Currently Listening: Isosceles Mountain

ISO MTN

Local post-rock trio dabbles in dissonance and wrings out their tones in such a manner that flirts with a hazy/heady psychedelic scorch, but they mostly keep things down to a steadily shunted stomp on their recent EP. It's a bulky, bristling sound, it's shoulders seemed up and at the ready and it might be carrying a blunt tree trunk whittled into a club, or it might be some spectacularly imposing, angular space ship steadily rocketing forth and causing an eclipse... A steady roar, burning, bending and looming forth... But it's not as brooding as your usual "experimental-rock" outfits. Instead, it's undeniably radiating with a bit more warmth, aided by the reverb-soaked guitars and occasional surging/shimmying rhythms... and they're never confrontationally acerbic here (even if the spaced-out closing jam can start lulling one's into some lava-lamp-friendly undulation).

Their 2010 EP came out recently and you can get it for free -here. ...Then you can see them live - (info below)

Crossed Wires

Superchunk, I'll tell you briefly, are putting out a split 7" of Misfits covers with Colliseum, along with a remastered/reissued (color-)-vinyl (and CD) version of Here's Where the Strings Come In - more info ............And here's a felicitous, feline-tinged video:

Record Store Day

Take a peek at a new documentary by filmmaker Jeanie Finlay - portraying "the last surviving vinyl record store in NE England..."

TRAILER: SOUND IT OUT - A documentary by Jeanie Finlay from Jeanie Finlay on Vimeo.

Read (and watch) more about it, here Get out and go shopping... Get some wax. Find a store.

Chapter Two: Without us, Song is nothing

~ "I'd like to see it explode into a million radiant hues/ to supernova this moment into a new civilization..." (Richard Wolhfiel, The City is Vast)

~~~

I want to find more... hear more... meet more...

There will be more...that's just it.

I woke up this morning, though, feeling disturbingly inspired to start this article out with the hyperbolic, and achingly pulp crime novel tinged hook of:

I must kill Jeff Milo.

....and then, the ensuing narrative would detail my sinister and exacting plot to starkly diminish the ardent glow that all of you wonderful, creative souls cast upon me. That said... if I haven't told you already, thank you. Seriously... I had no idea. If I haven't met you - I will soon. I wanna hear what you have to say, and to sing...

So, please, dear reader, revel with me at the farcical facade of the journalist's inclination for huffing hyperbole with those opening leads, hooking you with such melodrama. Of course, it's not Jeff Milo I need to kill. That was merely my knee jerk reaction (and halfway sensible, considering I was probably half-alseep and all the worst ideas come to me, honestly, when I'm just waking up...).

With all of your own personal flashlights flickering back upon me, from last night, it was like the spotlight on the spotlighter. I couldn't believe the electricity in the room and the sentiments pouring forth... such a light, shined back upon me... I felt I might disintegrate, having not been used to such attention. And maybe I should disintegrate...

Like, reinvent? Or something? Transmogrify my identity... Then I just started getting unreasonable...as often happens pre-coffee... And I got all burn-the-crops-and-salt-the-land on myself.

And I almost considered scrambling for some ill-advised reinvetion... and then, come back as something else...? Or merely reform my essence as a...what? Documentarian? Or just as the fly on the wall, or merely the regular at the stage's-edge? Maybe I just need a clean shirt?

Or a new pair of headphones... all the better to hear you with...

But I never had to kill Jeff Milo, (...I apologize for all the morbid metaphors-- after all, 27 is an ominous age, as any one who recalls Cobain, Morrison, Joplin or Bryan Jones will acknowledge)...

No...in some weird way, I had to help kill music journalism. Any knee-jerk panic that last night represented some sort of coming-up-for-air and realizing just how far I'd waded into the deep end of the musician's pool...

'Oh, no, this just isn't right... I need to be out, in the life guard's role...blowing a whistle of judgment and throwing scrutinizing inflated-rings upon their heads to make them all to self-conscious that they're swimming too deep themselves, or that they should be ashamed of rough-housing, splashing or canon-balls...'

That old sense of just sitting down with the band and tracking their meandering words only to snip out the interesting if sometimes mis-representational quips later on... That whole perfunctory press thing of putting out the blurby piece on the buzz band. I wanted to obliterate that approach...

But last night... it became clear that, every so often, I'm calling back "Polo" to some other band's shouted: "Marco!"

But it's too invigorating to resist.

The delusion I'll allow myself: I'm embedded.

Enough about me...

While you're here - check out the krautrock conjuring, headswimming fuzz and dreamy-(nightmarish) drones of Mother Whale; the shambolic charm and disarming soulfulness of illymack; the rousing rock from the igniting Macrame Tiger ensemble; the reggae-spliced, funk-flared dance rock of Electric Fire Babies; the beautiful, shuffling folk musings of Golden; the mellifluous earthy drifts of Legendary Creatures...

And the words of Mr. Richard Wolhfiel...drummer, writer, poet, historian... potential renaissance man:

"I believe we are well into the next stage..." he wrote--and spoke last night--concerning the city as a steadily birthed and booming galaxy, with precious potential, exploding along the stages of a Star.

"...the next stage where we are causing a series of nuclear reactions, forming different elements in shells around the core. The shells and elements being the various scenes that have cropped up and have rooted themselves over the past decades..."

"If this is true, then I cannot wait for the core to collapse."

"You make the change in the face of this failing system. Wake up and breathe your breath into the lungs of tomorrow."

Richard Wolfhiel (The City is Vast, 4/13/11)

~ Bonnie "Prince" Billy - exerts from "The Sounds are Always Begging"

"...to be heard, and had...and carried on... / without us, song is nothing"

"...always choose the noise of music / always end the day in singing"

Chapter One: Sing Your Thoughts

The whole point of it is, the music is bigger than you. It’s almost elemental in the coy and quixotic way, like Spring fever…but it’s also almost fanatical…or merely impulsive…or as serious as insanity. It’s influence is alive in these performer's eyes, whether their gazing out from the stage or whether their veiled by drawn eyelids; it's influence is given air and radiated through their belted voices and it's given force by the blistered fingers and stick snapping grip of the snare slamming wrist flick…

The whole point of it is, I don’t understand, really, what music does to you…or to me…but more particularly to you, because, unlike me, I’m guessing you actually write it, play it, read it, record it…make it.

The point of it continues to be that I was, am and will continue to be…affected (afflicted? infatuated? fascinated?) with finding out, in what nuanced ways, music molds you…alters you…helps you…

If I could bundle everything I’ve done in the last five years…every word written, every late night interview, every streetlamp-less dark back alley driven down to reach the next dusty flat with my ever-willing/battery-sapping recorder; every ruminating interview tended to with my weary, blue, darting eyes and crackling inquisitions, if I could bundle all the clips, all the copy, the blurbs, the blog posts…

...and heave it forth off from some monstrous dump truck’s roaring hydraulic bed…as some kind of further fertilizer? Or to surge it forth like liquid nutrient from a freshly cracked well’s wall to water the strange cement suffocated creative soils of this town?

I’d do it…

I’d feel it only necessary…fitting…the only way to match what happened last night. And I mean that…the maddening part of trying to describe this is that all the various creative types in this town with their uniquely erupting hearts (through sound) and delicately (and distinctively) assembled auditory chronicles already “meant the world to me,” so to speak… so to just say that the sweeping gesture of last night “meant the world…” blah blah blah…to me…would pale in what I would actually want to say.

And I never really had anything to say… until someone else sang something… and that …set me off!

So you… either you’re like me and you’re just genuinely turned on, or, ‘set off’ by what is, invariably “going on” …around here, thus you feel drawn to these shows. Or you’re a musician and you are a part of it on a deeper level, like a sparked synapse traveling across the veins (stages) of our scene’s body… either way, take heart!

Take heart. Because the cynics will always shoot down (or discount) “scenes,” belittling-and-whittling it down to “people just wanting to feel like they’re a part of something”

What they’d be grossly overlooking, criminally neglecting, blindly skirting, is that… with “what’s going on” around here, now… with us, is that, yes, we’re a part of something.”

The point of it is, to find out what that something is, and what it’s universal impact could be…

Take heart. Because we might not change the world. But someone went home from last night and wrote a song… Someone woke up with a hangover, and, even when they got themselves stone-cold sober by mid-afternoon today, torched back into normalcy by black coffee, they still remembered one, two, or five moments from last night and grinned with the glee of some kind of high.

An insanity. An elemental sort of thing—spring fever!

Beachwood Sparks – “Sing Your Thoughts” exerts

“I wish thoughts would come in music / Words I have…have failed me so far…”

“’What did I hear?’” / It only took listening to listen / Words interfere and cause confusion, frustration / But don’t cry / It’s too loud”

“Sing your thoughts…in music.”

Thanks

thanks....

...if it's 8pm or still the 13th, I'm at the Loving Touch... ...if it's 9am or going into the 14th...then I'm collecting my thoughts and writing what I can only assume will be a dissertation from a dazzled soul, fried brain, and weary body...infused with coffee... summing up the week and weeks to come...

~

Music.

~

Thanks for reading.

Heart-heartbeat Beats...gets beaten...then aches...

Having a wee bit of a revelation with the tunes on this tape...

There's something to be said for the invigorating bluster and blown-out fuzz firing from any band's live performance - particularly that of Detroit trio Deadbeat Beat...with their jangled and jittered, billowed-and-wavy pop's distinctive punch and reverb-crinkled riffs...

That's all well and wonderous in it's own foot-stomping, head-bobbing, ear-shearing way...

But in another way... through other means, one can settle it down, put some headphones on, and delve into the subtler nuances of the songs: particularly their honed harmonies and the intertwining guitars. The core of their sound might have felt something close to that shimmering, easy-going road-trip surf pop worn so well and so notably by acts like Best Coast (a band they opened for on their inaugeral show, one-full-year-ago)...but it's gestated into something much more substantial, if just dashed with deeper contemplations and a bit more of a darker edge. Altogether it's a reflection upon the ever maturing songwriting sensibilities of perennial-collaborators Alex Glendening and Maria Nuccilli (whom you'll remember their pre-20's up-and-at-em/shambolic-sunshine songs played in The Decks...), but also it displays Outrageous Cherry's audio guru Matt Smith's keen sense for layering a lush, jangly bubble-gum smacked-psyche-dashed pop song. Oh the dazzling and darkly-fuzzed guitar cascade and rushing percussive tumble of "No God..." Eesh.

It's a subtle, yet sparkling montage of Beach Boys meets Beat Happening...made all the more substantive by hearing the crisper delivery of their charmingly sardonic lyrics...introspective at times, albeit also breezy and biting. "and if I never try to destroy myself / then I'll never become anyone else..."

Yes, there's elements of surf...and pop.....I just wish all surf-pop would aim to be this distinctive... like a pop song about a garbage incinerator...or why not throw a Wire cover in, too?

More info from Gold Tapes

Bathgate - Salt Year - 4/21 Blind Pig

Quite Scientific

~

~W. Somerset Maugham once wrote that newspaper writing, particularly writing reviews of other works, will kill the writer’s soul, cut off his sense for feeling…

Bugger off Maugham; even for this lost soul, Bathgate percolates goosebumps, sets the tiniest glisten of moisture at the tear-ducts, yet somehow still starts a fire whilst enveloped in the chilliest of settings and semblance…with just his music and his voice.

One of Ann Arbor’s favorite songsmith sons, Bathgate deftly renders pure catharsis… making the over romanticized primal “catharsis” of the bang-your-head methodologists from punk rock or the lachrymose falsetto “catharsis” that Starbucks tried to package you with Death Cabs or Dashboards…feel cheap and hollow.

Bathgate’s a writer at heart, a true poet; achieving “folk” ballads that feel so emotional without being contrived, mopey or eye-rollingly maudlin; indeed, heretofore, his music has been flanked with adjectives more attuned to warning signs: bleak, brooding, melancholy, gloom, etcetera-et-sad-cetera.

Those are scary words – but what a writer finds so scary about Bathgate is his realness. Songs on his 2^nd full-length Salt Year are ringed and resonating with discrete droning tones from brass, steel-pedal or moaning guitars, evoking the same here-and-now gravitas of a displaced private space where a loved one starts choking up those first few bold words for what will, you preternaturally intuit, be a heavy, dragin-out talk.

Chris Bathgate: "Poor Eliza"

That, or the solemn slalom of certain chosen sonic elements, be they a haunting whap of a trumpet like a tinny interruptive growl under -shimmering yet-still-stark guitar’s amble on “Everything,” or the weird metallic sprinklings over a fuzzy looped guitar of “Borders” invoke the same subtle devastations wrought out and around all too ponderous minds in the quieter corners of the day, be it morning frost, or the divvyed afternoon dust or getting “all static and quivering with the shades all drawn…”

Bathgate lays it down with such calmness and with such intricate, piercing poetic phrases, in his Midwest-tinged baritone syrupy at some points, pained and raspy at others, through tracks like “Borders,” that it’s clear to writers who grab ominous adjectives just like they’d grab pillows or blankets, that Bathgate, with his brand of gothic Americana, epitomizes “evening fear coming on…” –tangible, but you don’t know why, like you’ve been on his wounded stages somewhere before, in memories so blocked out they feel like dreams.

Chris Bathgate: "No Silver"

Where other folk balladeers sound too much like radio reachers, Bathgate is closer to the quavered voice that punctures hearts with a telephone receiver’s fuzz, late at night. The pedal-steel’s warble at “Salt Year’s” opening elucidates the head-swimming lull one feels after either: a.) screaming their guts out, b.) remembering last kisses, or c.) getting punched in the temple.

I don’t get by on a happy tune / and I don’t get sung in the afternoon… / and when that evening fear is just coming on / I’m all static and quiverin with the shades all drawn

Here, Bathgate is unpacking the haunting surrealism felt when one rears away from the weird complacency set on by long relationships and tries to chart the why’s and where’s of how you, how we, how they, got to here, or got to there. But more so, it’s the measurement of not one, but almost three, hard-fought years of Bathgate’s steady steer to maintain his course cross the musical seas, in the face of other obligations, be they noble or perfunctory – giving it that much more passion to exude.

“Time” is a radiant, twanged out country blues tune, “Own Design” is a steely, stomp-and-pull-back rock pirouette, with dazzling guitars, while “Poor Eliza” gently sways and poignantly jerks you with effervescent acoustic guitar plods over low roaring upright bass saws. It’s redemption is the warmth of its swelling crescendos and sauntering bass, like fresh sun dried linens wafted down upon a weary body for much needed (if disregarded) rest, a dream-scattered nap at dawn, after a full night’s of writing and recording.

Info

Salt Year Release Shows:

4/21 @ Blind Pig - Ann Arbor;

4/22 @ The Strutt -Kalamazoo;

4/23 @ Founders Brewery - Grand Rapids

4/28 @ MAC's - Lansing

Keweenawesomefest

Bless Mostly Midwest... diligent, dedicated, informative...and, last weekend, more mobile than this blog...

Mobile enough to provide coverage for this year's Keweenawesomefest ~ which, sadly, this year, I essentially slept on... Mostly Midwest also provided a link to WMTU 91.9 FM's Keweenawesomefest Mixtape, featuring 14 of the slated performers.

And there's photo highlights here.

Peruse the site a bit while you're over there...taken in some Matt Jones via the Bridgehouse Sessions (#11).

Stay tuned for more highlights...

BENNYfit: Ben Borowiak

The mad scientist helming Spitting Nickels' characteristic "Hammond B-3 sonic wave" has been taken from us, tragically early, shockingly sudden...and still yet inexplicably. Ben Borowiak, passionate performer and all-around music enthusiast, dear husband and dear friend, will be missed and DC sends out its deepest condolences to his family ...and his "musical brothers" in Spitting Nickels. His friends and family turn these dark days into light by hosting a benefit, in Ben's name, to raise funds for a forthcoming scholarship in the music department at De La Salle High School. 8pm - first Saturday of May - 5/7 - at the New Dodge in Hamtramck. Brobots headline as BENbots with Spitting Nickels Karenin's Smile Given Six Irreverent Smile The Press Club and an open mic / jam session to follow... RIP Ben ~

Happy Holidays (Record Store Day)

Reocrd Store Day is April 16th...

...and apparently, our new governor recently declared it a state holiday... a more cute rather than cheap ploy at pleasing us in the bloc of broke liberal vintage vaunting voter bloc...

The Record Store Day web site can help you find splendid and diligent outlets for you to visit on this day

... like Dearborn's Stormy Records. -

Or you can click ahead find out what's going on at Dearborn Music.

What does Street Corner Music have in store?

And then there's UHF, one of the newest stores around, which is planning a bevy of in-store live performances, including sets from legendary Motown/funk guitarist (Mr. Cloud Nine himself) Dennis Coffey, along with The Octopus and Ryan Allen...

Also, a set from Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr (...can we call them indie darlings yet? or is it distasteful to remark upon all the blog buzz bubbling 'round them?) In any case they have a new album coming out later on this Spring...

Here they are live, on KEXP...

~

Meanwhile... in Ferndale, just a stone's throw from the Loving Touch, is the spirited collective behind records/vintage shop Hybrid Moments are hosting a full line up of in-store performances, with Jaws that Bite / Matthew Boynton / I.l.l.So.Naj. / K@DOG / and DJ AJ - things get started around 4pm...

...and some of these performers above will continue celebrating Record Store Day - down at the Mars Bar in Hamtramck...a benefit for the Greening of Detroit...and that gets started around 8pm.

More info