The Thermals' "When I Died"

Hutch Harris on rage, cynicism and the difference

13 MAY 2009 • by Bryan Reed

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After releasing something of a mini-landmark with 2006's bitter, enraged The Body, The Blood, The Machine, Portland trio The Thermals found itself at a crossroads. Ultimately, they pursued in a new direction: It meant a switch from one stalwart indie label (Sub Pop) to another (Kill Rock Stars), and a transition from the vitriol of The Body, The Blood, The Machine, to a somewhat more hopeful tone on Now We Can See. A political parallel, perhaps?

"When I Died," the first cut from the new record, sets the stage for the band's rebirth, even as its speaker sleeps with the fishes. Elemental imagery and frontman Hutch Harris' rhythmic vocals are indeed holdovers from previous efforts, but the band sounds almost triumphant here, even as it launches into a chorus beginning with the phrase "When I died."

We caught up with Harris as he and his bandmates traveled by train through New York for an MTV filming in the midst of an East Coast tour.

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: How did the song come to be?

HUTCH HARRIS: When I wrote The Body, The Blood, The Machine, I wrote "Here's Your Future" first, and that kind of opened this door where we said there are so many other places we could go with this. And then, I wrote "When We Were Alive" first, it seemed like a really good place to start writing from the perspective of people who are dead, or writing about life and the end of life. I just started writing most of the songs from that point of view.

Then, I guess on "When I Died" I was really thinking it's kind of a sequel to "Back To The Sea," from The Body, The Blood, The Machine, where you have the narrator who's sort of embarrassed to be part of the human race. He doesn't want to be a human anymore, so he sort of wants to de-evolve.

You have a narrator in "When I Died" who's the same as the one who wants to go back to the sea, but the arrogant side is that he thinks that that's something he can do. He doesn't think about the fact that you can't survive under the water and you can't just de-evolve into a fish because you want to. So you have someone that drowns to death.

It does seem that the band's imagery has been somewhat consistent. You talk a lot about the elements: air, earth, water. Did that start with The Body, The Blood, The Machine and just keep going?

Kathy and I go to the Oregon coast to write. We take all our gear up to this house and set up to write and record. It's a house on the coast, so we're near water and there's an influence.

With water there are always connotations of life, or with religious imagery—baptism and rebirth. And in this song there's a point where the narrator is sort of yanked back from the ocean. Is that some kind of resurrection, or a denial of his ability to, as you said, just devolve because he wants to?

I forget how we really got to that point in the story. It's not really a resurrection because it's more a way to show that the narrator was actually dying and not going to be able to actually be revived.

I've read a lot about this album having a more optimistic or hopeful outlook, especially when compared to The Body, The Blood, The Machine. I think the press materials used the term "cautious optimism."

Well, that's just what a lot of people have been saying about Obama. I mean, it is more optimistic than the last record, but I don't think it's so optimistic. I think it's still cynical, too.

Maybe more cynical than enraged?

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a healthy does of cynicism in everything that we do.

Do you think within punk rock, which is so often a very enraged genre, you seem to be broadening the emotional palate a little bit? Is that a deliberate thing?

A lot of what we do is very deliberate. And a lot of that is trying to get away from being just a punk band. It's very limiting. We hope with this record, people will think of it more of like a power-pop band.

It's been interesting because it's punk, but it doesn't fit a Warped Tour mold, which I guess could be a blessing and a curse when you're trying to sell records.

I guess. I mean, we've always thought of ourselves as a really simple rock band. I think the record's got a way in which the songs are more complex and the lyrics are more complex.

I think, too, you have a very distinctive vocal cadence, where when you hear a Thermals song you can recognize that immediately. It has that same sort of rhythmic bounce.

It's really recognizable, which is pretty much what bands try to do, just trying to find something that makes it new, and something that people can recognize instantly as being you.

Going back to the song, Thermals songs have always had an anthemic quality, but it seemed ironic to me to turn the phrase "When I Died" into this big triumphant chorus.

That's really funny to us. A lot of the point of the record is conquering your fear. And of course, death is big for so many people. "I Let It Go" is very similar, too, a lot of the songs are very similar, even "You Dissolve." It's just about celebrating death, or celebrating not being angry or afraid of it.

You're listening to the song, and there are all these images of death and the body being broken down, but it doesn't really sound, necessarily, like a bad thing.

At that point, it was just kind of funny to us, I think. Just to think about it.

With the label switch from Sub Pop to Kill Rock Stars, and this new record, it seems like there's a new outlook—even beyond what the songs are explicitly saying. It feels like The Thermals have been re-energized.

I would say so. I don't think we ever lost our energy, but we're definitely stoked right now.

Comparing this record with the one before it and with that rage turning into cynicism, the outlook's a little brighter, even if nothing's perfect. With the political climate meshing with the story of the band, how much of that was on your mind when writing this record?

Well, the world looks like a much better place right now. We're definitely glad to have Obama, but you know all the music and lyrics were written before Obama was elected. We knew we wouldn't have Bush, which was great, but we were thinking we might have McCain. So there was some hope, but it's very cynical, as well. We didn't know what we would be getting into.

So I guess maybe it's more that there's an opportunity for hope, but the outcome isn't clear?

Yeah, I guess so.

The Thermals plays Local 506 Thursday, May 14, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10-$12, and Shaky Hands and Point Juncture, WA open.

Independent Weekly, 5/13/09

Holidays For Quince throws a block party

Summer days

13 MAY 2009 • by Bryan Reed

Holidays For Quince Records—founded by record store clerks Jenks Miller, left, and Heather McEntire in 2005—outlasted the setting for this photo, the Chapel Hill location of Schoolkids Records. Photo by David Winton

More than any other season, summer in the South demands activity. Spring's break pales to summer's vacation—sweating and swimming, planting and playing. And then there are the block parties of summer, community gatherings that pause to celebrate the bustle.

Chapel Hill record label Holidays For Quince has been summertime-active since its inception. In just two years, the label has released eight records, gathering a wide range of Triangle sounds, from The Curtains of Night's heavy metal to Violet Vector & the Lovely Lovelies' day-glo pop.

"It's definitely aimed at somehow fostering a very broad and rich identity for this region, musically," says Jenks Miller, one of two HFQ co-owners and a local musician who plays in a half-dozen area bands, including In the Year of the Pig and Horseback. "In order to do that, we're trying not to get hung up on genres and concentrating more on working with people that we know or we like, or music that seems important."

For Miller and co-founder Heather McEntire, this summer seemed like the perfect opportunity to pause and celebrate many of the forces that have driven the label. So, of course, they're throwing a summer block party that encapsulates a trifecta of accomplishment.

First, the Nightlight—the Rosemary Street venue that hosts the three-night affair, and at which both McEntire and Miller work—just earned its liquor license. Second, the label landed an exclusive distribution deal with Chicago Independent Distribution last month, making the label's catalog available nationwide. Third, HFQ has spread its roster to Richmond, signing singer/ songwriter Liza Kate and releasing her album, Don't Let the Dogs, at the block party. It's the label's eighth disc and first from an artist outside the Triangle. It only seemed appropriate to welcome her to the neighborhood, so to speak.

Kate actually isn't too far outside of the community the label has already built up. She and McEntire have been friends since sharing a house show in Virginia half a decade ago. Kate opened the show, playing her spare folk songs on a "little blue guitar" in front of a stack of loud rock bands. "It kind of took me aback how she could captivate that crowd," remembers McEntire, who was there with her own rock band, Bellafea.

The two kept in touch. McEntire encouraged Kate to put a second collection of songs to tape. Holidays For Quince wanted to release it. "I believe in her music so incredibly much, and it just seemed like a good fit," says McEntire. "And she's my friend so we didn't think too much about it."

Working through personal relationships has been HFQ's early calling card. "We definitely want to work local outward," says Miller, meaning the goal is to start as close to home as possible, and let their records and rosters grow slowly. To wit, the first HFQ release was an EP from Un Deux Trois, the pop band formed by McEntire and Miller. The label then issued releases by the heavy Caltrop and the monolithic Curtains of Night as well as the Technicolor pop-act Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies, all Chapel Hill acts.

"We've tried to focus on regional artists, and Liza is from Richmond," says Miller. "And while we'd still consider it regional, she hasn't had a lot of exposure here in Chapel Hill."

The Block Party is an effort to change that, and it's a reciprocal approach for the label: Just as Kate could benefit from exposure in the Triangle, its local artists could benefit by having a labelmate in another state.

That idea has paid off for some HFQ affiliates, who have already begun moving beyond their neighborhood niche. Miller's solo efforts, both under his own name and as Horseback, have sported an HFQ imprint, but the next Horseback LP, The Invisible Mountain, will be released by notable Wisconsin-based experimental label Utech Records. (Disclosure: The first record, Horseback's Impale Golden Horn, was co-released by Indy music editor Grayson Currin.) McEntire's Bellafea released its LP, Cavalcade, through Chicago-based indie label Southern Records. Violet Vector recently inked a deal with Kentucky's Colorwheel Records.

That its members have begun to spread out only makes it more important for the Block Party to serve as a reminder of the circle of friends a music scene can create. "[The bands] want to feel like they're a part of a supportive community," says Miller. "This is a way to demonstrate what we have. I think that's really important. It's sort of a positive feedback mechanism. It feels more whole when you can see what everyone's doing at once."

But the Block Party is far from a self-congratulatory showcase of Holidays For Quince's growth. Screaming Females, who play the last night, are from New Jersey and aren't part of HFQ's chattel. The same goes for Max Indian, Wizzerds of Rhyme and Embarrassing Fruits', locals who don't call HFQ home. Next month, though, HFQ's Liza Kate and Mount Moriah will play TRKFest, a day-long festival held in Pittsboro and curated by Trekky Records, Embarrassing Fruits' longtime label.

Trekky co-founder Will Hackney says the plan was to have Holidays For Quince bands on the TRKFest bill, regardless. That HFQ asked a Trekky band to play its Block Party is simply a bonus.

"We're all allies in that we're all basically going through the same process of putting out cool records and putting together good shows," Hackney says.

"It's important to not be competitive with [other] small labels, but encourage each other and give each other a pat on the back," agrees McEntire. "One small label can't put out all the bands here."

Holidays For Quince curates the HFQ Block Party at Nightlight Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights (May 15-17). Performing acts include HFQ's newest signing, Liza Kate, plus The Moaners, Caltrop, Bellafea, The Curtains of Night, Mount Moriah, Screaming Females, Max Indian and more. The shows start at 9:30 p.m. and cost $6 per night or $15 for a three-night pass.

Independent Weekly, 5/13/2009

The Grappling Hook's ...And Those Who Would Keep Us Safe

(Blastco Records)

29 APR 2009 • by Bryan Reed

With its precise balance of complex song structures and swift, fluid changes in tone and time, Durham's Grappling Hook is a band for a live audience. Fantastical battle hymns reforge power-metal glory with noisy indie rock and tough-guy blues-metal. Onstage, the tunes inspire high theatricality and comic-book suspense.

That has a lot to do with the shape-shifting way they're built: Just when the band settles into the mathy opening of "I Judge You Not O Juggernaut," for instance, it morphs into dry-throated hollering and sharp proto-metal riffs. But it'd be hard to place Grappling Hook reductively alongside metal revivalist peers in the local scene (Valient Thorr and Colossus being the most fitting comparisons). No, this is different and divergent, which is to be expected from Hook frontman Dave Bjorkback, who recently retired his superhero alter-ego The Torch Marauder. The Marauder's comedic, operatic songs were an oddball local favorite, but his propensity for grandiose vocals and dramatic rock flair aren't lost in this new Grappling Hook oeuvre.

"A Closing Fist Can Crush Your Heart" begins with the sort of belted-out proclamation ("Shadows form a deadly circle/ A closing fist can crush your heart/ Destroying all you know") one might expect to give way to a breakneck verse and a gigantic, Maiden-fashioned chorus. But it doesn't—at least not instantly. Instead, the intro leans into a gauzy verse, with humming organ and restrained drumming abetted by tinkling glockenspiel and muted guitars. But a minute and a quarter in, Bjorkback unleashes a piercing howl, a harbinger of the change that sweeps in to gratify the glorious metal tension that's been building.

Normally, such toying with structural expectations is a means for a band to move beyond its genre's trappings. But Grappling Hook never seems to be working within or without any given category, so much as it seems to be directing its energy toward an imagined roomful of people with beer cans clutched in their raised hands. These people are listening to Grappling Hook simply because it sounds good. Rightly so.

Grappling Hook plays with The Travesties and Monsonia at The Reservoir in Carrboro Friday, May 1. The 10 p.m. show is free. Grappling Hook also plays Saturday, May 9, at The Pinhook in Durham. Minor Stars and Le Weekend open.

Independent Weekly, 4/29/2009

Snoop Dogg preview

Staff Pick Snoop Dogg w/ Knaan, The Hustle Boyz
When: Sat., May 16 Phone: (843) 853-3276
Price: (sold out)
www.snoopdogg.com

Since making his debut with a prominent role on Dr. Dre’s watershed The Chronic in 1992, and following that with his own Doggystyle in 1993, Snoop (Doggy) Dogg has been a marquee rapper. Beginning as the embodiment of West Coast gangsta rap’s second wave, sporting a Death Row imprint on his records, and marrying his syrupy (resin-y?) flow to Dre’s G-funk production, Snoop managed to make party records from tales of murder, mayhem, and misanthropy. But as his career has advanced, Snoop has ridden his pimpin’ aesthetic from fierce-but-funky to charmingly self-parodic roles (Huggy Bear in 2004’s Starsky & Hutch) and carefree detours in his music (the semi-ironic sex jam “Sensual Seduction” wound up a hit). Snoop, perhaps more than any other rapper, has stretched his longevity, turning the thug life, authentic and exaggerated, into a lucrative career as a bona fide (no pun intended?) pop star. Fo’ shizzle. 8 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Charleston City Paper 5/12/09

Metal legend Wino's silver lining

Metal legend Wino's silver lining
Opportunity in the midst of tragedy
by Bryan Reed

A veteran figure in the world of underground metal, singer/guitarist Scott "Wino" Weinrich has slung his six-string for, most notably, the Obsessed and St. Vitus, but until early 2009, had never recorded under his own name. Then came Punctuated Equilibrium.

Flanked by Clutch drummer Jean-Paul Gaster and bassist Jon Blank (of Rezin), Wino assembled the stunning debut LP this year. It spotlights effortless musicianship, recasting '70s proto-metal as something new and exciting. It's heavy without being brutal, and smooth without being wimpy. It's the type of record that would sound at home on any classic rock station, sharing airtime with Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, and Led Zeppelin. Wino's leads cut ornate pathways through a hefty rhythm section, while his riffs stay simply effective and momentous.

During a recent stint in Europe, tragedy struck Wino's band. Wino described the sad situation like this: "With great sadness, I mourn the death of my brother and fellow bandmate Jon Blank who passed away unexpectedly this weekend. He will be greatly missed. I will continue as support for Clutch acoustic [as a solo acoustic act]."

Blank's death, of an apparent overdose, not only snuffed out his burgeoning talent, but cuts a big piece from Wino's band's musical mass. But it doesn't take away from the songs. Augmented greatly by their electric accoutrements, they're blues songs at their core. With Wino performing as a solo act, audiences could expect a new focus on the songs' simplicity and construction, less on the dazzle of Wino's dazzling electric leads and his rhythm section's barrel-chested heave-ho.

Even in the face of tragedy, Blank's untimely departure creates an opportunity for an even more intimate showcase of Wino's formidable talents, as well as providing a chance both for the musician and his audience to reconsider what it is that makes a good rock song. Stripped of their original context, the songs will have to stand on their own structure and conviction. Something they are entirely capable of doing. —Bryan Reed

Scott "Wino" Weinrich performs with Clutch and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster at the Music Farm (32 Ann St., 843-853-3276) on Tues. May 19. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are available for $23, $20 (advance). Visit musicfarm.com and southernlord.com for more.

Charleston City Paper, 5/13/09

Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio: 10 years to 'Agony'
Making Pop-punk Last
by Bryan Reed

Punk rarely rewards longevity. Many influential bands' entire careers — Operation Ivy, Minor Threat, and Rites of Spring, for example — can be condensed to one disc. It's not uncommon for a punk band to release one revered album, and for each subsequent release to be greeted with backlash from longtime fans demanding the purity of the early stuff.

Chicago's Alkaline Trio is no exception. The Trio's 1998 debut, Goddamnit, released on indie label Asian Man, is a lasting favorite, built on youthful (need we say, "punk?") abandon, clever songwriting, and a general bitterness that bridges the maturity gap with anti-cop rants ("Cop"), heavy crushes ("Clavicle"), and heavier drinking ("San Francisco"). Suffice it to say, it's the type of record people grew up to — the type of record that inspires kids to start bands, helps them deal with heartbreaks, and enhances the nursing of hangovers.

The same can't really be said of the Trio's latest, last year's Epic Records debut, Agony and Irony. Nor could it really be said that the latest is a departure for the band, whose particular brand of clever, dark pop-punk has grown ever smoother over the past decade.

Through a three-album stint on Vagrant Records, the band's focus shifted from rough-and-ready drunken pop-punk to a tighter, more melodically refined act newly obsessed with mortality. The blood-and-guts imagery that ran through the earliest songs stayed mostly intact, but was less blackout drunk messes and more Misfits-y murder and mayhem. With Crimson, the Trio's final indie-label LP, the band took an even denser approach to its arrangements, adding keys and strings for texture and donning a suit-and-tie aesthetic like fashion-forward undertakers. By all accounts the band was ready for its close-up.

The Alkaline Trio on tour now is a polished rock band with sharp hooks and a refined sensibility to its approach. Indeed, this is major-label rock, tight and bouncy, not unlike Green Day — another underground pop-punk band turned marquee act, thanks to embracing a bigger, more approachable sound. So maybe Alkaline Trio will be that rare once-punk band to last beyond the genre's built-in sell-by date.

Alkaline Trio plays with Saves the Day and Nightmare of You on Fri. May 8 at the Music Farm (32 Ann St., 843-577-6989). Doors open at 7 p.m. Admission is $21 ($18 in advance). See www.musicfarm.com and www.alkalinetrio.com for more.

Charleston Cty Paper, 5/6/2009

Againt Me! (again)

Against Me!
New Brookland Tavern: Friday, May 1
BY BRYAN REED

Gainesville, Fla., punk outfit Against Me! begins its major-label debut, New Wave (released on Sire Records), with a declaration embedded in its title track: “We can be the bands we wanna hear / We can define our own generation.”

More than 30 years of punk rock is condensed to one couplet.

It’s that kind of thoughtful attention to lyrical songwriting that has proved constant through the band’s career.

“The lyrics have always been the most important part of music,” opines Against Me! frontman Tom Gabel, and fitting the sentiment espoused by “New Wave,” Gabel sets out to write the songs he wants to hear — or at least to avoid the type of songs he can’t stand.

“I don’t want to listen to something that’s mindless,” he says.

And mindless is hardly a valid descriptor for the Gainesville band, the songs of which have bridged the space between the personal and the political, meshing the narrative bent of folk with a political outspokenness born of both folk and punk.

New Wave, the band’s fourth studio full-length, covers the life of an unrepentant junkie (“Thrash Unreal”), the paradox of protest songs (“White People For Peace”) and globalization (“Americans Abroad”). But where a lesser songwriter would resort to bumper-sticker slogans, Gabel mines big-ticket themes from individual observations.

“At this point, doing this full-time, you kinda gotta be open to whatever inspiration comes your way and taking in everything you see,” Gabel says.

But his songwriting bent might be the only constant in Against Me!’s career. To date, (and counting only full-lengths) the band has moved from its ramshackle folk-punk debut, Reinventing Axl Rose, released by punk label No Idea Records, to two increasingly accessible LPs on NOFX’s Fat Wreck Chords (As the Eternal Cowboy and Searching For A Former Clarity). And then from the Fat Wreck days to the sonically condensed and rock-centric sound of New Wave on major label Sire (which punker-than-thou naysayers should be reminded was the imprint on all the Ramones records).

As is custom of beloved indie bands moving to bigger deals, Against Me!’s major-label jump (like those of The Replacements and Hüsker Dü) was greeted with some backlash.

But, says Gabel, it’s been a natural and organic transition in the band’s still-ascendant career.

“The labels we’ve worked with over the years have been the right labels for the size we were at the time,” he says. “[Working with Sire] afforded us a lot of opportunities that I don’t think we would have gotten elsewhere.”

Label politics aside, Against Me!’s ultimate goal, Gabel says, is as it has always been: “to keep improving and put on the best shows we can and make the best records we can.”

The sonic transition, though, has been perhaps more fluid than many long-time fans would be willing to admit. And with the same voice as its foundation, Against Me! is undeniably the same band whose early recordings helped it became the de facto figurehead of the early-‘00s folk-punk scene.

So even as Against Me! prepares its second major-label release (again enlisting Nirvana/Smashing Pumpkins producer Butch Vig to man the boards), the old adage stands true: the more things change the more they stay the same. Against Me! is still the band its members want to hear. As they’ve grown older, maybe the tastes have changed a little, but the philosophy is the same. And the band’s career arc has been decided as much by the legions of fans that have filled ever-growing venues across America and abroad as the band itself.

So, as Gabel nonchalantly asks, “If life took you to that place, why would you not want it? I’d just be happy if I were able to play music and support myself doing it.”

The New Brookland Tavern is located at 122 State St. in West Columbia. Off With Their Heads and Of Angels and Lions open. Doors open at 7 p.m.; admission is $10. Call 791-4413 or visit newbrooklandtavern.com for more information.

Free Times, 4/29/2009

Against Me! gets bigger and better

Riding a New Wave

by Bryan Reed

Ryan Russell
Florida's Against Me! garnered enough cred for that extra exclamation mark

Against Me!
w/ Off With Their Heads, The 33's
Tues. April 28
8 p.m.
$10
Pour House
1977 Maybank Hwy.
(843) 571-4343
www.charlestonpourhouse.com
www.againstme.net

Against Me! has come a long way since a young, gravel-voiced Tom Gabel sang "Reinventing Axl Rose" on his band's debut EP, bashing the strings of his acoustic guitar like it could make him more sincere — aiming to "strike chords that cut like a knife/It would mean so much more than a ticket stub or a T-shirt."

The song — both in its acoustic context, and as the electrified title track of Against Me!'s first full-length — plays like a creed, a mission statement for the type of dirty anarchic ruffians that would form a band rooted equally in agit-folk and crust-punk. And it worked. Against Me! seems to have become the de facto figurehead for an entire scene of politically outspoken folk-punks (This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, Andrew Jackson Jihad, et. al.) with Gainesville, Fla., as their Mecca.

So with such revered status in the underground, it's understandable that die-hard fans might have greeted New Wave, Against Me!'s Sire debut with skepticism and/or scorn. The punk-versus-major label argument gets a new chapter. And it's a circular argument in which nobody ever wins or loses.

Indeed, New Wave, sacrifices much of the raw, brittle spontaneity of Against Me!'s earliest recordings. But it doesn't come without precedent, either. The band's stint on Fat Wreck Chords — which resulted in two studio LPs, 2003's As the Eternal Cowboy and 2005's Searching for a Former Clarity — showed a steady evolution toward a more polished, but no less intense presentation. Those chords that once cut with a serrated blade now sliced more fluidly.

But with New Wave, Against Me!'s approach is not only more condensed, but almost void of the folk sounds on which the band built its reputation. Recorded by veteran producer and drummer Butch Vig, New Wave is a big-label rock record. No doubt.

But the confliction Gabel puts into his lyrics make it fit — perhaps awkwardly, but fit nonetheless. "Americans Abroad!" chases globalization through the eyes of an internationally touring band. Gabel sings with customary muscularity, "Here we are a rock band looking for new audiences/Wherever we go Coca-Cola's already been/We're Americans abroad! We're Americans abroad!/I just can't help but think there's a comparison/While I hope I'm not like them, I'm not so sure."

As he's done since the early days, Gabel is casting political commentary through personal experience. But where "Reinventing Axl Rose" played out with naïve confidence, "Americans Abroad!" casts a more jaded look at the affair. It's less hopeful, but only in that it's more realistic, swapping the righteousness of youth for adult observation.

It's easy to declare, "Baby, I'm an anarchist" when you're still playing basements and bookstores across an underground America. But Against Me! isn't playing house shows anymore, perhaps mostly because of the very legions of fans that would scorn their success.

Gabel sings as boldly as he ever has, on New Wave's title track, "We can be the bands we want to hear." That's what they're doing. And anybody who doesn't want to hear Against Me! anymore should know there's a Guitar Center on Rivers Avenue. You're invited to reinvent Tom Gabel.

Charleston City Paper, 4/22/09

8 Days A Week: Thursday, 4/16

Raleigh
Magic Babies, The Huguenots

Tir Na Nog—Together, Raleigh's Magic Babies and Chapel Hill's Huguenots thoroughly mine the fertile grounds of British Invasion pop. Clean, guitar-led melodies and swoon-n-croon vocal harmonies drive the mod-ish pop of both bands. Where The Magic Babies add organ for a fuller sound, though, The Huguenots rely on wide-eyed earnestness, usually falling just on the right side of twee. But brandishing star-crossed love letters in the form of smooth, hooky three-minute gems without detachment or reluctance has long been the charm of these Merseybeat-disciple types, right? The free show starts at 10 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 4/15/09

Hearing Aid: Yes, Please

04.18 RESIST NOT, STRAIGHT 8S @ THE CAVE
Durham's Resist Not boasts one of the year's best songs in "Choice Means Choice," a teen pregnancy parable told in the first-person. In it, Aaron Ward gives personality and empathy to hot-button issues, presenting social politics with the very specific life of one scared, young girl. Here, Ward's quartet of rabblerousers—more often irreverent than overtly political—promises to complement the revivalist rockabilly of Hillsborough's Straight 8s with its own rollick, rooted in anti-folk's spare sound and the clattering one-two of the Tennessee Three. 7:30 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 4/15/09

Persistance pays off for Shelby actor

Published in The Shelby Star, March 26, 2009. Page 1B.

8 Days A Week

Monday 4.06

1 APR 2009

Richard BacchusChapel HillRichard Bacchus and the Luckiest GirlsThe Cave—By distilling the swagger of his old band, D-Generation, into a smoother brew—less snot, more soul—Raleighite Richard Bacchus and his Luckiest Girls touch on New York Dolls' glam, Ramones' punk (Bacchus played in Sprokket with Dee Dee), Stones' blues and Cheap Trick's power-pop. Together, this sounds precisely how a now-adult ex-punk ought to: steady, sharp, just somewhat streamlined and refined. Raleigh hard rock outfits Burning Rays and Left on Cates open, but we'll admit that Bacchus' is the best band on the bill. Admission to the 10 p.m. show will run you $5. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 4/1/2009

Live: Viking Storm, pt. II: Prayers answered

Live: Viking Storm, pt. II: Prayers answered
Bryan Reed · 5 Apr 2009, 10:40 AM · 1 Comment

Viking Storm, pt. II (Hammer No More The Fingers, The Future Kings of Nowhere, The Dry Heathens, Deleted Scenes, The Beast)
Duke Coffeehouse, Durham
Saturday, April 4

Hammer No More The Fingers could have been upstaged.

There was the matter of the 16-foot Viking warship—resting across the Duke Coffeehouse stage, adorned with shields representing each of the nine bands that comprised the Viking Storm lineup. Then there were the Future Kings of Nowhere, resurrected as a team of lanky (Minnesota) Vikings, purple jerseys and crisp white football pants included. And, of course, a Final Four victory for the Tar Heels.

But the night, as expected, belonged to Hammer. And the standard for album releases in the Triangle, as expected, was raised.

The set began and ended with a live rendition of Viking Storm’s power-metal theme song, all the more forceful for the menacing vocal contributions of Tooth’s J-Me Guptill. Not that Hammer needed any help, but when it came—from Guptill’s throat or Pneurotic Rich McLaughlin’s six-string—it was a complement, Hammer proving its command over the larger-than-life show hosted in honor of the band and its debut LP, Looking For Bruce.

But even in the two lengthy pauses in which bassist Duncan Webster and guitarist Joe Hall tuned their instruments, the dead air seemed intentional. Drummer Jeff Stickley filled in, doing his best Viking growl, and was greeted by warm laughter from the packed house, but it didn’t matter. The music was the highlight, as it should have been.

Fresh off a two-week tour, the band played as tight as it ever has, running through a shuffled version of Bruce’s tracklist, plus the unreleased “The Agency.” The crowd’s response: clapping and singing along from the middle of the mosh pit that brewed up halfway into the set. And it was a response earned by the band whose far-fetched idea to throw a two-night, Viking themed album release festival, had come to glorious reality, horned helmets and fur vests woven into the crowd and dominating the band’s on-stage attire—at least until it got too hot.

Indeed, the only force that seemed it might have been strong enough to upstage the headliner was The Future Kings of Nowhere, playing for the first time since announcing an indefinite hiatus in November. After four months of absence, FKON played as a lockstep sextet, borrowing members of The Drowsies to add horns, harmony and keys to Shayne O’Neill’s breakup anthems. The crowd, which by this point filled the venue comfortably, responded by singing every word back at the band as if the hiatus never happened. The knowledge that this could well be the last FKON show ever served only to heighten the urgency of the set.

But still, the show belonged to Hammer, who took FKON’s last-shot urgency and added explosive charisma and dramatic on-stage lighting for a definitive cap to the two-night local music bender.

Openers The Dry Heathens, Deleted Scenes and The Beast all played solid sets with plenty of their own highlights—The Beast’s funky hip-hop spin on the Viking Storm theme song, for one—but lingered in the long shadow of the night’s final act. Granted, that shadow shone like a spotlight, and was far from a bad place to be. The celebratory feeling began with the first drop of specially-brewed Viking ale and ended after 3 a.m. with the last handful of Viking warriors battling in the parking lot with foam weapons, emboldened by alcohol and a night of music they won’t soon forget.

Independent Weekly, Scan blog, 4/5/2009

Live: Viking Storm, pt. I: Tooth leaves an impression

Live: Viking Storm, pt. I: Tooth leaves an impression
Bryan Reed · 4 Apr 2009, 12:41 PM · Comment

Viking Storm, pt. I (Tooth, Caverns, The Bronzed Chorus, Pink Flag)
The Pinhook, Durham
Friday, April 3

Mere observation be damned.

As Durham powerhouse Tooth packed itself onto the cramped Pinhook stage—rightfully headlining night one of Viking Storm—the band’s charged gallop churned every body, mine included, in the front half of the room to a flailing froth. It’s a testament to the band’s intensity and deep, cutting grooves that they could drive a room full of people to hurtle themselves at one another at a show where moshing had no precedent prior to the headliner’s set. Mere observation was impossible.

It’s a shame Tooth won’t be playing again until August. The band’s lunging sludge—lacerated by sharp leads and sutured back together with frontman J-Me Guptill’s demonic growls—ranks with the genre’s best and brightest active bands.

But Tooth’s was hardly the only noteworthy performance to come from the four-band bill. The night’s lineup moved smoothly, each band complementing the others despite a wide sonic palette. A chain mail-clad Pink Flag kicked off the show with a loose, carefree set of irreverent riot-pop, something like a noisier Bratmobile. Playing without any trace of pretense, the trio allowed its music to speak for itself, and even as the set lagged between songs it moved along and proved a solid opening.

The meat in the local-band sandwich, though, was a pair of instrumental acts—Greensboro’s Bronzed Chorus and D.C.’s Caverns—who both stretch the riff-based rock template into new and interesting directions. The Bronzed Chorus’ use of loop pedals is part of the duo’s larger-than-ought-to-be-possible sound, but the real key is the energy and urgency put into the songs, and their functioning as complete, melodic entities without the use of a vocal crutch.

Caverns, likewise, crafts concise, rocking songs, but theirs borrows less from post-rock and more from the close kinship of classical music and heavy metal. Classical piano forms the melodic focal point of the D.C. Trio, but guitar parts that alternately shred and bludgeon marry thick, frantic drumming to walk the line between hardcore and metal without feeling forced. Abrupt shifts and stops recall Fugazi’s dynamic, but that’s where the comparison ends.

Still, Tooth garnered the most physical response from the crowd, and in so doing, proved its ability to transcend its often disparaged genre, not by hyphenating it with some more-accessible nonsense, but by being really damn good at being a metal band.

Independent Weekly, Scan blog, 4/4/2009

The Thermals, Now We Can See

The Thermals
Now We Can See
[Kill Rock Stars; 2009]

Styles: punk/indie

Others: Ted Leo + Pharmacists

Links: The Thermals - Kill Rock Stars

Last year, people voted for hope and won. This year, The Thermals follow up their acclaimed 2006 LP, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, a scathing, enraged political album, with Now We Can See and a new (cautiously) optimistic outlook.

The result is an exuberant, almost joyful record brimming with sly cynicism and a newfound fondness for whoa-oh refrains and handclaps. On “When I Was Afraid,” lead Thermal Hutch Harris says of his former fear, “Fear was mine/ Fear was by my side/ It kept well, hell it kept me alive.” He’s still addressing the same subject (Bush-era discontent), but here he sounds liberated. Similarly, opener “When I Died” sounds almost triumphant. Nods toward the preceding album filter in and out, recurring images of water, swimming, and marine life echo Harris’ invoking Noah on The Body, The Blood, The Machine. But as much as it can be read as a sequel, companion piece or counterpoint to its predecessor, Now We Can See is another singular effort from the Portland punks.

The rhythmic base is elastic, pogoing effortlessly (and more fittingly) behind Harris’ particular vocal cadence. He’s always had a way with wordplay, making it sound natural, even slight, while lodging his phrases deep in the listener’s mind, making addictive hooks of simple couplets. Vocally, Harris is declarative, proud and confident. It’s a change from the boiling-blood seething he displayed on The Body, The Blood, The Machine, but like the hopeful zeitgeist that seems to have inspired the record, it’s a welcome change.

For The Thermals, though, this is at least a turning point and at most the band’s finest moment. “At The Bottom Of The Sea” slows down, betraying the tenderness that was only hinted at on previous efforts. “You Dissolve” (again, with the water) caps off the album with energetic confidence, a Jerry Lee Lewis piano part plinking in the background and Harris offering a sardonic message of contentment: “It’s just another way you dissolve/ Into steam/ You dissolve/ Like a dream.”

1. When I Died
2. We Were Sick
3. I Let It Go
4. Now We Can See
5. At The Bottom Of The Sea
6. When We Were Alive
7. I Called Out Your Name
8. When I Was Afraid
9. Liquid In, Liquid Out
10. How We Fade
11. You Dissolve

by Bryan Reed

Tiny Mix Tapes

American Aquarium's music rocks with Bible-Belt vigor

American Aquarium's music rocks with Bible-Belt vigor
Broken Hearts in Kicker Boots
by Bryan Reed

American Aquarium w/ Kentucky Shoes
Sat. April 11
9 p.m.
$8, $6/adv.
Pour House
1977 Maybank Hwy.
(843) 571-4343
www.charlestonpourhouse.com
www.myspace.com/americanaquarium

Pity the woman who breaks BJ Barham's heart. She'll probably end up in a song. Then the American Aquarium bandleader will sneer as he hisses her name into the microphone on any one of a thousand nights in any one of a thousand bars just like the one in which he probably met her.
He'll preface "Whore Song" — a live staple — with a sly comment. "I'm not bitter or anything, I swear," a pained smile curling his lip. "You fuck like a woman/But you love like a little girl" he'll accuse before launching into the chorus. "And I hope he breaks your heart/And I hope you cry all night/And I hope you feel like I do now."

His venom is convincingly pure. He sings like that very woman is in the back of the room smirking at him. His eyes narrow, welling up with bile and tenderness. He's nothing if not sincere.

And that sincerity — an echo of forbears like Bruce Springsteen, Jay Farrar, and Craig Finn — is a large part of American Aquarium's appeal. For the most part, the Raleigh-based band doesn't stray far from its thematic trinity: girls, God, and alcohol. But within its narrow scope, the band paints detailed portraits on a wide canvas, resulting in a universal resonance, helped more than a little by Barham's earnest intensity behind the microphone.

The band's new album, Dances for the Lonely, trades the whiskey-drenched country-rock dust-ups of 2008's The Bible and the Bottle for fuller, more colorful bar rock arrangements not too far removed from the Hold Steady. It also finds the quintet at its best, able to draw upon its back catalog's alt-country leanings, but flesh out the old ideas with new textures (like horns and pianos) and more completely mesh the band's rock and country tendencies.
Whether the band steps back to quietly complement a country ballad like "Downtown Girls" with a sad shuffle and softly weeping steel guitar, or ramping up a bar-room anthem like "Mary Mary," it sounds equally well suited for a dive bar, a stadium, or the best Chevy Trucks commercial never made.

Live, Barham can give his band a break, for a solo song borrowing plenty from all of Ryan Adams' heart-on-sleeve balladry and flashes of lyrical brilliance. Or with the band in tow, he can lead the room through shots of Uncle Tupelo's whiskey-drenched and gravel-worn country-rock and the Hold Steady's fists-raised bombast, making American Aquarium a versatile unit, and one that ought to strike a chord with anybody who's ever been drunk and/or heartbroken. Or about to be.

Sometime in the set, Barham will settle down. The bile in his throat will recede, and he'll remind you that love and lust isn't all pain. Maybe he'll crack a smile and head into "Clark Avenue," whose refrain gives The Bible and the Bottle its title. Jump blues piano trills and Telecaster crunch meets a blazing fiddle and a driving rhythm section. Barham's telling his story about meeting a "sexy as sin" redhead in double-time. "Her hand kept crawlin' up my thigh/She says, 'I don't do this with most guys,'" he boasts, surprised by his own luck. "My heart was racin' like an engine and dancin' like a Harlem queen."

Here's hoping — for her sake — she does him right.

Charleston City Paper, 4/8/2009

Hearing Aid

YES, PLEASE

04.04 FREQUENC ROOTS/ ACOUSTIC JAMDOWN @ NIGHTLIGHT
Tonight offers an ode to American roots music through "historically relevant DJ sets" and live music paying homage to the blues and old-time American music. It kinda makes Pinche Gringo—the Greensboro duo whose garage-rock rattle evokes blues and rockabilly plenty, but hardly on account of acoustic guitars—seem the wild card. But ex-Spinn Josh Johnson's grimy guitar lines meander and swing like his Piedmont forebears. Virginia's Black Twigs pair hollerin' breakdowns and languid contemplative instrumentals, while Brooklynite soloist Feral Foster throws his Delta moan and bottleneck guitar into clean-cut pop melodies. Unnamed DJs drop deep blues cuts and lost soul into the wee hours. $5/ 10 p.m. —Bryan Reed

04.08 AUXES VS. CHALLENGER @ LOCAL 506
Fronting his two-headed Auxes/ Challenger creation, this is more accurately Dave Laney vs. Dave Laney. In one (presumably longer than usual) set, Laney's band dips into the catalogs of both Challenger—Laney's early-'00s Chicago punk band—and Auxes, the more recent, more open-ended project which, ironically, would be the challenger were this an actual battle. Challenger's muscular shout-alongs offer a streamlined assault, striking head-on with the paired vocals of Laney and his Milemarker cohort Al Burian. Indeed, Challenger's got the strength. But Auxes' winding guitars and jittery rhythms offer a more nimble, more versatile approach. Looks like the audience wins. Boxbomb opens. Free/ 9 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 4/1/2009

VISITING ACT|Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

MARCH 11, 2009
VISITING ACT Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
Turning Points: Ryan Adams does stuff 'n' shit
BY BRYAN REED

Today, David Ryan Adams will lead his Cardinals through a set at the Performing Arts Center. It might be one of his last. Or not. On Jan. 14, Adams announced his pending retirement from music on his blog. Referencing the current tour, Adams wrote, "I am excited to finish this wonderful time I have had with the Cardinals, and whatever new adventures may come after march. Atlanta will be my last venture with the band and I am grateful for the time we have had and maybe someday we will have more stories to tell together."
Expressing a sincere dissatisfaction with the life of a touring musician, addressing hearing issues, the hardship on personal relationships, and a fear of a damaged legacy, Adams offered only a slight glimpse of hope for his fans: "Maybe we will play again sometime and maybe I will work my way back into some kind of music situation, but this is the time for me to step back now."
Seven days later, the retirement announcement was deleted. The general assumption was that Adams changed his mind. It wouldn't be a first for the singer/songwriter, who since becoming an alt-country icon as the frontman of Whiskeytown more than 10 years ago, has carried a reputation for erratic behavior. Notorious bouts of stage fright and a constant stream of studio work have all became synonymous with his name.
But his latest album, 2008's Cardinology, (Lost Highway), the third to feature the Cardinals as his backing band, finds Adams seated into a comfortable groove. He seems solidified by the sobriety he found in time for 2007's Easy Tiger (Lost Highway). This Adams, at least in the studio, sounds more focused and comfortable, which results in some of his most consistent work, even if not always his most exciting. Still, the fact remains, when Adams hits it just right, his songs are close to genius caliber.
That potential for greatness is what's kept Adams' fans coming back time and again for every album and every show. It's probably a good thing it was that blog post, and not Adams' future music career, that was deleted.
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals perform at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center (5001 Coliseum Drive, 843-529-5050) on Wed. March 11 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $31. Visit www.coliseumpac.com and www.cardinology.com.

Charleston City Paper

Elvis Perkins In Dearland

Elvis Perkins In Dearland
[XL; 2009]
Styles: rock/pop singer/songwriter

Others: Benjy Ferree, Van Morrison

Links: Elvis Perkins In Dearland - XL

Barring the obvious conclusion that, like so many discussions related to one’s appreciation of music, individual taste makes a concrete solution impossible, let’s ponder for a moment the importance of lyrics in pop songcraft. Granted, you’ve got your Darnielles, those whose verbose storytelling is the sole focal point no matter the sonic qualities. But in general, lyrics are shaded by our own impressions and interpretations, a misheard line becomes an existential dispute if left to fester too long and given too much gravity.

And what of the casual listen? What of the melodic or textural qualities that usually illicit the initial attraction? If lyrics form a song’s personality, is a good hook really no more substantial than a killer rack?

With his second LP, Elvis Perkins, an orphan to two of his era’s greatest tragedies — father Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates in Psycho) died of AIDS in 1992, and mother Berry Berenson, a photographer, died on 9/11 — keeps his pen trained on matters of finality. But you could figure that out by reading the tracklist. “Hours Last Stand.” “Doomsday.” “123 Goodbye.” You get the picture.

But, much like his 2007 debut, Ash Wednesday, Perkins speaks through characters and, more importantly, though his musical arrangements to present a nuanced approach to musing on mortality and loss and loneliness. And, given a tracklist and the instrumental takes, I’d imagine you’d get much the same message.

Album standout “Doomsday,” filled with vibrant horns and a barrel-chested oom-pah bass line, is a celebratory arrangement — celebratory like a New Orleans funeral. “Till Doomsday/Fiddle-Aye-Ay” boasts Perkins to a lover he’s forgotten. But simply by evoking a Dixieland jazz band’s lively eulogy, the message is solidified: finality isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The death of one thing is the birth of another. Lyrics are only a corroborative account. Same for “How’s Forever Been Baby,” a trudging shuffle, dirge-like in its languishing pace and spare ensemble. Piano, light drums, and acoustic guitar stagger along with the speaker. Occasional brass and harmonica evoke the blues. It gives Perkins the perfect soapbox from which to plead “How’s forever been, Baby?” This time he’s got his memory, and maybe this time he’s not so okay with losing someone, but again, the verses rely more on Perkins downcast croon than the actual words he’s crooning. The words don’t hurt. His images are masterfully placed and phrased. But the point’s not lost without them.

And maybe that’s the real mark of a good songwriter, when you can extract pieces without tumbling the tower, even though the combined effort of all those pieces all serve to strengthen the song. Nothing’s wasted, but all that’s necessary is the inspiration.

1. Shampoo

2. Hey

3. Hours Last Stand

4. I Heard Your Voice In Dresden

5. Send My Fond Regards To Lonelyville

6. I’ll Be Arriving

7. Chains, Chains, Chains

8. Doomsday

9. 123 Goodbye

10. How’s Forever Been Baby

by Bryan Reed

Tiy Mix Tapes

Butterflies' Nothing's Personal

(Trekky Records)

11 MAR 2009 • by Bryan Reed

"For you, I'll go and dig up my old roller-blades/ I'm taking off work for the weekend," Butterflies frontman Josh Kimbrough promises during "Relive Brielle," perhaps the best song on his band's Nothing's Personal. Musically, the song is uncharacteristic of the band, its electric charge proving an unexpected counterpoint to the rest of the album's acoustic shuffle. But thematically, it's the crux of what Butterflies is all about: small, simple gestures of friendship cast through a nostalgic filter.

Purportedly the product of Kimbrough's post-grad musings about lost friends, bands and freedom, Nothing's Personal proves to be a bittersweet collection that plays like a series of extremely personal notes: "Hang-Ups" tides its morose verses ("The words once music to your ears/ Have turned to daggers in your heart") into the album's most hopeful refrain: "You're gonna make it/ Whatever you do." The simplicity in the lyrics behooves Kimbrough, whose limited voice manages to express a very real sense of vulnerability and honesty. In fact, the album's biggest flaw comes from overdone arrangements, auxiliary instruments brought too far to the fore, where they intrude on Kimbrough's coming-of-age reflections. However, even this flaw is relative. An example: Robert Britt's fiddle—a frequent culprit—draws intricate and delightful melodies. Even as it oversteps, it engages.

Overall, though, Butterflies' latest aims for the heart and rarely misses. Kimbrough's songwriting is detailed but not obsessive, allowing the gauze of memory to soften his focus. In tandem with his voice, it gives the songs a welcome sense of sincerity and intimacy.

Butterflies headlines a free show at Local 506 Wednesday, March 18. Husband & Wife and Wes Phillips open.

Independent Weekly, 3/12/09

Live: Harvey Milk, "a baptism in tone and volume"

Live: Harvey Milk, “a baptism in tone and volume”

Bryan Reed · 3 Mar 2009, 2:13 PM · Comment

Harvey Milk, Black Skies, Pontiak
Local 506, Chapel Hill
Friday, Feb. 27

Harvey Milk is a band to feel live more than see: Sure ,the unassuming trio, in its old jeans and novelty T-shirts (singer/guitarist Creston Spiers’ read “Lord of the Strings”), was animated and personable on stage Friday, cracking smiles and spreading surprising affability from its Local 506 pulpit.

Harvey Milk's Creston Spiers: Oh, Lord. (Photo: Bryan Reed)

But it was hardly a visual spectacle. Then the music started, and it became clear why Black Skies frontman Kevin Clark, amid a tuning break, hurried his bandmates along: “Come on, we’ve got a show to see.” His sentiment echoed that of a growing audience, all eager to hear Harvey Milk.

For a full hour, the Athens-born weird-metal institution trudged its way through a career-spanning set. A few hundred heads—all nodding involuntarily to the band’s deep, rumbling pulse—cast their eyes to the stage. Chests rattled with the force of the amplifiers. The tandem of Harvey Milk’s down-tuned, start-stop sturm und drang and frontman Creston Spiers’ cavernous moan mines blues and drone, creating an impossibly weighty sound, a baptism in tone and volume. Milk’s deliberate pacing and loud-quiet-silent-louder dynamic made its performance—save for cuts from The Pleaser, which Spiers declared “our rock album”—hard to describe as a rock show. The structural elements of the songs didn’t fit the norm. Still, the feeling was the same.

The tar-thick heaviness of Harvey Milk proved an ideal counterpoint to Pontiak, who opened. The Virginia trio’s psychedelic overtones lent a spaciousness and melodicism to its sludgy riffs without sacrificing heft.

Pontiak's Van Carney (Photo: Bryan Reed)

If Harvey Milk were a glacier, slow, monolithic and uncompromising, Pontiak proved the groundwater beneath it, more fluid and prone to directional shifts. Both, though, seemed to have developed organically from atavistic elements, existing seemingly as they would in any era.

The same could not be said of local openers Black Skies, whose midtempo heavy metal—something akin to High on Fire’s more straighforward material—offered plenty of glimpses at potential, but relied more on a highly kinetic stage presence from Clark. While certainly enjoyable, the set felt rushed and a bit misplaced.

Black Skies' Kevin Clark (Photo: Bryan Reed)

Independent Weekly's "Scan" music blog. 3/3/09

Album of the Month

Whatever Brain's Soft Dick City cassette

(self-released)

25 FEB 2009 • by Bryan Reed

Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player.
This month's Album of the Month is presented as one track, due to the cassette nature of its release. The track order is: 1. Dead Flowers (The Urinals) 2: Nesting 3: Mount Whatever 4: Eli C/O 2k5 5: Swhatever 6: What Happened to All the Destructionaires? 7: BOHD 8: Pyramids 9: Summer Jammin' 10: What Happened to All the Destructionaires?

Also reviewed:
Whatever Brains's Mt. Whatever 7"
(Bull City Records)

In the half-hour it takes to hear Whatever Brains' Soft Dick City—a spray-painted, cassette-only release bookended by a screeching Urinals cover and a Johnny Cash sound-collage sabotage—there's little question what this Raleigh quartet is about: This is a band that can't sit still. From The Urinals homage and the Johnny Cash sacrilege to the hooky-and-hissy space between, raw enthusiasm comes tied together with jagged and noisy interludes.

Within that jittery impatience and irreverent ruckus, witness a consistency of style that's not just uncommon but mostly unknown for such a new band. And Whatever Brains has done it twice now. Just as Soft Dick City feels spontaneous in its noise and spittle-lipped in its urgency, the subsequent Mt. Whatever 7" feels self-assured and somehow meticulous in its relative professionalism.

The three tracks that comprise Mt. Whatever—two of which, the title track and "Summer Jammin," are reprised from Soft Dick City—come out cleaner, which is to say less shrouded in feedback, but no less excitable. On the 7" version of "Mount Whatever," cooed vocal harmonies turn to roars behind Rich Ivey's snotty snarl (Ivey is a contributor to the Independent Weekly). Jagged guitars spike harder, but with less static. It sounds no less primal than on the tape, where a droning rumble cloaks the song, making it rough and rowdy. The no-fi charm and noise-fueled unification of Soft Dick City is exhilarating, but the same holds—just in different ways—for Mt. Whatever's half-polished fits. The tape trades undulating feedback and squelching electronics for the single's basic guitars-bass-drums setup. Neither suffers the exchange.

Taken together, these two releases—both issued on formats you may consider obsolete—are defiantly good but defiantly inaccessible for mass markets. Just 500 copies of a 7" and a handful of cassette tapes remain as the lone artifacts of the band's existence to date. This is the sort of sticky stuff that could be huge, though (we've called these Brains "Raleigh's best new band," and we'll echo that here). Collectors and early listeners are rewarded, then, with two very different but complementary releases, each of which keeps its best track—Soft Dick City's "Swhatever" and Mt. Whatever's b-side, "Crass Ringtones"—proprietary and isolated. This is the stuff from which anthems, legends and eBay auctions come.

What functions as a two-part debut shows Whatever Brains to be a band born fully formed, a more prickly and brash cousin to Ivey's defunct Crossed Eyes, but with a similar foundation on pop-structured punk. Indeed, it's Whatever Brains' greatest virtue that, behind the din of scorched amps, shattered chords and snot-rocket singing, there's a gooey bubblegum center charged with immediacy and drunken abandon.

Mt. Whatever has just been picked up by Matador's distribution wing, so get your hands on the vinyl now.

Hearing Aid

YES, PLEASE

02.28 WAUMISS @ NIGHTLIGHT

The willfully scattershot sonics of Waumiss made the duo's self-titled LP a playful and engaging platter. Bits of dub and electronica pulse through psychedelic gauze and indie rock propulsion. Half-formed song structures keep things accessible, while allowing Clarque and Caroline Blomquist, Waumiss's core, to vary their textures—and the songs' direction—at a whim. In doing so, the pair creates an enticing, evolving sonic landscape that manages to be both fun and interesting. With Evil Wiener frontman Billy Sugarfix at 10 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Des Ark Photo by Jeremy M. Lange

03.01 DES ARK, YARDWORK @ NIGHTLIGHT

Now boasting a sturdy three-piece lineup, Des Ark is at its most muscular yet. It's a hellride of unpredictability that purrs and sputters and roars in new and exciting directions, driven, as ever, by Aimee Argote and her twin selves: the heartbreaking songwriter and the caterwauling frontwoman—either of which could send most bands whimpering. Good thing, then, that the more-than-competent Yardwork—Charlotte's next-big-thing for a hot minute now—will take on support duties. The band's room-filling clatter recalls Akron/Family and an Afrobeat arkestra as fronted by ex-hardcore kids. Register opens at 10 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Sound Board

Bleeding Through w/ Acacia Strain, As Blood Runs Black, Impending Doom

Sun., March 1.

Bleeding Through is yet another in a long line of metalcore bands worshipping at the altar of At The Gates, the Swedish band that literally created the template for bands melding death metal’s brutality with hardcore pacing and moody melodies. So why should we care about Bleeding Through? Short answer: they’re coming to town, and if the metalcore sound appeals to you, you might enjoy this. Consider the bulk of the genre to have the explosive power of Mentos and Diet Coke, which is to say it’s as momentarily impressive and ultimately innocuous as a geyser of Nutrasweetened cola. At its best, Bleeding Through bursts like a hand grenade, a tightly wound balance of keyboard gauze behind bludgeoning blast beats, squealing false harmonics and gruff hardcore vocals. At its worst, Bleeding Through is still as good as any other metalcore band. —Bryan Reed
$16, $13 (adv.), www.bleedingthrough.com.

Music Farm
32 Ann St., (Downtown)
(843) 853-3276
http://www.musicfarm.com

Charleston City Paper, 2/25/09

Hearing Aid

YES, PLEASE

02.22 ICY DEMONS, WHATEVER BRAINS @ LOCAL 506

Chicago's Icy Demons bring its swinging pop—keyboards buoying bass grooves and electronic accents like a head-fucked bossa nova—to the marquee. But the real draw ought to be Raleigh natives Whatever Brains, whose frantic fuzz-punk lives and dies by in-the-red guitars, snotty vocals and undeniable pop hooks. The band kicked off the new year with the three-song Mt. Whatever 7-inch, the first release on the brand-spankin'-new Bull City Records label. Watch out for these Whatever Brains, literally and figuratively. $8/ 9:30 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 2/18/09

8 Days A Week

Sunday 2.22

Chapel Hill
Dexter Romweber & The New Romans
The Cave—Drummer Dave Schmitt founded The New Romans as a vehicle for putting duo-veteran Dexter Romweber in front of a nonet. The band invoked Romweber's underlying love for surf-rock, '60s crooners and lounge music. Hazy keys and blankets of guitar reverb wash behind his growl. Saxophones bleat and moan. The music swings, slinks and seems to exist outside of time. Night Tide, released late last year, serves to document the band's rich retro-chic: rock 'n' roll with a balance of grooving instrumentals and charged shoulda-been-standards, meant for dancing in tight, dark bars. Pay $5 at 9 p.m. —Bryan Reed

Independent Weekly, 2/18/09

VISITING ACT | Michael Franti & Spearhead

FEBRUARY 18, 2009

VISITING ACT | Michael Franti

Spearheading pop music globalization: Michael Franti & Spearhead's worldly reggae rocks

BY BRYAN REED

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The idealistic Michael Franti and his band return with a pile of grooves

For all its questionable authority, Wikipedia has a means of prioritizing facts such that the first sentence of any entry is often alarmingly telling. It's little wonder then that Michael Franti's entry begins thusly: "Michael Franti (born April 21, 1966, in Oakland) is an American poet, musician, and composer of African, American Indian, Irish, French, and German descent." This is telling in that the author of Franti's micro-biography deemed Franti's diverse ethnicity second in importance only to the most basic details of his career. He's a musician who is multiracial.

And indeed, Franti's multiculturalism has been his biggest selling point since the earliest days of his band Spearhead. The same image of worldliness and multicultural awareness remains the primary focus on Spearhead's latest, All Rebel Rockers. Recorded in Kingston, Jamaica, with famed reggae producers Sly & Robbie, All Rebel Rockers adopts reggae's deep bass grooves, syncopated staccato guitars, and lyrics that mesh spirituality with politics — owing to the Marley school of songwriting. And at times it comes off a bit forced. The pairing of "Rude Boys Back in Town" and "A Little Bit of Riddim" are so tied to reggae-specific imagery that it borders on stereotype — think Combat Rock, not Natty Dread. Still, Franti's lyrics place his beliefs and motivations into simple terms: "A little bit of riddim make the world go 'round," he chants through the chorus of "Rock with Me," "I'm a human being, y'all."

Franti's messages of global understanding and unity are stated in no uncertain terms. This is where Franti & Spearhead are at their most consistent: making easily digestible statements into idealistic manifestos. But deeper into the LP, the sloganeering and typecasting of earlier cuts gives way to a proper mélange of worldly sounds, and Franti gives the politics some breathing room. On the record, he sings a lot about the transformative powers of music. But it's when he doesn't have to sing about them that his message seems most believable.

Michael Franti & Spearhead share the bill with Cherine Anderson and Courtney John at the Music Farm (32 Ann St., 843-853-3276) on Sat, Feb. 21. 8 p.m. Admission is $25. Visit www.musicfarm.com and www.spearheadvibrations.com for more.

Charleston City Paper, 2/18/09

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

02/18/2009

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

(Paw Tracks)

www.paw-tracks.com

Good feeling my ass. Sure, Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele deliver the charming, jangly crooner-pop replete with sunkissed steel guitar, easy shuffle sin the drumbeats and that ukulele, which, while perhaps something short of "magnificent" is at the very least pretty gosh-darn nice-sounding. And yeah, May himself delivers a warm kind of croon, something like a cheered-up Morrissey-even when he's a heartbroken troubadour as on the schmaltzy waltz "Girls On The Square," where he sings "The girls on the square make me blue/I always compare them with you." Indeed, May's lyrics are not so very good feeling at all. At one moment he's smiling to cover a wince, drinking to numb the pain on "I'm An Alcoholic," the next he's filled with schadenfreude, singing, "How does it feel to be nothing?/I wouldn't know" on "College Town Boy."

The Dent May proffering his so-called Good Feeling Music is a bit of a downer, a maudlin popsmith masquerading behind upbeat tunes evoking shallow, sentimentalist cheer like a sad clown intent on drawing laughter from his own undue misfortune. Maybe it's a coping mechanism or maybe it's a gimmick. It doesn't really matter. The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele does the job; it softens the blows we're dealt by attracting us, first with a chipper melody and then with the ability to point at the characters in the songs and remark, "Well, at least I'm not that guy." Sometimes that's the best medicine.

Standout Tracks: "College Town Boy," "Girls On The Square," BRYAN REED

Blurt, 2/18/09