SHUFFLE NO. 14

sh uffle Naked Gods + Ponchos (from peru) + Saint Solitude + Tyler Ramsey

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Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

The New South Andy the Doorbum takes on Southern stereotypes Hiss Golden Messenger wrestles with faith Inside and outside the Piedmont tradition box Carolina hip-hop: Dope enough to go nation-wide?

shufflemag.com Issue #14 Winter 2011

p. 13 05 Concert calendar 06 naked gods 07 Ponchos (from Peru) 09 Saint Solitude 10 Tyler Ramsey 14 Andy the Doorbum on Stereotypes 18 The New Traditionalism 21 Regional music — en español 22 Faith in Hiss Golden Messenger 24 Carolinas’ Hip-Hop Steps Up 27 Now Hear This/Editors’ Picks 30 The insider Publisher & General Manager Brian Cullinan

Photo Editor Enid Valu

Contributing Inspiration Rodney Lanier

Sales/Marketing James Wallace: Columbia, S.C. Sales Mgr. Contributing Writers Bryan Dowling: Charlotte Christie Coyle: Corbie Hill Assistant Editor Greensboro/WinstonMark Kemp Jordan Lawrence Salem/Triad Alli Marshall Brett Nash: Charleston Kim Ruehl Contributing Editor/ Phil Venable: Raleigh/ Website Durham/Chapel Hill/ Contributing Bryan C. Reed Triangle Photographers Kelly Sweitzer: Wilmington Daniel Coston Design Ninjas Jo Doyle: Asheville Taylor Smith Josh Robbins: Special Patrick Willett Projects/Events EDITORIAL Editor In Chief John Schacht

Illustrator Taylor Williams

Microphone image used for logo on page 34 courtesy of Vectorportal. com

Cover illustration: Taylor Williams This page: Enid Valu

Shuffle Magazine Attn: Music Submissions P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, N.C. 28224 -1777

Shuffle magazine is not responsible for your music tastes, just our own.

Copyright Shuffle Magazine, 2011. All content property of Shuffle Magazine, LLC. No reproductions or reuse of this material is authorized without the written consent of Shuffle Magazine.

Main Phone: 704.837.2024

Design Intern Alexandra Nelson

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Concert Calendar december

7 Darryl Hall & John Oates @ DPAC (Durham) 7 Touché Amoré with Pianos Become The Teeth @ Soapbox (Wilmington) 8 Beirut with Perfume Genius @ Cat’s Cradle (Carrboro) 9 Grieves and Budo with K. Flay @ Local 506 (Chapel Hill) 9 Kooley High @ Soapbox (Wilmington) 10 Hiss Golden Messenger album release with William Tyler @ Nightlight (Chapel Hill) 10 Moenda album release @ Snug Harbor (Charlotte) 10 Mayhem @ Tremont Music Hall (Charlotte) 10 Southern Culture on the Skids @ Cat’s Cradle (Carrboro) 11 Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion @ Neighborhood Theatre (Charlotte) 14 PC Worship with Whatever Brains and Manipulation @ Slim’s (Raleigh) 14 Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour @ Pour House (Raleigh) 15 Woods with Mmoss @ Kings Barcade (Raleigh) 15 Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour @ Neighborhood Theatre (Charlotte) 16 The Cheap Thrills @ the Milestone (Charlotte) 16 Southern Culture on the Skids @ Soapbox (Wilmington) 16 Temperance League with Shirlette & The Dynamite Brothers @ Snug Harbor (Charlotte) 17 Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour @ Grey Eagle (Asheville) 18 Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour @ Haw River Ballroom (Saxapahaw) 19 Double Negative with Bukkake Boys and Joint Damage @ Snug Harbor (Charlotte)

29 Toubab Krewe @ Pour House (Charleston) 30 Richard Parker and Mon Frere split album release @ Tremont Music Hall (Charlotte) 31 Toubab Krewe with London Souls @ The Orange Peel (Asheville) 31 Gore Gore Luchadores with The Emotron, One Another and Hectagons @ Milestone (Charlotte) 31 The Love Language with Last Year’s Men and Gross Ghost @ Soapbox (Wilmington) 31 Benji Hughes @ Snug Harbor (Charlotte)

january

1 Vestiges @ The Get Down (Asheville) 5 Fred Eaglesmith with the Ginn Sisters @ Grey Eagle (Asheville)

7 Akron/Family @ Pour House (Raleigh)

8 Akron/Family with Bad Weather California @ Grey Eagle (Asheville)

8 Loretta Lynn @ DPAC (Durham) 13-14 Branford Marsalis Quartet @ Reynolds Industries Theater (Durham) 14 Mipso Trio with Overmountain Men and Jim Avett @ Cat’s Cradle (Carrboro) 15 The O’Jays @ DPAC (Durham) 17 The Toasters @ The Milestone (Charlotte) 30 Jeff Mangum @ Memorial Hall (Chapel Hill)

february

Garrigan at Evening Muse. Photo by Daniel Coston

3 Carolina Chocolate Drops @ Memorial Hall (Chapel Hill) 7 Samantha Crain with American Aquarium @ Local 506 (Chapel Hill) 7 Thurston Moore @ Reynolds Industries Theatre (Durham) 9 Aretha Franklin @ DPAC (Durham) 10 Overtone Quartet (Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Jason Moran & Eric Harland) @

Memorial Hall (Chapel Hill) 10 Sunshone Still album release @ Evening Muse (Charlotte) 11 Fountains of Wayne @ Cat’s Cradle (Carrboro) 11 Sunshone Still album release @ New Brookland Tavern (Columbia) 12 Sharon van Etten with Shearwater @ Cat’s Cradle (Carrboro) 14 They Might Be Giants @ McGlohan Theatre (Charlotte) 15 They Might Be Giants @ Lincoln Theatre (Raleigh) 18 Annuals with Naked Gods and Lilac Shadows @ Grey Eagle (Asheville) 29 The Lemonheads playing It’s a Shame About Ray @ Handlebar (Greenville, S.C.)

march 2 The Lemonheads playing It’s a Shame About Ray @ Blind Tiger (Greensboro)

3 Naked Gods @ The Get Down (Asheville)

4 The Lemonheads playing It’s a Shame About Ray @ The Orange Peel (Asheville) 15 Wynton Marsalis @ Memorial Hall (Chapel Hill) 22 Herbie Hancock @ Memorial Hall (Chapel Hill) 30-31 Robert Glaspar Trio @ Casbah (Durham)

april

5 Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 @ Page Auditorium (Durham) 29 Elvis Costello & The Imposters @ DPAC (Durham)

Concert Calendar shufflemag.com 5

Naked Gods To Jam or Not to Jam?

By Jordan Lawrence

“N

aked Gods are a ‘hapless burlypop prog-punk’ quintet based out of the mountains of western North Carolina.”

This description starts off the self-penned bio of Naked Gods, a restless and thrilling Boone, N.C.-based band that has been making varied but familiar indie rock for just about four years. The genre tag is silly, but it’s not an all-together bad assessment of their energetic delivery. There’s a laid-back, almost Americana feel to their songwriting, and singer Seth Sullivan is most certainly burly — solidly built and approaching six feet, — with a fulsome black beard. Their songs are filled with hooks that, while not really traditional, are still catchy enough to get away with the “pop” tag. As for prog, the dexterity and complexity of the band’s wondrous and kinetic guitar-monies earn the modifier easily.

Still, like every song name and album title Naked Gods assign to their work, the description is meant more for fun than anything else.

“Hapless’ is just a funny word to describe the five of us,” says guitarist Christian Smith.

“We’re actually not very hapless, but we kind of look like idiots and vagabonds, so that was just kind of amusing. Seth’s a big dude with a big beard, and there’s a lot of facial hair and

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whatnot, so I guess that’s where the burly thing comes from. The rest of it is kind of a joke, but also kind of serious. The music is pop music. It is rock & roll, but it’s also hopefully really melodic and catchy and poppy. Even though it’s not punk rock, it’s informed to a large degree by it.”

The decision to name their lithe and powerful sophomore LP No Jams seems less sensible. For the most part, the album is all jams. Guitar tones melt down into raw, powerful catharses that suggest Dinosaur Jr at a backporch mountain jam. The band co-opt Rolling Stones swagger in a way that Spoon fans will instantly adore. Yet, these songs remain unquestionably and explosively their own. At first blush, calling this album No Jams seems like blatant false advertising.

But a trip to see one of Naked Gods’ raucous live shows will clear up the misunderstanding. It’s on stage that the band truly jams, letting loose in powerful performances that allow the players to push every tune and rhythm to the breaking point. Sullivan yells and beats the hell out of a tambourine. Fellow guitarist Brian Knox and Sullivan stare each other down, dueling through shrieking distortion as they wrest live-wire harmonics from what should be

jarring chaos. The tempos and tantrums on No Jams are tame in comparison.

“Sometimes you can lose the songs if everything is blown the fuck out, or if I’m screaming instead of singing,” Sullivan says.

“Live, there’s a visual element. On the record, you don’t have that to bridge any kind of sonic gaps. You have to do the songs as much justice as you can.”

The dichotomy between Naked Gods’ loose delivery and the seriousness with which they pursue their compositions is mirrored in No Jams’ lyrics. Many of these songs pair nostalgia for childhood with a fear of being unable to grow up. “Shaq & Diane” is a great example. Between piercing bouts of shockand-awe riffage, Sullivan intones, “All the early risers/ Come home/ Well, welcome ‘cause we’ve missed you.” His sly delivery achieves an air of both jealously and pity as he addresses friends who have relented to the 9-to-5 grind.

“We’re just playing rock & roll,” Sullivan says, summing up the band’s philosophy. “We make each other laugh a lot, and we like to have fun. We take the thing that is the music really, really seriously because that’s the thing that we’re doing, but the rest of it, you might as well have a laugh.” shuf14

Photo Courtesy of Naked Gods

Ponchos (From Peru) Port City DIY

By Corbie Hill

W

hen Wilmington’s Ponchos (From Peru) recorded their new LP, A Southern Gentleman Starts a War, they treated it like a job. For a solid week, drummer Will Brone and guitarist Adam Smith worked their 9-to-5s and then headed to the studio.

“You work and then you get there at like 7:00 and then you record until like 10:30, and then you work the next day and you come back and do it again,” Brone says, describing the second-shift approach to studio time.

Both members of Ponchos effectively worked a 60-hour week to save on otherwise prohibitive studio costs, but that’s not why Smith is excited. This is the first Ponchos release that wasn’t home-recorded, but he feels the time crunch — plus the quick turnaround between Southern Gentleman and its predecessor, Archetypecast — ensured that the songs were still fresh when they hit tape.

“It’s been a year since we put our last one out,” says Smith. “So [Southern Gentleman] is very alive to me.”

Ponchos play technical math-folk with jazz elements, with Battles-level tempo chicanery and drum-work backing electrified anti-folk. As a drummer, Brone is given to virtuosic somersaults, yet he doesn’t come across as showy. Smith plays his guitar

Photo by Sarah Gilliam

clean, the absence of effects or even distortion transforming his quick runs and hammer-and-pull riffs into something more complicated and jazzy than simple shredding.

Smith, who minored in poetry, writes purposefully abstract lyrics. Even the meaning of the album’s title is up to interpretation, he points out. ‘“When the Record Spins’ is actually about a friend who passed away, and it’s a metaphor,” he says.

“He’s really not there but I still think about him. But I think you wouldn’t get that just from the song.” Smith’s activist streak also asserts itself on songs like “The System.” “I got no armor/ over my chest/ it’s right here,” he chants over serpentine guitar and sparse, militaristic drumming. It has the menacing feel of an At the Drive-In song stripped to its constituent elements.

Even if the lyrics are open-ended, there’s still intense emotional heft. Smith says, “I think music can be more powerful than any other political tool because it connects you on a deep subconscious level but also on a top level.”

But these aggressive thoughts and tonalities, not to mention the difficulty of pigeonholing Ponchos’ sound, don’t always gel with retirees or tourists. And Wilmington

has its share of both.

“If you want to be in a cover band, you can make a lot of money,” Smith says, describing the scene rather than griping. “If you want to play metal, there’s actually a pretty strong metal scene. There’s a pretty strong jam scene too.” But there’s not much crossover. “People, once they start doing covers, they realize how much money they make,” he says. “They never want to go back.”

But Smith is proud of scene-mates D&D Sluggers and Fractal Farm, and he loves the intimacy of the small music community.

Ponchos’ records come in hand-painted cases, a personal touch from a band preferring that kind of DIY contact. “When you have positive feedback it’s more connected, it’s more real,” he says. “When you live in a bigger community and you have positive feedback, it isn’t personalized.”

For Ponchos, this city of fewer than 100,000 people is perfect. The band plans to press a humble 50 to 100 copies of Southern Gentleman. And if those all sell — which happened with the similarly short-run and home-packaged Archetypecast — they will be happy. “Even if there aren’t a lot of people that come out most of the time,” says Brone, “the people that come out, they’re really into it.” shuf14 shufflemag.com 7

Saint Solitude Don’t Leave Home Again

By Corbie Hill

“O

nce you get to a point of stability and happiness, when you’re sober and you’re clean, that’s when you start to get really boring,” says Dup Crosson. The songwriter behind Asheville’s Saint Solitude has observed plenty of artists losing their edge with age and comfort. Tom Waits and Nick Cave, who Crosson says have become more interesting with time, are his only exceptions.

So maybe Crosson’s a little self-conscious about how well things are going.

In mid-2010, this Maine native was set to move to Massachusetts. He’s always been restless, but he also felt out of place in Asheville, where he’s lived since 2003. He ascribed his unease to various elements of the local scene, the town, the South, you name it.

But as Crosson dismissed his backing band and set a departure date, he met a girl... and changed his mind. On his first record, 2009’s Journal of Retreat, he sang, “Is this the first of many years alone?” On the new By Some Great Storm he proudly belts out, “But then I fell in love.”

Today, Crosson admits that Asheville was never the problem; this whole thing was in his head. And he’s glad he stayed.

“I think a big part of this new record was

Photo by Dylan Babb

finding myself comfortable, reflecting on that, and not letting myself fall into laziness,” he says. “I’m 26. So, when you’re at that point you have to pinch yourself, remind yourself that you’re awake. Otherwise you can fall into doing the same thing every time.”

Crosson’s been at this since age 11, when he started playing drums. At 15, he picked up guitar and started writing songs. ”I wrote a lot in high school,” he says. “I would write a song a day sometimes.”

This fell off when he started at UNCAsheville. In retrospect, Crosson believes he was depressed at the time. The bleak, disaffected “Car Crash Headlines” on Journal of Retreat is the only song he wrote during this year and a half.

But then, at 21, he went to Sweden for four months.

“That was the first time I didn’t have any drums or guitar. All I had was a key to a room with a piano,” he recalls. “That got me on piano for a while, but all it really did was get me excited about writing songs again.” Crosson’s virtually monastic recording process may have started here. It’s a romantic idea — escaping into an artist’s hermitage to write and record — and for years Crosson has done everything himself,

including playing almost every instrument on both records.

After Sweden, Saint Solitude gradually evolved into a high-volume solo project, with live-looped keys and guitar. Crosson toured like this, his little Saturn packed with amps and instruments, before deciding he needed a backing band.

With the one-man show, Crosson didn’t feel he could pull off the big rock songs he loves.

Journal was very much an indie-rock record.

Its club-size tunes and inward focus reflected his solo years. But several tracks from Great Storm are stadium-huge. Crosson, a Smashing Pumpkins fanatic, is letting that influence show for the first time. “Lifted,” a soaring 90srock anthem, closes on a fuzzed-out riff that would have been right at home on Siamese Dream. And “Arielle the Ghost” and “Oh Memory” reveal Crosson’s college fascination with British melodrama-rockers Muse.

“I feel like it’s taken me all these years to find where I want to be with this project,” he says. For the first time, the live incarnation is a full-on, two-guitar rock band. Crosson can focus on singing and songwriting while someone else worries about lead lines. And, most importantly, there’s nowhere else he wants to be. shuf14

shufflemag.com 9

Tyler Ramsey Singing the Simple Sadness

By Alli Marshall

T

here’s a delicious shiver of loneliness to Tyler Ramsey’s new album, The Valley Wind. From the grayscale artwork to the echoes of reverb; from the lingering late-night waltz of “Angel Band” to the plaintive lilt of the title track: The Asheville-based singer/songwriter and Band of Horses guitarist has always had a knack for setting melancholy to music.

“All I can hope for is that yours goes with mine,” he sings on the starlit, Beach Boystinged “Time Is A Changing Line.” But here’s where the unlucky-in-love story takes a turn: Ramsey recently married the one to whom that song was likely directed, and the newlyweds paired Ramsey’s solo tour in support of Valley with their honeymoon.

It’s a happy punctuation to what’s been a happy handful of years for Ramsey. After spending most of a decade playing in various Asheville bands (his own Tyler Ramsey Trio, rock outfit Drug Money, and Aaron “Woody” Wood’s Hollywood Red), he met Band of Horses through friend/BoH bassist Bill Reynolds and signed on as the group’s guitarist. But even with BoH’s extensive touring schedule, he’s stayed focused on his own writing.

Released on Fat Possum this Fall, Valley is Ramsey’s third solo outing. The label also rereleased his 2008 record, A Long Dream About Swimming Across The Sea, but there are no plans to reissue 2004 Ramsey’s self-titled

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debut. “It still holds up,” Ramsey says of his earliest solo releases. “It’s a little awkward because I know what the songs were about.

But, it’s the same for the new record, he says, whether he thinks the songs are good or could have been improved.

He can probably rest easy, because Valley is Ramsey’s most thematically consistent album to date, juxtaposing images from nature against palpable emotions. It’s the poignancy of the songs, especially “The Nightbird,” that attracted Fat Possum to Ramsey’s project. He’d recorded a demo with acoustic guitar and drum machine, and shared it with BoH members. Singer Ben Bridwell took it to one of the heads of Fat Possum, which is also home to Bridwell’s Brown Records imprint. “He was like, ‘Was that okay that I did that?’” Ramsey says.

“Totally fine. Maybe I would have done a different version, but it turned out that the emotion of the song was there.”

Valley’s polished final version is culled from songs either written in a cabin in Hot Springs, N.C., or while Ramsey was on tour. “It used to be I had to write the whole song right there,” he says. “As my everyday life changed into constantly traveling and staying in hotels, I’ve learned it’s okay to write part of a song and pick it back up again when there’s opportunity to do so.”

When the time came to record, he tapped long-time collaborators Seth Kauffman

(Floating Action) and BoH’s Reynolds. An early vision for the album involved a full band and “an awesome old pedal steel player from Nashville.” But in the end it was just the unadorned talents of the three Asheville musicians who captured what Ramsey wanted.

Recorded at Alex The Great studio in Nashville, Valley resonates with reverb and cathedral acoustics — clear influences from the BoH sound. “I’ve figured out more about the electric guitar and effects,” says Ramsey, most of whose previous solo work was acoustic. “There’s a whole new range of stuff I can use to give the songs whatever they need.” His wistful tenor and lithe harmonies attest to an expanded vocal range, one that’s earned him comparisons to Neil Young in early reviews.

Ramsey’s expanded comfort zone was apparent, at his Asheville CD release show, where he joked with the audience before performing deftly-arranged selections from throughout his catalog. The evening was a triumph of finger-picked guitar, mellow beats and lush lyrics. Simple, like Ramsey’s current direction.

“At least for now,” he says, “I’m in the mode of trying to do things quickly and honestly.” shuf14

Photo by Daniel Coston

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Expanded. shufflemag.com Come check out the new site. More of what you love about Shuffle, lots more to come.

The New South M

ost everybody concedes it, and the 2010 census numbers hammered it home: the new South is a vastly different place from the old. Still, the consensus on what constitutes new Southern music always seems to lag behind and resist alteration; if the new South is many things, one of those things is still the old South. So how do the old music traditions fit with the new? There may be kernels of truth in every stereotype,

but how valid are the old ones? How much does faith still fuel the musical imagination?

Does the early-00s ‘Dirty South’ rap boom define our state’s hip-hop? This issue we take a quick look at some of these questions through stories that shed light on the new South through a Carolinas’ filter. Because even in a terabyte world where all of recorded music is at our fingertips, place still matters.

 shufflemag.com 13

By John Schacht

ith his lawless mane of dirty-blond locks, the sort of facial kudzu familiar from photos of Civil War officers, and a penchant for posing wild-eyed with firearms in promo shots, Andy Fenstermaker has seen the looks and read the subtext: Crazy redneck.

Increasingly, that’s an image that belongs with the Confederate currency of Southern stereotypes, worth more as curios: Bible beaters and bootleggers, rifle racks and pick-up trucks, good ol’ boy-bigots and semi-literate hillbilly music, all stubbornly writ into America’s cultural consciousness. Fenstermaker, the 27-year-old Charlotte native who plays very literate hillbilly music behind the moniker Andy the Doorbum, concedes the truth-kernels in these old reductive views. He’ll even cop to one or two himself. But to his mind, the reason they won’t fade into the shadows of the new South’s diversity has as much to do with jealously as ignorance today.

“That’s why people poke fun at Southern culture, because it stands out so much,” he says over a restaurant plate of meat loaf and okra in Charlotte’s Plaza-Midwood district. “Not to say the South’s better than anywhere else, but some of the pivotal American music movements come from here and are spawned out of one of the more interesting cultures in the United States. When people have those negative connotations, I feel like I’m helping define what it means to be a Southerner now.”

Fenstermaker is too courteous in conversation to put that as he might in song, like he does on “The Farm,” from his fourth and latest album, the deeply personal The Man Killed the Bird, and With the Bird He Killed the Song, and With the Song, Himself.

There, over a reeling acoustic strum and droning viola leavened by melodica, he relates in striking images the dark rural past of his “tribe,” railing against the shackles of traditions macro and micro. As the song concludes, he notches the tension to a feverish end and — for one of the few times on this double-LP — launches into his notorious throaty caterwaul, “I’ve heard tell of a thing called tradition/Well, we don’t buy that shit anymore.”

That’s just one of a handful of memorable moments from Andy the Doorbum’s most fully realized LP. The title comes from a Pygmy proverb that he says captures how creativity inspires him to persevere through difficulties past and present — and there’s plenty of persevering to do in these stories. Setting aside most of the experimental sketch-bursts and psychotropic country stomps of his previous work, the new record’s 12 tracks are cut mostly from the same processional-ballad cloth. These are scaled-back acoustic folk ruminations with banjo, melodica, fiddle, horns and gang choruses

that accompany tales set in the seedy underbelly of modern urban life and rural hardship. “There is symbolism, and there are scenarios from my life, and it’s not always pretty,” he concedes.

The music, though, often is. Known for his gruff bellow and roar, his voice here retreats to suit the tenor of minor keys and slower tempos, though it remains scruffy, wounded and off-key in all the right places. He insists that the songs’ somber tones are ultimately optimistic, their calm an entry point — and balm — to the unraveling sanity in the narratives. “Creating nice songs about weird nasty things” was the goal, he says, and the postapocalyptic scenarios, imploding families, rampant over-indulgence, and death obsessions drive the point home.

But this is no nihilist’s screed or black-and-white sloganeering. The people that populate these stories live in emotionally and morally complicated grey scales; writing from an early age has sharpened his eye for human frailty and helped trim the fat from his prose. He calls these lyrics the best he’s ever done: “The Orgy” condemns those “rotten with ambition” to a life where longing “is all that there will be;” “The Favor” begins as an anti-suicide homily until the person who steps in as savior has their own self-serving motives uncovered; the mass-gravedigger in “The Ditch” offers comfort as he goes about his work readying people for the worms; and “The Sisters” is a slow, super-creepy tale of closeted dead siblings, an Appalachian cousin to Nirvana’s serial killer tale “Polly.”

Grim stuff, but Fenstermaker insists all those “nasty and horrible things” are essential to making the world the “amazing place that it is.” Anyone who’s met him for five minutes, he adds, can see he’s a “feel-good kind of dude” (Author’s Note: This is true). For that, he credits the dark songs for their therapeutic quality.

But it goes beyond catharsis. As far as he is concerned, what’s happening now is all gravy. Writing songs, touring and playing music across America, traveling the globe, making art and cohabitating with his artist girlfriend (the talented NC painter Kelly Keith) — for much of his life, all of that was “pie in the sky.”

“As a kid, I didn’t think it was possible — it was a waste of time to even imagine it would happen.” · · · Like a lot of today’s Southerners, Fenstermaker comes from somewhere else. He was born in the Pennsylvania town of Titusville, tucked away in the northwest corner of the state closer to Eerie, N.Y. than Pittsburgh. It’s the birthplace of the oil industry, and the place where, years later, his father would add to his cumulative jail time by drunk-driving his pickup truck into town hall.

Andy is mostly mum on the details of a difficult childhood, 

All photos by Enid Valu Body Illustration by: Kelly Keith Insert Illustration by Taylor Williams

shufflemag.com 15

and insists that he and his old man have patched things up. At the age of 1, his parents, before their divorce, piled Andy, his older brother and all the furnishings and clothing that would fit into a ’52 International pickup and moved to the N.C. Piedmont. Until he graduated from East Gaston County High, his world consisted almost entirely of rural Gaston County and his family’s farm in Pennsylvania where he spent summers with his dad. “I’d lived in the country all my life,” he says. “I didn’t even know how to move to the city.”

Before he tackled that, though, he had a decision to make after graduation when his grandmother passed away and left him $2,000. He thought about getting his first car, but stumbled on an old travel guide of Iceland that was a year his senior. Seduced by the photos, he spent a month camping and hitchhiking across the island during its near-endless days. “It was the stupidest, scariest thing I’ve ever done,” he laughs, “but I got the travel bug bad.”

Less than a decade later, he’s been to 46 of 50 states, and his passport bears entry stamps from 15 foreign countries. Travel is now the prime mover behind most everything he does, whether it’s riding his 100-mpg scooter or working the door at Snug Harbor and the Milestone Club in Charlotte six nights a week.

It’s still done on the cheap, too, a tent his hostel and a thumb his transport. It’s inspiring to experience other topographies and cultures, but the purpose is just as much to step out of the comfort zones he’s so wary of. He’s not beyond putting himself in “seedy little situations” on the road just to court new adventures.

“It’s like doing piles of hallucinogenic drugs without any of the crazy and horrible stuff,” he says, though quickly amending; “Well, I’ve had some crazy and horrible stuff happen to me while traveling, but I love it — it’s still part of the experience.”

It’s also taken live Doorbum music to some interesting places.

He’s played Amsterdam clubs and jammed on a Spanish stage with Nigerian Touareg group Etran Finatawa in front of 3,000 fans.

He’s played dance recitals and library openings, barns, basements and illegal warehouse shows in Los Angeles. Wherever he goes, he finds himself in the role of unofficial ambassador for the South.

“People seem to be really excited about that — ‘You’re from the South? What you’re doing musically must be very interesting,’” he says, citing this as the other stereotype he typically encounters. “I feel fortunate people would make that assumption. I hope I follow through on it.”

He has, and showed early signs he would. He formed his first band at the age of nine — a quartet of stuffed animals he’d give different voices to while he banged on kitchenware for accompaniment. (He still has cassettes of The Scruples, as he dubbed them.) His dad gave him his first guitar at14, and he soon matriculated to 4-track recordings; before the Doorbum years, he estimates he recorded 10 LPs worth of original material, but kept them to himself.

He soon started playing in punk bands, the most notable being Charlotte’s IYF PoRK. In the early aughts, they played Queen City Underground gigs, where he met Neal Harper, one of the venue owners. As IYF PoRK wound down, and in need of a job, he began 16 Andy the Doorbum shuffle fourteen

pestering Harper to let him work the door at the Milestone, which Harper rescued from obscurity in 2004.

Working at the club seven nights a week, he wound up living there with Harper for eight months rather than driving back and forth to Stanley. After shows, they’d talk and party and play music — and on at least one drunken night take target practice inside the Milestone after it closed. (The two were shot at shortly after Harper reclaimed the club from the sketchy, drug-riddled neighborhood.) Eventually, he let Harper hear the tapes he’d made, and the 2013 Wolves guitarist/songwriter loved them. Out of that confidence builder, and buoyed by some successful solo gigs, 2005’s The Doorbooth Album eventually emerged: 25 belowlo-fi tracks recorded to 4-track entirely in the closet-sized space of the club’s doorbooth.

The music was the promising mess of an eccentric Southern voice, the songs peppered with references to bird flu, Yetis, drugs and death. It struck a chord with friends and patrons — who’d taken to calling him the ‘doorbum’ guy for his vagrant-friendly fashion sense. Some of the out-of-town bands took note, too, lobbying him to join them on tour after catching his act.

He picked up his playing and recording pace, and soon began touring the Southeast and Midwest on his own. The Mt. Holly Sessions followed in 2007, a (relative) step up in fidelity that was recorded to computer with frequent collaborator Robert Childers.

Songs like “Alamissibamassippi,” “Ode to Extinction” and “Horace

“I was raised in the country and know a lot about redneck culture, I’m related to a lot of them, and I do have parts of that in me, but I’m also extremely liberal and openminded …A lot of people perceive that the South is all one thing, but actually it’s a lot of different things, and that’s why it’s a really awesome place.“ —Andy Fenstermaker Wells & the Chloroform Addicts” — about the nitrous oxide inventor who got addicted and during a deranged episode poured sulfuric acid on two prostitutes, then killed himself when he came out of it — only confirmed the bizarre rabbit hole he was heading down. If a tweaker Johnny Cash and rural Hubert Selby, Jr. collaborated, and occasionally let Tom Waits or David Yow sing, it might sound like this.

Then came 2009’s Art Is Shit, which by his own account is when Andy the Doorbum began to flesh out on record what he heard in his fertile imagination. Recorded on a 24-track recorder, it’s a dizzying 67-minute sonic whirlwind through a gritty, poignant and often hilarious world of crack-whores and hobos, brutal 17th century executioners and a Pennsylvania ghost-mining town that’s been burning for 50 years. Though it may suffer from ‘let’s see what else I can track on here’ over-exuberance, it also marks the spot where his dark urban visions, foreign travels and rural past gel into a coherent aesthetic. The imagery feels alive, even feral, drawing cogent parallels between fucked-up city streets and a farm where death and decay are often an everyday harvest.

More and more, those summers spent on his family’s farm weed their way into his narratives as he comes to terms with his past, culminating now in one of the main settings for The Man Killed the Bird. Once stretching over an entire valley, the farm has been in his family since shortly after the Fenstermachers immigrated from Germany in 1737 and dropped the “ch” for a “k” in their name.

It’s a wild, off-the-grid 100 acres where animals get slaughtered for food, cable TV and cell-phone reception don’t exist, pastgeneration relatives have frozen to death, and a schizophrenic uncle lives electricity-free in a trailer. It’s a harsh existence, but he insists it’s not all that different from Gaston County.

“Western Pennsylvania, with the exception of the accent, (is) culturally almost identical,” he says. “They’re country mountain folk. The Alleghenies are part of the Appalachian Mountains. And I always think that Appalachia and Southern culture are kind of synonymous. Bluegrass, moonshine stillin’, bootlegging — all of that.”

Religion is a key songwriting inspiration in that culture, and now a favorite target of his. Growing up, he wrote his first poem for Jesus and says he adopted the trappings of Southern

Christianity of his own accord. It didn’t stick, though. “I got older, asked too many questions, and there weren’t suitable answers for any of them.” He now believes that our energy goes on after us, though, we’re not conscious of it anymore. That’s haunted him since childhood comes from, and it pervades his music today.

“Even if I was a vaporous mist,” he says, “I would enjoy knowing I was a vaporous mist.”

The answer as he sees it is to experience everything you can before they turn out the lights. That explains the lust for travel, and also his fondness for drugs. He calls himself an advocate for responsible drug use, but “to get as much reality as I can,” not to escape it. Drugs aren’t bad, he insists, only dangerous, and no more so than driving a car or growing obese and stupefied in front of a television. He captures that fine line between addiction and enjoyment on “Medicamentum,” perhaps his finest song to date and the A-side of a split 7” he did with Charlotte’s Yardwork early in 2011. “It says to take one, so I take 10/It don’t seem wrong until I fall/For 13 years I couldn’t remember anything/Suddenly I can see it all,” he sings over a galloping guitar and gang vocals until a hymnal organ shows up to escort the outro.

“You just have to be as responsible as you can about the decisions you’re making,” he says, “and try to make those that will enrich your life with experiences that you would not otherwise have.” · · · When Shuffle first caught up with Andy this summer, he was in the forests of Maine on his way to play a mountaintop house show near the town of Peru, and touring with spaz-core dude Emotron. That gig with his frequent touring mate turned out to be in an appropriately named venue — the Passout House. Midway through the Emotron’s set, as the two exchanged turkey calls, he slid from his stool to the floor in what for all the world looks like an epileptic seizure (you can watch it on YouTube). He says the heat — it was 105 degrees that day, the hottest ever recorded in Maine — and a lack of water and AC contributed.

But what left a bigger impression that night, never having played the state before, was finding 50 kids at a house show on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere Maine bellowing along to his strange ode to smoking and addiction, “Love Song for Cigarettes.” That’s one measure of success for which he’s grateful.

But when you compare his music to the great folk art traditions of the South, he gets to the nub of what’s truly driving him.

“The only success I ultimately care to attain is of artistic integrity,” he says. “If art pours out of you, it’s all you know — you can’t compromise that and remain genuine. The best thing I have to offer as a human being is doing my art.”

That’s true, and getting truer. But he’s offering us something else as well: a very good reason to alter our notions about crazy rednecks. shuf14 Topher Manila hung around this story briefly before he was called away to greet his newborn child

shufflemag.com 17

Same As It Never Was How area musicians bend without breaking from Southern tradition

By Jordan Lawrence

O

ver the phone, Tripp LaFrance is the embodiment of the Southern male. His drawl is thick and gruff, worn ragged by frenetic performances as the singer for Columbia’s Say Brother. His band, which revs up bluegrass and old-time structures with furious blues-rock energy, has just played a post-game gig at the University of South Carolina’s homecoming football game. Like any good South Carolinian at a tailgate, he’s spent the afternoon tossing back Bud Lights and warns that intoxication may color the intensity of his answers.

A booze-fueled interview is fitting when you consider All I Got Is Time, the band’s rough-and-tumble debut. “Waitin’ on You to Call,” for instance, starts like a calm little back-porch jam.

LaFrance cries about a girl that got away over driving guitar and banjo. Suddenly, drums and electric bass grab hold with a deep garage rock groove, and a wailing electric guitar enters. The solos tangle amongst aggressive acoustic strums, weaving to and fro in patterns more typical of a fiddle or mandolin. It’s decidedly Southern, drawing heavily from country and blues traditions, but the band grafts elements from each onto the other, arriving at a Frankenstein mix of old-time charm and modern rock aggression.

It’s as much indebted to Bill Monroe as it is to Creedence Clearwater Revival, but it’s more energetic than either reference would suggest.

It’s a catchy technique, as intoxicating as a six-pack downed in the glaring Southern sun, but it’s far from revolutionary.

National acts like Old Crow Medicine Show and Bright Eyes have won raves with similar tricks, and fellow Carolinians The Avett Brothers have made a mainstream splash with an ampedup bluegrass attack that operates in much the same way. But as LaFrance points out, Say Brother remains fresh because they invest so much of themselves in the music. Their songs resound with energetic conviction and heartfelt emotion.

“It’s just this same old E-A-B progression, and we put as much honesty in it as we can,” he says, noting how easy it would be to fall into the revivalist trap. “All that underground blues, country, rock & roll stuff, that shit is all the same. We do sound like a lot of

18 New Traditionalism shuffle fourteen

it. But we’re not trying to blow everybody’s mind or step it up to some new fucking level. I’m just trying to incorporate everything that I like into one thing, you know? My way.”

Contending with traditions is a challenge that all musicians face, but it’s of particular importance for Southern artists. In a land where believers keep their Bible Belts tight and racial tension still rears its ugly head, musical traditions are held onto with vigor, too. The blues derive from the angst of black southerners cornered by socioeconomic discrimination in the Postbellum era. Bluegrass began as the music of poor mountain dwellers, cobbling together makeshift instruments and passing down stories from generation to generation. Rock & roll was born in the South in the midst of the Civil Rights revolution, combining the music of different cultures into one defiant roar.

These styles connect to the area’s history in such profound ways that many take issue when artists put their own spin on them. That may be doubly true for non-native musicians who migrate here.

As a result, figuring out how to move a tradition forward while still respecting its history is an issue that permeates — and sometimes inspires — the work of many musicians in the Carolinas.

“The South is also home to some of the most progressive people I’ve ever met,” contends N.C.-born experimental musician Jenks Miller. He recognizes that deep traditions can breed prejudices, but he insists that the challenge makes great Southern artists who they are. “If you’re living somewhere where that’s totally homogenized, then you never are sort of exposed to challenging ideas. You can call yourself progressive, but it’s because you’ve never been challenged. In the South, where you have to deal with all these conflicting ideas, you kind of develop this adaptability.”

Adaptability, it turns out, is one of Miller’s greatest strengths.

He’s the mastermind behind Chapel Hill’s nationally acclaimed avant-metal project Horseback, but he also lays down the slowburning guitar lines that help define Mount Moriah, one of the area’s best folk-rock outfits. In both, Miller displays an uncanny ability to explore space while maintaining gritty intensity,

Photos courtesy of: Say Brother: Jordan Blackmon, Chatham County Line: Yep Roc Records,

(L-R): Say Brother, Chatam County Line, Caitlin Cary, Jenks Miller

blurring the lines between minimalist experimentation and blues/ folk traditions in the process.

Miller uses this technique to communicate a staggering array of moods. “Invokation,” the lumbering opener to Horseback’s 2010 LP The Invisible Mountain, melds a trio of bass and guitar into an oppressive march that’s shot through by Miller’s arresting snarl. In the background, there’s a heady, repetitive riff, a strungout simplification of a blues lick that bolsters the song’s dreadinducing atmosphere into something transformative.

“Plane,” one of the most devastating numbers on Mount Moriah’s transcendent debut, is powered by a similar guitar line.

The song is a battered break-up ballad, throbbing purposefully atop a metronomic rhythm section as Heather McEntire lowers her voice to a rough but beautiful whisper. “It was the tone of your letters and the fit of herring-bone sweaters,” she recalls, her voice trailing off at line’s end. It’s here that Miller rips through softly, though solidly, his patient tones burning with bitter-sweet beauty, the aural essence of a newly formed scar. It has all the power of a Loretta Lynn tearjerker, but Miller’s fiery playing reforms it into a decidedly modern creation.

“These things are always evolving,” he says, highlighting his willingness to twist traditional elements into staggering new forms. “We can’t treat them like static forms. If we do, if we try and preserve them as the way they were at one moment in time, then they die. The breath of life leaves them.”

Miller says that his technique is a direct result of being raised in the South, pointing to Greensboro-born avant-garde pillar Harry Flynt as the inspiration for his linkage of modern minimalism with blues structures. But what of those Carolinas artists who were born elsewhere?

“I yearned for a place like the South that had an originality to it,” says Phil Cook, who modernizes folk and blues traditions with the experimental trio Megafaun, and hews closer to old-time styles with his solo project Phil Cook and His Feat. He and his bandmates relocated to the Triangle from Wisconsin in 2005.

“The source of American music is the South. The story was born there, everything that happens in our music. I’ve always thought that, and even before I moved here, that was the music that moved me. I longed for that place down here, this place.”

His affinity for the South and its music is clear on Hungry Mother Blues, his second outing under his one-man-band moniker.

Keeping time with a kick drum, he picks his way through banjo and guitar instrumentals that work comfortably within accepted folk and blues forms. Still, Cook insists he isn’t limited by the rigid expectations many have for this kind of music. His first hero on the piano was balladeer Bruce Hornsby, and he says that inspiration continues to show through in his playing — even on the banjo.

Calling Cook’s song’s Hornsby-esque would be a stretch, but they resound with a sense of catchy pop tunefulness nonetheless.

The title of Blues opener “Frazee, Minnesota” points back to Cook’s Midwestern roots, and the music is a prime example of his liberated approach. It’s a simple but entrancing two minutes of deftly executed slide guitar with a solidly Southern twang. But the melody it follows is punctuated by a repeated passage that operates like a pop hook, branding the brain to crop up later as a whistle or hum. This is traditional music that the casual music fan might find easy to love.

“The biggest thing that I really believe about music is that it is a force that is way bigger than we can actually comprehend as people,” he says, “and that trying to hold onto or tie down to anything is against the point of it all. If you’re open to being inspired by it, then you’re already carrying the tradition on.”

Cook is excited to play music in an area that allows this view of tradition, and he’s not alone. Caitlin Cary, one half of the Southern-tinged Raleigh pop act The Small Ponds, cites the anchored but free nature of tradition in the modern South as a key force in shaping her as an artist. An Ohio native, she’s been working at the juncture of indie pop and country for more than a decade, joining Whiskeytown in 1994 and recording a magnificently straight-shooting collection of honky-tonk duets with Thad Cockrell in addition to a litany of other solo albums and collaborations. She  contends that the rich history

Caitlin Cary: Daniel Coston, Jenks Miller: Jeremy M. Lange, Phil Cook: Trekky Records

shufflemag.com 19

of the South helped her reach a clarity in her musical voice she likely wouldn’t have found elsewhere.

“There’s something expansive and warm about making music here that feels like people hold each other up,” Cary asserts. “It’s true, a tradition holds it all up. People value what has come before, including what happened in Chapel Hill in the 80s. I think folks in the South might be more used to, or attuned to, a cohesion of tradition.”

This cohesive spirit has reared many artists — including the lion’s share of Cary’s collaborators. Still,

“ I yearned for

a place like the South that had an originality to it.”

—Phil Cook

as with any case of parent and offspring, there will always be growing pains. Take Raleigh’s Chatham County Line, whose 2010 album Wildwood was their finest to date. Started in 1999, CCL has become one of the most highly regarded bluegrass acts in the nation, but they ran into controversy when they decided to include drums on several of Wildwood’s tracks, a big no-no among bluegrass’ more hard-line factions.

They were rockers first, and it shows through in their songs, catchy numbers that are just as beholden to Paul Simon and The Beatles as they are to Flatt and Scruggs. Far from backing away from this, the band will take another bold step forward with a 2012 live double LP of their holiday show, which features a set of traditional bluegrass and a just-for-fun amplified rock set.

“When we’re hanging out with pals drinking beers, somebody does pick up the drum sticks more often than the banjo,” singer/guitarist Dave Wilson explains.

“It’s just really a natural progression of who we are.”

It’s a daring move, and it shines with the willful, independent spirit that defines musicians in the area that push their traditions forward. That’s really all this is about; the natural progression of musicians not just here but everywhere. It’s just that here in the Carolinas, musicians are so close to the wellspring that they end up creating tributaries of their own. shuf14

20 New Traditionalism shuffle fourteen

Coming soon to Shufflemag.com Shuffle Magazine and Six Foot Kitten present:

Andy the Doorbum

live. locked. loaded.

The first installment of our upcoming series of studio sessions with feature artists from each issue of Shuffle.

Multi-camera, full production, killer sound…badass.

First episode: February 2012.

www.sixfootkitten.com creative consulting and media architects

sh uffle

Regional Music en Español ! !

hen I first heard the song “Raleigh,” by a roots band from the Triangle area, the words of love for North Carolina and the twangy acoustic music sounded like they could have come straight from one of those ultra-patriotic ditties by right-wing Southern rocker (and Wilmington native) Charlie Daniels: “Raleigh, North Carolina, you are in my heart…

Beneath your blessed sky my life changed … Raleigh, I know that I owe you a lot ... and I know that when I can, I’ll be back.”

The difference is, Rey Norteño’s words about those “blessed” Carolina skies are in Spanish, and the guy singing them is named Huerta, not Daniels. As for the twangy instruments — they’re guitars, sure, but fleshed out with accordions and bajo sexto, not pedal steel or banjo.

Rey Norteño is just one of many acts formed in the Carolinas by members of the area’s culturally rich and constantly growing Latino population. Not all of the bands perform traditional norteño, the genre of music from northern Mexico that’s equivalent to American bluegrass or folk. A growing number of Spanish-language bands in the Carolinas play classic rock, indie rock, hip-hop, ska or electronic music. By the early 2000s, the demand among young Caro-Latinos for homegrown rock en español had reached a point to where Tony Arreaza, guitarist of the now-defunct Charlotte band La Rúa, launched the Latin alternative festival Carlotan Rock. Between 2005 and 2009, the festival brought international bands like Venezuela’s Los Amigos Invisibles to play alongside a slew of local and regional acts including Arreaza’s former group and the Charlotte-based Spanish-language ska-punk band Bakalao Stars.

“Charlotte is a real hot spot for the whole rock en español movement in the South,” Arreaza told me for a story I wrote in 2008 about Spanish-language music from the Carolinas. Arreaza, now the events manager for the Charlotte Latin American Coalition, has worked hard to make Charlotte a Latin-music hotspot. This past summer alone, he brought Mexican alt-pop band Zoé and tapped the legendary Colombian experimentalrock band Aterciopelados to play Charlotte’s annual Festival Latinoamericano. Arreaza’s big goal when he began working at the Coalition was to bring the regional festival’s music up to date and consistent with the growing number of young Latinos raised on everything from norteño and salsa to Animal Collective and Lady Gaga. “A lot of people think Latin music is going to be mariachi or salsa,” he told Creative Loafing in October. “We need to educate them on things like reggae cumbia” and other, more contemporary fusions.

Bakalao Stars photo by Daniel Coston

Latin rockers and t wangers reflect Carolinas’ new diversity

By Mark Kemp

The Latin music scene in the Carolinas has been growing steadily since the 1990s along with the explosion of the Latino population in general. In that decade alone, North Carolina’s Latino population skyrocketed more than 300 percent. South Carolina’s Latino population tripled.

At several Charlotte shows by Venezuelan funk-rockers Los Amigos Invisibles since 2004 — at non-Latin clubs ranging from the Visulite to the Neighborhood Theatre — people have come in waving the flags of countries ranging from Venezuela and Ecuador to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. One of the Charlotte area’s bigger draws on the Dominican popbachata scene is Leydy Bonilla, whose family moved from D.R. to New York City and finally Charlotte. In the Bronx, Bonilla had performed alongside her neighborhood friends in the band Aventura, whose 2009 album The Last crossed over to Anglo and African-American audiences on the strength of the band’s collaborations with Akon, Wyclef Jean and Ludacris.

Since the early 2000s, several other big-name Latin rock acts have done well in clubs across North Carolina. Arreaza twice brought the critically acclaimed experimental Mexican band Café Tacuba, which collaborated with downtown New York avantgardists Kronos Quartet on one album and came to indie rockers’ attention in 2000 when the band opened for Beck’s Midnight Vultures tour. Arreaza also has brought the Mexican rap-rock band Molotov to Charlotte numerous times and went out of his way to help promote the September 2011 performance by Spanish protest singer Manu Chao.

Here’s the rub: As hard as Arreaza has worked to bring Latin music to non-Spanish speaking music fans, it’s been a major uphill battle. When I first returned to the Carolinas in 2002, I was convinced that Latin music would totally cross over within five years. That was eight years ago, and it’s disheartening to me when I go see bands like Café Tacuba or Aterciopelados and find little overlap between those bands’ audiences and the audiences for, say, Benji Hughes or Dirty Projectors or TV on the Radio.

As for Rey Norteño — I haven’t heard anything from them since they sang Raleigh’s praises in 2008. But since then, I’m sure a hundred other norteño acts have, like the bluegrass bands that play annual mountain festivals, formed, split up, reformed and reconfigured. And I’m sure they’re still singing those twangy songs about the new land they work de este lado — on this side of the border. shuf14

For an expanded version of this story, go to www.shufflemag.com

shufflemag.com 21

The Seeker

With Hiss Golden Messenger, M.C. Taylor searches for salvation — and maybe even finds it

By Bryan C. Reed

A

boy named Elijah has left his tiny black canvas sneakers under my chair. In the warmlylit living room where the boy’s 36-year-old father, M.C. Taylor, leans forward on a couch, fiddling with a black mesh-backed cap, talking about music and — at his interviewer’s insistence — about God, Elijah’s shoes are a subtle interruption to the room’s tidy, unfussy decoration and stacks of books. Though he’s not here, the boy has left something of himself in the room, as he has in the songs his father writes and records as Hiss Golden Messenger.

The boy’s name is significant to those of a Judeo-Christian persuasion. The Old Testament prophet Elijah raised the dead, brought fire from the sky, ascended to heaven in a whirlwind, and foretold the coming of a Messiah. In the New Testament story of the Transfiguration, Elijah appears with Moses on a mountaintop to inform Jesus of what fate awaits him.

“He is a very important character in the Bible,” Taylor agrees.

“It’s also just a good name. We just liked the name.” · · · Hiss Golden Messenger’s fourth album, Poor Moon, ends the way its predecessor, last year’s Bad Debt begins: with the plaintive, probing and powerful “Balthazar’s Song.”

“Are you with me now?” the song begs at its beginning. Taylor never makes explicit who his speaker is addressing, but later, he continues, “You could come to me/ You could take away my mind/ You could fill me up. Like an empty cup/ That would be fine.” It’s clear he’s looking for some kind of savior — or at least an alleviator.

The idea of spirituality is appealing, Taylor says. It’s comforting to think that there’s something out there that might be looking out for you, protecting you the way parents did when you were

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a child. “People get that protection in all different ways,” Taylor says, “and I’m not convinced that one is necessarily greater than the other. Some people do it with church, some people do it with meditation, some people do it with heroin or whiskey.”

In 2007, Taylor kickstarted Hiss Golden Messenger and left his native California for North Carolina, seeking a change of pace, a cheaper cost of living, and an understanding of the Southern culture that had long fascinated him. Hiss Golden Messenger released its first album, 2009’s Country Hai East Cotton, around the time Taylor matriculated with a graduate degree in Folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill. That album and subsequent ones, from 2010’s Root Work and Bad Debt LPs to this year’s Poor Moon, bridge the gap between rustic Southern tradition and liberalminded San Francisco psych. If the name didn’t give it away, Hiss Golden Messenger has used spiritual imagery as fuel for impressionistic songwriting that feels both mystical and earnest.

In announcing the release of the spare, all-acoustic Bad Debt, Taylor wrote on his blog, “The Old Straight Track,” “Bad Debt is about my God: That is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world. It’s also about donkeys, snakes, betrayal, redemption, scarecrows, wandering and love, though anyone that listens to the words may wonder whether I’ve gone off the deep end for the Lord.”

In fact, he hasn’t. Taylor is not a religious man, but he is a curious one. When he was growing up in Southern California, Taylor’s family did not regularly attend church. His parent’s didn’t trust organized religion. Taylor still tiptoes around claiming any sort of faith. He’s in the middle of reading José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which outraged the Catholic Church in its fictional retelling of the life of Jesus — one in which

Photos courtesy of Paradise of Bachelors

the protagonist is more human than deity. Taylor says it’s very beautiful. “I think that spirituality can be a crutch, or it can be kind of a balm,” he says. “The songs of mine that deal with this stuff — which is not my whole catalog, but the past few years it’s kind of moved in that way — is like trying to pry apart what it is that is helpful and joyful in spirituality, and how I can involve myself with that, and what it is that is nonsense and just total dogma and un-useful.”

Elijah, who is not yet 3 and is presumably barefoot while sleeping in another room, is part of the reason his father’s songs have begun to re-examine spirituality.

The responsibility and gravity of parenthood can be overwhelming, Taylor says. “There are things that we have control over, and there’s so much that we have no control over. It can be terrifying, and it can really turn a person’s mind inward and like a serpent just start eating itself.”

The other part is more utilitarian. Taylor’s music resides at an intersection of a number of genres in which spiritual considerations are natural tropes: American (and specifically Southern American) folk music, country and western, psychedelic rock, even reggae and dub. Borrowing these genres’ tendencies to explore faith, sin and redemption seemed like a natural — and useful — tool. “Those sort of heavy relationships in songs provide an allegory for this much more important here-and-now relationship to other people,” Taylor says.

The bible, he says, disclaiming that he might come across as cynical, is a useful tool for the imagistic songwriting he favors. He appreciates the book and respects its importance, but “it’s flawed,” he says. “It’s a flawed piece of work.”

And it’s far from the only influence on Taylor’s music.

Hiss Golden Messenger is an outgrowth of The Court & Spark, which began in 1998 when Taylor and longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch (whom Taylor considers a “musical soulmate”), having tired of the frenzied, volatile hardcore they’d played in Ex-Ignota during their late-teens and early-20s, began to explore a more folk-based style of playing. The Court & Spark released four albums and an EP of texture-heavy rock rooted in Americana to steady acclaim.

But Taylor, an avid record collector who cites influences as disparate as dub musician Augustus Pablo, krautrock vanguards Neu!, Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis and Pennsylvania folk singer Michael Hurley, was disappointed when critics didn’t pick up on those cues in The Court & Spark’s music. “It was like, ‘Goddammit, why aren’t they hearing that we put this Klaus Dinger beat on this tune, but we’re using the same space-echo that King Tubby would have used?’” Instead, critics reductively called The Court & Spark “alt-country.”

What those critics might have been picking up on is an attribute in Taylor’s songwriting that Hirsch says has been a constant thread in his friend’s music. “Mike (as Taylor is known to his friends) has always had a way of conjuring a vibe that I can only describe as ‘authentic,’” Hirsch says. “You hear a new song he is working on and it sounds classic already somehow.”

Illustration by Taylor Williams

Even so, the alt-country tag doesn’t fit Taylor’s songwriting in Hiss Golden Messenger, either. He largely shies from narrative songwriting. (Wordy songs are a pet peeve.) Though the concise story of “Jesus Shot Me In The Head,” Poor Moon’s tale of a troubled soul using faith as a crutch, offers some kind of exception, Taylor’s focus is on minimizing word-counts to maximize impact. Hence his fondness for Haiku. “That kind of economy of language is really what I’ve always been trying to get at,” he says.

In Taylor’s opinion, the music should be expressive enough on its own. “The voice, in music, is all about breath, and phrasing, and timbre, and rhythm,” he says. “I feel like I can sort of exercise all of those things when I have a small, finite amount of words to sing, not a big yarn.” Songs need to have their own strength, he says. “There has to be something in it that’s so compelling that you could totally fuck it up and it would still work.”

Fittingly, two of Poor Moon’s songs are instrumentals: the gently rollicking fiddle tune “Pittsboro Farewell (Two Monarchs)” and the Hirsch-penned meditation “Dreamwood.” Neither wants for words; both capture the same feelings of cautious hopefulness and introspective curiosity that characterize Poor Moon as a whole.

“Generally, they’re these little prayers or homilies,” Taylor says, describing his style of songwriting. He’s not sure they’re directed anywhere specific; maybe just to the listener. But, he offers, “If there’s a higher energy up there that helps with the order of things, then I hope that the songs are making it there. It maybe sounds like hokum, but the older I get, the clearer it becomes that I have control of almost nothing, and I’m sort of hedging my bets here.” · · · For Taylor, it seems as if music already offers the kind of balm spirituality might. He calls it sacred, says if he didn’t have it, he’d be dead. “I’m so lucky to have this thing that I can do that is really emotional, but is structured in such a way that people don’t think I’m absolutely crazy for sort of expressing myself like this,” he says.

“Not everybody has that and people go crazy. People do awful things because they don’t have a way to articulate their emotions.”

On the back side of Poor Moon’s handsome jacket, Taylor is pictured crouched beneath a straw hat, barefoot in a wooded clearing. Elijah, a few small steps in front of him, is examining some artifact of nature, a butterfly, perhaps, or a particularly interesting piece of bark; the photo’s borders end before the object can fully reveal itself. Inside the photo’s tightly-cropped window, the scene is quiet and peaceful. The father is a calm guardian for the son, enthralled by the world he sees. One could go mad thinking about the world and the universe that exists outside the photo’s edges, but Taylor doesn’t have to. He’s got Hiss Golden Messenger for that. shuf14

shufflemag.com 23

The Heads Are A’ight Three Carolinas’ hip-hop artists step into the national spotlight, but does everyone benefit from the exposure they receive?

By Kim Ruehl and Jordan Lawrence

I

t’s the first Friday of October, and Pierce Freelon has just wrapped a night spent on the panel of a hip-hop summit at Raleigh’s Shaw University. He’s audibly tired, but there’s excitement in his voice. The summit was a first shot at what he hopes will be an annual gathering of musicians from the national scene for an academic survey of the current state of hip-hop. The panel also included Brooklyn MC Special Ed, who made a splash in 1989 with the song “I Got It Made,” and was moderated by the up-and-coming New Yorker DJ Prince. According to Freelon, the discussion hinged on such questions as, “Is hip-hop dead, and if so, who killed it? Where are the women in hip-hop? What happened to hip-hop’s political voice? Where are the Public Enemies and Lauryn Hills?”

Freelon, the MC for hip-hop-and-jazz-fusing Durham ensemble The Beast, is a veteran of such discussions. The son of Grammynominated jazz singer Nnenna Freelon is a hip-hop scholar who’s taught classes at UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University. He thinks those searching for what’s new and happening in hip-hop need look no further than right here in the Carolinas.

“There are all the components,” he says, noting how the panel kept coming back to how rich the NC hip-hop community is.

“There’s the young, hungry up-and-coming MCs. There’s the established professionals. There’s the elders. Then, there’s the industry stamp . . . I think the components are there for a really strong scene, moving in a progressive steady inclining direction.”

24 Carolinas’ Hip-hop shuffle fourteen

The relevance of the area’s hip-hop community — particularly in North Carolina’s Triangle — was thrown into sharp relief this fall. On Sep. 27, some of the state’s heaviest hitters celebrated what they anointed N.C. Hip-Hop Day. The occasion? The three best-known regional artists dropped albums on that same day: Fayetteville star J Cole released Cole World: The Sideline Story; Raleigh/NYC-based Grammy-winning producer 9th Wonder unleashed his latest, The Wonder Years; and Triangle rapper and Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte delivered his first solo album, Charity Starts at Home. (Charlotte-based Big Pooh, the third member of the influential Little Brother triumvirate with 9th Wonder and Phonte, dropped his own CD, Dirty Pretty Things, this Fall as well.) Reviews painted these albums in various positive and negative hues, but each is a solid testament to the state’s newfound assertiveness in the fertile field of southern rap.

The Big Three may be the most nationally visible N.C. rappers, but they come from a burgeoning regional scene seemingly more primed than ever now to blow up. But the question of who’s next, or whether anyone else in the region can get any lovelight in the shadow of the Big Three, remains an intriguing question.

Phonte, whose tenure with Little Brother is widely cited as inspiration for the current set of young Carolina rappers, thinks that the attention the trio has received can only be seen as an asset to the rest of the Carolinas’ hip-hop community. He sees their success as a conduit for other area artists to reach new ears and as a blueprint for them to follow in their own careers.

“I think that now, with cats seeing what we went through early on as Little Brother, we gave people the inspiration to see that they could make it happen for themselves,” he says. “When we were coming up, our dream was a record deal. But the kids now can say, ‘I saw what Little Brother did. They’re not looking for a deal. They just want to make the music they want to make and put it out on their own terms, do it for themselves.’”

Many local artists are already getting caught up in the success of these heavyweights. The Wonder Years is 9th Wonder’s first proper release as an MC, but he made his name as the production Photos courtesy of: J. Cole: Roc Nation, Phonte: The Foreign Exchange,

Carolinas’ hip-hop (L-R): J. Cole, Phonte, Rapsody, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, King Mez end of Little Brother. He has since built a small empire that includes the It’s A Wonderful World Music collective, the Jamla Records imprint, and an oft-copied production style that centers on head-knocking snare hits and warm soul samples. In the past year alone, he’s helped release albums from Winston-Salem’s Big Remo, Durham’s Thee Tom Hardy, Raleigh’s Median and Apex’s HaLo, among other Carolina artists.

One of the most promising talents in 9th’s camp is Rapsody — the female MC from N.C. hip-hop collective Kooley High. Her debut mixtape, Return of the B-Girl, which dropped in August, includes production by 9th and Khrysis of the Durham-based Justus League, and guest spots from Rah Digga, Big Daddy Kane, Thee Tom Hardy and more. The disc was well received, its poised rhymes earning covetable comparisons to MC Lyte and Lauryn Hill.

Still, in the intro to B-Girl, Rapsody asserts, “I’ll be one of the greats,” before name-checking big-time male artists like Jay-Z, T.I., Lil Wayne, and Kanye West. You get the feeling she wouldn’t be content with being considered a great female rapper; she’s aiming to be one of the best, period. Indeed, her raps are richly narrative and filled with impeccably detailed storytelling. But even as she delves into the unexpected twists of her own life-story on “1983,” she shows she’s quite capable of dropping memorable one-line zingers when necessary (“Had rhythm in my soul before the nurse ever weighed me”).

“I think 9th and Phonte’s brand and high standard of quality has trickled down to a lot of the hungry, young up-and-coming acts,” Freelon says of the area’s new talent. “They’re not putting out mixtapes that aren’t mixed and half-assed verses. A lot of the things that trips me about the scene is so many people are coming super hard.”

While few argue that artists like 9th and Phonte have set a high standard for the area’s artists, there are still those that don’t see the Carolinas as a place where you can base a successful hip-hop career. Many artists still head off to New York, Chicago or Atlanta when it comes time to record, network, and develop their brands.

When it comes to making a career out of music, establishing relationships and audiences in larger markets is still a must.

“I’m not saying you can’t blow up if you’re from S.C.,” says WXYC DJ and blogger Nanci O, who’s also co-host of the podcast “Where Is Hop-Hop?,” and an official media sponsor for both the 2010 and 2011 South Carolina Music Awards. “I [just] feel at some point you’re going to have to leave because if you just stay in your own state networking with the same people over and over again, how are you going to grow? It’s not like the industry is coming to S.C. on a regular basis.”

As Nanci O points out, smaller markets like Columbia, Asheville and Wilmington don’t afford artists the resources or name recognition that an established area like the Triangle can provide. This isn’t to downplay promising artists on Charlotte’s Black Flag Records (A. Moss and Deniro Farrar, particularly), Asheville’s Two Fresh, or Columbia’s Preach Jacobs, to name a few emerging talents. That’s a broad range of styles displayed there, but if there’s a sound that can be called Carolinas’ hip-hop, it’s got a retro feel. “If you listen to the styles and content,” says Foul Mouth Jerk, a member of two Asheville collectives, Gurp City South and Granola Funk Express, “there is an overall old school, golden age type of feel to a lot of Carolina hip hop, that’s pretty consistent no matter what area.”

But unlike the Triangle, where many pieces are already in place (including, as Phonte points out, the fertile-ground-for-hip-hop colleges), other regions still face an uphill battle for acceptance.

You only have to look at this summer’s brouhaha in Asheville when organizers for the annual Bel Chere Festival  claimed there wasn’t room

Rapsody: It’s A Wonderful World Music Group/Jamla, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo: Mike Belleme, King Mez: fisdj.foto

for DJ Kool (or any other hip-hop act), or this Fall’s Free Times Music Crawl in Columbia, when the Wet Willie’s chain pulled out of the event after its corporate management found out the club would be hosting a hip-hop stage, complaining that the lineup was “too urban.”

Given some of the limitations and lingering prejudices, artists in these cities rely even more heavily on the Internet’s broad reach. “With the industry being how it is, anywhere with internet access is enough to be successful,” says Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, an Asheville MC who has retooled his career to include a nationally successful brand of kid-targeted hip-hop.

He says that working from a small market like Asheville — often considered “the weird, mushroom eating country brother to the Triangle scene,” he adds — can be tough, but it’s cheaper to live there than in NYC or Atlanta. Getting to gigs in bigger cities is a must, but the low cost of living more than makes up for travel expenses.

“If you take the elements that have always made hip-hop incredible and mutate them in new ways that people haven’t heard yet, then you will make waves,” he says. “The Carolinas have enough understanding and respect for the elements, combined with enough freedom from the trends, that heads will do exactly that.”

Time will tell in other NC/ SC cities whether the rise of the J. Cole/9th Wonder/Phonte triumvirate and the Triangle scene can help overcome old prejudices, few hip-hop friendly venues, or a lack of basic resources and any kind of historic track record. Academics and critics can debate these points for years to come, but for now, anyway, the magic remains in the Triangle. It’s a scene developing a rich history that new talents are most often thrilled to be part of.

Take King Mez, a Raleigh-based rapper with a groove and style similar to Rapsody. He sports life-story rhymes that don’t shy away from painful personal details, describing severe loneliness, abuse, and neglect; his mother recently passed, and the 21-year-old has been caring for his little brother. He’s been working on his full-length debut in Chicago, but for now, he’s happy to base his efforts in the Triangle. Though there are all kinds of styles making waves in the Carolinas, Mez believes the area is growing into a unified scene with a rich enough tradition that it might one day rival the traditional hip-hop hot beds.

“I think we have something important here,” he says. “I feel like everybody’s growing and embarking on new opportunities all the time. I think we’re doing good, and we will in the future as well.” shuf14

“ Now, with cats seeing what we went through early on as Little Brother, we gave people the inspiration to see that they could make it happen for themselves.”

—Phonte

26 Carolinas’ hip-hop shuffle fourteen

Organic Coffee Beer Art Music Music Schedule: greensborobean.com Book Shows: greenbeanbooking@yahoo.com 341 S. Elm St, Greensboro, NC 336-691-9990

sh uffle Help Wanted Know your way around your local music scene?

Shuffle magazine is looking for part-time sales/ market reps in the following areas: • Raleigh • Durham • Chapel Hill Prior or existing media sales experience helpful but not necessary. A passion for what we do, intimate knowledge of the local music scene and great relationships within it are what we’re looking for.

Flexible schedule requiring a few hours a week making sales calls/visits. A great gig for someone already employed in the local scene looking to help us out and make some extra dough in the process.

Interested? Email publisher Brian Cullinan: brian@ shufflemag.com

Bombadil All That the Rain Promises Ramseur Records

Illustration by Taylor Williams

T

wo years ago, it seemed that Durham’s Bombadil would be gone forever. Following Tarpits and Canyonlands, the band’s solid sophomore LP, the quartet was deprived of a tour or even a proper release party due to a debilitating nerve injury in the hands of bassist Daniel Michalak. For a time, the condition took away his ability to drive, type and, ultimately, play music. The others went their separate ways. Guitarist Bryan Rahija moved to Washington, D.C. Drummer James Phillips left for Portland. Now, with Michalak’s condition under control, the band returns with its third full-length.

All That the Rain Promises is the work of a band that almost fell apart. It’s a reality that permeates the record.

Lessened is the irrepressible whimsy that had previously defined these well-meaning indie-folk minstrels. These are still somewhat silly songs with off-kilter, often antiquated rhythms and harmonies that are made more beautiful by their oddity. But they’re delivered with maturity and restraint, their words tainted by crushing doubt.

Opener “I Will Wait” is a bare, piano-driven spiritual, a prayer to Jesus that openly questions whether the deity is even listening. Singing in a strained and cracking voice over stately, clanging chords, pianist Stuart Robinson cries out, “Oh my Lord of Love, where are you hiding far above? Why don’t you come down and show me what I ask you of?” He piles up complaints and evidence that Jesus is ignoring his pleas, before calmly repeating that he will wait for him to “swing below and take (him) away.”

It’s beautiful and stirring, a shocking departure from the cluttered sound the band has favored in the past.

None of the other songs are as stripped -back, but they

all move with a downtrodden but defiant air. “Laundromat” begins as a simple contemplation of the time we waste washing our clothes.

Riding a militant drum beat and raggedly strummed electric guitar, Rahija declares that the next time he’s at the laundromat, he’s going to ask out the girl he sees there. It doesn’t stay so simple. Next, he’s promising that he will call his dad and apologize for a wrong that’s never revealed.

Suddenly, the laundromat has become both a representation of his shortcomings and an opportunity to overcome them. “I’ve been waiting week and after week and after,” the band repeats in unison, building his confession into a roar. It’s less catharsis than condemnation.

Bombadil still hides behind conceits, but on All That the Rain Promises there’s almost always a wrenching emotional hook behind them.

Paired with an approach that cleans up the clutter of previous outings, the band arrives at an organic and unique style of modern folk that utilizes oddball sounds and patterns that accentuate, rather than hide, the fragile feelings within.

“A Question” is the worst song here, a marginally successful attempt to build from simple, ukulele-powered twee into lush art-pop over a three-minute span. It piles on keys, electric and acoustic guitar and synthesizer by the end, and it would be an interminable mess save for the raw emotion at the song’s core. “Do you like me?”

Robinson begs, pushing his voice to the breaking point, filling a stereotype with such genuine angst that it still manages an impact.

Somewhere in the last two years, Bombadil learned that emotionally resonant songs are worth far more than unusual instrumentation and silly stories. That’s more than worth the hiatus.

—Jordan Lawrence shufflemag.com 27

Bitch Magnet Bitch Magnet: Deluxe Reissues Temporary Residence, Ltd.

B

itch Magnet’s music is dated, but this is only to say that it is entirely current. For rock fans, 2011 has been a year spent remembering things that happened two decades ago. The husks of grunge have been dredged up and set as taxidermist mantelpieces to remind us of the good old flannel-clad days. Already this year, we’ve been welcomed to a marathon of classicalternative reruns from the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr and Archers of Loaf, which we may now enjoy in syndication on sick days.

These reissues assume, with varying degrees of validity, that these were albums deserving of a second examination, overlooked in their time and/or ripe for a new audience. That’s a reasonable assumption, though. The ‘90s thing is in right now. This is an age in which bands including (but hardly limited to) The Jesus Lizard, Dinosaur Jr, Superchunk and Archers of Loaf have all returned to stages and record stores after protracted periods of relative dormancy, and in which the well-heeled holders of the Nirvana estate see fit to line their pockets by pretending an album everyone’s heard gets somehow better with the addition of superfluous alternate-take detritus and an inflated price-tag. And this is to say nothing of the rising young bands — Yuck, EMA, Cymbals Eat Guitars, et al. — who’ve used the sounds of their childhood as a template for the sounds of their adulthood.

None of this ’90s nostalgia might seem to matter for a band which had run its course by the end of 1990. But as far as the Sound Of The Era is concerned, Bitch Magnet — who formed at Oberlin College in Ohio and promptly relocated to North Carolina — might be the quintessential specimen. Frequently cited as influential to the post-rock and noise-rock ’90s bands like Slint and Shellac (whose frontman Steve Albini recorded Bitch Magnet’s debut, Star Booty), Bitch Magnet’s aggressive post-hardcore is complex and ambitious, but never at the expense of being, well, good.

Superchunk leader, Merge Records impresario and Bitch Magnet fan Mac McCaughan has said, more clearly than most could posit, “Bitch Magnet created this amazing equilibrium between heaviness/ prettiness and density/space. These juxtapositions were explored by a ton of bands at the time, but Bitch Magnet wrote songs.”

This was apparent as early as 1988’s Star Booty EP, in which songs like the Hüsker Dü punk blitz of “C Word” work in tandem with the mid-tempo Burma-ballad “Sea of Pearls.” By 1989’s Umber, the band had become more confident and less restrained, tying Shellac-worthy clang and squall to choruses on “Motor” and “Big Pining,” songs that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Archers of Loaf set. The 1990 swan-song Ben Hur is only a refinement of ideas already laid forth by its predecessors.

The knotted guitar riffs in “Spite Y Malice” are clearly of the same mind as the driving scuzz of Umber’s “Navajo Ace;” the askew bassline that opens “Valmead” is a follower of the guitars opening Star Booty’s “Knucklehead.” Bitch Magnet never hits a rut, but with its entire recorded output — only the three albums and a few singles — released in only three years, Bitch Magnet was a band with a clear and consistent vision.

Packaged together, Bitch Magnet’s slim catalog makes for a thankfully lean box-set. Standout single tracks “Sadie” and “White Piece of Bread” are added as a postscript to Ben Hur, while alternate versions of six songs appear as unnecessary but not unwelcome bonuses (and mostly to fill out Star Booty’s short duration).

Still, the completist tendencies of these sorts of memorials are thankfully spared. Nothing here is a clunker, and the band’s horrendous take on The Misfits’ “Where Eagles Dare,” originally released as the B-side of a bonus 7-inch included with the Ben Hur LP, is quietly omitted, left to float around the ether-net.

What’s left is an essential document of a short-lived and vital band that fully embodied the loud, adventurous routes rock was taking in the years leading up to The Year Punk Broke.

—Bryan Reed

28 Now Hear This shuffle fourteen

The Body & Braveyoung Nothing Passes (At A Loss)

Sometimes it’s good when things turn out pretty much as you’d expect. Case in point: this fulllength collaboration between Greensboro’s lush, melancholic Braveyoung and brutish but nuanced Providence, R.I. metal duo The Body. For the first three engrossing songs on this four-track release, they funnel The Body’s sinewy sludge through Braveyoung’s patient, atmospheric filter, layering in strings and faraway voices to create a dark and absorbing expanse. The last song takes a turn. They layer burly distortion onto a stark acoustic cover of Exuma’s bleakly beautiful “The Vision,” balancing doom and salvation into a surprising but perfectly suited conclusion. (JL)

The Catch Fire Rumormill (No More Fake Labels)

Singers/songwriters Mike Mitschele and Jon Lindsay lead this Charlotte quartet’s dive into the power pop gene pool. The two take turns delivering compatible tunes recalling Big Star, GBV and especially midera Teenage Fanclub: Driving percussion and bass thrum, one guitar for barre-chord fuzz and one clarion-clear for melody, swirly synth fills, and lyrics devoted to girls or girls-are-gone regrets. Mitschele gets the lion’s share of mic time, and carries more heft than Lindsay’s ethereal vocals (most noticeable when they trade verses on “Short Fuse”). But they fit together seamlessly — consider the cross-thatched harmonies on “Younger Every Summer” — the highlight of highlights here. (JS)

Milton Hall Numb World (Space Idea)

Columbia’s Milton Hall already makes collage artwork and short films, but is still determined to add this, his musical debut, to the list, as if the world needed another bedroom popsmith. But Hall makes a good case for himself with this 15-track cassette release. Hooky cuts like “Feel Tha Fire” deliver all the ragtag jauntiness and smirk-worthy whimsy of The Beets’ best songs, while the fidelity-fried instrumental riff-experiment “Electric Fairy Tale” wouldn’t feel out of place next to some of Sebadoh’s meanders. Perfectly imperfect and invitingly insular, Numb World’s meeting of easygoing melody and pillow-y fuzz makes few demands, but more than reciprocates your attention. (BR)

Houston Brothers Empty Spaces (Electric Mountain)

For a decade, brothers Justin and Matt Faircloth have crafted wistfully textured vignettes that sound like seasons in the Carolinas should sound, and done it without the usual twangy signifiers. The secret (note the LP title) is carving enough room — in both arrangement and tempo — for each instrument to interact and state its case. Produced by Scott Solter, these 10 tracks have the golden hue of autumn: fadingPolaroid nostalgia colored by Matt’s tasteful guitar fills, earth-tone keys and the brothers’ blood-harmonies.

“I’m used to giving love, but now I’m giving all the space in between,” Justin sings, capturing what the band does so well sonically, too. (JS)

For the results of our critics' year-end poll, head to www.shufflemag.com

Moenda Moenda’s self-titled follow-up to the Sophie’s Moenda Palace cassette and split 7-inch with harsh-jazz (Kinnikinnik) shapeshifters Great Architect finds the Charlotte trio (memorialized here as a quartet) at its fiercest and most focused. The guitar on “Hi-o Hi-o Ipsini-o” might attack like a prison stabbing, but the churning funk beat underneath and Baltimoreart-space electronic counterpoints make the track feel as vibrant, kinetic, and obsessively detailed as the ultraviolent “Superjail” cartoon. It’s not a bad representative for the collection, which suggests the vicious, mechanized grooves of Black Dice or Fuck Buttons, as much as the noise-jazz excursions of Zs. (BR) Pyramids/Horseback A Throne Without A King (Hydra Head)

Reigning Sound Abdication...for Your Love (Scion A/V)

Dark, static-burned drones and abrasive concrète accouterments provide the bulk of this collaborative four-part title suite. For Horseback fans, it carries in the vein of Forbidden Planet’s horror film-score ambiance and the dark, dense drone-metal of the Locrian collaboration New Dominions. For Pyramids fans, 2009’s collaboration with Nadja predicts this collection’s ominous, fluid drones and its use of vocals. So even when part two peels back the undulating grime to introduce ethereal melodic singing — sounding a bit like Antony chopped and screwed by Arthur Russell — it’s beautiful, but not unprecedented. We don’t hear the earth shattering, but we do hear two well-matched acts producing a remarkable and welcome entry to both catalogs.

(Plus, Horseback’s, “Thee Cult of Henry Flynt,” on the included 7-inch split, is essential: a dynamic suite moving from blackened prog cacophony to dark minimalism. The N.C.-born minimalist Flynt would — I imagine — approve.) (BR) Best free release of 2011 — by a mile. With this eight-song mini-LP, former-Oblivian Greg Cartwright and his Reigning Sound clean up their down ‘n’ dirty garage sound with sparkling production that takes advantage of Scion A/V’s corporate patronage. “Lyin’ Girl” and “Watching My Baby” pair swaggering rock muscle with heartbroken narratives. “Eve” is a pillow-soft ballad powered by whirring organ and Cartwright’s ragged whisper. Best of all is “Not Far Away,” a twinkling break-up tune with a perfect chorus: “We could be who we want to be if we weren’t who we are,” Cartwright sings, surrounded by silky female back-up. It’s nearly classic and entirely free. (JL)

For a full list of this issue’s Editors’ Picks, go to www.shufflemag.com

Sea Wolf Mutiny The Last Season (self-released)

People will always need larger-than-life pop songs.

Giant hooks, stately piano thrills and spacey riffs provide catharsis that rote lives and mind-numbing day jobs just can’t give. Their potential for universal meanings and direct communication makes them an essential musical staple. The only problem is that for every stellar U2 jam, you get a flat, emotionless Coldplay stinker. Enter Columbia’s Sea Wolf Mutiny, a brash and big piano-pop band that renders heartstring-pulling choruses with a deftness the Keanes of the world only dream about. This eight-song debut sports dense melodies, emotionally rich lyrics and magnificent washes of distortion. Catharsis, indeed. (JL)

Sunshone Still TheWaytheWorldDies (Potato Eater)

Chris Smith’s last record was a tribute to the life and death of Kit Carson based on Hampton Sides’ marvelous biography; this one is based on the life and death of Smith’s own brother, who committed suicide in 2010. It’s harrowing, heartbreaking fare, but rendered beautifully in many of the same fitting dusky noir and Appalachian shades, with Rodney Lanier’s pedal steel and Jason Hausman’s orchestral arrangements providing essential moving parts to the whole. Smith’s remembrances flicker past like Super 8 home movies, and several songs erupt in transcendent conflagrations to underscore the loss and confusion left in suicide’s wake. It’s a compassionate testament that strives for an understanding that may not exist, but in the yearning for it we are privileged to be allowed in to listen, and to empathize. (JS)

Wesley Wolfe Cynics Need Love Too (Odessa)

With Carrboro’s Wesley Wolfe, it’s hard not to focus on songwriting. His driving pop-rock pairs explosive melody with words that nail down neurotic bitterness without becoming disagreeable. The songs are great, but so is the sound — an element for which Wolfe is equally responsible. The selfproducer switches up his palate on Cynics, leaving behind the warm, booming sound that defined last year’s Storage for a more insular approach that garnishes stark strums with brittle electronics to reflect the searing self-doubt at the core of the songs. It still moves at an appealingly quick pace, but it achieves a fascinating new impact. (JL)

Young And In The Way V. Eternal Depression (Antithetic)

Young And In The Way is a band torn between opposing instincts. But on this, the band’s fifth outing, the quartet deftly balances the smoldering atmosphere of tectonic doom and windswept black metal with sudden lunges of feral, frantic crust-punk and grindcore. “Times Are Cold,” a straightforward blast of grimy metallic hardcore, is almost uncharacteristic, surrounded by tracks that pair blitzkrieg attacks with tense breaks of pins-andneedles guitar work. Still, it’s “The Gathering,” the album’s 11-and-a-half-minute death-march closer which — by introducing horns, martial rhythms and the crests and valleys of instrumental post-rock to a piece paced like an orchestral work — truly betrays this band’s boundless ambition. (BR)

shufflemag.com 29

Dem Bones: On Musical Nostalgia

The nsider

By Brendan Greaves

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

—Paul Valery

O

n el Día de los Muertos, the release date of Hiss Golden Messenger’s autumnal, spectral Poor Moon LP, I’m thinking about ghosts. Poor Moon, as informed by its cosmic country and wah-wah cowboy ancestors as it is conversant with new horizons in Southern songcraft, is the second album on Paradise of Bachelors, but the first comprised of new music. From the outset, we’ve broadly defined ourselves as a label, soundsystem, and archive dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the Southern vernacular, regardless of vintage. Everyone involved in the album senses a common lineage with the workaday poetics of our inaugural record Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988, a reissue of Carolinas soul and gospel. But it has been fascinating to note and circumnavigate the hesitant reactions of press and market alike to music recorded in 2011 as opposed to 1971. Audiences today crave the patina of authenticity imputed to unheard history, sometimes regardless of quality — hence the hunger for archeological reissues of records with dubious value beyond their previous scarcity.

In his 2011 book Retromania, critic Simon Reynolds argues against what he sees as a pervasive, self-consuming recycling impulse in contemporary pop music. He provocatively claims that “the world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt, [and] music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness.” It’s easy to sympathize with this anti-nostalgic position. Today we can stockpile and catalog our music ad infinitum, because increasingly we collect not just physical artifacts, but digital simulacra, binary data that we electronically catapult between steadily shrinking plastic containers. Access is immediate, and the archive is among us, on our bodies, in the ether, in the thickly wired and wireless interstices.

Collecting music today is easier, more ubiquitous, and more banal than ever before. Our digital collections contain more data than we can experience in a lifetime. Oddly, oldness imparts realness; it’s one index, however arbitrary, to order the chaotic glut of sound, and through the digital archive, much more old music is suddenly available to explore and cannibalize. The new is constantly in retreat. The act of collecting now entails far less research, ranging, and expertise, so devotees seek artifacts that can incorporate a more corporeal devotion, such as vinyl. Music is mechanically and physically inscribed in vinyl, so the data

30 The Insider shuffle fourteen

is tangible, concretized; the impending apocalypse may render digital media obsolete, but enterprising folks can still build a record player with a wheel, a needle, and a horn.

I recognize Mr. Reynolds’ worries. But musical nostalgia is not an intrinsic problem with our culture, just a reflection of exponentially increased access, which is ultimately a positive, democratic development. There is nothing new about nostalgia, nor bemoaning a contemporary rut of self-reflexive nostalgia. (In 1733, the Russian military invented a terrible, but highly effective cure for this unmanning brain disease: live burial.) Historically speaking, our cultural obsession with originality — as epitomized

by Ezra Pound’s contagious dictum “make it new!”— is a recent one. For thousands of years, musicians aspired to achieve mature mastery, tempered by subtle innovations, within an ongoing, stable tradition by effacing traces of the personal or original.

Recorded music, radio, and the internet changed that radically, but the traditional impulse continues unabated. Those worlds of vernacular practice are as worthy of documentation as the more rarefied milieus of the avant-garde frontiers, and the boundaries between the two are highly porous.

So what to do? As a record label conjuring both old and new dreams, the challenge is how to render this inexorably waxing musical nostalgia productive rather than reductive. We’d like to position Paradise of Bachelors as introspective, rather than retrospective, and opposed to fetishized nostalgia. We hope to release music, historical or futuristic or otherwise, with contemporary relevance and resonance — rarity matters far less than curatorial and aesthetic coherence and our ability to articulate compelling narratives through engagement with the artists, through oral histories, photography, friendships. For us, that means looking backwards, to American Indian psych, to Vietnam vet laments, to Carolina soul, to coastal honky-conch, to Communist disco, but also to contemporary iterations of the mutable, mercurial traditions of Southern vernacular music. It’s the dialogue between those modes, and through those years and artifacts, that we find interesting.

Make it new? No, just make it good. Don’t sweat those ghosts, because they aren’t going anywhere, and without them, there’s nothing new anyway. These are the days of the dead.

Brendan Greaves is a writer, folklorist, and co-founder — with Jason Perlmutter — of Durham’s Paradise of Bachelors record label. You can (and really should) read a longer version of his essay at our website: www.shufflemag.com.

Brendan Greaves photo courtesy Brendan Greaves