It has always bothered me a bit that the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s and early 80s is viewed by some as being sort of behind New York and London in terms of importance and influence, when the fact is that it’s really the opposite: Los Angeles was just as interesting, if not more so, than those other places. For every person I see reading Please Kill Me (which is a crucial book, no doubt), I really […]
Will Oldham, Craft Beer, and Bars’ Backyards
On Saturday evening, I staked out a spot at the Williamsburg bar Spuyten Duyvil, ordered a pint of beer, and waited for Will Oldham to show up. The occasion was a release event for an EP and a particular brew that served as a collaboration between Oldham, the band Watter, and Baltimore’s Stillwater Artisanal, a craft brewery who’ve done a handful of collaborations with musicians, including Lower Dens. The band, Bonnie Stillwatter, was doing a lightning round of appearances, stopping […]
Pop Investigations, Specificity, and Misheard Lyrics: An Interview With Fred Thomas
The songs heard on All Are Saved, the new album from Fred Thomas, cover a wide stylistic range, from stark narratives to ecstatic arrangements. To anyone familiar with Thomas’s body of work, which includes albums released under his own name as well as with the groups Saturday Looks Good to Me and City Center, this is probably not going to be much of a shock. Throughout, memorable riffs and choruses weave around haunting memories and observations of geographical spaces. It’s […]
“A Road Trip Album for Driving Around Fantasia”: Talking Miller and Brautigan With Doldrums
Montreal’s Doldrums, the musical project of Airick Woodhead, isn’t the easiest entity to categorize. There’s a stripped-down aesthetic at work, but a number of the songs on their latest album The Air Conditioned Nightmare are magnificently catchy. That the album shares a title with a Henry Miller book is also an indication of Woodhead’s fondness for books. Literary allusions can be found throughout the new album, and I checked in with Woodhead via email to learn more about the process […]
Some Notes on Xetas’s “The Redeemer”
Austin’s Xetas first came onto my radar via Andrew Earles’s review of a recent 7″ on Still Single. “I suppose there’s a dominant essence of this that could have been heard in 1995 out of the San Diego scene,” he notes, and that’s a comparison that definitely got my attention. That’s how I came to pick up their new album The Redeemer, which has been on heavy rotation on my turntable and via iTunes for the past week or so.
Pop, Opera, and “Finding Sonic Transcendence”: An Interview With GABI
GABI, the group led by composer Gabrielle Herbst, fits neatly into the increasingly blurred space between the rock club and the new music venue. GABI’s debut Sympathy (due out on April 7th on Software) is an unpredictable album, at times disconcerting in its rearrangement of familiar elements, at times washing over the listener in a more melodic fashion. It hits on both a cerebral and a visceral level, and I spoke with Herbst about balancing her pop and compositional impulses, […]
Talking Sheila Heti, Ghosts With Hats, and Seattle DIY With Chastity Belt
I first heard Seattle’s Chastity Belt via their 2013 album No Regerts, a winningly smart indie rock record. Their new album Time To Go Home (out later this month on Hardly Art) doubles down on that album’s strengths I mean, I’m in my late 30s, and Tsumani’s A Brilliant Mistake comes to mind when I hear this–it’s got that same blend of sharp-edged lyrics and music that can burn slowly or channel essential punk energy. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s a […]
Talking RIP DIY With Curator Nicki Ishmael
Last fall, when wandering through the expanded space of Death by Audio during that venue’s last week of shows, I caught sight of a wall featuring photographs taken at a host of DIY spaces. They featured bands in motion and crowds watching the action; they brought back memories of venues that no longer existed; in some cases, they brought back memories of buildings that no longer existed. That turned out to be the prelude for RIP DIY, a show of […]