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.

Black Time Tour The US For The First Time!

Black Time hails from London, England. They are skinny, black- clad boys and girls with bad attitudes and a desire to make intrusive, obnoxious rock’n’roll music. March brings the band across the Atlantic for their first ever US tour. All dates are with San Francisco's The Husbands except Oakland.



03/22 Arcata, CA @ Jambalya
03/23 Portland, OR @ Towne Lounge
03/24 Seattle, WA @ The Funhouse
03/27 Oakland, CA @ Stork Club
03/28 Los Angeles, CA @ Scene Bar
03/29 Long Beach, CA @ Alex's Bar
03/30 San Diego, CA @ Tower Bar
03/31 San Francisco, CA @ The Knockout

Beirut Bowery Ballroom Shows Announced

Indeed those that pupate in a cocoon must eventually escape from it. It appears that Zach Condon is ready to emerge from his winter hiatus. March will bring Beirut to Austin for a 4AD SXSW showcase and an Austin City Limits performance hosted by Seattle's KEXP. Beirut has also just announced two Bowery Ballroom shows on May 6th and 7th. No telling what's next.

Akron/Family Tour Press

In their relatively short existence as a band Akron / Family have logged in some serious time on the road. In 2006 alone they conquered numerous tours of the US, Canada, and Europe. Judging by the list of upcoming shows they don't appear to be slowing down any time soon. Mid West and European dates are listed below. Check out some recent tour press from their latest East Cost jaunt.

Akron/Family live preview
Washingtonpost.com
Feb 22/07
By David Malitz

The first (and only) time David saw Akron/Family was Dec. 8, 2005. Why does
he remember the specific date for a random concert? Because -- and sorry to
get all Zach Braff on you -- more than any other show over the past few
years, that one changed his life the most. Here's why: It wasn't necessarily
the best show I've seen during that stretch, although it certainly was
great. It was more the circumstances surrounding it. It was a Thursday
night, the forecast was calling for snow, it was a band I was into, but not
all that much. Still, I felt some pull to go see this show, to support a
good band that I hadn't seen before on a night when there clearly wasn't
going to be much of a crowd. So I went to Iota and was rewarded with one of
the most unique performances I've ever seen. The band certainly didn't care
that there were maybe 30 people in attendance. It went about its business as
it normally would, playing a two-hour-plus set that veered all over the map
from instrument-free four-part singalongs in the middle of the audience to
psychedelic noise freakouts that extended past the 10-minute mark. The
band's album didn't prepare me for that second half of that equation. I was
expecting mostly gentle, back-porch folk with some experimental undertones,
not the second coming of Blue Cheer. It was an awesome show and it served as
inspiration to check out more unknown, somewhat obscure bands on a regular
basis, because you never know when you'll have your mind blown. Tonight the
Family has a much more high-profile show at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Opener
Kitty Hawk flies under the radar in the Federal Reserve collective, but it
might just be the best of the batch, with fragile indie-folk songs that
exude that most intangible of musical qualities -- honesty. Deleted Scenes
rounds out the bill.

The Weekly Dig / Boston
Akron/Family
All together now
by Michael Brodeur
February 07, 2007

“Quit your job, move to New York, we’ll live in the shittiest neighborhood
in the city, and we’ll start a band. It’ll be fucking great!”

Ahh, the mating call of the North American indie rocker. Who in the prime of
their youth hasn’t heard its sweet, completely impractical song? And yet, as
tired and done and old and over as the notion of leaving behind one’s
proverbial Pennsylvania to find success on the sticky stages and glossy
pages of the big city may be, that’s precisely what Akron/Family did.

They also did the requisite
crappy-apartment-in-Bushwick-right-above-volume-fascist-neighbors thing
until they could afford separate quarters and a rehearsal space; as well as
the 50-copies-of-their-demo-stuffed-into-an-Astor Place-mailbox thing,
complete with “here goes” finger-crossing and starry eyes. The thing is,
that shit actually worked.

From the 50 vellum packets sent out by the four transplants, they received
two replies: a friendly pre-printed “thank you”/“sorry” card from Merge
(“That was nice of them,” Akron multi-instrumentalist Dana Janssen says) and
a relatively detailed appraisal and critique via email from ex-Swans czar
and contemporary fringe impresario Michael Gira.

“He started coming to see us perform every Sunday at Pete’s Candy Store,
suggested we work together on recording and releasing and album, and we were
like, ‘Great!’” Janssen recalls, sounding residually dumbstruck even three
years after the fact.

Then the story momentarily pauses while Cameron Crowe goes out on the
balcony to have a cigarette and phone his mom.

Just kidding.

But this whole thing just seems so easy, doesn’t it? Gosh, what happens
next? Does Uncle Jerry die and leave the kids his decrepit old tour bus from
the ’60s? You wouldn’t expect one of the most original bands out there to
spring from the oldest story ever told, but if there’s one thing clearly
demonstrated by both the making and the music of Akron/Family, it’s that
cliché (cliché as it is) is hardly barren—it can be mined, refined and used
for fuel.

The debut record that rose from their initial encounters with Gira (as
producer) caught them at their songiest and most level—clear-minded but
elaborate, decadent but modest, noisy but controlled. It was a strategy, no
doubt, devised by Gira himself, whose flair for introduction could be
credited for launching that whole Devendra Banhart situation. Gira’s Young
God label, even with all 10 of its toes wiggling in the tepid freakfolk
puddle, would prove to be the perfect forum for Akron/Family to come into
their own. Interest swelled as label devotees were automatically curious
about what a Young God rock band could possibly sound like, while the
collaborative yet laissez-faire M.O. of the label ensured they’d never sound
like one thing for long.

Perhaps the best realization of the band’s ease with variety is last year’s
split album between Akron/Family and Gira’s own Angels of Light project (for
which the boys served as backing band). On the Angels’ half, the Family
holds down beaten slo-mo country grooves for Gira’s moany baritone to crawl
across. On their own songs, Revolver-ish arabesques collapse into storms of
noise that would make Glenn Branca giggle; limpid, croony ballads erupt into
mathy fits and stutters; and Jewish mystics crash an Appalachian hoedown.
Throughout it all, the band sings in unison. Sometimes this unison sounds
like a gospel choir from central Vermont; sometimes it sounds like the
occupants of a plummeting elevator—but it always sounds like Akron/Family.

“That’s directly related to Michael’s influence,” Janssen says. “[Bandmate]
Ryan [Vanderhoof] had worked a lot with harmonies in the past, but it was
something that Michael really wanted to pull out of us and showcase. That’s
the role of a producer, partly, but really, it’s a gift that Michael has for
seeing things.”

One song in particular from the split album, “Raising the Sparks,” features
a stretch where the instruments drop out entirely, leaving the four
hollering, clapping and practically leaping right off the recording. It’s as
explosively lonely as it is powerfully vulnerable—Akron/Family at their
best.

“How can I put it—it means to uplift yourself,” Janssen says. “So often, you
have to deal with this whole image thing. People just want to be cool. And
that’s fine. I like cool people. I don’t want to be a preacher—the point is
to let it go, loosen up, not worry about what the guy next to you thinks of
your dancing.”

And, like the nightly climax of any rock dream come remarkably true, you can
bet there will be dancing at this week’s appearance—or some approximation
thereof.

“People lose their shit,” he says, “and I think we’ve already lost ours.”


03/08 Ann Arbor, MI @ Blind Pig
03/09 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
03/10 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
03/11 St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club
03/13 Vermillion, SD @ University of South Dakota
03/14 Grinnell, IA @ Bob’s Underground at Grinnell College
03/16 Columbus, OH @ Little Brothers
03/17 Buffalo, NY @ Sound Lab
03/07 Annandale-On-Hudson, NY @ Bard College

04/10 Stockholm, SWE @ Debasser
04/11 Oslo, NOR @ John Dee-Oslo
04/12 Copenhagen, DK @ Vega
04/13 Berlin, DEU @ Festsaal Kreuzberg
04/14 Rotterdam, NL @ Motel Mozaique, Fest
04/15 Brugge, BEL @ Cactus
04/17 Brussels, BEL @ AB Domino Fest,
04/18 Tourcoing, FR @ Le grand mix,
04/19 Bourges, FR @ Printemps de Bourges Fest
04/20 Bilbao, ESP @ Azkena
04/21 Madrid, ESP @ Low Club
04/22 Lisbon, PRT @ Music Box
04/23 Braga, PRT @ Teatro Circo
04/25 Barcelona, ESP @ Auditorio
04/26 Turin, IT @ Spazio 2121,
04/27 Milan, IT @ Jail Club
04/28 Ravenna, IT @ Bronson
04/29 Romam,IT @ Circolo Artisti

Papercuts 8.3 Review On Pitchfork Today!

Papercuts
Can't Go Back
[Gnomonsong; 2007]
Rating: 8.3
Online review here.

Papercuts (the lacerations) fall somewhere between painful and annoying on the irritation scale. They're one of life's great certainties, unavoidable no matter how much care you take in sorting sheaves or stuffing envelopes. It takes a few seconds after that first, fateful slice before the sting sets in, a throbbing, sometimes bloody reminder of the fragility of our fleshy frames.

Papercuts (the band) fall somewhere between pleasant and beautiful on the listening scale. They're self-consciously mysterious, no matter how much effort you put into making sense of the decidedly low-key yet somehow stirring songs. It takes a few seconds of Papercuts' second album, Can't Go Back, to think that maybe you've stumbled upon something special, a delicate mood piece made to slice through the din and chaos of modern life.

Or maybe it's just another gently indulgent bedroom production featuring a guy cribbing from a great record collection, cooing sweet nothings and coming off like some late 1960s summer-into-fall semi-obscurity sprinkled with a healthy dose of indie-dust. But like Papercuts' namesake, there's a nagging sensation there's more going on than first appears, and that the band's modesty can't disguise a gift for melody equal to its knack for channeling a host of half-familiar influences.

Perhaps that should be "his" knack for channeling, as Papercuts is essentially Bay Area songwriter Jason Quever, whose last name almost perfectly describes his high, thin singing voice. That voice is frequently double-tracked and cloaked with touches of ghostly reverb, the last refuge of the painfully insecure and a surefire way to hide yourself while imparting an otherworldly vibe. But the shy act-- "I'm always on the outside looking in," Quever sings on "Outside Looking In"-- may be just that, as no wallflower could accumulate the fans this guy has. Devendra Banhart and Vetiver's Andy Cabic are releasing the disc via their Gnomonsong imprint, and Grizzly Bear tapped Papercuts for their current tour. Quever's also collaborated, crossed paths, or intersected with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Cass McCombs.

He's also breathed deep from the stylish post-Summer of Love haze, when dope-smoking folkies traded tokes for euphoric doses, and when the VU started sharing (select) shelf space with Dylan albums and dreamy L.A. singer-songwriter projects. Not that you'd necessarily glean that from the first song, "Dear Employee", an anomalous chamber-pop kiss off that's got more in common with the Hidden Cameras (minus the "gay church" thing).

Halfway through second song, "John Brown", however, after a dramatic pause gives way to a double-time detour, the disc's trippy heritage kicks in. "Summer Long" channels prime girl-group pop for the coffee-house set, sounding like Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited players subbing for a Phil Spector session, while humming organ and airy harmonies underscore the deceptively bright "Unavailable".

With the shaggy, shambling "Take the 227th Exit", the fashionable psych and Basement Tapes touches really begin to meld and manifest themselves, and over the disc's latter half the shape and spirit of the songs such as the droning "Sandy" and the sepia-toned sunset of a eulogy "Just Another Thing to Dust" grow more and more diffuse, even if the winsome tunes keep them from floating off into the ether. The songs seem to proceed on a narcotic lag, with the subtle, shimmering backing instrumentation shifting ever so slightly in unexpected ways.

By "Found Bird", Quever's on another plane, his voice processed to an abstract warble that sounds like he's singing from the heavens, looking down, amused at the world he's left behind. The disc's extended denouement, with its protracted and seemingly improvised piano solo, achieves a certain transcendence before giving way to the statelier "The World I Love", a sign that Quever's still with us and not off counting butterflies or something.

Not that he sounds like he would embrace subjects so hippie-banal. Quever might run with the hairy-and-happy crowd, but "Can't Go Back" avoids unicorns and fanciful imagery for something simpler and more affecting. West Coast to the core, it's music for the journey, not for the arrival, the soundtrack to getting somewhere else rather than music to get lost to. Or maybe both.

-Joshua Klein, February 22, 2007

Paperucts are currently on tour with Grizzly Bear

02/23 Tucson, AZ @ Plush
02/24 Marfa, TX @ Ballroom Marfa
02/26 Norman, OK @ Opolis
02/27 Dallas, TX @ Club Dada
02/28 Austin, TX @ Emo's Jr
03/01 Baton Rouge, LA @ Chelsea's
03/02 Atlanta, GA @ Drunken Unicorn
03/03 Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
03/04 Washington, DC @ Black Cat
03/06 New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom

The Butthole Surfers Are The Jewel In The Lone Star Crown.

It must've been proclaimed five hundred trillion times since it's inception, but thank the heavens for YouTube. Already so much well deserving footage has resurfaced and it doesn't seem like the well is going to run dry anytime soon. Like this unearthed video for Fast Song by the Butthole Surfers. At ten minutes in length it's a bit more than the average Buggles video, but well worth every disturbingly genius second. It's been awhile since the Butthole Surfers have produced any new material but their incredible back catalog plus a fantastic rarities disc are available from the band's own Latino Bugger Veil label. May the legacy of Butthole Surfers live on forever.