MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG

Nervous energy

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:33:10 GMT

The unlikely rise of Does It Offend You, Yeah?
“If I actually stopped to think about what’s going on, I’d probably shit myself,” says James Rushent, singer/bassist for UK electro-rock quartet Does It Offend You, Yeah?

YEAH? “The thing I love about our record is, it’s quite a naive record,” notes James Rushent.

Although his outfit is named after a line Ricky Gervais spouts in the British version of The Office when confronted about his workday boozing, James Rushent — singer/bassist for UK electro-rock quartet Does It Offend You, Yeah? — says he didn’t have even one drink before the group’s very first gig a year ago. “I swore I would never do that again,” he laughs over the phone from London.

If Rushent was nervous then, playing for 20 or so fans in a dank, tiny Liverpool basement, the situations DIOYY? have found themselves in of late — a high-profile club trek with Bloc Party, massive festivals in England, arena shows in the Northeast just this past week as the support act for Nine Inch Nails, and now their first headlining US tour, which comes to Great Scott on Sunday — have made a few calming drinks prior to showtime a virtual necessity.

“If I actually stopped to think about what’s going on, I’d probably shit myself,” says Rushent, referring not only to those times when he’s playing in front of huge crowds but to his band’s speedy career ascent. “You gauge your success when you retire, you know? You can’t think about that while you’re doing something, that’ll just screw you up. We just keep our heads down and go.”

If the band — Rushent, singer/guitarist Morgan Quaintance, keyboardist Dan Coop, and drummer Rob Bloomfield — possess any collective performance anxiety, you’d never know it from the brashness and swagger they display live. Opening for Bloc Party in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, DIOYY? prowled and leapt around the stage as they charged through a set that merged disorienting digital noise and in-the-pocket grooves, with squealing synths, gigantic riffs, iron rhythms, and lunatic screams and chants coming together in a hypnotic assault.

There’s some of that aggressive wallop on their full-length debut, You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into, like “Battle Royale” and the industrialized “With a Heavy Heart (I Regret To Inform You).” But other sounds emerge as well. The melodic new-wave-pop anthem “Dawn of the Dead” sounds like OMD with balls, or maybe the soundtrack to a remake of Sixteen Candles starring Jason Statham in place of Anthony Michael Hall. And the mind-numbing “Let’s Make Out” combines the unhinged yelps of LCD Soundsystem or Death From Above 1979 with the rubbery electro-funk of !!! and Daft Punk.

Unstoppable force

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:43:47 GMT

The sludgy juggernaut of the Melvins
“Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”

YOUR PROBLEM “I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Strange hairdos aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find a link between Melvins frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne (a/k/a King Buzzo) and 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. But over the phone from a tour stop in central California, the 44-year-old singer/guitarist loosely paraphrases the Dominican friar in summing up his band’s long, bizarre career: “Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”

Can you feel my love, Buzz: A chat with Mackie Osborne. By Michael Alan Goldberg.

That’s true. The more-than-30 full-length albums and EPs the LA-via-Washington band have issued since 1984 defy all attempts to define their style or determine their genre or even say what the bleep is going on. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. The Melvins’ sound is most often reduced to either “stoner rock” or a slow, Sabbathy sludge “that begat grunge.” Both of which it has been, at various points, but such descriptions don’t take into account the forays into menacing ambient/industrial creepiness, thrashy noise punk, trippy psych freakouts, and even something approaching pop, however skewed and darkly humored — experiments that can all pop up on the same album. It’s like watching one of David Lynch’s baffling cinematic sequences: you’re better off just enjoying the strange ride than stopping to try to figure it out.

Which brings us to the band’s new Nude with Boots (Ipecac). The one-two opening punch of “The Kicking Machine” (with its Zeppelin-style boogie rock) and “Billy Fish” (built on a guitar riff very like the one in Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush”) would seem to augur a quasi-conventional outing. But that turns out to be a tease. “Dog Island” writhes in an electronic-dappled tarpit for nearly eight minutes, and the unsettling instrumental “Dies Irae” summons demons quicker than that puzzle box in Hellraiser. The nimble, comparatively speedy “Suicide in Progress” and the title track might be some of the Melvins’ catchier work, but then there’s the soothing “Flush,” which sounds like whales and birds swimming together in ocean depths, and the howling, clattering closer, “It Tastes Better Than the Truth,” which sounds as if it had been recorded during the Spanish Inquisition.

Old souls

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:50:32 GMT

The Bouncing Souls stay relevant
“The very first Bouncing Souls show was a battle of the bands in high school. We took third place out of four bands. We sucked, though — we were terrible. Horrible ."

TOUR OF DUTY: “I’ve done the math — I’ve spent a year of my life on Warped,” says Pete Steinkopf.

“The very first Bouncing Souls show was a battle of the bands in high school,” says Pete Steinkopf, guitarist for the New Jersey punk quartet, as he fixes his thoughts on his group’s ignominious late-’80s public debut. “We took third place out of four bands. We sucked, though — we were terrible. Horrible.” Making things worse, he chuckles, was losing to a Rush cover band. What became of that fierce competition? “They’re probably working at 7-Eleven now. Or on Wall Street, probably.”

Either way, what they aren’t is the fierce, well-respected, globetrotting force that the Bouncing Souls have evolved into over their lengthy career — which is just short of its 20-year mark. Keeping a band together and thriving for two decades is no small feat; keeping a punk band together and thriving for two decades is near-impossible.

But with their always improving combination of classic hardcore, Oi!-style street punk, metal, and pop (and versatile songwriting that’s both silly and serious, personal and political), the Souls are anything but tired, boring, or (gasp!) irrelevant. Their most recent, The Gold Record (Epitaph, 2006), was punk-as-Springsteen: tales of love, longing, celebration, and escape, straight from the Jersey shore. They sure don’t sound like four dudes in (or closing in on) their 40s.

True, maturity can be detected in the little bits of piano, organ, and accordion sprinkled amid the charging guitars and rhythms. And the Souls — Steinkopf, singer Greg Attonito, bassist Bryan Kienlen, and drummer Mike McDermott — did recently embark on a brief tour called “An Evening with the Bouncing Souls” — which seems more Dockers than Doc Martens. And they did play older songs in mostly acoustic fashion, throwing in a cover of Sick of it All’s “Good Lookin’ Out” with Attonito on ukulele and McDermott on spoons. And it was entertaining, even rowdy in its own way.

Steinkopf says that jaunt was designed as a way to keep things interesting for themselves. This summer, however, they’re back to raising ruckus on the Warped Tour, which over the years has been a home away from home for the Souls. They’ve done the whole thing four times and two-or-three-week legs (as they’re doing this year) several more times.

“I’ve done the math — I’ve spent a year of my life on Warped,” Steinkopf laughs. It’s a good chance to road-test some of the material the Souls have been penning over the past few months. They expect to have a new album out for their 20th anniversary next year.

Two for the road

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:22:47 GMT

The Watson Twins escape the shadows
Most music fans discovered the Watson Twins — 31-year-old identical sisters Leigh and Chandra — via their backing vocal appearance on Rabbit Fur Coat , the 2006 solo debut from Jenny Lewis.

OLD SOULS: The first listen feels more like a well-worn slab from your vinyl collection than a new recording.

Most music fans discovered the Watson Twins — 31-year-old identical sisters Leigh and Chandra — via their backing vocal appearance on Rabbit Fur Coat, the 2006 solo debut from Jenny Lewis. On the spooky, Shining-esque cover, the six-foot-tall siblings — statuesque, onyx-haired, and dressed in powder blue — flanked the diminutive Rilo Kiley singer. Inside, their preternatural, church-choir-trained harmonies nudged Lewis’s tunes into the realm of the sublime — luminous wing women aiding their leader in nailing many an alt-country target.

These days, the Kentucky-bred Twins — who’ve been a mainstay on the Los Angeles indie-rock scene since moving there more than a decade ago — are flying solo, trying to escape the shadow of the rapturously received Rabbit Fur Coat and create a different kind of magic with their full-length bow, Fire Songs (Vanguard), which arrives two years after debut EP Southern Manners. “Fall,” the magnetic third track, encompasses most of what makes their music so engaging: the inviting, slightly husky timbre of their voices — like a combination of Linda Thompson and Beth Orton — and, of course, those heavenly harmonies. Simple, rootsy melodies are fashioned out of acoustic strums, piano plinks, mournful cello, subtle percussion, and distant pedal steel, with the recurring bite of moody electric guitar to scuff things up.

The rest of the album (co-produced by one-time Sebadoh drummer Russ Pollard) ain’t too shabby either, from the jaunty “Map to Where You Are,” with its Polynesian sway, to the torchy midnight-pop stunner “Only You” to a countrified cover of the Cure’s “Just like Heaven,” with harmonica where some of the synths should be. Across its 11 tracks, Fire Songs exudes warmth and richness. Even the first listen feels more like diving into a well-worn slab from your vinyl collection than a brand-new recording.

“We’re all fans of classic rock and a lot of older music, so we all wanted there to be that organic vibe,” Chandra says over the phone from her home in LA. “It was important to us to make it so it wasn’t too polished or slick, so it sounded like you could really hear the room, you can hear the air, you can hear the heads of the tape machine. Those are the sounds I’m drawn to, things that make it sound like it’s living.”

Polvo give it another go

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:40:58 GMT

After a decade-long hiatus, the progenitors of math rock find their chemistry still exists
The North Carolina quartet’s noisy sound was music to a select group of ears.

CAROLINA LIAR? Ash Bowie has little interest in the notions of legacy or Importance.

“And now, back to the music!” a voice exclaims over the WMBR airwaves. It’s the tail end of 1991, and the quip comes from a member of Polvo, who have just concluded a seven-song live session on MIT’s radio station (it can be heard on-line for minimal Googling) with a blistering, feedback-drenched tear through “Vibracobra” — the track that would kick off the band’s full-length debut album, Cor-Crane Secret, which Merge Records would release the following year.

At the time, the North Carolina quartet’s noisy sound was music to a select group of ears — cacophonous guitars and flailing rhythms circling around melody and structure and the half-buried vocals of frontman Ash Bowie, and then all of it collapsing in on itself like a semi-controlled demolition. In those nascent years, Polvo seemed to draw inspiration from a number of sources: the chorus-pedaled fury of Hüsker Dü; the slithering complexity of Slint; the deft tension-and-release of such Dischord bands as Jawbox and Lungfish; and certainly the arty dissonance, weird tunings, and aural freakouts of Sonic Youth (Bowie’s laconic delivery was particularly Thurstonian too). Over the next seven years and about as many LPs and EPs, Polvo shaped and refined their enthralling assault into something singular, never quite abandoning the clamor or becoming all that accessible, but from time to time incorporating moderately straightforward riffage or ambient drones, or exploring more wide-open spaces instead of the usual all-consuming guitar density. (Witness the odd classic-rock chops of 1997’s Shapes.)

The band amicably called it quits in 1998, and the decade since has been kind — like Slint, Polvo have been elevated to iconic status, cited as progenitors of “math rock,” and hailed as influential for a new generation of post-rock/post-punk groups. One such outfit, the Texas instrumental band Explosions in the Sky, was charged with curating this year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in England, and when they asked Polvo to get back together for the May event, not only did the quartet agree, they appear to have made the reunion more lasting. Singers/guitarists Bowie and Dave Brylawski, bassist Steve Popson, and drummer Brian Quast (formerly of the Cherry Valence, he replaces original Polvo drummer Eddie Watkins) have written new material slated for an album they hope to begin recording in September, and they plan to spend much of this year touring the US.

Twin reverb

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:44:45 GMT

Centro-matic and South San Gabriel
For the better part of his prolific songwriting career, Texas singer/guitarist Will Johnson, when not releasing albums under his own name, has donned distinctive hats for his two bands.

MORE, MORE, MORE: And yet, as Dual Hawks attests, Will Johnson never sacrifices quality for quantity.

For the better part of his prolific songwriting career, Texas singer/guitarist Will Johnson, when not releasing albums under his own name, has donned distinctive hats for his two bands. Centro-matic and South San Gabriel sport the same line-up: Johnson, guitarist Mark Hedman, bassist/keyboardist Scott Danbom, and drummer Matt Pence. Yet the former outfit makes raw, rollicking roots rock suited for a Saturday-night bar crowd and the latter makes quiet, moody indie folk for solitary Sunday contemplation.

Johnson has alternated between the two formats since 2000, when Centro-matic released the subdued South San Gabriel Songs/Music, spawning the wholly separate project, but his hats hang on the same hook with the new Dual Hawks (as well as on the tour that comes to the Middle East this Saturday). A double album, Hawks offers 11 Centro-matic tracks and 12 South San Gabriel tracks. In concert, the foursome have been playing one set as one band and then a second set as the other.

Sure, Johnson could save some of the trouble and just do everything as the better-known Centro-matic, but as he says over the phone in a thoughtful drawl, “I think for us, it kinda helps to change the scenery a little bit. I feel like it’s healthy to do that. I feel like it’s helped us become better musicians and better listeners.”

He explains that during the Centro-matic sessions for Hawks, most of the songs were written in the morning, hammered out in the afternoon, and recorded in the evening. That’s not surprising given the raucous, restless energy that crackles through “Strychnine, Breathless Ways” and “Every Single Switch,” with their swaggering, Crazy Horse–channeling fuzz guitars galloping alongside Johnson’s rough desert warble. And yet nothing comes across half-baked: the arrangements stay sturdy and compelling while Johnson’s sharp lines on ruptured love and complicated entanglements range from cryptically poetic to jarringly evocative.

More time went into the South San Gabriel sessions, with the band bringing in a host of guests to color their primarily acoustic compositions with strings, pedal steel, bass clarinet, trombone, even some throat singing. “There were some songs that I thought were gonna be pretty stark that wound up being a lot more complex and a lot more layered and just way more, quite honestly, beautiful than I had originally envisioned.” The SSG numbers incorporate those added elements in both conventional and unorthodox ways. Cello and pedal steel pull the cymbal-dappled strums of “Kept on the Sly” and “My Goodbyes” into atmospheric and melancholy country-rock-ballad terrain marked with intimate, confessional lyrics. “Of Evil/For Evil” buoys Johnson’s whispery croon with a Kronos Quartet–style modern string arrangement for a torchier, more theatrical mood.

Drear as folk

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:46:18 GMT

The bleak interiors of Damien Jurado and Jeremy Enigk
It’s that feeling of overwhelming sorrow tempered by the faintest sliver of hope that’s evoked by the music of two veteran Pacific Northwest songwriters and long-time friends who share a bill at Great Scott this Saturday night.

SING LOW Jurado spins weighty tales of love forbidden, unrequited, or betrayed.

From Lake Whatcom to Soda Springs, Cave Junction to Bonners Ferry, the Pacific Northwest is littered with abandoned houses left to molder on forgotten lots. Sapped of their color by the elements and the ravages of time, they’re manmade echoes of the forbidding gray skies that enshroud the region so much of the year.

Ignore the long-ago-posted “No Trespassing” signs, step inside the ruins, and you’ll find the skeletal, frequently fire-scarred remains of their innards, branches reaching through gaping holes in the sagging roof. From time to time, you may stumble across fairly well furnished, if fusty, interiors. Torn sofas and weathered appliances from bygone decades. Floors, closets, and counters crammed with the detritus of lives departed — photos of Christmas smiles, holey jackets swaying on wire hangers, tattered utility bills, yellowed newspapers. Sifting through it all can turn the people who once lived there from distant characters in some vaguely imagined “dreams deserted” narrative into actual people.

Then you consider the unanswerables. Why did they leave? What became of them? Were they evicted — sent into the night with little more than the clothes on their backs? Did they die, alone, with no family to pick up the pieces? Or maybe they escaped, leaving a grim existence behind for something better and brighter far away?

It’s that feeling of overwhelming sorrow tempered by the faintest sliver of hope that’s evoked by the music of two veteran Pacific Northwest songwriters and long-time friends who share a bill at Great Scott this Saturday night. Damien Jurado, 35, and Jeremy Enigk, 33, couldn’t be more different. Jurado possesses a weary tenor, a linebacker’s build, a working man’s presence and demeanor, and a 12-year career that’s been largely unheralded outside his native Seattle. Enigk has a soaring falsetto, a slender frame, a rock-star aura despite his everyman appearance, and a widely celebrated history as the former frontman of early-’90s Seattle rock dramatists Sunny Day Real Estate (and, later, short-lived trio the Fire Theft). Yet both meditate on decay, loss, and fragile optimism as they explore the human condition.

Soul purpose

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:20:11 GMT

The BellRays get us all kinds of worked up
The BellRays — whose married core is singer Lisa Kekaula and guitarist/bassist Bob Vennum — have been making music since 1990.

SHOW NUFF “Every time we get on stage we want to be the best band in the world and nothing less.”

The BellRays — whose married core is singer Lisa Kekaula and guitarist/bassist Bob Vennum — have been making music since 1990. The albums? Well, all eight (including their new Hard, Sweet and Sticky) range from good to fantastic. The live show? Fucking mind-blowing. And virtually unimpeachable — you’d have better odds of finding D.B. Cooper than someone who’s been to a BellRays gig and walked out going, “Ehhhh, it was okay. . . ”

Watching a live clip of the California quartet on YouTube tells maybe half the story. There’s the robust Kekaula, all precarious heels, enormous Afro, and skin-tight dress, shimmying and strutting across the stage, her tightly gripped tambourine having a seizure while her other hand clutches the microphone for that rich, impossibly soulful voice (equal parts silk and napalm) to pour into. There’s the long-haired, bespectacled Vennum — visually a cross between Iggy Pop and Lou Reed — gripping his low-slung SG, slashing out turbo garage-punk bite and nimble, bluesy Stax grit. There’s the rhythm section (drummer Craig Waters and bassist Justin Andres) nailing every groove like an eight-ball cracked into the corner pocket. It’s rock-as-tent-revival fervor meets soul-as-atom-bomb ferocity.

But you could watch that clip 100 times and it wouldn’t convey the electricity flowing through the room: the way the sweat shakes off Kekaula and Vennum; the small pockets of cool air that pass over you, providing respite from the heat generated by dozens of drenched, dancing bodies; the amps so loud your ears clog up and other senses take over, turning sounds into colors and smells, like some glorious acid trip, even as each delectable riff penetrates your body and coils around every internal organ.

“Every time we get on stage, we want to be the best band in the world and nothing less — I want to be the only thing occupying the audience’s thought while they are with me,” Kekaula asserts via e-mail. She’s in Paris, where, after a few weeks of European touring, the BellRays are getting a brief respite before starting the month-long US tour (which comes to T.T. the Bear’s this Sunday). And she’s e-mailing rather than talking to me on the phone, as we’d planned, because, no surprise, she lost her voice after a particularly scorching show two nights earlier in Finland.

Eastern promises

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:24:58 GMT

Balkan trends with DeVotchKa and Firewater

TAKE A CHANSON ME: DeVotchKa soak up the instrumentation of Gypsy camps and cabarets.

Firewater’s Tod Ashley (a/k/a Tod A) and DeVotchKa’s Nick Urata — both of whom come to town this week with their respective groups — are pivotal figures in the neo-Balkan movement: an extensive network of bands (Gogol Bordello and Beirut among the best known) who’ve soaked up the exotic instrumentation of Eastern European villages, Gypsy camps, and smoky cabarets, then cross-pollinated it with rock, pop, and punk — to increasingly popular ends.

Ashley’s NYC-based Firewater have been at it since the mid ’90s (not long after the dissolution of his previous outfit, post-punk apocalyptics Cop Shoot Cop). Like so many other forefathers, Ashley has existed at the fringes of the scene he helped create, his band’s trailblazing efforts often overlooked amid the hype surrounding their descendants.

Count Urata and his Denver-based band among that successful progeny. Since debuting with the self-released Supermelodrama back in 2002, DeVotchKa have fed (and fed on) the trend, hitching their engaging bouzouki/accordion/sousaphone-fueled bazaar dreams to a busker’s resolve, and achieving a considerably higher profile. Non-stop touring and recording have swelled their following, as did DeVotchKa’s Grammy-nominated contributions to the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack. A Mad & Faithful Telling (Anti-) — the group’s recently released fifth full-length, and their first since Sunshine thrust them into the spotlight — was one of this year’s most eagerly awaited discs.

But if circumstances have posited the two bandleaders at differing levels of recognition, both on their new albums are equally committed to pushing their sounds past the borders of Eastern Europe. Like indie-rock Jason Bournes, Ashley and Urata traverse the globe, acquiring sonic bits and pieces with which to flesh out their musical identities, staying one step ahead of everyone else.

Ashley’s journey was a literal one: a divorce, a severe bout of depression, and a seething hatred of George Bush drove him to leave the US in 2005 for a three-year trek through Thailand, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, and Turkey. With a microphone and laptop, he wrote and recorded with dozens of musicians he encountered; The Golden Hour’s resultant cross-cultural constructs are entrancing. In what sounds like a klezmer band rocking a Peshawar banquet hall, insistent thickets of South Asian and Mediterranean percussion (chimta, dholki, dumbek) carry the guitars, harmonium, and Ashley’s sepulchral rasp in “This Is My Life.” And in the especially cinematic “A Place Not So Unkind” and “Feels like the End of the World,” the sinister twang of midnight-surf guitars blends with swaying Sufi melodies and bhangra rhythms to paint pictures of sweeping Khyber Pass vistas — an apt soundtrack for Ashley’s displaced disillusionment.

Band of Horses

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:33:06 GMT

Cease to Begin | Sub Pop
Much has changed for Band of Horses and their mercurial frontguy, singer/guitarist Ben Bridwell, since they quietly released their debut album.

Minus the Bear

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:52:30 GMT

Planet of Ice | Suicide Squeeze
Minus the Bear are at their best when they let down their guard and allow a little heat to penetrate their Planet of Ice.

The Rosebuds

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:35:03 GMT

Night of the Furies | Merge
The title of the Rosebuds’ third full-length refers to Roman mythology, and the accompanying booklet sports Colonial American artwork.

Adult.

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:19:36 GMT

Why Bother? | Thrill Jockey
Detroit electro-provocateurs Adult. continue to run away from the catchier, clubbier colors of their early work toward, as they put it, “uneasy listening.”

King of the hill

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:49:57 GMT

Mark Linkous revives his Sparklehorse
“I didn’t think anyone would come to these shows. I figured the venues would be half-empty, and it hasn’t been that way at all,” says Sparklehorse mastermind Mark Linkous.

MOUNTAIN SOUNDS: Linkous has made a comeback from drugs and despair.

“I got so down on myself mentally that I thought, ‘Well, it’s been five years and people have moved on . . . ’ — that it wasn’t that great a thing to begin with,” Sparklehorse mastermind Mark Linkous says in his unruffled Southern drawl over the phone from a tour stop in Arizona. “I didn’t think anyone would come to these shows. I figured the venues would be half-empty, and it hasn’t been that way at all.”

Indeed, a week later, the Showbox Theater in Seattle is near capacity. Swooning abounds — eyes-closed swaying greets the quartet’s sometimes spectral, sometimes raucous ruminations on isolation, death, frustration, and hope encased in bewitching, dreamy country pop. Darkness and light are woven together as nattily as Linkous’s black-and-white cowboy shirt. If not exactly bubbly, the singer/guitarist does sport a satisfied grin on his face for most of the set — a departure from the well of despair, paralyzing depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and utter lack of artistic confidence he’d fallen into. Linkous’s afflictions had dated back to Sparklehorse’s 1995 debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (Capitol). But they got particularly bad after 2001’s lush, mordantly titled It’s a Wonderful Life and the subsequent tour.

“I think it was a combination of feeling guilty about making a living doing this and turning it into entertainment. I would never let it actually make me feel good. Doing the music in the first place, like almost all art, was an outlet to keep my head from exploding, and then turning it into a traveling road show where you perform to people night after night after night . . . it seemed like it corrupted everything.”

Retreating to his mountaintop home in North Carolina, Linkous battled his demons while piecing together Sparklehorse’s fourth album, last fall’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks). Multi-instrumentalist Dave Fridmann and drummer Steven Drozd help define the album’s skewed melodicism. But there’s also a spare and riveting collaboration with Tom Waits (“Morning Hollow”) that features former Dambuilders violinist Joan Wasser, and a handful of the disc’s dozen tracks were co-produced by Danger Mouse, who upgrades Linkous’s fondness for scrapyard sonics and lo-fi electronic experimentation. The album has the expected ghostly, melancholy ruminations, but at times it’s downright cheerful. Indeed, the opener, “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away,” is one of the most upbeat songs Linkous has written.

Making nice

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 19:01:32 GMT

Deftones go on a healing tour
‘If this breaks up, it’s not like I can go sell a Basquiat like Lars Ulrich.’

REBIRTH: This time a year ago, Deftones were all but dead.

SEATTLE — If the walls of the Fenix — a cavernous club in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighborhood — could speak, they’d have been gurgling from all the condensation dripping down them when the Deftones tour came through on November 2. The combination of the sopping rain and bone-chilling wind outside with nearly 2000 sweat-drenched roiling bodies jammed inside turned the atmosphere into a jungle. Toward the front, where the fog from the smoke machines crept into the first few rows of fans, it looked like a psychedelic battlefield. Figures tumbled over the barrier like infantrymen storming a barbed-wired trench; skinny, shirtless bodies stumbled and whirled as they emerged from the eerie mist and headed back into combat. Occasionally a beefy security guard materialized with a limp body in his arms, whisking it away from the fray like a soldier sworn to leave no fallen comrade behind.

There was a similar kind of solidarity among the quintet on stage, who were locked together in one pummeling groove after another as they uncorked songs from their debut album, 1995’s Adrenaline, all the way through their new and fifth studio disc, Saturday Night Wrist (all Maverick). Chino Moreno, all Dickies shorts, tube socks, scowls, and howls, was up on the riser, a cord wrapped around his forearm as he crouched and disgorged every last bit of oxygen, spit, and bile into the microphone. As always, Stephen Carpenter — a burly, bearded beast of a man unleashing torrents of thorny crunch from his guitar — and Chi Cheng, a more slender but no less imposing presence with his steely stare, dangling dark hair, and low-slung bass, flanked Chino. To the rear, Frank Delgado stoically manned a table of keyboards, samplers, and effects boxes while drummer Abe Cunningham thrashed his kit into shock-and-awe territory.

Body language speaks volumes too: band members leaned into one another, playing off musical shifts, feeding off the surging energy, occasionally grinning at one another. And there were softer moments in the music befitting a band who’ve been called “the Radiohead of metal”; at one point, a blurry, shoegazery haze inspired Moreno to shape his angsty croon into the unmistakable lyrics of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack.” It evoked smiles of recognition but few laughs — Deftones are, after all, a group who have previously covered Sade, the Smiths, and Duran Duran without irony, and they breathed more sensuality into the tune than Timberlake could ever muster. The crowd took the opportunity to catch its collective breath and sway instead of clobber. But then it was back to the brutal onslaught. At the climax of the two-hour set, the Fenix was a sweat lodge, and the performance, at least for a little while, like a spiritual ceremony of rebirth.

Work ethics

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:51:08 GMT

Jason Molina and Magnolia Electric Co.
You can file Jason Molina with the über-prolific. Magnolia Electric Co., "Lonesome Valley" (mp3)

SELF-EDITING “I throw so much stuff away,” insists the ever-prolific Molina (far right).

How much product is too much? Most acts drop an album every two years or so. Some established artists — say, Radiohead and DJ Shadow — can go three or four years. But others, like Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, put out so much material so often that even though diehards scoop it all up, it’s hard for most fans to keep pace, to keep shelling out cash, and to avoid wondering whether some of the releases aren’t more filler than killer.

You can file Jason Molina with the über-prolific: the 32-year-old Chicago-based songwriter has 20-odd full-lengths and EPs to his credit since starting his career in the mid ’90s, first as Songs: Ohia and under his own name, then with his band Magnolia Electric Co., whom he’s led since 2003 after retiring the Songs: Ohia name and who come to the Middle East this Friday.

Even now Molina is in the midst of turning out six new albums on long-time label Secretly Canadian. First up was the vinyl-only solo album Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, released under his own name, in August, a stark, downcast, stinging acoustic-folk treatise on depression and isolation that was self-recorded in a dimly lit Indiana garage studio over three days last year. This week sees the release of Magnolia Electric Co.’s Fading Trails, an overview disc that draws its nine tracks from the four Magnolia discs that will emerge in the coming months: The Sun Studio Sessions, recorded this past February in Memphis; Nashville Moon, recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago in July 2005; The Black Ram, a collaboration with David Lowery (of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame) recorded mostly last fall in Virginia; and Shohola, a batch of older, home-recorded tracks once slated for release but then shelved.

Over the phone from his Chicago home, Molina acknowledges the doubters. “I’ve heard rumblings about people thinking, ‘If you put out all this music, is there no editing? Is it now up to the purchaser of the music to file through all the shit you put out and decide what’s good?’ That’s absolutely not the case with me, because there’s so much editing, so much quality control. I throw so much stuff away. But if I have a lot of material that I think is good and worth sharing, I’m gonna try to get it out there. Why not?”

Harmonic convergences

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 22:15:13 GMT

The Futureheads get past the post-punk blues
Beyond their artful, crackling, dueling-guitar geometrics and layers of cunning rhythms, the Futureheads' most distinguishing and potent weapon is their four-part vocals.

HYPECAST: The Futureheads’ debut was swept along with bands like Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, and Radio 4.

“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Ross Millard mutters, shrugging at his mates as he sets his guitar down at the rear of the small stage at the back of Seattle’s East Street Records and ambles toward his mic stand. No sympathy is forthcoming from his fellow Futureheads, only smirks from drummer Dave Hyde (sans drums), who's perched on a stool to his right, bassist Jaff (sans bass), who's perched to his far left, and Barry Hyde (chief songwriter, Dave’s older brother, and the British quartet’s other guitarist), who's standing mere inches away, with a twisted smile that makes him look even more like a cross between Jon Stewart and Billy Bragg. (He sings a bit like Bragg too.) His isn’t the guitar that’s popped a string — a potential set killer when you’ve brought only two instruments and no roadies to an in-store acoustic performance.

“I guess I’ll be the hype man, like Flavor Flav — 'Everybody scream!',” Millard improvises. Coupled with his bespectacled, slightly nerdy appearance and Sunderland accent, his corresponding b-boy pose elicits laughter instead from the dozens of onlookers leaning against the vinyl and CD racks and angling for prime snaps with their cellphone cameras. Beyond their artful, crackling, dueling-guitar geometrics and layers of cunning rhythms, the Futureheads' most distinguishing and potent weapon is their four-part vocals, with sharp lyrics and refrains like “ooohh ah OH oh oh” and “ba bah BAH” circling around each other, melodies jumping in and pulling out and occasionally coalescing into stirring resonance.

They waste no time deploying those harmonies, with only the elder Hyde’s simple strum as accompaniment, for a stripped-back yet brightly wiggly rendition of “Skip to the End,” from their just-released sophomore full-length, News and Tributes (Vagrant). No doubt the fully electrified versions, as heard on album or at a standard concert, are exhilarating, but with voices like these, they don’t need much else — certainly not any hype man — to get their point across.

Harmonic convergence

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:45:05 GMT

The Futureheads get past the post-punk blues
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Ross Millard mutters, shrugging at his mates as he sets his guitar down at the rear of the small stage at the back of Seattle’s East Street Records and ambles toward his mic stand.

HYPECAST: The Futureheads’ debut was swept along with bands like Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, and Radio 4.

Still, it’s hype — specifically the hype that came attached to their 2004 Futureheads debut album — and how that affected the making of the new album that I'm hoping to talk to Barry Hyde about after the set. When that disc arrived, examination of its ample merits — the way the serrated, polyrhythmic, hyperspeedy start/stop buzz compacted a trunkload of XTC, Gang of Four, and Wire LPs into a batch of brief, irresistible herky-jerk songbursts, pushing their influences into fresh sectors with the incorporation of those glorious multi-part vocals — was short-shrifted in favor of celebrating and promoting an emerging trendy new-postpunk scene into which the Futureheads were swept along with Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, Radio 4, et al.

Beast masters

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Wed, 10 May 2006 21:45:17 GMT

Mogwai celebrate 10 years of loudness
“I think that what we do very naturally as a band is quite predictable,” says Mogwai guitarist and de facto leader Stuart Braithwaite.

CRITICAL MASS: Mr. Beast marks one of the very few times in Mogwai’s history that the band are truly fond of their album.

“I think that what we do very naturally as a band is quite predictable,” says Mogwai guitarist and de facto leader Stuart Braithwaite over the phone, just weeks before the Scottish band embark on a US tour that has them headlining Avalon this Sunday, May 14. “Y’know, the whole quiet-loud, quiet-loud thing, maybe some of the sounds and parts, so we have to make an effort to do something different.”

Since introducing themselves in 1997 as a primarily instrumental post-rock outfit with both the Young Team LP and Ten Rapid, a round-up of singles recorded and released over the previous two years, the Glasgow-based quintet — Braithwaite, guitarist John Cummings, bassist Dominic Aitchison, drummer Martin Bulloch, and pianist/guitarist Barry Burns — have indeed striven to evolve from the sprawling, explosive riff-and-feedback mayhem (typically set up or intersected by hypnotic, restrained passages) of those early works while maintaining their singular style. On 1999’s sparse, downcast Come On Die Young, the band mostly ditched the cacophony; on 2001’s Rock Action and 2003’s Happy Songs for Happy People (2003), they shortened and prettied up those explorations with billowy synthesizers, strings, and sporadic vocals, only rarely dipping back into the noise well.

So where to go on their fifth full-length album, Mr. Beast (released in the US, like the previous CDs, by Matador)? How, after a decade of operation, do Mogwai find new terrain to explore?

“I dunno, move our fingers a couple frets to the left?” Braithwaite offers, laughing before sidestepping artistic pretense and demystifying the band’s creative process. “You just keep trying things until it sounds good and it doesn’t sound exactly like the stuff we’ve done before.”

Mr. Beast isn’t a radical departure for Mogwai. It’s more of a distillation of the band’s biggest strengths — those deftly shifting dynamics, those moments of hushed, elegiac beauty, those explosions of what sound like 37 wall-rattling guitars. Each of the 10 tracks captures something essential about the band in a way they’ve never before managed in the studio. The way a stark piano takes the point for the intense, steadily advancing swell of guitars, electronic burbles, and tribal beat in “Auto Rock” makes for an ideal opener. The meshing of drum machines, vibraphone, lap steel, and vocals on the languid “Acid Food” creates a psychedelic, country-tinged soundscape. The glacial atmospherics of “Emergency Trap” outdream Sigur Rós; pulverizing guitar maelstroms swirl in “Glasgow Mega-Snake” and the final cut, “We’re No Here.”

Vocal musings

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:51:43 GMT

Beth Orton finds her comfort zone
“My voice is a bit like a piano with a dodgy key on it or something,” Beth Orton chuckles quietly over the phone as her tour bus rumbles toward the Canadian border.

“My voice is a bit like a piano with a dodgy key on it or something,” Beth Orton chuckles quietly over the phone as her tour bus rumbles toward the Canadian border. Her analogy would hardly startle any fan; the 35-year-old Briton’s vocal style has long been celebrated for the “flaws” that make it so warm and enthralling. It’s hoarse and unrefined, prone to cracks and croaks as it slides from dusky murmur to ardent falsetto — qualities that render her melancholy lyrics that much more immediate and affecting.

In this case, however, Orton is lamenting the nasty lung infection that’s plagued her for the whole of her current North American tour, which comes to Avalon on April 8. Its weakening effect on her delivery was evident the previous evening at Seattle’s Showbox Theatre, a gig she calls “shambolic” before politely but firmly steering the conversation elsewhere. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Thinking about it does my head in.”

Although her voice was breaking more than usual that night, and a slight cough punctured the occasional melody, it all gave a heightened sense of beauty to her songs as Orton and her four-piece backing band pushed through a nearly two-hour set, leaning on material from her new fourth album, Comfort of Strangers (Astralwerks). Given the disc’s lyrics, which struggle between hope and heartbreak, righteous indignation and self-immolation, hanging on and letting go, Orton’s genuine struggles on stage seemed fitting.

Comfort of Strangers is her most intimate, confessional disc to date, and the one of which she’s the most proud. “While the rest of my world is falling to pieces around me, at least my work stands up. And I stand by it, you know? It’s almost the one thing I can find rhyme and reason to in my life.”

Unhappy with 2002’s Daybreaker (Astralwerks), Orton sought a new beginning with Strangers. Encouraged by producer Jim O’Rourke, she did away with the electronic beats and textures of her previous material and focused on her country-folk side, crafting simple, organic compositions centered on her acoustic guitar and colored by piano, violins, harmonica, and restrained percussion. Freeing herself from her past, she says, allowed her to tap back into the joy she used to derive from songwriting. “Coming up with songs is the most wonderful feeling there is. It’s a lovely process, having the songs flow out and then fiddling with them. I’ll be out somewhere and I’ll be like, ‘Oooh!’, thinking to myself how I can make a song better, and then I just wanna run home. It’s like going home to a lover. I get really excited to go home to that.”