Rob Hollamby

I write about music. You can also find me at Crack in the Road and The 405.

[roastwiththemost-blog]

Rob

Dave

——

Every now and then, when your life gets complicated and you bail on your mate’s birthday bash, the only cure is to float the conciliatory promise of a pub roast at them.

This usually works, if you remember to book. I didn’t, and it took a series of increasingly-sweaty Sunday...

[robhollamby]

Groundislava - Frozen Throne

Look up there.

Wouldya look at that cover?!

I mean, look at it.

That cover is everything, to the atom, that I would have wanted from a video game, from a toy, from a cartoon, as a child. The neon-on-black, HUD vibes of its logo. The cybernetic suggestions adorning Jasper Patterson (for it is he)'s shadowy visage. It's Metal Gear. It's Perfect Dark. It's Fade to Black. It's so. Fucking. Cool.

It's also the first indication of where Patterson has been fuelling up for Frozen Throne, his third full-length as Groundislava. Nah, not video games necessarily (though the connection between those and his music has been well documented), but the '90s in particular. The once dark-haired boy has had a peroxide makeover, coming off something like a disco'd-up version of Keifer Sutherland circa-Flatliners. Speaking of whom, Frozen Throne's high-concept sci-fi thrust (boy lives in dystopian future, comes to rely on electronic girl-dream, girl disappears, boy goes postal) evokes the likes of (don't say fucking Bladerunner, do not say fucking Bladerunner) Sutherland-starring '90s flick Dark City, as well as a smidge of Total Recall, or anything else set in a fucked-up metropolis that exacerbates the equally fucked-up psychology of its protagonist. The music itself is Patterson's most overt flirtation with that decade's dance music, as well as its pop and R&B (whatever that means anymore); a weird kind of nostalgia for a view of future past.

So from the pizzicato/panpipes balladeering of album opener 'Girl Behind The Glass', we're dragged willingly or no to the decade of my childhood by R Kelly's dread hand, and in this sense, Frozen Throne is as transportive as its concept. Patterson cherry-picks from a bank of '90s staples throughout the record, from sort-of-sexy slow jams ('Under the Glow'), to clattering breakbeat ('Terminate Uplink'), to bouncy garage ('Feel the Heat'). Thing is, most of my fellow citizens into this sort of thing twenty years ago were also busy crunching their way through fistfuls of blue doves and being part of the biggest countercultural movement since 1967. What sounded good then doesn't necessarily hold up so well now, and much of Frozen Throne can come across pastiche rather than reinvention. 'Girl Behind the Glass' almost gets powerful when it stops relying on its interminably-repeated, Dali-dripping titular epithet and drops away into Patterson's searing keys, but the moment's all too brief. 'Feel the Heat's bloopy bassline works the other way, slinking into the party to high fives and raised drinks, only to wobble out to a ubiquitous facepalm two and a half minutes later, when its goofy spring-loaded synth buddy shows up and makes an arse out of himself.

It's not that Patterson can't fashion something beautiful out of nostalgia, as anyone familiar with his videogame-evoking oeuvre thus far will know. The guy's a past master at wringing warm emotion from cold machines, especially when paired with a doleful voice - any of the Jake Weary-featuring cuts on his debut speak to this. That record also demonstrated his deftness with a dance track, and not all of that magic is lost on Frozen Throne. The aforementioned 'Terminate Uplink' is the record's most successful marriage of banger and concept, conjuring Tron-coloured landscapes, a lightspeed ride through a motherboard jungle, soundtracked by frenetic, quietly explosive drum patterns. It's followed by the title track, which ranks among the most majestic pieces of music that Patterson's ever created, whipping itself up from TV-static snowfall to Balearic euphoria via Anthony Calonico's bruised soul. Patterson has tapped up Calonico's 'Future Pop' outfit Rare Times for inclusion across much of Frozen Throne, and whilst it makes sense to have one recurring voice across a record like this, Rare Times are more often to be found dropping clunkers than weaving rich imagery. Chief culprit is 'October Pt 2', on which Calonico repeatedly emotes the creepy, vaguely stalkery hook "So don't run away, let this be your new home," over sickly house that owes more than a little to Whigfield's 'Saturday Night'. A band like Rare Times doesn't need to excel lyrically in their normal, croony context, but for a record with this kind of thematic drive, their high-saccharine melodrama swaps out power supply for blown fuses.

This is all kind of a shame, because Patterson sure as shit knows how to dial in his tones, and in many ways Frozen Throne is his most cohesive body of work yet. Where before he went from the gentle calm of synthesized seashores to flipping the bird at brostep in the space of a song, everything here feels like the same, radar-hued record, and that's to its credit. But, like coming back on regular solids after binging on chocolate cereal, the tooth-rotting sugariness of Frozen Throne's poppier cuts tend to overpower its mood pieces, so 'The Descent's near-subliminal bass grind, or the Ozrics-channeling keyboard duels on 'October Acid' get lost in the record's more syrupy excesses, rendered empty where they should be substantial. Instead of smashing apart and reassembling its twenty-something visual and sonic template, built in a time when our tastes ran simpler and summers stretched on into infinity, Frozen Throne relies on sentimentality for its weight, and listening can come off something like revisiting your favourite Saturday morning cartoons as an adult: more head-splitting brightness than genuine magic.

[robhollamby]

Speedy Ortiz - Real Hair

The term got torn a new one decades ago when Sonic Youth called it 'disgusting', ill-equipped to represent the effort inherent in slogging away at being an alternative rock band. But 'slacker' is a word that gets chucked around in much of the press attendant to Massachusetts' Speedy Ortiz, a band who, yes, wreath themselves in sludge and a deceptive looseness of groove, a louche delivery that belies the bitchin' shred of their fretboard acrobatics. Frontwoman Sadie Dupuis, as is often mentioned, also fronts an all-girl Pavement covers outfit, an homage to a band similarly tied up in the ideology of that word. That Steven Malkmus is as musically active as ever at 47 is also kind of telling, but whatever.

So yeah, we get it. 'Slack' equates to rad, vibey, mad decent. But Speedy Ortiz' physical hard work notwithstanding (their touring ethic is after all separate from their sound), it's still a broken description. The songs on Real Hair will be no real revelation to Speedy fans turned on by last year's superlative Major Arcana, despite their label's poptimistic assertions that they've folded in chart and R&B influences. The EP is a set of lopsided, fuzz-happy indie rock, a four-instrument bunfight that makes a splattery mess everywhere and references all your faves - Pavement, yes, Archers, Dino - without sounding much like any of them. Lead track 'American Horror' is probably the best thing they've come up with yet, obtuse and incendiary six-string divebombs that unfathomably mesh into a jubilant whole, while 'Everything's Bigger' achieves the admirable feat of having this weirdly slinky verse that's just as catchy as its molten, spiralling chorus. But if Speedy's instrumental antics start odd and end up addictive, it's Dupuis' way around language that severs her band from anything resembling the mumbled or half-arsed.

Because while Real Hair could get away with bypassing brains and going solely for guts on the strength of its adrenalised volume and bizarre melodic bent, rest on its laurels it don't. It's in Speedy Ortiz' lexicon, rather than their roaring distortion, that this EP's teeth lie, and as such we're cast conversational hooks loaded with the sort of meaty bait befitting a frontwoman who teaches at UMass and logs time over at The Talkhouse. "Well it's not what you think," sings Dupuis at the start of 'American Horror', and she's damn right - as Real Hair progresses , her prolixity becomes an intoxicating game of chance. Does she mean for 'Oxygal's drunken refrain of "Be in this picture, this picture with me" to evoke an early Elliott Smith lyric, but pitted against the druggy grime that characterized his latest work? Did she really just sing "I'm a donut" on 'Everything's Bigger'? Or was it 'dolma'? Regardless, what does she mean? Does she present herself here as Jawbox's 'Savory', framed to be consumed, or something else entirely?

That it's 'dull knife' hardly matters, because like all the scorch-marked guitar roar, Real Hair's verbal fluidity starts off disorientating, but ends up, like, totally righteous. A few spins in, you'll wince at the stings of the web full of bees on 'American Horror'. You'll laugh at the notion of being relegated to 'a stage of awful singles ventilating'. You'll punch the air when Dupuis hands romance's derriere to itself on ramshackle closer 'Shine Theory', quipping that despite everyone banging on about how pretty and swell someone is, it's still alright not to get aroused.

If Speedy Ortiz are 'slackers', they're not not some Nietszche-misquotin', conspiracy-theorisin', piff-slingin' con artist, but rather that hood-lidded savant who turned up to morning lectures behind dark glasses for three years, who started writing at 2am for noon hand-ins, then left the place with honours to their bloodshot eyeballs. Most importantly, Real Hair resolutely refuses to collapse under the weight of its own wordiness. It's clever, sure, but it's high-grade, pedal-hopping rock music by the same token.

[robhollamby]

Swearin' - Surfing Strange

All of this, if you'll excuse me, is points on a graph. Humanity, bands, music, we all bumble along an x-axis with time gnashing at our heels, before eventually falling off the end, into a dark infinity beyond mathematics. But life, life is what happens on the y, the highs and lows chalked up on the grid in complex constellations. We grow up. We graduate. We land jobs, and we lose them too. And pop-punk, so-called here because I'm bored of censoring my own crassness, is apparently something we are growing into again. Whether it's become less boring, less puerile, or whether we're just realising that we're also boring and puerile, is anyone's guess. While it's only really been a year since they offered up their self-titled debut, on second full-length Surfing Strange Philadelphian foursome Swearin' sound a little like they've been growing older - and more miserable too - modifying their formula for that genre to suit.

For a start, the band no longer sound like they've spent their studio downtime getting loaded on fizzy pop and jumping on the sofa. Much of Surfing's execution is loose and rangy, characterised by slack, grumpy tempos and an emphasis on guitarist Kyle Gilbride's laconic, all-American sneer over axe-partner Alison Crutchfield's more obvious tunefulness. That this is Gilbride's album (where Swearin' was undoubtedly Crutchfield's) is apparent before the man even sings a note, from the moment his guitar spews warping voltage over Crutchfield's thunderous, anthemic swing on opener 'Dust in the Gold Sack'. The song is a convenient dividing line, on which Swearin' dovetail the toothsome sugariness of their first record into Surfing Strange's self-conscious, disenchanted oddness - while 'Dust in the Gold Sack' ends on a wonderful, drunken chorus of broey chanting, it's prefaced by those wonky, growling leads, and Crutchfield singing of dirt where there should be treasure. The following 'Watered Down', dudely grunge frayed to the point of falling apart, is similarly brimming with the rhetoric of the beaten; it's a stoned, wry chuckle into the big empty, equal to anything the Lemonheads released at the depths of Dando's despair. As Gilbride listlessly intones "I hope you're right" over the meatgrinder chords that close the song, we know that he's dispensed with hope already.

It's not until 'Mermaid', though, that the extent to which Swearin' have mutated becomes wholly apparent. The song's hulking wall of sludge, bereft of chorus (hell, largely lacking vocals at all) and advancing at a muddy crawl is about as far from Swearin''s exuberant suckerpunches as the same band could get without descending into gimickry. Surfing Strange is littered with moments like this, songs which catch you short and wondering what weird locale you've stumbled into. 'Glare of the Sun' is the most obvious culprit, a palindromic nugget of psychedelia that comes off like one of the druggier cuts from Elliott Smith's latest days, a gangly, bass-driven centre encased in parentheses of fizzing distortion. Similarly (but, y'know, not too similarly), Crutchfield frames her snarkiest hooks this time in a hushed strum reminiscent of her sister's much-lauded project, as she deadpans on the frighteningly bare 'Loretta's Flowers', "when you grow up, you'll realise this wasn't love - or you won't, and you'll remain ignorant and in pain." OK, so the song lacks the juxtaposed thrills that once framed equally cruel lines like "I hope you like Kenosha so much you stay there forever and we all lose touch," but it hits just as hard for its unprecedented starkness. I'd commend Swearin' for bravery in their branching out, if I thought that Surfing Strange didn't embody, in all its bizarre u-turns and boiling apathy, that most wonderful aspect of bandliness - simply not giving too much of a fuck about what anyone else thinks.

Of course, all this adventure can work to the record's detriment. There is nothing as instantly addictive as 'Here to Hear' or 'Kenosha' on Surfing Strange, and from a fanboy P.O.V. if not a critical one, that smarts a little. The tellingly-titled 'Young', penultimate track and really the first upbeat number to feature Crutch on vocals since 'Dust in the Gold Sack', will be like manna from heaven for anyone jonesing for the saccharine jolts of last year, its atonal squall of an intro swiftly giving way to the sunniest, jangliest, Swearin'iest two minutes on Surfing Strange. That said, though, it doesn't come out on top here - Surfing's real aces lie where Swearin' marry their newer, more morose tendencies to the fearsome energy that made them great in the first place. 'Unwanted Place' is probably the peak of it all, the youthful abandon of the band's debut hammered into new shapes by slashing rhythms, the truth portrayed as something negative, and a tree-felling power riff that has a stab at rivalling its antecedent in The Post. Anyone who's seen the band live recently will attest to the destructive power of 'Echo Locate' - Gilbride's voice, his campy rolling of 'r's and nasal drawling of vowels, is perfect for the song's "reading trash rags" hook, and when he and Crutchfield team up at the song's close, spitting "makes no difference now" over some truly horrible guitar tones, it's impossible not to be convinced, whatever it is they're singing about.

As Gilbride keens on closer 'Curdled' (two and one-half minutes of quiet, flame-gutted beauty), "critical shifts make the blaze decay/ritual rots, then you come awake." Everything, music, human, or whatever, risks its dips on the y-axis. When they're laid out like Surfing Strange, though, a thorny, gorgeous mess that encompasses misery, happiness, love, hate, getting high and getting bored, it's difficult to mind all that much.

This review originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

Interview: White Lung

When I agreed to do this, I had known about Vancouverite punks White Lung for twenty-four hours, give or take. But I had become swiftly and eagerly addicted to the coruscating 'Blow It South', A-side from their forthcoming Songs About The South seven-inch, in that time period, and I still believe it to be one of the year's most fuckin' incontestable guitar-based bona fide superhits. Singer Mish Way's predatory growl, Kenny's McCorkell's painstripping fretboard theatrics, rhythms that hit like tropical storms courtesy of Anne-Marie Vassiliou and Grady MacIntosh. Blow It South is a flagship for how destructive and seductive rock music can be given the right personnel, divesting itself of all that aloof and icy distance that so often comes with what's termed 'post-punk' for something white-hot, close, and dangerous.

So I find myself stalking my kitchen, a few minutes to an interview with Way, fretting and taking alternate hits from a tin of Heineken and a plastic bottle of something gross and cinnamony called Fireball, that my friend Kim brought me from the US. This is nothing all that new. Maybe I'm especially nervous about this one because, I don't know, because men are afraid of Way, as she later notes, explaining the lyrics to 'Blow It South'. In any case, I am very conscious of not wanting to fuck up. There are important questions to be asked here, questions not just about music, questions about gender politics and lifestyle choices, questions I'll be asking a punk with a degree-level education.

As it is, I bottle on nearly all of them and we talk a lot about music.

When the time rolls around I sit down at the screen and Mish appears, sleepy-eyed and gripping what looks like a latte in a glass beer stein. I shoot a panicked glance at the tin of Heinie, just out of shot. Timezones - they do funny things to one's sense of decorum.

"Hi," says Mish. "It's morning for me, so it's night for you, right?"

Yes. It's coming up to seven. You?

"I just woke up. I was just actually on the phone with Hayley from Paramore."

I knew about this - Way sustains herself financially by writing for a number of publications, which is reassuring to me. Most musicians I know fluctuate between abhorring music 'journalism', and simply being a bit baffled as to its raison d'etre. Anyway, turns out Way likes the band a lot ("I have a secret love for Paramore and Hayley, I think she's really cool, I think she's a really good frontperson...she's got, like, this HUGE voice!") which is nice, because I kind of do too.

So, you write about music as a day job...

Yeah, that's how I make money when I'm not on tour. And I do it on the road too. You've gotta hustle for free forever, it's kind of like music.

How'd it start?

I got my degree in Gender Studies and Communications, and I was writing this blog called 'Fucking Diaries' for a while. Someone at Vice Records liked our band, so I guess the blog somehow made it to an editor there. Then Raph, the editor of Vice Canada, asked me to start writing for him, and I wrote for free for all these other publications forever. I worked for Hana May, who taught me so much, at Hearty, and I interned at a magazine here for a while, and then it got to a point where it started to snowball. I was getting more and more offers from places and actually making money.

How does that fit in with playing music?

It was kind of in line with White Lung. I really abused that connection, being like 'I can write from this perspective', and I tried to manifest the two things at the same time. I was like 'I'm never gonna make money from music, so I gotta be doing something on the side that I can make a little bit of money from that I love equally as much.' It kind of snowballed to the point where I could almost survive on it. It's not easy, chasing cheques all the time, but I'd rather do that than something I don't like doing. You do the sellout gigs for money, write Red Bull stings...I've done a lot of really weird copy and stuff.

What do you look for in writing about music?

I think websites are doing really interesting things. There's always going to be Rolling Stone and Spin and all that stuff. And you come from the UK, you still have all the important print media that sets the trend of what everyone else cares about. But a site like Noisey is really fucking with the idea of what it means to be a music journalist. And that can be a really positive thing or a really negative thing, because the information is still being relayed so quickly and there isn't like, a lot of, care, maybe...not care, care's the wrong word...like, I can do a Skype interview with Patti Schemel, and it can be just very casual, and that's still important information for the media to digest. But then, on Noisey, Drew Millard will write these amazing stories, like go down to the South and spend time with R. Kelly and write this proper piece that could be in GQ or something.

I like honesty. I hate writing reviews myself, but I like when people screw with them. The Talkhouse is a great example. Michael Azerrad asked me to start writing for it when it came out, and it's all musicians reviewing other musicians. Kathy Valentine just reviewed Haim's new record, Lou Reed reviewed Kanye. To me, that site's where it should be at.

You were just mentioning a Skype interview with Patti Schemel, which is pretty cool - I was reading an interview of you by Tobi Vail the other day, how was that?

Well, Tobi? OK, she used to come when we would go and play in Olympia before Kenny even joined. We went down to play Olympia and Tobi, like, came to our show and introduced herself to us, so we've known her for a while, and I've always kept in contact with her sparsely. I think she's a really interesting lady, and she's super-nice. I was honoured when that interview came out, she said some of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me, about me and what I was doing, and I was really grateful to have her 'get it'.

In that interview you were talking about having day jobs outside of White Lung. How would you feel being able to sustain yourself through the band?

It's funny, I was FaceTiming with Danny Brown the other day and we were talking about that because he was doing some voiceover stuff. He was like, 'I'd rather make more money doing this so that I don't ever have to change music to make it be what someone else wants it to be.' To me, it's weird, because I feel like so many people that you wouldn't expect to have day jobs, do. Dave from Japandroids lives next door to me, and I'll phone him up and be like 'Hey Dave, blah blah blah', and he's all like (Mish does a little bumbly gruff man-voice which is just killer) 'oh, I'm just at RainCity working'. And I'm like 'OK, you guys make 50k at Coachella and you're still going to do your day job...why are you working at RainCity in social housing? You don't need to do that, you have money.'

Anyways, if we ever got to the point where I was like strictly just making money from the band...I already do, I make enough to semi-survive, but I don't think it would ever get to that point. I just don't ever see that happening. I would always write no matter what.

A bunch of press blew up in the wake of Sorry; have you noticed backlash from earlier fans?

The sellout police? Grow up. No, I haven't really noticed it. I feel like people would maybe make comments on social media, but no one's gonna come up to you and say it to your face. Everyone's been really supportive, we released that new song ('Blow It South') the other day, from the 7-inch, and we're writing a new record now, so I'm just focused on that.

Could you take me through what 'Blow It South's about? I've been listening to it on repeat recently, and I have some ideas which I don't want to say...

It's about a friend of mine...he knows it's about him, because he totally busted me and texted me the other day and was like 'let me see the lyrics', and I was like 'OK, whatever.' It's basically about men being afraid of me, masculinity, and this funny experience I had with a friend of mine in Florida, in a shower, that was really ridiculous. I don't know. It's just funny. I like to write little 'fuck you's to people.

Why did you decide to call the 7-inch Songs About The South?

The other song, 'Down With You', is about another experience that happened in the South, so I was just like 'I'm gonna call it Songs About The South'. And I say 'south' in both songs. Like the first line of 'Down With You' I say something about 'crawling across the south'. They're just songs that I wrote about touring, wrote the lyrics in the van, fixed them when we wrote the actual music.

The world hasn't been introduced to 'Down With You' yet...

It's more metal. There's this really cool swirling guitar part that Kenny does. Sorry is really fast and really aggressive, but there's tonnes of sugar, it's a poppy, sugary record. This one will totally still have pop hooks, that's just in me, but it's a lot darker, more metal-influenced. We've been experimenting a lot with that kind of stuff, because Kenny just likes to play that kind of guitar, it's different. It's gonna be cool. I'm excited.

Image by Mandy Lyn

So do songs tend to start with Kenny riffing on a guitar part?

He'll always bring a riff, and I'll build a melody on top of that, and we'll jam it out together. Kenny's such a perfectionist - he'll have four riffs, and be like 'these could be four different songs, but they'd be four weak songs, but let's just put all these parts together and make one really good song.' It takes him forever, because he's so careful, but that's what makes him a really good songwriter. He's not into repetition, choruses especially. I'm always like 'you gotta give me two more seconds, dude, I want one more line,' and he's always like:-

Mish, through a series of snorts and grunts, eerily recalls the impression my ex-housemate Ian used to do of our landlord. He was also named Ken. I have no other way of describing this.

When we're in our practice space writing, he'll be playing and I'll be figuring out melodies by watching his hand, and it's so crazy, he plays with such ease but when you actually look at what he's doing you're like 'holy fuck! Holy shit! You're hands are...that's crazy!' It's like watching someone skateboard, it's so effortless but it's not, it's fucking tough.

You're going on tour with Antwon.

So excited!

I read your interview with him the other day. It seems like you got on really well, and you said that a lot of people would be taken aback by that. I was. What attracted you to his music?

We were both playing a showcase at SXSW, for the publicity firm we have in common. I heard about him there, he played before us, and I didn't see his whole set, but he was kind of on my radar. Afterwards, Antwon posted this thing where I had to write up one of my dreams and he had to interpret it, and we just ended up talking on Twitter.

I met him in San Francisco when I was playing bass for my friend's band in the summer, and started listening more and more to his music. I think that rap is probably the most progressive genre right now, because it looks at what's going on in pop culture, it's very self-reflective. There's the same aggression and energy, the same stimulation provided by a hardcore show, that happens at a rap show, and of course, there's totally different things going on. The booking agency we share were like 'we want to have Antwon open for you on this tour,' and we were like 'hell yeah, obviously'. We text and talk all the time - he was supposed to be here this weekend actually, but he didn't make it over the border, him and Le1f are playing up here. I'm really looking forward to the combination of the tour, it'll be a big party.

Have you got plans to come over here?

We're gonna be over next year. I really liked playing in the UK when we came in September, the London show was totally insane.

A lot of Antwon's lyrics are pretty, ah, male gaze I guess, could be said to be normalising women as sexual objects. How do you interpret that?

I think, especially in that kind of genre, there's this performance that has to be done, where men are hypersexual, kind of misogynistic - that's the language that circulates. But knowing him personally, I can see that it's part of this performance. There's certain things where I'm like 'alright, whatever...' I totally understand what you mean, it seems like there's a conflict.

But I don't know, I like The Dwarves and Brainbombs, and that shit is misogynistic and horrible, but it turns me on too, you know - and in my brain, that's fucked up. It conflicts with my system, but there's something about it that's kind of attractive. I was talking about this with my friend Jesse, about how there's this shitty masculine thing that I totally like. But Antwon's...I'm sure he says things that're probably very rude. But when you're up on stage, you're using this one portion of your personality that you've decided to put out there, and it becomes hyperextended, and you take on a character.

...I babble some shit about being relieved, glad to find that someone more clued in that I came up with the same answers, or lack of. I ask Mish what the last record that took her face off was. She begins to pick through the collection on her computer, says that she's been listening to a lot of 'weird girl rap' before settling on something.

"You know what's really beautiful," she says, "you know that band Majical Cloudz?"

I reply that I do.

"Devon and I started talking on Twitter, and I was like 'I've gotta listen to that record, I've heard so much about it,' and I'm really impressed by him, he's got a really incredible voice. Coming from my band, which is so busy and so chaotic and so congested, to listen to a record that's so barren, so vulnerable, I really admire that. I think he's a really intelligent songwriter, I've been listening to that record a lot. There's one song called 'Silver Rings' that's really pretty. It reminds me of lounge, or something, it's really interesting. I could never do that."

This interview originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

Chalk - Chalk

It's difficult, isn't it, being an unhappy young man with an acoustic guitar. Because what of Smith, what of Oberst, what of Jackson C Frank and Keaton Henson, and of Owen, of Drake, of Devine? What of their legacy, and what of your self-loathing? Can you shoulder that weight, the inevitable backlash if you break from the bedroom, but more likely the indifference when you don't?

My dramatics aren't entirely appropriate, because drama is not something that runs all that strongly through the songs of Steven Stride, the man behind Chalk. What I'm saying, though, is downbeat tunes made largely with a lone acoustic and voice (for this is what these are) can be kind of easy to knock, by virtue of both the illustrious lineage they spring from, and how little sonic scope they give themselves to work with.

Listening to Chalk's self-titled debut full-length, it's hard not to feel that Stride has to some extent pilloried himself in his chosen medium. The record's twelve sad songs owe a distinct debt to their forebears, and its bookends encapsulate this neatly. Elliott Smith, besides being chucked around like a worn-out tennis ball in all the RIYLs attendant to Chalk, is an obvious ancestor from the off, his breezy strum/beaten sentiment tag-team and unpredictable way with a chord progression feeding Chalk's opener 'No One's Listening', while Stride closes the record channeling Bright Eyes for 'Today is Not That Day', whose wheezy reed organ, self-aware lyricisms and occasional yelps stray as close to Fevers and Mirrors as is possible without committing the same sort of gross plagiarism as An Angle.

So no, Stride has not made things easy for himself, positioning Chalk (his debut, no less) so close to the kind of artists who elicit, and not always hyperbolically, accolades like 'life-changing' or 'genius'. But there are ways in which Stride bears his cross as Chalk that'll make you like him.

I said that 'dramatic' wasn't a qualifier that applied to the songs here, and it is not. There's a well-worn review trope that goes "X could sing a phone book/shopping list/dishwasher assembly guide and make it sound emotional," but Stride's beaten deadpan, a voice utterly incapable of hamming anything up, works in the exact opposite way here. Despite the fact that his songs are couched without exception in negativity (read the tracklist as a starting point, if you fancy arguing), Stride's unassuming delivery strips Chalk's tunes of any semblance of self-pity, meaning that he can husk out lines like "got all these things to say, but no one's listening," or "today I'm just happy in my misery," (on 'All These Things', Stride's most convincing appropriation of post-hardcore chord progressions for fingerpicked, lush folk) or "you were happy when all I wanted was to be sad" with absolute conviction.

Sentiment here is not delivered for some hoped-for emotional response, it's delivered because it's just what's going down. And that, in an attempted answer to the self-effacing question Stride poses on 'Today Is Not That Day', is one of the parts that makes Chalk art, instead of just a boy crying 'woe is me,' and it means that the album retains bags of genuine emotional clout where handled differently, we'd be reaching for the puke bag.

It also means that Chalk is a whole hella lot less easy to wallow in than might be expected. Which is healthy, sure, but means that we have to look elsewhere in the record for a hook from which to hang ourselves. It's not there in the production, either - Stride has chosen to record largely solo, and everything is crisp, clean, and unadorned by the static or scuffles that can add inestimable depth to a record this acoustically bare. Without any sort of heart-on-sleeve theatrics or studio trickery, Chalk can start to feel a little monotone at times - as good as songs like the streetlit 4 a.m. blues of 'Somebody's Home', or the swaying, whiskey-drunk 'Missing' are for all their nearly-sharpened hooks, they're not really given a chance to come out of themselves here.

Perhaps the consequence of a hangover from his more amped-up projects (Stride's also involved with abrasive post-punks Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea, as well as irresistible Brightonian brainiacs Love Among the Mannequins), Chalk can ache for distortion - the popping harmonic interplay and eventual full-on riffage of 'Why Do We Have To Get Along', for example, or 'Oh Charlotte', whose chunky chords fall just short of full-on Weezery power-pop as presented here (the song's ending is a nice reminder that even the staunchest of misery-guts can have a laugh, though).

So it's where he fleshes out Chalk that Stride really gets results. Drums come in for the first (and nearly only) time on 'You Really Thought You Had a Chance at Getting Out of Here', turning what could have been just another downbeat acoustic number amid a recordsworth of downbeat acoustic numbers into something with all the slack swagger of Heatmiser or Either/Or, and when Stride strains at the line "...if there's no-one there to care," before falling away bruised into the gentle tide of click and strum, the effect is chilling. Similarly, 'In Your Suit's razor-sharp storm of strings cut twice as deep for the starkness of their surroundings, not to mention the song's shocking brevity.

When Chalk hits its...er...stride (sorry), it works. Oh, it works. The deathly, hushed picking of 'Stinted Verse', Stride whispering "you're brave and bold, but nothing on your own," as though to remind us that even at our best, we're still absolutely and irreversibly fucked, is a gut punch as swift and crippling as those of any name I've carelessly dropped over the last few hundred words. At the other end of the scale, 'Next To Useless' (by far one of the most self-assured things on here) channels all the desperation and energy of a full rock band into one furious blur of droning strum and cracked voice, somehow managing to avoid sounding lacking or clumsy. In some respects, it can feel like Chalk wasn't quite ready to come off the boil, but based on its highs (or rather, its low, low lows), what Steven Stride does next should be nothing short of heart-stopping.

[robhollamby]

Lunchtime Sardine Club - Icecapades

It’s grey out, and hot, that close heat that imparts no warmth but brings forth an ocean of reeking, salty ooze from your pores. The clouds look solid and impossibly dense and heavy, igneous rock as portrayed by gases. The suggestion of humming. It’s going to rain soon. It will rain hard.

I am sat at my kitchen table, contemplating smoking. There’s a song I’ve been meaning to hear, so I put in headphones, thinking little of it, and press play.

For a few minutes, I am no longer in the room. I am held immobile, carried on an insistent, doped-up drone, which sucks me inexorably into this scene in Lock Stock, Eddie stumbling away from Harry’s poker game, beaten, fucked, Iggy yelling ”now I wanna be your dog” in our ears. All this, despite the song owing a distinct debt to Autolux (like a bunch of its Sonic Anhedonic brethren, actually), a band wholly unlikely to ever make it onto the soundtrack of a Guy Richie film. There’s a desperate, broken chorus, something about holding down the line and shaking up the night, getting high, some semi-pissed guitar grumble, throaty like coffee grounds in a garbage disposal. It’s one of the best songs I think I’ve heard this year.

This thing, this ‘music’, sometimes it’s most powerful when it dredges up images of something else. Which is what I think first drew me to ‘I’m…Jesuschristmaam’, lead track from Icecapades, Oliver Newton (he of Yndi Halda, Shoes and Socks Off, Bermuda Ern, etc etc etc)’s first full length as the mysteriously-monikered Lunchtime Sardine Club. After that deadbeat, junk-eyed juggernaut, flanked by the equally-dirgey ‘Charon and the Boxer’ and the sweet/sour snippet of ‘Two and Three’, it can be tempting to start imagining Icecapades in the vein of something like labelmate Chalk (albeit more fleshed out), a downcast folk record built on bad times and a well-played set of Elliott Smith albums. But really, rather than straight sadness, it’s that conjuring of imagery that Newton plies his trade in here, which he does by peppering the album with found sound, snatches of forgotten chatter, unexpected sonic curios. One minute, Newton might deign to play us a song, but the next, we’re evesdropping on an anonymous conversation about Christmas presents.

And so, toeing the imagery-line, I’ve come to associate Icecapades with Doc’s lab in Cannery Row, the aural equivalent of those rows of dusty jars, rockpool oddities pickled in formaldehyde, gramophone music from another room. There’s a press shot of Newton knocking around, sou’wester-clad on a grey Brighton beach, grinning and holding a boom mic, and this works for me, the man as an adventurer in sound. Icecapades begins with traffic rush and fluttering woodwinds that give way to Newton’s strum on ‘Charon’, which morphs from forlorn acoustica to a threatening, cyclical grind that recalls Midlake at their toothiest. The drums on ‘Charon’ are a dusty trap set, but by ‘Old Truths, Rare Grooves’, they’re soaked in unexpected reverb, and see the song transcending its lineage (M. Ward’s ‘Poison Cup’ by way of Wilco’s ‘Deeper Down’) and exploding into a kaleidoscopic, glittering jam. On ‘Rumours’ perfect pop, they’re bitcrushed and crackling, foil to Newton’s foregrounded vocal singing inscrutably of Jesus, jetplanes, lighthouses, and sea-birds. By the time ‘Quesadillas’ rolls around, though, he’s shrouded his words in effects, and here, yes, Icecapades weighs heavy with Smith’s ghost, transplanted from Portland back to Texas, floating over border towns, soundtracking scenes from Cormac McCarthy novels.

The synergy of song and sound doesn’t always work. While Newton’s writing and arrangements can flash unnervingly bright amidst the debris of his samples (see the way ‘I’m…Jesuschristmaam’ rears its sludgy maw from child talk and birdsong, for example), the latter half of Icecapades can tend to lag. ‘808’ suffers from a lack of instrumental colour, choosing to stay earthbound where a burst of warm overdrive might have propelled it skyward, while ‘Jack Rabbits’ flounders in a murky slime, all texture and little tune. This lack of second-half standouts means that the inclusion here of minute-long mood pieces like ‘Four and Five’ can feel baffling, even willfully difficult, where in the record’s earlier moments they contribute so importantly to its character. So Icecapades is not perfect, no, but of course, it never had to be. There are science and poetry both here, and while some of Newton’s forays into weirdness don’t work as well as others, when they come off, they can be breathtaking. Whichever course the man decides to strike out on next, I’ll be paying attention.

This review originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

Diarrhea Planet - I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

Whether you’re one of those binge-glugging weekend wankers who’s still using terms like ‘pre-drinks’ and ‘lash’ as if you don’t come off like a suppurating pig’s urethra (and this far into your twenties, no less), or whether you’re a little more honest about the fact that you’re abusing booze to take the edge off of growing up, the fact remains: however we choose to frame it, the bars can get the best of us.

I mention this not only because I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, second full-length from guitar-slingin’ Nashville sextet Diarrhea Planet, is informed by a whole host of eminent bar bands, and probably vat upon vat of the sweet, sweet sauce, but because it goes so far to reconciling supposedly opposing forces. ‘Lite Dream’ bursts out of the blocks on the back of Sammy Hagar’s electrified corpse, a heavy metal (/pop-punk) odyssey in under four minutes that collides head on with ‘Separations’. The opening one-two handily encapsulates the idea of Diarrhea Planet, this being because

1. ‘Separations’ sees frontman Jordan Smith banging on like a bozo Ian Mackaye over one of Diarrhea’s exemplary chugathons,

2. It contains the lines ‘so dig your heels in, and grit your teeth, and quit your bitchin’’, one of the most Diarrhea sentiments on this whole damn thing, and

3. Because where the fuck else has any album ever elicited favourable comparisons to both a bloated hair-metal has-been and a revolutionary punk act inside of its leading twosome?

This is the unfettered joy of Diarrhea. They’re destroyers of irony, and for them there is no dissonance in loving without question two opposing forces. Diarrhea Planet is, like all the best trips to your favourite watering-hole, a perfect meld of silly and serious. It’s a one-on-one with your best bud, a reassessment or affirmation of life decisions set aglow by bourbon, then proceeding to launch the fucker flailing over a garden wall on the way home. Ever cried so hard you wanted to laugh? Vice-versa? You’re rich beyond your wildest dreams.

There are moments here, as everywhere, that don’t work as well as others. I’d just about headbang to ‘Togano’s leaden wallop if I were steaming drunk and pretending to be Jim Belushi in Animal House (though it’s a shogun-peasant love story inspired by Fumiko Enchi, the contrast in which again handily bottles the band’s appeal), and ‘Hammer of the Gods’ feels like little more than a protracted axe-duel masquerading as a song, which is disappointing considering that the Tennesseans are more than capable of bashing out honest-to-goodness pop-rock masterpieces. But Diarrhea’s ineffable, glorious stink has only really grown more pungent and irresistible on I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Diarrhea are still wonderfully irreverent; as far as I can tell, ‘The Sound Of My Ceiling Fan’ could well be about how a ceiling fan sounds, and there are moments when Smith comes on more like a broken Justin Hawkins rather than any of the comfier reference points. But the song’s glittering coda, harmonics that shimmer and float like bubbles, rising and bursting against the titular device, would have been unthinkable on Loose Jewels. ‘Field Of Dreams’ does the opposite when it breaks, molasses-thick waves of distortion shot through with a rippling solo, but the effect is much the same, a statement of the band’s power that brooks no dissent, all the potential of ‘Raft Nasty’ realised in full. Ditto on ‘Ugliest Son’, a song that throws a Weezery curveball at the proceedings and ends with a fist-pumping, heavyweight groove that makes me wholly unashamed of all the horns I ever threw as a kid. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.

I think that the heart of I’m Rich… lies at the centre of ‘Kids’, though. If you’re here, chances are you’ll know this one already. It was the first song I heard by Diarrhea Planet, and I wrote it off for its first fey sixty seconds, a fuzzy arpeggio and distant vocal that could be any of the current crop of no-rate shitgaze reverb-monkeys. It gets better fast, becomes lurching, midtempo barroom rock of the highest calibre, in fact. But the real crunch comes at a hair over two minutes, when all the Springsteenesque grandstanding falls away and we’re left with Smith blurting out ‘I’m a singer/I got no self-control’, the canary unable to stop himself spilling the beans, the lush with a lot on his mind and a liquor-loosened tongue. A few seconds later, that quadruple guitar attack unleashes the goofiest solo this side of Fang Island, and it’s like the walls of stone from ‘Skeleton Head’ (the only other moment that we’re allowed a brief glimpse through a crack in the clowny makeup, a song of slacker sadness all the more wonderful for the sentiment of ‘Separations’) being erected right back up. There’s the rub again. Diarrhea Planet can do feeling shitty just as well as The Boss’ eternally unfortunate caricatures, or Patrick Stickles and his unflinching inward searching, but I’d guess they also know that people start to resent that unless you grit your teeth, and dig your heels in, and quit your bitching. I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams is a belly-laugh at a funeral, a massive toothy ‘fuck yeah’ in the face of everything a little bit bollocks, and goddamn, it feels good.

[robhollamby]

Owen - L'Ami Du Peuple

Like the rest of us, Mike Kinsella is getting older. And on L’Ami du Peuple, the man’s seventh record as Owen since 2001’s self-titled debut, he sure as hell ain’t shy about mentioning it.

Kinsella’s thrown a few curveballs leading up to the release. His recent time flailing around with Evan Weiss in Their/They’re/There bled into L’Ami du Peuple’s two advance scouts, the awkward, ornery (but that’s the point, right?) ‘Bad Blood’, and ‘Blues to Black’, which ramps up the trem-picking he’s often used for atmosphere into a whirling rush of weightless indie-rock that’s muscular and delicate in equal measure. But past all this energy and ever-youthful bluster, L’Ami du Peuple feels like Kinsella coming to terms with approaching middle age. It’s addressed in typically bald fashion from the off on ‘I Got High’, an image of long-decayed adolescence if ever I saw one, which should provide with its cobwebby strum the sort of warm fuzzy that legions of sensitive types flock to Owen for their fix of. But it’s coloured by uncertainty, a sense of precipice-teetering from which L’Ami du Peuple never escapes. “There’s a boat leaving,” Kinsella sings, “where it’s going, I don’t know.”

At times, it doesn’t half feel that way, for L’Ami du Peuple seems to struggle under some odd choices of tone and style. Before, Owen’s acoustics were sparkling, but with a vital, woody thickness to them. Here, they’re wont to be airy, insubstantial, without much in the way of backbone or ballast. There are fewer of the Red House Painters-cribbed strings and distant pianos that populated his earlier records, but Kinsella seems to have developed an appreciation for melodica, which he deploys on L’Ami du Peuple in an odd context – where the likes of, say, Neutral Milk Hotel use the instrument for colour as part of a varied palate, here it carries whole melodies which sound limp as a result. ‘The Burial’ is the worst culprit, schoolroom Yamaha keys that ape the Glee version of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’, and guitars that glitter, but with a synthetic sickliness that doesn’t quite sit right. Perhaps worst of all, we’re getting Owen at a lyrical low, rehashed images of being “buried in this bed” (remember when he spent entire days in a bed too small for two?), or his repetition of the stock phrase of the needy partner at the song’s close – “Are you tired? ‘Cause I’m wide awake.”

Kinsella has been open about his change in modus operandi for L’Ami du Peuple, his being less shy about influences which before he’s suppressed – the wholly non-ironic guitar duel on ‘Bad Blood’ is a case in point. This is fair enough. And precisely because it’s fair enough, I’m lead to a question that flies in the face of objectivity, but which I don’t for a second think I shouldn’t ask.

Is Owen changing, or am I?

All of this isn’t to say that there aren’t flashes of that Kinsella brilliance here, the deadpan insight that slashes through routine introspection and sets Owen apart from more prosaic contemporaries. ‘Love is Not Enough’ presents unflinchingly the harsh realities of a maturing relationship – a dearth of financial capital, crying children, a man’s ever-present wandering eye – and finds that these give inescapable rise to the dismal realisation of its title. The seamless one-two of ‘Where Do I Begin?’ and ‘Vivid Dreams’ are both lovely – if unremarkable – folk numbers whose depictions of aging (so “I’m fat and I’m drunk and you love me/the kids are a little weird but they’re happy”, and “now I’m a dad and my dad’s dead”) will be as much of a gut-shot to anyone ruminating on their advancing years as ‘Never Meant’ was to them in their teens or early twenties. But it’s telling that the best thing on L’Ami du Peuple, for me, is ‘A Fever’, a rerecording of a track from the Japanese edition of 2006’s At Home With Owen. It’s more boisterous and gusty than before, clunky pulloffs run through with searing welts of distortion, and its volume and conviction and foulmouthed sentiments burn all the more brightly for their place on an album that feels like its author is running short on answers.

So maybe it’s that Kinsella has grown up, and I’m refusing to. My flatmate, as loyal an Owen devotee as could be wished for, stands by his word that L’Ami du Peuple is the most accomplished, well-produced, cohesive piece of work ever put out under the Owen banner. For me, on the other hand, Kinsella’s admission that he doesn’t know where the boat’s going carries into the record’s washy melange of instrumentation and styles, and besides which is a sad admission from someone who always seemed so quietly convinced of the truth in everything he sang, whether good or bad. But Mike Kinsella is still sure of one thing, which has me hopeful.

He’s getting on, with or without you.

[robhollamby]

Mat Riviere - Not Even Doom Music

In a recent piece for The Quietus, Norwich-bred soundscapeer Mat Riviere detailed an awkward festival experience in Spain, after which he penned the majority of the lyrics for 'NEDM', de facto title track from his latest full-length. "Felt simultaneously humbled/depressed/overwhelmed that I was even there," he writes, "and very unsure of why anyone would even choose to do music in the first place. Worried a lot about the reasons I do music."

I feel ya, buddy. Swap out the 'do's for 'write about's, and I feel ya.

I mention all this not because I feel the need for a third party to shore up my wobbly confidence in why I see fit to publish these odd readings of other people's music (hell, I'm not sure even my friends read these. Also, fuck you), but because Not Even Doom Music is a record that has split me right down the middle. Rivere's turned out, apparently, to be a press-kit pith-quote dream - we get "genius bleak pop" from the NME, "simply fantastic" from Artrocker, "glitchy, lo-fi, minimal pop heartaches" from TLOBF. You see where I'm going with this.

This is problematic, because there's a reactionary in me who's grown at least to my shoulder, and lord knows that Riviere doesn't make things easy. He alternately croons, shivers, husks and yells in a strange baritone not a million miles off Paul Banks, if the Interpol man had an unshakeable sinus problem and a pronounced distaste for the close proximity of microphones. 'NEDM' inverts hip-hop's braggadocio and drains away its sexiness, Riviere proclaiming "don't want no hype" over mallowy synth and an off-kilter drum loop. Initial listens had that cynic inside me spewing half-formed diatribe, damning another awkward misery-guts for appropriating what used to be funky and dangerous and turning it into something anaemic. Likewise, the childlike simplicity of the acoustic loop in 'Salathund' felt willfully obtuse, and the way that 'Summons' somehow sounds like both Do Make Say Think (minus drums) and Sparklehorse, without approaching the stratospheric propulsion of the former or the blasted wreckage of the latter, frustrating.

"I don't get this," snarled the cynic, "and I resent that other people seem to."

I felt simultaneously humbled/depressed/overwhelmed that I was even there.

So there was a point, around the third or fourth listen to Not Even Doom Music, that I wanted to write the whole thing off. It's easy to notice the painstaking craft that Riviere brings to his music - the snippets of dialogue (cuts from Rivers Cuomo and Vera Brittain among them), the washes of traffic, the impeccably crystalline music boxes that open 'In ~2 Seconds'. But an artisanal mastery of sound does not alone equal the sort of music I long for, the sort of songs that burrow their way into your centre and build themselves a jealous keep in there. But little things kept me listening. Not least opener 'Wool', the most immediate thing on here, a song whose clanking piano bears resemblance to something off Fevers and Mirrors, whose dusky synths shroud it in a luscious darkness. I began to take immense pleasure in 'Greece', for how its fuzzing, bass-heavy slabs of noise brought to mind my much-missed Parts & Labor, and 'Gardens' for its skysized and gutwrenching hook, a kid's wish roared at the night by disillusioned adulthood. And the little things kept creeping in. I started to notice that when I'd made it through the 2.5 minutes of atonal bell'n'drone interplay that opens 'The City Is As Cold As You Want It To Be', it becomes a glitchy, distant anthem easily as good as anything off Life After Defo. I started to notice that 'Salathund' builds from that faltering, babyish guitar into tectonic shifts of shivering string ecstasy, that there's a weird but genuine groove to 'NEDM's brutal reductivism.

I don't love Not Even Doom Music, not in the pure and hot-hearted way that I love Japandroids, or Titus Andronicus, or most of the music I listen to with any regularity. I don't love it for possessing the fractured x-ray mirror that Bright Eyes or The National hold up to my insides, though it takes something from both artists. But nor is listening to Mat Riviere's second record a simple exercise in academia, as a set of expertly-corralled sounds selected and arranged by a skilled pair of ears. Not Even Doom Music, at its best, is so much more than this. It's songs. And songs are the reason I chose to do music in the first place.

This review originally appeared on The 405

[loveamongthemannequins]

D16

we have a song from our new EP on the SARC SAMP1ER compilation:

http://sonicanhedonic.bandcamp.com/

[robhollamby]

There are no words. Feckin' brilliant.

[robhollamby]

The weight out of living: an At The Drive-In retrospective

August 28th, 2012. A recently-reformed At the Drive-In, post-hardcore cult darlings since the turn of the millennium, are playing to a sold-out Brixton Academy. Guitarist and founder Jim Ward called it "the last show of the Relationship of Command tour." According to Drive-In evangelist Mike Diver "a lot of lumps formed in a lot of throats." This was a happy occasion, then. A band returned to finish what they started, for everyone who wasn't there the first time around to finally experience what they never got to see, but so badly wanted to. Innit nice.

Half a year later, and Transgressive have re-released two of the El Paso punk act's records – debut full-length Acrobatic Tenement from 1996, and 2000's gold-plated classic Relationship of Command. For the vinyl-hungry among Drive-In acolytes, myself included, this news is manna from heaven. At the time of writing, there is a single lonesome LP copy of Relationship listed on eBay, from a seller in Japan. The fifteen listings of the record on Discogs range from €79.00 to £150 in price, all non-inclusive of shipping. Acrobatic Tenement, meanwhile, has not seen release on the grooved circle until now. You can practically hear the phlegmy sniggering of vinyl archivists, the dry whisper as they rub their pale palms, in the knowledge that these records, too, can at last be theirs. A reformation, rereleases; the Texan ambassadors really are spoiling us. Right?

Of course, At the Drive-In's return hasn't been without critique. That show in Brixton elicited the full spectrum of reaction from its attendees (and indeed from those absent), the negi corps citing disparate factors for their ire: the Academy's notoriously divisive sound, the motives behind the show, the subdued comportment of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, whose earlier million-volt stage antics had been dialled back to restrained at best, and downright uninterested at worst. There was a lot of embarrassed foot-shuffling when it came to light that the man's mother had recently died. In an interview with Cleveland Scene, though, the guitarist didn't sound overjoyed about those shows regardless, comparing himself to an actor who's gotten too close to a self-destructive role, and looking forward to moving on. I won't deny the wholesale goosebumpery I experienced from a shaky video of 'Enfilade' at the Academy, but to see the guitarist cruelly slopping out 'One Armed Scissor' like it had never meant anything to him ever, that felt horrible. The mantra of 'Ebroglio' put into practice – it's all a façade, but nothing really matters now. So were Ward's words a reflection of Rodriguez-Lopez' opinion, that the shows were just "to close the chapter on that era," or did they imply the start of a new one?

Ward, perhaps characteristically, is the only band member quoted as speaking up on the rereleases: "It was interesting to revisit the recordings that bookended the first chapters of our band," he says. "The earnest and pure excitement of the beginning and the level of craftsmanship we achieved by Relationship of Command leaves me nothing but proud. I am happy these records have found their way to continue to feel new as people discover music they love and embrace our work." Omar stated quite the opposite to Alternative Press in 2010, that Relationship of Command is a record that he still cannot listen to. Funny he should highlight Andy Wallace's mix as a sore point, a mix that goes teeth-first for the throat where the 600-buck recording of Acrobatic Tenement doesn't even fizz with garage-band charm. But then, Rodriguez-Lopez' obtuseness and his opposition to his counterpart in Ward, these are things that made At the Drive-In as earth-shattering as they would become.

I've always been one of those reductivists who hears, in The Mars Volta and Sparta, At The Drive-In split down their logical middle into two exact halves, one personified by Jim, the other by Omar. Sparta have never been subject to the acclaim heaped on their drummer and frontman's previous outfit, and not without reason – 'Cut Your Ribbon', as decent a rock song as it is, cannot touch the transcendent six-string spasms of 'One Armed Scissor' in terms of jerky electric thrills. Sparta are saddled with 'easy' just as the Volta can't escape 'difficult', the implicit value judgment being that there's more artistic worth to the latter. But to discount the former is to discount the chunky, careening hookiness that makes At the Drive-In such an addictive proposition. Jim Ward has a way-underestimated knack for wringing rock-solid slabs of delicious overdrive from his instrument, and a feeling for chord sequences that turned 'Invalid Letter Dept.'s slow-melting notes (I've never heard a guitar approximate a Dali clock as much as these) into the more trad, but no less affecting 'Cataract'. Ward's enthusiasm about the re-release of Acrobatic Tenement is unsurprising – he's all over this record, not yet a base coat for Omar's envelope-wrecking expressionist hijinks (Rodriguez-Lopez handled bass duties at the time), and as such, Jim drives these songs. His choppy work gives 'Ebroglio' (our first encounter with Julio Venegas, whose life and death would resonate through Cedric and Omar's work past De-loused in the Comatorium seven years later) most of its considerable elasticity and tension, while the plangency of his guitar on 'Initiation' foreshadows the tenderness that made 'Hourglass' a highlight on In/Casino/Out. The way he lets his clean chords on 'Ticklish' hang loose before slashing them out nervous and tight and having them explode in tactical shards of searing distortion, all these things make the song the album highlight that it is.

That the two guitarists on Relationship of Command didn't possess a united vision for their band is common knowledge now. Omar says as much in that AP interview, but perhaps the best documentation of their differing attitudes is the now-infamous Later… performance, Omar using his guitar as an instrument of sabotage while a stubborn Jim ploughs on regardless. There're a bunch of reasons that At the Drive-In's swansong exists in such a different universe to their debut, and one of the biggest is Omar's heartstopping guitar work, part John McLaughlin, part Guy Picciotto, the way it's so utterly in opposition to Jim's low-end and so much more electrifying for this. Cedric once said somewhere that Relationship was a straight-up Fugazi rip (for all my trawling I cannot for the life of me remember where, but here's what proof I have), and while At the Drive-In's debt to their forefathers is more obvious in the songs on Tenement, Michael Azerrad's description of the DC legends' guitars, that Picciotto's Rickenbacker "cut through Mackaye's chunky chording like a laser beam", is a near enough perfect description of Rodriguez-Lopez and Ward on Relationship. Witness Ward's punk charge on 'Pattern Against User', hefted bodily along by the explosive barrage of bassy ordnance from Paul Hinojos' Stingray, Rodriguez-Lopez arcing like plasma across it all. The way Omar flickers wonky Morse code through Jim's distorted fog at the start of 'Arcarsenal', the way his hatred of his instrument came to be used for such beautiful ends; the wanton wreckage of 'Sleepwalk Capsules', the unsettling, alien approach he first exhibited on 'Rolodex Propaganda' (which made a particular reappearance for 'Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt'). Buddies or not, Ward and Rodriguez-Lopez transcended At the Drive-In's punk lineage with their tradeoffs on Relationship of Command, jettisoned doctrine and came out swinging. Without one or the other, I'm convinced that the record wouldn't have smashed into that sweet spot between reckless invention and honest-to-goodness tunesmithery. It's not there on Acrobatic Tenement, it's not there on The Wiretap Scars, it's not there on De-loused in the Comatorium. I have not (well, maybe once, but more on that later) heard a record before or since that throws me around in the way that Relationship of Command does.

At the Drive-In's creative peak isn't predicated entirely on the serendipitous fallout of these two opposing forces. Acrobatic Tenement, for all its frayed nerves and scrappy mania, is also devoid of another key component that makes Relationship of Command such a thing of beauty. We heard the possibility of At the Drive-In really grooving on 'Alpha Centauri', on 'Chanbara', but before this, At the Drive-In counted neither Paul Hinojos nor Tony Hajjar among their ranks. Drums on Acrobatic Tenement are ably and forgettably handled by Ryan Sawyer, and Rodriguez-Lopez's basslines are largely unremarkable, bludgeoning, punkish things, though he plays a key role in building up 'Ebroglio', and carries 'Initiation's verses. But the rhythm section of Relationship seethes with its own vitality, quite apart from the guitars' more obvious attack. For all the blips and smog that open 'Arcarsenal' it's really Hajjar's song, flurries of precise, breakneck battering that give direction to the murderous stabs of guitar. Where he gets his most obvious moment in the sun opening 'Quarantined', it's Hinojos, not Ward or Rodriguez-Lopez, giving us whiplash in the weird, truncated swing of 'One Armed Scissor's verses. The two of them define 'Enfilade' and forcibly distance it from any preconceptions of rock rhythm. That leering, reptile slink at the song's centre, Hinojos socking in the groove over Latin percussion as alien to post-hardcore (or whatever) as Hajjar's tripping nods to two-step that propel the rest of the song. Bass and drums are too easily relegated to the realms of the indistinct in rock music, Acrobatic Tenement a case in point. But on Relationship of Command, Hinojos and Hajjar are essential, eschewing a boring, lumpen formula for something more hip-shaking.

And the words. Oh lord, the words. That intoxicating tumble of imagery that comes on like Cedric's hunted through the duskiest of library stacks, formal documents, idioms and signpostage, and kidnapped his favourites, suturing together unlikely bedfellows to bizarre and brilliant effect. Diver, again, has always been keener than most to get to the writhing, juicy centre of the frontman's luxuriant wordiness – "surely the wordplay of Cedric Bixler," he asks in his 2011 reappraisal of Relationship for Drowned in Sound, "is capable of summoning myriad magnificent images to the mind's eye: some shocking, some stunning, but everything so real one could almost reach out and touch the oil." He's right – it's the lexical equivalent of the rushing mess of light and limbs and monochrome bokeh and indifferent skylines from the original 'One Armed Scissor' video, thrilling and unpredictable and relentlessly visual. My mate Louis, not a man prone to flights of fancy, once told me that Cedric's sneering "have you ever tasted skin?" on 'Arcarsenal' conjured up for him horrific images of the shock-haired frontman dragging his tongue lasciviously across a steak cut from human flesh. I too can no longer listen to this song without the picture flashing across my brain, like Tyler Durden's spliced-in nanoseconds of porn, and from this I know one thing: these are as psychoactive as words come.

For me, Bixler's key weapon is the value he places (whether he means to or not) on the element of emotional surprise. Tracing things back to Tenement, the singer's trademark tonguetwistery is muffled and unrefined, but still wholly evident, if you listen for it. At one end of the scale sits something like 'Schaffino', on which the singer moulds entries from a dictionary of medical terms around romance, or the oblique, Naked Lunch-style sexuality of 'Paid Vacation Time'. We're also treated to glimpses of more traditional emotion, though – the refrain of 'Starslight', that "you know your insides true/better than I do", or the palpable fury of Bixler "kicking in windows" on 'Ticklish' are rendered doubly affecting for their being half-obscured in impossibly bright verbal surroundings. It's a technique that carried right through to Relationship of Command, embodied for me by 'Quarantined'. The song came close to the end of a record's worth of weapons-grade surrealism, and suddenly amid the psychedelic storm Bixler yells out "push becomes shove/days become months/and I seem to have forgotten the warmth of the sun" – which I took to mean, the world has been turned inside out, and I have been cast adrift with it, helpless. Whatever the lines mean, they floor me every time. That strings of supposedly unrelated words can make us feel this paranoid, this dizzy, this desolate, is just as powerful as the thunderstorm call and response of the El Paso band's twin guitars. "Is this the comfort of being afraid?" asked Bixler-Zavala on 'One Armed Scissor'. I know my answer.

Thirteen years ago, things didn't look fantastic for rock music. Relationship came out the same year as Chocolate Starfish, as Hybrid Theory, as The Sickness. I was thirteen then, and my decision that my future lay firmly in the guitar happened to coincide nearly exactly with the release of Relationship in September of 2000. Never having enough for CDs, I spent all my money on magazines, and this is where I first heard the band, 'Incetardis' on a Rock Sound cover-mounted disc. I hated the song's wilful otherness, and I hated 'Pattern Against User' only a little less when I heard that a few months later, still bombarded with hype from a press engorged on the band's energy. When they split, I paid no attention. But things started changing. Thursday barrelled their way into my consciousness thirteen months later with 'Understanding in a Car Crash' (which invented and immediately bettered a whole wave of emo before it had even started), a frenetic anthem whose tragic subject matter held an inescapable allure for fourteen-year-old me. Casting around for literature, I often found that At the Drive-In were the reference point. Things got serious in 2003 with The New Romance and A Song to Ruin, two records that took over my life that year. Listening back, I can easily hear Ward and Rodriguez-Lopez in the jagged interplay of 'All Medicated Geniuses', Hinojos and Hajjar's combined menace opening 'Charlie and the Propaganda Myth Machine'. I can now state categorically that Billy Talent's debut, also out that year, would not have existed without Relationship of Command. But back then, all I had was the name as a reference point. At the Drive-In. That weird band I didn't like, until idly watching TV on an unremarkable day in 2004 or 5 and 'One Armed Scissor' flashed across the screen and it all made sense. By 2007 I was a Drive-In devotee and watching Meet Me in St. Louis, a band who often drew comparisons with the Texans for their feral stage presence, their relentless forward surge, Toby's cut-up and often unfathomable approach to lyrics, those same glinting moments of human feeling strewn amongst the debris. The one album they left the world with, Variations On Swing, means just as much to me, if not the world at large, as Relationship Of Command.

These are not bands I'd expect the members of At the Drive-In to listen to, or even to be aware of. At the most cringeworthy (tell me the guitars on Taking Back Sunday's 'One Eighty By Summer' don't sound like Jim Ward), it's debatable whether the band's influence was always positive. But it was there regardless, and now everyone wants to know what happens next. In January, and apropos of not very much at all, Pitchfork stirred up some rather unfounded 'new album' hype. Rodriguez-Lopez, of course, had already put the unequivocal kibosh on anything of the sort, and since the Mars Volta break at the start of the year, seems content plugging away in Bosnian Rainbows. If you're jonesing for hopes, it's Bixler-Zavala you should be pinning them on, though I wouldn't endorse it. Jim Ward's love for At the Drive-In has never been a secret, so hearing him say to LA Weekly that "the most exciting part to me is that there's not a firm ending to this band," doesn't elicit the same levels of optimism as if those words had come from his fellow guitarist. But Bixler-Zavala's not been all that vocal on the subject in the past. Where he and Rodriguez-Lopez have previously presented as an inseparable unit, the frontman came over all soppy for the Drive-In in his Volta breakup letter, proclaiming his love for the band, and maybe having a little dig at his erstwhile bandmate's recent performances. It's that sea change, rather than anything else, that should leave fans expectant. But I'm not holding my breath. I'd venture to say that if there is any creative future for At the Drive-In, it'll be without Rodriguez-Lopez, which would be strange after his profound positive effect on Relationship of Command. Without him to reign in the overblown U2isms of the more recent Sparta output, who knows whether new material would be as electrifying and singular as we so badly would love it to be? Or would Bixler-Zavala fulfil this role, spiking Ward's keenness for the straightforward with hallucinogens? Questions are all I have on At the Drive-In's future. I don't need them answered, and if they ever are, I won't go sleepless waiting.

Because in the middle of writing all this I step from a train to a concrete platform in a grey suburb, part of a cold tide of commuters all wrapped for winter, though it is nearly April. Breaking loose from the seething mass, the chords at 2:44 in 'Cosmonaut' burst like shrapnel into my consciousness. This is my favourite part of my favourite song by At the Drive-In, the most locked in this band of such disparate parts ever sounded. Hajjar, Hinojos, Rodriguez-Lopez and Ward gather and fuse into a single deadly rhythm, jagged and jubilant and unstoppable, Bixler stutter-screaming in animal fury over the top. I am reduced to the mass and consistency of a shriveled leaf in the biting wind, rendered powerless, whipped around and carried away and stripped of all worry and human failing for a few brief seconds between a train station and a high-rise office block.

Whether they're futureless, whether this was all about the Benjamins, these things matter not. This is my At the Drive-In, and it takes the weight out of living.

This feature originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

Iron and Wine - Ghost on Ghost

The first time I heard The Shepherd's Dog, I vomited into a hat. The record hasn't elicited this reaction since, but the incense-smoke sitars on the spiralling 'White Tooth Man' turned a hungover journey down the M1, all the spiteful juddering and furious pneumatic drills, into a kaleidoscopic netherworld that I couldn't swim up from. The album's technicolor overload caught me unawares, considering Iron and Wine's earlier modus operandi, dusty acoustic songs left largely unadorned. Three years after The Shepherd's Dog, auteur Sam Beam put out a boisterous, tetchy interpretation of 70s FM radio, whose blaring horns and four-minute outros ventured even further from 'Upward over the Mountain' than the album that preceded it. He's not a man to rest on his laurels, is what I'm saying.

On first listen, it's tempting to imagine that Beam's slowing down a little with fifth full-length Ghost on Ghost. Opener 'Caught In The Briars' has all the hallmarks of the friendlier songs on Kiss Each Other Clean – a warm mix, sonorous brass belches, Muscle Shoalsy 'ooh's. Beam prefaced Ghost on Ghost with a statement that attempted to distance the record from its two closest antecedents, saying that there was an 'anxious tension' to The Shepherd's Dog and Kiss Each Other Clean that he wanted to move away from. "Back alleys full of rain, and everything's shining," he sings on 'Caught In The Briars', and it's true, Ghost on Ghost sounds slicked, clean, uncluttered by the claustrophobic miasma of effects that hung over his last two efforts. Lead single 'Grace For Saints And Ramblers' is genuinely jaunty, has a bit of the Paul Simons in its popping bass and syncopated keys. Beam gets his smooth on for 'Desert Babbler' and 'New Mexico's No Breeze', which expertly channel Nixon-era Kurt Wagner and the Lambchop man's love of Memphis soul, lush strings. There's a song called 'Joy', fer Chrissakes, which if not exactly jubilant in tone, at least sounds cautiously optimistic. It's a wonderful tune, by the way, Beam eschewing his usual intoxicating rush of images for a poetic honesty that gets right to the core of the wobbles in a good relationship, all over a twinkling Rhodes, probably the nicest-sounding instrument in the world. I like it a lot, all the more so for Beam's refusal to ham up the sentiment, choosing to clock it in at under three minutes.

So all this white tooth happiness, this expansive warmth, it gets pretty boring, right? Perhaps in the hands of another, it would. But as we soon come to realise, Ghost on Ghost is rammed to the peeling rafters with the kind of vaguely unsettling creepiness that Beam began to flirt with on 'Peace Beneath the City' and perfected around 'Rabbit Will Run', the luxuriant paranoia that gave a sensitive bedroom folkie, that most bland of musical archetypes, such a deliciously unsettling edge. This time, instead of splattering filters over everything or chucking the contents of a school music cupboard at a song, Beam's using the power of jazz (yes, the power of jazz) and all her tributaries to commune with the far-out on Ghost on Ghost. Our first warning comes at the close of 'Caught In The Briars' straight-laced pop, which breaks down into a brief freakout at its close, drunken piano tumbling over what sounds like a shehnai. It's vaguely jarring, but you can chalk this up to anomaly. That is, until Beam mangles that soul imprint into something growling and obsessive for 'Low Light Buddy Of Mine', or the way 'Grass Widows' puts you in mind of some weird, druggy cocktail lounge where someone may or may not be having their toes broken in a back room, or how he manages to make a "quiet line of trees" sound like the scariest thing ever on the taut funk of 'Singers And The Endless Song'. It's 'Lovers Revolution' that tops them all, though, which creeps from gutter-jazz beginnings to an amphetamine-bop breakdown that bypasses brains and goes straight for the hips, a visceral danceability that Beam's barely even hinted at before. He's snarling and angry and bitter through the whole thing, too, and to hear this man of the gossamer whisper bare his teeth like this is completely thrilling. The only bad thing about 'Lovers Revolution' is that it turns closer 'Baby Centre Stage', a crying-lapsteel ballad just made for closing a record, into something unremarkable.

Ghost on Ghost is the sound of a man who's settled, but not complacent. The way 'Winter Prayers' is hidden in the record's hinterland at track nine feels deliberate, as though Beam's reminding us that he can still write something desolate and heartstopping with barely more than his guitar and voice, but that he'd never be so crass as to take the safe option. Ghost on Ghost can feel underwhelming at first, like it doesn't quite claw deep enough after the psychoactive mess of the past two Iron and Wine records, or the unspeakable closeness of Sam Beam's earlier work. But there's a buried edge here, there's rushing torrents of freaky imagery, there's opportunities to groove.

And, yes. The power of jazz.

This review originally appeared on the 405

[robhollamby]

Shlohmo - Laid Out

There's this bit in Robocop 2 that always puts the shits up me. Having been rehoused inside a hulking metal chassis after his near-fatal car crash, drug dealer and all-round shit bastard Cain decides to smoosh the head of his girlfriend Angie, after she reminds him of his lost… ah… 'manhood', by toying suggestively with one of his wrench-like pincers. That something once human (an unreserved scrote of a human, but nevertheless) can so suddenly destroy the person dearest to it after having turned machine, well, that just really gives me the willies.

So it probably doesn't take Dr. Juliette Faxx to figure out why most of my favourite electronic music has a strong human element to it, or why I've spent the last twelve months enthusiastically re-evaluating (like a lot of you, I shouldn't wonder) my position on R&B. Shlohmo is L.A.-based producer Henry Laufer, and with new EP Laid Out, he's blown the downbeat, introverted glitch-hop of last year's Vacation wide open.

It's fitting that Tom Krell's hanging-by-a-thread melodrama is all over lead track 'Don't Say No' – both he and Laufer share a penchant for channelling digital sadness into a representation of the natural. Here, Laufer wrangles whispering static to come off like rain on a porch roof, while drum machines fizz and crackle against a soaked-through guitar, wailing somewhere off in the distance. It's not a new idea, this meld of soul and circuitry – one more obvious reference point is Blue Sky Black Death's 'Sleeping Children Are Still Flying', which also drizzled some pleasingly widdly six-string over 808 rollers. Similarly, 'Out Of Hand's Burialist 2-step comes on a lot like a comedown redux of last year's excellent Stumbleine record. But where both Blue Sky and Stumbleine veered into the realms of the overblown, Laufer keeps things taut. Even with Krell's pleading 'wait' weaving in and out of 'Don't Say No's sodden lick, the desperation is always tangible, never in doubt, pinned down by Laufer's pared-back beats.

Even if the pedigree of Laid Out's opening one-two are easily recognisable, it shouldn't be said that Laufer is coasting. Third track 'Later' is something entirely his own, six and one half minutes of tectonic bass shifts, hails of ratchety snare, searing blasts of weaponised melisma that level everything in their path. That Laufer later removes all trace of percussion and turns up the filters to muffle what's left only increases the thing's power, the storm passing on. Even better is 'Put It', which embodies everything that terrifies me about electronic music, dredges up half-formed fears from somewhere just beyond my scared skinny-kid grasp. It's hip-hop's swagger in the darkness of a shadowy club, a place where the subs force out oxygen, where bad things are happening in indistinct corners, where everyone's cancelled eyes look straight through you and ants crawl under your skin as whatever you hoofed half an hour ago starts to wear off. But it's as seductive as power and darkness are, and you will eventually succumb to its slingshot bass and Mega Drive synths. It's just a matter of when.

After 'Put It's chemically-induced claustrophobia, closer 'Without' allows us to surface for air, making return to some of the more organic sounds that Laufer deals in. We get Rhodes, glockenspiel, another moody funk lead. We get beats that sound like they've come from wood or hide, rather than a circuitboard. But Laufer soon folds in those clicks and hisses, some honest-to-Bladerunner synthwork, and turns up the reverb until the purity and glassiness of the chimes starts to sound perverse over the black chasms cut by the sawtoothed keys. That morose-six string comes back, 'Maggot Brain's little brother, moaning out like its bodiless player has nothing in his pocket and no-one to go home to. It's just as stirring as Krell's falsetto skyhooks at the start of the record, this layering of man on machine, and it's a devastating end to a near-perfect EP. Whether Henry Laufer will be able to maintain all the warm soul and variety present on Laid Out for the duration of a long-player remains to be seen. Until then… well, try not to go smooshing any heads.

Stream Laid Out on the Friends of Friends bandcamp.

This review originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

Low - The Invisible Way

I'm a sucker for routine.

Every weekday I follow the exact same pattern of movement. In the mornings I am a Rube Goldberg machine, a series of painstakingly linked activities to reach simple ends, making coffee, drying myself after a shower, so forth. Deviation from this succession of knock-on effects means that I am inevitably late, puts a fluttering sickness in my gut that leaves me shaky, unable to accomplish everyday tasks without great effort.

Without deviation from routine, though, life loses its colour. Day by day some unseen hand pulls down the fader, until you're left with a vast expanse of infinite greys. Low are a band whose sound is well-defined – Alan Sparhawk's wilful pigeonholing of his band is applicable (in one way or another) to any Low record, but nevertheless, the more maximalist moments of The Great Destroyer shouldn't be easily mistaken as coming from Drums and Guns' frozen wasteland. With their constant record-to-record evolutions, Low avoid existing in those endless greyscale plateaus, but never shy away from documenting them with a fearless and unforgiving eye.

And so to The Invisible Way. You'll already know how Duluth's finest have chosen to fuck with their template this time around. Acoustics trumping electrics, Mimi Parker's seraphic vibrato more likely to be found centre stage, heavy use of piano. Exhibit A: third track 'So Blue', which has been doing the rounds for a while now. Those hammered ivories, Mim's tremulous call, intertwined and ascending skyward. These things sound jubilant at first, but the more I've listened to 'So Blue', the more I'm convinced that what I'm feeling isn't joy, no, it's the weightlessness that comes in the vague and hyperreal seconds that bleed into awareness of something painful, the unbelievable heat just before we pull our fingers away from flames.

Songs like this force us to feel alive, wrench us from routine and push colour into white space. And The Invisible Way has these songs, yes, some of the finest songs in Low's two-decade history, if you listen for them. There's opener 'Plastic Cup', a quiet and crushing rumination on humanity's general idiocy in the face of time, its bottomless bass drum rumble and constant strum the ever-ticking seconds. There's the coke-rush strut of 'Clarence White', which drains all fear right out of you, pokes wings from your shoulderblades, a destroying angel on the commute. The flipside being 'Just Make It Stop', in whose four minutes we get all the wretched and cyclical pointlessness of depression, while Sparhawk's guitar, for the first time, threatens to growl. Then there's the bit when Mim breathes "I don't know much, but I can tell when something's wrong… and something's wrong" at the culmination of 'Holy Ghost'. Jesus fuck. These are sad and beautiful and comforting songs of great, great worth.

It would be remiss not to credit producer Jeff Tweedy with some of this. Not for me the mic response diagram as masturbatory aid, but this record sounds incredible. Rich, lustrous, oaky, all those twattish production-as-wine signifiers that get trotted out every time some lit-grad bellsmear pretends to know about sound (ahem). It'd be too easy to say that Tweedy has invested The Invisible Way with some of his day job's twang, though maybe the creak and rustle of the record's many acoustics point to that. What Tweedy has done, though, is create an awesome, wideopen space with the bare minimum of instruments, something that spans the fearsome width of the country that birthed both Low and Wilco and their catholic musical lineage. 'Amethyst' the pinnacle of this, unfolding slow and gentle and impossibly deep, Sparhawk making the notion of time tearing out our eyes sound as inevitable and calm as drifting into sleep.

I am, for better or worse, subject to the vagaries of my own uncontrollable tastes. There is another, more unfortunate sense in which Low buck routine on The Invisible Way. While half the record has my tongue tangling itself up with rampant hyperbole, there is no shortage of lesser songs here. Perhaps you would care to disagree with me when I say that 'Four Score' is plain dull, that for all its unassailable sentiment 'Mother' is schmaltzy and even a bit gross, that 'Waiting' leaves us doing exactly that, while going precisely nowhere. Feel free. It's arguable that these songs suffer from the record's stripped-back aesthetic, that with more volume and layers they might come into their own. For me, it's just a mercy that The Invisible Way's weakest moments are also its shortest.

An album of two sides, then, good and not so. And routine, the prison that we have drawn for ourselves, abides. But late for work and disproportionately perturbed I hear Mim sing "if I could just make it stop, I could tell the whole world to get out of the way," and the source of warmth that lines like this can be should never be underestimated. It is Alan, though, who comes in first for forward motion:

"Maybe you should go out and write your own damn song, and move on."

This review originally appeared on The 405

[robhollamby]

The Men - New Moon

"We are homesick most for the places we have never known."

- Carson McCullers

Past-fetishism, nostalgia. It's the reason the UK's current number one, as sung by five preening, applecheeked urchins barely on the cusp of their twenties, is a rehash of two tracks released fifteen years before said urchins were born. It's the reason garage rock came back, the reason New Romanticism came back, the reason rave came back, each latest version spackling the cracks left by erstwhile urgency with cynicism, marketing bumph for a generation who weren't there the first time round, and jealous for that vital buzz. Making copies of copies of copies, as Tyler Durden had it (and hey, maybe we can start getting sentimental about that film (yes, the film) again, fourteen years old, first fresh in its fire and fury, then stale through overexposure, and now perhaps fresh again through the miracle lenses of those pinkish spex. Your call.) But Hell, few of us are exempt. Nostalgia, McCullers' homesickness, is a part of the reason I buy vinyl (and I will not accept that it's not part of the reason you buy vinyl too). It's part of the reason that, when drunk, I like to listen to music I'm already familiar with. It's an insidious disease and a sickening flaw, but damned if I know how, or if I even want, to cut myself loose.

The Men do not deal in nostalgia, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. Reason one: if the rash of comparisons to acts past that bubbled up in the wake of last year's Open Your Heart didn't fool you, then some of the songs on New Moon just might. First track 'Open The Door' is tender, pastoral loveliness (yeah, really), a gentle Creedence shamble through rolling, green America. It's sunshine on red barns, pearly smiles, driving with the top down. As if its title isn't signifier enough, 'High And Lonesome' revels in sentimentality, a wistful daydream of far-off Hawaii, a longing for the ease of assured warmth and loving. 'The Seeds', like 'Candy' before it, is another softly rollicking, fiddle-less version of the Stones' 'Country Honk'. All of this is as far removed from the terrifying sneer of 'Animal' or Leave Home's wilful dissonance as is possible.

Reason two: with nostalgia comes vulnerability. On New Moon, The Men sound more vulnerable than they ever have, and not just through the softening of their tones. While 'Half Angel Half Light' cranks the gain back up to 'jet engine' after 'Open The Door's haystack jam session, The Men's voices are front and centre, no longer hiding under fuzz, and we're told in no uncertain terms of their drinking, their indulgence to the point of surrender, and there is no glamour in their wastedness, just the failure of their vices to hold back the inexorable tide of real life. 'Bird Song' gurgles self-doubt over the best thing The Band never wrote, a bittersweet barroom jaunt packed with clanking electric piano and drunken slide, while 'I Saw Her Face' sees The Men pitching a straight-up Zuma-era Crazy Horse rip. The lexicon of longing is here too, as they beg to be taken away to that special place. For a band who have sounded both blackly malevolent (Leave Home) and consummate masters of their art (Open Your Heart), it's devastating and wonderful to hear The Men strip back the aggression and acclaim and present themselves as their namesake, as humans.

But The Men know that really, nostalgia is weakness. It prevents anything new from happening, anything truly creative, because we're content to rest in the warmth and safety of what's familiar. So naturally, they have to let us know that they haven't gone limp, that they're still using noise as a weapon. Just when you think you know how to file 'I Saw Her Face', just when the song's drive at escapism has built to the point of inevitable deflation, The Men switch up from rangy, loose-limbed jamming and propel their Sampedro-aping guitars forward at the thunderous speed of punk. The cymbals that burst through 'Without A Face' are the gnashing teeth of demons, swallowing distortion while a harmonica spits acid. "There's nothing you can do," yelp The Men, as if it wasn't already obvious. The closest thing I can equate 'The Brass' to is two giant mutant dinosaurs, levelling a city. This isn't a metaphor. The guitars, roaring at each other across the speakers, sound almost exactly like Godzilla, the rhythm section smashing masonry.

It is 'Supermoon', however, that is New Moon's pinnacle, placed so rightly at the record's close, a startling collision of the revered past and murky future. Guitars shriek, punch gated noise over an animalistic straight beat and a groove that's cyclical like a trip is cyclical, small variations that turn in on themselves and reroute and end up the same. Listening to 'Supermoon', I realise that I am trying to wield a broken rhetoric. Phrases like 'electrifying', 'white-knuckle' and 'thrillride' have been stripped of all weight for years now. It seems appropriate to do as The Men do, to mash together a couple pop culture references: if you ever felt like this, 'Supermoon' is the soundtrack to this.

On New Moon, The Men jettison the nostalgic baggage of their influences by being a sonic patchwork quilt (and by out and out pure harsh noise) – their sounds are so varied that they avoid being lumbered with one dead scene or another, getting your brain doing bunnyhops from time period to time period with all the attendant motion sickness, until you learn how to ride it out. And ride it out you will, because The Men are men, humans; they've opened the door for you, and this time, instead of commanding us to open our hearts, they have opened theirs.

[robhollamby]

Interview: E

I am ten and one half minutes into an interview with Mark Oliver Everett and I am done, I think. Floundering under the gazes of E and a permapresent PR sat a few feet away, I make a mumbled attempt to be endearing, a fan out of his depth, and I ask if Bobby Jr. (the German Shepherd/Bassett Hound cross who came to the attention of Eels fans with his 'singing' on 'Last Time We Spoke') makes any appearances on Eels' forthcoming tenth record Wonderful, Glorious.

"Bobby Jr. doesn't make an appearance, but he was present throughout the recording," E says, lobbing me a bone, I guess. "He's always been a part of our recording sessions since I got him in 2002 or 3. He's a constant presence."

There's a pause. I squirt rank desperation from every greasy pore. E goes on.

"But y'know he, it's not that he didn't try to get on the record. He's a hounddog, so he's always singing along to certain sounds. There were times when we had to kick him out because he gets too distracting."

And I've gotten distracted too.

Before all this it is the Monday after last Friday and I am still reeling when I skip work at lunchtime, pull my coat tight around me and head into grey November for Kensington. I shiver on the Overground and I splutter my way through a rollie on the High Street and I walk up to the hotel and decide no, don't stop, so I keep walking and the man I am about to meet sings at me from my headphones and I don't think I'm ready yet.

I'm not feeling up to it now.

So I shake on a peeling bench under naked trees in frosty Kensington Gardens, hoping for Neverland, pulling together what I've done with what I've got, trying to figure a way to make this worthwhile for the both of us. I push things to the wire and have to go in, and I'm met in the glistening marble lobby and taken up in the lift and into a starched, muted suite where two lackeys glance my way and nod and turn back to the plasma screen, engage in stilted debate as to whether we'll get snow. I take a toilet break and yell silently at the mirror, then E arrives and we decamp into the adjoining room.

"How long will these go on for?"

I have just turned on the recorder on my phone, and E is asking about it.

"I don't… I've done a 45 minute thing with it before, so quite a while."

E continues to look at the phone.

"That's promising," he says. I mutter something about all the editing, the lot of the music 'journalist'. That's what you signed up for, he says. I didn't think I signed up for anything, I say.

Three summers back, Eels released twelve howls of desire called Hombre Lobo, followed seven months later by the desolate End Times, a record that had me worrying about the mental state of a man I'd never met. I'd not seen a photo of E in a while, but I guessed he'd now look something like the crumpled, white-bearded gent on the record's sleeve. Seven more months and Tomorrow Morning rose glowing from the horizon, sweet relief for anyone mapping the ping-pong pattern of highs and lows from Beautiful Freak onward.

"I definitely pinned myself into a corner with each of those, where it had to be specifically dealing with whatever the idea was," E says, "and I guess it was liberating that for Wonderful, Glorious I didn't really have any rules at all. That I could just see what happens. After years of having so many rules, it was inevitable, I had to break out of that prison."

"So it's pretty good, to be out of that kind of thr…"

"Great. I don't think I'll ever give myself any rules again.

I ask if the new record marks a continued upward trajectory in Eels' musical mood. I waggle my finger in the air, tracing that jagged line from record to record on the happy-sad scale.

"Yeah, they kind of go up and down, but this time they didn't. I'm more on the positive tip of two in a row. So that was a curveball in itself. Maybe Tomorrow Morning was the beginning that set me up for a more long-lasting positivity," E says, "let's hope. We'll see. Who knows, maybe I'll do another death record after this."

To those of you looking for concrete proof that E's settling a little after emerging from pitch-black musical night, I present his band. Eels have operated something of a rotating door policy since inception, but for Wonderful, Glorious, E is using the same personnel that's populated Eels' live incarnation for their last two tours.

"They're just such good musicians," he says, "they're so talented. So many bands that are married for life, or whatever, tend to make the same record over and over again, because they're limited by their imaginations, you know? I always use the Beatles as an example – four people who were married to each other for a lengthy period, yet they had such boundless imaginations that they made these wildly different records from year to year. But you don't see that happen very often. That's why they were the Beatles. I just feel like with these guys I finally got into a group of people who really have pretty huge imaginations, so I'm just very comfortable with them rather than feeling like 'OK, this has run its course, time to mix it up'. I don't feel any need to mix it up because we're all so busy mixing it up ourselves."

"You've said that Knuckles is involved in songwriting too, now," I say.

"Yeah," E says, "not only that, he wrote the bulk of the music for the whole title track. It's not like he just wrote a drum part or something (maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think I can hear a drummer's hand in writing the taught, clicking funk of the song's verses). Everybody plays a lot of different instruments, even Knuckles."

I ask how collaborative Eels is on the lyrical front, bearing in mind E's past tendencies toward what people like to call, I don't know, 'intensely personal themes', 'melancholic imagery', and so on.

"Not at all. That's the one thing. Those guys don't have anything to say," E says. We both laugh. I sound a bit like this lady I used to work with, whose teeth-gritted, nervous-tic howls could scrub your insides with ground glass from the next room. "I do all the words and melodies."

"Do you see Eels staying that way forever?"

"Nah, I'm totally open to it. Like, if Chet gave me a lyric that I really thought was great I'd totally sing it, but I… doubt that's gonna happen. Then again, if you'd told me a year ago 'Knuckles is gonna write the bulk of the title track for your next album' then I would have laughed. You never know."

The first track on Wonderful, Glorious is called 'Bombs Away'. Its central character, according to the PR, is a 'quiet man pushed too far by modern life's increasing incivility'. I've since found out how it sounds, short-circuit distortion sculpted into a slinking, edge-of-mania groove by Koool G Murder's distant thunder. 'Nobody listens to a whispering fool,' E sings on 'Bombs Away', and I know now that he's right. Three months ago in a room in a hotel with E, though, I haven't heard Wonderful, Glorious. A quiet man myself, I didn't mention this to anyone beforehand, assuming it par for the course in the unending battle against leaks, all that. I have however heard the gravelly stomp of lead single 'Peach Blossom', so I seize on that.

"The only song I've heard off the new record is 'Peach Blossom'," I say.

"Oh, you haven't heard the record?" E says.

"No, I haven't heard it."

E turns to the other half of the room. "Am I gonna be getting a lot of this today?" he asks. He is reassured that despite problems with streams, other people will have heard it. So I say

"YeahI'mprobablyalotlowerdowninthejournalisticchainthanalotofthepeopleyou'regonnameettoday."

and then I ask about the song some more.

On 'Peach Blossom', E growls his gospel of positivity over some maxed-out rock riffs and Knuckles' relentless pounding. Together, the two things sound at odds – great, don't get me wrong, but E's entreaties to open the window and smell a variety of floral fragrances come off to me sarcastic, delivered as the song in the man's phlegmy husk, atop heapings of stabbing, in-the-red overdrive.

"There's nothing sarcastic about it to me," E says, "and that's something I get saddled with mistakenly sometimes, people think I'm being smarmy or sarcastic when I'm not. And then other times when I am trying to do that, they don't get it, so I don't know why I bother trying." He sounds like he means this, like he wants to give up the whole sordid business and go and live under a bush. Then again, maybe he's just being sarcastic. "No," he says, still talking about the song, "it's all genuine."

So I sweat on my little teal-upholstered vanity bench and worry that I am fucking up. I keep glancing behind me to where I've kept my notes on the dressing table, blotty scrawls from frozen hands on the park bench defacing what I'd come up with in the warmth of my living room. I think I choose topics at random. I ask about E's new studio ("It's amazing, like my teenage wet dream come true, a whole house to be creative in. What would be the living room is the performance area, and then the attic is the control room") and the difficulties thereof ("We have to go up and down the stairs a lot. But y'know, I figure if the Beatles had to do that in Abbey Road all those years, we can handle it.") I ask if E has any plans for his forthcoming four month tour, bearing in mind the theatricality displayed in Eels outings to date – the beards, the fighter pilot outfits, the bandana. "That's what I'm gonna go figure out when I get home," he says, "I don't have any idea how that's gonna go down yet."

I want, really, to talk about music. Not how much E loves his band (which you can read here), or how much he loves his new studio (which you can read here), but his new record (which, incidentally, you can now hear here). Not having heard it, and not wanting to ask 'so…what's it like?', I still have one question that's not a PR-regurgitating non-entity. I just don't much want to use it. On October 19th 2011, there was a post on the Eels website newsfeed about E's contribution to Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self. We heard nothing more until a year, to the day, later, when a solitary 'Hi' popped up. Tailing off from some straw-clutcher about the Wonderful, Glorious bonus disc, I ask what E was doing for that year.

"It only took us a month to make the record, and the rest of the year I was just bored," E chuckles, easily. "Sometimes after you put three albums out in a year, you have to go away."

"Yeah?"

A moment hangs between us. I feel infinite and icy time slowing its crystalline creep to glacier speed. I know that I'm supposed to ferret and search, to ask where E was and what he was doing for that year, because that's what people want to know, right? Dull red shards bat at my temples.

"I just went away." E says.

A gnarled celestial hand turns the speed dial from molasses to regular, my synapses fire and I know that I won't press him. So I fumble some stuff about a dog and then I am ten and three quarter minutes into an interview with Mark Oliver Everett.

"I'm actually done, I think, if that's OK with you," I say.

"Great."

"Sweet."

"Alright."

This interview originally appeared on The 405