Essis Jain Writeup On Daytrotter.com

Great review of Essie Jain's We Made This Ourselves along with a random top five from Essie herself posted on Daytrotter.com today.
Full online article

Essie Jain Gets Lasso'd
18 April 2007
Words by Sean Moeller

Essie Jain will make you shiver. No one is immune to what this New York-by-way-of-London-England young lady will do to the skin and the bones. She will make you clutch for your collar or hood to pull it in tighter around your exposed or unexposed surface. It doesn't matter. Inside or outside, warm or cold, wind or none, Jain will send a bullet of a ripple through all of your layers and the haunting will commence, rattling all that's moveable and reachable. Jain's measured and immaculate voice pours over you and dries slowly like melting candle wax, which you can break out of, but it feels better to just wear that windbreaker of a plastic coat. She insulates you and could make a racing heart come to a screeching halt, calming it down with ladles of coos and a starkness that still spreads its wings out to give an impressive picture of vast, vast space. Her first full-length record We Made This Ourselves gives that haunting or any haunting a good name, as it has a general feeling of being way too close to you – reading your thoughts, knowing your untold secrets, kissing you on the mouth, combing through your hair, putting its hand upon your knee and staring, just fucking staring at you with that look. But it's not bad that it does all of these things. It's never intimidating. It's as if an immediate trust was formed between Jain and yourself – somewhere in another time period where she feels comfortable talking to you the way she does and you feel all the same listening to these personal-sounding issues. (There's nothing more unsettling than having someone spill their guts and hearts to you when you're not expecting it or will to make the investment.) She's going to sing about things you never knew you were thinking and she's going to do it with a pristine sense of less is more that lands you hook, line and sinker, pulling you from the waters and into the boat just so a good look attcha can be had. She turns us inward as she turns herself inward and inside out to make a startling piece of art that could be placed in a meadow, set to play and in a short amount of time, forest critters would be gathered around it, sitting Indian style and just reflecting themselves on the emoting going on, able in some instinctual way to connect with the vibrations. If you look quickly, the moose and the Kodiak bear were both brushing tears away from their furry cheeks, affected as they were by the unshakable sincerity.

1. NO FIREARMS ALLOWED IN HOMETOWN FOODS
This was a sign posted on the doorway of a grocery store in Kansas. We
had stopped the van for a snack break on tour, and needless to say,
after seeing that, I wasn't at all excited about buying their local
apple juice.
2. SHOES FOR $8 AND CANDLESTICKS FOR 25 CENTS
I'm not sure I ever fully understood the concept of New York shopping
extortion until I bought the items above, for these prices, while
browsing out of town.
3. THE WONDER OF A MACROBIOTIC MEAL
I went to a restaurant in Austin that was supposedly going to nourish
my entire body in one shot. It turned out to be true, and I came out
of that place feeling like I had been injected with joy.
4. RANDOM DOGS AND CATS
I have met many nice ones recently.
5. SLEEPING
There are some weeks out of each year, where you just really enjoy
having a good nap. This week was one of them.


Guerilla street video for 'Glory'

Finches Review In Free Press Houston

The FINCHES
HUMAN LIKE A HOUSE
(Dulc I Tone)

There were a lot of folk inspired album released in 2006, and it has become a tiresome tactic. The Finches while closely related to this style are much more than one might assume at first lesson. Human Like H House is a collection of songs that gets progressively better with each listen. The first listen will reveal the melodies and Carolyn Pennypacker's voice which gives a shimmer to each note sung. Pleasant and restrained, but still able to unveil hints of disappointment and humor, her voice accented by Aaron Morgan's baritone back up, gives the songs an almost conversational feel, which each song seem more familiar. One thing this CD does not share is a reliance on the guitar strums and stories as rhythmically it establishes a pace that can lead to a head nod if so inclined. "The Last Favor" is a special pop song that bids farewell to a friend (in whatever connotation). "O L A" is somewhat folky, but it is also a little reminiscent of 60's British pop. This album is a favorable start to the new year for me. The songs are strong, the lyrics are strong, and melodically this album is satisfying, as the title implies it is human, it's strength is it's subtlety.

Dead C Compilation Revered By Tiny Mix Tapes

Tiny Mix Tapes delves deep into the Dead C's career-spanning Vain, Erudite and Stupid compilation. And for those of you who can't get enough of uncompromising improv rock, Future Artists, the band's first new album since 2003 will be released on Ba Da Bing at the end of May.
Full online review

The Dead C.
Vain, Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987-2005
[Ba-Da-Bing; 2006]

Styles: post-punk, free-jazz, noisy guitar improv, industrial
Others: Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, The Fall, early Sonic Youth
If I had but one word to describe The Dead C., it would be
"underappreciated." I thought the band's mix of noisy abstractions,
post-punk, and pure sound art on a 4-track would make them a college
favorite overseas, akin to Sonic Youth in the mid-'80s. Such is not
the case. When I interviewed Bruce Russell in February, he said the
New Zealand band's fan base is extremely small in their homeland. The
band scored an opening slot for Sonic Youth in 1992, and many popular
local acts were dismayed. In the liner notes to Vain, Erudite and
Stupid, Nick Cain, a fellow New Zealander, expresses his initial
discouragement with the band's perceived ineptitude. He chalks it up
to the average New Zealander's unfamiliarity with the history behind
the band's sound aesthetic. He writes, "It shouldn't be forgotten that
New Zealand is a very young country, and one with about zero history
of freeform — or 'experimental' or avant-garde — music whatsoever."

Though the band's fan base lies mainly in Great Britain and the United
States, coverage of the band by the media in these countries has been
slim. Until Mike Crumsho's phenomenal Dusted Magazine article on the
band, virtually nothing of substance has been written about the band
in our little digital music community. The Wire is the only print
magazine with the stones to cover the band avidly, and they hardly
touched upon what the classic sub-underground label Siltbreeze meant
to the band's career. So, when Bruce Russell told me in an interview
last year that Ba-Da-Bing was issuing a two-disc anthology to
celebrate the band's 20th anniversary, I thought The Dead C. were
finally getting their due. After all, this is the perfect year to
release such an endeavor. Experimental music is rapidly gaining an
acceptance among the indie rock set, and there seems to be a rapid
production of new, strange, great, challenging underground music.

Much to my dismay, when I received Vain, Erudite and Stupid, the
career-spanning Dead C. compilation, it came adorned with a huge
sticker that touted the group as a "new favorite band" for those who
like "Lightning Bolt, Sunn 0))), Wolf Eyes and Growing." Not only do
these bands sound nothing like The Dead C., but the oldest band in the
group has existed for only half as long. The Dead C.'s sound is
steeped more in the smart, philosophically-driven sounds of post-punk
and free jazz than modern, rock-based experimentalism. The band's most
engaging output relies on gritty, live-in-the-studio (or on 4 track)
recording techniques. They sometimes layer their recordings by
employing a trick they learned from The Fall, improvising the song
atop the original recording without listening to the recording. The
modern "out" music enthusiast may be thrown by the close listening
required to absorb the band's textural brilliance.

But, if I judge the album by its cover sticker, I become a part of the
very same problem that limited The Dead C.'s audience for so many
years. If the sticker succeeds in selling more records, the band will,
ultimately, gain more listeners. When placed in the player, Vain,
Erudite and Stupid's genius speaks for itself. The hazed, almost folky
sonic attack of "Max Harris" begins the double disc splendor with a
whirlwind of ambience and freeform fury à la Bad Mood Rising. From
there, the anthology guides the listener through The Dead C.'s
stunning career.

Disc one follows the band from 1988's DR503 LP to 1994's odds and ends
collection World Peace, Hope, et al. This disc showcases the band's
evolution from lo-fi revisionists of '70s post-punk to free-jazzers
guised as a post-punk outfit. Most of the songs have lyrics and follow
some sort of structure, albeit not verse-chorus-verse. Almost all the
songs close out with open-ended jams seeping from the basic structure
of the tune and sifting through vast deserts of avant-garde stylings,
from ambience to drone to harsh noise. The band more closely surveys
these textures on disc two, which chronicles the period from 1994's
The Operation of the Sonne to 2003's The Damned. In this period, the
band traveled further away from conventional song structure, until the
majority of their tunes could be classified as compositions.

There will surely be some dispute over the anthology's track choices,
as the band had to summarize their 20 years of work with two 70-minute
discs. The tracks selected from the band's landmark double album Harsh
70s Reality, "Constellation" and "T is Never Over Pt. I & II," were
lumped off the CD version due to time constraints, and are not
necessarily the best representatives of the album's sheer glory. The
tracklist also features no real rarities or hard-to-find tunes. The
past six years of the band's career, which yielded a double album, two
LPs, and a split 12" with Konono No. 1, are represented by six songs.
Thus, those listeners getting their first dose of the mighty Dead C.
from Vain, Erudite and Stupid learn little about what terrain the band
is shredding these days. The three post-millennial albums by The Dead
C. are, by strides, brilliant and intriguing, but I'd side with
Siltbreeze Records head honcho Tom Lax's liners and label the band's
years on the Siltbreeze imprint as their best.

Of course, their Flying Nun and Xpressway output is equally
impressive. The majority of this material finds the band exploring
ways to showcase their sonic diversity within the constraints of
actual song structure. During this period, the band's indebtedness to
post-punk heathens like Throbbing Gristle and This Heat is apparent,
but the band's voice, albeit embryonic, dampens any critical "clone"
cry.

"3 Years" is exemplary of this period, with its forceful, disjointed
dueling guitars. Mike Morely investigates the exuberance found in
applying Mark E. Smith's "repetition, repetition, repetition"
aesthetic to his rhythm guitar line, alternately slowing down the
tempo and revving it up and stressing certain chords in the
progression. Bruce Russell adds interstellar atmosphere with
excursions into drone, feedback, and Godz-style skronk, while Morley's
singing, which is close to an outback version of Lou Reed's sing-talk,
is gentle and rhythmic, providing the melody where the guitar lines
leave gaps. Robbie Yeats' militaristic drumming builds the dark mood,
melting it all down into an exciting bad acid feedback fuzz fight that
hints at what was to come in the band's career.

"Helen Said This," the band's first Siltbreeze release, is a
masterwork. It marks the moment when the band used their influences as
a launching pad, rather than an anchor. Included on the anthology in
its entire 11-minute splendor, the song is a jagged shard of lo-fi
post-punk. The song begins with a sort of art-punk guitar take on the
Wild West gunner showdown anthems of Ennio Morricone before whittling
down to give way to the lackadaisical, almost tandem dual vocal
delivery. Throughout the song, the disjointed vocal lines and stern
rhythm guitar allow the band to explore far out regions in each bridge
while remaining grounded in the basic song structure. With each
repeated verse, the band gains mountainous intensity until they
combust with fuzz guitar mayhem. As the explosion simmers down, the
guitar lines slow down and the band delves into industrial textures,
until the song wades in an ambient cooling pool. A beautiful
call-and-response results with slowly blossoming chords and chiming,
machine gun strums being accentuated by guitars played like percussion
instruments.

Many of The Dead C.'s songs follow a similar formula. "Power" uses the
whistles, moans, and hums of feedback derived from a fervently
strummed guitar in place of the customary rock guitar solo.
"Constellation" virtually recycles the "Mighty" riff but lets each
chord bleed in droning distortion. By this time, coming up with a new
riff seems less important to the band than examining the possibilities
of the riff itself and seeing how much they can skew a song structure.
After five minutes of Morely's singing and the purring riff, a
different recording is spliced into the song. Psychotic yelling
replaces Morely's usual delivery. The distortion that once provided a
tourniquet, allowing the guitar fuzz to linger, gives way, and the
resonating notes end with sharp feedback shanks.

"T is Never Over Pt. I and II" is a four-minute supernova of
inter-spliced ideas. Beginning with a 30-second foray into isolating
minimal industrial soundscapes, the song is an exploration of the
formlessness of ideas coming to fruition. While a guitarist tries to
conceive a riff in the background, sharp dissonant guitar infusions
and what sounds like a Ham radio transmission overlaps the jam. Pot
and pan percussion and wavering, formless guitar sound chunks blot out
the background session, and the song becomes a metaphor for The Dead
C.'s future recordings. The idea trumps the song, and in the end, the
shapeless sound is more interesting and absorbing than it would be if
it were fully realized.

Eventually, The Dead C. threw any sort of song structure out of the
window of a moving car and recorded the results. "The Marriage of
Reason and Squalor," from 1994's high-water mark three-piece drone
suite The Operation of the Sonne, is a 14-minute void wherein sci-fi
B-movie synth effects, amplifiers humming white noise, and jagged
guitar lines heighten a spoken philosophical treatise. Words have now
been pushed to the background in favor of droning electronic
interactions. When the words fade out, one is able to stare into a
meditative infinitude with the resulting sound clash.

Save for the thrash 'n' clang noise rock of The White House's
"Bitcher," much of disc two operates on a similar plane, sacrificing
lyrics and melody for sound design. "Repent IV," off 1997's
sound-collage Repent, sounds like a spaceship flying over a no-wave
band practice. "Head," from 1997's rock-based Tusk, jitters with an
overlay of scary post-psychedelic guitar noise, while Yeats keeps a
steady drum beat and Morley conjures a dark, angular boogie.

The centerpiece on disc two is "Tuba is Funny (Slight Return)" from
2000's double disc The Dead C.. Many other selections from the double
disc are steeped in industrical, electronic soundmaking rather than
The Dead C.'s usual guitar excursions. On "Tuba..." the band chooses
to create a groove akin to something off Miles Davis' On the Corner.
The chords of the repetitious bass/brass line are forceful and sly,
but they give the band enough leeway to delve into a pit-of-hell
guitar assault underneath the groove. As a bonus, Robbie Yeats' tribal
percussion lends an even more occult feel to the song. When the tape
finally shorts out and the song is sucked into infinity, the magic of
The Dead C. is apparent. Here is a band that can do virtually anything
and draw little or no attention to themselves. They create layers of
sound but record it on primitive equipment using primitive techniques,
effectively hiding their glory from inattentive listeners. Vain,
Erudite and Stupid suggests that perhaps the band is not overlooked
and underappreciated, just hidden in plain sight.

by S. Kobak

Lengthy SJ Esau Review on CokeMachineGlow

SJ Esau's Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse receives a "BUY IT: Great; repeated listens suggested " review on Cokemachineglow.com.

SJ Esau
Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse
(Anticon; 2007)
Rating: 79%
Combined Rating: 80%

For his Anticon debut Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse SJ Esau is able to imagine a bleak mise en scene where some tired chump or chumpette blinks out bending to feed the cat and falls to the floor, dead, supine alongside the pots and pans cabinet. That’s Esau’s carte blanche: any number of terrible decisions could have lead to such a moment and such a boring, pathetic, maybe lonely death, none of which would resemble the daily acceptance of monotony. I mean, maybe Esau’s pointing to the typical neuroses of a cat owner and calling out the obsessive, projecting crap, the picture mugs and endless reminders of feline antics and shameless fur-saturated wool sweaters…I’m a cat owner myself, and that means that I hate my cat and it hates me, enough for me to refer to it as genderless, an ancillary thing that depends on me and resents me simultaneously. Whatever Esau’s representing with his cat metaphor -- even if he is just talking about his cats -- the symbol doesn’t matter in the sinking throes of death, because keeling over in your loser kitchen onto your dusty floor and then shuffling off before you can witness your cat sprint for the food spilled out of your limp hand is a terrible way to go.

One way to figure out why SJ Esau is wrong-faced -- or why Sam Wisternoff, the guy behind the album, has created a set of songs about a person that’s wrong-faced -- is to inspect his past; an admiral and unexciting past it is: He’s a son of Bristol. He rapped when he was eight and was a third of the True Funk Posse, using drum machine programs, at his brother’s behest, behind a ZX Spectrum. They made pre-pubescent hits. Later, he was in a noisy band teenage-wise, citing the Pixies, Husker-Du, and Sonic Youth as influences, and then eventually settled with his current moniker, releasing a number of EPs, the shoe-ish-gazer, self-released album Queezy Beliefs (1999), and band side-projects. He also signed to Anticon after working with Why?, after Yoni Wolf played Esau’s demo over and over into inculcation on the tour bus and on internet radio, and after Esau barely acquainted himself with Why? at some show or another. Wisternoff’s a guy that makes befuddling loops and pop songs in awkward dynamics, juicing the two to wring out any ounce of catharsis he can manage, propping the sullen rinds up on stilts. That’s why “Cat Track” seems so easy. It has that candy formula of careful plucking into fuzzy wail, like in The Departed when a tense moment leaps into an exciting moment where Leonardo DiCaprio is probably brooding in the back of a speeding car, and the fucking Dropkick Murphys explode inside your retinas while they’re growling over a fiddle. Just listen to the DVD menu. That could be the chorus on “Cat Track,” and it could be my favorite song of the year, mostly because if I admit that I can begin to wean myself off it.

So, it comes to pass that Esau’s biographical tale doesn’t really have any verve or any healthy sense of danger; it’s more just a hardworking, successful series of isolated, bedroom songs where some guy tries to let everyone listen to his gorgeous, pale-faced music (that sounds a bit like Leeds-type folk with psychedelic pustules) despite whatever disappointments flood his way. But I bet his parents haven’t heard of Why? and can only politely nod when the subject‘s broached, and that’s not an insult, because I’m sure Why? gets the same crap about Fog or maybe Dose when Dose walks in with that scandalous mohawk of his. When Anticon describes Wisternoff playing “anthems for the unsung and uneasy hero in each of us,” I just think Wrong Faced is wholly pessimistic. A downer. A dreary ode to walking the line and dying short of expectations, peppered with feral bouts of madness. No, with enlightened moments of unadulterated anxiety.

So, “Cat Track,” part envy, part just describing complacency wherever it may lurk, is an opener -- past the umpteenth noise chortled out of the insignificant first track -- about a housecat, “Fully fulfilled, he’s got no balls / Spends every day…calm of breath / Found a new place to breathe in.” The cat is satisfied with a meager environment, with the tinkling piano that pervades the opening and with the cheap loudness that defines the choruses, but in turn is weak, dependent, and without reproductive means. In “The Wrong Order” Esau continues his images of mundane environments, singing through his dry husk of a throat, “My hard-system’s cluttered up / With typos and pointless stuff / …a rhino smashed up my flat.” A harmonica intones dynamics for the see-sawing bass, parses crackling backdrops into accessible mosaics. He says soon after, “Deception / In bits and pieces,” and we understand immediately that the quotidian without bits and pieces could be unmanageable and maybe pointless because (anyway) daily patterns are difficult enough to bear without overstated highlights. In fact, everything about Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse is overstated, from the milquetoast politics to the dins of release splitting most of the songs into parts.

Esau’s album could seem unoriginal because of its unabashed, fist-popping structure and its overtly middleclass angst, but it succeeds thoroughly on both accounts, heightening the tension in whatever ennui it alludes to, wrapping chemical malaise (“My thoughts turn to alcohol”: I fucking love that turn of phrase) in synths and strings that endlessly build off one another. Through it all, Wisternoff’s melodic timing is impeccable. He’s always able to conquer the walls he builds, able to sit on the noise and bare the logic at hand. “Queezy Beliefs” is probably the best distillation of Esau’s method, a sappy tar-thick mélange of multi-instrumentalist Max Milton’s orchestral backing and Sam’s gravelly, beanpole voice. And that organ drone’s so fittingly gothic; suck it, Arcade Fire. This stuff’s mopey but never amounts to a dirge. SJ Esau is too grand to be bitter, too misanthropic to be cheesy. Governed by impulse, shit’s alive.

I probably know that pharmaceutical drugs can alter my personality. I’m scared of getting tied to addiction or laziness or dependency. I’m terrified of the future and of machines and of my unibrow slowly creeping into my eyeballs, even though I can deal with all three regularly. Wisternoff answers these complaints by quieting; still, interstitial tracks plain don’t matter, or the goobered bounce of “All Agog” is killed (gimmick’d), and “Halfway Down the Pathway,” a four-track wisp in saturated disguise, sounds too weak to get past that ugly, diced coda. Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse, then, sounds almost there, almost the future, and Esau’s almost the most accessible scaredy-cat troubadour since Nick Drake. Too bad the floor sometimes gets in the way.

Dom Sinacola
April 6, 2007

Papercuts On NPR

The Papercuts gem "Unavailable" scored song of the day on NPR.org today.

Song of the Day
By Michael Katzif

Burying Romantic Angst in Sweetly Retro Pop
NPR.org, March 28, 2007 · Youthful angst, romantic insecurity and naive innocence pervade virtually every moment of The Papercuts' Can't Go Back. Like the best pop groups with nostalgia for the '60s, Bay Area singer-songwriter Jason Quever disguises his songs' weighty themes in lush delicacy. By injecting overtly somber contemplation into summery, feel-good pop instrumentation, Quever wears his West Coast influences — not to mention his heart — on his sleeve.

Shimmering like a Summer of Love history lesson, the disc sweeps between the sprightly jangle of Buffalo Springfield or The Turtles and the cooing vocal harmonies of The Mamas & The Papas. Without the right atmospheric touches, it could easily come across as a transparent genre exercise. And, while the Dylan homage "Take the 227th Exit" borrows noticeably from "Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35," the Byrds-inspired "Unavailable" sounds considerably more inventive.

The clean guitar arpeggios and airy vocals that open the song recall the familiar Byrds hit "Turn! Turn! Turn!" But rather than call for social change, the song speaks from a more intimate voice, as Quever confesses to an unrequited love, in the process conveying luminous gloom. "I don't know, baby, if I can provide like he do," he sings. "But I do know one thing's for sure: I'll be around while you wait." Turning friendship into something more is a common desire, but the sentimental flourishes of light humming organ and acoustic guitar add an understated, vaguely cinematic quality. The result is as relatable as it is lovely.

TNV In Time Out New York

Times New Viking relieves Mike Wolf from his incessant boredom in recent Time Out story.

Font of youth
Times New Viking rescues indie rock from a boring death.
By Mike Wolf

At the end of “Little Amps,” the uncannily catchy third cut on Times New Viking’s Present the Paisley Reich, drummer Adam Elliott exclaims, “Pop song-uh!” in celebration. He also seems to want to assure us it is a pop song, because the minute-and-a-half track sounds like a garage-full of saw blades in joyous attack mode. Everything in “Little Amps”—and the whole album, actually—is distorted to the point where it’s hard to tell if Elliott is harmonizing with keyboardist Beth Murphy, or where Murphy’s instrument ends and Jared Phillips’s guitar begins, or that there’s no bass. (With all the dirt and fuzz flying around, who needs bass?)

Elsewhere on the new record, the band’s second, the fidelity jumps from severely shitty to medium in midsong (“Ladders”) and one channel of the music cuts out for a few seconds (“Common Cold”); the killer melodies at the heart of provocatively named tracks like “Imagine Dead John Lennon” and “Allegory Gets Me Hot” are in constant peril of being overthrown by noise. “Most of those things are happy accidents,” says Phillips, 25 (as are both of his bandmates), over the phone from Columbus, Ohio. “I think they happened while the record was being mixed, ’cause a lot of our music we mix down from a reel-to-reel onto a cassette—”

Elliott interjects: “That already has stuff on it.”

“—that already has stuff on it,” Phillips confirms.

This might seem like a surprising M.O. for any band in 2007, when pristine digital sound is accessible to anyone with a computer, and so-called mistakes on a recording don’t need to be there. Times New Viking has more elemental concerns. “I’m always after the intimacy of someone recording in their bedroom or practice space,” Elliott says. “Music is about getting together with people and enjoying it. If we do it at our house, we can get together on a Saturday night and record a song.” Talking like a short-order cook throwing together a meal, Phillips adds, “You just put some mikes up, make up a melody on the spot and go, ‘That sounds good.’ Then you make up some vocals, and you have another minute-long song that’s good.”

“No reason to think about it too much more than that,” quips Elliott.

That spontaneity helps make Times New Viking one of the most exciting indie-rock bands in years; the group’s live sets are so electrifying that, while in the moment, you feel like there’s no better band on the planet. The trio’s December show at Cake Shop undid weeks of seasonal blues, turning a crowd of roughly 75 people into a gleefully clumsy, beer-spilling mosh pit.

The three, who met at Columbus College of Art & Design, are also reinvigorating a vital, decades-old DIY lo-fi tradition that has always found special acceptance in Ohio. Columbus, in particular, had a superb lo-fi rock scene throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but after the shocking deaths of two of the city’s most talented rock songwriters—Jim Shepard (by suicide in 1999) and Jerry Wick (of the band Gaunt, in a 2001 bike accident)—things in Ohio’s capital went quiet.

Times New Viking’s first show, in early 2004, helped shake a trio of key figures out of semiretirement. Ron House and Mike “Rep” Hummel had for years played in and acted as godfathers of the Columbus scene; one or the other was involved in almost every good record to come out of the city. “Ron’s ego is like, once he found out there were kids who liked him, he had to start playing again,” Phillips says, jokingly, “to make sure he was in competition with them!”

House and Hummel soon passed recordings of the band to Tom Lax, whose then-dormant Philadelphia label, Siltbreeze, was responsible for some of the best underground sounds of the ’90s. Dig Yourself, Times New Viking’s debut, came out on Siltbreeze in 2005, and things have been rolling for the band ever since—the trio signed to Matador before Siltbreeze even released Paisley Reich. The bigger label’s interest in a band that might turn in its masters on a used cassette makes sense to Elliott. “It’s fitting because Matador put out the music we were influenced by in the ’90s,” he says. “Guided by Voices was like our Beatles, and Pavement was like our Kinks. I’d always imagined that the band I wanted to be in would be like if those bands had a baby.”

Present the Paisley Reich is out now on Siltbreeze.

Some sun bleached live footage of "Let Your Hair Grow Long" from this year's SXSW festival.

Ashley's Painted Garden On Dusted

Referencing Roky Erickson, Skip Spence and Van Dyke Parks, Dusted Magazine.com gives a thorough review of Greg Ashley's latest solo work.

Artist: Greg Ashley
Album: Painted Garden
Label: Birdman
Review date: Mar. 21, 2007

With each successive album, whether solo or with his band the Gris Gris, Oakland’s Greg Ashley continues to both refine and expand on his version of the New Weird American sound. While Ashley isn’t a visionary in the same sense as Roky Erickson and Skip Spence (or other turned-on musical drop-outs from the Love Generation), he’s certainly indebted to them and travels similar musical lost highways. In the case of the above – easily identified, though certainly not the only, precedents of Ashley’s – their genius and legacy is forever intertwined with psychosis and reclusion. I know very little about Greg Ashley as his past relates to the hard times Spence and Erickson fell upon, but it’s equally as irrelevant to understanding and appreciating his music, as knowing about Roky and Skip’s time in an asylum is to being moved by The Evil One or Oar.

Still, Ashley makes some seriously far-out sounds. The basic musical template of Painted Garden, as on 2004’s Medicine Fuck Dream, is simple enough: pop songs built on folk, country, and blues forms, with an occasional nod to classic R&B (“Pretty Belladonna”) or Songbook. But Ashley takes these familiar sounds and drapes them in all manner of ethereal soundscapes, bells and whistles, hallucinogenic found sounds and free jazz skronk. While distorting a roots template with reverb and fractured constructions is nothing new in 2007, the tension that Ashley creates between the melodic and more warped elements in his songs is indeed unique. Unlike other spacey contemporary troubadours, Ashley's hooks certainly aren’t buried or meandering, in fact they’re quite immediate – at times positively toe-tapping (“Fisher King”), at others, hauntingly beautiful (“Caroline and the Orange Tree,” “Sailing With Bobby”) – but they exist wonderfully at odds with a production aesthetic that transports them from the terrestrial to the celestial. Medicine Fuck Dream, however, was a decidedly more lo-fi affair than what we’re given here. And while Painted Garden occasionally hints at the sort of slick, expansive cosmic sheen Dave Friedman has made de rigueur, thankfully that sound is merely a single element of a diverse yet fully cohesive and even-sounding recording.

Ashley’s music has a built-in awareness of American musical history, which makes clear that he’s not working in some sort of vacuum, running on his own twisted creative energy and that alone. In fact, I’m willing to wager his record collection is a stunner. Yet, his synthesis of those various forms – finger-picking folk songs, soul ballads, Sun Ra-style cosmic jazz, Tin Pan Alley pop – still feels organic and original. With that in mind, another ’60s oddball worth referencing would be Van Dyke Parks. Yet, where Parks cloaked everything in irony and knowing glances, Ashley makes the whole synthesis seem completely unaffected and true.

By Nate Knaebel


Greg Ashely tour dates galore:
03/29 Dallas, TX @ Double-Wide
03/30 Memphis, TN @ The Hi-Tone
03/31 Atlanta, GA @ 11:10 Teahouse
04/01 Nashville, TN @ The Springwater
04/02 Cincinnati, OH @ The Comet
04/03 Columbus, OH @ Caraba
04/04 Akron, OH @ Lime Spider
04/05 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland
04/06 Kalamazoo, MI @ Kraftbrau
04/07 Toronto, ON @ Rancho Relaxo
04/08 Hamilton, ON @ The Casbah
04/09 Ottawa, ON @ Babylon
04/10 Montreal, QC @ Zoo Bizarre
04/11 Boston, MA @ PA's Lounge
04/14 Brooklyn, NY @ Uncle Paulie's
04/15 Washington, DC @ Red & Black
04/18 Rochester, NY @ The Bugjar
04/20 Athens, OH @ The Union (Blackout Fest w/Miss Alex White)
04/21 Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick
04/22 Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen
04/23 St. Paul, MN @ Big Vs
04/24 Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
04/26 Seattle, WA @ The Sunset Tavern
04/27 Vancouver, BC @ Pat's Pub
04/28 Portland, OR @ Slabtown

Times New Viking 8.2 Review On Pitchfork

The Siltbreeze label and TNV recieved some well earned flattery from Pitchfork.com today.

Times New Viking
Present the Paisley Reich
[Siltbreeze; 2007]
Rating: 8.2

Apparently Tom Lax of the venerably awesome Siltbreeze label was minorly miffed that Pitchfork somehow missed Times New Viking's first album, 2005's Dig Yourself. So call this oversight correction, because I fucking love TNV. Dig Yourself was, famously, the first new release on Siltbreeze in a bazillion years, after Lax had mothballed the label that hhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifad brought us such head-rearranging 90s noise-rock totems as the Dead C's Harsh 70s Reality, Harry Pussy's Ride a Dove, and dozens more. Times New Viking, three pain teens from Ohio punning on fonts, are another remaindered irregular tweed suit off the label's rack.

If the group's thrashing pop flair and shouty boy-girl vocal tradeoffs initially feel a little, well, hooky to stand alongside such cap-peeling titans as Mssrs. Russell, Morley, and Yeats, do not forget that Siltbreeze also released singles by the likes of Guided By Voices and was deeply steeped in the scratchy kiwi pop aesthetic. And the opening drums on "Imagine Dead John Lennon" (now that's a song title)-- the lead track from Present the Paisley Reich, TNV's second album-- sound like hammered aluminum, and the rest of the song, all 1:36 of it, seems as if it was recorded with one tin can in Ohio, the other tin can in Dunedin, and the twine dredged across the silty bottom of the Pacific. I wouldn't blink if you told me that the pressing plant actually used dryer lint or dead leaves to conserve petroleum; the album's sparkling multi-hued murk and wet paper flatness will have you cranking the volume in iTunes.

Paisley Reich recalls everything from the Swell Maps' bedroom odes to Gerry Anderson to Huggy Bear's claustrophobically recorded teenpocalypse rave-ups, and from the snotrocket twee of the Vaselines to the musky, druid's glen fog that hung over the production of the Fall's Slates. And the songs are pop-punk gnashing and snarling and droning with all the sexual frustration-- "Teenagelust!" goes one title, and note the exclamation point-- and delicious ennui that's been surgically removed from the radio version. Times New Viking write the kind of terse, bitingly smart lyrics too smart to be buried in 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey, but hopefully you'll just listen harder.

So they caterwaul, "I don't want to die in the city alone" and reject a lonely death with frantic cymbals and keyboards like needles in a camel's eye. 30 seconds before the end of "Ladders" the whole song shifts, jump-cuts, or changes channels, from distant noise to, like, louder noise. They bring out a Nuggets/"96 Tears" organ that they play like a cloddish Terry Riley on "Hiding in Machines". And forget this era of emo concept double albums and epic Neon Bible-style chest-beating; Paisley Reich is finished and done in 28 minutes. If you think that indie rock preens too much these days, Times New Viking probably sport bruises and scraped knees, and if you think it was all over for Pavement after "Forklift", TNV's lo-fi skree and bounce will certainly shake your love shack.

-Jess Harvell, March 23, 2007

Essie Jain Short Film

ASAP video reporter Ray Zablocki documented Essie Jain's first trip to Austin for the South by Southwest music festival. The three+ minute film gives a before and after glimpse of her March 16th showcase performance.

VIDEO - Essie Jane goes to SXSW

Essie is currently touring her way back to New York.
03/21 Lawrence, KS @ KJHK (on air Performance 2 PM)
03/21 Manhattan, KS @ The Dusty Bookshelf
03/22 Omaha, NE @ O'Leavers Pub
03/23 Saint Paul, MN @ ON AIR: MPR 89.3FM (on air performance 1 PM)
03/23 Minneapolis, MN @ The Alamo House
03/24 Minneapolis, MN @ The Triple Rock
03/28 St Cloud, MN @ KVSC 88.1FM (on air performance 4:30 PM)

Field Music Tour Press

With SXSW conquered, Field Music move on to tackle the rest of North America. Regional press keeps rolling in in anticipation of their upcoming Mid West & Eastern US shows. All dates are with Menomena.

03/20 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
03/21 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom
03/22 Pittsburgh, PA @ Lawrence Moose
03/23 Toronto, ON @ El Mocambo
03/24 Ottawa, ON @ Zaphod Beeblebrox
03/25 Montreal, QC @ Main Hall
03/27 Boston, MA @ Great Scott
03/28 New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
03/30 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda‘s
03/31 Washington, DC @ Rock And Roll Club

Chicago Tribune feature:

Chicago Sun Times feature:

Chicago Reader Critic's Pick:

Cleveland Scene review/preview:

Riverfront Times review (St Louis):

Minneapolis City pages:

Daily Southtown (Chicago) feature:

Check out Lesbian's E-Card

This link will provide you with everything you ever wanted to know about the psychedelic / progressive / metal band known as Lesbian. The mighty "L" are currently touring their way back home from SXSW. More dates to come.

03/19 San Diego, CA @ Scolari's Offic
03/20 Los Angeles, CA @ Mountain Bar
03/21 San Francisco, CA @ Annie's
03/24 Seattle, WA @ Record-Release-Post-Tour Party at Casa Seven Tweezy
03/29 Seattle, WA @ Tin Hat "Power Hör" listening party - Lesbian DJs all night!
04/14 LIVE on KEXP 90.3 FM or worldwide at kexp.org 10pm PST
04/20 Seattle, WA @ Comet Tavern
05/11 Seattle, WA @ The Funhouse

Reigning Sound with Mary Weiss on Conan O'Brien

The Reigning Sound will be the backing band for the legendary lead singer of the Shangri-Las Mary Weiss for a Conan O'Brien Show performance on Tuesday March 13th. The band recently backed Weiss on her first ever solo album Dangerous Game. The Reigning Sound enter the studio the first week of April to record their follow up to Too Much Guitar for In The Red. Exciting stuff.