Atlas Shrugs
After a Year of Carrying the World On His Shoulders, Deerhunter's Bradford Cox Rocks On His Own Terms
originally published February 13, 2008
Bradford Cox
Few years are as good or strange to a band as 2007 was to Deerhunter. Atlanta's own indie stars began the year as a humble noise-rock band that was virtually anonymous outside Georgia and known at home mostly for being awkward and at times uncomfortably chaotic.
Enter PitchforkMedia.com, stage left.
The hugely influential website championed Deerhunter, and the world soon fell in love with Cryptograms' blend of post-punk dynamics, drone and ambient atmosphere, and most of all remarkably strong pop songs. The fact that the songwriting is so strong is something that continues to draw fans to Deerhunter even a year later, confirming that both the album and its companion EP, Fluorescent Grey, are the real thing.
So it is particularly intriguing to meet up with vocalist and principal songwriter Bradford Cox and chat about what a difference a year makes. Kicking off a massive tour in Athens, Cox is looking to give critics an entirely new reason to praise the band. Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (out on Kranky Records) is the debut full-length from Atlas Sound, and all sounds on the sprawling 14 tracks are generated by Cox. He is quick to downplay any significance to the solo turn, however - it's more Kevin Barnes than Justin Timberlake.
"I didn't intend to extricate myself from Deerhunter by going off on my own," he says. "The album just came out of a need to create. I feel like it has a lot to do with distracting myself from everyday insecurities and anxieties. I have to record, and I can't just wait for Deerhunter to get together."
The album will inevitably land under many magnifying glasses, and chances are it'll hold up as long as folks keep in mind that it's not a Deerhunter record. The album's mood is most strikingly different from Cryptograms. Full of buoyant melody and bright percussion and never staying in one place too long, the set would feel coked-up were it not for Cox's trademark melancholy nostalgia. Here the balance of manic joy and wistful sadness finds a nice balance.
For the world-conquering tour, Cox has assembled quite a who's-who list of experimental musicians as his backing band: Adam Forkner, of Yume Bitsu fame (and opening the show as White Rainbow); Honey Owens, also opening as Valet; and Brian Foote of Nudge, just to name three. All are notable representatives of the newer Kranky label sound, and it'll be interesting to hear in what directions the songs travel. "I am super-excited about everyone in this group," says Bradford. "I was lucky enough to have it just work out that way."
No one can have a year like Cox's '07 and not have a million stories and topics to discuss. But when asked about the trials, tribulations and stunning successes of the past 12 months, Cox chooses an understated approach: "Well, I would say I've learned a lot and changed a lot as a result. I realized that the only thing that matters is trying to make good songs, and not expecting anything from it. I'm very grateful for all the luck and great opportunities we have had."
It's a succinct statement from a young musician who with great frequency saw his words, lyrics and actions picked apart to the point of pointlessness. The last the greater world heard of Deerhunter, the band had gone on hiatus. Cox, however, has some great news on that front.
"Deerhunter is actually not really on hiatus anymore," he says. "We're rehearsing the songs for the next album, which we will record when I'm done with this tour."
Deerhunter's return isn't the only thing on Cox's plate. "I'm going to Morocco with Ed Droste [of Grizzly Bear] and Owen Pallett [Final Fantasy] to make a record of some sort." Oh, and that next Deerhunter album is, fingers-crossed, coming out before Halloween.
But in the meantime, there's plenty to enjoy with Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel [see review here]. There's an infectious and kaleidoscopic feel to the record, and although the effect can be disorienting at times, the bottom line is that the songs succeed because they're simply well-written. It might not take the world by storm, because by now we all expect great things to come from Cox after being inundated with thousands of thumbs-ups. It's actually easy to forget, after all that hype and conjecture, that Bradford Cox is a true talent, and there's more to come.
WHO: Atlas Sound, White Rainbow, Valet
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, February 16
HOW MUCH: $7 (21+), $9 (18+)
Let The Mind Go
Frolicking In The Bong-Hit Heaviness of Dead Meadow's Psychedelia
originally published February 13, 2008
Dead Meadow
Upon first listen, Dead Meadow comes at the listener like a slow-moving behemoth. The guitars chug along with the drums lagging just behind the beat. First impressions suggest that the long twists and turns the band makes are the product of countless hours of bong hits and jamming, but upon further listening, something else is apparent: a genuine love for the group's psychedelic forefathers.
"Why does psychedelic music kind of form feelings that others don't? The first time I heard it my mind was blown. It's not just all about the sound and the layers, there's just so much that is super inspiring," says bassist Steve Kille in a phone interview with Flagpole.
The band, hot on the heels of the release of its fifth album, Old Growth, is traveling through the hills of Los Angeles. Much like the city Dead Meadow's members call home, the band's rolling jams and lazily recited lyrics can instantly give way to something more upbeat and chaotic. But on the new album, Dead Meadow isn't just resting on psychedelic laurels, it's continuing to grow and experiment.
"You have to come up with something new and exciting for the listeners: each record you have to up the ante," says Kille. "But now I look [at our earlier albums] as chapters in the books of our lives, and now that they're done, I can look back on them fondly. If anything, this album is the next chapter of our lives."
On Old Growth, the musicians continue their assault with overdriven guitars and plodding drums, but also are bringing more of a softer side to light. The lyrics, however, are classic Dead Meadow, showing elements of fantasy writing mixed with a tinge of J.R.R. Tolkien and some H.P. Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. But that doesn't mean that the band's lengthy jams are sprinkled with mentions of Cthulhu and hobbits.
"People say that there's references to Tolkien, but I don't think that we're like Zeppelin and talking about Mordor," says guitarist-vocalist Jason Simon, "but I think that there is a vibe and something that takes you there. With our lyrics, they're never far-out fantasy stories; they're more narratives with fantasy images."
All the harkening back to beloved authors and classic bands is a dangerous road for any band to take: with one wrong turn any band can turn into an intentionally derivative parody. But Dead Meadow somehow walks the tightrope between having a familiar sound without being derivative of bands that have come before.
"You've got to make your own spin on it," says Kille. "I think that a bunch of the boundaries with psychedelic music has already been pushed with instrumentation and in the studio, so [we] chose to go the other way and do it with limited instrumentation. When you're limited by what you can do, the challenge is to make a great record that's still new-sounding."
Dead Meadow has done just that on the new release. The three-piece band (rounded out by drummer Stephen McCarty) plods and pounds its way through a fierce set of songs that are something more than background music; they are an experience. It's bong-water-thick rock and roll that never manages to sound dated. It even at times references the punk rock the band grew up listening to without giving into that genre's rebellion-by-the-numbers aesthetic.
"When we started the band, when we started we wanted to get away from punk rock and that uptight aggression, we wanted something that was laid-back," says Simon.
"Laid-back" is possibly the understatement of the year. Dead Meadow's songs are in no hurry to unfold. This is music that gives itself enough air to breathe, and the simplest groove turns into something completely different over the course of a song. Though the members of Dead Meadow reside in Los Angeles, the land of hustle and bustle, the group's sound is anything but hurried. "What we play is far-out music that is good for letting your mind wander," says Simon.
WHO: Dead Meadow, All the Saints, The Dumps
WHERE: Tasty World
WHEN: Tuesday, February 19
HOW MUCH: $5
Resurrecting The Ghost
Local Label Ghostmeat Relaunches With Albums From Lona, William Tonks And Founder Russ Hallauer
originally published February 13, 2008
Russ Hallauer
For the past several years, Ghostmeat Records has been known mainly for being the organizing and manufacturing arm behind the annual AthFest compilations, but the formerly semi-dormant label is getting a shot of new life, thanks to the efforts of founder Russ Hallauer. Even so, Hallauer doesn’t call it a comeback.
“It’s funny for me to think of it as a new phase... Ghostmeat has always existed as something that could ebb and flow according to other things that were happening around me,” he says. “[The label] turns 14 in March. In my view, Ghostmeat has never stopped, but when you average one or two releases per year for awhile and then announce that you have eight coming out in 2008, I guess it’s fair to call it a new phase.”
Formed in 1994 as a vehicle to release records by Hallauer’s own band Sunbrain, Ghostmeat unexpectedly wound up releasing recordings by a few artists who would have a solid impact on the shape of new music in the new century, including some of the earliest recordings by a teen-aged Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) and Andy LeMaster (Now It’s Overhead).
Lona
As a functioning independent label, Ghostmeat was one of the first in Athens (and beyond) to issue co-op compilations whereby all the bands split the manufacturing costs and each received a share of the pressing. It might seem quaint now, but in the mid-1990s, CD manufacturing cost a good deal more than it does now, not to mention that Internet access was expensive, and this method proved to be effective in helping bands get heard.
“I stole the idea from Rob Keller,” says Hallauer, “who used to run Spinning Mule Records in Clemson. My first experience with a co-op compilation was my band, The Love Psychos - wow, did I really name a band that? - being one of the bands on a Spinning Mule CD called Deep South. This would have been circa 1992 or so. There are no plans right now, but we have been kicking the idea around again.
”Over the years, the annual AthFest CD took the place of the Ghostmeat compilations. But the AthFest CD is for Athens bands only. With all of the things Ghostmeat has brewing these days, there might be a reason for a compilation that is open to Athens and non-Athens bands alike.“
William Tonks
Ghostmeat is currently gearing up to celebrate the debut solo release, titled Catch, of long-time local player William Tonks (Hot Burritos, Barbara Cue, Workhorses Of The Entertainment/Recreational Industry) and a re-release of the 2001 album To The Nth by local band Lona. In pure Ghostmeat style, both these releases were born out of Hallauer’s personal friendship with the artists.
”I’ve been a William Tonks fan for years, ever since I saw the Hot Burritos play The Band’s ’It Makes No Difference’ at the High Hat in ’95 or so,“ says Hallauer. ”When I learned about William’s plans for the solo album, we met a couple times and decided that the album being part of the Ghostmeat family was something that just naturally made sense.“
In the case of Lona, the relationship goes a little deeper. ”Clay Leverett and I go way, way back,“ Hallauer says, ”When I met him I think he was 14. [Leverett’s band] The Remedy traded a few shows with Sunbrain in the early ’90s. [Leverett and LeMaster’s band] Drip’s debut was the first full-length on Ghostmeat. We were in The Lures together for years.“
Hallauer says producing Lona just came naturally: ”The idea to reissue To The Nth came from discussions Clay and I had last fall before he left to tour with Bright Eyes. With Clay’s commitments to Bright Eyes, Now It’s Overhead and The Chasers, Lona has been on and off the radar a number of times over the past few years. With plans to record a new Lona album this year, Clay wanted to have the old material available again to build momentum," says Hallauer. "I talked him in to including a couple bonus tracks that were not on the original release.“
You might call it business among friends. ”Everything Ghostmeat has ever done is the result of the artists and myself working together in a cooperative manner," Hallauer says. "There are no contracts or recording advances. In that sense, it’s debatable if the phrase ’record label,’ in the traditional sense, is even the correct term to use for Ghostmeat.“
With a back catalog teetering near 50 releases, and a good amount of those out of print, Hallauer has been steadily releasing albums from the Ghostmeat family to the digital realm and making them available via iTunes. Hallauer also has a solo CD of his own that he’s releasing; all three albums were officially issued on Tuesday, Feb. 12. To commemorate the event, Hallauer & Co. are putting together a Ghostmeat show at Kingpins on Sunday, Feb. 17; Lona also plays at the Caledonia on Saturday, Feb. 16.
WHO: Lona, Jackpot City, The Michael Guthrie Band
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Saturday, February 16
HOW MUCH: $6 (21+), $7 (18+)
WHO: Lona, William Tonks, Russ Hallauer
WHERE: Kingpins Bowl’n’Brew
WHEN: Sunday, February 17
HOW MUCH: Call
Scavenger's Garden
Former Fugazi Bassist Joe Lally Has Been Mapping His Own Territory, Expanding The Boundaries Of What Was Into What Could Be
originally published February 13, 2008
A few years ago, it seemed that independent music took a long, hard look at itself, and then somehow froze while gazing at its own reflection. With the reemergence of navelgazing as the underground pastime of choice, our attention has turned inward via catharsis or introspection. Be it the uncomfortable truths of Xiu Xiu or the brotherly reassurance of Panda Bear, indie-rock has by and large become a parlor for the personal, an endless examination of psyche and self. It feels like the world outside of ourselves has been forgotten.
So if that's the case, where does Fugazi fit into the world we've built for ourselves in 2008? As popular recorded music continues on its cycle of self-cannibalization, Fugazi's grave has remained relatively untouched. After bowing out with the truly graceful The Argument in 2001, all has been pretty quiet on the Fugazi front. No blog-blessed dilettantes are pillaging the group's sound; there has been no reunion at Coachella. Do young music listeners know what Fugazi was, what sort of weight that band carried?
Maybe, maybe not. It's possible that some memories have survived stronger than others, the surface concepts held intact but the substance therein somewhat diluted. Something about $5 shows? Well, Fugazi was a rock band from Washington, DC. The ensemble's guitar players were named Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto. The drummer was named Brendan Canty, and the bass player's name was Joe Lally. In 1987, Fugazi (quasi-sort-of) formed out of the ashes of pioneering hardcore band Minor Threat, a band of teens whose reverse-rebellion of clean living inadvertently spawned an honest-to-god youth moment; it's called straight edge. At the outset, Fugazi abandoned hardcore and "straight edge" (at least in their most dogmatic forms), but the band retained a very important aspect of both: a pure, unilateral mode of outrage.
Political activist Angela Davis once said, "'Radical' simply means 'grasping things at the root.'" Fugazi's rejection of age-restricted shows, random violence and unchecked consumerism was, on the surface, a first-offensive attack. But the songs were really just insistent battles in support of what the bandmembers cared about and what they believed in. The battles were natural to them; it was a pursuit in which they felt the need to subsume themselves. These guys saw seemingly worldly, even ephemeral political issues as being symptomatic of greater, more innate problems with our own internal systems, and they attacked them viciously.
Fugazi, upon examination of its 15-year, seven-album creative arc, approached revolution backwards: first and foremost, the band's members became more well-known for demanding answers for crimes of unabated capitalism than for the music itself. Indeed, although their music was a lithe, rhythmically lean take on punk rock - what later became, y'know, indie-rock, post-punk, emo, etc. - that stood solidly on its own, the members of Fugazi became a symbol of ethical stoicism.
But by the time they reached their endpoint, a hiatus begun in 2002, their lyrical focus turned somewhat towards their own "epic problems," their own personal revolutions. And their music had evolved to a dubby, studio-as-instrument, tension-boiled style spiked with sporatic anthemics that was practically a genre unto itself. They were in their late thirties. Fugazi has scattered into different corners of the globe, and its members have taken up new projects and pursuits. But natural battles are not something that end easily.
Antonia Tricarico
Joe Lally
"There were basslines... lyrics, melodies, words... all these things, I guess they just... kept coming," muses Joe Lally from his home in Rome, Italy. "Knowing that I couldn't work with [Fugazi], and the difficulty of having gotten used to working and writing songs with the same three people for so long… it was just very hard." Lally moved around America, settling briefly in Los Angeles (a mistake, he says - not his decision to live there, but the city itself) and struggled to determine what to do with a brain that was still creating content but had no apparent vehicle for output.
"I spent most of that time with the beginning of my first record in my head - most of it, the bulk of it - but not understanding how to get it out," he says, "and I really didn't understand how to get it out until I was making my second record."
There is Here certainly bears that mark, the strange counterbalance between the veteran musician and a man perhaps somewhat shell-shocked by his newfound freedom from editors or collaborators. Lally's knack for eerie calm is documented sparsely over the course of the latter Fugazi albums, but stands out among the more forceful vocals of MacKaye and Picciotto. On 1995's Red Medicine, Lally sang lead on the smoldering slow-burner "By You," and he provided a vivid horror story of modern indoctrination on The Argument's "The Kill." The songs on There is Here are very much in the same vein, but maintain an even more reserved mode. Several songs are a bass guitar, a vocal, and some spare rhythmic elements. That's it.
"It just began without me, in a way," Lally claims of his creative process. "It just kind of started and I had to follow it. [In the studio,] we realized that some of the quieter things would make more sense just to play with a percussionist playing light drumming, which after the initial recording, I started doing live."
The years of writing, recording and - some would say most significantly - touring Lally had experienced were to continue, this time naturally. Joe Lally began touring with friends, adopting them as his back-up groups, sometimes only the drummers. Audiences were treated to renditions of Lally's minimalist rock via groups as varied as Philly spazz jazz act Capillary Action and the double-drum corps of the modern-day Melvins.
"[Melvins members Dale Crover and Coady Willis] were behind a city of percussion," Lally laughs. "I'd look behind me, making this sort of personal, quiet music, but I couldn't even find them behind the drums."
Members of Capillary Action (along with former members of Fugazi, as well as John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) have gone on to accompany Lally on the aforementioned second album Nothing is Underrated.
The music that Joe Lally traffics in could possibly be in the same pool of sound as similarly low-key, sparse bands like Morphine and The For Carnation. But this is barely cosmetic: the sinister twilight mood these bands evoke is really just a vehicle for the personalities producing it, and so here instead of Mark Sandman's wry smooth talker or Brian MacMahan's deadpan dread, we have Joe Lally's plainspoken doomsayer. Over a bed of drum-tight, dry-as-dust rhythm-and-bass, Lally presents himself as the lyrical calm in the storm of rapidly dissipating culture and rampant amnesiac politics. With a decidedly global attitude, Lally examines our ideas and our forgetfulness, and isn't judgmental but is keenly fair. The attention-span gap and the white noise of modern living are appraised, even in the album title. Explaining Nothing is Underrated, Lally pauses and says, "Literally, doing nothing is underrated. You always have to be doing something, producing something… your mind has to be chattering away to feel like there's some sort of accomplishment." It wouldn't be a stretch to call his two albums collections of protest music.
"If I'm going to express myself about something that I feel strongly about, it just happens that I feel strongly about… well, I guess there's a lot of things I feel strongly about," Lally says. "But my feeling about society is that things are essentially wrong with the way things seem to be set up. I don't know what kind of life we are really - people who live on the planet Earth, because I don't think it really matters where we are - I'm not sure what we've designed for ourselves in modern civilization."
Despite his assertions to the contrary, it might be telling that the sole genre chosen for Joe Lally's MySpace page is "Folk." Documenting worldviews, the building block for basic pop-music songwriting, derives from folk music. Folk music derives from journalism: a first-person account of someone's life and times, their grievances; culture examined and historically preserved according to someone with a modest sort of firmness in tone.
"Pieces of string fall from fingers of authority," Lally sings, and with almost two decades of post-Cold War repositioning of allies and puppet states, he's not kidding: look where forgetfulness has gotten us. The folk artist will continue to be someone who believes in the important of remembrance.
WHO: Joe Lally, Edie Sedgwick, Martyr & Pistol
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Tuesday, February 19
HOW MUCH: $6 (21+), $7 (18+)
Not Quite Southern Rock(ish)
As A Solo Percussionist, Tatsuya Nakatani Explores The Fringes Of Improvisation
originally published February 13, 2008
Tatsuya Nakatani
It's almost comical to read an email from percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani in which he explains that his work with the decidedly Southern improv/experimental music ensemble Zepubicle has more of a "rock(ish)" approach than most of his solo work. Bear in mind that he's talking about a group that is the product of four minds shaped by years improvisation, defragmenting under the direction of drones and staccato noise.
Each member wields obscure or one-of-a-kind instruments with names like "Big Red," the "H'arpeggione" and that infamous thing called a Chapman stick that looks more like a weapon from "Star Trek" than a real instrument. The sounds they create bubble and percolate like bits of molten metal swirling in clusters of scattershot rhythms that hardly sound like any conventional approach to rock music.
So what does this say about the Easton, PA-based Osaka transplant, who builds percussive objects, teaches workshops on improvisation at the university level and tours the country playing with musicians whom he's never met?
At Odds With Academia
It's difficult to assign a name to what Nakatani does. During performances, everything from singing bowls to a traditional drum kit are bowed, scraped with jagged pieces of metal and otherwise manhandled to create a jumble of textures and caterwauling acoustic feedback. Nakatani defers to the clinical distinction of "contemporary solo percussion" when addressing his music. As stiff as that sounds, he thrives well outside the boundaries of academia; and he seems to suppress signs of irritation brought upon by the very words "academic music."
Still, the description is apt when considering the fact that he is coming to Athens to teach a workshop on improvisational music at UGA's Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Nakatani will also perform a solo set, as well as play with Zepubicle cohort Killick (the Athens musician formerly known as Erik Hinds) at Flicker. This trek to Athens is part of a 60-stop tour that carries Nakatani across the country for several one-off performances with other musicians, in venues ranging from The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to local coffee shops. Following his performance at Flicker in Athens, he will head to Atlanta to perform with Zepubicle, Col. Bruce Hampton and Dennis Palmer of the Shaking Ray Levis at The Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery.
Killick
Playing in these varied configurations is key to progressing through new material in this line of musical performance. "I am a percussionist who is touring as a soloist," Nakatani explains. "Improvised music makes this possible for me to explore and collaborate with musicians when I work out of town, such as with Killick. As I have experienced, [playing with] the same members in different combinations makes totally different chemicals happen."
Chemical Bond
Killick and Nakatani perform regularly together in Zepubicle; this week's show at Flicker is the first time they've paired down to a duo. In the group context, there are various avenues of escapes. If ideas fall flat, it's not difficult to move on to something else when there are other elements at work.
Killick explains that a duo is the closest thing to facilitating a speaking conversation in improv. "Tatsuya and I both do the solo thing, so it's a matter of opening up a bit more, listening, responding, ignoring, working together, working against and all with a sense of discovery and creating something greater than the whole," Killick says. "I clear my mind, and do whatever the music demands."
And with such an advanced level of chemistry being exchanged, the music will demand an awful lot. But for anyone adventurous enough to embrace such far-out fringes of "rock-ish" music, the pairing will yield some great rewards.
WHO: Tatsuya Nakatani & Killick
WHERE: Flicker Theatre & Bar
WHEN: Monday, February 18; 8:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $6
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