Lorraine Ellison: Deserving more light

With a nodding acquaintance at best with mainstream-ish music and a low tolerance for presenters’ forced banter, I don’t have much use for the Grammy Awards these days. I checked in for no more than 15 minutes total on Sunday night, mostly to see how the locals were making out. (Not well, turns out.) One of two performances that I saw was Mary J. Blige’s “Be Without You,” a turn that I’d describe as ornate but uninvolving—at least, that is, until its final minute. That’s when my 15 minutes of viewing was rewarded and anyone both attentive and curious got a history lesson: Blige segued into “Stay with Me” and brought her time in the spotlight to a dramatic, high-emotion close.

I’d wager that most of the people who recognized Blige’s “Stay with me, baaaay-beeee!” ending know the song from the Bette Midler movie The Rose and/or that film’s soundtrack recording. However, “Stay With Me” actually dates back to the mid 1960s, to the days—for better or worse—when divas didn’t have tattooed biceps. The song was co-written by the prolific Jerry Ragovoy, and it was originally recorded in 1966 by the under-appreciated and rather under-recorded vocalist Lorraine Ellison, who died young of cancer in 1983. Let loose to display the full range and power of her voice, Ellison made “Stay With Me” one of soul music’s greatest high-drama pieces. She seemed to be prying the words from the most anguish-ridden corner of her soul, suggesting nothing less than dead-of-the-night desperation.

Here’s the payoff: In two weeks, a three-disc Ellison set titled Sister Love: The Warner Bros. Recordings will be released. (The collection originally came out on Rhino Handmade, from whom I bought it, late last year. WEA has apparently picked it up now that Rhino’s limited-run release has run its course.) Its centerpiece is, of course, “Stay With Me,” and there are a couple other cuts in that same smolder-to-full-burn vein. But the set also makes clear that Ellison was far from a one-style performer, as she moves from standards such as “Heart and Soul” and “Cry Me a River”—which boast sophisticated arrangements and adventurous vocal flights that have more in common with jazz and big band than with soul—to gorgeous covers of “Caravan,” “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (both recorded in Muscle Shoals), and “Many Rivers to Cross.” The package paints Lorraine Ellison as a gifted and, more notably, inventive soul singer who’s ripe for (re-)discovery almost 25 years after her passing. Maybe Blige’s tip of the hat to Ellison (whose spirit I hope she had in mind during that finale) will be the spark.

It’s too easy to hate hardcore in 2007.

The genre is synonymous with either fake suburban gangbangers sporting brass knuckles and camo shorts or mascara-clad faux metalheads with jeans that look like body paint. Group A wears jock mentality with XXL jerseys and dog piles. Group B boasts hair-metal riffs, kickboxing and pillaged underage girls. There are a few intricacies subdividing the jock stuff and the glam stuff (straight edge, veganism, Christianity, Nikes, whatever), but the embarrassing sects still make up 95 percent of current hardcore.
Raleigh’s Double Negative is not only part of that select five percent: They’re about to dominate it. Their debut LP, due out in the next few months on Richmond’s No Way Records, is a ringer. People had better go ahead and take notice. The 18-minute scorcher may be the best NCHC record since Corrosion of Conformity’s 1983 classic, Eye for an Eye, and it should be required listening for anyone that has anything to do with hardcore, especially the kids dropping big bills on Guns Up! t-shirts and bootleg Underoath wifebeaters.

This isn’t an album review. This is a heads up for anyone who cares about hardcore 21 years after its supposed death. This is a call out to the cockroaches who survived hardcore’s dark days and the newjacks who make it worse. Don’t miss this record. Sure, I want to hate hardcore in 2007.

Damn Double Negative. They won’t let me.

Ah yes, the flurry of numbers, statistics being crunched and reformed, charts giving way to realizations. No, I’m not talking about the end-of-year music polls or your blogger friend shooting flares from their cyberhole, but the basis of many in the Triangle’s livelihoods—hard academic research.

Endeavors, the magazine for Research and Creative Activity at UNC-Chapel Hill, touches on some amazing work in their student-written profiles. In the Winter 2007 issue now online, Jason Smith’s “Phonographic Effects” delves into the work of Mark Katz, assistant professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences. Katz has been exploring the invention of recorded music and its vast effects, eventually writing Capturing Sound, “a book about how and why recordings, from Schubert to Public Enemy, influence musical life, and how technology, from the phonograph to the MP3, has turned the musical world on its ear.” His work makes for great, often hilarious, reading. Check out this colorful note from the article on early record listeners, “Inventors came up with machines that, when attached to a phonograph, would rotate images in time to the music. One British listener created elaborate sets, characters, and costumes to look at while listening to his favorite operas, and he would change them all for every new scene.” That makes my old portable 78 player sound a bit mundane.

Katz is fascinated with the shellac itself, too, and its cultural aesthetics. He became obsessed with turntablism, the art of creating music from a fader and the grooves in the record and some deft hand movement, from current DJs like I.Emerge, who Katz studied, and the positively pyrotechnic A-Trak, who recently cut a white label version of our own Little Brother’s song, “Step Off,” and also visited UNC, documented by Tim Ross at his blog here. Katz is writing another book about that topic, entitled Groove Music, while teaching at UNC. Talk about deep cuts.

Wetlands Dry Up, Tries to Blend In
If you blinked recently, you may have missed that Chapel Hill music venue Wetlands Music Hall has reemerged as Blend, a combination coffee bar and music club. The change appears to be a toning down of the space to accommodate clientele other than the live music crowd. Manager Idan Eckstein says, “Wetlands was an indie rock club with loud live music. Blend is a new nightclub and lounge that offers espresso, pastries, and desserts during the day. At night, we offer those things plus dancing and DJs and a place to lounge with friends.” And the page turns again on local Triangle music spaces.
Stay tuned, and check out Social Memory Complex’s CD release party there tonight (covered here in this week’s Indy) to give those snazzy couches the once over.

Birds of Avalon’s debut, Bazaar, Bazaar, finally has a release date. The album, produced by Greg Elkins, Brian Quast and Mitch Easter, will be released May 22 on Volcom Entertainment, the California label that also calls Carolina bands A.S.G. and Valient Thorr its own. BOA plays five shows in three days at SXSW, and they’ll tour all the way to Nevada and back before heading back on the road for two weeks in late May with the Fucking Champs.
Oh, and a tracklist: 1. Bicentennial Baby 2. Horse Called Dust 3. Instant Coma 4. Set You Free 5. Wanderlust 6. Taking Trains 7. Superpower 8. Where’s My Jetpack 9. Turn Gold 10. Think 11. Lost Pages From the Robot Repair Manual

Boss Rothko gets to hang with the kids again.
When Chaz Martenstein opened Bull City Records in November 2005, his goals were simple: Sell punk records and put on punk shows. He paid the bills with Death Cab for Cutie and The Mars Volta while he kept his cred by stocking the latest Jay Reatard and Government Warning singles. Martenstein also booked scores of the best punk shows to hit NC, let alone Durham, in 2006. The 26-year-old’s first big investment was going well.

But everything changed one sweltering August evening when a particularly rough and sweat-soaked show ended a few inches lower than it had begun. Hardcore broke Chaz’s floor. Instead of whining about his loss, Martenstein started booking shows a 305 South and local Triangle houses, eagerly awaiting the day when he’d have his own space again. That day has come.

Along with a small handful of others (including members of Durham’s Midtown Dickens and The Future Kings of Nowhere), Martenstein recently exchanged his signature and good word for the keys to a space in downtown Durham: Bull City Headquarters. The 1,300-square-foot storefront located at 723 N. Mangum St. is meant to pick up where the record store left off that fateful summer night, though with a slightly wider focus: “We’re talking about hosting a bike co-op, an art space, a show space, classes and workshops,” says Martenstein. “It’s run by us for us—you know, the general ‘us.’”

When punks collide with punks, they break floors. When punks collide with hippies, they start art spaces.  BCHQ’s grand opening is scheduled for March 5 with Eberhardt, Dead Elephant Bicycle, Mandarian Dynasty and probably some more, but they’re asking for any suggestions and/or help you can offer before that. See the MySpace if you can help. Get stoked, Durhamites, Trianglers and other Carolinians: This could be awesome.

Serious historic heat.

Jason Perlmutter knows the funk. More importantly to us here in both Carolinas, he knows our funk—and soul. And he’s gotten so obsessive (or what some of his collecting peers would call completist) that he’s assembled a library of sorts, called Carolina Soul, that contains within its listings the history of North and South Carolina studios, the bands that dealt in fierce drum-breaks and bass lines and the hard-working people within them, from Taylorsville’s Harry Deal & the Galaxies’ “Fonky Fonky” and Durham’s Tri-Oak Records to Communicators & Black Experience Band’s “The Road.”

He’s been digging into this dusty realm of records for years now, since he was a DJ and station manager at WXYC. And by digging I don’t mean on E-Bay: He’s been taking weekend trips to small town locales and contacting former members of groups and asking to meet with the. He’s learned a lot about their past, hoping to shed some light on former glories worthy of more visibility. Last week, he did a “Thursday Night Feature” on XYC spotlighting some of these gems. Here’s the formidable playlist.

On Saturday, Feb. 24, he’ll be joining the Hell dance crew for a shot at making bodies move to bumping numbers that swiveled hips when they first came out as largely regional releases, many in ‘60s and ‘70s heyday of such works. Indeed, the contemporary relevance of these cuts isn’t lost on Perlmutter. Through the prism of modern hip-hop, which cherishes the best old funk and R&B breaks as its backbone, he’s also dealt in these records with DJ alchemist pioneers like DJ Shadow. In essence, Perlmutter knows how these things should be put to proper use for a dance floor. Check out some examples of his beat research on his MySpace page. He’s hoping to have some compilations of these dandies out on labels in the future. More on that to come. In the ma, saddle up for Saturday night and get ready for some historic heat.

Like this, but with more beards and references to dogs and lines.

It’d be a distortion to call it a squeal of delight, but I did make a noise of general happiness when I first read about Endless Highway: The Music of the Band. Although I remain in the minority who still enjoy tribute albums, my good mood wasn’t because of the announcement of the collection. (Endless Highway, which came out at the end of January, has turned out to be merely decent despite strong efforts from Rosanne Cash, My Morning Jacket, and a couple others. Sweet Relief, Beat the Retreat, Real, or Conmemorativo it ain’t.) Nope, it was because right there in the middle of the set was a take on “The Weight” by Lee Ann Womack, with backing vocals from Buddy and Julie Miller. Some people collect baseball cards, salt and pepper shakers or subpoenas. But I collect versions of “The Weight.”

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You’ll get to know David Karsten Daniels pretty well in the paper next week, but here’s a quick tip of the hat to his six dates with Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, just announced today. They’ll head all the way to California together in late March, following David’s several SXSW appearances. I waxed hard about the guitar solo on Arbo’s “Pale Rider Blues” for Pitchfork back in December. You can download that song here.

Ben Folds is coming back to Carolina. He plays the renovated Memorial Hall on campus on March 28 with Clem Snide’s Eef Barzelay. Folds has a new DVD out, too. And Widespread Panic returns to Walnut Creek Amphitheater (‘cos it ain’t Alltel no mo’) on April 20 & 21. Those guys and their clever, punny tour routing. In better news: This Red Collar EP is pretty good, and you don’t even have to buy dank to like it. They’ve got a release show March 2 at 305 South.

Things are upside down: The Prayers and Tears at Kings two weeks ago, when Kings were Kings (Photo: Derek Anderson)

I left the not-so-bustling city of Lynchburg, VA in 2003 with the half-hearted intention of attending and eventually graduating college. I told my parents that I really wanted to go to N.C. State. I almost believed myself.

I’m in my last semester of college now, and I couldn’t tell you half the classes I’ve taken, more than five authors I’ve read, or what in the hell one is expected to accomplish with a B.A. in Communication Media.
Fortunately, as I said, that’s not why I came here.

The first show I attended at Kings Barcade was Saturday, Aug. 23, 2003. I had been here 7 days. Valient Thorr, des_ark and The Kickass opened for Party of Helicopters, and, as disappointing as that headliner was, that night made me realize how great it would be to live in Raleigh. These three, incredibly sweaty local bands came to this smoky bar with broken arcade games and clogged toilets. They wiped their collective ass with the out-of-towners, and we loved it. It wasn’t Jerry Falwell, Liberty University and soccer moms. It was dope, guns and fucking in the street. It was my new home, and I’m not the only one with that story.

Kings Barcade has been the sole staple in my four years as an Oak City resident. Whether I was watching, playing or just drinking, it was the only steadily awesome venue in Raleigh. Its owners and workers played in killer bands and booked most of the worthwhile rock shows in town while hosting out-there events like A/V Geeks and Death Jazz that the Brewery, Lincoln or Pour House didn’t dare touch. I’ve found about as much solace in those other clubs as I did in the douche bags sitting next to me in COM 230.

Kings’ closing an abhorrent display of poor city planning by idiots with no rock ‘n’ roll ethos. Just take a guess at who they’ll get to play the convention center and its hinterlands, and you’ll know it’s true. I never thought I’d say this, but fuck The Man.

One of the best shows I’ve ever seen was at The NorVa in Norfolk, Virginia. The Flaming Lips were touring off of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and it was magic. The Lips return to The Norva on Thursday, April 19. The day before, they’ll play the Disco Rodeo in Raleigh.

...even the trees cry.

Funeral Doom is probably the genre name I’m most embarrassed to say out loud. It’s followed not-so-closely by Yé Yé. Then Ghettotech. But, I’d be lying if I didn’t say FD’s lead is pretty insurmountable. Mostly because, as a phrase normal people might use in casual conversation, it sounds A) stupid B) annoyingly and repetitively morose and C) made-up. Plus, there’s the whole pretentious-asshole aspect of even THINKING you should drop some descriptor (no matter what Wikipedia says!) with such damning A-B-C’s. For anyone who doesn’t have time to nerd their way through Google searches for “Cathedral torrent“and “Solstice metal download,” FD needs some serious explaining.

So… Funeral Doom (Don’t read this out load. I might hear you. I might hit you.) is a kind of Doom Metal. Doom Metal is the slow, heavy, dark stuff, hinted at on early Black Sabbath wax and brought into clearer focus by Saint Vitus and Candlemass in the ‘80s. It’s the roomy, riffy (pot-heady) stuff: MASSIVE, DRUM-INTENSIVE, NEGATIVE-SPACE METAL! None of the quick fingerwork, Golem-vocals and tremelo picking of black metal (which probably lands at number 8 on my won’t-say-out-loud list), none of the crazy, smokey solos, schizoid tempo-changes and prog-worship of the tech-metal set, and none of the steamroller momentum, growling vox and moving-wall-o’-chugga feel of death metal. It’s just pure thickness, slow as molasses in January and off-its-pills depressed.

What Funeral Doom does to the Doom Metal formula is step on the breaks even harder and funnel that gloomy depression through even more disaffection and ambiguously threatening atmosphere. It tends to lean more ambient, filled sometimes with pagan-loving nature sounds (think field recordings from the Devil’s Tramping Grounds in Bennett), but it’s almost always slung up by lo-rumble guitars and mega-spaced crash cymbal. Taken in bulk, it sounds like the bottom of the scariest, darkest pit you could ever imagine. Meanwhile, some FD (or, the type called “melancholic funeral doom”) is like black or death metal in slow motion: The growls are back, evil guitar melodies take the place of the smothering chug, and the aesthetic isn’t quite as static. Basically, it’s the saddest (most mournful?) music in the world—big and loud and slow and heavy, dripping with itself, covered in cried-off black eye makeup and sucking down a plume of black smoke.

This is the best of the best, just in time:

Asunder: The latest from these Oaktown d-bags is a two-track, 70-plus minute crawl through mud and murk called Works Will Come Undone. It’s basically brown-sound’d every other 06 doom record. It’s like waking up in a prehistoric tar pit. Plus, there’s fucking Gregorian chanting.

Celestial: Here’s the art doom. Field recordings of wild animals and other forest spookiness, cathedral-reverb on massive drums, and the deepest of wind-tunnel growls. Peep a bit of “Haunting Cries Beneath the Lake Where Our Queen Once Walked” off of last year’s Desolate. The title pretty much sums the sound up succinctly.

Officium Triste: Rotterdoom from Rotterdam. This is the melancholic stuff—cape-spreading synths, a march-esque barrel, occasionally clean guitars and man tears! They owe a large debt to the G-fathers of MELANCHOLIC FUNERAL DOOM (I just punched myself):

My Dying Bride: Since the early ‘90s, this Yorkshire five-piece has sunk further and further into the sog. After all, when goth calls, FDers answer. ‘92s As The Flower Withers was heavy death, a far, far cry from last year’s A Line of Deathless Kings, their gloomiest, stone-face-with-a-single-tear offering yet. They’ll always be metal’s Sisters of Mercy. But what’s so bad about that?

Do you get it?

I had more fun at Friday’s Antifolk Southeast Winter Extravaganza at Duke Coffeehouse than I’ve had at a concert in a while. Granted, it had something to do with a tough workweek followed by hanging out for a few hours with friends. But I think it had more to do with the performances, willfully imperfect appearances from bands like Charles Latham, Midtown Dickens and The Wigg Report. At one point, Dickens’ Catherine Edgerton picked the wrong banjo note and looked up stunned, ashamed for an instant. Co-Dickens Kym Register smiled from across the stage: “Yeah, I like that.” Everyone laughed. They cheered when Wigg guitarist Stephen Mullaney backed Latham on drums for the festival’s closing set, too. His tiny kit started to fall over, but he didn’t fix it or apologize: He played harder and louder and turned the microphone into a tom drum. Sometimes, the best stuff just happens of necessity.

The irony is that I’d spent my tough week writing a story about Chapel Hill’s Bu Hanan collective, a collaborative cache of five songwriters who play in each other’s bands and record each other’s records. Perry Wright of Bu Hanan’s The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers was at the antifolk festival, and he loved it (See Perry sing along to Billy Sugarfix with Bowerbirds’ Phil Moore here). But Bu Hanan doesn’t let much hang out. As the story goes, the bands in the Bu Hanan collective criticize one another in some asymptotic pursuit of perfection. When something isn’t right, they raze and reassemble. It’s a system that works, even if the participants occasionally get their feelings hurt.

But both approaches—make it, put it out there, keep going versus make it, make it better, make it better again, maybe put it out—do the same thing I look for in art, at least on an heuristic level: They challenge the artists to try something beyond the obvious, forcing the audience into not-quite-familiar territory. This is certainly more obvious with Bu Hanan. Both through meticulous songwriting and arranging (like The Prayers and Tears “Lisa” or David Karsten Daniels’ “Beast”), it’s clear that they’re reaching beyond expectations and requesting that the audience comes along for the journey. But Durham’s antifolk crew (and, luckily, they’re as tongue-in-cheek with the term antifolk as they should be) puts itself at perpetual risk simply by standing up and saying, “This is it.” Such moments will inevitably be called cute, lazy or silly. But it’s quite the opposite, and—as a reaction to a world full of pressures to grow up, get successful and make money—both Bu Hanan and Durham’s antifolk movement are an attempt to get a little autonomy back. Sometimes, it takes a stage, a crowded room and an out-of-tune guitar. Or maybe it needs a studio, a well-tuned guitar and four friends taking batting practice with your best ideas. Either way is close to perfect, and each mechanism is alive and well right here.

By the way, we’ve got mixes of music from both camps streaming over at www.indyweek.com: Hear Bu Hanan here and antifolk here. And the entire Bu Hanan collective gets on the Local 506 stage Saturday, Feb. 24 for the release of David Karsten Daniels’ Sharp Teeth.

We should all be in bed together.

“What is the saddest thing I can say
Words aren’t sad enough
Music isn’t sad enough
How could it bear to be
It doesn’t need to be
Because life is there to do it, for real.”
—BARR, Track 4 (“Complete Consumption of Us Both”), Summary

“I’m pretty sure that there is some sort of situation
Off in the distance of some sort
I’m pretty sure it’s dependent on you
And the fact that you have written in this mode for so long
Without dying or losing everything yet is even further evidence
Of the fact that the world is truly waiting for you
You have so too much to give
It’s crazy.”
—BARR, Track 5 (“Untitled”), Summary

A tall dude named Brendan Fowler lives in Los Angeles and makes records under the name BARR. They’re mostly solo excursions, his spoken-sung-rapped words laid atop looped or dubbed piano, drums, bass and (occasionally) noise. He records for 5 Rue Christine, and his second album for that label, Summary is about surviving what he calls “an Armageddon break-up” that ended a seven-year relationship. It’s harrowing and intense. It’s hopeful and existential. It’s one of my favorite records of the year. (more…)

Standing up for decibels

The dB’s Peter Holsapple was only partly joking when he quipped “Didn’t I go to high school with you all?” from the stage of Friday’s Cat’s Cradle show. From former classmates and Mitch Easter to Mac McCaughan and my uncle Donald, the audience indicated that a Carrboro dB’s show could spark more interest than your average 25-year high school reunion. And “Eye of the Tiger” wasn’t played once.

Chapel Hill’s finest Chris Stamey apprentices, The Mayflies USA, opened the evening with a more-than-ample blend of southern-fried college rock and Big Star worship, gearing up gray-hairs for the exalted kings of North Carolina power pop.

And, when the dB’s finally took the stage, the crowd was ready. Anyone looking noticed two things immediately: the addition of keyboardist Andy Burton and the awesomeness of Peter Holsapple’s mustache. Both held up well throughout the show, sweat and all. The dB’s launched into “Black and White”—the opening cut from their 1981 debut, Stands for Decibels—first. They continued to knock out hits through nearly two hours, three encores and a handful of guests.

Indeed, Holsapple and Stamey acted as pied pipers to the sold-out Cradle, luring it back to 1982 with each flick of a wrist or hint of harmony. Gene Holder’s low-rumbling bass glued the guitars to Will Rigby’s precisely disjointed Southpaw drumming, more jaw-dropping live than on record. The expectations of the band’s younger fans (and there were a few) were nailed with “Dynamite” and “Cycles per Second,” while older dB’s fans were launched into near-geriatric frenzy during “Neverland” and “Amplifier.” Out of nowhere, Bob Northcott of the pre-dB’s and pre-Sneakers band Little Diesel climbed onstage for a raucous version of the recently-reissued 1974 track, “Kissy Boys.”

With The dB’s often lauded as underappreciated, overlooked or simply forgotten, perhaps this reunion—and the album it may produce—could help them earn the attention they deserve. But just perhaps.

Remember when The Arcade Fire played The Cave? Most people don’t, as the band was then just another act from Canada in town to play for its new label, Merge Records. I’m pretty sure we wrote something about it, but the oldest thing I can dig up is Chris Parker’s one-sentence mention of the band in July 2004. Anyway, they’re arguably one of the five biggest indie rock bands in the world now, and the push behind their Neon Bible (“DUE MARCH 6TH” SCREAMS THE BLOGOSPHERE) has been laughably zealous. They’re playing in New York tonight, but there U.S. tour doesn’t start in earnest until April 26. And, as you wouldn’t have guessed, there’s no Chapel Hill date: They’ll get as close as Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, and that’s it.

Eating my feelings.

I’m stressed. And weird things happen to my listening habits when I’m stressed. At the end of my rope, it’s all about UNDEMANDING adult-rock and minimal-commitment stuff. That’s why I’m pretty fond of Augustana, Snow Patrol and the rest of the climax-weaving Grey’s Anatomy shit right now. The loud (Naglfar), strange (I less than three Ipecac), “challenging” (Musterion) music gets blacklisted when I’m sweating. So it’s bye-bye The Stars of the Lid and hello Travis. Ugh. And, when I’m feeling REALLY sapped, I retreat entirely. I close iTunes. I steer clear of the promo pile, the leaked Nine Inch Nail songs, that fantastic program Peel and the 50 blogs I set it to aggregate the other day at the office.

Because new music is hard work.

When I’m stressed, I stop wanting to unpack a fresh record, or pay attention to an (admittedly WONDERFUL) 11-minute wander courtesy of my boy Matthew Cooper, or figure out just why I still give a shit about Low. Sorry, Marnie Stern, I simply don’t have energy to invest in your guitar right now. I’m busy.

Instead, what I do is hit up You Tube, maybe the worst kept secret in the you-can-find-any-song-online world. I search for “Novocaine For The Soul” by Eels, or “Scooby Snacks” by the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, or “Sucked Out” by Superdrag (except I can’t find anything other than this crummy skate video), or “Brim Full of Asha” by Cornershop. Cause when I’m stressed, I need high school. I need the calm of my teenage bedroom, headphones on, loving every second of “Sink to the Bottom,” because, damn, nostalgia is comforting. Of course, this isn’t listening; it’s remembering, enjoying. When I’m ‘tubing, I don’t have to think/care, cause I already did that, like, 10 years ago. It’s my auto-pilot, my comfort food.

Hey, all’s I’m sayin: It’s been a long December…

You knew he’d cruise to victory, right?

It’s February, which means that the year-end list season should have officially ended. However, I’d like permission to sneak in one last top tenner, a list I’d like to, cautiously, call The Definitive Roots/Alt-Country Top Ten of 2006. It’s the “Definitive” part that I’m cautious about, so maybe “Consensus” would be better.

To compile the list, I turned to a half dozen sources of roots/alt-country music information and discussion, all of which released Tops of 2006 lists: 1) Country Standard Times’ editor/publisher Jeffrey Remz’s 2) The Yahoo music group guitartown, where discussion tends to revolve around roots music with only the occasional drift into socialist manifestos. 3) Bimonthly alt-country bible No Depression. 4) The No Depression message board, which predated the publication. 5) The monthly 3rd Coast Music newspaper, whose list reflects the likes of some 100 DJs whose roots/country shows air on noncommercial stations. 6) WNCW out of Spindale, NC—specifically, its annual year-end readers’ list.

Keeping it simple, I awarded 10 points for a No. 1, 9 for a No. 2, and so forth and did a tally across the six lists. Results after the jump.

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Oh, Stephen, you’re crazy for this one.

With all this talk of revived jangle-pop and its associations with Athens’ three-lettered masters of gothic pop, I think it’s time another another Athens treasure (who’s three release last year got slept on in a big way) gets some mention.
Chimeric band Harvey Milk existed in a ‘90s purgatory for new music from Georgia: The Athens heyday  had fizzled, and they lacked local peers in their chosen field of load-bearing metallic overdrive. Anthem, a three-and-a-half hour collection of live footage released by the Chunklet magazine label, puts those who know the band only on record back in the boots of those lucky crowd members. And it provides another chance for the discovery of a band who deserves it: Indeed, Harvey Milk’s anti-melodic noise walled them off from most of their contemporaries, but hindsight now shows they were forebears of the drone-metal school currently fetishizing monstrous  amps and trading in Sabbath extensions (Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley designed the DVD’s packaging). Harvey Milk was more diverse, though, eventually shifting to a direct hard rock sound indebted to riffs over catharsis. They’ve been enjoying a brief revival, recently returning with a new record and a reissue of the seminal Courtesy and Goodwill Toward Men on Relapse.

Anthem looks through fans’ cameras, in all their glorious shakiness. There’s the occasional chatter of tapers marveling as the band works. But it’s the visible dead-stare release on front man Creston Spiers’ face that says it all about this maverick band. His head is cocked back, his eyes closed. He drops his head and opens his throat in long growls: It’s the gravel bed over which the band’s inch-an-hour steamroller grinds. There’s no long-haired “grooving,” no goddamn hoods, no po-mo mystery. These are just riffs being arced out with the subtlety of a staple gun. Essential listening and watching.

This begins our irregular look at the best Triangle radio has to offer. Check back often to see who’s spinning what across your dial.

Mark Thomas, host of “A Broken Heart and a Glass of a Beer” on Duke University’s WXDU, is a soft-spoken, unassuming sort, but he’ll tell you what he likes: “Yeah, I like steel guitar and fiddles,” offers Thomas borderline wistfully as he talks about the music he plays on his Sunday morning show. “That kind of sliding, swooping, twangy sound.”

Thomas’ show, which gets its name from a song popularized by Hank Thompson & the Brazos Valley Boys, plays out like a heaven-sent jukebox for fans of steel and fiddles. In short, those who like to swoop and twang. In simplest terms, “A Broken Heart and a Glass of a Beer” is a showcase for vintage country music, and on the music page of his Web site, Thomas gets quite specific as far as what he means by that term. “Pre-WWII commercial country music (or any other old-time string band music); western swing; and post-War electrified honky-tonk of the west-of-the-Mississippi variety (adherents of this style came from all over, but Texas and California were fertile breeding grounds),” he writes. “Even some of the Nashville-style stuff, especially those songs with the witty lyrics (although I certainly take points away for girlie choruses or strings that are too prominent).”

Every show kicks off with the theme song, either one of several versions by Thompson that are in Thomas’ vast collection (“Live cheaply so you can buy CDs” is one of his mission statements) or a take by the song’s writer, Alan Flatt. The show then takes a chronological route, serving up a condensed history of country music, starting with old-time music and singing cowboys from the ‘20s and ‘30s. Western swing, early bluegrass and other definitive sounds of the ‘40s follow to close out the first hour, with the 9 a.m. hour featuring honky tonk from the ‘50s on into the early ‘60s.

Thomas has shared those sounds with listeners on three different radio stations, beginning with Texas A&M’s KAAM. It was a cable-only station, meaning that you had to have your cable television hooked up to an FM radio to receive the station. “It was a good place to break yourself in because no one listened to it,” is how Thomas describes that first stop. When he moved to a community station in Texas, he took “A Broken Hear and a Glass of Beer” with him, and it also followed him to North Carolina when he moved east to take a job at the Duke Library.

He’s been doing the show on WXDU for five years now, earning a devoted audience with his efforts. He enjoys remembering a phone call he received one morning from rural Alamance County. “The guy said, ‘You know, we don’t pick up your show very good in the house, so me and my uncle go out and listen to it in the truck.’ I don’t know whether they were sitting in the driveway or they were driving around,” Thomas recalls with his typically understated chuckle. “That was nice.”

Sample Set after the break… (more…)

The list of the first 700 bands officially confirmed for SXSW made the rounds this morning, and only two Triangle bands are on it: The Mountain Goats and Valient Thorr. Apparently, both of these bands are from Chapel Hill, as that’s how the roster for the mammoth music conference lists them. But we all know that’s not the case: The Mountain Goats are here in Durham, and Valient Thorr claims Venus (yes, the planet) as homebase. Other locals we know are playing SXSW: The Rosebuds, The Moaners, Birds of Avalon, Annuals, Patty Hurst Shifter, The Honored Guests and David Karsten Daniels. Schooner is in the running for a showcase spot through Reverb Nation. Go give ‘em some help.

Cloud Cult: Makes grand records, but kind of bad at cover art

Let’s talk big-sounding stuff: The Meaning of 8, the new album from Minnesota’s Cloud Cult, has kept me mesmerized for a few weeks now, and that’s saying a lot, considering that it’s way too long, too loud and too involved. Cloud Cult has been the project of Craig Minowa since 1995, but the band kicked into a different gear when Craig’s two-year-old son, Kaidan, died in 2002. Minowa has made four albums since, and they’ve all dealt with the death of Kaidan and Minowa’s subsequent separation with his wife. More sane people are going to tell you that the dude should get over it and make an album about something else (I know, because some of the same sane people have told me the same insane thing), but that’s as silly as living someone else’s life in your shoes. His son died, and, five years later, he’s still dealing with it by experiencing his catharses on the cutting-room floor. I’m not going to lament that. It’s his situation and context. I’ll just listen.

But I am only half-joking when I say The Meaning of 8 is too long, too loud and too involved. It’s 19 tracks stretched over an hour, and some of the songs are but distractions to how good the rest of them are. Part of the difficulty is Minowa’s unabashed use of least-common denominator indie rock. He puts post-rock swell next to IDM beats next to British post-punk buzzsaws while alternately sounding like the total second cousin of Wayne Coyne, Stephen Malkmus and John K. Samson. That leads to a disjointed record, but it’s also part and parcel to Minowa’s open invitation to redemption: “If you hate that song, maybe you’ll love this one. Just sing, smile and dance sometime before you die, please.” The video for “Chemicals Collide” works something like that.

If you want to find empathy for your struggles while taking heart in the fact that the person on the other end of the speaker has had a fucked-up few years that you’ll likely never match, it’s barely going to get better than The Meaning of 8 and “Take Your Medicine.” Thankfully, the new anthemic rock of this decade has been consistently personal when it’s been listenable (The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, the best parts of At War With the Mystics and Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan album). This puts that on another plane of praxis, if only for one-fourth of an exhausting album—per person—per listen.

I don’t think Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail (for 400 Electric Guitars) is going to go down like that. It’s more high-brow mathematics than LCD’s and LCM’s, but it’s also one of the most impressive, commanding records of the year. Most people will overlook it for the high-flying abstract forebear who’s responsible for it (read about Chatham here, here or here), but those same people will spend the next year riffing on Tim Hecker, Eluvium, Stars of the Lid and most of the other ambient records Temporary Residence and Kranky release. That’s not a diss of those bands or those labels: Stars of the Lid’s Tired Sounds (Kranky) is one of the better epic cimematic albums from the new school, and last year’s Temporary Residence Eluvium EP, When I Live by the Garden, is exquisite drama. But it is to say that, considered in that peer group, A Crimson Grail is the trump card and an improved lesson from an aged teacher. Not only does it sound pretty, but it also sounds overwhelming and viral, a welcome sense of unease attached to its prettiest parts. A live recording of the premiere of a piece Chatham was commissioned to do by French authorities, it’s all inebriating sound and wide-eared glory, and it’s perhaps the most conclusive statement he or Glenn Branca will ever make. Now, that’s epic.

There are at least seven ways to take this image.

We saw it coming, but a few months ago everyone and their mother finally realized that 2006 would be the first year someone (anyone) else would sweat over the intro to Pazz & Jop other than Robert Christgau, the venerable VV grandpa and long-time poll caretaker, who was (we’ll try and put this politely) “asked to leave” last summer after the paper was purchased by New Times.

So when the perennially self-impressed Gawker-funded music blog Idolator posted a purported introduction essay to this year’s MASSIVELY-ANTICIPATED poll, I bit. I bit hard. I got nothing but fork. Basically, the thing was made of vitriol and broken pencil points. It was gross, way too much, and totally removed from anything Bob would have done had he stuck around. Or what the Voice would actually do with their uber-tumultuous 06 (more on that later). Christgau always had a way of talking about the blogspot: it was there, it was important, but so was he. Soldier on. Laugh and cry. (more…)

The only thing more perplexing than Arcade Fire’s appearance on Saturday Night Live is frontman Win Butler’s smashed guitar at the end of “Intervention.” NBC has already snagged the full-length version of that track and “Keep the Car Running,” but this clip of the smashed guitar (emblazoned with a Haitian proverb) remains. Actually, Butler could have only made things more awkward by slamming U2 and Oasis. Oh yeah, he already did that.

Meanwhile, over in Chapel Hill on Saturday, David Karsten Daniels released his Sharp Teeth. The 14-piece band nailed “Scripts.” And the dude killing the tambourine on stage right two minutes in is Perry Wright, frontman of The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers. His band was one of three openers. Here they are opening their set with “Lisa.”