// Category Archive for: Current Faves

Music Review: Las Acevedo, Homemade Cookies EP

By Chelsea Spear

Sometimes judging a record by its sleeve yields unexpected rewards. While reading the blog Puerto Rico Indie in search of news about a rumored upcoming release by Rita Indiana, I came across a free compilation put together by the up-and-coming band Las Acevedo. The hand-drawn and collaged sleeve art, with its depiction of a purple-haired, antlered girl snuggling a guitar, drew me in, and within a matter of seconds I found myself purchasing their EP Homemade Cookies from their Bandcamp site.

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Music Review: Emily Bindiger, EMiLY

By Chelsea Spear

Before Kate Bush or Fiona Apple, there was Emily Bindiger. While on summer leave from the High School of the Performing Arts in New York, Bindiger was cast in the legendary, star-making French revue Double V. She dropped out of school and traveled to Paris alone to appear in the show. Through Double V, Bindiger met Michel Polnareff, who introduced her to the members of the psychedelic pop band Dynastie Crisis. Bindiger’s lone solo album, EMiLY, was released through Pathe in 1972. In honor of the album’s fortieth anniversary, British label Cherry Red has given EMiLY its MP3 debut.

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DVD Review: Paul Williams: Still Alive

By John Lane

Bar none, one of the sweetest documentaries that anyone will view in a lifetime is Stephen Kessler’s Paul Williams: Still Alive, just released on DVD. The bar had been set extraordinarily high when 2010 saw the release of Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him). After years of our culture pumping out salacious VH1 Behind-the-Music-style garbage about musicians, I had all but assumed intimate portraits with heart were doomed. The Nilsson documentary restored my faith that an honorable rendering could be done; Kessler’s film on musician/entertainer/actor Paul Williams solidifies that feeling for good.

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Music Review: Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds

By Hanna

One of the best things about Matmos is their enduring sense of the wacky. It’s rare to find truly challenging and avant garde music, but rarer still to find some with a sense of humor. One of the ways that expresses itself is in their penchant for bizarre—almost gimmicky—methods of making music and collecting sounds.

This time this is focused less on the use of weird noises, but on the entire way of making the album. The buzzword for The Marriage of True Minds is telepathy, continuing from The Ganzfeld EP from last year (review). Both works were made using ganzfeld experiments; a pseudoscientific method of tapping into the psychic senses by limiting regular sensory perception and creating a ganzfeld effect; an effect similar to sensory deprivation. It’s characterized by the halved ping pong balls placed over the eyes, like the beginnings of a Crow from MST3K cosplay. By carrying out ganzfeld experiments on their friends over the years and recording the results, the basic structure of this album was formed.

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Music Review: Iceage, You’re Nothing

By Less Lee Moore

When we last heard from Iceage in 2011, they were causing quite a stir with their debut album New Brigade (review). Encapsulating yet confounding the parameters of post-punk and hardcore in this new millennium, critics and music fans took notice. Now Iceage has returned with You’re Nothing, which does all it can to beautifully obliterate New Brigade, while still retaining the spirit that made that album so good.

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Music Review: Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie “Prince” Billy, What The Brothers Sang

By Less Lee Moore

It could easily be argued that without The Everly Brothers, the history of rock & roll would be vastly different. When Don’s baritone and Phil’s tenor were combined in their unique, close harmony singing style, it provided an enormous influence on the vocals of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, and countless others. Don’s open-G guitar tuning inspired no less a musical dignitary than Keith Richards, among others.

Their talents translated to the Billboard charts as well. “Wake Up Little Susie,” released in 1957, ascended to #1 on the Country, Pop, R&B, and Canadian charts, as well as #2 on the UK charts. Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the Cadence Records songwriting team, wrote the track while the brothers were on the Nashville-based label. In the late ’50s, under the stewardship of music publishing house Acuff-Rose, the brothers would enjoy chart success with more Bryant-penned hits on Cadence like “Bird Dog,” “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” and “Devoted To You.”

However, feeling stifled by Rose’s demands, the brothers left for what they thought were greener pastures at Warner Bros. in 1960. Although they were no longer privy to Bryant compositions, Don’s composition “Cathy’s Clown,” released in 1960, reached #1. The brothers would enjoy success in the UK through the early part of the decade, but their appearances on US charts began to diminish. One-digit chart hits turned to three-digit ones and soon ceased altogether. By the time the Beatles were breaking chart records in 1964, the Everlys’ biggest successes were behind them, with the exception of their #2 UK hit “The Price of Love” in 1965.

The singles-based musical economy of the time meant that radio and incessant touring were part of the daily grind; this had begun to take its toll not long after the brothers left Cadence for Warner Bros. Drug addictions, suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, broken marriages, and estranged children eventually dampened much of the youthful exuberance of the Everlys, who had been performing music nearly since birth, under the tutelage of their father, Ike. (The senior Everly had his own radio show in Iowa—on which his sons appeared—and his fingerpicking guitar style fostered a big influence of its own.)

Tensions escalated to a boiling point, culminating in a notorious alcohol-fueled spat during a 1973 Knott’s Berry Farm concert in which an enraged Phil smashed his guitar and stormed offstage, leaving a shattered Don to sober up and finish the set solo. It would be ten years before the brothers would even speak to each other, much less record or play together. They eventually made up, playing a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983 and releasing two critically acclaimed albums later that decade, even continuing to tour together throughout the next two decades. Though their relationship remained cordial and at times, strained, the incandescence of their musical partnership has never dimmed.

Now to the present day, and a different pair of singers and musicians: Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham). The duo, who have performed together and separately, enlisted the help of an impressive array of their own former collaborators as well as much-respected Nashville session musicians to create What The Brothers Sang, a tribute album to the Everly Brothers.

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Music Review: Parenthetical Girls, Privilege*

By Less Lee Moore

“But hard as I’ve tried, I’m helpless to describe.”
—Parenthetical Girls, “The Pornographer”

If you’re not yet familiar with the unusual pop music of Parenthetical Girls, you’re in for an aural treat. Despite what connotations they may have intended for the title of their new album, it’s an apt descriptor for these 12 songs; experiencing them is indeed a privilege.

It’s not often that a band comes along so precisely indefinable as Parenthetical Girls, always a sure signifier of brilliance, with genius waiting in the wings. It makes categorizing their aesthetic troublesome, though no less enjoyable to attempt. “Chamber pop,” though appealing, has its origins in the mid-1960s, and Parenthetical Girls are far too modern for a term older than the average ages of its members.

“Indie rock” has its own negative connotations; despite the Girls’ decidedly independent means of releasing records (not to mention their seeming inability to serve any mistress but their own unique flights of fancy), that descriptor brings the word “twee” to mind, and Parenthetical Girls are much to daring to be considered twee.

I have chosen to dispense with such aspirations and simply review the album.

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Music Review: Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, RiPELY PINE

By Chelsea Spear

Over the past few years, singer/songwriter Aly Spaltro has beguiled New England audiences with her project Lady Lamb the Beekeeper. Her fractious, off-kilter songwriting is well-matched by a voice that seems to explode out of her. After releasing a series of demos, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper is poised to take over the indie world with her first studio album, RiPELY PINE.

While the sparely produced, independent Lady Lamb releases foregrounded Spaltro’s considerable talents, RiPELY PINE finds her experimenting with a more commercial sound. The clean production, with its new-found focus on the slow-burn dynamics of Spaltro’s songwriting, comes off like the aural equivalent of a leather-bound book with gilt-edged pages and four-color illustrations. Her minimal guitar riffs bristle with closely held emotion, as though she were denying herself a catharsis. The driving percussion and echoing violin that drive “Bird Balloons” emphasize the song’s theme of anger borne from love. The waltz-time instrumental break in “Mezzanine” pits a staccato prog-rock guitar solo against a mellifluous clarinet chart that, combined with the lyrics about ghosts and haunted houses, could break your heart. Spaltro’s dense arrangements and frequent use of odd time signatures, combined with Nadim Issa’s straightforward and pleasingly mid-range production, suggests the influence of Throwing Muses. Like Lady Lamb, songwriters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly negotiated a mid-point between their knotted, intuitive personal mythologies and the rewards of finding a wider audience, and as with Spaltro’s work, their albums had an appealing tension between these poles.

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New Single From Upcoming Album: Big Black Delta, “Side Of The Road”

By Less Lee Moore

Big Black Delta‘s Tour EP was one of my Top Ten faves of 2012, so I’m thrilled to hear news of an upcoming album. The self-titled disc will be released on April 9 on CD, digital, and vinyl via Masters Of Bates.

The first single, “Side of the Road,” is fantastic and features the same Big Black Delta hallmarks that I loved on their EP. It’s a synthy, spacey, and surprisingly emotional track that proves Bates knows how to do Autotune the right way (in part because he can actually sing).

Big Black Delta, a.k.a. Jonathan Bates, will be performing at this year’s SXSW, on Wednesday, March 13, at Cedar Street Courtyard. For details, visit the SXSW schedule page. You can also listen to another track on the SXSW website.

For more on the band, check out the Big Black Delta website.

Music Review: George Jones—The Complete United Artists Solo Singles

By Cait Brennan

“Country music,” George Jones told music writer Holly George-Warren “is a religion to me.” Well, if country music is a religion, George Jones’s music is one of the bedrock gospels. From 1950s hillbilly hellion to elder statesman of the genre, Jones has always been one of the purest singers in country music. Jones is “just” a country singer the way Sinatra was “just” a saloon singer—both men mastered, then transcended their genres, making each song uniquely their own.

Some of Jones’s finest mid-’60s sides are collected on George Jones—The Complete United Artists Solo Singles, one of three essential country music compilations released on February 12 by those high llamas of music at Omnivore Recordings. No no-shows here; this is prime time Possum, showing the hall of fame singer on a diverse range of material penned by Jones and some of classic country’s greatest songwriters.

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