UNC-Asheville where Dr. Moog lectured, Berklee College of Music where he received an honorary degree, and Cornell University, where Moog received his Ph.D. The Foundation is also designing outreach programs to bring electronic music into the schools “as a vehicle for children to connect science, music and creativity,” says MoogKoussa.

In August 2008, the Foundation celebrated its two-year anniversary with the launch of a Moog Foundation YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/moogfoundation,) which offers a video tribute, “Virtuality: The Moog Legacy” by musician Amin Bhatia. Moog was also paid tribute through an all-Moog composition by synth wizard Erik Norlander dubbed “The Princely Hours,” which is available for download on the Foundation’s MySpace page, myspace.com/moogfoundation. The Foundation also offers t-shirts and bumper stickers through its Web site.

Eventually, the Foundation plans to open a Bob Moog Museum to display and preserve his archives and memorabilia and present exhibits on other innovations in electronic music. Until then, the Foundation continues to accept donations, plan concerts and fundraisers, and make its presence known at events.

If the Foundation has any say in it, Moog’s legacy will continue to inspire electronic music and creative technology for years to come.

“My father has a unique and beautiful legacy of touching people’s lives through innovation, creativity and human warmth,” says MoogKoussa. “The Bob Moog Foundation aims to carry that legacy forward.

As my father would say, ‘What’s not to like?’”

Editor’s Note: Portions of this story appeared in Blurt-Online SHUFFLEZINE.TV

CLICK ON THESE

American Aquarium RALEIGH | MYSPACE.COM/AMERICANAQUARIUM

Snatching its name from a Wilco lyric and its sound from the Whiskeytown playbook, American Aquarium writes the kind of heartbreaking ballads that stumble through the abridged history of country music, honky tonk, Western swing and alt-country. The band’s latest, The Bible And The Bottle, features the type of writing that is readily (and unfortunately) relatable. It’s a shame front man BJ Barham’s been screwed over by so many women, but at least he puts those stories to good use. (JW)

Big Treal

CHARLOTTE | MYSPACE.COM/BIGTREAL

The Dream Merchant, Vol. 2, 9th Wonder’s 2007 showcase, boasts a solid collection of MCs, but the record’s biggest and most welcome surprise came in the form of “Baking Soda” and its star, Charlotte’s Big Treal. The Crown Town MC chews and stretches words, wrapping them around the beat, swaggering between drum hits and squeezing in between bass thumps. His malleable syllables create an image of a cocksure Treal standing tall as he makes a weapon of the mic. (HG)

The Cashmere Blackout Morganton | myspace.com/thecashmereblackout

Crafting pop songs with classic hook-laden pacing and rhythm, this quartet blasts out jittery garagerock that gets ingrained in your head for days at a time. “Devil Eyes” combines a semi-automatic drumbeat with the infectious chorus, “Come on pretty baby, you’re so stoned,” and a touch of punk swagger, making the song hard to shake. A debut album just dropped, promising more songs to get wrapped up in. (JW)

Cement Stars Charlotte | myspace.com/cementstars1

This duo creates electronica that swirls with celestial synth and whispery vocals. It’s obvious that Bryan and Shaun Olson know how to start a party, but also obvious that they recognize when the fun winds down. “Just when you think it’s all over, you’re wrong,” they sing on “Over and Done.”

Always ready to practice what they preach, they kick it up on other tracks, providing astrological atmospherics for your next dance-floor romp. (JW)

Elonzo Rock Hill | myspace.com/elonzomusic

This family gathering — siblings Jeremy Davis (guitar, vox) and Maggie Davis Bourdeau (piano, vox), with Maggie’s husband Dan Bourdeau on drums – just released a beyond-their-years-mature debut, All My Life. Filled with stately fare a couple notches louder than Red House Painters, some VU choogle, and sneaky folk-rockers that suggest Nor’wester Damien Jurado on a Carolina Southern freight-car, Maggie’s intricate piano fills and organ primer coats also give their self-described “Nuevo Southern Rock” a bracing twist. (JGM)

36 | CLICK ON THESE

The Graves of Fairmount Chapel Hill | myspace.com/thegravesoffairmount

Though Paul O’Keefe, the former Red Collar drummer behind the Graves of Fairmount moniker, won’t call his solo project more than “the din of a dying cat,” it’s actually a powerful expression of the terror that comes once you realize your youth has died. On his homemade Calendars and Casualties EP, he fills out the sound with a bevy of instruments that bolster his visceral confessions.

But live, alone with a guitar, his lonely, pained example lends the songs a whole new level of affecting intimacy. (JL)

Bruce Hazel & Some Volunteers Charlotte | myspace.com/brucehazel

Purveyor of down and dirty garage-rock blues with the occasional flourish (horns and strings) for contrast and color, former leader of The Noise Hazel still has the front-man goods, firing his shows with ‘holy-shit’ spit-take intensity not that far removed from heroes Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer.

With a set lineup — finally belying the band-name — and a new release almost in the can, Hazel seems set to take the Next Step. (JGM)

Holy Ghost Tent Revival Greensboro | myspace.com/hgtr

It’d be much easier to list the few sounds that don’t influence HGTR than all the ones that do.

Melding traditional bluegrass and ragtime charm to raucous E Street rock ’n’ roll, and adding New Orleans jazz horns and a garnish of Beach Boys harmony, the sextet creates a sound that’s like all the great traditions in American music meeting in the woods outside of Greensboro, and having one hell of a hoedown in the process. (JL) PHOTO: SCOTT BILBY COURTESY OF: HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL

Maple Stave Durham | myspace.com/maplestave

Maple Stave’s every note pounds with atomic intensity. Powerful attacks of guitar, bass and drums meld into a serpentine bludgeon to create a chaotic roar that belies its meticulous arrangement. And though the trio’s assault is merciless, it resounds with emotion. The music’s power is born of the seemingly deliberate and unavoidable feeling created by the mostly-instrumental arrangements. We get the message, even when it’s unspoken. (JL)

Ponchos from Peru Wilmington | myspace.com/ponchosfromperu

From hushed moments of tinkling glock and subtle guitar lines to horn-fueled transitions and dramatic multi-voiced crescendos, this quartet may not break molds with their newest release (they’re calling it their first “official” record), but they have that charming thrift store-rock thing down pat. A little bit Rademacher, a little bit Joan of Arc, the back-and-forth vocals from songwriter Adam Smith and McKenna Oakes seem like an especially fecund territory to explore. (JGM)

Joe Romeo and the Orange County Volunteers Carrboro | myspace.com/joeromeomusic

A vibrant interpretation of Dylan’s amphetaminefueled blues, combined with an exquisite touch for pop melody and songwriting that’s so matter-offact in its wisdom it makes us chuckle even as it points out our flaws. That’s the recipe that makes Joe Romeo great. Playing live with a group of area veterans (including ex-Two Dollar Pistols guitarist Scott McCall) known as the Orange County Volunteers, Romeo’s music transforms into a bombastic Americana that goes down even better with a pint of ale. (JL)

The Saint Peter Pocket Veto Winston | myspace.com/thesaintpeterpocketveto

On the Kinnikinnik-released Hippo Campus, this Triad duo blows out eight tracks of math-rock that sounds more like fun than homework. There’s an air of loose affability lending the songs a playful

weirdness that, while never abrasive, keeps guitar and drums spiraling around each other, rubbing elbows and wrestling each other to the ground. At moments, though, the songs retreat into abrupt stops, offering sly smirks before jumping back into the glorious melee. (HG)

Thank God Columbia | myspace.com/thnkgod

“Human Flavored Tofu,” the first song on Thank God’s split with Japan’s likeminded Deepslauter, is like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the water below, hoping it’s deep enough, and then flinging yourself off anyway. A trembling intro of frantically scratched, muted guitar strings gives way to a headlong fit of flailing spazz-rock before the drum kit-artillery and frenzied screams let loose. It’s also an ideal summation of Thank God: a little terrifying, mostly exhilarating — and anything but forgettable. (HG)

Town Mountain Asheville | townmountain.net

Town Mountain embraces the outlaw image of country music as it picks through badass breakdowns and draws a straight line back to Bill Monroe with its brand of sour mash sing-along. But unlike many modern bluegrass contemporaries, who seem to have one foot in the past and the other turned toward the prospect of an innovative future, the Asheville ensemble toes the line. With a new album released in late September, expect these boys to blaze through winter. (JW)

U.S. Christmas Marion | myspace.com/uschristmas

U.S. Christmas isn’t the heaviest band on Neurosis’ Neurot Records label, but that’s not really the point. Instead of dropping abysmal low-end thunder and gruff posturing, U.S. Christmas twists charred guitars through a soupy mist of steady drumming and synth-and-theremin haze. If Neurosis is a rainstorm, U.S. Christmas is the steam and fog that floats off the concrete when it’s over — more haunting than bludgeoning, more densely atmospheric than rhythmically heavy. Consider it a post-metal palate-cleanser. (HG)

PHOTO: BEN JACK

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

AUXES

BLITZEN TRAPPER Furr Sub Pop

CROOKED FINGERS

Sunshine Lovitt

With his pedigree decided a decade ago with Milemarker and Challenger, Dave Laney’s aesthetic is pretty much set. And Sunshine, the debut from what is functionally a solo project (though his live crew swells to include, among others, members of Milemarker and Fin Fang Foom), fails to disappoint. Laney sticks to the sonic cues of his brand of 90s post-punk: dual guitar parts wind around each other; on “The Things Lovers Do,” they tightrope towards Laney’s ragged growl; on “Radio Radio,” they wail, piercing like air-raid sirens. And Laney’s malleable tones suit his songwriting, which is alternately lamenting and urgent (“The Things Lovers Do” and “Radio Radio,” respectively). But, as this is Dave Laney, there are plenty of sonic detours, like the acoustic chant-along of “Hometowns,” which closes the album with an unexpected highlight. But overall, Laney and Auxes are at their best with the more angular electric approach that Laney made his name with in the first place. BR

Far from finding its own voice, Blitzen Trapper—now four records deep—is still content to cut-andpaste from the ragged edges of a Xeroxed fanzine. On “Gold For Bread,” snatches of Dylan’s lyric cadence, Neil Young’s crunchy twang and Marc Bolan’s sashayglam mingle — but not effortlessly. At other times, this Portland sextet recalls Pavement’s diversity.

The record fits Sub Pop’s current propensity for rustic Americana, especially on “Furr,” a folky turn complete with a harmonica line and the warning, “You better be sure if you’re makin’ God a liar.”

Actually, God makes quite a few cameos on Furr, a heady turn for a band whose instrumentation and aesthetic is more flannel-chic than choir-robe clean.

“Saturday Nite” does show the band trying to loosen up, but a subpar falsetto and kitschy near-disco bounce submarine the effort. The band repents on the spare country-blues of “Black River Killer,” but by that point cliché lyrics and too-obvious arrangements have spoiled the fun. JW

If only all of Forfeit/Fortune could be as perfect as its final song, “Your Control.” Crystalline 80s synths fall just-this-side of cheesy as the drumbeat lowers its head to the wind, charging forward toward the finish line as the voices of Eric Bachmann and Neko Case embrace with starry-eyed, camera-spinning, first-kiss wonder. “Got no mind to forfeit fortune,” they sing together. Ultimately, it’s the golden ending to an otherwise lukewarm record. Some songs hit — like the dark-tinged amble of “Let’s Not Pretend (To Be New Men),” in which Bachmann leads a delicately plucked acoustic guitar and bare-bones drum into an ambush of growling cello and sobbing violins.

Others miss — the Latin artifice of the talk-sung “Sinesteria” doesn’t suit Bachmann or his band, and relies heavily on a tired beat and predictable movie-Western trumpet. But then Crooked Fingers slide “Your Control” in front of us like the perfect last present on Christmas morning, and much is forgiven. BR

KARL BLAU

CASTANETS City of Refuge Asthmatic Kitty

THE CURTAINS OF NIGHT

Nature’s Got a Way K Bill Callahan and Arthur Russell — easily the two artists who see the most time atop my listening pile.

But rarely on the same day. On his latest release Nature’s Got a Way — his first for K Records — prolific Northwest lo-fiphile Karl Blau ties a strange knot between the two.

Blau has the same deadpan, distant delivery and twang as Callahan, able to give weight to the silliest of lyrics. But his minimal basement experimentation (and a similar voice) recalls the bedroom dance of Russell — albeit filtered through a shitty, dry practice amp (check the vocal loop on “Before Telling Dragons”). On “Make Love that Lasts,” Blau gives away his formula: “I’m like a chemist, inventing new potions/Words, like children, float from my oceans.” By the way, dude ain’t afraid to drop some classic psych over it all either. Blau’s aesthetic will be an obvious fit for those familiar with K Records’ back catalogue. ED

Raymond Raposa’s music has never induced the warm and fuzzies. What heat previous Castanets records generated came from the contrast between organic twang or folk and the occasional bursts of feedback or computer noise. Here, though, Raposa strips away most everything — including, it feels like, his skin — in skeletal, reverb-rich arrangements well-suited to the environment they were mostly recorded in: a run-down mom and pop hotel in the Nevada desert. Isolation is this record’s grist, and with his adenoidal whisper and drone-y guitar figures, Raposa embodies it. Souled American’s Scott Tuma is among a group of bare-minimum overdubbers, and a couple of tracks bear the stamp of that band’s pioneering fucked-up twang-blues — though any underpinnings of warmth or playfulness are absent. Still, over the course of 15 songs and mirage-like instrumentals, something resembling a peaceful feeling descends. It sounds like Raposa found refuge in the wasteland; whether the listener does is another matter. JS

On their debut, The Curtains of Night — a duo, it should be noted — are heavier, more confident and more interesting than most like-minded bands will ever dream of being. Lauren Fitzpatrick pounds with deliberate force, boiling beneath the crust-flinging guitar lines that steer the songs into scorching, drawn-out feedback skuzz, drop-tuned chugging, and the depths of blues-metal’s psychedelic meanderings. In less than 30 minutes, the six-track Lost Houses manages to pull massive momentum from the strength of tracks like the seven-and-a-half minute “Golden Arrows.”

Here, a scorching,10-second drone kicks into gear with a slow-burning dirge, swinging on Fitzpatrick’s inspired beat, and building its impact over the course of almost three minutes before Rogers’ buried screams put an insistent charge into the song.

On “Total Domination,” a militaristic beat signals the charge for the guitar riff to pile into a monolith by sheer persistence, gaining gravity with each repetition and modal shift. And just like that, the duo delivers the unflinching confidence to make a mega-ton epic out of a half hour. BR

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Forfeit / Fortune Red Pig/Constant Artists

Lost Houses Holidays For Quince

DAYLIGHT DIES

DEERHUNTER

NICOLETTE EMANUELLE

Lost To The Living Candlelight

Microcastle Kranky

Pinafore self-released

On the Raleigh quintet Daylight Dies’ second release for the infamous Candlelight Records (which made its name as the home for Norwegian black metal), it all comes apart during the guitar solos. In brooding, restrained passages, the band utilizes slow-burning six-string slashes and insistent rhythms to manifest a sense of strung-out post-metal isolation. We’re trapped in the dark, the music almost comforting even as it smothers us. But when the band pulls back the curtains, letting loose instrumental chops with soaring solos recalling Swedish melodic death metal brethren In Flames and Opeth, it’s as if the night has been rolled back and we’re left stumbling around, unable to see through unadjusted eyes.

The shift is jarring and hampers the nervy loneliness of the record’s bulk. And even with more composed moments than out-of-control wails, Lost To The Living is an incongruous listen that’s pleasing only in chunks. JL

As the frontman for Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, Atlanta’s Bradford Cox has been either critical ire or inspiration for three years now. Relative to Deerhunter’s innocuous third full-length, Microcastle, Cox’s earlier records under both names seemed over- and underdeveloped. Like the rickety textures of Atlas Sound’s debut, the forced experimental phases of Deerhunter’s Cryptograms were symptomatic of a band reaching for something it didn’t yet have. Microcastle is a vast improvement, gracing the band’s strong dream-pop tendencies with glinting rays of (a little too much) reverb and understated but insistent drumming. Microcastle showcases a new knack for editing, the sounds sharp even when they’re serpentine (“Nothing Ever Happened” doesn’t feel six minutes long), and downright anthemic when they’re not (“Never Stops” charges its hook with feedback). Some of these songs are about growing up. That’s about right. GC

Charlotte’s Nicolette Emanuelle has the star-crossed fortune of possessing a singing voice that sounds like one we’ve heard and adored before — namely, that of Tori Amos. But if Emanuelle let that stop her music, or denied the influences, it’d be a disservice.

And haven’t we seen this kind of criticism pale in the face of talent before? Emanuelle can overcome her audio doppelgangers with playful songs that stretch her range, and she does on tracks like “1 a.m.” and “Let’s F***.” Pinafore perhaps speaks to the cloth Emanuelle is shadow-playing behind.

Songs like “Jack the Ripper” and “Pirate Girl” put her in persona shoes, but not necessarily ones that stray from the girl outline we’ve come to know since the early 90s. They’re intriguing, but it’s her lyrics that lean on the personal that sound the most original. We like what we hear, but who’s the woman behind the curtain? Come out, we want more. EAB

DEAD CONFEDERATE

THE DONKEYS

EMBARRASSING FRUITS

Wrecking Ball TAO On its debut, Georgia’s Dead Confederate plays raucous southern rock with a penchant for ethereality and gloom; Wrecking Ball straddles the fence between the swirling big guitar sounds of My Morning Jacket and the cathartic intensity of New York rockers Calla. Alternately loud and quiet, atmospheric and dense, the group is strongest when it keeps things in high gear, as the generally darker lyrical and tonal undercurrents of their songs are best served with big drums, loud guitars, and Cobain-inspired vocal immediacy. “Start me Up” and “Goner” best showcase the album’s mien, with the latter slowly gaining momentum before exploding in a punctuation of sound that touches on Nirvanalike grunge-fed squalor. The rest of the album is similarly competent and energetic, but nothing really stands out from the rest, which isn’t exactly a compliment, but neither could it be considered a real criticism. WM

QUICK HITS

BLACK SKIES—Hexagon: Six tracks of competently skuzzy doom ’n’ gloom from the Chapel Hill metal trio, but without enough blunt force or surgical precision to really slay. More sleepy than Sleep-y.

MATTHEW PAUL BUTLER – Harlot EP: Strumming with Richie Havens’ passion and main-lined into Jason Molina’s stripped-raw emotionalism, these five guitar-and-voice narratives blend the Biblical and secular with an assurance that’s almost shocking for someone as green as Charlotte’s Butler. A debut that embodies “promising.”

Living On The Other Side Dead Oceans

The First Time EP Trekky

After hearing their sea-breeze harmonies and shuffling country-rock, it’s little surprise to find out The Donkeys hail from California. The album’s 11 songs, each one full of peaceful, easy feelings, drift on warm melodies and simple, memorable songwriting. “Walk Through A Cloud” relies on ambling drums, sharp, plunking guitar and gentle harmonies to push its repetitive (only five different lines) nature into two-minutes and 46-seconds of loose country-rock bliss. “Downtown Jenny” moseys along, offering a kiss-off to the titular character that sounds more like a post-breakup affirmation than an acidic rejection.

“What you’re wearing has got me staring/But I don’t want you around,” finds the still-infatuated speaker determined to affirm his life without Jenny. The sonic touchstones are clear: Byrds jangle, Bakersfield boogie and Beach Boys joviality. But the sum of these parts is an inviting, good-natured record that is at worst pleasant, and at best moving in its welcoming calmness. BR

Judging by The First Time EP, the three men of Embarrassing Fruits logged their share of bored adolescent hours wandering aimlessly through parking lots, riding too-small bikes, sneaking beers from the garage, crushing hard and often, and digesting 90s indie rock records. Listening to “Willing Partner,” it’s hard not to go back to our own long-ago (or not so long-ago) heartbreaks when Joe Norkus sings, in a lonely drawl complemented by crunchy guitars and moaning lap steel, “I wanted to be the man/ Who killed spiders for you.” And it’s hard not to feel the rush of newly claimed independence when he sings “We’ve all got our own songs/Stuck in our head, hey,” capped with an Eric Bachmannworthy howl cutting through a crisp, winding Pavement-like six-string on “Bicycle.” Though the songs are glazed with nostalgia, their directness lends freshness to their tried, but still true, inspirations. BR

QUICK HITS DAWN CHORUS—Florida St. Serenade: There’s a casual ease to this record, the third for the Greensboro sextet, that makes it feel effortless, like indiepop this delightful was a happy accident of plucky guitars colliding with upbeat hooks and tumbling into gently driving percussion.

DEATH BECOMES EVEN THE MAIDEN—The Pink EP: While “The Chop” grooves on an insistent bass and synth spillover that puts the joy back in Joy Division, “The Only Thing I Feel For You Is The Recoil” screeches through feedback and a Damned-worthy punk riff to brusque perfection.

Columbia, S.C. awesomeness.

QUICK HITS

DOUBLE NEGATIVE—Raw Energy EP: Vitriol flies off this Raleigh act’s clear vinyl disc in gobs of psycho-frantic vocals, scorching feedback, pummeling drums and barely contained chaos. This is probably the most exciting thing you’ll hear any time soon.

FUTURE ISLANDS/DAN DEACON—Split 7-inch: Baltimore-via-Greenville, N.C. synth-popsters Future Islands bridge the geographic gap by sharing a slab of purple vinyl with Dan Deacon, the figurehead of Baltimore’s weirdo-dance scene. And with their one-track A-side, they provide an immediately catchy counterpoint to Deacon’s playfully—and delightfully—scatterbrained five-cut B-side.

SHUFFLEZINE.TV

ANNUALS

BEN FOLDS

GIRL TALK

Way To Normal Epic

Feed The Animals Illegal Art

Such Fun Canvasback

Rarely has Ben Folds sounded like he’s having as much fun as he does on Way To Normal. In the past he’s done a good job alternating between heartfelt and humorous, but suffered from a tendency to ride his honed-in style into a rut, and to annoy as much as inspire. And at times, Way To Normal falls victim to the same old traps. “Errant Dog” puts a story of a misbehaving pet along jagged piano chords and strained vocals — but drops in fuzz-baked guitar and well-placed choral harmonies to nice effect. When Way To Normal leaps beyond Folds’ trademarks — as on “You Don’t Know Me,” a duet with Regina Spektor that ruminates on a boring relationship with the piano used for rhythm, augmented by shots of synthesized strings — it makes for a wonderfully dramatic dialogue. The sonic detours Folds takes here, shot with a dose of infectious energy, make his latest nothing if not fun to listen to. BR

GIANT SAND

The last two records from Pittsburgh mash-up star Girl Talk have been big erections, throbbing and pulsing, risqué and daring, growing one stimulus at a time until collapsing from mutual fatigue 50 minutes later. But, like most organs, Feed The Animals is more than body and veins: At his best, socialist sound splicer Gregg Gillis (dude doesn’t pay for these samples) offers the sort of pop erudition that only those who can spot snippets of Kenny Loggins and Fergie tracks when they coincidently drop can appreciate.

Still, the whole thing is mostly a work of art, smearing Lil’ Mama’s “Lip Gloss” over Metallica’s rugged “One” hide, or upping the elegance of Trina’s “I Got a Thing For You” by letting it glide atop Tone Loc and Fleetwood Mac. Though Feed The Animals occasionally gets busy for its tight jeans (“Still Here” is a sticky mess), all is forgiven when the balls get heart on the last track: Andre 3000 speaks sentimentally over Journey, and a single tear drops. At least we hope that’s a tear… GC

proVISIONS Yep Roc

GROWING

Given their namesake, Annuals ought to have died by now. They burst into bloom with 2006’s outof-nowhere debut, Be He Me, and earned heaps of blogger praise. But the shelf-life for bands jettisoned by Web-fueled hype is painfully short (Remember Tapes ’n Tapes?

How about Takka Takka?), the backlash is inevitable and expectations for a successful — much less long-term — career are tiny. But after a relatively quiet two years, in which Annuals released a handful of EPs, signed to Sony-imprint Canvasback and spawned an LP from brother-band Sunfold, here we are again, staring into the face of Such Fun, a second full-length offering from the Raleigh sextet.

And what we see is a band that has grown into its sound. Where Be He Me’s exuberant eccentricity was suited for sudden, dramatic bursts of playful energy, Such Fun opts for a more restrained way with dynamics better suited for urgency and earnestness.

Front man Adam Baker still spills his vocals like he’s singing directly to God or something bigger, but here he’s more direct. Glitchy texturing is mostly cast off to make room for home-spun strings that both soothe and squeal; guitar choogle that leans adeptly into bluegrass rollick (“Down the Mountain”) while balancing prog-rock intricacy with power-pop chug’n’-buzz (“Talking”); and tasteful but enthusiastic drumming. “Hardwood Floor” finds Baker singing “Won’t you send me back home now/Like I deserve,” with a downcast croon, even among a cavalcade of ethereal voices. Indeed, Annuals haven’t lost an ounce of lushness, but with Such Fun, their voluminous arrangements take on a spectral, rustic quality that lends an air of earthbound authenticity.

It seems as if Annuals have started to dig solid roots in the still-fertile soil of big-band indie rock. They survived winter in the blogosphere and their forecast is brighter for it. BR

Howe Gelb calls ’em his meanders: those dips, tangents and side projects necessary to nurture his muse but which have alternately delighted and confused his fanbase.

For the last few years Gelb’s been on an extended meander, issuing a string of off-kilter solo records, but with proVISIONS he’s back at Giant Sand ground zero, this time with his “new” version of the band (comprising three Danish musicians) fully indoctrinated into the Sand-y ethos. The record boasts a widescreen, sonically nuanced production that puts the lie to Gelb’s reputation as a maven of reckless spontaneity, and the songs themselves leave a warm glow in the tummy.

From the countryish “Without A Word” (featuring guest Neko Case) to the hissing noir of “Increment of Love” to an emotional cover of PJ Harvey’s “Desperate Kingdom of Love,” proVISIONs finds Gelb at an artistic peak — Giant Sand’s best since 2000’s Chore of Enchantment, and possibly a career-definer. FM

All The Way The Social Registry If being consumed by sound appeals to you, please turn this up. New York guitars-and-effects duo Growing proffers a captivating synesthetic experience, the alternately muted or mauling glow of its whirs, clicks, long tones and glitches suggesting sensations of touch and color. Sound becomes vision becomes sound enhancement, and so the cycle grows: All The Way, the band’s third release on Social Registry this year, coruscates electronic hums and shimmers with beats built mostly by the same devices. Thanks to the pulse of “Rave Pie Only” and the junkyard whir of “Reconstruction,” renewed comparisons to former tour-mates Black Dice will be inevitable.

But the composure defining Growing’s interlocking sound structures suggests an ascetic, lab-like rigor that many of the band’s more famous boroughmates forego. That’s not saying this record won’t take you places (seriously, turn it up), but — like Fennesz as greasy art kid — the ride feels better engineered and more believable. GC

QUICK HITS

GUERNICA—Currents: Churning guitars and a battery of drums make Guernica’s brand of dynamics-fueled, post-hardcore tumult all the more effective, burying the vocals and making these Charlotteans’ sound truly desperate.

BRETT HARRIS—Side Two: As a pop songwriter, Durham’s Brett Harris knows how to craft a hook well-suited for his slightly gruff voice. But he’s still stuck playing it straight, his song structures and sonic palette too bland to make anything really satisfying.

KERBLOKI—Kerbloki 12-inch: Kerbloki’s oddball brand of sugar-buzzed party rap wins for its pounding rhythm section (which the Chapel Hill/ Durham outfit shares with the metallic Caltrop) and the hyperactive energy MCs JB and Mike Westbrook put into their humor-injected verses.

40 | EARHOLE

QUICK HITS LEMMING MALLOY—Avalauncher: From the ashes of beloved Chapel Hill nerd-rockers Eyes To Space emerges Lemming Malloy, a soon-to-bebeloved steam-punk band with tasteful guitar leads and ethereal female backing vocals that provide the ideal complement to frontman Jay Cartwright’s nasal inflection and keyboard grooves. (HG) OBSTRUCTION—Obstruction 7-inch: “Darby Crash died a piece of shit/Don’t strive to be a douche,” declares the 18-second “Montana Face,” a superlative invective on this Charlotte act’s 5-song EP of loose-limbed hardcore that buttresses slurred-speech diatribes against deceptively varied song structures.

QUICK HITS

OPENING FLOWER HAPPY BIRD—White Music: Carrboro’s OFHB mix boogie and swoon here. It often sounds like straight pop, but there’s enough of an out-minded bent in the duo’s psychedelic fusions to make a hypnotic delight of its woozy electronics and subtly tribal pulse.

RUN DAN RUN—Basic Mechanics: Charleston’s RDR has a tendency to drift off into NyQuil territory. That said, “Your Name Escapes Me” is a great song. Electronic pulses and repetitive keys pair well with Dan McCurry’s drowsy croon and Erin McKinley’s sweet vocal counterpoint.

HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL So Long I Screamed… self-released Bluegrass is the baseline of Holy Ghost Tent Revival’s music, but this album isn’t just hoedown fodder.

Delta blues fuels “Found No Other Place,” and other homegrown touches include claps, stomps, whistles, kazoos and zydeco horns. Whereas most of HGTR’s songs deal with timeless themes, gems like “Phone Syndrome” pay heed to modern day woes. If we were to compare styles, I’d say the Greensboro group’s sweeping harmonies are executed in a similar fashion to the Be Good Tanyas, but gender flipped. The men’s vocals are even barbershop-sounding at times. The fault in HGTR’s debut may be that they’ve included too much. I’d rather they saved some pop/rock tinged tracks for another album, and kept a tighter collection of old timey-sounding tunes in this smaller tent. But I could be converted to want all 16 songs in a live performance. EAB

HORSE FEATHERS House With No Home Kill Rock Stars If Frodo Baggins had a band of troubadours serenading his journey, Horse Feathers would be it. The Portland trio’s sophomore release, rich with Appalachian strings, blends fairyland aura with solid melodies, recalling Sufjan Stevens. The rhythmic “Working Poor” has double-tracked vocals, and interwoven instrumental swells and stops that carry the listener down mountain trails and country roads, while the lyrics tell

of the hopeless poor in the brightest way possible.

In “Albina,” the band scrapes through a moment of well-placed dissonance that brings a curious edge to the gentle, folksy song. The music’s dips and crescendos add orchestral flavors to otherwise simple progressions, just as the layered melodies and breathy harmonies strengthen delicate vocal lines. Despite this variety, the album remains mellow throughout. As such, Horse Feathers may not be well-equipped to fight off the Orcs or evil wizards of Middle-Earth, but they’ll always have their place in the green, sunny Shire of the Hobbits. EB

HOTEL LIGHTS Firecracker People Bar/None Records Inside the second Hotel Lights full-length is a text-free, threepanel landscape photo; taken just as the last light seeps away, only the blurred outline of a telephone pole remains — more imagined than seen. It’s fitting artwork for songs that drift by like road-side imagery whose details blend into formlessness, but whose impressions amount to something emotionally compelling. Ex-Ben Folds Five drummer (and Chapel Hill expat) Darren Jessee reprises a bit of his old band’s easy pop on the sprightly piano-based “Amelia Bright” and the bloodless title track (the disc’s weak link), but mostly the songs are lushly textured, minor-key folk and twang-rock — think Mark Kozelek, but give a fleshing-out assist to ex-Sparklehorse vet Alan Weatherhead for keys, guitars, and string samples.

These songs unfold in gently undulating arcs, with occasional low-key crescendos that provide just enough perspective to keep them from going by — unnoticed — in the dark. JGM

J. MATTHEW GERKEN, CHRISTIAN KEIFFER, JEFFERSON PITCHER Of Great & Mortal Men: 43 Songs For 43 Presidencies Standard Recording

By now our 2008 presidential fate will be sealed; one popular reading is that we’ll be led either by a visionary in the mold of Abraham Lincoln, FDR or JFK, or the buffoonish equivalent of Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover or The Shrub. Either characterization is oversimplified by the larger-than-life job, and further distorted today by the glare of 24-hour media. Demythologizing those views was a driving force behind this ambitious three-disc, 43-song set co-written by songwriters J. Matthew Gerken, Christian Keiffer and Jefferson Pitcher. All three have loads of outstanding moments ranging from experimental folk and sonic-feedback dissonance to bare-boned twang and textured chamber rock.

But just as the music eschews easy hooks or era-specificity, the narratives illuminate character through telling personality traits and ethical/ spiritual interior-monologues as often as historical highlights: Monroe’s doctrine, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and FDR’s New Deal share stagetime with Chester Arthur’s delusions of grandeur, Andrew Jackson’s self-righteousness, and W’s crass shallowness. Over 75 musicians contribute, many providing highlights like the cathartic guitar freak-out by Charalambides’ Tom Carter as Richard

Nixon’s resignation speech spools out, to name just one of dozens. But it’s the guest vocal slots that add critical breadth – the only quibble with this set is that the array of presidential personalities benefits so much from different voices, you wish there were even more like Bill Callahan’s rugged interpretation of John Tyler, the sonic reverie-haze Califone and Tim Rutili bring to Ronald Reagan, Greg Vanderpool and the Monahans’ luminous depiction of James K. Polk, and Alan Sparhawk imbuing Dwight Eisenhower’s story with Low’s Great Plains melancholy. This takes nothing away from the brain trust; packaged handsomely with 43 artists’ renditions, lyrics, and an introductory essay from an ex-CIA analyst and historian, Of Great and Mortal Men is an epic slice of Walt Whitman-esque Americana, and more worthy than some of the office. JS

THE HOWLING HEX Earth Junk Drag City Howling Hex shape-shifts with every release, but Earth Junk makes a play for ex-Royal Trux guitar man Neil Hagerty’s most out-of-thebox moment (it’s not). Far from the deliriously sloppy rock of last year’s XI, or the dirty blues and off-kilter twang of early Howling Hex, these 10 songs are rhythm section-free circus doodles: keyboard bass pedals for bottom end, swirling organs for atmosphere, no drums. Hagerty’s odd guitar lines are still extant, but they’re reduced to treated accents or fuzzed-out accompaniment too often. “Big Chief Big Wheel” opens in an organ waltz, with synth bleeps and guitar noise, establishing the template: Sketch over composition.

Hagerty’s haunting scales elevate a couple other tracks, but mostly my notes read: “Hammond and Rhodes do endless battle,” or “same pattern repeated for four excruciating minutes” (“Blood & Dust”). We’re all for imagining the box as a porous sphere of insubstantiality free from all laws, but there’s still a box here — and not a very interesting one. JGM

DAMIEN JURADO Caught In The Trees Secretly Canadian It’s 2021. You’re flipping through this, the 50th issue of Shuffle, at a thrift store or library kiosk, or perhaps perusing it, bag-wrapped tallboy in hand, beside some shady creek-side culvert. You’re a music fan, a pack rat, a sonic sociologist, and these old tree leaves are your tea leaves. You read that Damien Jurado started out releasing cassettes (remember those?) on his own Casa Recordings. You read that Jeremy Enigk brought him to Sub Pop, which you know now as the label releasing music made by aboriginal yak herders, being as they are always on the cutting edge of The New, New Shit. You wish you could find a copy of Caught in the Trees, ’cause the reviewer fella says that the album begins with his favorite “single” (old term for standalone track) of the year thus far, “Gillian Was a Horse,” and while he has no idea who Gillian is (there once was a folktress of some renown with said moniker), that song, followed by the simple strummer “Trials” and cascading “Caskets,” keeps him from getting more than three songs in before starting all over again. But now that he has, dude opines it might be his favorite album (old term for grouping of tracks) of the year. Sez he: Get thee to a virtualreality hologram-band viewer and download immediately. TCD

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LOST IN THE TREES All Alone In An Empty House Trekky It’s hard to capture the bitter taste of failed love better than the first lines of All Alone In An Empty House, the third release from Ari Picker’s collective. “I’ve spent my whole life on you/And built you a gorgeous house/To put up with your bitched mouth,” Picker laments in the title track. Surrounded by rich, orchestral arrangements that vary between gorgeous shimmers and unsettling bursts of shrill fury, the LITT leader paints heart-wrenching portraits of a person abandoned by love and family. Looking for redemption, the last two songs — one, an uninteresting instrumental and the other, a syrupy number about rebuilding one’s heart — prove that this band is better at depicting misery than hope. But for the first seven songs, All Alone is visceral enough in its melancholy to convince any depressed listener that he is not alone in his suffering. JL

MAMIFFER Hirror Enniffer Hydra Head In the first moments of Hirror Enniffer, when the despondent piano riff and death-march snare are joined by a gut-rumbling, cavernous bass drone, the tone is set for the rest of the album. Doom metal’s abysmal low-end couples with ethereal, wordless vocals and piano from Mamiffer’s central figure, Faith Coloccia (joined by musical partner Chris Common of These Arms Are Snakes). Beginning with Coloccia’s melancholy piano compositions, the duo stretches out to include a bevy of sounds from guitars and drums to field recordings and distorted noise — or gives the keys room to breathe, as on “Annwn,” in which an arpeggiated riff is coupled with throbbing bass notes from the piano, and barely more than a sparse drum-beat for accompaniment. What Mamiffer creates is a clear soundscape of dark, brooding mystery and intrigue. Coloccia’s balance of harmony and dissonance, heavy bludgeoning and feather-light melody make for a captivating debut. BR

MOUNT EERIE WITH JULIE DOIRON AND FRED SQUIRE Lost Wisdom P.W. Elverum & Sun It’s sad that so much beauty goes overlooked — a fate likely (not if I can help it) to befall Lost Wisdom, a true beauty, and a small artifact of a heaven-made collaboration among Phil Elverum, Canadian chanteuse Julie Doiron, and guitarist Fred Squire. The record is built entirely from guitar and the interwoven voices of Elverum and Doiron: his a deep warmth, hers a fragile, haunting slip of tone. Squire’s guitar lines hang lightly, suspended as if by a breeze, while Elverum and Doiron spin forlorn yarns through sudden shifts in phrase (“We would not be so 42 | EARHOLE

scared of losing hair and slowing down if we knew that our hearts are not aging/Our little hearts are born already ancient”), scratching out a heartfelt tenderness from the sparsely assembled songs.

Creaking chairs supplement the recording on “With My Hands Out,” as Elverum leans into the microphone, lending a further layer to the impossible intimacy that is the album’s greatest strength and most affecting feature. BR

OKKERVIL RIVER The Stand-Ins Jagjaguwar If the goal of any partnership is to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, then the pairing of Okkervil River’s companion pieces, last year’s The Stage Names and this year’s The Stand-Ins is the definition of a successful union. With The Stage Names, Will Sheff explored the conflicts that emerge from a society whose pop culture reigns with a sardonic wit. On The Stand-Ins, that theme is continued, and dug into deeper, turning postulation into accusation.

“He’s the liar who lied in his pop song/And you’re lying when you sing along,” Sheff rails on “Pop Lie” against a Cars-worthy power-pop backing replete with handclaps and synth. On “Singer Songwriter,” a rollicking invective against name-dropping tastewhores (with plenty of name-drops of its own), Sheff sneers “You’ve got taste/You’ve got taste/ What a waste that it’s all that you have.” And hearing it on a pop record makes Sheff’s fingerpointing all the more poignant. HG

PARTS AND LABOR Receivers Jagjaguwar Those expecting Parts and Labor to finally boil-over the pot of 80s faux-futurism and Moody Bluesgone-berserk stew they’ve lately been percolating in will have to inhale and wait longer; Receivers flirts with, but never commits to, full-out spillage. Rather, the Brooklyn-based noise-rock outfit opts to simmer in their own unique blend of ‘everything but’ pastiche, this time utilizing hundreds of website-submitted field recordings throughout, while tethering their sound to persistent kit work, existentialist vocalramblings, and anthem-blasts of cathartic cacophony. “Nowheres Nigh” offers the first indication that the band has settled in, nestling comfortably between new-wave nostalgia and modern indie-punk experimentation. The album’s eight tracks all raise a common flag, that of digitalism and wall-of-sound togetherness; still, nothing on Receivers categorically severs them from their previous, more anarchistic and insistent selves, but, defiantly, most of the record introduces them to the pantheon of postmillennial acts (Liars, Secret Machines) that map the space where understatement and pomposity live together. WM

THE PHYSICS OF MEANING Snake Charmer and Destiny at the Stroke of Midnight Trekky/Bu_hanan

Drawing together his passions for theater and classical violin, Daniel Hart has creating a stirring work with Snake Charmer. With lyrics grown from poetics and the stage, The Physics of Meaning aims for a grandiose display, and delivers. From the frantic violin solo opener, “In Dreams, We Discover Ourselves Broken And Yearning,” to moments of tenderness like “Around The Bend,” Physics uses Hart’s exaggerated song craft to push the music out of the self-conscious realm of indie rock, making Snake Charmer as much akin to Andrew Lloyd Webber as Andrew Bird. “Around The Bend,” could well have been extracted from a musical, its swooning reeds and strings never overpowering the warm duet that forms the meat of the song. At times, Physics can be overwrought, as on “Why Can’t We Fall In Love Forever (Anything Is Possible)” which finds an over-eager rock band infiltrating the LP with leaden dance-rock drumming. But mostly, Snake Charmer comes together as a tastefully melodramatic piece of orchestral pop. BR

RAISED BY WOLVES Return to the House of Ill Repute Giant Panda Charlotte’s Raised by Wolves emerge from the debris of late-90s twangers Memphis Quick 50, who fizzled quickly after a promising start that left folks wondering what might’ve been. Nearly a decade later, one answer is here in a RBW debut indebted to some of altcountry’s leading lights. Lead singer/songwriter Chris Stephenson has an undeniable Ryan Adams lilt to his sleepy phrasings, and on a Stranger’s Almanac-like country rocker such as “Sometimes Lately,” things go a bit too doppelganger. Wilco and My Morning Jacket influences also appear, but blend well enough on a cut like “See Touch,” whose synth buzz/crashing cymbals show-down sounds like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recorded in Jim James’ grain silo. Overall, Stephenson’s songs add just enough twists — see the dirty-slide-meets-sitar vibe of “If You Had the Glue,” the pulsing fuzz-fest “Caramel,” and the organ swirling through “Stuck In a Spoke” — to keep the “derivative” dogs at bay and lift the record above the usual Americana rabble. JS

THE ROSEBUDS Life Like Merge Raleigh-ites Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp’s last record, Night of the Furies, was a keyboard-driven affair, owing more to Eno and Ennio and, well, Depeche Mode than the candy-coated, sweet-tea college rock the band cut its collective teeth on. It wasn’t a bad record, but there was a certain melancholy missing, an aboutto-flower sumpin’-sumpin’ that, if not excised com

pletely, hid itself too deep in the mix. Lyrically and musically, then, Life Like isn’t so much a return to form as a return to returning: to one’s own self, perhaps, or one’s loves lost and/or re-evaluated.

The perhaps not-all-that-literal qualities of the title aside (check the large pink elephant on the front cover, being effectively dismissed by a silhouetted businessman chooglin’ on about his business), the sunny wonder of the songs — see the Throwing Muses-like angle-jangle of “Bow to the Middle,” the no-nonsense (yet nonsensical) “Nice Fox,” and the cool, calm and conflicted “In The Backyard” — is decidedly not a figment of your imagination.

TCD

THE SAMMIES Sandwich MoRisen After the three-day rush that spawned the raw booze-rock of their eponymous 2006 debut, The Sammies’ weeks in Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium makes for a slicker (more keys, slightly fewer guitars), though still highly energized, Sandwich. Rather than rest on their garage-rock laurels, they’ve added late-60s Kinks-inflections (“Old Grey” and “Carried by the Breeze,” which both come with heat-generating crescendos), and driving guitar lines ala the Feelies and early Luna, creating welcome texture and turning scatter-shot energy into turbine propulsion. Four of those cuts — “Pinecone,” “Golden Sun,” “Billy Mitchell,” and disc-highlight “Glisten” — spread the momentum like relay transformers throughout. But if your listening limitations mean “energy” must come from one codified, max-tempo beat, the lusty “In the Basement” and nervous,

Talking Heads-like “Ain’t Easy” reprise the debut’s bratty swagger. But maturity is the base-line here, and the new directions energize in much more interesting — if not always spot-on (cf. the trippy over-reaches “Bufford” and “Saw Your Mother”) — ways. JS

ALINA SIMONE Everyone Is Crying Out To Me, Beware 54º-40’ or Fight!

Absenting herself from the warm, Cat Power-gone-minimalist hues of last year’s Placelessness in favor of a more lo-fi, Nico-esque sound may seem risky for songstress (and former North Carolinian) Alina Simone. To eschew casting her gorgeous, tremulous pipes in English or even singing her own material — Everyone is a collection of covers of Yanka Dyagleva, a young Russian singer-songwriter who died in 1991 — smacks of madness. Simone’s crazy as a fox, however. Employing trumpet, cello and percussion and warbling in accented syllables like a young PJ Harvey or a less airy Kate Bush, Simone takes an art-punk/freak-folk approach as she navigates across somber but deeply soulful territory. Some tunes, like the jaunty “Half My Kingdom,” boast full arrangements, while others, notably the chilling “Beware,” are mostly acoustic and stripped to the bone: in the latter, when Chris Barrey’s electric guitar comes screaming in unexpectedly, it’s like being shaken violently awake. Raw and spontaneous, Everyone is indeed risky and a little bit mad.

It’s also one of the bravest-sounding records you’ll hear all year. FM

MARGOT AND THE NUCLEAR SO-AND-SOS Animal! and Not Animal Epic The evergreen artist-versus-label debate, it seems, is as much about marketing as it is about artistic license. Take these sophomore efforts from Indiana act Margot and the Nuclear So-and-sos, the follow-up to 2005’s outstanding The Dust of Retreat. Story goes: The band and its label couldn’t agree on which songs to include on the new record, so the band puts up a fuss — “Give me (creative) liberty or give me death!” But rather than leave the record unheard, collecting dust in label/band-skirmish purgatory, both parties decide to have their cake and eat it, too. But note the clever marketing of physical format here. Two versions of the album are to be released, the vinyl-only Animal!, and its brother album Not Animal, available on CD and digital — surely enough to perk a rock-critic’s ears. (It worked on me, at least). Whether Margot’s indieminded fans turn out to be vinyl purists or iPod junkies is yet to be seen. But what of the music?

The albums share five songs in common, and (perhaps unsurprisingly), they’re the standouts. That’s not to discount the other tracks, though. Both albums are solid collections of charming pop songs expressing a sense of dread and uncertainty in tune with our crumbling zeitgeist. The eight-piece

band provides dynamic swells that keep the songs moving on their own, while maintaining a sense of intimacy that suits frontman Richard Edwards. His songs, delivered in a soft, rich croon, have always felt like daydream meanderings, surreal images meeting tactile ones to evoke more than illustrate.

These are no different. But with no clear “better” album, the marketing angle turns more confusing than helpful for those of us still willing to pay for music. Buy both and have duplicates of five songs, or buy one and miss out on seven? Decisions, decisions. BR

SUNFOLD Toy Tugboats Terpsikhore Let’s get it out of the way: Raleigh’s Sunfold is the sister band to indie darlings Annuals, the reconfiguration moving Annuals guitarist Kenny Florence to the forefront, with the rest of Annuals switching roles to fill out the Sunfold roster. The relationship between bands is interesting trivia, but Sunfold and Florence don’t need the association to make them relevant. That’s proven by Toy Tugboats, which sees Florence abandoning the occasionally over-indulgent soundscapes of Annuals for more straight-ahead guitar rock. And he’s more than competent; he’s damn good, in fact. His chops shine through, opting for noodling (but tasteful) solos that wind their way through the tracks, straining the upper reaches of his guitar. Florence’s writing is immediately accessible, maintaining the listener’s interest throughout the record’s relatively short (36-and-a-half minute) running time. So, avoid the comparison. The younger sibling’s growing up real nice on their own. JW

TINDERSTICKS

THE VIRGINIA REEL

The Hungry Saw Beggars/Constellation

EP (self-release)

You can’t hear Tindersticks without imagining Stuart Staples in some smoky Euro cavern-club, surrounded by louche women and bottles of red wine, a mix of ennui and weltschmerz writ beneath knitted-but-bemused brow.

Now deep in its second decade, and having indulged a revitalizing five-year sabbatical, the Nottinghamborn Tindersticks may have traded insouciant young-man swagger and nervy angst for world-weary wisdom and continental resignation (Staples lives in France now), but their blend of slow-burn blues, sinister noir, soulful horns, and orchestral flourishes still intoxicates. As per, love’s vicissitudes are seen for what they are: obsessions akin to mental illness, but worthy for the knowledge that joy and pain confirm existence. The title track measures up quite favorably with “Blood,” a similarly themed cut from the band’s classic 1993 debut, but now when Staples saws — literally — through muscle and bone to get to the heart, it’s with the steady, knowing hand of an inveterate romantic. JS

File under: Boot-gaze. Charlotte mainstay The Virginia Reel plays the music you slow-dance to with a creepy stranger 20 minutes after last call. Conversely, it could just as easily be the music you throw on the morning after. Pretty and plain enough, and with enough smooth AM hooks, to get you through those first cups and assuage that metaphysical hangover.

Chief Virginian Neil Allen’s Malkmus/Pavement-twist wrestles this five-song EP away from the full-on West Coast 70s pop-rock thing. There are a handful of triumphant trumpet bursts from ex-member Kristin Garber on a couple tracks and some mid-song “Pink Moon”-ish piano bliss on standout “Middle of the Night.” “The whole world’s asleep/So, I’m trying to be quiet,” Allen croons at the beginning of the track, laying out the band’s modus operandi. Enviably, nonchalantly, The Virginia Reel keeps Charlotte’s great songwriter tradition alive. ED

CHAD VANGAALEN Soft Airplane Sub Pop Chad VanGaalen first stumbled across my radar in 2005, opening a triple feature with Rogue Wave and Fruit Bats.

VanGaalen simultaneously played guitar, drums, harmonica and sang; a tribute to his years busking on Calgary’s frozen streets. During which time he recorded hundreds of songs, eventually constituting his first two albums. Soft Airplane was uncharacteristically written and recorded in a single drive, recorded to tape in his basement. Airplane employs homemade and modified instruments, samples and eccentric percussion, a testament to VanGaalen’s creative potency. “Willow Tree,” a banjo-driven tune about death (“When I’m dead/Is when I’ll be free”) sets a quirky, macabre tone. Following suit are “TMNT Mask” (“I’ll think I’ll go sit by the river”) and “Molten Light” (“She’ll find you and she’ll kill you”). From eclectic folk to warbly pop to guitardriven rock accentuated by VanGaalen’s Neil Young falsetto, Soft Airplane is arguably the most profound release from an underrated versifier. BM

044 | CONTENTS

WOMEN Women Jagjaguwar Like new labelmate Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut from the four Calgary men known collectively as Women benefits from a certain Northern technological isolation. Recorded by pop mess Chad VanGaalen “over 4 months on ghetto blasters and old tape machines in [his] basement, an outdoor culvert and a crawl space,” these 10 tunes consume the charms of their rudimentary conduits. On the slight drone “Woodbind,” the overloaded crackle of old equipment lends an alluring mix of grit and mystery. These ideas seem strong enough to survive proper studio treatment, though: While the handclaps, gauzy vocals and sunny glockenspiel of “Black Rice” charm as they cloud what sounds like one microphone, the tune’s Lou Reed-with-a-smile jangle works in and out of narcolepsy and basements. A precious mix of present fulfillment and future promise, Women — classic stacks of 60s NYC and California narcotics, puffed and passed north by early indie rock filters — is a sweet little dimly lit daydream. GC

PORTASTATIC Some Small History Merge Portastatic’s Mac MacCaughan is like that baseball player who you know is a lock for the Hall of Fame, yet the question remains: what cap will he wear when inducted? The Superchunk lid? Maybe a Merge Records beanie?

Or something to honor his onetime one-off and now one-and-only “side project,” Portastatic? MacCaughan has poured most of his considerable musical energies over the last decade into the everevolving Portastatic, releasing CD after single after soundtrack of low-end, high-energy experimental econo-jams. What’s more, the music, while still retaining enough rough edges to snag the unsuspecting, has aged into something approaching, dare we say it, graceful (appropriate, as MacCaughan approaches middle age). What better time, then, for the career retrospective, or, as the dubious might put it, a cleansing of the vault? Some Small History is a bit of a misnomer though. Unless you’re a fan of the high-and-tight 'Static style, you may tire somewhere in the midst of these 44 (!) tracks.

It’s a little like a baseball season in that way; a few groaners (see “Sandals With White Socks”), a bunch of no-hitters (or, at least, “not hits”) and more than a few wildcard seedings (see covers of Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina” and a heart-into-stomach take on Prefab Sprout’s “Love Breaks Down,” plus Dylan, Sandy Denny and others). So yes: “Some Small History” is for completists: there’s a reason, after all, that many of these tracks are being collected here for the first time.

There’s Mac working on his curveball (Hot Chip’s “Boy From School”), his knuckler (low-fi ramblers like “Lousy Penpal” and “Dragging a Crow”) and the good 'ol, straight-n-fast gas (“Too Trashed To Smoke”). When he’s got it all working, however, this Big Mac shows himself to be a no-doubt firstballot selection. TCD

EX-

PATS

BEN FOLDS

Fond Return to Franklin St. Folds’ First Stop on the ‘Way To Normal’

By Grayson Currin

O

n a recent Thursday night, I had 15 minutes to spare before seeing a show in UNCChapel Hill’s Memorial Hall, a luxurious auditorium that holds a little less than 1,500 people.

Walking down the town’s collegiate thoroughfare, Franklin St., I knew I had time to grab a cup of coffee just before the music began. Peering through the windows of the town’s only Starbucks, I spied a familiar frame.

Inside, Ben Folds was lifting a soy chai off the counter, nodding to his barista, and turning around. We shook hands and said hello. He posed for photos for four college students sitting beside the door. The student who smiled the biggest wore one of those thickly silk-screened black T-shirts that, between nipple and navel, pictured B.B. King, smiling.

Folds exited through the front door, and the chatter began. Some spoke of Folds’ time in Chapel Hill. Others took out cell phones, calling their friends, telling them whom they’d seen. And before taking my order, the clerk—trapped for the night in her spotted-green, standard-issue apron—asked heavily, “So, are you going to the show tonight?”

Just 15 years ago, Ben Folds walking down Franklin St. would have been less than a big deal.

Indeed, as former Ben Folds Five bassist Robert Sledge remembers, that’s what Folds was doing in 1993 when he ran into Darren Jessee, a drummer Folds had known in Nashville. Folds — who’d grown up in Winston-Salem but spent time in New York, Nashville and Miami before finding himself back in North Carolina, looking to start a band — asked Jessee to join his piano-pop trio.

You likely know the rest of this story: Ben Folds Five released three albums and a collection of outtakes and live tracks, selling nearly two million albums domestically. Much of that success was driven by “Brick,” a sensitive piano ballad Folds co-wrote with Jessee about an old girlfriend’s abortion. The trio toured everywhere, playing big theatres and outdoor festivals, lending songs to soundtracks, and generally forgoing a normal life for a seven-year career that ended in the commercial failure of album three, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, and complete exhaustion.

A year later, in 2001, Folds released his first solo album, Rockin’ the Suburbs, on which he name-checked Sledge. This September, he released Way to Normal, his third eponymous stu-

dio full-length, which combines sharp-tongued wit and hints of deep romanticism, much as Folds always has. Opener “Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit His Head)” is a song about falling off the stage in Japan while touring back in the day with the Five. Fittingly, just before he released Way to Normal, Folds came back to Chapel Hill to reunite Ben Folds Five for a one-off charity show. It was a welcome return for a band that just ran its course.

“Once we split, we all kind of just desperately rushed to find our own independent ground,” says Folds, who lived in Australia before settling in Nashville. “It wasn’t a matter of we didn’t want to talk to each other, as much as we were all just preoccupied with cashing in on … missed years of just independence.”

About an hour after the chai run, Folds and his old boys played 18 songs in Memorial Hall — all of Reinhold Messner and seven more tunes split unevenly between the trio’s first two more financially successful albums. Folds’ father, Dean, ambled onstage to read the slightly psychedelic voicemail he’d left for Ben about spaceman muscle atrophy back in November 1998. A horn section provided liftoff for “Don’t Change Your Plans” and handclaps for “Army.” Sledge flitted between synthesizers and his fuzz-toned electric bass. Jessee pounded and sweated, and Folds forgot lyrics about his grandmother dying. It was jovial and congenial and mostly excellent.

After the show, I’d said hello to the band downstairs in a nonchalant backstage party where they posed for the flashbulb of a photographer hired by MySpace and drank beer with friends from a well-stocked cooler. Conversely, I’d met a teenage college student that had flown in from England to see the show, and he told me about a Japanese friend that had called in sick to work to be here. For them, the reunion was a very big deal.

After welcoming the visitors to North Carolina, I started heading toward Franklin St. again.

A few hundred yards away, another group of Tar Heels raved about the concert and the songs and the excitement. Following the two-hour gig, they talked about being hungry. When no one knew where to go, they picked Pepper’s, the pizza joint that includes a colony of painted portraits of North Carolina musical icons by local drummer and artist Scott Nurkin. There on the wall—among the faces of George Clinton, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Randy Travis and a dozen others—Ben Folds’ face hangs out in Chapel Hill nightly. It’s just that, every once in a while, some lucky kid gets a photo op.

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46 | ROCK ODDITIES

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