Kylesa - From the Vaults, Vol. 1 LP (Season of Mist)

If this had been released as a proper studio album, it is safe to say none of Kylesa’s exponentially budding fanbase would have been the wiser. A title like From the Vaults, Vol. 1 usually works as a disclaimer, in the sense of providing a framework as to who should be alerted to the release (hardcore fans) and what they should expect: an endearing historical document, contextualizing the band and uncovering prescient snapshots of their current, past or future glory. A patchwork quality in recording and unfinished zygotes of song are excusably revealed, while the inclusion of covers is standard issue. From the Vaults, Vol. 1 includes two such covers and features a song called “Drum Jam,” so while these assumptions are not completely irrelevant, Kylesa’s sixth full-length LP bears a thoughtfulness worthy of its place alongside 2010’s Spiral Shadow in the discography. The comprehensibility was intended. It is properly sequenced and uniformly booming in sound. Old songs, previously released or not, are never just upended from the floor.

It is more like the past revisited, with out-of-print fan favorites like “A 111 Degree Heat Index,” “Between Silence and Sound” and “Bottom Line II” completely re-recorded for Vaults, the last of which has changed to reflect its live, speedier rendition. Kylesa’s ever-expanding genre base is fully represented, making this a valuable compendium. The band’s sludge upbringing is cited verbatim with a Buzzov*en cover. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” speaks to their future of allowing more psychedelic and improvisational moments on their next album, slated for spring. It is this future and the sense that Kylesa is good for the long haul that is the most exciting aspect of this release. It is the first volume after all, implying that a dearth of material from the future-past will become available. As another batch of songs, three unreleased efforts previously remiss of vocals, further makes clear, Kylesa is neither shy of the past, embarrassed from missed connections, nor unable to grow forward.

-Elizabeth Murphy          

-from Agit Reader

Connections - Private Airplane LP (Anyway Records)

Connections Private Airplane is out now in Columbus, Ohio

I don't want to talk about the Ohio water, as in what's in it, as the raison d’être for another instant classic of underground pop to surface to vinyl with Connections’ Private Airplane. This allusion is justifiably thrown up in the hands of well-wishers at a loss for words, yet to say Ohioans are dosed from the tap with a certain knack is to slight what constitutes the substance. Other liquids are more conspicuously involved: blood, beer, whiskey and gasoline - although I wouldn't recommend that order. Songs like "Finally", "Casuals", "Cindy" and "Love St." don't just happen, albeit by the time we hear them it certainly seems like they do; spontaneously, with whatever working degree of immaculacy you uphold. The five members of Connections are not bystanders for a conduit; Kevin Elliott and Andy Hampel of 84 Nash, Adam Elliott of Times New Viking, Dave Capaldi of El Jesus de Magico and 'peach district laureate' Philip Kim have been clocking in for awhile now. Private Airplane is a result of their craft; fifteen paragons of song, each laden with hooks you can't pay for, never mind get, anywhere else.

It's in the blood. Originating with the 84 Nash representatives, a kernel of the songs on Private Airplane evolved over time, and the genetic make-up of this band is thankfully evident; which is to say, you will hear Guided By Voices, The Mice and 84 Nash's own micro-arena rock. If Connections was mounted on honing relics, it is safe to say the glacial pace has served its purpose. With the skilled naturalism of Capaldi's guitar, Kim on bass, and the drums and guiding hand of Elliott the younger, who truly shines as a producer (trust me, I know), Connections is experiencing a flash. Another album is rumored to be completed. You would be wise to get on board now.

Outstanding on Private Airplane is the tone. It's positive, and this is quite refreshing. Easy to be contentious and nihilist, both saturate a market where pop, not cool enough to stand alone, always suffers an avant-garde signifier. What is hard is to make something genuine and full-hearted without becoming a target. Connections achieves this, but it is not born of naiveté. For if water is at work here at all, it is David Foster Wallace's water, one he addressed as ennui and the daily choice to wade through it, to which Ohioans are adept. Of equal habit to principle songwriter Andy Hampel, is the counterattack. With Connections, we are called to engage – join the formation to offset the void. It may be closer than you think.

Appropriately, a record label founded on the belief that music should be from your own backyard invested in the release. Anyway Records, from Columbus, Ohio, has been one purveyor of the 'timelessness' (est. late '80s - early '90s) found on Private Airplane; a certain melding of rock, skewed and blaring through speakers, not in the least from vehicles in any driving town. It doesn't take a song like "Totally Carpool" to recognize this album's ideal context: From Dayton to Columbus, Columbus to Cleveland, here to there, A to B. Connections. And that’s the gasoline. (The beer and whiskey are implied.

-Elizabeth Murphy

CONNECTIONS / LISTEN

Brian M. Clark - Songs From The Empty Places Where People Killed Themselves 12” EP (Discriminate Audio)

This is an exercise in program music – four instrumental songs crafted to impart thematic intent upon the listener. I don’t know how they did this back in the golden days of orchestra, in the pit/pre-pit, but the exposition found on this EP leaves little room for error. The track list on Songs contains even more explicit subtext. For example, “Suburban Bedroom (A Pretty Young Girl Swallows A Bottle Of Pills For Reasons That Would Have Seemed Stupid In Retrospect, Had She Lived)”. I want to frame the declamatory nature of this with “Death of the Author” and the assertive naiveté of abstract painting, but again, the margins here are narrow, even for my esoteric criticism (itty-bitty). Moreover, considering the source, this record is more genuine, more direct, than a didactic monolith for darkness’s sake. Suicide is a rote walk in contention park next to Brian M. Clark’s oeuvre of overtly deviant-themed artwork, anti-books, and nihilistic sucker punches.

He is Boyd Rice’s biographer, a Modern Drunkard and, as evident in the smack he laid down on Henry Rollins in the Denver Syntax, and his skepticism at large, possibly the closest thing to the counter-alternative that Peter Schjeldahl promised us in 1978. Maybe it is just the lighting (or, the critical thinking I pine for) but it renders this EP an anachronistic head-scratcher nonetheless. I cannot conjure vignettes of disparaging fools while listening to this album, even with the complimentary lines of mind fluffer. If anything, it’s Heck Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls,” minus the machinations of vertigo, until the “cafeteria” portion of “High School Library, Gymnasium and Cafeteria (A Fat Nerd Finally Brings His Guns To School),” and it becomes more like “why was he fucking around on a church organ this whole time when he can play guitar like that?” Clearly, the concept does not cater to how an immersive listener typically experiences music. But in this culturally bankrupt landscape in which we find ourselves, consumers are the most broke of all. Interpretation? They accept donations. It all checks out. And here I thought the record was gonna wavy-bowl itself! (Like, put itself in the oven… give us the ol’ bell jar…SYLVIA PLATH KILLED HERSELF.)
-Elizabeth Murphy

-from Still Single, Dusted Magazine

Yek Koo - Love Song for the Dead C LP (Emerald Cocoon)

Burgeoning through a capricious gaze in the late ‘80s, the Dead C.’s tempered rise to legacy is currently testing the glass ceiling of the underground. If you, as I, were also born with the moon in post-punk, early Dead C. records were beyond the pale by the time you came of age. However, recent years have offered respite in reissue format, with the exception of Operation of the Sonne, a title which I happen to covet. In the spirit of the popular opinion garnering interest, whittled on down to cliche, if I had a penny for every time the Dead C. was referenced, the price of this original pressing would increase in tandem and still no transaction would transpire. Good thing I thought that one through first. Guess who didn’t?

How do I explain Yek Koo? You know how people like to say, “Blondie is a band”? Well, Yek Koo is a suck.

This is an exceptional example of the inevitable meretricious collateral seen in the long program of new waves and their wakes. At best, this album was a prepaid party favor at a particular online fundraiser’s end game – the mixed-message installation art show, “Touching Them Touching Me – A Love Song for the Dead C.,” by artist Helga Fassonaki, who performs as Yek Koo. In addition to funding the album, contributions went to a hyperreal reconstruction of Empire Tavern, a bar in New Zealand in which the Dead C. played early shows, and a ping-pong table – not sure. The closing was a separate event; three nights of bands billed as a “three day performance series,” with a subtitle I will drop as gently as possible, “Trapdoor Fucking Exit.” Three enviable nights regardless, as the Charalambides and notable kiwi émigrés Brian and Maryrose Crook of the Renderers played. I could have grabbed a smoke during the “drunkenly stumbling,” lackadaisical, free-form guitar with occasional percussive gestures and bathtub chanting that is the basis of the recording I am supposed to focus on here, as previously captured with a Dictaphone to vinyl.

As tributes go, Love Song for the Dead C fails diametrically. If meant to honor the band in form, it does so by picking up tenets at the surface: improvisation, a guitar, not using a recording studio, applying them with the cadence of a narcoleptic doing homework. Surely uncomplimentary to a band that finds even Yo La Tengo’s cover of “Bad Politics,” the Dead C.’s most accessible song, subpar. If we view Fassonaki’s work, the album and installation in total, with the pretense of the Dead C.’s philosophies at hand, refractions of mimicry and idolatry overwhelm, which couldn’t be farther from their ultimate endorsement of a new musical language. The only thing that keeps Love Song for the Dead C from a complete wash is its bookends, two versions of a traditional Persian love song, first in Farsi, then in English, and we have to agree that they are love songs because they are love songs. But it’s a cheap device, and ultimately an undermining one, because it provides the final nail in the radical contingency of naming coffin. The identity of the work is in the identification. Trapdoor Fucking Exit… a tautological misstep.

In a statement of the artist’s intent, Fassonaki is compared to the role of a hagiographer, that she is depicting the lives of saints, here with the Dead C., in part one of a consecrated (God forbid) series. For good measure, it is also offered that she is commenting on delusions implicit in fandom. This choose-your-own-adventure style thesis is as damning to the popular opinion of contemporary artists as her album is to a working understanding of the subculture it aims to endorse, or critique, or worship, or emulate, or whatever. Yet we find the sublimated motive to forge a link between herself and the band tenuously achieved. Installation photographs depict Fassonaki with a seat at the bar she commissioned, the exacerbated double of the Empire Tavern. Although the program text available online fails to mention this, it is where the Dead C. recorded the closing side to Operation of the Sonne. I hope it is not too self-serving to suggest that there may have been more effective means to an end here.

-Elizabeth Murphy

-from Still Single, Dusted Magazine

Robert Pollard - Jack Sells the Cow LP (GBV Inc.)

This is a Robert Pollard solo album—12 songs, 32 minutes—hovering around the 80th percentile on a sliding scale of his own design, methinks. With this number, I aim to fold the extent of my critique, as it is all I see fit to impart on a Robert Pollard solo album in 2012, the fourth record he has been a part of this year and the googleth of his career. His net has been cast, with a fanbase like a block of granite and a persistence equally resolute. If ceaselessness panders to futility, here it is the writer’s burden to bear. The same agent that puts a damper on criticism’s utility is an accelerant to the torch of a relic. 


The XX - Coexist LP (Young Turks)

The Antithesis of M. Night Shymalan-A-Ding-Dong 

I was really rooting for this, until I realized the album title alluded to, not post-disclosure human/alien love, but yucky, mopey, regular old hetero-loss of love. Ho Hum. 

The boy/girl vocals on Coexist take turns airing disengaged musings in real time. They never hear each other, which is a shame because they often say the same things. So much in fact, the occasional sentiment occurs in unison and we find their timbres match. This is by chance, an inadvertent by-product of having once been close, like ordering the same toppings on a pizza. Now besides the point, it becomes a futile agreement. Patterns of speech line up and everything is colloquial—from the language and brand of insight to their intonation, scantly more melodic than talking. This is all a modest allegory for the lyrical content: the mutual, yet distinct, grievance of the dissolution of a once sacred pact and the tragic irony in wanting and needing and saying something so parallel that acquiescence is impossible.

Some recent reviews I did for Still Single...

Is it still hatorade if the substance actually has a bitter taste to it? If not, what bev-y is that? Unequivocally-bad-artorade? Cause I be drinkin’ that.

Debatorade.

Dan Deacon - America LP (Domino)

At any point prior to America, mentioning Dan Deacon to this reviewer could evoke the following associations: 

1.) The guy that brought a loaf of homemade bread backstage for Bradford when my band played with Deerhunter in 2008.
2.) This:    

                                Q. "Can It Get Eddie Veddar?"         
                                A. "You bet your Dan Deacon it can!"

3.) That brassy ring-leader of the opposition in dogs vs. cats.
4.) "Who's chair is that? Not my chair. Not my chair, not my problem that's what I say..."

How is it that the public can be both paranoid and complacent about the apocalypse? Perhaps because, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek says, it is easier for people to imagine the world ending than what it would take to stop it. Although it is nothing if not narcissistic to suppose the rapture will happen in our lifetime, this possibility, with its various seductive entry points, flickers across the minds of the best of us. As a hypothetical, it is the great perspective-inducer, socioeconomic leveler and priority adjustment bureau, becoming ever more mercurial as it slouches toward reality. In such a case, sheer terror would eclipse any sense of beauty.

But the theoretical apocalypse?

Bailterspace - Strobosphere LP (Fire)

Strobosphere, Bailterspace’s first studio album since 1999, wastes no time in assuring us of its formidability. Whipfast, the first breach from silence to song in “Things That We Found” is merciless in its arrest. It is primarily the guitar melody that baits, hooks, and demands a replay, a replay that is permitted by the song’s fadeout, and with which the vocals, low and along for the ride, aren’t at odds. All of this has been standard critical issue for Bailterspace in the past, but here it’s on its head, servicing the song impressively.

Charlie Megira & The Modern Dance Club - Love Police

Confounding! Guitar virtuoso Charlie Megira’s identity is couched in ‘50s greaser/surf nostalgia, rounded out with an Elvis fixation. Half of the material on the double album Love Police is in debt to this, while the other half is a near-comprehensive skirting of the rock genres that have followed: ‘60s garage, ‘70s punk, tongue-in-cheek nods to No Wave, ‘60s heavy/hard rock, ‘80s and ‘90s re-interpretations of the same. It is all done with unnerving verisimilitude. Megira’s ability to deftly transition between styles, in form and historical scope, self-aggrandizes above all else. It creates a kiss-off element, and with “No Wave Exercise” and “Another No Wave Exercise,” he makes sure we know he knows (we know). They are what they claim, yet the album contains at least seven other tracks, without smart-aleck signifiers, that also tread my-kid-could-do-that waters via backwards tracking, radio roulette and some goddamn convincing hazardous Dead C.-esque guitar noise. Love Policebegs to be compartmentalized, and aims to be all inclusive with one-offs like “Existence” (hard rock), “Here Comes Your Mama” (country, swing), “Je Ne Parle Pas Francais” (new wave), and even “Dead Girl Blues” tacked onto the end, although the plug is pulled after 48 seconds (dude, we know you are not serious).

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012

If you will be in New York this weekend, you would be wise to stop by Spectacle Theatre in Williamsburg, where for $5 you can see the films of Liliane Lijn - as curated by my girl Kellie Morgan at STRAIGHT TO VIDEO. She let me write the bio, below:

Liliane Lijn: Collected Film and Video Works 1970-2012 Spectacle Theatre
124 S. 3rd Brooklyn, New York

Liliane Lijn is widely known for her Poem Machines (invented in 1962 alongside William Burrough’s and Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine) through which she stirred conversation more relevant now than ever: the relationship between language and time, text and movement. Lijn’s application of text onto rotating cone-shaped “koans” stripped language of its meaning as it dematerialized the volume of the cone, inducing a hypnotic state not unlike the nullifying effect the increased rate of information has today. The Poem Machines were on view in MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabet exhibition this past spring.

But Lijn's video What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1971–1973, documented the sculptures in a montage that is perhaps the ideal way to experience the breadth of their impact.

Always one to stay current, Lijn has used the evolutions of science, industry, and technology as fertile hunting grounds for unearthing the archetypal resonance within. This query begins with vignettes of industry in Factory Snaps, a series of production close-ups captured in Super 8 film using factories that aided Lijn in her work throughout the late ’60s in London. She trades the autobiographical jumping off point for one rooted in mythology in Fire Water and Caution Matter, initially a video installation, but shown in this program as vignettes. Fire Water further crops industry to specifics, while expanding its key to the logical mythographic end, which is to say the beginning, as Lijn documents two factories found along The Sacred Way – the connecting road from Athens to Eleusis. A “reconnection” of art and science is the central thread of Inner Space Outer Space, a series of interviews with scientists from when Lijn was a resident at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley interspersed with moving images of her life’s work. But it is the timeless absurdity of Power Game that has provided the most coherent touchstone in Lijn’s career. The stipulations for this send-up of power, which uses the ambiguity of language as currency in which complicit “players” hedge their bets, was first staged by Lijn in 1974. This video enfolds layers of the original game with its subsequent re-stagings up to 2010. These films, along with a batch of autobiographical works that enlighten Lijn’s familial ties and early awareness of the body as matter, will be shown August 5th and August 19th at Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. Films in which art critic Frank Popper has heralded as instrumental in “the passage from the mechanical to the electronic in art” are not to be missed as we find ourselves approaching even more guarded passageways in art, technology, science and industry.

 Sunday, August 19th $5 Program 1: 7:30 Program 2: 10:00 Program 1: Practice/Process +Factory Snaps, 1970 +Fire Water, 2007-8 +Caution Matter, 2011 +What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping, 1971-1973 +Power Game, 1974 +Power Game The Arches, Glasgow, 2011 Program 2: Life/ Context/ Construction of Identity +Inner Space Outer Space, 2010 +It Never Happened Before, 2008 +Look a Doll! My Mother’s Story, 1998-2000 —Early Events— +Seagate: the Sea in my Elbow +Great Neck: Shouldering the Burden of Childhood +Lavender Queen +Paradise Lost About Spectacle: Spectacle Theater is a nonprofit cinema space located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Our programming features rare films, lost oddities, missing classics, and special events. All screenings are $5 unless otherwise noted.

Lorelei - Enterprising Sidewalks LP (Slumberland)

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since distortion, feedback and volume joined to form an unremitting flesh. It jostled the  pedantry of post-punk and offered a backbone to sentimental pop across the Atlantic. At once a warm blanket and fierce intimidator, shoegaze liberated the twee literati. At the helm was Washington DC’s Slumberland Records, an imprint that established lines for these transatlantic sentiments and then some. As important as it was to introduce Stereolab to America, it was the nurture and support to bands like The Lilys, The Swirlies and Lorelei that cultivated the American underground pop aesthetic as we know it. 

Samothrace - Reverence to Stone

At first, it was just an island. Later, in pre-Hellenic Greece, it was a place where you could sacrifice pig’s blood to chthonic deities and join a mystery cult. And in 1884, when an acephalous female in white marble appeared frozen atop a staircase at the Louvre to a stunned crowd, she presented her placard with a set of wings and no arms: The Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Magnet Magazine Guest Editor

My week as Guest Editor at Magnet Magazine has wrapped.
In case you missed anything, here are the highlights:

The New Face of Spokescreatures has  No Face, No Voice and No Identity

TV Yellow

Gran Torino

The Ungoogleable & The Unutterable: Two Trends in Naming

Dominoes Pizza Tries Harder: Self-Deprecation in Advertising

Something Funny This Way Comes

Aztec Camera's "Jump" (Loaded Version)

True Weird America

No Tops Without Bottoms, No Bottoms Without Tops: Being Defined By What You Are Not

Something Guided By Voices Related

The Rhyming Scheme is A-Z

A Titanic Misrecognition 

Hyper-Nostalgia

The Hot Dogs - Say What You Mean

Purity Ring - Shrines

An electric guitar riff, middle C, reverb—no genre holds propriety on these building blocks of sound. But as radio-friendly R&B becomes increasingly minimal and weird and art students are encouraged to experiment with hip-hop beats, there is a swath of music being produced today that hovers in a nondescript void. The artist’s voice, and its carotid attachment to biography, becomes the ultimate decider insofar as how a particular work is compartmentalized. Prior to the vocal track, such gonadal pop sounds could birth either R&B or indie-bound electro-pop. The splintering of genres, a homogenized generational sound, the democracy of production—are these good problems? Probably too soon to tell, but Purity Ring’s Shrines is a timely case-study.

Baroness - Yellow & Green LP (relapse)

Yellow & Green has taken the form of a coming-out party for the band’s departure from “heavy,” and is sure to become part of a larger conversation regarding how American metal bands are evolving. The motives for such evolution are admirable: everyone in the old guard wants to save rock from obscurity as well as sustain metal’s legacy of consistent evolution. More and more cues have been taken from previously isolated metal landscapes, as evident by the recent sundering of Black Metal (Liturgy, etc). In the other direction, where we find Baroness, bands like Mastodon, Kylesa and Torche are spiraling out from the confines of any sub-genre to produce simply good guitar-based music.

Look ma! I'm Still Single!

Doug Mosurak decided to let me write for the unflinching Still Single. What follows is my first batch, and be sure to follow the link at the bottom to read reviews by my synonym finder (Andrew Earles) including Dichroics, Infinity People In Love With the Light, False Tropics Sample Based Beats, Criminal Code, Knock Knock We Will Raise Your Child and Looks Like Miaou.

Jennifer Castle – Castlemusic LP (Flemish Eye)

Although the first in her oeuvre to be released under her real name, Jennifer Castle’s Castlemusic is even more fractured and detached from self than what brought criticism to her previous albums. But the decision to nominally shift, while carrying the previous moniker of Castlemusic along for the ride as the album title, is one Castle admitted to not giving much forethought.

Nothing wrong with working on intuition. This album seems to be the result of disparate impulses to pick up instruments honed to craft, and indulge in a kind of anti-autobiographical therapy like some find in running or knitting. Imprinted here is a survey of Castle’s technical abilities, available tones, vocal range and evocations of style; a pretty impressive resume pitting Joni Mitchell against Mazzy Star in an atmospheric mystical Mad-Lib that’s got “the blues,” Canada-style.

It’s not that there isn’t something that can move here. “Neverride” employs a note-change that can bank on it as Castle ushers in some of the album’s most concrete lyrics, but the paper-thin falsetto confuses the sentiment. Something definitely stirs once the dandy, ready-made elfin morning of “Remembering” turns a dark corner. The mic’d ether is compromised in “The Friend,” a realistic representation of Fahey if it weren’t for the faint sound of a cell phone vibrating in the room. “Poor As Him” could be an uncompromising country punch if the guitar weren’t completely drowning in someone’s new tremelo toy. This album has resounding potential energy, effectively so in the first pass; a half hour spent in traction, bracing for the emotionally slaying knockout that never happens.

But why do people listen to music? Surely not always to be slayed, especially if you are from Canada. By the way, I am aware of Castle’s contributions to Fucked Up albums and that Fucked Up is also from Canada and that they happen to slay. Considering this, Castlemusic is a suitable soundtrack (funded by the country itself) to match any residual melancholy and hold it at bay. From American soil, all that technical talent seems distilled, like the bottle of whiskey I want to give Castle in hopes of dislodging something raw, devoid of cosmic wheelies.
(http://www.flemisheye.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Catatonic Youth – “PISS SCENE” 7” EP (Perennial)

RECOMMENDED

How aggravating is it when you send someone a very comprehensive text message and their response is, “what?” JUST READ IT AGAIN. Wait, do I have to send it again? Compelled to re-send the original message is how Diltz Barrett of Catatonic Youth must feel, because I will be goddammed if the two A-siders found here, “I’ve Had It” and “Out of Control”, aren’t the same … a man, a bedroom, a drum machine … songs on the FUCK JAZZ CD-R (ltd. ed. 30) from 2007. Save an additional song on the B-side (culled from The World’s Lousy With Ideas Vol. 5 comp –Ed.), it is the exact same 7” the condiment-barons at Hozac got their grubby hands on in 2008, which remains the mustard (mmmmm) of the label’s catalog. And that’s it: four years, four songs. I’d like to liken the re-re-release of these songs to the senior thesis of a sneaky Situationist art school devil behind the curtains, because when the affliction of a particular low-income refurb cottage industry is that it all sounds the same, and you are the proprietor of two consummate examples working within the limits of the genre, how hilarious is it to RE-RELEASE THE SAME TWO SONGS OVER AND OVER? Call it over-thinking-man’s lo-fi, but seriously … Catatonic Youth? The devil drawing on the cover and label? “PISS SCENE”? Which is actually printed on the cover in quotes, acknowledging the incredulity of its own existence. Here we are, four years later and “PISS SCENE” remains the shit-shine specimen of what one man with a four-track mind and a bladder full of piss and vinegar can do. That is legitimate urgency you’re hearing folks! How did he do it? Locked in his bedroom, he literally had to take a piss. (http://www.perennialdeath.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

The Croissants – s/t 7” EP (Sacramento)

This punk rock band should be called The Scones because this feels like a chore and they aren’t even French. Someone should tell them they don’t have to do this. Here is my review:

“This is some bratty pop punk. Short songs, quick execution and minimal lyrics. Four songs straight out of the RAMONES play book. All that is missing is the 1-2-3-4 count before each song.”  -Maximum Rock N Roll

“Trashy pop punk of the highest order is what you get from this Sacramento three-piece. Lo-fi and DIY, these Croissants are filled with distorted guitars and snotty, sneering vocals. These numbers are also incredibly peppy and catchy, with lots of “Oh Yeah” choruses. Reatards and/or Nobunny fans will rejoice with this little gem of a record”  -Razorcake Magazine

(http://www.sacramaniacs.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Final Club – Blank Entertainment LP (Adagio830)

RECOMMENDED

“Everything has been done” has been done. The hard kernel at the center of punk ideology has been mimicked ad infinitum itself, but it is easy to discern those using it as affectation, and those really feeling its effect. Above any redundancy of love, mimeographed joy or remembrance at odds with the day it is this – the nihilistic constraints that exist when you are just four guys toting guitar, drums, bass and vox – that Final Club are waxing passionate about. Like molasses, writhing tunefulness folds over this record’s austere packaging and signifiers, encasing a quality that sneaks in with a grade A “banger” or whatever in “Tragic World”. But more than this song running laps around your average flappy garage disavowal is that it’s a gatekeeper, ushering in the masses with an innocuous party invite. Are you listening? This is meant only for you. “Buy Into It” pulls in lyrically before turning its lilting nostalgia into a portable welt distributor that services the rest of the album; making turns and drawing corners at odd, exciting moments. Alternate universes are revealed in slight, then SIKE! A tangible chorus. Hair-raising, but tangible. Bite-size psychedelic asides begot catchy pop, and vice-versa. The methods all seem so coherent but they swell; see “Wizard Wells”, the return to zero song – the song that makes you want to listen to the whole album again at once. And a note on the guitar: Holy shit. Diverse and demanding of your attention: think Polvo. Also demanding are the lyrics. They poke out with bleak awareness, yet this all ends without infecting emptiness. For the dose was a placebo, all you felt was real; this is no empty gesture. Now we all know one can be too smart for their own good. Intelligence can compromise integrity, especially as one gets older and it becomes laced with anxiety. If this record has propriety on any finitude, it’s in its specificity. Captured on Blank Entertainment is the result of precise amounts of self-awareness, musical ability and youthful energy; all operating on the exact frequencies needed for it to happen.
(http://www.adagio830.de)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

Mattress – Eldorado 12” EP (Malt Duck)

Bedroom rockabilly, or what a sober Jim Morrison would be doing if he had continued to partake full-steam ahead until around Y2K. Eldorado is classic DDIY (literally – this is a vinyl reissue of his first CD-R, dating back to 2006), effects keyboard-reliant song type things with vocals that seem to be making fun of Danzig and Alan Vega, or touched people. It’s the local art guy that incidentally chose music as his medium. His thesis is to incessantly create and his inspiration is the perpetual lack of any coherent fan base. There is at least one in every town, with their yearly message board diatribes bent on uncloaking the secret society of those in town that can “get shows.” Stillborn zinger factories and purveyors of inoperable puns (underground rappers do this too), they implement phrasememes and malapropisms in vain, as they operate on only one level.

Hey, not all dorks are smart, some are just dorks. But it is all about context. Hypothetically, if I was on a grueling, ill-attended month-long US tour with my, say, mid-to-low level indie rock band and Mattress were opening for us in Eureka, California, it is a safe bet that there would be some R. Stevie Moore inspired rhetoric surrounding his performance in a very drunk van on the way to the hotel. And with that said, what really makes this much different than a John Maus, other than Mattress not understanding the value in lo-fi swashbuckling? Maybe it is who you know. But don’t worry Mattress, you will get yours. I would be ahead of my time to give Eldorado an unabashedly glowing review in the present. This is not the music people like in real time, but rather the music people will be digging up in 30 years, vying for the rights to reissue it.
(http://www.maltduckrecords.com)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

William Cody Watson – Bill Murray LP (Bathetic)

Looped incidental music; the kind played to induce calm when you get a colonic or bikini wax. Your kooky buddy has a Buddha Box that he named Bill Murray (doesn’t make sense! So funny!). This record includes an insert that simply states, “They Will Never Believe You”, which is (allegedly) what Bill Murray said to some guy after temporarily blinding him before passing him on the street. It turns out Bill Murray was incorrect: Everyone believes him. The story would not be so widely disseminated otherwise, yet it is only due to Murray’s reflexive supposition that the incident is worth retelling in the first place. That is called situational irony. This record, sonically nondescript and nonrepresentational, is an underscore to an anecdote.
(http://www.batheticrecords.com/bill_murray)
(Elizabeth Murphy)

                                                                                                                                        -from Still Single

The Young - Dub Egg LP (Matador)

Youth: the period of possibility, room to grow, and spitfire resolve. The Young’s debut album, Voyager of Legend, released in 2010 on Mexican Summer, harbored all the emergent exuberance you could hope for in a first record. It was a combination of spritely hooks and a kind of musical formidability, like, say, punkers suddenly released from their genre shackles of enforced simplicity to find a newfound freedom in developing some chops.

Kimbra - Vows LP (Warner Bros.)

Literally the interpretive dance of music, and the metaphor is implied. Which is confusing, yet a pointed confusion. Like two ships meant to pass in the night, the space that doesn't connect is exactly where sense rests, pure and perfect. Leave it alone. Don't even touch it with your mind - that would be salt to slug.

or

IT'S LIKE A METAPHOR.

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If indie labels are the new majors, one must assume major labels have now been usurped by even more almighty power structures, operating in cahoots with organizations that go as far into the Earth’s crust as you can fathom. These projectionists are so skilled at crafting reality, you might think the words you are reading are actually real and possibly that I am really fucking crazy. Still, imagine what they are manufacturing beyond a thousand Linda Perry clones on steroids: the synthetic opiate of the masses, popular music. It is for this reason that when questions of authenticity are raised by dubious journalists, albeit cast from a reactionary embrace, the answer seems obvious. Of course, they wrote this music—it is horrible. Unfortunately, with Kimbra’s Vows, released on Warner Bros, nothing is that tidy.

Royal Headache - s/t (What's Your Rupture?)

Punk broke rock. It also gave us a way to put it back together. In the aftermath, rock & roll has consisted of experiments in assemblage. We amalgamate the past with the tools and license punk rock repurposed from the poor and uncool, a.k.a. DIY.