Colour Revolt
Plunder, Beg and Curse
Fat Possum
originally published March 19, 2008
Listening to this record may be dangerous. Colour Revolt warns of being "bludgeoned to death by sound, by music," adding that, "We have you and are not afraid." These are strong words, but the band has revealed its true intentions. The long-awaited full-length debut is here, and yes, it will smack you around a bit. The artwork alone is enough to give you nightmares. This album is a gorgeous mix of grunge and post-rock; fuzzed out distortion and wah-wah pedals laced with thundering bass lines and kinetic drums. Darkly poetic lyrics combine with religious imagery and give off a distinctly eerie vibe that's whispered and screamed in equal doses by singer Jesse Coppenbarger. Coppenbarger himself sounds like a cross between Beck and Chris Martin, had they both been possessed by the spirit of Layne Stanley. This album will invade more than your eardrums; Colour Revolt is on a mission, and it's obvious the band's arsenal includes a strange dichotomy of thick grooves and frantic melodies made all the more ominous by the band's three-guitar approach and the dark messages slithering out the speakers. "Naked and Red," "Ageless Everytime," and "What Will Come of Us?" are perhaps the best songs on the album, and if not the best, at least the most accessible. The boys have shared the stage with the likes of Dinosaur Jr., Black Lips, Explosions In The Sky, Menomena, and Atlanta's Manchester Orchestra, but with the release of Plunder, Beg and Curse, the band is looking to be headliners in the near future. If Colour Revolt does return to Athens, be forewarned, the band's not coming to tell jokes.
Charlie Garrett Band
In Time
Independently Released
originally published March 19, 2008
Country rock can be laughably easy. Step one: buy a copy of The Byrds’ Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Step two: memorize every note and really soak in the down-home hipster aesthetic. Step three: laugh all the way to the bank. It’s a formula that works for a reason. While the purveyors of this particular genre aren’t reinventing the musical wheel with their creative output, they are constantly cranking out rather decent songs. The Charlie Garrett Band is no different.
Located at the intersection of The New Amsterdams and Gram Parsons, Garrett’s soft voice, heart-on-his-sleeve earnestness and rhyming schemes display a down-home sound that can only be conveyed by a perfect pedal steel solo. It’s hardly revolutionary, but it does work. Through eleven songs about heartbreak and loss, Garrett’s sad-sack songs do get a tad redundant, but his ear for melody and great harmonies provides a perfect counterpoint for his excellent guitar work.
The album’s stand-out track, “Never Saw It Coming,” works because it breaks from Garrett’s well-worn mold of songwriting. Instead of by-the-numbers country rock, listeners are treated to blistering, and often noisy guitars, and a sound that dares to break out of the limitations of Garrett’s genre. While Garrett might not be mentioned as any sort of musical trailblazer, the songs on In Time are tuneful enough to help distinguish him from the rest of the country rock ghetto. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t decide to stay there.
Charlie Garrett Band plays The Melting Point on Saturday, Mar. 22.
Growing
Lateral
The Social Registry
originally published March 19, 2008
Some loyal readers of Flagpole might have caught onto the fact that I love Growing a little too much. The Brooklyn duo releases about an album a year, and I'm biased enough that I'd give each a glowing review before I even heard the first shimmering note. Last year's Vision Swim saw Kevin Doria and Joe Denardo turning their focus away from both the crushing blasts of near-doom guitar noise and the pastoral drone of the past. Instead, they furthered 2006's Color Wheel's notion of building epic tracks from shards of guitar and electronic pottery into channel-fading and delayed symphonies. It was like a huge mirror obliterated into millions of slivers, then glued loosely back together and used to signal spacecraft.
Mini-album Lateral is the band's CD debut on NYC's The Social Registry following a limited 7" release. Cutting to the chase: the four tracks are an epilogue to Vision Swim, so much so that this could easily be the last third of that album. Opener "Swell" even fades in as Vision Swim's closing track ended - with a gorgeous thick wave of distortion. Lots of phasers ensue. "First Contact" is zipping ping-pong balls of effects and pretty guitar noodling. The title track flits through lovely blips of processed guitar noise while an ominous, but never dark, wall of texture rises up behind.
But the wonder of Growing is that the duo always, without fail, constructs moving pieces of music from whatever disparate splinters have come from smashing musical rules. Like seasoned jazz veterans, Denardo and Doria play off one another with astonishing telekinesis, and the results are never short of mesmerizing. Is Lateral an afterthought, then? Hardly. As the drifting stasis of the closing track reveals in its title, it's an "Afterglow."
The Old Ceremony
Our One Mistake
SonaBLAST!
originally published March 19, 2008
Living the life as a decorated member of The Old Ceremony is not a bad gig - tour with whiteboy funkstars Cake; get yourself caricatured as a cast member of the Family Guy; have your debut label release, Our One Mistake, featured in PASTE magazine - all the while lingering enough in the barroom shadows to retain artistic freedom. It’s this lifestyle that goes hand-in-hand with the band's intelligent vaudevillian aesthetic - as though The Old Ceremony's literate variety of New Orleans retro-swing could be performed in a Barnes & Noble speakeasy.
Knowing that The Old Ceremony’s Django Haskins was a Yale alumnus named after the late gypsy guitarist, is a clue that this smooth operation is a well-orchestrated effort. History, after all, does not write itself as Haskins himself points out on “Poison Pen.” It’s these kind of scathing indictments that made Elvis Costello notorious; though, Haskins feels no shame in borrowing the hook from Costello’s “Radio Radio” in The Old Ceremony’s “Radio Religion.” Maybe this systemic anomaly is all part of the album’s theme of historical dissonance; yet, it’s the album’s most lighthearted track that comes across as its strongest. The swanky ragtime of “Papers in Order” feels awkwardly placed amidst the overall feel of the album, which is oftentimes academically pedestrian, rather than poignant.
The Old Ceremony recently played a hair-raising set to a packed house at the 40 Watt, opening for local gents Modern Skirts, having much too much fun to be as bitter as the lyrics suggest. If Our One Mistake is too polished to sound dirty, then The Old Ceremony is too polite to be so bad. And by bad, I mean good.
Everette Adams
720
Prestige Life
originally published March 19, 2008
Everette Adams’ debut album, 720, is a strange beast. Bearing a cover illustrated with the crudely drawn head of a man looking back over his shoulder, and an interior festooned with symbols that seem at least partially Masonic, its genre is indeterminable from the visual experience. It’s hardly more so once one pops it into the CD player. Everette, AKA Brian, creates loose, loopy, odd beats, then half-sings, half-speaks over them, often in repetitive phrases and never in a voice one would consider conventionally good. At first, it seems like a novelty record, the kind of CD destined to rot away in the bargain bin at best, but there’s something in Adams’ simple songs that hooks you. “Pop Bottles” at first seems a reworking of the Birdman song of the same name, but while the lyrics are similar (the chorus repeats the phrase “I’m poppin’ them bottles and dancing with models/ Look at my chain; it’s worth thousands of dollars”), the impression conveyed is not a celebration of materialism and partying. Instead, the combination of an extremely pared-down beat, and Adams’ obsessive but quiet insistence, makes this address of the same themes into an interesting and almost autistic grind. Some songs seem created on a Casio (“Take That”) but not without consciousness of the benefits of lo-fi music machines, and others (like “Nuak,” the concluding song) are either entirely or nearly instrumental, soft layerings of chords with intriguing interruptions. Probably 720 isn’t for everyone out there, but it’s a refreshing visit from what may be another planet.
Widespread Panic
Free Somehow
Widespread Records
originally published March 19, 2008
After 23 years and 10 albums, any band is going to start resting on its collective laurels. On Widespread's latest offering, Free Somehow, the band meanders its way through 11 songs that showcase the band’s trademark sound, but throughout the album, the syrupy thick evidence of malaise is apparent.
Despite rather earnest attempts at writing anthems, most notably the album opener “Boom Boom Boom,” the album’s laid back feel works as a detriment to the more upbeat songs. Recorded in Nassau, Bahamas by producer Terry Manning and the band, the album's rather goofy faux soul songs (“Angels on High” and “Up All Night”) feel less like a tribute to the muscular R&B that Panic has drawn influence from over the years and more like the musings of a cruise ship band playing for uninterested 40-year-olds.
But when Panic’s music clicks, it works in spades, most notably on the title track. Through a light, airy song and a gently reverbed guitar, lead singer/guitarist John Bell channels his inner Mark Knopfler for the album's best song. Its simple outro of “I don’t think I’ll be coming down” echoes throughout the close of the song, it’s a textbook lesson in good songwriting, and proof that Panic still has a few tricks up its sleeves.
For the band's (and their fans') sake, let’s hope this hiccup in Widespread Panic’s recording career is just that, a brief diversion and a souvenir of the band’s trip to the Bahamas. At their age, they deserve it.
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