Caroline Monroe

Ghost Town

Independent Release

originally published April 25, 2007

Ghost Town is the first release from Athens country ingenue Caroline Monroe. Monroe, formerly of departed local rock act Umpteen, works here with a choice cast of Athens-area musicians in tow, including Randall Bramblett, William Tonks and John Neff; her easygoing, accessible singing style is a sure fit for the album’s songs, many of which were penned by producer and sometimes duet partner Fester Hagood.

Though Monroe has drawn comparisons to artists like Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, her tender vocals are more reserved and less pronounced. Tracks like “She Regrets Her Tattoos,” “Brand New Chapter of Life” and “See Rock City” document both new beginnings being made and, on the flipside, other characters who wish they had the opportunity to make new beginnings. Others, such as “This Old Town” and the hungover lament “Sunday Sinner” showcase a more playful side of the young singer-songwriter.

Monroe is definitely going in the right direction to get airplay on modern country radio, for which many of Ghost Town’s songs are well suited, but her chops aren’t quite sharp enough yet. Fortunately, she doesn’t come across as another pop-hopeful diva in the making. Monroe and Hagood’s slice-of-real-life songs and her warm, worn-in approach with them do, however, make the two locals ones to keep an eye out for in the months to come.

Michael Andrews

Caroline Monroe is playing at the Melting Point on Thursday, Apr. 26.

Packway Handle Band

Extreme: Live in 2006 EP

Independent Release

originally published April 25, 2007

Local bluegrass act Packway Handle Band serves up a brief mix of traditionals and originals on the Extreme EP, a six-song slice recorded at various tour stops late last year. The quintet of banjo player-vocalist Tom Baker, guitarist-vocalist Josh Erwin, fiddler-vocalist Andrew Heaton, bassist Zach McCoy and mandolinist-vocalist Michael Paynter has gained a loyal local following and their performances here capture the group at appearances in Boulder, CO, as well as Atlanta’s Eddie’s Attic.

The Packway Handle fellas prefer their bluegrass fast and freewheeling, so the EP’s a pretty quick ride. In it, they gleefully holler through “There’s Something Going On In the Graveyard (Like You Ain’t Never Seen),” add some bluegrass thrills to the old gospel standard “You Don’t Knock” and reference the small North Georgia town of Ellijay (home of late Athens trio the Primates, as well as guitarist Erwin’s family) in “Shelva Ann,” in which the featured family’s names comprise the song’s slippery rhyming chorus.

There are no out-there covers here as there were on Packway's 2005 full-length (Sinner) You Better Get Ready, the harmonies are sometimes a bit off-kilter and the setlist could use a few more slow songs. But the band’s youthful vigor and inventiveness with the genre makes for a satisfying, if not surprisingly electric, live souvenir.

Michael Andrews

Packway Handle Band is playing at UGA's Legion Field on Thursday, Apr. 26.

Telenovela

Saffron Songs

Le Man-Ape Recordings

originally published April 25, 2007

At first, Telenovela's full-length debut Saffron Songs seems like a small album. There are lots of little sounds mixed with lots of little samples, and the vocals - declamatory if they're Zachary Smola's, smoky and murmured and sweet if they're Stephanie Clayton's - hide behind, obscured by mixing and the accumulated weight of appropriated music. There are no epics, no big rock-outs, no particular swoons or screams or even slumps. There are bossa novas and folk-rockers and sleepy ballads. The first song is called "Paint it Beige."

Listen closer, though, and you discover all that smallness is in service of a big subject: magic. Now, this sounds awfully twee (and it is a little twee), but, to be more specific, it's about the lack of actual magic in the world, and how we deal with that; how we resolve the free-floating contents of our heads with the banal realities at hand. And this is a big subject, since, as someone or other once said, art is magic. It has no discernible purpose, and yet we continue to produce and consume it, because it does have an effect on us. Why? How? Who knows? Magic? Maybe. But that book is still heavy, that show is still crowded and hot, those bills still need to be paid, and though love is nebulous and strange, it can also get your ass arrested.

In "Crazy Love," maracas shake, acoustic guitars pluck, and analog tones decay slowly, while Clayton and Smola sing, "It's a treasure that's easy to find / dust it off, it's the last of its kind / it's a dream that's impossible / magic comes, magic goes / life goes on, I suppose / Give me that crazy love…" It's that "I suppose" that really kills as an evocation of love's shared (and wonderful) psychosis, the denial of the impossible until it, maybe, becomes true. Again and again, the album describes a fantasy, then tears it down, only to grant its possible incarnation elsewhere. On the best song, "Breakfast With Birds," Clayton repeatedly attempts to enact the magical, but each time falls sick, and this rebuke of the body can only be cured, she continues to insist, by the object of affection to whom the song addresses itself ("turns out I just need you"). But even this object is unspecified and distant, a possible cure but one she would prefer to keep unrealized, so that it might persist as a potential cure-all rather than become yet another problem.Saffron Songs is a beautiful album, and, like its nearest musical antecedents (Stereolab, Stephin Merritt) it's wonderful enough in the background, but closely attended, it's illuminating and complex. On "Surrogate Magic," they sing: "Jesus God, oh can't you give / a standing for a will to live / substitute reason to rise through the day / surrogate magic tries to take you away." There's no resolution here, but in that tension, there is something indescribable, and on this album, there's something really wonderful.

Michael Barthel

Telenovela is playing at the Caledonia Lounge on Saturday, May 5.

Andy Ditzler

Songs from Yes and No

Independent Release

originally published April 25, 2007

The speak-singy collection of Buddhist-philosophy-influenced, jazzy electronic interludes of political and social commentary called Songs from Yes and No really does make much more sense when you know that they're just that… songs from a one-man theater show called Yes and No. As a whole, the album by Atlanta artist Andy Ditzler plays out with very little flow from song to song, each song a piece of Ditzler’s stream of consciousness, each bit a piece of his journey of trying to make sense of, well, everything.

Language barriers, biases, consumerism and western economics, the Buddha, publishing company mergers… you ask for it, it’s there, mixed in with horn solos, piano arrangements and techno beats and sampled sound clips. It’s an eclectic blend of topics and song formats, but Ditzler’s style of theatrical vocal parts and bright harmonies holds the album together.

For those who ponder similar, academic and social topics on a day-to-day basis, the songs will resonate and his commentary will seem sharp. In this case, the music comes along for the ride. However, for those looking for music to be primarily aesthetic instead of topical… Songs from Yes and No isn't ideal. Maybe dip your toes in the waters with the first track, and go from there. Ditzler majored in music, but he’s really a philosopher and a storyteller who happens to make interesting, quirky musical theatre.

Lia Brunelle

Andy Ditzler is playing at Little Kings on Thursday, Apr. 26.

Fact Not Fiction

Conversations With Eyes Closed

Independent Release

originally published April 25, 2007

Conversations With Eyes Closed is the first album from Fact Not Fiction; a relatively new indie-rock band from Hartwell, GA. Formed in January of 2006, Fact Not Fiction is a band whose music encompasses both actuality and invention. Most of the songs were written from true-life experiences focusing on heartache, harsh real-world realities and recollections of breezy summer days.

Recorded in a '60s-era trailer over the course of six months, the album allows its lo-fi sound to permeate all corners. The sound emitting from Conversations With Eyes Closed is completely laid-back, subtle and haunting with a few trance-like synth numbers thrown into the mix. Immediately, comparisons to Pavement and Death Cab for Cutie spring to mind. Lead singer Zeke Sayer has the ability to weave a story into a song, and not once does it come off as anything less than genuine and emotive.

One of best tracks on the album, "In My Car" builds with a slow, simmering intensity that yields to its own dissolution right before the end. Another treat is the acoustic track "Psycho," a sweet-sounding lullaby with a hidden agenda. Conversations With Eyes Closed is one of those albums that can easily play in the stereo; with 11 solid tracks of feel-good and feel-bad melodies, there's no need to fast forward.

Charley Lee

Fact Not Fiction is playing at Tasty World on Tuesday, May 1.

Grouper

Wide

Free Porcupine Society

originally published April 25, 2007

Imagine walking through a vast forest on the side of an even vaster mountain. There's a thick mist blurring everything around you as night falls. But there's the deepest peace here within such a cold and possibly menacing setting. Eventually you emerge from the trees and the mountainside to find an enormous lake covered in the mist. But the mist turns out to be ghosts, thousands of lost spirits swirling about, and each is singing, mournfully, lovingly for what once was. Now take the sound of all that has preceded this moment and filter it through tape decay, echo and reverb.

With primarily her guitar and voice, Liz Harris has done exactly this. Her debut as Grouper, Way Their Crept, was gorgeous, no matter how murky and wrapped in cotton it is. Like an earthier William Basinski, Harris crafts music that crumbles away, and in that decay lies a beauty an intact document could never hold. Wide picks up where that masterpiece left off, only this time there's a ray of sunlight or two to be had. "Giving It to You" features a piano that's almost out in the open. "Little Boat/ Bone Dance (Audrey)" sounds like a mangled Joy Division tape.

If Arvo Pärt (to whom Harris is tangentially compared) used effects pedals and worked with Liz Fraser, he might compose minimal pieces such as this. Yes, Wide is that good. There's a similar sense of loss as in Basinski's influential Disintegration Loops series, but more than ever, Grouper's songs are more actual songs than shrouds. Not quite the decomposing glory of Way Their Crept, but you will be haunted all the same. Ethereal. Essential.

Michael Wehunt

El-P

I'll Sleep When You're Dead!!!

Definitive Jux

originally published April 25, 2007

The Armageddon is hot shit right now. Loads of bands, movies and books are getting all raptured up, preaching The End via worldwide conflict or old-fashioned Gomorrah in our backyards. So, folks read newspapers - do they deserve a gold star for calling it like they see it? Certainly not. It’s not enough to conjure premonitions of WWIII anymore: you’ve gotta do it right. That’s why El-P is still the man he is, because he waxes dystopian with some swerve. Pioneering new “dirty dusty” rap music with his blink-and-it-missed-you NYC-based group Company Flow, El-P has stood as a lonely planet unto himself, creating uniformly aggressive, endlessly textured hip-hop with an arty streak that is too tough and too fun to be maligned as “nerd rap.” And while we watch the Middle East with bated breath to wait for our era’s Lusitania, why shouldn’t my editor hand me a copy of El Producto’s second full-length solo effort? And right before my trip to New York? Are you kidding me?

While El’s previous really-real solo album, 2002’s Fantastic Damage, buried its more intimate moments on the second half, the auteur on “I’ll Sleep” is open here in every way. Controlling both the microphone as well as the production, El-P gets neg here in all imaginable contexts, whether he’s discussing NY traffic, the war on terrorism, or his own personal demons. But instead of sounding paranoid, he comes off like a rugged truth-teller/ soothsayer, heralding doom like a pundit with the candor of an observational comedian. Quotable lines (conveniently located in the lyric sheet; hello iTunes Nation!) are available in surplus, and the song’s topics are pinhole-camera vivid. “Dear Sirs” is a justice-seeking diatribe with an “oh shit” punchline, and “Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)” is a Philip K. Dick romance fantasy.

All the special guests advertised? Honestly, almost impossible to detect. And that’s fine. It’s 13 tracks of one of the most talented people in hip-hop telling you how it is, a stark and noble counterpoint to the ass-dumb world of coke rap. A complaint that could be registered against I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is that it’s admittedly more of the same, with El-P’s production remaining just as minor-key dense as his previous work. But I’d speculate that our world needs as much of what El has to offer as long as we’re around. (However long that may be.)

Jeff Tobias

The Rosebuds

Night of the Furies

Merge

originally published April 25, 2007

Who would've thought Royal Trux would be so influential? In the '90s, the group made a series of albums tackling separate decades, and though the same basic Royal Trux style carried through, the structure forced variety and was incredibly productive. Belle & Sebastian seem to have found new life in this technique, going from mid-'60s folk-rock to early-'70s glam and becoming an entirely new band.

Now it's the Rosebuds' turn, and their move is maybe the best yet: having mastered power-pop on their first release and turned gentler on their second, they've moved forward in time to sound like ABBA and make a concept album about the demigoddesses of retribution. They're aided by not having a drummer, and so they bust out the drum machine and pile on synth-strings, which, when married to the instinct for hooks intrinsic in 'Buds Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, produces gorgeous electro-pop on Night of the Furiesthat, due to the band's retro grounding, ends up sounding like the legendary Icelandic pop quartet: focused pop songs with distinct parts concentrated for maximum effect.

There are still classically Rosebudian songs ("Silence by the Lakeside"), but even these take on a new life in the context of stuff like "Get Up Get Out," which is too good to be described (swooning, effusive disco?), and "I Better Run," which perfectly evokes a cracking, darkened dance floor in the provinces. It's still the Rosebuds - bittersweet, sparse, dark, pinpoint - but it's the Rosebuds transformed into something no one's been for 20 years. I can't wait to see where they go next.

Michael Barthel

The Rosebuds are playing at the EARL in Atlanta on Saturday, June 23.