Real Estate

While we're at it, here's a short piece I wrote for Athens' Flagpole on Jersey boys Real Estate, whose recent Days proved to be a sleeper fave of mine last year. Over the phone, singer Martin Courtney waxed nostalgic about teenage summer nights and the power of shared musical discoveries.

It’s an electrifying thing when a band realizes its potential. Last year’s Days was a turning point for Ridgewood, NJ indie-rockers Real Estate, whose 2009 self-titled debut was a marker of budding talent, yet displayed little cohesion.

“When we made the first record,” explains singer and guitarist Martin Courtney, “we were barely even a band. Those songs were recorded before we had coalesced into Real Estate. We played hundreds of shows between the first and second albums. When we started recording the first album we hadn’t even played one show.”

Read the rest here.

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Frankie Rose

Here's a piece I wrote a few weeks back for Creative Loafing on Frankie Rose, former Vivian Girls/Crystal Stilts drummer and current indie pop obsession. Her new record Interstellar is bold and beautiful - "dreamy," to employ an overused but admittedly apt adjective - if also unapologetically derivative and a tad on the slight side. (28 minutes? What is this, the Green Album?) Still, Interstellar is a worthy listen from an interesting interview subject.

From shitgaze to chillwave, the last half-decade in music has been a blur. Lo-fi recording techniques and impressionistic lyricism have come to represent a noncommittal norm, guided by ghosts of history and a very modern sort of ennui bordering on post-paranoia — the terrible and normalized acceptance that the worst can and probably will happen. It seems our only ongoing concern is how to get back — or pretend to get back — to where we once belonged.

"I was really tired of things just being kind of awash," songwriter and guitarist Frankie Rose explains. "I was tired of the haze."

Read the rest here.

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Borgore

Yes, ^that^ guy.

Dubstep has reached its post-moment. Where once there was a bustling and mysterious underground there now appear liquor commercials and Grammy nods. The onetime cutting edge now barely qualifies as the middle of the road. It's hyperdriven cultural evolution for our times — the sudden omnipresence of the once-elusive, the death of the cool. Yet somehow dubstep adapts. Intransigent though EDM may be it is also swift-moving and cavernous in scope, and it remains that to know dubstep you gotta know dubstep. The amorphous subgenre trends ever upward due in large part to a constant barrage of innovators and rabble-rousers, feisty Diplo-approved producers whose sole goal is to keep one another on their toes. Call it friendly competition — or don't. "There's two [kinds of] people that are getting into dubstep right now," explains Asaf Borger, or Borgore, the brash Israeli DJ best known for his callous songwriting and furious, genre-bending mixes. "The people that really love the music, and the musicians that like the money."

Read the rest here.

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Top 25 records of 2011

Below, behold my top 25 records of 2011 as submitted to Tiny Mix Tapes.

Yeah, I know, year-end lists are whatever. As always, the numbering is largely arbitrary. And there are inevitably a handful of great records I discover right at the November deadline (which is too early, by the way) or after - namely, there are a whole bunch of hip-hop mixtapes I managed to miss and a few sweet drone records that I've been digging on lately. Regardless, these are all albums I thought were pretty damn great. They come heartily recommended.

25. Stalley - Lincoln Way Nights (Intelligent Trunk Music)
Backpack-throwback type stuff from Rick Ross's new signee. Smart and smooth.

24. Low - C'mon
Latest album from slowcore heroes was lean and mean.

23. Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the Harvest
Solid stuff from Ms. Welch and longtime compatriot Dave Rawlings.

22. Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
Glad I heard this one in time. Not an everyday listen, but remarkably poignant.

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Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow

Kate Bush is weird in the best way. 50 Words for Snow is a great winter album yeah, but it's also sort of the perfect album for this specific moment in time, this season, on the calendar but also culturally, politically and on some base level of human existence. (Let this album occupy your headspace for a while.) It all sounds totally grand but it's entirely relatable in its weirdness, familiar despite being painstakingly new. My TMT review of 50 Words for Snow (a fast last-minute entry on my Top 25 of 2011, which I'll post here soon):

Kate Bush is of a time when pop singers didn’t need faux-lesbian makeout sessions to express nascent female sexuality, when eccentricity was not some contrived aesthetic end but a consequence of the creative process itself. For Bush, the beauty and weirdness of sex — of sensuality — was the basis of art. Her early music was shocking not for any overtly explicit content, but for its desperate attempts to celebrate sensuality in an age of technology and the vicious detachment it wrought.

Read the rest here.

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Future Islands

I spoke recently with Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, who told me tales of the construction of the group's new album, the impressive On the Water (pictured). I whittled it down to 350 words for the Portland Mercury.

Synthesizers and self-flagellation were the last two things anyone expected at Pickathon, but there was Samuel T. Herring barreling across the stage, pounding his chest, gagging himself with his free hand. He was a maniacal mirage, a dense cloud of danger interrupting the idyllic panorama. "I was intimidated," Herring admits regarding Future Islands' chaotic incursion into the folky, family-friendly Portland festival. "At the same time, it was liberating, too, to get up there and do what we wanted."

Read the rest here.

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Mark Kozelek @ Aladdin Theater, Portland

Last weekend the lady and I braved the Sunday night sleepies to go see Mark Kozelek play at the venerable Aladdin Theater. It was a performance peppered with, how do I put it... uncomfortable moments. I'd heard tales of Kozelek's off-putting stage demeanor, of his impatience with excessive crowd noise and the like. The crowd at this show was impossibly submissive, hanging on every note the man played. Kozelek managed to alienate nonetheless. Still, he continues to be able to write a mean heartbreaker.

I wrote about it for Tiny Mix Tapes' recently revived live blog.

“Shit, I had a bunch of dirty jokes I wanted to tell,” Mark Kozelek deadpanned upon seeing a child in the front row of the reverent mid-sized crowd at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. It is itself a venue that demands some reverence, an aged and atmospheric place ideal for intimate performances such as this one. Kozelek’s most recent outing as Sun Kil Moon, last year’s Admiral Fell Promises, was a chilly and cartographic affair that sent listeners across the physical and emotional distances of the American West and through the tangled recesses of its creator’s wry and yet tortured headspace.

Read the rest here.

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Sonia Leigh

I recently penned a piece on Sonia Leigh, a swiftly rising figure in the Atlanta country scene. She's best buds with fellow Georgian/Grammy winner Zac Brown, which explains said swift rise. Also, her songs ain't too bad, I guess.

Sonia Leigh speaks with quiet confidence, in a measured drawl that implies a lifetime of Southern living. It's an artist's coolness, one that's been nurtured since she saw Loretta Lynn at age five and first realized her calling. Largely because of the supportive influence of her musician father, Leigh recalls songwriting as "something I never questioned [if] I could actually do."

It was this sense of destiny that gave rise to an honest career. As a child, Leigh absorbed and imitated every note of family favorites such as Hank Williams and George Jones. As she grew older, she began writing her own material. "I always had these songs in my head," she says. "I used to sit in school and write songs. I'd get home and get to my guitar and try to get some music connected to what I was hearing in my head."

Read the rest here.

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Wilco: The Whole Love

Pleasantly surprised by Wilco's new one, since their last two outings didn't exactly inspire confidence for their career trajectory. Thankfully, the Tweedmeister and company have managed to break out of their formula-rock rut to deliver a startlingly fresh-sounding record in The Whole Love. Even though the title sounds like some gross, borderline-criminal pickup line from the Tweed Jacket. Oh, Tweedums, you so-and-so.

Looking back, it’s entirely possible that music critics and listeners alike put too much stock in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That record, hailed both as Wilco’s breakthrough (true) and an infallible slice of American-made genius (more debatable), was and is still analyzed through a decidedly distorted lens. That the album was conceived and recorded long before September 2001 was of secondary importance in the minds of many who found a deep, if accidental, profundity in Jeff Tweedy’s blurred depictions of tall shaking buildings and general human malaise.

Read the rest here.

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Das Racist

Since their arrival on the scene some three years ago, much blog hullaballoo has been made over Das Racist's post-ironic clusterfuck rap. But though the internet debates have raged, the wider hip-hop world has mostly shrugged; now that the group has delved into Diplo-fied club-a-dub-dub with its debut LP Relax, expect folks to start paying a little more attention.

I recently penned a feature on Das Racist for Creative Loafing in which I tried to parse the dudes' labyrinthine musical language.

There's a moment of quiet impact in a now-famous Dave Chappelle sketch about a "Leave it to Beaver"-esque family whose last name happens to be homophonous with a certain racial epithet. Clad in milkman-minstrel garb, Chappelle finally turns to the camera and utters a smiling SOS: "This racism is killing me inside."

Rappers Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri operate with less comedic masochism but with a similarly absurdist eye for racial politics, cloaking their observations in a stoned but studious tone that could rightly be deemed subversive. It's Chappellian-via-Wesleyan, less "Did he really just say that?" and more "Wait, what did he just say?" As Das Racist, the Brooklyn group self-released two stellar and much-blogged-about mixtapes in 2010, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. On the surface, Das Racist consisted of a couple of wildly talented jokesters musing on dumb shit: junk food, rap culture, weed. Underneath, they were a couple of wildly talented jokesters with a penchant for profundity. "We are family," goes the deadpan chorus to "Puerto Rican Cousins," from Sit Down, Man. "At least that's what we look like we might be."

Read the rest here.

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