Shalini Magnetic North Paisley Pop It’s risky to presume autobiography on the part of songwriters who routinely employ metaphor and character sketches. Still, listening to Shalini Chatterjee’s fourth solo release, the inevitable conclusion is that someone’s gotten their heart broken, what with such lines as “I sense a change,” “you don’t want me around” and — most pointedly — “betrayal… desertion… heartache set in motion.” The latter indictment comes from “Walking Ghost of Death,” a ripsnorting slice of power pop that sounds like a sweaty collision between the Breeders and the Plimsouls, and it’s emblematic of how exposed-nerve emotion can elevate a song from just “good” to “great.” Elsewhere the Shalini band (abetted by husband Mitch Easter on piano and Velvet’s Jane Francis on backing vox) conjure distaff images of classic Dream Syndicate (“One of One”) and psychedelic Cheap Trick (“Echo”). Translation: kickass music — or music to kick someone’s ass with. Don’t be on the receiving end of this gal’s wrath. Fred Mills
Mike Strauss Band Ideal Road Self-released You’ve read such a description a hundred times before: “like it’s from kinder, artist-friendlier times when radio wasn’t built around pigeon holes, and genres were encouraged to crossbreed.” Prepare to hear it at least one more time because this rock ’n’ roots-rooted
throwback proves it. All eight songs feel smartly measured (fold in blues, add a gospel pinch) but without a whiff of contrivance, which is a pretty neat trick. And by doing the most with the hybrid approach, the horn-enriched “Gabriel’s Song” and the country-soulful “In Search of a New Beginning” earn standout nods. Those of a certain vintage might be reminded of listening to Bonnie Raitt’s Takin’ My Time, Ry Cooder’s Paradise and Lunch, or a Little Feat mix tape through their first Pioneer speakers. Factor in that Mike Strauss may be holding Mark Knopfler’s voice for ransom, and the trip back to those four-songs-to-a-side days, most likely in a Pacer, is complete. Rick Cornell
Thank God Ice/Age Exotic Fever Somebody stick a spoon in my mouth, I think I’m having a seizure. On this, their finest outing, S.C. spazzers Thank God are like strobe lights to epileptics, exploding blasts of white-hot speed-skronk with very little by way of warning. But, while the intensity on Ice/ Age is at superhuman levels, to focus solely on the frenzy is to miss the point here. Thank God’s manipulating our brains the whole way through this ordeal. The three-part “Hugo/ Chavez” suite slowly builds over two tracks as deliberate and increasingly agonizing as water torture until the third movement finally offers release. These passages of (relative) calm are just as vital, though. They’re the nervous tiptoes before your foot finds a landmine. And the tension Thank God creates in its paths between the taut, patient passages that serve as tripwires and the inevitable detonation is more than enough to build utopia for auditory masochists. Chris Powell
Valley Maker Valley Maker Self-released The solo project of Columbiabased Austin Crane strips his eponymous act’s arrangementsrich songs to mere lattice-work; when you’re writing a song cycle based on the first book of the Old Testament, the fewer sonic gewgaws, the better. This is, however, no come-to-(pre-) Jesus proselytizing or Christian Rock drek. The 10 songs were actually Crane’s senior honors thesis, and his skeletal guitar lines, spare croak, occasional percussion, and the foilharmonies of Georgia singer Amy Godwin keep the focus on these character studies. The minimalist electric guitar blues “Babel” eventually rumbles with tower-forging percussion; Godwin trails Crane like a shadow on the acoustic “Hagar and Ishmael,” befitting the handmaiden-as-surrogatemother tale; the entwined vocals on “Jacob and Esau” mirror the fraternal twins’ fates; and the beatific choruses of album-highlight “Joseph” are worthy of their subject’s rise from slavery. You don’t have to be a believer (believe me) to enjoy Crane’s retellings, and this beats the bejesus out of my thesis’ entertainment value. JG Mellor
Various Artists To Live A Lie Records 2010 Sampler To Live A Lie You have to wonder, just how extreme can music get before it exhausts itself? With its 26 tracks spanning only 24 minutes, this compilation curated by Raleigh’s To Live A Lie Records would seem
to represent the outer poles of speed and brutality in grindcore and hardcore, but to these ears it showcases stability in the genre. The assumption that feral vocals and blitzkrieg instrumentals are inherently more difficult falls flat in the face of dramatic dynamics and engaging delivery. N.C.’s Thieves evoke hardcore pioneers on their 59-second contribution, “Hard Kids.” Female-fronted D.C. outfit Deathrats unleash a hailstorm of clattering blastbeats and tumbling guitars that opens into a panoramic breakdown. And it’s indicative of the genre that each of these cuts, culled from as far afield as Turkey (Sakatat) and Japan (Conga Fury), speaks a universal language of hyperbolic speed and volume, but also that each embraces dramatic shifts in approach in order to maintain interest. Chris Powell
Wages In Sun Self-released Emerging after the amicable split of Arizona, this Asheville trio propitiously dials back pretty much everything from the parent band. The first in a series of 2010 EPs, In Sun drops Arizona’s psychedelic and proggy excesses for shorter, tighter songs with influences ranging from the Byrds and R.E.M. to Slowdive’s shoegaze and Fleet Fox folk. “You” nicely matches Peter Buck arpeggios to its marching percussion, while “Eclipse” cribs the same beat but opts for glissandos and reverb, plus a brief piano bridge, to create an entirely different-sounding song. “Turning Around” tilts twee-folk, but it’s brief, and EP-highlight “Hurricane Cocaine” adds welcome heft by careering between jangling Rickenbackers and glistening 4AD reverb. Even the sixminute-plus “Golden Tower” glides coherently — which wasn’t the Arizona way — into its noisy shoegaze bridges. And with Nick Campbell’s pleasant,
feathery vocals replacing former frontman Ben Wigler’s distracting dog-whistle alto, the focus remains on Wages the band — which these tracks suggest is well-earned. JG Mellor
Andrew Weathers A Great Southern City Full Spectrum Using shifting textures as his primary tool, Greensboro’s Andrew Weathers envelops listeners in what amounts to warm fugue states, songsculpting from droning computer noise and repetitive figures (often via guitar here). A pulsing form slowly takes shape during the nine-minute “Dusty Summer Ghost,” a storm-front gathering through successive layers of computerized keys. By the end, it’s like losing yourself in cloud-watching and realizing entire weather systems have crossed the sky. The record balances these long modern classical styles (“Left Arm Sunburnt,” like Arvo Pärt on a morphine drip) and ambient post-rock (the metallic-toned “Skin Holding Atoms In”) with short, three-minute guitarcentric vignettes like “Sails” and “Song” — Weathers even sings on the latter, but as though from a space outside the studio. The folk-like “First Front Porch Brooklyn” features guitar figures that eventually give way to rich organ wash; it sounds like a hymn to simple pleasures — not unlike this record. Inés Fonseca
fin8
shufflemag.com 29