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Review: Dish – Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 17, 2009

There’s plenty to love about Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour, the second outing from Dish, but the verdict is still out over the disc’s most engaging attribute. Is it the vocals of Roberto Aguilar, the eerie way his wail channels Jeff Buckley at his always-familiar, rock-inflected peaks? Or is it the junk percussion of brother Nathaniel Aguilar, the jagged and inventive backbone of the duo? No matter your answer, this disc, out now on ROA Records, will transfix you – and for all the right reasons.

The disc begins with what, for lack of a better term, could be called a spiritual number or even a work song, the voices multi-tracked over the banging of a metal rail and a hubcap. But, after that 90-second introduction, Ma Raison De Vivre Ton Amour kicks into gear with “Cold Is,” a bright pop-rock nugget with plenty of hooks and a fist-pumping chorus. From there, the disc simply carries you from one great moment to the next. There’s “This Ain’t Livin’,” where Roberto Aguilar largely sets the pace with a shuffling acoustic guitar, and “Tired of Writing Songs,” which unfurls a lullaby guitar line over clattering percussion. On “Closer Dead,” Nathaniel Aguilar dresses up a pensive verse with the occasional pop of found percussion. On the sensual “Pictora” or the driving “Flutter,” the junk, the way those notes spike and jump out of the speakers, nearly steals the show.

The disc is also nothing if not diverse. At one turn, these guys are refining the art of the low-key (the trippy “The Song I Couldn’t Say,” the ballad “I Will Run For Our Love”). Then, without stumbling, they shift to the grandiose, from the country-and-western-tinged “Letter To You” to the excellent “Flutter,” which fleshes out its refrains with trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba.

There are too many great moments on the 16-song disc to list, from the jazzy swing-and-sway of “I Saw A Bird” to the poppy humor of “Zombie Love Song” to “Death and Romance,” which begins with vibraphone but ends a dirgy barnburner.  The disc ends with “Because The End Is Near,” where the brothers Aguilar again accompany the proceedings with horns. But, here the mood is reflective, a moment of pause at the end of 53 incredible minutes. It’s a calming curtain-close, almost an antidote to the heightened pop-rock pulse of it all. Not if only we could determine to which element of the band we should pledge our allegiance.

Review: Point Juncture Wa. – Heart To Elk

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 8, 2009

The album begins with the click and clack of electronic percussion but, within moments, carefully gives way to humming horns and punctuation from a vibraphone. The percussion, on a full kit and now more pronounced, slinks along, a jazzy shuffle. The mood is somewhere between sleepy and dreamy, that ill-defined middle ground where the world starts feeling fuzzy and then slips away. “How blissful it would be to think only of me,” sings Amanda Spring, her breathy voice floating right in the middle of the mix. This is our introduction.

Point Juncture, Wa. isn’t really a place in the sense that conventional maps or cartographers would have you believe. But if the attributes of the Portland-based quartet that has chosen the moniker as its name were applied to a town, a real speck on the map, it surely would be inviting. Every home on every block would be warmly lighted from within, the winding roads would be clutter-free and every intersection would be carefully plotted. City planners would appear to leave nothing to chance.

Heart to Elk, Point Juncture, Wa.’s third release, is evidence of this modus operandi but, make no mistakes, it’s far from cold or over-calculated. It’s a beautiful and well-produced record, one whose craft is clearly matched by the attention and care it received in the studio. Its 13 songs sometimes lack the requisite hooks to call it pop, but there’s something almost inherently catchy about the material, something that quietly slides it under the surface of your skin to make it feel at home. This is music to remember.

For lack of more precise terms, Heart to Elk sits at the same intersection of pop, rock and jazz once occupied by Eleventh Dream Day. There are moments on the 49-minute disc that pump the blood (the distortion-drenched “Biathalon,” the closing minutes of “Melon Bird”) and there are others that are quiet and contemplative (“Rocks and Sand,” “The Easy Winners”). At one turn, the band is offsetting grungy bass with gentle background cooing (“New Machine”); at the next, it’s placing a gently strummed acoustic guitar front and center alongside interjecting horns (“Kings Part II”). “Viking Mission to Mars” is a pop-rock gem, complete with frenetic refrains. “Stray Bear” veers between the honey-dipped and the adrenaline-pumped. “Sick On Sugar,” with its light-footed guitars and blaring horns, feels like it’s about to soar out of your stereo.

The record ends with another song aided by electronic percussion — “The Easy Winners.” But, here, unlike on the album-opener, the electronic percussion lingers, pockmarking the background as the band builds and rebuilds a song with the solitary notes of an electric guitar, understated bass and Victor Nash’s plaintive vocals. (“It’s better if you don’t, it’s better if you don’t,” he sings, pleading.) The song then buckles under the weight of clattering guitars, roiling drums and carefully timed backing vocals, everything in its right place, more details in yet another song worth remembering.

Profile: Nonagon (2009)

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy June 1, 2009

Nonagon’s songs have a way of popping, no, better yet, of exploding out of stereo speakers, as if they were bottles of pressurized soda water just itching to be uncapped. On No Sun, their self-released and hand-assembled debut CD, angular guitars tear through the landscape, bass and drums lunge back and forth, and a barked refrain is never far away. The moment on the title track when frontman John Hastie screams “No sun! No sun! No sun!” might be among the most adrenaline-fueled moments of 2008. The record leaves an impression. And it’s only 15 minutes long. Delusions of Adequacy recently got the chance to exchange e-mail with the trio – bassist Robert Gomez, Hastie and drummer Tony Aimone – and talk about interesting names and what it means to be a punk band from Chicago.

Delusions of Adequacy: So, what’s the connection between a nine-sided polygon and a post-punk band? And do you mind if I call you a post-punk band?

John Hastie: The name was chosen with some degree of randomness. It was the first not to be vetoed by one of us. That said, I guess there are some happy accidents: We, too, are divisible by three. We seem to have a proclivity for odd-numbered time signatures (although I don’t think “9″ has happened yet), and it sounds fantastic when chanted by thousands of fans en masse.

Post-punk is fine, I guess. When asked, I just end up just defaulting to “punk” almost immediately. It’s a convenient answer to the “what’s-your-band-like?” question because it’s a term that has lost most of its specificity. Folks are satisfied with the answer because they immediately attribute their own set of assumptions and baggage to it.

Robert Gomez: Yeah, our previous #1 choice for a name was a made up word. However, a few months and several random web searches later, we discovered some hardcore band had came up with the same unlikely combination of letters before us. That’s when we fell back on randomly pointing to words in a Spanish-to-English dictionary.

Tony Aimone: In my mind, we’ll always be called Brown Sabbath.  Nonagon was just a name that the other two nerds in the band could understand and relate to. Since we came up with Brown Sabbath back in ‘92 there have been countless other bands with that name.  But it’ll always be ours.  Always.

DOA: Let’s talk more about “defaulting to ‘punk.’” How much of what you guys do is filtered through the music, some of which you could call punk, that’s come out of Chicago in the last 20 years? How much are you a product of the region?

RG: I didn’t start playing in bands or going to shows until I was in college down in Champaign-Urbana in the early 90s. A large chunk of what I saw were either Chicago bands or student bands comprised of Chicagolanders who were reared on bands like Big Black or Naked Raygun (unlike myself who was reared on Dr. Demento and Casey’s Weekly Top 40). So, I literally learned to play music in this environment or scene, or whatever you want to call it. And I suppose that sound will always pervade much of what I bring to Nonagon.

JH: I guess it would be a pretty obvious lie to claim we weren’t influenced by a bunch of the stuff we were listening to when we were considerably younger. It’s like what they say about a person’s clothing choices: they tend not to stray too far from the stuff they wore when they were at the happiest point in their lives. I guess you just have to wear it unapologetically, hope you wear it well and try to do something fresh with it.

So yeah, for me it started with a pretty steady diet of Naked Raygun, Big Black, The Effigies and a dozen other bands from Chicago that would play all ages shows in the mid-eighties. Then, of course, Touch and Go blew it all wide open. At the risk of sounding corny, it was an incredibly exciting time and I still think it’s inspiring.

I think it’s fair to say that what Nonagon is doing now might have begun there, taken strolls through Dischord and SST, and spent a chunk of time in 90s Illinois college towns (another exciting time). But it’s also been informed by a ton of what we’ve absorbed since then, which is to say, a lot. We’re kind of old. Don’t tell anybody.

DOA: Tell me about the history of the band. When did you guys form and how? For how long were you playing before you ventured into the studio for the EP?

JH: It’s been something like five or six years ago at this point. Tony and I had played together in the latest of my “one-show-and-out” bands along with our friends Brian (who used to be in the Baltimores) and Mark (who is now in an amazing band called Neptune out of Boston).

I had pretty much had a long string of those short-lived projects ever since the mid-nineties. I could never seem to find a group of folks with whom musical kinship was balanced with social compatibility. For example: I briefly brushed a snare drum and sang high-lonesome harmonies in a bluegrass band in Kansas. I loved the other folks in the band, but it was obviously pretty far from where I prefer to sit musically.

When Mark moved to Boston breaking up The Metric System, Tony and I realized that we seemed to be on the same page. I had recently run into Robert after years of not seeing him and remembered that he was a pretty great bass player so we kidnapped him from his wife (who seemed eager to get him out of the house, frankly). It kind of replicated what, up to this point, had been my most fertile and comfortable place to be: collaborating in a loud trio with like-minded folks who at least pretend to stand my company.

I’d love to report that things moved quickly after that, but we decided early on that trying to force the band on our families, jobs, etc., might make it a source of tension, so we practice, play shows and record when we can squeeze it into our “adult” lives. This means occasional periods of inactivity (sometimes a couple of months long) followed by spurts of frenzied band-ness (like the one we seem to be in right now).

DOA: Tell me more about when and how you pieced together the EP. And how conscious of a decision was it to self-release it?

JH: There was never any real doubt that this would be a self-release. Pretty much every decision was made with that in mind. There are really great and trustworthy labels but the equation seems stacked against the whole endeavor: Nobody with any scruples is making much money in this milieu and there are a ton of really good bands worthy of exposure. For small labels, that means there are a lot of attractive-but-risky prospects out there, bands they love personally and creatively that they’d like to support but who may not be “wise financial investments.” Add to that the fact that the ever-dwindling audience for live rock, and the picture isn’t pretty.

From the beginning we decided that we really didn’t want to be evaluated by anybody (especially friends) based on our potential rate of economic return. It can create weirdness and regrettable decision-making.

With that in mind, we went into the recording of the EP the same way we’ve approached the whole band thing: as a hobby, a cathartic, expensive, obsessive hobby that we take seriously, but a hobby all the same. Someone might think that sounds like we’re not dedicated, but the way I see it: keeping the band removed from our food chain means that we’ll only make decisions based on what we owe it and what we get from it.

So we waited until we had some money saved and then recorded and assembled the EP based entirely on our own desires and limits. We worked with the folks we wanted to work with, packaged it the way we wanted to package it, made it the length we wanted it to be, priced it the way we wanted to, had to find our own workarounds for snags, etc. But really, once we made the decision to actually start the project last August, it didn’t take too long before we had an actual, finished, debut CD in our hands.

That said, there are some things I would’ve loved some label-like support with: Sending out copies to radio stations, ‘zines, Web sites and venues. Booking out-of-town shows. Finding distributors and stores who would agree to stock the EP. Cutting, folding, gluing, and stuffing the sleeves, etc. Doing it all from scratch — and without the “cred” of the right label or distributor — has been challenging and has taken a long time.

What’s great is that we’re discovering that there are still some folks here and there who will take a chance and listen to the occasional unsolicited CD in their mailbox.

DOA: You can count me among those open to unsolicited recordings. So, what’s next for you guys? Does the hobby nature of things keep you from planning too far ahead when it comes to tours, new records, and so on?

RG: Getting the CD together gave us a chance to hear some of these songs that we had been tooling around with for a few years finally come together, and it has gotten us itching to do more. Lately our practices have been more about creating new songs and trying some different things rather than simply burning through our set list. There has even some preliminary discussion regarding our next recording.

That said, the hobby nature of the band does limit our scope a little bit. As much as I would love to create an epic double-disc concept album, we realize that it’s just not possible given our lives outside of the band. I think we are happy with the idea of releasing an EP every year or two and traveling out-of-state occasionally on weekend micro-tours.

So, the band is planning and moving forward. But things just happen to be moving on more of a geological time scale.

JH: Life intervened right after our EP release party causing an immediate hiatus and pretty much killing all momentum. Now that we can play again we’re making the most of it with a nice flurry of activity: writing new songs (the next EP is pretty much covered), and setting up shows (in and out of town). The hope is that we make at least two steps forwards for every inevitable step backwards and integrate this unwieldy thing ever-more-regularly into our lives.

By the way, anybody booking a show within five hours of Chicago should track us down.

Review: Only Thunder – Lower Bounds

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy May 4, 2009

Only Thunder? Talk about faulty advertising. Those turning on Lower Bounds, the Denver quintet’s outing on Bermuda Mohawk Productions, will be surprised by the lack of thunder the disc conveys. There’s nothing raw or unsettling about it, nothing that particularly stuns you or shakes you in the place where you stand. One could call Lower Bounds a punk-rock record, to be sure, one of a variety that combines dynamics with volume, but it’s hard to call the proceedings moving. It’s a rock record that knows its boundaries, sometimes loses sight of its finer moments and, surprisingly, plays it rather safe.

The album-opening “Tapestries, Candles, Zima?” and “Back and Forth” set the tone for the 40-odd minutes that follow: a give-and-take between verses of crunching guitar and barked vocals and more fluid, less distortion-soaked passages. Only Thunder features not one, not two, but three guitarists, so there’s plenty of noodling, lots of trebly notes laid over power-chord refrains. That works and sometimes works well but what stands out from the very beginning is how much the songs cling to a pattern – the safe reprise of a verse-chorus-verse mold, or the plotted course of a repeating measure on guitar. On “Back and Forth,” the tangents and departures are what’s best; the too-short instrumental passage halfway through the five-minute song is more articulate than much of the clutter that surrounds it. It’s a shame.

Some songs fare better than others. Parts of “Splatterhouse” and “There Is No Peace on Colfax” are fun and light on their feet, the type of vaguely SoCal-inspired punk-rock moment one finds in a teen movie. The beautifully titled “Fucking Your Way To The Middle” features moments that border on math-rock and others that seem to aspire to paraphrase Tool. The band plays with a similar dynamic on the less beautifully titled “I’m A Witch, Burn Me,” where quiet sections are surprisingly reflective and loud sections display the better parts of the three-guitar assault.

The end of the record is a study in thwarted expectations. Time and again, the group flirts with engaging material, only to toss it aside for more of the same. “Fence Fight” begins with a murmuring bass line, simple percussion and semi-groggy guitars, something off-kilter but inviting, but wastes little time launching right back into louder, more obvious terrain, the singer barking, “Someone please take me home.” The beginning of “Airwolf” roils as guitars weave between and among each other but, again, the group abandons some of that complexity to go for the big refrains. In the song’s closing minutes, the group returns to some of that terrain, albeit with more volume, but then it happens only briefly. When the song passes, instead of being left with the engaging material, we remember the singer shouting “Where are we now?” over a pounding refrain that’s so stereotypical it borders on the humorous.

Lower Bounds seems to aspire to a brand of throttling but controlled punk magic but, unfortunately, doesn’t quite get there. It’s not that they don’t try hard enough. It’s just that they seem to focus on the easily replicated rock moments instead of the more unique passages they scatter throughout the disc. And, maybe, in the end, there’s just not enough thunder.

Review: The Phantom Band – Checkmate Savage

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy April 15, 2009

Checkmate Savage, the debut from Glasgow’s The Phantom Band, is a special kind of mutant. A well-crafted hybrid of sounds as disparate as post-rock, folk-blues, pop, rock and techno and, damn, is it good. There’s not a dud on the nine-song disc, which is impressive given the scope of the task this sextet undertakes. Not content to merely jump from genre to genre, cutting and pasting the necessary segments along the way, the group displays an undying dedication to seeing how much they can wring from mashing the sounds together and doing it seamlessly. This isn’t genre-bending, as much as it is genre-blending. And, if April were December, we’d be measuring up Checkmate Savage as one of the great records of 2009.

The experiment begins with “The Howling,” which cruises from a dance-ready introduction with throbbing keyboards to a chorus whose punctuating backing vocals just might be paying homage to Frank Zappa. Then there’s the infectious “Burial Sounds,” where a pounding and almost tribal drum line collides with bridges of fragile acoustic guitar, and “Folk Song Oblivion,” whose grungy guitar line, all jagged edges, is looped around borderline carnivalesque keyboards and the resulting chorus descends/ascends into pop-rock bliss. These are just the first three songs, each unbelievable in their own way, and, 15 minutes into the disc, the group’s talent and ambitions are more than evident.

Press material for The Phantom Band’s Chemikal Underground release talks about prolonged studio sessions built around “long, meandering and experimental” jams and, the more you listen, the more that tends to make a lot of sense. The disc is focused and far from meandering but it sounds like the group took the best parts of its genre workouts and simply weaved them together to birth something inherently different. As a result, we get moments that reverberate with tones of classic rock (“Halfhound”) and others that flirt with the blues (the nine-minute “Island”). At one corner, they’re The Beta Band (“Left Hand Wave”); at the next, the lead singer channels Will Oldham and Bonnie “Prince” Billy over swamp-rock (“Throwing Bones”). The disc is nothing if not diversified. And did I mention these guys are clearly students of Captain Beefheart?

The Phantom Band also understands the inherent magnetic pull of repetition. It’s all over Checkmate Savage, whose songs often build around a central theme and pull in different directions from there. Whether it’s the drums of “Burial Sounds” or the central guitar segment that runs through “Island,” the sextet is focused on using repetition as a kind of building block; the songs’ “architecture”. On “Crocodile,” an incredible math-rock instrumental, the proceedings begin with palm-muted guitars and expand to include infectious drums and a pulsating bass line. Everything fits in its right place as we’re introduced to a humming keyboard line and the soaring moan of an e-bowed guitar. The song climaxes about five minutes into its 7:42 running time with full-blown distortion and capital-R-Rock strutting. But when the song ends, we realize the group has not abandoned that central guitar line that started it all. Instead, it goes on as it had before, the repetition burning an imprint in the listener’s mind.

The disc ends – even at 54 minutes, too soon – with the beautiful “The Whole Is On My Side.” It begins with simple narration: “I’m standing on the edge/ I’m looking over swaying from side to side,” the singer – harmony man Richard Princeton? guitarist Duncan DeCornell? – offers. “I’m jumping up and down / I’m rolling on the ground / I’m dancing on the edge of this / And it’s all around us now.” But the thing that’s most transfixing about the song is a simple acoustic guitar line, the gentle plucking of a few rotating notes here and there, an elegant and dreamy kind of narration all its own. After a somewhat-extended excursion into pop-rock terrain, the record ends with the shimmering echo of an electric guitar in isolation.

There’s plenty of reasons to love Checkmate Savage, from its ability to engage listeners on its own terms, to the craft it exhibits in blurring the lines between genres, to the way repetition works its own brand of special magic. I simply can’t file it away and stop listening to it. It’s an amazing disc, an early contender for the accumulation of all those best-of lists, and worth tracking down. You won’t be disappointed.

Review: The Televangelist and The Architect – There’s A Song In There Somewhere

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Marfch 23, 2009

Let’s rewind. The year is 2003 — six years ago, give or take — and a Berkeley, Ca. band by the name of Grand Unified Theory has just released its debut on the indie label Undetected Plagiarism.

The self-titled record’s 10 songs are emotive and engaging, and they display a well defined understanding of quiet-loud/soft-hard dynamics. They are guitar driven pieces that define a band, to borrow a quote from these pages, that is “too loose and frayed around the edges to be claimed under the ever-popular banner of emo, yet their songs have a calculated dissonance to them that makes them too complicated to be written off only as some post-Pavement collegiate indie act.” The songwriter behind the group is Jerry Chen and, on Grand Unified Theory, he wears several hats, playing guitar, bass and synth. He also sings, his voice light and vulnerable and somehow defining.

But that was then. Back to 2009. Chen has left Berkeley and is now recording under the moniker The Televangelist and The Architect in a basement in Cambridge, Mass. (One could trace Chen’s postgraduate years – he’s now a doctoral student at MIT, according to press clippings – through liner notes.) The sound is much different. Gone is the thunder that occasionally rumbled below the surface of things, the loosely woven indie rock that depended on the chemistry of a full band. On There’s A Song In There Somewhere, a six-song EP out Feb. 26 on Undetected Plagiarism, the songs are folksier, the arrangements often built around a single acoustic guitar or piano and a voice or two. The songs might lack the punch of Grand Unified Theory (or even earlier outings by The Televangelist and The Architect) but, despite being stripped a little more bare, Chen’s work does not lack emotion.

Some of the sound of the new recording might be a function of its birth. The songs were recorded, between albums, with thoughts of a collaboration in mind. Once that idea was abandoned, Chen avoided studio flourishes and instead kept the songs in a basic form. “While I always do my own tracking in my basement studio, this was the first time I attempted to mix my own recordings for the sake of learning how to do it,” Chen writes. “With that in mind, I deliberately kept the production simple and the instrumentation sparse to avoid getting in over my head.”

Compared to 2006’s Diaries of the Intelligentsia or 2004’s The Mass Exodus from California, There’s A Song In There Somewhere can feel like a solitary affair. There’s the lonely shuffle of an acoustic guitar here (“A Work In Progress”), a moody bit of piano (“The Letters”) or somber bit of nostalgia (the title track) there. The best songs on this short disc seem to build around the basics, as on the engaging “The Scene of The Crime,” where Chen gathers some momentum around little more than an acoustic guitar and a trembling voice. (“Don’t let me, please/ as my hands wrapped ‘round your neck/ and I squeeze too hard/ I hold for too long/ Now you’re lifeless forever in my arms.”)

There’s only one bump in the road. On the comparatively ornate “… In The Blizzard,” contributor Alyssa Barbour offers a female counterpart to Chen. Her voice is fragile and delicate enough but the arrangement doesn’t work; their voices end up overlapping to the point where the song sounds like a muted kind of argument instead of a give-and-take between male and female leads.

Elsewhere, The Televangelist and The Architect aims high and hits the mark. “A Work In Progress” starts as a simple ballad for acoustic guitar but expands with an incredible use of a string section. On the closing title track, Barbour returns, this time offering spot-on punctuation to Chen’s lead. On “…By The Pond,” the most band-centered exercise, Chen’s voice wavers and nearly cracks as he sings lines like “I know this road you’re heading down seems so very much obscure/ you were lost but I found you in my heart.” The moment — surrounded by shuffling acoustic guitars, quiet percussion and a casual bass line — is a picture-window onto the best parts of the disc, and clearly worth the gaze.

Review: The Marches – 4 A.M. Is The New Midnight

The Marches get about 65 seconds into the opening of its Satellite/Star Records outing before someone name-drops the title of the record. The detail is a minor but, unfortunately, an illustrative one. 4 A.M. Is The New Midnight always seems in a rush to nail down the bottom line and deliver; while this keeps the record’s 15 tracks compact and colorful, it does less to allow the band to explore the terrain it’s sculpting here – a mixture of Motown, funk, pop and dancefloor designs.

The record is occasionally accented with what, for lack of a better phrase, could be called electro-pop. The title song, which opens the record, features both a snaking keyboard line and vocals from what sounds like a Mac. “Rudolph Valentino” uses similar synths to flirt with hip-hop. And “Bobby Brown,” all synths and distorted voices, caves under the pressure of its own electronic conceits. But the better songs on the disc wander from this formula, whether it’s using piano to establish some drama (“Sometimes Sex Isn’t About The Money”), injecting horns to jazz up the proceedings (the incredibly catchy “Cold Hands Warm Heart”) or letting a lead saxophone’s blaring just take the show away (“Ghost of A Chance”).

The record has some genuinely engaging moments. The sensual female lead that simmers her way through “Need Me Back” – “Have you ever needed someone ‘cause no-one needs you back?” she coos  — is one of the record’s standout performances. The incredible “Don’t Love With Your Eyes” channels swing bands like the Cherry Poppin Daddies. The foot-stomping “Bad Touch,” with its hopping bass line and sax-driven choruses, gets the blood flowing and the funky sway of “So Ill” also is worth noting. (This is all especially impressive given the fact that only two songs on the disc crack the three-minute barrier.)

There are, sadly, a couple of bumps in the road, from an oddly placed faux-rock exercise (“Wish You Were Here”) to a pair of synth noodlings that merely slow the pace of the record (“Skinema,” “The Trouble with Heart Murmurs”). For some reason, The Marches also has chosen to include 90 seconds of goofing around in the studio, right in the middle of the record (“End of The Album Pt. 2”).

All in all, it’s good record, especially so for someone seeking bite-size fare for the dancefloor. You just wish they had given some of the material on the disc more room to spread its wings and grow.

Review: Pit Er Pat – High Time

Every time I listen to Pit Er Pat, I am reminded of the early silent films of Man Ray, the way the camera fixates on an object or a motion and, by fixing its gaze, somehow both illuminates and changes it. Like Ui before them, these guys know that, if you give voice to the twins of rhythm and repetition, magical things can happen.

The evidence of that kind of extra-linear musical thinking is in high supply on High Time, a thoroughly modern invention — the trio’s sixth record and its first outing since 2007’s Covers EP. On the album-opening “ANNO IV:XX,” percussive elements and a faint, trebly guitar lead the way as much as a repeating and transfixing count-off that never seems to transcend beyond the number 2. On the moody “Creation Stepper,” we’re not treated to verses and choruses as much as expanding bridges built around xylophone and a well-buried bass. On the closing “The Good Morning Song,” we’re bombarded with walls of orchestrated and found sounds but the driver is a pulsing piece of keyboard melodrama that envelopes you even as it offers the song a simple pace, a stable foundation on which to build.

That’s not to say the record is some brainy academic exercise. “Copper Pennies,” with its punctuating bass, and “The Cairo Shuffle,” whose main beeps and blurts sound like an organ filtered through a fuzz pedal, speak directly to the hips. “Trod A Long” features a percussive thrust of a reggae flair. Even less percussion-focused songs, like “Evacuation Days,” seem like a flirtatious invitation to the dance-floor. (Fay Davis-Jeffers’ sultry delivery doesn’t put any dents into the suggestive nature of it all.)

It’s hard to pick stand-out tracks because the record is full of them – from the memorable repetitions of “ANNO IV:XX” to the subtle jazz slither of “Omen” to the wonderful, Tortoise inspired slinking of “Creation Stepper.” Even the record’s sole aside, a two-minute offering titled “My Darkers” can feel magical, a piece that transforms a church organ murmur into something both menacing and comforting. It’s an interesting bit of alchemy and, like much that surrounds it, it works.

Review: Blackout Beach – Skin of Evil

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy March 11, 2009

The record opens with a repetitive thumping, like some primitive dance beat mouthed onto the waiting surface of a microphone, before we hear the guitar, shimmering and beautiful, a fragile and repeating series of notes cascading off the walls in an echo chamber. Voices drone and murmur low in the background. “I think there was men before me who were too scrambled by Donna’s awesome, awesome power,” a man laments, his voice confident and bordering on the theatrical. “But did any of them ever fly? And by fly I mean dipping out … into the indentations and the golden crescents of the sky?” The song progresses — the man’s voice joined by a second, even more theatrical, of his own design — before the guitar shifts and the song suddenly expands. “Decelerate! Decelerate!” he moans. “The aeroplane is diving out of gold.”

Skin of Evil, out on Soft Abuse Jan. 20, is a breathtaking, mesmerizing record, a lyrical song cycle about love and loss, affection and anger and alienation. In 30 short minutes, Blackout Beach – the “nom de guerre” of Vancouver’s Carey Mercer, on loan from Frog Eyes – creates a musical universe with a densely constructed language all its own, meshing a theatrical, often-campy vocal delivery with gothic-rock atmospherics and lots of them. The record, to be sure, will only unveil its treasures to the right set of ears but that almost seems beyond the point for someone willing to listen. In short, this is a gem.

Mercer, who appears herein almost universally alone, builds Skin of Evil around a woman named Donna and, though he invokes that name regularly throughout the record’s 10 songs, her presence is more urgent for what she sometimes represents.  This is a theme record. She is often gone, but she is never gone.

In “Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star” — which features a somewhat traditional piano progression, synths, and backing vocals from Carolyn Mark and Megan Boddy — Donna is an object of longing, something Mercer remembers as keeping him above the tide. In “The Whistle,” whose biting nature is offset (or supplemented) by the grungy rumble of an electric guitar, she is a woman who has distanced herself from Mercer’s affections. Her current love becomes an object of scorn. “William, her boyfriend, feeling her up, so tacky, so she groans,” Mercer sings. “So I laugh. An old friend, but fucking William I want to crack his neck and perform one million castrations with his bones. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I won’t.”

In “Three Men Drown in the River,” Donna sleeps on a riverbank as men, presumably lovers, drown, a poisonous symbol. In the closing “Astoria, Menthol Lite, Hilltop, Wave of Evil 1982,” she leaves behind a cracked cassette tape and Mercer just can’t summon the strength to burn it.

The clear passion in Mercer’s lyrics is matched by the aesthetics of the sound he builds around them – textured guitars, occasional percussion, the interjection of a piano. His voice, always high in the mix, falls somewhere between Bowie and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and it is an incredible vehicle for material that pulses with the stuff of life. But the sound also is worth lauding – the Dead Man guitar scruff of “Three Men Drown In The River,” the trippy reverb of “The Roman,” the vocal swooning and swaying guitars of the abbreviated “Woe to the Minds of Soft Men.” Occasionally, these sounds fall together into something conventional – the acoustic verses of “Sophia, Donna, I was Down the River Waiting,” for example – but, more often than not, they are heartbeats and spare soundings that accompany Mercer’s voice.

“Astoria, Menthol Lite, Hilltop, Wave of Evil 1982,” which closes the record, begins with a rumination about feeling like an ocean town stuck in winter and ends, like many songs, lamenting the absence of Donna. The closing might be the most typically beautiful segment of the record – skittering electric guitars and acoustic guitars dance above a piano reprise in the last two minutes or so – but it’s Mercer’s words that will burn into your memory. “She wanted to sail away to some other cape, some other town, some other series of towns that suck the little highway into the ground,” he sings, his voice building. “But that was not alright with the dawn. That was not alright with the dawn.” He ends the record wailing. And Donna is still gone.