This song is about that lying son of a bitch president of ours announced at his February appearance at the in Arlington, VA, introducing his opening song and the title track to Taking Up Serpents Again. He finger-picked over a few chords on his banjo and shook his hips side to side in a lazy sort of way while looking down to the floor for a few minutes, then raised his head, approached the microphone: It s about Abraham Lincoln.
Curtis Eller plays and writes a music that some might call traditional or folk.
His romps and ballads could have been borne in the delta or a post-Civil War parlor. His characters recall musicians, celebrities, and politicians long gone, reaching back as far as the mid-nineteenth century. He reaches back and finds the American Gothic tradition.
However, his music is utterly modern, since it s all really just a set up, a hoax on the modern listener to think that Eller is just some bygone folkie singing the same old traditionals that seem so enervating compared to the electronic trends currently evading popular music today. You see, every song is a history lesson and a puzzle. Each song is a lamentation on and a celebration of the past, present, and the future.
Eller takes the listener on a journey through time where it is impossible to tell when you are.
May 17 Mo Pitkin s House of Satisfaction New York, NY
When the average music fan thinks of heavy metal, in either its traditional Maiden/Priest theatricality or in one of its numerous violent subgenres, there is usually one constant in its approach: a sense of misplaced seriousness. This is a practice as old as metal itself, as lines like Judas Priest’s “Grinder / Looking for meat / Grinder / Wants you to eat!
” and Slayer’s classic “How long can you last in this frozen water burial?” were delivered without a hint of irony or self-referential humor. Death metal has a similarly straight-faced delivery much of the time, even with the ridiculous B-movie horror themes or that old standby Satan as inspiration.
Modern instrumental metal bands are serious in a different way, creating heavy but somber music that sounds like the score to a very dramatic scene in a film in which a character contemplates suicide or cries about something. I saw the band Pelican (the Explosions in the Sky of metal) live a while back, and not only did they stare at their instruments and not move the whole performance, but they specifically requested that only blue and red lighting be used to illuminate such a boring spectacle.
Canadian quartet Electro Quarterstaff creates exciting, vital instrumental metal without falling into the dreaded trap of seriousness.
They are certainly serious about writing riffs, but they refuse to forget that metal should be fun and slightly goofy. “We act silly on stage,” guitarist Andrew Dickens wrote to me, “because we’re all silly in person. We have a great time playing these songs and express that through a stage show filled with funny faces, hip-swinging and foot-stomping good times.
We aren’t going to put on a show acting like we hate the world.” From their song titles (“Something’s Awry in the Hetfield of Dreams”) to to their debut album (a bizarre pastel-colored painting of a one-antlered creature in the ocean with a boat sailing through the hole in its torso), the band is winking at the metal establishment. And unlike many other instrumental metal-ish bands, like Red Sparowes or the aforementioned Pelican, Electro Quarterstaff aren’t here to uplift your heart – they play fast and the riffs never stop.
Ever. “The goal of this band has always been to embrace the power of the Riff, or in the case of our songs, many riffs working together to resolve themselves into some kind of cohesive musical speech that’s both sonically fulfilling and challenging to play,” says guitarist Drew Johnston. “There’s such an abundance of boring, tepid, predictable catshit out there that passes for ‘music’ that we try to create something that can be heard as majestic sonic weaponry puncturing the shield of mediocrity… or at least making a dent.
”
If you like riffs, then Electro Quarterstaff’s debut album Gretzky is for you. It’s a buffet of tasty licks courtesy of the triple-axe assault of Dickens, Johnston, and Josh Bedry. Dan Ryckman pounds the drums and somehow keeps up with the hyperactive harmonic shred squad without veering into the tasteless unrelenting blast territory of brutal death metal.
Three guitars and drums – no vocals, no bass. “I don’t think of our unorthodox lineup as a defining characteristic of the band. In fact, I hope riff lovers from around the world relate to our sound for the same reason we do, the ‘feels good sounds good’ approach.
I guess the whole triple guitar instrumental band thing might spark some interest for the uninformed, but to ride that as what defines Electro Quarterstaff would be selling us short in my opinion,” says Dickens. Johnston adds, “I find that instrumental music is like reading a book. The listener is enabled to use their imagination to really focus and zero-in on the interplay between the instruments as opposed to having the pictures painted for them by a vocalist or singer yattering on and on, gurgling ad nauseum; which, in the case of extreme metal, can sometimes trivialize or belittle otherwise brilliant music It’s literally impossible for us to get away with something that sounds half-hearted or half-baked as there are no vocals to ‘carry it’ or to ‘masquerade’ a presumably mediocre or temperate section.
”
Their music is rooted in metal traditions, but just because you think you don’t like metal doesn’t mean you can’t get down to this. “We’ve never been too concerned about being considered a part of the metal world. Our roots are clearly in metal and the high-gain riff-intensive songs are that of metal, but I would hate to limit ourselves solely to one genre…I think we have enough to offer to allow some interest from outside the genre, as well as to alienate some of the narrow-minded metalheads out there.
” The songs are meticulously-planned (Johnston compares the arranging process to “the molecular Tetris match from hell”) modern compositions that the composer decided to orchestrate within the sound of a specific genre. There’s very little repetition in these songs, and considering only one of the eight songs on Gretzky is under five minutes long and one is nearly eleven, that’s a lot of riffs. Johnston says, “The instrumental aspect of the band is liberating in that we’re totally unencumbered by conventional structure, so it’s been interesting for us to experiment with idiosyncratic accent placement, mutating syncopation, and mathematical patterns embedded between multiple, overlapping and intersecting riffs.
” Riffs are serious business, but that’s pretty much the band’s only statement. “We don’t have any message or political ideal we’re trying to get across,” says Dickens. “We’re just a few guys having a good time playing songs we love and that’s how we’ll always keep it.
”
The band completed their first tour in the spring of 2006, which included a stop at the highly-regarded Maryland Deathfest. “[The tour] was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” says Dickens. “We had an awesome response, made lots of new friends, introduced Electro Quarterstaff to quite a few new faces, and even came home without having to get a second job to pay the bills.
” Gretzky was released on Willowtip Records last fall, and the band has been back in Winnipeg since the tour, going to school or working a job and playing the occasional show. They hope to tour again soon, which would once again bring the riffs to the masses, as well as the most outrageous guitar faces you’ll ever see. “I liken the faces and antics to a profoundly cherished quote: ‘You gotta make it look like it sounds!
’” says Johnston. “Since I sing with my guitar instead of my voice, it’s fun for me to kind of mime the riffs using my face and body. As soon as you climb onstage, you immediately become a performer or entertainer whether you want to admit it or not, so why not relish in that for a minute?
I have a lot of fun playing this wild music and I think that unbridled enthusiasm comes across to people when we play live and is effective in establishing a rapport between us and the audience, regardless of how sophisticated their musical tastes may or may not be. At any rate, I certainly hope our band can at the very least be a catalyst or buffer in raising ‘riff awareness’ and turning people on to more progressive, challenging music they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to or interested in.”
Rumor has it, when Scottish band the Twilight Sad went down to Brighton, UK to meet with their label reps at Fat Cat Records, they took the piss out of everyone’s southern accent.
It’s hard to believe they meant it maliciously. The affective souls responsible for Fourteen Autumns Fifteen Winters wouldn’t offend, would they? Of course not.
But, at the same time, don’t take these lads as creampuffs just because their band name suggests a night in with red wine and Morrissey on the hi-fi accompanied by more than a few tears. The Twilight Sad can run with any crowd, and they will surely please people all over the indie spectrum. They’ve certainly pleased this Post-Rockist contributor.
Part way through opener “Cold Days From The Birdhouse” their Achilles heel/ace in the hole is revealed: James Graham’s voice. More specifically, it is his accent that shocks. With one of the thicker sung Scottish accents in pop music, it’s distracting to say the very least.
It may also be that one extra idiosyncrasy that launches this band to superstardom! Well…that’s not going to happen. But, there’s no denying that what lies just beneath the thick Scottish brogue is a powerful set of pipes well-equipped to belt it out, even over the frequently cacophonic guitars and equally aggressive rhythm section.
But, don’t get cocky on us, Mr. Graham: your vocals aren’t that sexy. The album feels a bit sluggish when it relies too heavily on his vocals.
Songs such as “Last Year’s Rain Didn’t Fall Quite So Hard,” which is built around a repeated vocal line, are a bit aimless and boring. But, in defense of The Twilight Sad, shame on any listener who expected something spine-tingling or exciting from a song titled “Last Year’s Rain Didn’t Fall Quite So Hard.”
That said, the album is a very solid debut with a lot more highs than lows.
The Twilight Sad will surely draw comparisons to fellow Scots Mogwai, or, I think even more appropriately, to Texans Lift to Experience. But, unlike these classic post-rock groups, the order of the day isn’t dynamics; it’s complements. Rather than drafting every song around the quiet/loud dynamic, the Twilight Sad complement their loudest, most distorted moments with a powerful, hooky vocal line here, a humming accordion there.
These little touches make the louder moments more unpredictable, the quieter moments more memorable. Even as “Walking For Two Hours” opens with guitar tones that swing back and forth, seemingly with reckless abandon, it’s all done to a melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on Ride’s Nowhere. At other times, given the urgency captured in both Graham’s howling messages and the frenzied percussion, they sound reminiscent of the urban paranoia of New Yorkers like Interpol or Longwave.
But, in a very Scottish way.
And, since there is no better place to insert this comment, here’s a sidebar. Though I haven’t been able to get confirmation on this point, I am quite certain that track two, “That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy,” is a reference to Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic Stand By Me (or possibly Stephen King’s novella The Body, on which the film is based).
But, instead of telling us their story about a fat kid named Vern and a dead kid name Ray Brower, the Twilight Sad deliver a tale of about the clash of everyday disappointments and affirmations. And they prove convincingly that a row of effects pedals and an accordion make for better storytellers than Richard Dreyfuss.
-Posted by E.
Kula Cody Chesnutt flirted with success briefly in 2002 when he was featured on the Roots’ single “The Seed (2.0)” from their Phrenology album. The song was actually an adaptation of one of Chesnutt’s own solo tracks, a cleaned-up, tighter version of his sloppy and occasionally out-of-tune original.
Chesnutt opened for the Roots on their tour supporting that album and gained a small amount of buzz as a result.
2002 also saw the release of Chesnutt’s debut album, the ambitious, eccentric, hilariously-titled double-disc The Headphone Masterpiece. The first time I heard it, I suppose I was expecting songs like the Roots’ “The Seed (2.
0),” and I was quite surprised to be greeted with a forty-second tape-hissy keyboard and vocal track followed by a seemingly endless, though actually less than four minutes, naughty/sexy spoken word piece by terrible guest poet Sonja Marie. The record was already confusing and frustrating me, and then he couldn’t even hit his own high notes in the original “The Seed!” He’d play a great lo-fi acoustic track like “Enough of Nothing” for less than a minute and then follow it with a looped beat for another 46 seconds with him on top saying, and I quote, “Test test test test ahhhhhhhhh.
” By the time I got to the end of the tremendous nearly-100-minute album (this guy’s got some serious huevos rancheros putting out a debut that long and bloated) I was left thinking, “What a weird album.” Then I realized – I love weird albums!
It’s like the diary of a nutty, earnest, gifted, horny, and slightly delusional recluse put to music by the love child of Stevie Wonder and Daniel Johnston.
Chesnutt has no reservations or continuity lyrically, going from songs about childhood best friends to songs about sex while high, then continuing to beg for forgiveness for cheating on his woman and singing a 13-second ode to his “big black penis.” He’s all over the map musically as well, from acoustic guitar and vocal ballads, hip-hop tracks (with occasionally dreadful freestyle rapping), retro soul, and straight-ahead garage rock, all recorded with a lo-fi feel and usually with a drum machine. His aesthetic is unique, and it’d be hard to find an artist that sounded like one of these tracks, much less an artist who can pull them all off like Chesnutt does.
And his voice, despite its limits and occasional blemishes, is remarkably expressive and smooth. The pimp anthem “Serve This Royalty” has a bridge melody that’ll break your heart and the introspective “5 on a Joyride” hits me right in the middle of my soul.
After his short stint in the spotlight and this wonderful album, Chesnutt has all but disappeared, apart from a painfully-brief appearance in the high-spirited documentary/concert film Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and a recent inclusion on the Biblical concept compilation Plague Songs.
Chesnutt contributed “Boils,” a rollicking reggae track full of horns, groove, bombast, and notably improved production values.
Chesnutt’s hints at a new collection of songs called The Live Release, “a unique experiment in music, an exercise of the living word.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but I’m excited to hear it.
He releases what he wants when he wants, and whenever he decides to drop another album on the unsuspecting public, make sure to take notice.
A Long (belated) Valentine to the Detholz!
(from Who Are the Detholz!
?)
Detholz! recordings, Detholz!
tour dates, and other assorted Detholz! tidbits available at .
The Detholz!
have a way of rearranging the realities of the sensory world. At every Detholz! show I have ever been to, there has been a sniff of the weird, or a sense of the infinitely possible.
Strangers show up at Detholz! shows and turn out to be long-lost twins. Lovers reunite, and people who do not yet know they are perfect for each other pair off.
I have run into ex-boyfriends, ex-peers, ex-coworkers, ex-costars, and ex-floormates at Detholz! shows. And, it seems, I learn another of the endless and eerie commonalities between myself and drummer Andrew Sole, who grew up in metro Detroit, just like me, and went to church a mile away from my house.
He babysat for the kid who played Poseidon to my Medusa in a high school play (directed, as an extra note of interest, by the fiancée of one of the editors of this website); his pastor was the father of a former symphony standpartner, who also made a guest apperance as the frontman of an opening band at a show they played in Wheaton, Illinois.
I was an eighteen-year-old with an angry ache nestled in my heart when I saw the Detholz! for the first time.
After a crunchy, kitschy set of space rock – songs about following a spurning lover on a train to Mars, a supervillian named Mr. Electricity who is “impossible to touch,” cities overrun by alien armies – the band came back for an encore, wearing bright suits and pale make-up. They set their gear up in silence, played a few tentative chords, and when they all wailed in unison, they spit out cornstarch blood.
They played “Celebrate” and “Hot for Teacher,” rendering every tacky cover with charge. By night’s end I had never been sweatier or more worked up. I had never heard silliness delivered with such urgent earnesty, flushed rock beauty paired so seamlessly with nerdy irony.
My heartbreak was smashed into dust and scattered over the ocean. I was in love.
It was my first year at Beloit College, and during my four years there, the Detholz!
became an institution, playing once a semester in the smelly, roady basement of the C-Haus. Their shows were like no other shows. They played to shirtless, screaming crowds for hours, encore after encore, giving us their best songs two or three times.
The walls of the bar would sweat brown streaks of beer, tobacco, and grime. Afterward they would come to our parties and dance on our tables. This was rock revivalism at its best, with all of the danger, all of the spirit, all of the flesh.
The Detholz!, of course, have regularly scheduled lives away from this dirty booze pit on the stateline. They live together in Chicago, have other jobs, play music with other bands (notably, Baby Teeth and Bobby Conn), and maybe – no one really likes admitting this, but we’re jealous lovers – maybe have dedicated fans that aren’t Beloit College students.
Formed in 1996 at Wheaton College – the notoriously fundamentalist alma mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, where dancing was banned until 2003 – the band initially explored their frustrations with stagy irreverence, performing in space suits and smashing television sets with pickaxes. Return engagements at Wheaton resulted in demonstrations, prayer circles, and altercations between fans and detractors.
“We nurtured images of the ‘quintessential Detholz!
fan,’” says lead singer Jim Cooper, “who is a socially maladjusted male between the ages of 15 and 30, in a profession related to science or math, probably hopelessly addicted to porn, terrified of women, snorty, constantly apologizing, etcetera.”
In 2002, Detholz! debuted their first full-length, Who are the Detholz!
?, a sort of campy musical Metropolis. Though members of the band have expressed reluctance at ever performing or even hearing most of the songs on that album ever again, it is nonetheless meticulously crafted, full of tabernacle harmonies, impeccable electronics, electrifying arches of melody and rhythms so sharp they could snap your neck.
This was the album I took home with me after my first life-altering Detholz! experience, and it spent long summers spinning in my car stereo, and lonely winters waiting with me for the thaw of the earth and the blistering homecoming of my heart’s most resilient suitors.
Seasons turned and the band returned, time and time again, to the C-Haus.
I kept listening to Who Are the Detholz!?, but it was becoming evident that the album was aging, and that these rock-and-roll missionaries were not themselves getting any younger.
Their new songs were full of disco experimentalism, psycho-curious explorations. Jim’s televangelistic monologues were getting darker and closer to the quick. And as the annual Halloween Jukebox of the Dead fete became increasingly elaborate – evolving to include covers of “We Built This City” and the unfortunate Cher-surrection single “Believe” alongside old favorites “Like a Virgin” and “Dancing on the Ceiling” – their sets of original music became tentative.
Requests for “Last Train to Mars” were not always honored, to widespread disappointment. Songs were played that we would never hear again. Whispers persisted that a new album was coming out “soon,” but we could never get a straight answer as to when.
Their shows remained transcendent. We kept taking our shirts off.
What is going on?
Were these guys Christians or what? Were there kernels of sincerity in their preacherly tirades? Was a song like “I.
M.A. Believer” presented to us only in parody?
Wheaton College was no big secret, and of course we would have accepted the Detholz! regardless of agenda or persuasion. Still, it nagged, and it nagged more as the band seemed to be scampering off in ambiguous directions.
And then, like a strike of lightning from the sky, the good people at RightRightRight Films produced and released Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a feature-length documentary about Christian rock and including extensive interviews with members of Detholz!, addressing at once the question that many of us had formulated on our own over the course of a long courtship with this band, and forging a valley of clarity.
This was a band that was Going Through a Transition. They were Figuring It All Out.
Jon Brion s weekly live show at the shockingly small restaurant (it s a stretch to call it a club) Largo in Los Angeles is kind of legendary.
It s just him, a wide array of instruments, a looping system, and a stage. You can book a reservation months in advance to sit and have dinner while he plays, or you could stand outside for an hour or two hoping to get a standing-room spot where servers carrying trays of food will ask you to crowd closer to the bar. Brion plays original tunes and brilliantly reimagined covers, which he often performs spontaneously from audience requests.
The night I was fortunate enough to attend, he played (Sittin on) the Dock of the Bay with one hand chording on an upright piano and the other controlling a vocoder, creating a robotic rendition of the song that had way more soul than any song with the word robotic in the description should ever reasonably have. He also killed two audience request birds with one stone by flawlessly transferring Bowie s Heroes to the basstwang style of Johnny Cash. A few minutes later, he combined the Beatles I Feel Fine with Prince s Kiss in such an imaginative and effective way that I burst out laughing.
The covers stole the show. I walked out of the club proclaiming to my friends that Brion was a genius. I still believe that, but I now have even more proof: his lone solo album, Meaningless (2001).
There’s nothing gimmicky about the album: it’s just eleven pop songs. It’s hard to really convince someone that an album is brilliant without their ever hearing it, but damnit, I’m gonna try.
Meaningless starts, appropriately enough, with a song called “Gotta Start Somewhere.
” “I might not have anything to offer you,” Brion sings. “I might not have anything to say that’s new / But you’ve gotta start somewhere.” The song starts the album perfectly, and leads into the following track, the standout “I Believe She’s Lying,” with its absurdly fantastic sped-up drum beat pushing the tempo but never losing the focus on the wonderful melodies that are all over this album.
The set calms down but never loses momentum in the second half, ending with a slowed, piano-based seven-and-a-half minute cover of Cheap Trick’s “Voices,” where Brion modifies the already superb harmonies of the original to emphasize the creepiness of the lyrics. You know how you can hear any Beatles song, like, once or twice, and then you’ll know the melody for the rest of your life? How every note they sing or play sounds in its right place?
This album is like that.
Now, bear with me for a minute: the title track of the album is about being constantly reminded of your ex by various stupid, meaningless things you saw together. But naming the album Meaningless seems to imply either an inferiority complex or a pessimistic analysis of the state of the art.
Are these songs meaningless? Is pop music? Does it matter that Brion might not have anything to say that’s new?
A good pop song is hard to find these days, especially compared to the heroes of the ‘60s and ‘70s pop/rock heyday by which Brion is clearly inspired. But he’s created a, dare I say it, meaningful set of tunes worthy to be placed among the great albums of that Golden Age.
The Bowerbird’s represents musical duo/couple Phil Moore and Beth Tacular as cozy in headspace, peaceful in spirit, and restful in soul, giving the impression that their music will mirror this life serene.
The trees and grass, various birds, insects, and animals, the ocean and its daily occurrences all find places in the landscape of their songs. But the warbly vocal deliveries, jangling acoustic guitars, percussion that often sounds like spoons tapping on a wooden table, and chanting choruses and melodies belie themes that are both dark and mysterious.
The true spirit and soul of their songs call up a kind of desperation and claustrophobia of the self and offer to us an understanding of our destructive potential as humans.
All of the songs on their self-released EP, Danger at Sea, may be composed of settings and metaphors from nature, but the songs do not take you to Walden Pond and its surrounding forest as much as they enclose about you the forest of Dante, where you are lost and cannot find your way.
“Bur Oak” is the most deceptive song on the EP. Moore, with Tacular doubling and harmonizing at various moments, delivers in the chorus a melody sweet and sweetly sung: —“Down by the bur oak tree / I had lost your locket in the loam, / And there fell to my knees, / neath the coil and the brush of the fern”.
But the melody shrouds in euphony a desperate situation.
Bowerbird’s lyrics have a novelistic tendency, focusing intently upon seemingly small things in order to explore the gravity inherent in them. For example, in novels and in well-crafted songs, objects are extremely important and useful to the writer in expressing meaning.
All objects carry with them meanings and connotations, in art and in our individual lives.
Among the many objects humans might own in life, a locket carries with it (or “in” it) intense meaning. It carries a picture or object of one you lost, of one you loved, or of one you remember.
It is worn around your neck, hangs down into your shirt, hovers near your heart. To lose another’s locket is to lose for that person those memories; it is to lose another person. When Moore sings “There fell to my knees” he expresses visually what cannot be expressed in words: both the desperate attempt to recover what is lost and the utter dismay and sorrow that comes with losing something of another s that is so precious.
And the eerie moaning and thumping of Beth Tacular s accordion sends chills down my spine.
Yet the songs are so beautiful, the kind of music to which you must close your eyes and lie upon your floor to listen to, or with headphones lying on your back on the grass of a dewy field. That s the miraculous thing about this EP: simultaneously it breaks and mends your heart.
If you like: acoustic music a la Devendra Banhardt or the softer songs of the Decemberists and M. Ward, you ll really like the Bowerbirds.
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