Normanoak

A Double Gift of Tongues

Secretly Canadian

originally published June 6, 2007

Releasing your album only on limited-edition vinyl in the year 2007 is almost like titling it I Don’t Really Want You to Buy This Record. It’s kind of a shame that Chris Barth of the Impossible Shapes has gone that route on his second solo release under the name Normanoak, but if you dig even a little bit on the Internet, you can find digital copies to buy. Yes, it’s the kind of music that rewards sitting cross-legged a pillow, grooving to the popping sounds of the LP as it slowly rotates, perhaps with a pair of big headphones, but most of us don’t have the time for that in this day and age. Even freak-folk adherents bop around town playing Animal Collective on their iPods, and A Double Gift of Tongues might take well to shuffling, even though the songs flow one into the next.

The main area where Barth differs from his fellows in song is in the length of the tunes, most of which run only about two minutes, following a strumming guitar line and a few strange instruments (something that sounds like a musical saw, a background of wailing voices), but not exactly to a conclusion. Each song is more of a brief exploration of what one can do with those building blocks, and while some (e.g., “Mercury”) end up more like pretty, weird pop tunes, others don’t end up anywhere at all, meandering as though someone forgot the structure when putting them together.

It’s an album that requires (and possibly rewards) patience, so perhaps, if you’re lucky enough to have the leisure time, you should buy the 12-inch version after all.

Hillary Brown

Normanoak is playing at the Caledonia Lounge on Friday, June 8.

The PF Flyers

Sort Out the Mischief

Independent Release

originally published June 6, 2007

There are touches of the White Stripes, OK Go, The Unicorns and the Plain White T’s, but Mississippi's PF Flyers fail to settle well into any of these comparisons. Formed from the merging of two high-school bands in 2005, this four-piece ensemble makes being very young sound very good on its first LP Sort Out the Mischief. Songs like "Money Buys Time" and "Put Up the Flair" contrast the sounds of quick clicking drums, and cooing voices with electronica beats and beeps. However, the catchiest songs, "Open the Door" and "Stay," stick to more traditional instruments and rely heavily on guitar. Tying the album together, every track is indelibly marked with John Barrett’s brave, fresh voice, both brash and crisp at once.

The guys have released two EPs, and they’re supporting the spring release of the debut full-length with touring around the Southeast. The PF Flyers give off that intangible vibe that this could be a band that someone will introduce you to in six months or a year, and you’ll kick yourself for being a lazy bum and not checking it out earlier. These boys are young, but if this is where they’re starting, we have a lot of good music to look forward to.

Lia Brunelle

The PF Flyers are playing at Tasty World on Friday, June 8.

Pissed Jeans

Hope For Men

Sub Pop

originally published June 6, 2007

Someone at Sub Pop must have figured now was a good time to get back to the basics of releasing the dirtiest, loudest, most distorted classic rock/ punk hybrid outside of SST Records. Allentown, PA's Pissed Jeans - taking cues from '80s scum-punks like Flipper, Fang and Stickmen With Rayguns - brings feedbacked, riffing sludge-punk to its label debut Hope For Men, with plenty of weirdness intact. Guitarist Bradley Fry is adept at deviating from the riff to evoke master shredders like atonal Greg Ginn and reverb-drenched Randy Holden.

Pissed Jeans released a 7" and album on another indie before Sub Pop released the lurching "Don't Need Smoke to Make Myself Disappear" 7" last year. Now the band is even stranger. Opening track "People Person" screeches through five minutes of noise, feedback and guitar while singer Matt Korvette continually yelps that he is, in fact, not a people person. "The Jogger" might as well be a 2007 update of Black Flag's "Family Man;" "I'm Turning Now" features a blown-out surf riff that would make the Ventures spin in their not-yet-dug graves.

Before, Korvette bemoaned sexual frustration, self-loathing, more sexual frustration, and, in a fine touch of Western self-indulgence, the aggravation of running out of cell phone minutes while trying to finish making his night-time plans. Pained David Yow-esque vocals complement this neuroticism. Not much has changed lyrically, though the metaphors (ice cream, scrapbooks and leather fetishes) have grown more bizarre.

Pissed Jeans doesn't exactly provide hope for mankind, but it reflects mankind as we stand, particularly for young, single, self-centered men. Likewise, Hope For Men isn't pretty music by a pretty band. Then again, it's not a pretty world.

Scott Reid

All Smiles

Ten Readings of a Warning

Dangerbird

originally published June 6, 2007

The most notable aspect of Ten Readings of a Warning is its context: All Smiles is the solo project of former Grandaddy guitarist Jim Fairchild, and the album is the first release by a member of that venerable indie act since its dissolution in 2005. While these 10 songs never stray too far from that Grandaddy sound, Fairchild emphasizes simple arrangements, sunny, strummy pop melodies, earthy acoustics, and breezy hooks over apocalyptic imagery and fuzzy guitar riffs.

His less-is-more musical approach often makes these songs sound like demos - loose and rangy, not quite fully developed or complete. Admittedly, there's a certain charm in this aesthetic, especially on the upbeat "Sprinting Hyphens" and "I Know It's Wrong." Fairchild gathers a small but impressive roster of backing musicians - including revolving drummers from Great Northern, Menomena and Sleater-Kinney - all of whom contribute to the album's casual vibe. As a result, Ten Readings is best when it sounds fullest. Instead of sagging, the album peaks in the middle, with the burbling keyboards of "The Velvetest Balloon" and the tectonic piano chords and guitar static of "Moth in a Cloud of Smoke."

However, for all its modest qualities, All Smiles lacks the weirdness that distinguished Grandaddy from so many indie guitar bands of the past decade. Fairchild's guitar-work transformed frontman Jason Lytle's technofantasies into catchy pop songs and gave the oddball lyrics a hefty emotional weight. By contrast, Ten Readings is simply too grounded and humorless, which makes Fairchild sound too much like just another singer-songwriter.

Stephen Deusner

Vladislav Delay

Whistleblower

Huume

originally published June 6, 2007

Word on the street has it that this record is German producer Vladislav Delay's (best known for his work as Luomo) political statement. He's certainly earned the right to make such a critique: on Luomo's recent Paper Tigers album, Delay and his collaborators explored relational power struggles with both honesty and imagination. There, and throughout his 10-year career, he's proven to be the rare electronic musician capable of diagnosing the human heart and mind.

Exactly on whom he's blowing this whistle never becomes clear, though. Thankfully, Delay doesn't splice samples of Dubya's most egregious speeches, as so many artistic plebes have done. But his post-industrial palette of reverbed synth pads, static hums and whirrs, and clattery percussion is so abstract that one struggles to interpret these sounds as signifying world issues of any kind.

Taken as pure sound, Whistleblower leaves fewer questions unanswered. One of Delay's most ambient excursions to date, this record could have served as Children of Men's soundtrack. Much of this soundscape is desolate, devoid of rhythm or melody and shrouded in spectral electronic washes. These barely-there blotches eventually cohere into more corporeal forms, with geysers of dubbed-out beats launching each song into forward motion. Delay's juxtaposition of sparse sketches and rhythmically-engaged climaxes recalls the late-night ebb and flow of The KLF's Chill Out. Few other records are at once this empty and this rich.

Phillip Buchan

Jandek

Manhattan Tuesday: Afternoon of Insensitivity

Corwood Industries

originally published June 6, 2007

Manhattan Tuesday is the first live Jandek album to embrace the muffled spaciousness of a live recording. This double-disc sounds like a bootleg, and in light of the ghostly pace of the performance, the hazy low-end feels like a deliberate, aesthetic choice. Slow-motion waves of funereal drones ebb and flow in the foggy fidelity, shrouding bursts of drum rolls and rattles under layers of echoing resonance.

The lyrical content of each song is a survey of social anxiety and existential jitters. The Representative from Corwood hovers behind a Korg synthesizer, howling away over plodding organ sounds. His voice whines and weaves a chain of dark philosophical inquiries. Song lengths range from seven to 20 minutes, and no one track is any more or less hypnotic than the others. These seven numbers, recorded at the Anthology Film Archives in September of 2005 are appendages of a larger composition titled Afternoon of Insensitivity. (Though Afternoon of Insecurity would be a more appropriate title.)

This is also the first Jandek recording where the fingerprint of another, recognizable musician - guitarist Loren Connors - affects the compositions so profoundly. Manhattan Tuesday takes shape as a collaboration that gives direction to Connors' drifting washes of sound, while bringing Jandek’s obtuse ways to a discernible point. Matt Heyner (bass) and Chris Corsano (drums) lay down a slow, rhythmic foundation, but their contributions are only the frame around the haunting merger of Connors and the Rep’s respective takes on abstract musical expressionism.

Chad Radford

Young Galaxy

Young Galaxy

Arts & Crafts

originally published June 6, 2007

At some point during the summer of 2004, I lost track of Canadian indie-rock side-projects and offshoot bands. Like Chicago's post-rock scene, the Great White North's underground is incestuous to a maddening degree. In the liner notes to the Montreal-based Young Galaxy's full-length debut, for instance, you can spot the names of folks who are associated with acts as diverse as Stars, The Dears, Besnard Lakes, and A Silver Mt. Zion. The tools who fancy themselves walking wikis of indie-rock trivia will slip discs playing six degrees of separation with this record.

Young Galaxy's effects-drenched anthem rock aims for the cheap seats, however, offering more to the average Josephines in need of a chorus to shout along with than it does to the MP3-hoarding obsessives. Co-songwriters Stephen Ramsay and Catherine McCandless belt out rallying cries that would make Bono blush; brash imperatives like "Burn my name / Move in the dark / Towards endless music / Forest and spark" are par for the course.

Equally lofty but far more palatable are the group's stargazing delayed guitars, meaty Echo & the Bunnymen bass riffs, and swelling echo chamber vocals. Think The Verve covering Yo La Tengo for the rockers and vice versa for the ballads and you'll get the picture. As winsomely epic as individual tracks are, though, they're ultimately too same-y to comprise an engrossing album. Potential abounds here, but for the time being, Young Galaxy is only a diverting footnote in its homeland's guitar rock genealogy.

Phillip Buchan

Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities

Lucas

Ghostly International

originally published June 6, 2007

If you were an electronic musician working on your new album, and friends started dropping by, and you told them to pick up whatever instrument, and friends kept coming by your place, and they wouldn't stop, really, more and more of them squeezing into your little homemade studio, and all of them started banging on things and singing and blowing into horns, and you felt things starting to slip out of control, the sound getting bigger and denser, and then some dude (the 13th buddy) walked in with the proverbial kitchen sink hanging around his neck and a couple of spoons, and you were just sitting there with your hands on all your knobs and your laptop open tweaking beats, would you scream at them all to get the hell out?

Or would you say, the more the merrier, giving them free rein to bleep and bloop and skronk away, trusting in your innate ability to compress and frame it in a way that doesn't sound like a hopeless cacophony, rather creating a tightly controlled chaos in which every note joins the fray with a purpose, in which you can overwhelm with sound in a live-band setting, titling songs things like "Fake Tits" and "The Shit From the Dogs" in order to make the laptop minions blush while appealing to the "collective" jam crowd with your "loose" feel?

Would you let your decent electro frameworks be swallowed by meandering percussion and free jazz wankery, resulting in a hit-or-miss record that's frustrating in its ample yet ultimately wasted potential?

If you're Matt Mehlan of Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities, you just did.

Michael Wehunt

Brantley De'Angelo

I Did It for Love

The Write Music

originally published June 6, 2007

Unlike the burgeoning hip-hop scene in Athens, R&B is barely a local presence here, especially as compared to Atlanta. Maybe the boys and girls with beautiful smooth voices just head down 316 to the big city as soon as they possibly can. So thank god for Brantley De'Angelo, whose debut I Did It for Love could quite easily be mistaken for a major label release. It's not dirty (he's a Jehovah's Witness), and it's not peppered with rap guest appearances, but it's not geared to kids either (unlike Chris Brown, for instance), even though De'Angelo shows his braces when he smiles in photos.

I Did It for Love also isn't obsessive about achieving a retro sound - there are plenty of R. Kelly bubbles in the mix, which is choral and buttery, nicely put together by Choir Boyz Productions (can we get these guys to work on more?). There are moments when De'Angelo's pipes fail him slightly, when it sounds as though he's reaching too hard for the top of his range, but they're quickly forgotten when the pillowy, multilayered chorus kicks in. It's also important to remember that he's not just a photogenic face and a pretty set of vocal chords, but the songwriter behind all 13 tracks.

Nitpickers could complain that the general sound is too boilerplate gentle R&B, too much "I love you, girl, but there's something coming between us, and I'm sad about it," but damn if it ain't pretty, and several tunes - "Excuse Me Miss" has a shot at being the Athens summer jam '07 - break out of the formula. It sure would be nice to keep him here for a while.

Hillary Brown