Elite tha Showstoppa

A Hater’s Motivation, Vol. 1

RCP Music Group

originally published June 20, 2007

The excitement and tension of expectation unfortunately sometimes fights with the confines of a genre, and there’s a minor brawl between the two on Elite Ellison’s first release, which is finally out, almost a year after his single “Liquor” and its accompanying video hit Athens, but the release is also fundamentally a mixtape.

This means it’s too long and contains too much to keep track of (18 songs; about 80 minutes) and that it’s packed with excess in the way of hype over even tracks you might know already and with skits; at least the latter are vaguely amusing and serve the concept, which boils down to “there are a lot of haters out there looking for reasons to hate, but they’re also pretty ridiculous, so you shouldn’t let them get you down.”

Everything you want to be on here is (“Juicy Juicy,” “Liquor,” “Boogie Oogie” and “Happy Go Lucky,” hyped as a “MySpace favorite” at the beginning of the track), and there’s some good new stuff too, like “The Appetizer,” the album opener, and “Small Time Rapper,” both infused with Athens love and nicely paced. But by the time you start to hit the five-minute-plus songs toward the end of the record, your patience might be wearing a little thin.

Luckily, Ellison still has that sandy growl (which he can alter depending on the amount of grit a particular song needs), a smart sense of how to pull people onto the dance floor and an attitude that’s generally amused at life. Now get cracking on the album! We know you can do better.

Hillary Brown

Art Brut

It’s a Bit Complicated

Downtown

originally published June 20, 2007

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking Art Brut just picked its name because it sounds good chanted (e.g., “Art! Brut! Top of the pops!”). Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term to describe what we tend to call outsider art in the States, wrote what could be the band's manifesto: “There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.”

Breaking boundaries doesn’t always have to be done in extreme fashion, though, and one way to do it is to put out a second album that sounds nearly exactly like your first. Who says our artists have to grow or make records that cohere? Art Brut is content to obsess about what it does extremely well: the three-minute-or-less almost-spoken pop song driven by a simple guitar riff and some silly words. It’s possible that it’s a bit complicated, but only a bit. Really, it’s very simple. Girls, guitars, drinking, music and being young and stupid and loud. These pleasures might seem too primitive, too brut, but floppy-haired frontman Eddie Argo sells them with genuine desire that’s not above simultaneously winking at itself.

Listening to It’s a Bit Complicated is much like looking at an Adolf Wölfli drawing (to pick a particularly famous and crazy artiste brut); one can’t process any of it analytically without destroying a lot of the appeal. It’s about the surface reaction, not a hidden agenda. So: did you like the first record? Then you will like this one, too.

Hillary Brown

Julie Doiron

Woke Myself Up

JagJaguwar

originally published June 20, 2007

Julie Doiron always sounds as though she’s about to fall apart, emotionally, but the difference between her vocals and those of Antony Hegarty and Jamie Stewart is that she’s able to maintain her composure better. There’s a great tension created by her not letting go, and this new album, recorded with her original band, is full of that suspense, Doiron’s voice warbling over mostly minimal instrumentation driven heavily by bass. Is this folk? Well, it has some pretty electric guitars on it, but it also feels open and isolated.

We know there are other musicians involved, but it could very well just be Doiron from the feel, a Canadian woman mulling over her screw-ups and weaknesses in the middle of a rural setting. It’s also vocally oriented in a way that most folk music is, the production bringing her whisper right up into your ears, pushing it between left and right tracks in the fashion of early Leonard Cohen. And that voice. It’s not polished so much as lightly brushed like an aluminum appliance - cool, flexible (she can put a kazillion degrees of feeling into just a few lines), not practiced so much as direct and natural, as though your mom were singing to you.

Woke Myself Up's songs vary in goodness, but the album sticks in your head in strange ways; “The Wrong Guy” isn’t exactly catchy, and it’s painful in its obsessive recounting of a mistake, but somehow you want to hear it again. Doiron’s never less than interesting, and she proves it every time she puts a record out.

Hillary Brown

Schooner

Hold on Too Tight

54º40’ or Fight!

originally published June 20, 2007

This five-piece band from Raleigh featuring siblings Reid and Kathryn Johnson on most of the vocals has been causing mild hyperventilation over the possible resurgence of the Carolina music scene, but it's safe to assume that, much like “Athens” seems to ebb and flow in terms of national popular radar, the Carolinas are always there and producing plenty of quality music. Nor does Schooner sound overwhelmingly from the area. Largely dreamy, with a lot of big-room production reminiscent of Camera Obscura’s last record (which is to say it also sounds like mid-'60s slow-dancing music) and prettily interwoven singing, the songs could just as easily have come from anywhere in the country or out of it.

“There’s Enough to Do” echoes with a less sloppy Tim-era Replacements feel. “I Would Tell You That I’m Stuck” does feel a touch like Guided by Voices or Superchunk, but even in the waves of big chords, there’s a bit of enervation. It’s a quiet album, and learning that Reid Johnson wrote a lot of the songs by himself at 4 a.m. makes a lot of sense. It’s floor-bound, stuck in one place, and the lyrics bear witness to this impression, packed with the conditional and subjunctive moods, the feeling we’re inside the head of someone picking over things that have happened or could.

Progress isn’t necessary in music, especially in lyrics, and the stillness doesn’t come off as catatonia, but merely as thought-gathering. We all need a little meditation from time and time, and late summer nights are a nice time for it.

Hillary Brown

Lewis & Clarke

Blasts of Holy Birth

La Société Expédionnaire

originally published June 20, 2007

Playing under the stage name Lewis & Clarke, Lou Rogai hails from Delaware Water Gap, PA, about two hours north of Philadelphia. Fittingly, his songs evoke a rural placidity far removed from big-city bustle and indie-rock noise, but he forgoes the folksy Americana usually associated with small-town life in favor of a more exotic and quietly experimental sound. Blasts of Holy Birth, recorded in nearby Bethlehem, is full of gentle drones of bowed cello (courtesy of former Rachels member Eve Miller), ripples of plucked harp strings (by Russell Higbee of Man Man), slow-motion cascades of horns and synths, and existential rhythms of tabla and trap-kit snare, all tied together in patient, sophisticated arrangements that highlight Rogai's spiritually inquisitive lyrics and quietly demonstrative vocals. Listen closely to the eight-minute "Crimson Carpets" and you can even hear what sounds like the soft cry of Rogai's newborn son, whose birth inspired these songs.

Birth and rebirth are the key themes here, introduced in the short instrumental opener, "Secret of the Golden Flower," which is based on an eighth-century Taoist manuscript, and further explored in the title track, which arcs gracefully to a lone guitar picking a soft theme against evening crickets. "Comfort Inn," which was written by Hella's Aaron Ross, interrupts its story of a man redeemed by love and art with a long upwardly spiraling instrumental passage that's both stately and psychedelic. As Blasts of Holy Birth progresses, the songs incorporate more and more eastern instruments and influences, yet never lose their front-porch informality, striking a unique and often beautiful balance between the mystical and the mundane, the universal and the local.

Stephen Deusner

Fridge

The Sun

Temporary Residence

originally published June 20, 2007

London trio Fridge - Kieran Hebden, Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers - last checked in around the turn of the millennium with Happiness, a somewhat gorgeous, somewhat boring instrumental post-rock album that wasn't rewarding enough to capture waning American interests. But still, the record was too interesting to totally dismiss, which is what makes The Sun such an intriguing listen. The years between these records found guitarist Hebden exploring electronica, abstract beats and rhythms with Four Tet, and the more recent Exchange Sessions with jazz drummer Steve Reid.

Hebden's journeys into the fringe areas of abstract rhythm and noise give Fridge a renewed and discernible charge as the off-center beats of the title track come into focus. The spacious crashes that echo in "Clocks" and the whirlwind of tonal colors in "Our Place In This" are pretty and thoroughly hypnotic. But when the group slips into the vanilla rock melodies of "Eyelids" the album looses steam. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the tonal drift of "Clocks" is swallowed by a glowing, Tortoise-like jam. This clash of directions tumbles through to the end as the flow of "Oram" and "Insects" are interrupted by showy, wimpy clusters of repeating strums and chugs.

Fridge is best when its members are just coasting along, lost in their own headspaces and letting the pieces fall where they may. When they try to rock out, though, The Sun fades quickly. The album's most engaging moments are when the group is reaching farthest out. Why fight them?

Chad Radford