Phosphorescent

Pride

Dead Oceans

originally published October 24, 2007

As legions of Athens concert-goers can attest, when Matthew Houck (AKA Phosphorescent) is on, he's on. He's lightning incarnate. He belts out Johnny Cash tunes like he wrote the damn things. He leads a rag-tag horn section a' tearin' through campfire rave-ups. He plays brittle ballads that give yearning a color, shape and density. He's Will Oldham, he's Townes Van Zandt, he's Gene Clark, he's eternal.

When Houck left Athens for Brooklyn earlier this year, he had given us over his years here a dozen or so truly great performances and plenty of other really good ones. But he hadn't given us an album that could hold a candle to the best Phosphorescent shows. He packed a handful of gems into 2005's Aw Come Aw Wry, but he also overloaded that record with too many experiments and interludes. Aw Come Aw Wry's ambition was admirable, but it obscured Houck's greatest gift: the simple, earnest folk song.

Pride, Phosphorescent's third full-length, is similarly frustrating. Recorded in Houck's old Athens home and his new NYC digs, Pride is sparser than its predecessor - lots of tambourines and gently plucked acoustic guitars, no woozy horns. But despite this simpler palette, Houck and his cohorts (who included Liz Durrett, Jana Hunter and Castanets' Raymond Raposa) often shroud themselves in sonic indeterminacy. A number of songs barely register: "Be Dark Night" is overly spectral and clattery; "The Waves at Night" is all texture, no meat; "At Death, A Proclamation" is an out-of-place stab at rocking out that's over before it begins.

But maybe I'm quibbling, because the bulk of Pride enthralls. In fact, it boasts the three finest pieces in Houck's songbook. In the verses of "Wolves," Houck's quaking voice elicits chills. In the song's chorus, he quits cowering at the sight of claws and blood and jumps suddenly into an awestruck refrain: "The hilltops at night / They are beautiful." Against all odds, the shift works - Houck's singing from a child's perspective, so any preciousness we might perceive is mediated. Lyrical disaster is also averted in "My Dove, My Lamb," in which Houck explores a stock conceit - woman as savior - through gripping images, rendering a simple trope as a stream of highly personal symbols and ineffable experiences.

And, most notably, in "Cocaine Lights," Houck fuses craftsmanship and experimentation more effectively than he ever has before. This is "Sunday Morning Coming Down" on codeine, grave piano and creaky electric guitar fleshing out the isolation in Houck's lyrics. The whole deal sinks to the bottom of your gut like a sackful of horseshoes. Then a sickly-sweet chorus of moans and hollers closes the song and bleeds into the album's title track, which is really just an extended coda. Unnerving and more than a little abstract, this chamber of lost souls reminds us why we listen to tear-in-my-cough-syrup songs like "Cocaine Lights" in the first place: we long to know that we're not alone in our misery. Even with its flaws, Pride makes for real good company.

Phillip Buchan

Castanets

In the Vines

Asthmatic Kitty

originally published October 24, 2007

Ever since he released his first album Cathedral in 2004, Ray Raposa, the tunesmith behind and only constant member of Castanets, has been pegged as a singer-songwriter, a neo-folkie. Sure enough, his swampy rasp, rhythmic and visceral acoustic guitar, and wanderer poetry make him a compelling troubadour. Despite their earthy hues, however, Castanets' songs are, at their core, languid, dreamlike, borderline ambient, even. Raposa's a folk-rocker of the most peculiar of stripes, operating within the same genre-trawling, gravity-escaping tradition as Roy Harper, Tim Buckley and John Martyn.

In the Vines, Raposa's third record, drifts even farther out to sea than its predecessors. "Three Months Paid," the album's centerpiece, is a cocoon of space-cowboy guitar and dominating, embryonic bass. "Rain Will Come" opens in a country-blues mode, but eyeball-frying white noise and knots of out-of-tune strumming soon blight out the melody. Even the more stripped-down numbers are supple and rife with indeterminacy; in "This Is the Early Game," for instance, lambent slide guitar drifts over crumbly chords and a chorus of wispy backing singers.

While cutting these songs, Raposa reportedly wrestled "incapacitating" depression. We can only guess how much Raposa's desire to transcend this struggle might have contributed to the album's weightlessness, its heavenward trajectory. Whatever the circumstances surrounding its recording, In the Vines is Castanets' most satisfying trip to date.

Phillip Buchan

Castanets is playing at the Secret Squirrel on Friday, Oct. 26.

Sea Wolf

Leaves in the River

Dangerbird

originally published October 24, 2007

Leaves in the River came out last month, but Sea Wolf's first full-length seems perfectly timed for Halloween. Not only does the record feature a song about being a wolf, it even starts by narrating an All Hallows' hook-up: "I met a girl on Halloween, when she was lost and I was drunk / and it was dark and cold out when we left." So, where are the licensed Sea Wolf masks and glowing inflatable lawn ornaments? The John Carpenter-directed videos? C'mon now, am I the only one seeing the marketing tie-ins?

Sea Wolf is a vehicle for singer-songwriter Alex Brown Church, whom we first glimpsed in May when Dangerbird Records released the debut EP Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low. For both that effort and the full-length Leaves in the River, Church recorded with Seattle star indie producer Phil Ek (Modest Mouse, The Shins, Built to Spill). For all that firepower, Leaves in the River's tonal palette is fairly restrained: washes of autumnal melancholy largely comprised of finger-picked acoustic guitar, cello, toy piano and occasional programmed sounds. And of course, Church's voice, which is pleasant almost to a fault, as if he's a smoother, unfreaky Wayne Coyne.

Yet the album's best songs are the deviations from that mellow mood. "Winter Window" is led by a Waitsian accordion over a driving beat, as Church indulges in some Nick Cave-style imagery; "Black Dirt" is likewise dark yet dancy. And the cello-laden "You're a Wolf," reworked from the debut EP, is clearly Church's most instantly appealing song.

The Dangerbird label seems a mark of craftsmanship these days, and if anything, the second half of this record feels a bit too consistent and groomed. You start wishing that, like Get to the River, this one were also an EP, or that Church would take a page from the more adventurous production of labelmate The One AM Radio. But, slight problems aside, with this particular bark at the moon, Sea Wolf is undoubtedly off to a solid start.

Aaron Jentzen

Sea Wolf is playing at the 40 Watt Club on Monday, Oct. 29.

Japancakes

Giving Machines

Darla

originally published October 24, 2007

The double-edged sword troubling Japancakes is that the band's songs might not be abstract or dense enough to fire all the synapses of those who obsess over the sort of hi-fi genre the group explores, but each of its past albums does present a nearly flawless thesis on dusty languid post-rock that can satisfy newcomers. There's a reason no one really listens to any of the countless Stereolab clones anymore, but you can still laze around in the twilight to Japancakes.

The easy statement "if it ain't broke don't fix it" definitely applies here. While there's more anticipation to hear the band's upcoming reworking of My Bloody Valentine's seminal album Loveless (to be released next month), Giving Machines serves as a reminder of why Japancakes can probably pull it off. "Double Jointed" leads off with the usual suspects: delicate picked guitar and Heather McIntosh's cello, soon blanketed by the ol' John Neff pedal steel like powdered sugar on French toast.

A faintly wheezy synth and drums carry the track to near-epic drama, as always without ever relying on distortion. "Lalita" is a Valium hoedown. "Recovering Australia" is the best thing here, standing beside anything on Waking Hours with its incredible drone texture, syrupy pedal steel and absolutely perfect plaintive piano. There's even a cover of the Cocteau Twins' "Heaven or Las Vegas" that captures the shoegaze forebears' dream pop and effortlessly refracts it through Japancakes' twangy prism.

Giving Machines just kind of happened, without the band doing much performing to promote it, and its almost unnoticed release is a little here-today-gone-tomorrow. Regardless, the band's as top-notch as ever, and it's a good thing Japancakes is still here to inject much-needed humanity and warmth into a genre that always needs it.

Michael Wehunt

Wiley

Playtime Is Over

Big Dada

originally published October 24, 2007

Wiley and Dizzee Rascal are the only two solo artists to release internationally successful grime full-lengths (Lady Sovereign's affinity with the underground U.K. rap sound ended as soon as she hit "TRL"). Journalists and message board hounds predicted that the two emcees would together launch their genre into the mainstream, but that never happened, and it never will. Dubstep has supplanted grime as the stuttering pulse of young, black England. But this hasn't stopped Wiley from seeking to further define himself as an auteur.

Perhaps this need to make a name for himself and outlast the subculture that spawned him is why Playtime Is Over, his second album, teems with arresting rhythms and unchecked braggadocio. Futuristic drum machines fire like gats and queasy synthesizers leave slime trails in the low end; imagine a cyborg Three 6 Mafia. Atop the drums and scum, Wiley announces his superiority to other gangsters and other rappers. He's more Dirty South than Southampton.

Wiley fails, though, to substantiate his boasts. For example, in "Gangsters," a defense of his crew's badassness, he spins no clever metaphors or mind-bogglingly technical rhymes, painting his scenes with no color. His school of hard knocks didn't teach him to show rather than tell. As a result, Playtime Is Over neither salvages nor transcends grime.

Phillip Buchan