The Sammies
The Sammies
MoRisen Records
originally published November 14, 2007
As someone once said, "Novelty songs have always lived on contempt for meaning," and though that's frequently untrue, contempt for meaning is the best explanation I can come up with for "Panther Leap," a song about the Carolina Panthers football team whose chorus goes: "So panther leap / into the crowd / and hear them say / 'The Panthers rule!' / And you know they do!"
Most listeners will have to turn the album off at this point and take a few deep breaths, but the rest isn't quite as soul-destroyingly painful. At times, it's downright pleasant, and you'd have to be of a stern constitution not to enjoy driving around in October with the autumnal jangle of "For John" as your soundtrack. But unless this is the only album you've heard in the last 10 years, you'll be able to play "name that influence" with almost every song. The aforementioned "For John" owes a certain debt to Athens' favorite sons, and they are by some distance the oldest reference in evidence. "Caretaker" is Franz Ferdinand; "She Died" is a blatant and abundantly horrible Interpol rip; and "Trainwreck" is the Hives. (The Hives!?)
If all these influences piled onto one song, it would be interesting, but the fact that they're cordoned off onto separate tracks gets at the Sammies' key problem: they don't have any sound of their own. If their stylistic experiments were more innovative, this would be forgivable. They're not. Nor are the Sammies.
The Sammies are playing at Tasty World on Friday, Nov. 16.
Mouser / Quiet Hooves
Snakemouth Maintenance Man
Party Party Partners
originally published November 14, 2007
Athens' own Mouser starts out this collection with four songs. The tender, darkly textured "Hear God" comes first and is gorgeous in both its arrangement and simplicity. And sadly, that's the last good thing we hear from Mouser on Snakemouth Maintenance Man. "Liquor Kitty" opens with a solid 50 seconds of staccato horns, which lead into a full-on staccato rocker which, except for brief blasts of a genuinely propulsive chorus, is completely irritating. "Netherlands," on the other hand, utilizes its horn arrangement intelligently even when breaking down at certain points. The four-chord guitar lines feed the song through a marching-band psychedelia and the track is solid, although it could do without the slowed-down afterthought of an ending. The final Mouser song, "Far Tart," is much too close to a Neutral Milk Hotel interlude (namely "The Fool" from In the Aeroplane over The Sea) to even really merit consideration.
Quiet Hooves begins its part of the record with the non-song "Quiet Hooves," which is really just a nice keyboard progression which leads into a short full-band semi-jam. The next track, "Buried," takes its key horn riff directly from the soundtrack of Bamboozled, which is unfortunate because the rest of the song is a cleverly arranged track full of doubled vocal tracks and rising musical lines. "What's Been Happening" is so quiet it's almost not there, a very pretty song whose problem is, really, only its lack of volume and it could still do without any horns. The final two tracks, "Your Troubles" and "Drive Away Faster," serve as examples of what's wrong with Snakemouth Maintenance Man as a whole: nearly everything here, from each group, sounds like it's from a different band. "Your Troubles" works with a tight, slowly played intensity and a creative vocal melody, whereas "Drive Away Faster" is completely superfluous and full of half-imagined, throwaway musical goulash.
Each one of these bands has the ability to produce moving, intensely emotional music, but unfortunately, you'll only find scattered examples of that on Snakemouth Maintenance Man. Each band would be vastly improved if it would dump the horns. Their presence is a musical crutch, and winds up weakening songs which could've been much stronger.
Mouser is playing at the Caledonia Lounge on Friday, Nov. 16, at Tasty World on Monday, Nov. 19 and at the 40 Watt Club on Wednesday, Nov. 28.
Captain #1
The Humble
Just Me
originally published November 14, 2007
You can come at Captain #1's second record partially through its packaging, which consists of two different pieces of paper folded in threes, one rotated 90 degrees from the other and placed inside it, both with a hole punched through a middle and fastened with a brad. It's cute, it's clever, it's creative and pretty, but it's also ultimately a little frustrating and impractical. Captain #1 is the baby of Tim Denson, recently moved to Athens, veteran of other bands and head of the Just Me Records label.
The Humble definitely has some high notes. Some of the songs run together, but my ears pricked up every time a few of them had their turn in the rotation: namely, "On the Back of a Whale," a simple, melodic guitar tune accented with glockenspiel; "Clockmaker's Son," a woozy, rhythmically strummed singalong that features up-front female vocals and weird, strained, near-yelling in the background; and "Apple of My Eye," the second really good song by that title that's come out in Athens this year (the first is by the Broken Bits), and by far the best track on the album, a fact the band no doubt knows, as it comes up first on Captain #1's MySpace page. "Apple of My Eye" chimes and swings and blends its disparate instruments just beautifully, in a compact fashion that contrasts with the meandering that ends up killing some of the other songs.
A simple guide to the better songs on the album can be gleaned from merely looking at their running times. "A Matter of Time," for example, could make its point the same by chopping off two minutes, and "Hope in a Mason Jar" is a nice tune that seems more fun to sing, in the end, than to listen to. More discipline here would produce a higher percentage of great stuff, but, while the "single" is most worthy of your time, it's not the only thing on The Humble that is.
Blue Flashing Light
Shadowboxing
Independent Release
originally published November 14, 2007
We are cautioned against judging books by their covers, but when a band's photo involves guyliner, superficial judgments can be entirely accurate. Add six members but no instrument more exotic than a keyboard and you have recently local band Blue Flashing Light, whose album's very first moment ("Since I Caught You") sounds like plastic trying to be paper, a bloodless and airless guitar riff played through an emulator preset I could dial in with my eyes closed. It's like the ProTools tutorial decided to form a band.
They take themselves very seriously - on the title track guyliner'd lead singer Ian Schwarber gives the sentence "Are you afraid to ride the train?" the most dramatic reading ever - and they sound almost unbelievably generic, a grandiose blare of competency that I can only describe as sounding like a rock band. There's no denying that they worked hard on this, but as much as I'd like to cut them a break, aside from the part of "Lucky Days" that sounds like Depeche Mode, there's not a single thing here worth anyone's time.
On a certain level, this is a mean thing to say. On another level, it's entirely justified. ProTools and guitar emulators are good things, or should be, because they open up possibilities. So to hear them used in such workaday ways is galling. In a world where the possibilities of creation are almost limitless, to work so hard at making something so ordinary is god-damned offensive. But, sadly, not offensive enough to be interesting.
Blue Flashing Light is playing at the Melting Point on Friday, Nov. 30.
Summerbirds In The Cellar
Druids
Independent Release
originally published November 14, 2007
While not the most economical band, Summerbirds In The Cellar is more reserved than it probably should be. The band plays super-tight, deliberate music that, while coming quite close to grandeur, remains too controlled; for all the band's atmosphere and spacious choruses, there’s still no air to breathe. On one hand, it’s nice to hear a band so dedicated to its craft that the guys pay attention to detail, but if they’d just open that cellar door a little bit, maybe things would bust right on out.
Case in point: opening track “Wicked World” features a slow twin guitar line that is harmoniously pleasant but packed with tension, but the intensity doesn’t lend gravity so much as just sound polished. The second track, “Night Thief,” continues on this path but with alternating guitar lines.
Finally, though, Summerbirds breaks slightly open with the wonderful “Fake Angel Skin.” The band skillfully navigates a minor-key progression, effect-laden guitar and quick-shuffle beat through emotive verses and a classic, big-rock chorus. Musically and stylistically, it’s on par with R.E.M. circa 1989. And while not at all musically similar, the track reminds me structurally of the best INXS songs, where the song focuses on the chorus while the verse lines are perfunctory.
There’s no singular sound that can be pinned to Summerbirds In The Cellar. The band moves between large-sounding, big-rock tunes, to electro-synth (“Now We Are Ugly Inside”), to very quiet, pretty interludes (“Hidden hand (2nd Veil)," “Safe Passage”). With many bands, this would could come across as needless genre hopping and create a muddled mess. With Summerbirds, it flows seamlessly.
The band never fails to sound like itself and there’s a nice amount of creative experimentation on Druids. In the end, the album is the next logical step for a band that has made a determined effort over the past couple of years to chart modern, Southern psychedelia. It’s head music, but also heart music, and while the super-tight studio arrangements detract, Summerbirds can bring these songs to full life in any live setting.
Summerbirds in the Cellar are playing at the 40 Watt Club on Friday, Nov. 9.
Chartreuse
Summit
Thor's Rubber Hammer
originally published November 14, 2007
When you hold in your hand an oddly packaged little EP, with a large paper sleeve and a three-inch disc, and you notice the numbers 68/70 inked on the paper, your interest will surely be piqued. But it's likely a novelty that fewer than a hundred people will ever hear. Let's hope that's not the case with Athens' own Chartreuse. This is Drew Smith, at a young 22 years, making a solo nod - he played in the now defunct thrash band Gasmask & Matchsticks - and it's about time! The presentation is humble and the music matches, with 21 minutes of calm drones and soundscapes stretching across four tracks and directions.
"Summit View From North" perhaps looks toward drifting glaciers, delicate tones sustained with the barest shifts of melody beneath the ice. "Summit View From South" indeed gazes toward sunnier climes, with bright picked guitar melodies endlessly delayed somewhere between Fennesz's Endless Summer and Rafael Toral's guitar processing work. "Summit View From East" speeds up the essence of the previous piece, a rapidly fluid and gently strong melody that rings throughout the valley lying below Chartreuse's expansive view.
And finally, "Summit View From West" rounds out the EP by stretching back toward the beginning, around the compass to the hushed drone of "North." Only this time, Smith has crafted something that could drop jaws, if just a bit. This brushes elbows with Kranky Records artists like Christopher Bissonnette and Windy & Carl at their more ambient. It's a seven-minute trembling breath that nearly encompasses all that makes drone an exhilarating form. A full-length album is forthcoming, but for now, here's a sincere request that Smith reissue Summit in a wider pressing. This is too good for just 70 people to hear.
Ween
La Cucaracha
Rounder
originally published November 14, 2007
If you haven't heard of Ween by now, you must have been crapping in a dark cave for the last decade. If you think you are too cool to listen to Ween because it's "that hippy joke band," then stop reading this, because you, my friend, are retarded. La Cucaracha fits into the Ween catalog much like any of its other records, by destroying any sort of categorization attempt. Gene and Deaner opened the floodgates on this one, with songs ranging from Mexican game show theme songs ("Fiesta") to beatnik prog mind scorchers ("Woman And Man") to Dr. Phil swamp boogie ("Learnin to Love"). This is Ween turned up to 11, folks, and damn it - this fan couldn't love it more!
Despite the fact that every song sounds unique and abnormal, they all fit together cohesively into a death trap of righteousness. The band recorded 60-plus songs during this recording session and spoon feeds us the crème of the crop. As you listen to what plays like an ultimate party record, you get the feeling this is Ween unbridled. The humor is there, the jams are there, and brazen "see if you can handle this one" attitude also rears its ugly head. That all adds up to make this one of Ween's best records since the '90s. Famed R&B saxophonist David Sanborn shows up on "The Party," a clear album standout. Between the erotic sax and the overboard yuppie-esque lyrics about potential wife swapping, this song closes the album with a seductive wink and swift kick to the groin. Ween is riffing forth from the edge of the Earth's highest musical peak right now: come join the party.
Bettye LaVette
Scene of the Crime
Anti-
originally published November 14, 2007
Bettye LaVette, the comeback queen of blues and soul, gets fixed up on a sultry blind date with Athens’ own Drive-By Truckers for Scene of the Crime, LaVette’s follow-up to her resounding 2005 release I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise. Trucker Patterson Hood, David Barbe and LaVette herself produced the album, and the gang convened at Muscle Shoals’ hallowed FAME Studios (old stomping grounds for both the DBT and LaVette) to plot, practice and record together for the first time.
In his liner notes, Hood recounts being reminded by LaVette that she prefers to think of herself as an interpreter, rather than a songwriter. From Scene of the Crime’s get-go, we’re reminded that LaVette is seldom a casual interpreter of her, or anyone else’s, songs. From Eddie Hinton’s “I Still Want To Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am)” to a wrenching reworking of the Tumbleweed Connection-era Elton John ballad “Talking Old Soldiers,” each selection is bent into place, stripped down and built back from scratch to suit LaVette’s commanding presence as both vocalist and bandleader.
As the rhythmic foil to LaVette’s lead, the Truckers are a reliable, though sometimes underused, element. However, their subtle tweaks in arrangements - like Shonna Tucker’s strutting bass intro to “They Call It Love” and Mike Cooley’s stinger-sharp guitar picking - help give many of these songs a necessary gritty, from-the-gut edge. Another special guest, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, works some old-school magic with LaVette throughout the album, particularly on the sparse tracks that feature the two as duet partners.
A rarity for the self-proclaimed interpreter, the Hood/ LaVette songwriting collaboration “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette)” tells the story of a topsy-turvy career, complete with botched record deals and years of obscurity. Listening to her growl “I was singing R&B back in ‘62 / Before you were born, and your mama, too,” it's clear that, this time, LaVette aims to stick around a while. She’s not about to let anyone forget it, either. With two striking albums in pocket after years of toiling in the shadows, why in the hell should she?
Georgia Guitar Quartet
Puzzle
Solponticello
originally published November 14, 2007
Classical is a mathematical music that relies on complex structure, absolute virtuosity and an often devastating but ordered beauty. And Puzzle is clearly the work of immense talent. During the past decade or so, the Georgia Guitar Quartet has gracefully and cunningly picked its way through a wide spectrum of the classical canon, from Bach to Grieg, even veering occasionally into gorgeous jazz programs. The first of the group's four albums to consist entirely of original compositions, Puzzle walks a tightrope between the avant-garde and the accessible, citing Cage as well as Ralph Towner along the way.
Most prominent are the proudly displayed compositional skills. Each of the quartet's members has a few pieces of his own, while only two tracks are collective efforts. "Prelude," one of the latter, leads off the set with pure texture and sets a plaintive, abstract mood. "Flight" veers from hard strumming to scraping and knocking percussion to plucked strings, building toward a big payoff any fan of "regular" guitar can dig. "La Vague" spreads over four tracks and is the most overtly classical piece here… and the best. Wonderful picked melodies wax and wane, quietly lulling until a mournful cello swoops under their wings and slows the tempo.
The fact that guitars are being wielded here signifies that many otherwise shut ears could give the Georgia Guitar Quartet a chance rather than assuming an image of stuffed-shirt elders holding brandy snifters. Puzzle deserves as many open minds as it can get; the ultimate payoff would be for these minds to follow the band's lead into the geometrical beauty of the classical world.
Bear In Heaven
Red Bloom of the Boom
Home Tapes
originally published November 14, 2007
A few years back, Atlanta native Jon Philpot started Bear In Heaven as a project by himself. After moving to New York, and rounding out the lineup, Bear In Heaven is an honest-to-gosh band and, more importantly, it sounds like one. Philpot's songs run into each other in sometimes smooth, sometimes jarring, transitions. The experience is akin to only being able to see several square inches of a mural at a time, and then having to instantly adjust one's eyes for the next several inches.
Beginning with a heavy, keyboard drone, the track "Bag of Bags" switches modes after almost two minutes to a high-pitched vocal line. What sounds like muted guitar strumming refashioned into a loop is repeated until the track builds slightly, then descends, and finally blasts through more noise and fades away.
The psychedelic, treble-y guitar line of "Slow Gold" grants the album its identity. It's an album for your head, rather than one to dumbly rock out with. For a record so full of modern technology, it's warm and inviting. "Werewolf" sounds like it was formed out of bubbles rather than musical notes. It's a slow, gentle song that never loses its purpose, even as it eventually rises to a full band crescendo. Similarly, although structurally opposite, "Fraternal Noon" sends the listener floating in space, but never disconnected. Easily the heaviest track on the album, it's akin to the mid-1970s moodiness of Pink Floyd.
The mournful, melodically rich "For Beauty" closes the record. It's the one place on the album where the tension sounds more like release than anger or sadness. As the track fades into the ambience of what sounds like a wind-tunnel (or perhaps highway traffic), there's a definite sense of feeling lost, but not lonely. Although Red Bloom of the Boom features a mere seven songs, by the end, it's obvious that any more would've been too much. And for an album the title of which invites speculation into its economic inference, the economy utilized here is perfect.
Clockcleaner
Babylon Rules
Load
originally published November 14, 2007
Clockcleaner has quickly become a notorious band in the Northeast for a lot of reasons, few of which have to do with the music it makes. There's the badmouthing in the press of other Philadelphia bands like Man Man and Dr. Dog for being "humorless" and "suck[ing] horse dick," respectively. There's being banned from a popular Philly venue for urinating on another band's merch. There's the Philadelphia Weekly cover story about being the "most hated band in Philly," for all of the above reasons, plus several more. But with the release of its second album, Babylon Rules, Clockcleaner should come to be known as a cut-above noise-rock trio.
Clockcleaner is well-versed in the noise-rock churned out by the Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go indies in the '90s; on Babylon Rules, the grunt-and-groan is updated for 2007, in effect, and as a result of these near-dystopian, non-Clintonian times, sounding that much creepier, narcissistic and antisocial. John Sharkey's vocals are unmistakably similar to Jello Biafra's, sneer and snot intact but with throaty venom. There's plenty of electric-drill guitar and distorted bass dirge and dismay on Babylon Rules to appease the weirdoes who wish Killdozer and the Jesus Lizard were still around, pissing off and alternately frightening audiences.
Last year's excellent Nevermind (yes, that was its title) was poorly distributed, but with a new home on Providence, RI traditional-noise label Load, Clockcleaner should find itself louder on the lips of listeners who value confrontation, misanthropy and, most importantly, volume in their rock.
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