Guided By Voices’ Brilliant English Little League: The Other Blogs Got It All Wrong

You can never trust the indie music press: they screw everything up. For the past month, the blogosphere has been abuzz with the ostensibly bad news that Guided By Voices‘ fourth album (!!!!) in the past year, English Little League, is a dud. And that’s dead wrong.

It’s the best of the four, in fact, one of the best albums of the band’s celebrated career, even with the reinvigorated “classic” lineup of guitarists Tobin Sprout and Mitch Mitchell, bassist Greg Demos and drummer Kevin  Fennell. With their two-guitar attack, especially, there was always a hint that they were about to head in more of an art-rock direction, and this is the album where they finally do that. Which makes their ever-more anthemic sound even more intriguing, considering that none of the album’s sixteen songs go on for much more than two and a half minutes, if that. Frontman Robert Pollard is as inscrutable and sometimes frustrating as ever, but he’s still pretty unsurpassed as a surrealist visionary: among the unexpected lyrical gems here are a creepy recurrent theme of “friction in Japan,” a “fishtank with black sails” and a shout out to Zero Mostel, possibly the first ever in a rock song. Behind him, the band plays with fury and drollery and a rich, mentholated, reverb-toned resonance.

They get off on a good foot with the first single, Xeno Pariah, a post-Kinks romp with a tricky tempo and the gorgeous guitar sonics that will linger throughout all the other fully fleshed out songs here (impressively, most of them are). Know Me As Heavy works a solid backbeat drive, like Oasis with a sense of humor in lieu of insufferable attitude. Island (She Talks in Rainbows) rises from a hushed tiptoe to a killer four-chord hook, psychedelic 60s Britpop spun through Pollard’s wryly fractured lens. Trashcan Full of Nails pulses like mid-70s Who as it reaches for a tongue-in-cheek stadium rock swagger, while Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes) follows a trajectory up from elegant chamber rock, like the Church but with a smirk.

Quiet Game stomps along on a hypnotic riff in a gritty Steve Wynn garage rock way. Noble Insect is a dead ringer for apprehensive late 70s era Wire, except that it has a groove. The most nebulous, traditionally indie thing here is Crybaby 4 Star Hotel, which works because of the lyrics, followed by Flunky Minnows, which looks back to the Beatles and Kinks for a tune but gives the lead line to the bass.

Birds is dreampop as the Church (them again) would have done it if dreampop had existed in 1982. The Sudden Death of Epstein’s Ways is a Brian Epstein reference, given away by the gorgeously ornate Sgt. Pepper tune: what it means isn’t clear. The Fab Four are also referenced on Taciturn Caves, which is like Hey Jude with guitars, while the final track sounds like the Clash done as powerpop. Admittedly, there are a trio of what appear to be solo Pollard sketches featuring a disastrously out-of-tune piano that were unwisely included here. But that’s a small price to pay for tunesmithing this offhandedly brilliant. Count this among the best albums of 2013. To all the Bushwick and Wicker Park blogs who dissed this album: up yours.

A Dark Psychedelic Stone Show by Tzar Featuring Moist Paula Henderson

[repost from NY Music Daily's older sister blog Lucid Culture, who took the jazz with them when the two blogs spun off of each other. Occasionally they'll throw back a dark gem like this one]

Moist Paula Henderson (whose nickname stems from her longtime leadership of legendary instrumental trio Moisturizer) has been the standout baritone saxophonist in the New York downtown scene for several years. Her own work has an irrepressible joie de vivre and wry humor; her new album with her latest project, Tzar, recorded live at the Stone this past February takes a turn in a considerably different, much darker direction. Here she’s joined by Ithaca, New York musicians Brian “Willie B” Wilson on drums, electronics and bass pedals (who really gets a workout, playing everything  simultaneously, it seems) and Michael Stark on keyboards. Their intriguing multi-segmented pieces blend elements of trip-hop, downtempo, noise and the edgy jazz that Henderson has pursued more deeply in recent years. It’s a deliciously mysterious, eclectic ride. The whole thing is streaming at their Bandcamp page.

The first track, There’s a Prayer for That opens with a raw, bitter piano theme and variations against rumbling drums, Henderson’s stark, biting swirls enhancing the smoky ambience. Funereal organ then replaces the piano and the piece morphs into creepy trip-hop. Begin At Sunset maintains the vibe, sax mingling suspensefully with layers of uneasy synth and squiggly eleectronic EFX, then takes an unexpected turn into dub reggae. The most improvisational-sounding number is Ambient Subtraction, Henderson’s otherworldly, harmonically tingling polytonalities blending into a morass of textures as the storm builds to an ominously insectile rumble. By contrast, the cheery go-go theme Hibachi Sushi Dance sounds like a Moisturizer outtake, but even more minimalist. The album winds up with Knuckles & Milk, juxtaposing surreallistic, mechanical menace a la Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine with noisy, paint-peeling synth squalls over a martial beat, Henderson raising the tension with a marvelously terse, chromatically-charged interlude before turning it over to Wilson’s misty cymbals. Play this one with the lights out. Recommended equally for fans of jazz, psychedelia and dark rock.

A Dark, Richly Resonant Live Album from Phil Shoenfelt & Pavel Cingl

Czech rockers Phil Shoenfelt & Southern Cross have earned a cult following across Europe for their brooding, artsy gothic rock. The core of the band, frontman/guitarist Shoenfelt and multi-instrumentalist Pavel Cingl are coming to New York for a tour of some of the dives here, They’ll be at Pete’s Candy Store on May 24 at 9 – with their similarly dark tourmates Lorraine Leckie & Her Demons opening at 8 – then at Zirzamin at 7 on May 26, plus an 11 PM gig that same night at Otto’s. Fortuitously, Shoenfelt and Cingl also have an unexpectedly lush duo album out, Live at the House of Sin, which has an anthemic sound far more rich than you would expect from just two performers. It may be a cliche to say that if a song sounds good stripped down in an acoustic format, it’ll sound even better with a band, but it’s true. So if this album is any indication, New York dark rock fans are in for a treat next weekend.

The opening track, Vivi the Flea unfolds in a down-and-out New York milieu evocative of Mark Steiner at his gloomiest, Cingl’s soaring violin contrasting with the lingering resonance of Shoenfelt’s guitar. The second track, Twisted, has Cingl playing through a wah effect to raise the psychedelic factor. The Irish-flavored Saviour’s Day reminds a lot of Nick Cave – the irony of the title is not lost in a doomed gothic context.

Cingl switches to eerily reverberating electric mandolin, Shoenfelt fingerpicking his twelve-string on Black Rain for a majestic, sweeping ambience. Shivers Inside brings to mind Mark Sinnis at his most darkly seductive, while The Gambler works a menacing two-chord vamp, Cingl’s violin taking the intensity to redline. Alchemy sounds like a Lee Hazelwood theme taken forty years forward in time to Transylvania; Martha’s Well mines a bitter, abandoned theme.

The aphoristic Darkest Hour brings Sinnis to mind again, but in full-blown angst mode. Angel Street has some neat guitar/violin tradeoffs; Shoenfelt’s sepulchral croon rises to a casual menace on Black Venus, a traditional tune with new lyrics and a deliciously ringing mandolin solo. With its echoey violin, Hospital has Cingl looking over his shoulder at the Smiths’ How Soon Is Now. The album winds up with Letter From Berlin, which manages to be both elegaic and sympathetic: at the end of the song, the narrator offers to walk the suicidal girl home. Fans of Shane MacGowan, Leonard Cohen and the other troubadours of doom will eat this up.

Menacing Noir Surf and Garage Rock from Wooden Indian Burial Ground

Portland, Oregon band Wooden Indian Burial Ground play some of the most kick-ass rock around. Part horror surf, part dark garage rock, they thrash around references from Syd Barrett to Link Wray to the Coffin Daggers. Their latest album, as well as their previous stuff, is all streaming at Bandcamp. An echoey, menacing surf rock riff rampages along to the turnaround when the creepy funeral organ joins the mix, half-shouted vocals obscured in a cloud of reverb. The funeral organ takes a slinky solo. Then a guitar feedback solo? A Theremin solo?  It’s hard to tell, but it’s as invigoratingly noisy as all getout. And that’s just the practically eight-minute first track, Helicopter. They’re playing Grand Victory in Williamsburg on Friday the 24th sometime after 9.

The new album’s second track, Sparklerella takes a sludgy Cramps riff and speeds it up, with a dead-cheerleader chorus in the background.  Lazy Ascension is a Lynchian 60s Nashville gothic pop anthem done rough and ragged for extra menace, right down to a long, haphazardly reverberating electric piano outro. From there the band segues into the funereal, marching Waltz for Eldritch, shiveringly twangy guitar set to a zombified acoustic guitar-and-piano tune.

A slightly out-of-tune Link Wray riff suddenly modulates as White Bats gets underway. The shortest track here, Bryant St. Death Cult sets paint-peeling layers of Stoogoid wah guitar over a slow, hypnotic minor-key riff. They follow that by juxtaposing a faux-tender doo-wop theme with an out-of-breath Texas roadhouse stomp. The final cut, A Long Way From Cerrillos works an uneasy, skittish, Doors/Radio Birdman theme up to a surreal, dirgey grandeur.

It’s refreshing to see that the album is also available on vinyl and cassette. It’s worth owning in either format and it’s one of the best to come over the transom in the past several months, a welcome, creepy companion to similar efforts by New York outfits Ulrich Ziegler, Twin Guns and Beninghove’s Hangmen.

House of Waters Bring Their Gorgeous Psychedelic Textures to the Rockwood

House of Waters are one of New York’s most interesting and unique bands. Part funky jamband, part Afrobeat and part pan-Asian, there is no other group in the world who sound remotely like them. In a casually expert way, frontman Max ZT is the Hendrix of the hammered dulcimer, an instrument on which he is a former American national champion. Yet while American folk music informs his songwriting, his rippling, hypnotic, warmly psychedelic instrumentals draw on styles from around the globe. As one would assume from a disciple of Shivkumar Sharma, India’s greatest master of the santoor – an ancestor of the hammered dulcimer – he’s taking his instrument to places it’s never gone before. The lush, dreamy quality of many of these songs disguises the fact that there are only three instruments in the band: the dulcimer, Moto Fukushima’s eight-string bass and Luke Notary’s cajon. They’re playing the small room at the Rockwood at 11 PM on May 17; if global sounds with a psychedelic edge are your thing, you’ll love this band.

Their album is titled Revolution: their kind of revolution is a good-natured, upbeat one. It’s a generous fifteen-track mix, the resonant ring of the dulcimer blending with the undulating bass and a thicket of percussion. Sometimes the dulcimer and bass double each others’ lines; other times they play off each other, or trade places, dulcimer anchoring a trancey groove as the bass sails overhead. There’s often a layer of dirt in the tone of the bass, and Fukushima uses all eight strings, especially if he takes a rapidfire guitar lead. Sometimes the beats are straight-up, other times they’re more tricky. That it’s often hard to tell who’s playing what speaks to the intricacy of the arrangements and the chemistry in the band.

A couple of the numbers work variations around a central tone as in indie rock, one of them rising to a big, insistent, anthemic stadium-rock crescendo, the other going into unexpectedly moody, ominous territory. Another track has a swaying triplet rhythm and a warm Mediterranean feel. Sound of Impermanence works around spiraling upper-register licks on the highest strings of the bass, while Sabula rises to a majestic, spacious atmosphere, Max ZT choosing his spots. The album’s most energetic cut, Agnolim, has the dulcimer machinegunning over a nonchalantly catchy, low-key groove – and then the bass goodnaturedly takes over. The closing track, Ball in Cage sets spacious Asian riffs over interwoven loops in both the lows and the highs from the bass. There’s also a terse rainy-day theme and a brief interlude that sounds like a resonator guitar solo but clearly isn’t.

Eerie Jagged Noir Blues from Austin’s Sideshow Tragedy

Sometimes it boils down to cred. The presence of Dimestore Dance Band’s noir gypsy guitar mastermind Jack Martin on Austin band the Sideshow Tragedy‘s album Persona instantly makes it worth a listen – it’s up at their Bandcamp page. For anybody who likes the idea of the Black Keys but finds them impossibly tame, the Sideshow Tragedy will not disappoint: they are the real deal. They’re upstairs at Bowery Electric, guessing at around 10 PM on May 15 and then at Zirzamin at 10 on May 17. If dark twisted surreal country blues is your thing, this will hook you up for the duration. Frontman/guitarist Nathan Singleton took the entire blues dictionary, distilled it, lined it up down the bar and then did shots of it until he had the whole thing in his system. And then recorded this album, for the most part just with drummer Jeremy Harrell. It’s like the Gun Club, but more raw, or like Dylan at his most haphazard and interesting – and funny. Singleton’s wry sense of humor is a welcome change from all dese wotbo blueschillun who done take da blues so serious, uh huh – there’s none of that blackface BS here.

Another cool thing about this record is that aside from Martin’s jagged guitar on the haunting, Otis Rush-influenced fifth track, The Bet, the rest of the album is all Singleton. He’s a one-man blues army, sometimes wailing with a slide, sometimes fingerpicking, sometimes slashing and roaring as he builds a doomed, menacing ambience. The album’s opening track, AM in Chicago sets the tone, an evil, reverb-drenched roadhouse vamp over tumbling drums: “A structure fire in the tower of song, a prisoner’s wish before he’s gone.” That the Leonard Cohen reference isn’t absurdly out of place speaks for itself.

“If you won’t believe me, I’ll keep telling you lies,” Singleton smirks over tasty layers of steady, shuffling slide guitar on Gasoline, then adds a sly, funky edge that reminds of Jon Spencer on the pulsing Something to Do. If there’s anything here you could call a hit single, it’s the wickedly catchy Satellite, bringing in a rare, upbeat major-key vibe.

Vasseline is a swirling, Steve Wynn style desert rock stomp. The title track, a snide portrait of a status-grubbing groupie type, opens with bit of feedback, early 70s stoner metal throuth the prism of punk, and then goes scampering. The exasperated I’m Gonna Be Your Man has distant echoes of the early Yardbirds and cool reverb on the vocals and the drums. The album winds up with the menacingly swaying Long Way Down, a hypnotic Howlin’ Wolf style groove, resonator guitar carrying the brooding tune over a wash of eerie distortion.

Another Brilliant Noir Instrumental Album from Beninghove’s Hangmen

Bandleader Bryan Beninghove is a jazz saxophonist with a busy schedule around the New York area, and writes a lot for film and tv. He has a distinctive, individual voice on the soprano sax; he also plays tenor, and melodica as well. Back in 2011, he and his band Beninghove’s Hangmen put out a richly creepy, eclectically cinematic debut album of noir theme music which was one of that year’s best. They’ve got a new one, Rattlesnake Chopper just out, streaming at their Bandcamp page, and it’s every bit as murderously intense. They’re playing the album release show this Friday, May 17 at Nublu at 10 PM.

The Hangmen’s lineup this time out is pretty much the same: guitarists and John Zorn alums Eyal Maoz and Dane Johnson, trombonist Rick Parker (of similarly dark Bartok jazz project Little Worlds and a million other bands), Shawn Baltazor on drums, and Kellen Harrison on bass (dub maven and Super Hi-Fi leader Ezra Gale takes over on bass for the show).

Where the debut album was more of a jazz record, this one is horror surf rock along with a couple of lively departures into gypsy jazz (Beninghove also plays that style of music in the memorably named Jersey City group Manouche Bag) and noiserock. The darker material here brings to mind another great New York band, the Coffin Daggers; Maoz’ presence here adds a Middle Eastern edge similar to his own high-voltage instrumental rock band, Edom. The title track, which opens the album, could be the Hells’ Angels’ theme, a slowly marauding, minor-key biker rock groove with lurid neon horn harmonies, an absolutely sick Maoz solo followed by…a theremin solo. Hangmen’s Manouche has a jaunty swing, Beninghove’s carefree melodica and tenor sax contrasting with Parker’s brooding trombone and Johnson’s surreallistically warped Jeff Lynne guitar. One of Beninghove’s best songs, Surf n’ Turk works a menacing Anatolian guitar riff that everyone who plays an instrument will be trying to figure out: it’s absurdly catchy, but it’s tricky and it’s the darkest thing here.

Choro Clock D’Lite begins as aa bubbly soca theme, adds a weird undercurrent with Johnson’s outer-space EFX, then heads to New Orleans. The album’s other horror surf masterpiece, Surfin’ Satie builds variations on a macabre, reverb-drenched chromatic theme, a shivery tenor sax solo handing off to a jagged guitar duel. The final track, Powerstine, slows things down to a sludgy Macedonian-flavored grind and then picks up, gypsy-tinged soprano sax leading the way. Best album of 2013? One of them, no question.

Art Brut Join the Nostalgia Parade

Nostalgia always leaves out the good stuff. Ever notice how 60s nostalgia always conveniently neglects how central a role opposition to the Vietnam War played in that era’s music? Outside of CBGB coffee table books (how NOT punk is that?) and never-ending tours by bands like Agent Orange or the Subhumans (who are at Bowery Ballroom on 6/15 and  the Music Hall of Williamsburg on 6/16), who outside of a crowd of diehard individualists remembers first-wave punk bands like those two? And isn’t it funny that the first wave of 90s nostalgia, like the Breeders’ recent comeback, looks back to the earliest part of that decade, or even to the 80s?  Is this a generational thing, a twenty-year cycle…or a reflection of how forgettable so much of the 90s’ ostensibly most popular music was? And there’s more to come: zeros nostalgia is next in line.

Although those who spent that decade across the pond might disagree, the European corporate music conglomerate took longer to drown itself in dreck than it did here in the US: good bands like Pulp and Blur spent a lot of time on Top of the Pops. Which the Brits take very seriously, or at least used to: let’s not forget that American Idol was a spinoff of the long-running Eurovision competition. That fascination with pop-charts-as-spectacle springboarded the career of Art Brut. A cynic would ask how many songs they ever made after the surprise 2004 hit Formed a Band: the answer is on the new Art Brut retrospective – imagine that! – appropriately titled Top of the Pops. Forty tracks, including one by Art Brut “franchise” band We Are Scientists (one of a friendly network who dedicate themselves to keeping the Art Brut catalog alive in concert). Defiantly blue-collar, sometimes to the point of self-parody, frontman Eddie Argos’ tongue-in-cheek, wide-eyed persona fuels the songs’ irrepressibly cynical sense of meta.

It’s funny how quaint so many of these songs are, even though the band is still active. Pump Up the Volume has a guy taking a break from making out with a girl so he can turn up the radio. My Little Brother “only listens to b-sides.” Nag Nag Nag Nag has a kid escaping the drudgery of home, his “album collection reduced to a mixtape” for travel purposes. Sideways references to decades of radio hits pervade these songs: the riff from Cool Jerk, allusions to ZZ Top, the Beach Boys (or the Clash parodying the Beach Boys), oi punk and especially Wire (a cynic would say Elastica instead). Ian Catskillkin and Jasper Future’s guitars (not to neglect founding member Chris Chinchilla on the early stuff) buzz and roar and are surprisingly tuneful despite themselves. As the band grew up, you can watch the humor extend to the music: wry harmonics and phasers and other effects make their appearances, more or less to mask the band’s musical limitations. What other group would have set a song about Guns & Roses’ brain-damaged vocalist to a Joy Division bassline?

Is 40 tracks of Art Brut overkill? For a band that was basically a lark from the git-go, maybe – although what’s most impressive is how strong, and funny, the satire is throughout most of this. DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshakes’ kitsch-obsessed trendoid, the snooty Strokes wannabes in Demons Out! and the Jarvis Cocker wannabe in Sexy Sometimes all get a karmic kick in the ass. And Alcoholics Unanimous is just a great song, one that needed to be written and a good thing that it was Art Brut who did it. How ironic it is that a band formed as a spoof of the pop music machine would become one of the very last to ride that machine to any kind of genuine success.

A Gorgeous New Album from the Wailin’ Jennys’ Ruth Moody

Banjo player/songwriter Ruth Moody - one-third of perennially popular all-female Americana roots trio the Wailin’ Jennys - has just released a new album, These Wilder Things, her second as a bandleader. It’s excellent for so many reasons. First is David Travers-Smith’s purist but lush production: many of the songs follow a familiar trajectory from a skeletal intro and then bring in the instruments one by one until there’s a fullscale bluegrass orchestra motoring along. As one would expect from a member of the Wailin’ Jennys, the songwriting is strong – Tift Merritt comes to mind – and the playing is tremendous.

The opening cut, Trouble & Woe, a stark gospel-flavored minor-key banjo tune, is basically the Wailin’ Jennys since the whole band’s on it. As it picks up steam, the bandleader’s brother Richard Moody’s viola and Adrian Dolan’s fiddle join with Sam Howard’s bass, the viola firing off a nonchalantly searing solo as it winds out. One And Only, a gently swaying country song, blends delicious layers of slow-burning electric guitar from Adam Dobres, rising and falling around a tersely biting slide guitar solo.

Where so many others have failed, Moody pretty much succeeds at reinventing the old Springsteen radio hit Dancing in the Dark as sprightly seductive retro acoustic swing a la Lake Street Dive. The title track takes the volume down with Moody’s pensively airy vocals over hypnotic gospel-tinged piano: “We can’t be tamed, these wilder things,” she insists quietly. She keeps things hushed and ethereal with the brooding, restless Trees for Skies, while Mark Knopfler gives a clinic in terse multitracking on the even more brooding Pockets: “We took the roads most would avoid,” Moody asserts, unintimidated by anything that might imply.

The spare piano waltz Make a Change evocatively builds an evocative calm-before-the-storm ambience, pedal steel lingering in the background. One Light Shining blends Dolan’s mandolin with guest Jerry Douglas’ dobro, followed by the delicate, Celtic-flavored Life Is Long and then the quietly elegant, similarly low-key Nothing Without Love, a big anthem stripped to just the essentials. Moody will be on tour this summer; watch this space for possible NYC dates.

A Gateway Drug to the Surreal World of Chicha Music

Most people north of Peru still have no idea who Los Destellos are. Credit Chicha Libre, New York’s funnest live band and America’s finest chicha group, for opening the floodgates for a generation worth of trippy, echoey, clangy Peruvian psychedelic rock by bands who from the late 60s through the early 80s played a surreal blend of surf music and rhythms from across Latin America. With their two Roots of Chicha compilations, Chicha Libre’s label Barbes Records were the first to release anything by Los Destellos outside of their native Peru. Los Destellos were the first to use the term chicha (a corn beverage that’s essentially the Peruvian equivalent of malt liquor; its slang meaning is “ghetto”) to describe their music. In that genre, they are what the Ventures are to American surf music, generally acknowledged as its finest and most prolific practitioners.

On the brand-new Rough Guide to Latin Psychedelia compilation, they appear once on the first disc and get an entire bonus disc devoted to them. While what’s here may not be definitive – for example, there’s only one track, the woozy fuzztone bossa groove Onsta La Yerbita, from their stunningly ornate 1971 classic Constelacion album – it’s still off the hook. El Boogaloo Del Perro morphs unexpectedly from a latin soul vamp into balmy Hugh Masekela territory and just as unexpectedly back again. Volando Con Los Destellos reinvents Oye Como Va as a blazing fuzztone jam, a showcase for lead guitarist Enrique Delgado to show off the chops that made him an icon in his native country. They take Flash & the Dynamics’ broodingly shuffling Guajira Sicodelica (which also appears on the compilation) and remake it as Byrdsy twelve-string rock, Delgado having fun with his echo pedal and a handful of stolen Ventures licks. Recycling that same Byrds hook for all it’s worth, Boogaloo De Los Destellos proves for all time how much the California band’s sound would have been enhanced by timbales. Among the rest of the thirteen Destellos tracks here, Noche de Garua has a Lullaby of the Leaves feel; La Cumbia Del Sol works a lo-fi take on early Santana; Soy Un Campesino rocks out a Peruvian folk tune; while the rest have a spiky, wickedly catchy, reverb-toned drive and intensity. Considering how tinny so much of chicha music sounds, the remastered sound quality is tremendously good. The rest of the compilation concentrates on soul grooves fused with many different south-of-the-border sounds, from the obvious (Joe Cuba) to the deliciously unexpected (Los Pakines’ stoner anthem Tomalo O Dejalo).

Chicha Libre are also represented, by an unexpected choice, keyboardist Josh Camp’s Number 17, a tribute to Fermat primes. The whole thing is streaming at World Music Network, a place you can get just as lost as at youtube except that there are no annoying commercials. Let the main page for the Rough Guides send you down the rabbit hole – if esoterica is your thing, you can check in any time you like and basically never leave. Salsa Dura NYC? Check. Music of the Sahara? Doublecheck. Desert blues, Russian gypsy music, the list goes on and on.