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Month: January 2012

Blue-collars

Red Wanting Blue is the personification of the blue-collar road warrior band. Since 1996, the band has been cranking out melodic rock’n’roll/pop that fits neatly next to Counting Crows—which is a great thing in my book, as I know almost every word of August and Everything After. RWB’s newest, From the Vanishing Point, just broke into the Heatseekers chart at #10, which is a hard-earned spot for a band that’s worked diligently for so long. As my Dad quips, “One of these years I’ll be an overnight success.” Here’s their video for the ridiculously catchy “Audition.”

Charlotte & Magon have been charming me for a while (exhibits A, B, C and D), and “The Mining” is no different. The tense, sparse tune draws from trip-hop, electro-pop and post-punk before bursting into a wicked guitar solo. Yes, a guitar solo. They’re ratcheting up for the release later this year of their “magnum opus, rock novel” Life Factory, which is “the story of the working man in search of hope and truth.”

Early Download: Jacob Furr's "Voices on the Sea"

Jacob Furr, whose fingerpicked marvel Finches I raved over last June, has a batch of new songs called Farther Shores coming on Tuesday. He kindly allowed us to share the first single “Voices on the Sea” in advance of the release.

The song features a chord-heavy version of folk that nods toward his debut album The Only Road. Keening pedal steel, sparse percussion, and accordion lend a high desert feel to the track. The lyrics deal with regrets and travel, which are two of Furr’s consistent themes. The arrangement, vocals and lyrics work together to create a deep sense of longing. If you’re into storytellers like Damien Jurado, Denison Witmer or the Calexico/Iron+Wine collaboration, you’ll be into this.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the album, which drops over here on Tuesday. Download it here.

Single: "When I Write My Master's Thesis"

I listen to so much pop music that I’m impervious to humming all but the catchiest of tunes. But even my melodically jaded self can’t stop from singing along with “When I Write My Master’s Thesis” by John K. Samson. The leader of the Weakerthans’ new solo album is called Provincial, and it includes the aforementioned power-pop gem. Samson’s excellent vocals carry a thoughtful, wry set of lyrics about the difficulty of monumental tasks which will appeal to an audience far larger than just graduate students. Add to that a perky Weezer/Fountains of Wayne guitar line, and you’ve got gold.

Not everything with an acoustic guitar is folk

Rebecca Zapen’s delicate “Swamp Pit” sways with a charm reminiscent of a stately, classy woman leaning over to you and unexpectedly revealing her affections. There’s no big move or huge shift; it’s just a lovely little waltz. The lyrics are wonderful and perfectly matched to the melodies, as well.

Torn Shoe Records, which is run by quirky acoustic dudes The Mothafolkin’ Soul, will soon release a comp called Torn Shoe Vol. 1. The release includes TMS, The Cimarron Music Show, Timmy Lane, Arthur Elias, and Josh Hathcock. You can check out two tracks from it at the label’s Bandcamp. Both are really earnest, melodic acoustic tunes without the polished sheen of John Mayer or Matt Nathanson. [Editor’s note: This label is inactive and this release is unavailable.]

It seems that I am obsessed with the indie music of Australia. The number of bands from down under that I’ve been repping is now close to ten with the addition of Smith & Frank. Their gentle ambient/acoustic tune “Charlie” is more concrete than most ambient tracks, but less structured than most acoustic-pop. The well-handled balance of spacious vibe and layered arrangement results in a unique and interesting experience. I’m definitely looking forward to more tunes from this duo.

Videos: Ugly Kids Club/TimPermanent/A Road to Damascus/SoundCloud

You may have heard that Sleigh Bells is releasing a new album. If it can’t get here fast enough for you, some Sleigh Bells-esque noise-pop action is available in Ugly Kids Club‘s “Diamond in Your Fire.” You’ll hear SB’s influence all over it, but when the melodies are this infectious, who cares? The video itself is really weird; just go with it.

While we’re on the subject of strange videos, here’s TimPermanent’s “Busy” clip. The song itself is a burbling indie-electro tune that owes The Postal Service a debt of gratitude. The video is something else entirely.

I’m reviewing fewer and fewer bands with the word “hardcore” in their genre name, but I don’t abandon friends. A Road to Damascus‘s video to “What a Waste of Breath” shows off their pop-punk/hardcore in a tour video: if you’re not down with the genre, it’s worth jumping to 1:45 to see a five-second clip of the bassist pulling off a one-handed cartwheel on stage while holding his bass. I don’t see that every day.



SoundCloud
has reached 10,000,000 sound creators, which is a pretty impressive number. The guys behind the project have created a Story Wheel to tell the history of SoundCloud. It’s a pretty fun little slide-show and presentation, and it’s only a few minutes long. Story Wheel is a pretty cool little app/program as well – I hadn’t heard of it until this came in over the wire.

What it means to be a band

I grew from my pop-punk roots into a deep admiration of Sufjan Stevens’ intricate arrangements and Death Cab for Cutie’s use of all band members on Transatlanticism. Sufjan is self-explanatory, but the latter album’s careful maximization of every band member’s skills is now something I seek out in music. If you can apply both of these elements to pop-punk, well, that’s nigh on heroic.

Signals Midwest is that band. Latitudes and Longitudes is easily the most carefully crafted album of punk rock I have ever heard. I don’t even want to call it punk rock, because the audience for this band is far greater than guys and girls who love three-chord stomping (and trust me, there’s great love for that in my heart). Signals Midwest has put together a statement, and that’s impressive.

It starts toward the end of opener “In Tensions,” which is a perfectly-chosen descriptive title to set the tone. The band drops out, and vocalist Maxwell Stern is left alone over an finger-picked acoustic guitar: “I was counting the miles/You were counting the days/And it’s strange that the numbers we wanted/were moving in opposite ways.” The lyric and melody appears twice more in the album: once in the next track “Monarchs” and once in closer “The Weight and The Waiting.” So there’s an intro, then a re-statement of theme, then the body, then a reaffirmation of theme as the closer? Yes, this is that organized.

The sound is incredible as well. Two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer give all they’ve got on these ten tracks: Rarely does the band drop into four-on-the-floor, pound-it-out mode. The songs all feature a rhythmically and melodically unique lead guitar line, backed up by rapidfire bass and heavily patterned drums. “Family Crest” is mind-boggling in its construction, as each member seems to be maxing out his capabilities. And it’s not even the best song, because technical proficiency is only one of the things that makes this band. Oh, and just to overawe you some more: they recorded most of this thing live.

But the melodic capability and corresponding vocal fury really set this apart from other bands. Single “The Quiet Persuader” opens up with a neat guitar line that recalls early 2000s pop-punk before snapping into martial rhythms and delivering the lead to Stern, who just rips the song apart with his passionate vocal performance. His voice is permanently halfway between singing and yelling, in that zone that seems exclusively the domain of punk rock. He may persuade quietly, but that’s the only thing he does without volume. “I Was Lost” has a wiry groove to it; “Memo” is crushing in its tension and release. “Limnology” is a how-to on mid-tempo rock.

But Latitudes and Longitudes isn’t all throwdowns: “January and Seven” is a poignant, acoustic ballad that doesn’t go maudlin or sterile, as is the sin of many punk acoustic tracks. It’s a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the toughness of being. Turns around every corner: closer “The Weight and The Waiting” casually throws in a horn section to cap off the album. It’s a perfect way to sum up the message of the album: it’s a tough life, especially when your friends are far away. But when those friends are all in one place, it’s a celebration of life. And with the hope of those future meetings in place, we press on.

Latitudes and Longitudes is what happens when four men at the top of their game get together and think hard about how to best use their skills. This is easily one of the best of ’11 in any genre, and I’ll be listening to this long into ’12. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Chilled: Two Suns/Mombi/Wild Belle

Two Suns, the ambient/dark/dreamy/electronic project of Jake Davidson, is releasing Dream Familiar one song at a time. The third of these tracks off the 10-song album is “Nostalgic.” The tender acoustic piece is appropriately named.

Mombi‘s “The Misunderstanding” is the second ambient piece of the day, although this one builds synths on top of synths for a drifting, free-floating feeling.

I’ve featured maybe five reggae bands in the almost nine years of Independent Clauses, so I was as shocked as anyone to find myself drawn to the white-girl reggae of Wild Belle‘s “Keep You.” I mean, those coy vocals! And that honking bass sax! This is so great!

Horizon: The Phusion

In ESPN’s 30 for 30 film “Jordan Rides the Bus,” Michael Jordan is noted as being relieved that his first professional baseball spring game experiences were terrible. He wanted to get the initial mistakes out of the way and get on to playing. Artists’ debuts are often like that: “let’s get it done and learn from it.” In an age where “release” is a shifting concept, this sometimes means as much as a whole album of uneven content or as little as sporadic singles released on unheralded Soundcloud accounts. But the mantra stands: you have to start somewhere.

The Phusion starts with In the Shadows of Giants, which does the neat side-step of acknowledging in the title that there are a lot of influences on display. And there are: the jazz/funk/indie group throws down chord progressions generally associated with jazz (“Moving Fast,” “Birdbrain”), ripping bass lines (“All That You Are,” “Comfortable Prison”), and a liberal dose of Ladies and Gentlemen-era Spiritualized synth wash (“Where Did They Go?”). The ph/fusion is the thing on display here. The band does a pretty good job of synthesizing, yet it’s still clear that these are disparate influences mashed together with a great deal of rehearsal. The evidence of thought and practice show up all over, however, in the precision with which the instrumentalists interact. If they keep this work ethic together (or even work harder), then they will be on their way to building their own little corner of the indie-verse.

The Phusion hasn’t found its unique voice yet, and that’s totally fine. Radiohead didn’t figure out who they were on Pablo Honey, either. But they throw down some intriguing ideas on In The Shadow of Giants, and that’s what a debut should do.

Call your senators now against SOPA/PIPA

Independent Clauses supports the SOPA/PIPA Internet Strike Day, and here’s why: if used as it intended (not even abused, mind you, just used as intended), “they” would have the power to shut down Independent Clauses for an infringement anywhere in our last 8.5 years of posts. This is absurd. Please read this and call your Congressman from your computer or from your phone. And if you don’t know what to say, here’s what to say. Help keep the Internet the same, so that it can stay the always-changing, wonderful thing it is.

The Ridges' Daytrotter session shows a folk band on the move

In the brilliant Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, author Michael Azerrad describes Beat Happening as flaunting “rudimentary musicianship and primitive recordings, a retro-pop style, and a fey naivete in a genre that became known as ‘twee-pop’ or ‘love rock.'” Twee would continue on through the ’90s, and its fey naivete would become a driving force in indie-pop (which was twee without the junky recordings). Indie-pop begat indie-folk of Iron + Wine and Sufjan Stevens, which crashed into the singer/songwriter genre just as the latter was trying to differentiate itself from Lilith Fair and alt.country. Thus, the two sides of indie-folk met in the middle to create a new aesthetic, and that (along with a little bit of bluegrass and some Great Depression imagery thrown in along the way) is how we ended up with Mumford and Sons.

All that to say, there’s a serious side and a playful side to indie-folk, and The Ridges most definitely fall on the serious side. The band’s Daytrotter session shows them building on the strings-heavy folk sound that they crafted on their debut EP. The three EP tunes don’t stray much from their previously-recorded incarnations: “Not a Ghost” is still a rambling, shambling, catchy song with atmosphere; “War Bonds” shows a bit of their playful side with a bell kit, while still commenting on “dead friends”; “Overboard” is a sea shanty of merit. The upsides: the strings sound even more vital in these recordings, while the vocalist Victor Rasgatis gets unhinged. If you haven’t heard the Ridges yet, this is as good a way as any.

The real treat is the two unreleased songs. (I expect that a great many more bands will start sending me Daytrotter sessions of new music, because if a band’s up to one-take recording, that’s a five-song EP with no recording costs, yo!) “Dawn of Night” would have fit in perfectly with their self-titled EP, as a raw energy pulses through the tune, punctuated by ragged “oh-oh”s. The underlying intensity that The Ridges bring to the table is something that’s rarely seen in folk; there seems to be something truly ominous about their work, and not in a “ha! look! this is creepy!” sort of way. “Jackson Pollock” tones down the eerie for a four-on-the-floor fast song. Despite the speed, the arrangement is remarkably complex for a live recording, which makes me all the more impressed by The Ridges. The string melodies are especially solid.

The Ridges’ “melodic strengths are honed to a fine point” here, as I hoped in my last review. If you’re into serious indie-folk (Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Little Teeth), you should be all over this. Look for the Ridges to make a splash in 2012.