THE DECEMBERISTS Double Live Gonzo

Double trouble: The Decemberists drop a two-CD live set

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 10, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/10/double-trouble-decemberists-drop-definitive-two-cd-ar-1833098/

The Decemberists, We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11) (Capitol)

LIVE WIRED: The Decemberists deliver a concert keepsake

Kiss' Alive! (1975); Neil Young's Live Rust (1979); Rush's Exit. . . Stage Left (1981). Those are just three of the monolithic live double albums that had an immeasurable impact on me during my impressionable formative years. Two slabs of black vinyl packed neatly into an extra thick — double-wide, if you will — fold-out jacket that promised and delivered the next best thing to actually having been there, from the roar of screaming crowds (preferably not dubbed in post-production), to the nearly palpable exultation of the pro-forma extended guitar and drum solos, to the swaggering stage banter. . . those discs offered something akin to a genuine window into the seductive, even mythical realm of the Rock Concert.

       And there were more. As my record collection grew, and my musical vistas broadened, I submersed myself in Zeppelin's monolithic The Song Remains the Same (does anybody remember the hilarious "Stairway To Heaven" ad-lib "does anybody remember laughter"?), found myself wishing that the Who had been kind enough to add a second disc to Live at Leeds (which they finally did on the 2001 deluxe reissue), and marveling at the strange glam-era visage of Lou Reed that adorns the cover of Rock 'n' Roll Animal, an album that, in due course, led me back to discover 1979 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed, and finally Reed's hilarious and, at times, disturbing 1978 train wreck Live: Take No Prisoners, which, to this day, contains some of my favorite unintentional comedy routines. Oh, and let's not forget Ted Nugent's way over the top, not so cleverly self-referential Double Live Gonzo, if only because it's fun to say out loud and it pre-dates the Nuge's emergence as a right-wing wing-nut.

       My nostalgia for the double-wide, double-live experience has remained largely unabated over the years. As recently as 2000, for example, I took the time over the course of a single weekend to listen to all 25 of Pearl Jam's "Official Bootleg" series, which amounted to 50 discs in total. And I don't think I flinched once. So, if there's a target demo for We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11), a two-disc, 20-track live collection drawn from eleven shows the Decemberists' performed in the wake of their big commercial breakthrough (2011's The King Is Dead), then I guess I'm it.

       And yet, until a recent drive to Richmond, I was finding it surprisingly difficult to drum up the necessary enthusiasm to work my way through the entire set. The first disc starts out promisingly enough: frontman Colin Meloy, the band's bespectacled, well-read frontman, assures a crowd in Oregon that, "This is not the Keith Urban concert. . . if you mean to be at a Keith Urban concert you will be sorely disappointed" — just the kind of bemused, off-the-cuff banter you want from a good live album.

       And, this is a good live album. Very good, in fact. The band delivers the necessary King Is Dead hits ("Calamity Song," "Down By the Water," "This Is Why We Fight") with rousing aplomb. They offer up the requisite deep cuts, dating all the way back to "Leslie Ann Levine," an acoustic lament from their 2002 indie debut Castaways and Cutouts. And they indulge in their own brand of the extended jam, powering gracefully through all 16:09 minutes of "The Crane's Wife 1, 2, 3," an epic story with a suitably obscure narrative that ebbs and flows and then ebbs and flows some more.

       The problem is, by the time We All Raise Our Voices arrived, I’d already seen, streamed or in some way digitally accessed, various iterations of the material on the album, including the part where Meloy sheepishly introduces “Dracula’s Daughter” as “the worst song I’ve ever written in my life.” I even bookmarked YouTube clips from the tour that I found particularly amusing and/or compelling. Which begs the question, is there really a place for the live album, much less the double-live set, in the Internet age?

       I’m sure there’s no easy answer. But, the well-defined rationales behind the double-live have largely vanished. For the record label, it was once a rather cheap, if somewhat extravagantly packaged way to strike while the iron was hot by quickly bringing new product to market on the heels of a successful studio album/tour. It also bought time for the artist to unwind, recover, and begin work on the next album. And, fans got a raw, unvarnished keepsake to tide them over until the next big release and tour.

Sadly, very little of that applies anymore. So, until someone comes up with a new business model for the double-wide, it just may be on its way to being a thing of the past — a past that Colin Meloy, for one, apparently shares a certain nostalgia for. . .  

CUDDLE MAGIC

Symmetric system: the avant chamber-folk stylings of Cuddle Magic

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 11, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/11/symmetric-system-avant-chamber-folk-stylings-cuddl-ar-1834366/

AVANT FOLKS: Cuddle Magic take conservatory training to the clubs

As a general rule, terms like compositional pedagogy and analytical formalism tend not to play a big role in the lexicon of rock and folk, particularly of the "indie" and/or "alternative" varieties. But even general rules are made to be broken. And, at least since the 19th-century, when the Czech composers Antonin Dvorák and Bedrich Smetana openly appropriated folk idioms, it's been more or less inevitable that at some point the methodology of the conservatory would bleed back into what we tend to think of as the more intuitive endeavor of writing a simple folk song, and then on to rock and pop as well. Indeed, as Sir Paul McCartney's latest album, a collection of standards titled Kisses on the Bottom, suggests, the Beatles were just as happy borrowing from the music of their parents' generation as they were subverting it. And, the post-punk era, with its anything goes ethos, created all sorts of openings for guys like Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, two acolytes of experimental composer Glenn Branca, to apply avant-garde compositional techniques to the simple art of guitar rock in Sonic Youth.

       Three decades later, it's becoming more and more common to find a group like the ten-piece ensemble Cuddle Magic, who play the Mockingbird in Staunton on April 13 with adventurous songstress Anaïs Mitchell, flaunting convention, defying genre, and taking conservatory training into the indie underground. Self-described, in their press materials, as "avant chamber popsters," they registered as "rock/pop" when I pulled their new album, Info Nympho, up on my iTunes. Which seemed like a pretty good place to begin my conversation with Alec Spiegelman and Dave Flaherty, two members who helped found the group when they were students at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music in 2007.

       "I like that our music is difficult to categorize," admits Spiegelman, a multi-instrumentalist songwriter who contributes everything from vocals and guitar to clarinet, harmonica, and flute to the group. "Without meaning to sound too pretentious, I'm happy we're making music for which no single label makes a whole lot more sense than another."

       "We're kind of in between categories or genres," affirms Flaherty, a percussionist who adds drums, vibraphone, and glockenspiel to the Cuddle Magic mix. "Some of us went to NEC to study jazz, and some studied improvising in general, and some of us have a background in old-time and folk music. All of that influences us."

       There are avant and even vaguely experimental moments on Info Nympho — the glassy tinkle of chimes that introduce "Baby Girl," the wordless, Phillip Glassian female vocals that pop up fairly regularly, the occasional odd piano chording. But for most of the disc, which was recorded and engineered by Bryce Goggin, an engineer best known for his work with left-of-center indie artists (Pavement, Sean Lennon, and Antony and the Johnsons, to name three), Cuddle Magic come off as a reasonably accessible, culturally literate, underground folk band (think Pavement unplugged) who just happen to have a whole lot more than guitar/bass/drums at their instrumental disposal. In fact, the first line of the opening track, “Disgrace Note," references the late indie-songsmith Vic Chesnutt before moving on to detail other notable deaths and suicides (from Albert Ayler to Spaulding Gray).

       Flaherty explains, "What makes folk music work tends to be these fundamental underlying symmetries that a theorist or an ethnomusicologist might hear. You can create a slightly different folk music by messing with those underlying structures. I think we're just trying to create folk music that has different symmetries, that could underlie folk music in an alternate dimension."

       That said, on the surface there's nothing particularly strange about the winding acoustic guitar arpeggio or the vocal melody that grounds a track like Spiegelman's "Baby Girl." It's just a little quirky, perhaps. "That's totally fair," Spiegelman agrees. "You don't hear the formal complexity, but there is a rigorous formal structure to 'Baby Girl.' There are three seven-note guitar figures that are easy for a mediocre guitarist like me to play and form a 21-note arpeggio. When I was writing it, I was thinking about a technique that has a basis in a lot of folk music, especially in Mississippi John Hurt's solo performances. In a lot of his recordings, the melody he sings has notes that hit at the exact same time that the note comes up in the guitar pattern. So I gave myself the exercise, like you would in a composition class, of taking that 21-note pattern and writing a bunch of melodies within it that were very strictly in the pattern already, so that there would be no breaking of the rules. It’s an approach that’s at its most rigorous and formalistic in that song. But, if you look for it, you’ll find it throughout the album.”

       And, if you can’t find it, don’t worry; we’re not all trained musicologists.

       (Cuddle Magic will be back in Virginia on May 14 to play at Random Row Books in Charlottesville.)

THE DANDY WARHOLS/GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS/THE MARS VOLTA

Alternative notions: The Dandy Warhols, Great Lake Swimmers, and the Mars Volta

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 04, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/04/alternative-notions-dandy-warhols-great-lake-swimm-ar-1816921/

The Dandy Warhols, This Machine (The End)

Great Lake Swimmers, New Wild Everywhere (Nettwerk)

The Mars Volta, Noctourniquet (Warner Bros.)

MEASURED MELANCHOLY: Great Lake Swimmers know the art of subtlety

If you're looking at music through, say, the lens of the Grammys, then you're likely to have one particular, somewhat narrow, yet perfectly acceptable view of what's going on. In the wake of this year's annual red-carpeted smoochfest, that perspective might best be summed up in one word: Adele. But, over the last decade and a half, the proliferation of digital downloading, nifty little iPhone apps, and user-friendly soundclouds has helped to create and sustain an increasing number of niche markets for all kinds of artists who, more often than not, swarm under the mainstream radar, if, indeed, something that could properly be called a "mainstream" still exists.

            There used to be easy designations for much of this music — indie, alternative, post-punk, neo-punk, emo-punk, anti-folk, and just plain "alternative." But even that imperfect system has essentially broken down. At this point, perhaps the only reasonable way to make sense of artists who thrive somewhere in that gray area between obscurity and international fame — bands like Oregon's art-damaged Dandy Warhols, Canadian Americana enthusiasts Great Lake Swimmers, and the El Paso-bred prog-punk juggernaut that is the Mars Volta — is simply to accept that they're all alternatives to one another, each with their own compelling approach to fashioning something unique out of scattered scraps of the past, as all three demonstrate on their latest releases. 

The Dandy Warhols emerged out of Portland as something of an alt-rock one-hit wonder in the mid-’90s. Unfortunately, the hipster anti-anthem "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" (from the 1997 album …The Dandy Warhols Come Down), which, for all of its raging psychedelic guitar slinging, was the wrong hit. It would have been much cooler if their sardonic spot-on Velvet Underground homage, "(Tony This Song Is Called) Lou Weed" (from their ’95 debut Dandys Rule OK), had found a place on alternative radio. Maybe then the band would have stuck to their garage-rock guns instead of going out on a thin, neo-new wave limb with 2003's Welcome to the Monkey House, an album produced by Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran infamy.

            Except for an odd 2004 rockumentary that chronicled the contentious relationship between the Dandys and a garage-rocking trainwreck known as the Brian Jonestown Massacre (it actually won the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance that year), I pretty much lost track of the band after Monkey House. But frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor, guitarist Peter Holmström, keyboardist Zia McCabe, and drummer Brent Deboer have stuck together, plugging steadily away in their aptly named Odditorium studio, vacillating between synth-pop silliness and the serrated churn of grungy guitars.

Their new This Machine finds them somewhere in the vicinity of a rockist comfort zone, even if they’re still not above dabbling in a little electro-fuzz nonsense here, there, and especially on the track “Alternative Power To the People.” Goth god David J of Love and Rockets fame transports himself from the ’80s to lend his voice and guidance to the dark-toned, yet playful “The Autumn Carnival.” But the Dandys are still at their best when they’re waxing wryly nostalgic on a tune like “Enjoy Yourself,” where Taylor-Taylor puts his best Iggy Pop impersonation up against a thick guitar hook and celebrates the art of simply having a good time.

Great Lake Swimers found their comfort zone — plaintive, pastoral, poetic soundscapes — straight outta the gate on their 2003 self-titled debut. And they haven’t left it since. If anything, singer/guitarist Tony Dekker has consolidated his considerable songwriting talents as the band have grown from a spare trio, who fell somewhere between the wistful airiness of Cowboy Junkies and the hushed jangle of early R.E.M., to a more outwardly rootsy fivesome featuring Erik Arnesen on banjo and guitar, the violin and background vocals of Miranda Mulholland, Bret Higgins on standup bass, and drummer Greg Millson. The band’s latest offering, New Wild Everywhere, also features a full complement of guest musicians, adding keyboards, vibraphone, flugelhorn, pedal steel, mandolin, and a whole bunch of strings to the mix.

            Subtlety is Dekker’s stock in trade. He’s a master of measured melancholy, of peaceful uneasy feelings, of the less-is-more aesthetic. He deploys the additional instrumentalists fairly sparingly, accentuating the band’s ethereal hooks and mournful melodies without getting overly ornamental. “Think That You Might Be Wrong,” a skeletal blues, may be the most polite kiss off to an ex-lover that I’ve ever heard. “Well, you’re larger than life,” Dekker admits in a near whisper before offering the quiet qualification, “When the lighting is right.” The disc’s title track finds Dekker on rockier ground, with a solid backbeat and growling guitar buoying his naturalist musings.

Dekker has a gift for finding solace in sadness and a preference for the “wide open spaces” he explores in “The Great Exhale.” But he’s equally adept at marrying memorable melodies to social commentary, as he does in “Easy Come Easy Go,” an upbeat tune that addresses the economic downturn, and “Ballad of a Fisherman’s Wife,” a poignant yet pointed survey of BP oil spill that carries pleasant echoes of Woody Guthrie at his best.

The Greek Myth of Hyacinthus, Superman’s arch-rival Solomon Grundy, and the ’80s Brit band the Godfathers are all, apparently, part of the narrative behind Noctourniquet, the latest missive from the wacky dudes behind starship Mars Volta, a hard-rocking screamo fivesome who reside somewhere between the elves of Middle Earth and the cylons of New Caprica. Only the second part of that equation is meant as a joke. The first part — Hyacinthus, Grundy, and the Godfathers — is straight out of the Mars Volta playbook. Powered by the ambitious songwriting and out-there vision of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the band have been reviving the lost art of prog-rock obscuritanism (think Uriah Heep or deep Zeppelin cuts like “Achilles Last Stand” and you’ll be in the ballpark) since they embarked on their journey in 2001. Hell, they even got themselves a Grammy three years ago (Best Hard Rock performance for the song “Wax Simulacra).

This time, however, they may have outdone themselves with an album that’s primary conceptual motif might best be described as a nervous breakdown in 13 parts. I tend to prefer the Volta guys more when they’re copping Zeppelin riffs. It’s something they’ve done to great effect in the past, and it’s a lot harder than it may seem. But Noctourniquet, with its typically cryptic song titles (“Vedamalady,” “Molochwalker,” and “Lapochka” are three I resorted to Wikipedia to decipher) and lyrics like “convalesce your fetish in me,” goes well beyond classic-rock revivals to incorporate quite a bit of digital studio manipulation and electronic gadgetry. On the downside, the results tend to override the band’s guitar wizardry and downplay the impact of Bixler-Zavala’s Plantian wail — two of the band’s greatest assets. On the upside, the Mars Volta appear to have created yet another new subgenre: electro-prog-punk.

THE HACKENSAW BOYS

String theory: The old-time Americana of the Hackensaw Boys lives on

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 04, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/04/string-theory-old-time-americana-hackensaw-boys-li-ar-1818234/

BACK WITH THE BOYS: David Sickman (right) returns to his Hackensaw roots

David Sickman's on the road, hauling a load of wood flooring from Illinois to New York City before he heads back to Lynchburg to gear up for a regional tour with the Hackensaw Boys, the old-time country string band he co-founded with current Modest Mouse member Tom Pelosi back in 1999. It's a tour that'll kick off this Thursday at Mangia, hit the National in Richmond the following night, Growler's in Roanoke on Sunday, and then head south for shows in Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, Birmingham, and Atlanta. But right now, Sickman's musing over an interesting coincidence. "It's funny," he remarks. "We were just out here in the Midwest three weeks ago. So I'm basically driving the same roads that I drove with the Hackensaw Boys, only I returned here as a woodsmith or a carpenter instead of a musician."

       Up until a little over a year ago, the very idea of Sickman splitting his time between banging nails and strumming guitar, much less hitting the road with his old band, would have seem far fetched at best. Sickman left the Hackensaw Boys, who formed in Charlottesville and became something of a local institution before garnering a national and international audience for their traditional, yet idiosyncratic take on folksy country music, in 2005, when the grind of the road got to be too much and he experienced what he characterizes as a nervous breakdown of sorts. "I was never diagnosed by a doctor, but I was pretty low and totally burned out," he concedes.

       "First and foremost it was just physical exhaustion," he continues. "I was away from my family, which was difficult. And I'd basically gotten to the point where I couldn't find the joy in it anymore. That, coupled with how one person's mood can affect an entire band, just pushed me to the point where I felt like I had to quit. We were in London, touring, and I just said, 'sorry guys but I have to go home tonight, after this show, even though we have four or five more booked.' They gallantly went on to perform those shows and kept it alive from that moment on, which is awesome because the Hackensaw Boys were like a gang — a gang of good guys."

       Sickman essentially retired from music to focus on family life in Lynchburg. And, with no hard feelings, the band soldiered on, adding an old friend of Sickman's, singer/guitarist Ward Harrison, to a line-up that's seen a number of players come and go over the years. But, last year, Sickman rediscovered the joys of singing, strumming, and songwriting. He returned to the fold with his own locally based group, the Bellweather States and, in the fall, reconnected with Harrison, who informed him that the last two original members of the Hackensaw Boys were calling it quits.

       "In twelve years, the band has never had a break, even though members have changed a bunch of times," Sickman explains. "And Ward really didn't want the band to stop.” Sickman offered his services, the band liked the idea, and by November he was a Hackensaw Boy again. Just a few days after Thanksgiving, he was on stage with the band at the Jefferson in Charlottesville.

       Since then, Sickman has put the Bellweather States on hold — "suspended animation," is how he describes it — and thrown himself back into the Hackensaw Boys lifestyle, a kind of traveling hootenanny facilitated by an inspired band of outsiders who’ll be heading to Europe for a string of shows in May. In a sense, that’ll bring Sickman full circle, back within spitting distance of the 2005 breakdown that sent him packing. And, back to pedaling the stylized but never quite shticky homegrown Americana stylings, replete with fiddle, upright bass, and a drummer who plays an ingenious, handcrafted rhythm contraption known as the "charismo," that made the original Hackensaw Boys legendary enough to earn a spot on a big tour with the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, and Cake, as well as a three-week gig backing country-gospel great Charlie Louvin.

       "We played the Grand Ol' Opry, country music's most hallowed ground," Sickman recalls with pride. "And I got to play at Red Rocks with the Flaming Lips. Our attitude is that we can play with anybody, any time, at any place. We can step out of a vehicle and start playing music; we've actually done that."

       In the years since Sickman took his leave, the Hackensaw Boys have continued recording new material, releasing the full-length Look Out! in 2007, and, more recently, two six-song EPs titled The Old Sound of Music, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. And the band, who at one point grew to include a full complement of eight musicians, has been pared back to five — Sickman and Harrison (guitar/vocals), Ferd Moyse (fiddle), Ben Jacobs (bass), and Brian Gorby (charismo). But, for all the changes the band have been through, Sickman's happy to report that most, if not all of what's made the Hackensaw Boys a uniquely compelling enterprise since their inception, has remained much the same.

       "The band that is the Hackensaw Boys right now is definitely carrying on in the original spirit. I know that I am. And I was there at the beginning. It's never lost the spirit of wanting to provide people with a fun night of dancing, maybe with some ballads thrown in. It's all about, you know, coming out, having a good time, and not worrying about having to go to work tomorrow — just hang out with us for the night. A lot of bands aren't really accessible to their fans. I don't even like to call people who like the Hackensaw Boys fans. They're friends. They're people. Most Hackensaw Boys shows, no matter how big or little, end with us going out on the floor and playing for the last 15 or 20 minutes. We do that every night. So the intentions of the original band, just doing our own take on the music of Doc Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, and, of course, outlaw country guys like Waylon and Willie and Merle, are still there. I know it might sound corny, but a big part of it is also a desire to make the world better place."

LOST IN THE TREES

SONIC SACTUARY: Lost in the Trees master the art of sadness

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 28, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/28/sonic-sanctuary-lost-trees-master-art-sadness-ar-1799387/

Lost in the Trees, A Church that Fits Our Needs (Anti-)

There are confessional songwriters, plenty of them. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is value and a compelling kind of art in crafting something universal out of what would otherwise be mere journal entries, even if too often there's a certain narcissism involved in turning the vicissitudes of one's life into an open book, regardless of how uniquely painful or elevating the raw materials may be. Rarer is the songwriter who travels beyond the confessional, to an often remote place where putting words to music is a kind of therapy, where easy answers are hard to find and what otherwise might be mere mirror gazing leads beyond the looking glass.

       Ari Picker, a North Carolina singer-songwriter who also happens to be a trained composer and adventurous multi-instrumentalist, can count himself as one of the few who truly fits the latter description. Born and raised outside of Chapel Hill, he was first drawn to indie-rock before decamping for Boston's Berklee School of Music, a jazz-heavy institution where he studied the more obscure and sometimes seemingly lost art of classically based film scoring. Out of this meeting of two very different musical approaches emerged the odd yet oddly natural amalgam that is Lost in the Trees, a loose affiliation of musicians helmed by Picker, that serves as a vehicle for both his deeply personal — at times downright harrowing — poetics, and his penchant for embellishing simple strummed acoustic guitar with a symphony of violins, violas, and cellos, as well as tuba, harp, and the occasional field recording.

       Picker isn't the first singer-songwriter to deploy orchestral strings and the like. The late Elliott Smith earned an Oscar nomination for the indie chamber-pop that characterized his contributions to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, to name just one relatively recent example. And plenty of rockers, dating back to the Beatles, have retained the services of entire symphony orchestras. But Picker, for all his similarities to a fellow outsider artist like Smith, is an entirely different breed. For starters, he wrote his own charts and he put together his own ensembles for Lost in the Trees’ 2008 debut full-length, All Alone in an Empty House, and the new A Church that Fits Our Needs. And, unlike Smith, an unabashed pop omnivore with a well developed ear for Beatlesque hooks and equal enthusiasm for hushed, fingerpicked acoustic guitars, and well distorted electric powerchords, Picker has a single-minded vision that brings to mind a subdued rural campfire session with string quartet in tow.

       That vision extends to the core of his songwriting. When All Alone in an Empty House was picked up by the LA-based Anti- label in 2010, and Lost in the Trees began reaching a national and then international audience, Picker was remarkably blunt about the subject of his songs. In interviews, he referred openly to the "extreme loneliness" he'd witnessed him mom, artist Karen Shelton, endure, as well as to "domestic abuse kind of stuff," concluding, "My family is really broken.”

       The tone of that album, somber and weighty but never heavy-handed, carries over to A Church that Fits Our Needs, a plaintive song cycle inspired by passing of Picker's mother, who took her own life three years ago. It begins with "Moment One," a short montage of fractured piano chords punctuated by the crumple of paper and typewriter keystrokes that lead directly into the mechanical, click-clack rhythm track and sharp string bowing that alternate with Picker's softly strummed acoustic guitar and his fragile, unyielding whisper of a falsetto on "Neither Here Nor There." It's an elliptical yet visceral remembrance of things past, a Radiohead-style tone poem that conjures the confusion of loss with crafty allusion in verses like, "Swept up by the sea/Birds fly into my room/When you sat with me/We're neither here nor there."

       The disc carries on in much the same fashion for 12 tracks, including a second sound collage ("Moment Two") that, with little more than footsteps crunching leaves on a walk through the woods, reinforces the contemplative nature of A Church that Fits Our Needs. As he works his way through the various stages of grief, Picker maintains an artful balance between the ebb and flow of mellifluous strings and spare acoustic soundscapes, and deploys the operatic, wordless vocals of Emma Nadeau as a beautifully haunting visage that breezes like the ghost of his mother through tracks like the slowly surging "Red" and the drum-less dreamscape "This Dead Bird Is Beautiful," an eerily airy composition that shares a certain ethereal quality with the productions of Bon Iver. "A golden glow that glowed at night/Don't you say she was weak/I'll carry her/Because she breathed I breathe," he affirms with quiet, Thom Yorke-ian force.

       Like Radiohead and Bon Iver, Lost in the Trees are more about subtle seduction and small, telling details than brash hooks and anthemic choruses. A Church that Fits Our Needs is a sonic sanctuary you go to, not one that comes to you. Once you open the door into Picker's world, it's hard not to marvel at how elegantly he brings country to the conservatory without forcing it, without it ever feeling the least bit contrived, and how gracefully he approaches sadness without succumbing to despair.   

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS: The merits of being Stephin Merritt

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 13, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/13/magnetic-fields-merits-being-stephin-merritt-ar-1763614/

The Magnetic Fields, Love At the Bottom of the Sea (Merge)

Stephin Merritt is arguably the greatest, or at least most prolifically constant songwriter of his generation. There are others — Ryan Adams comes to mind — who have inundated fervent fans with more than the average bear's worth of tossed off material under various monikers. But rarely has Merritt sacrificed quality for mere quantity. He has, however, crafted dozens upon dozens of songs over the past two decades, recorded and released on albums under a number of different guises. He may have began his career as the humble frontman of The Magnetic Fields, but that's only the most readily recognizable nom-de-pop under which he's plied his craft, a craft that's included the acclaimed, ambitious 1999 three-disc set 69 Love Songs, which delivers exactly what it promises: three baker's dozens worth of songs about love of all sorts set to music that touches on nearly as many genres.

       He followed that up with i, an album of 14 tracks that begin with the letter "i"; the fittingly titled, noisy guitar-driven collection Distortion; and the largely unplugged Realism, completing a double trilogy of sorts that seemed to prove he and The Magnetic Fields could be comfortable working in just about any medium or mode. As if that weren't enough, he's found time outside of the band to write tunes for indie luminaries like Sebedoh's Lou Barlow, Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, and Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley, to sing on two discs credited to The 6ths, to offer his bubblegum-pop take on goth in a spinoff group called the Gothic Archies, and to toy with electronic dance grooves in Future Bible Heroes. Oh, and he's also dabbled in Chinese musical theater with director Chen Shi-Zheng and provided music for the Lemony Snicket children's books A Series of Unfortunate Events.

       Let's just say that it would be mighty difficult to find anyone, outside of a guy like Randy Newman, with a more impressive resume. But if there's a drawback to being a kind of one-man Brill Building, it's that it can reduce songwriting to a scientifically mechanical process. And, that's pretty much the only problem with Love at the Bottom of the Sea, the new 15-songs-in-under-40-minutes salvo from The Magnetic Fields.

       The disc marks a return to the synth-heavy productions of the albums the band recorded leading up to 69 Love Songs. Meritt is still working with a crew that includes drummer/singer/all-around enabler Claudia Gonson, cellist Sam Davol, and guitarist John Woo, along with sweet-voiced chanteuse Shirley Simms. And his pointedly dry wit and wry disposition — let’s just say he's exceptionally drwry — remain very much intact.

       “Your Girlfriend’s Face,” for example, finds Simms singing rather dispassionately about taking out an ex-boyfriend and injuring his new love interest. Against a bleating backdrop of playful synths and an up-tempo dance beat, she innocently intones, “I’ve taken a contract out on you/I have hired a hitman to do what they do/He will do his best to do his worst/After he’s messed up your girlfriend first.”

       It’s certainly funny, in a morbid sort of way. And the rhymes are clever. But, like the spurned lover’s plan to have her ex buried alive on crystal meth, there’s something a little too cold and calculated here. The hooks are all perfectly positioned; the melody is nothing if not infectious; and the meter of the lines is spot on. And, yet, for all its appealing attributes, in the end it feels more like a genre exercise — a Gothic Archies novelty number — than anything else.

       It’s no accident that every track here clocks in at under three minutes — apparently, that was one of the parameters Merritt set for himself when he got to work on the disc. As the album unfolds, with Merritt himself delivering a sad yet never quite moving ode to unrequited infatuation (“Andrew In Drag”) in his affectless baritone, Simms tossing off the punny punchlines in “I’d Go Anywhere with Hugh,” and a chorus of voices “thumping to the pumping” in the robotically discofied “Infatuation (with Your Gyration),” a theme of sorts emerges. What we’ve got here is essentially a short sequel to “69 Love Songs,” replete a vaguely rootsy excursion (“Goin’ Back to the Country”) that includes zingers like “Let Laramie take care of me ’til they bury me,” the new wave-y “The Machine In Your Hand,” and a Latin-tinged ballad titled “All She Cares About Is Mariachi” that rhymes “hibachi” and “Liberace” with, yes, “mariachi.”

       Apparently, Merritt is still a firm believer in working within self-imposed constraints, even though he’s already acquitted himself quite well in that regard. When it pays off, on a song like the genuinely affecting break-up tune “Quick!,” there’s more than just method to this madness. But too many of Merritt’s feats of compositional prowess are beginning to ring hollow. It's as if, having nothing left to prove to the world, he’s got no one left to amuse but himself. If so, that's our loss, not his.

IOTA PACHYDERM

Heady or not?

The sonic ambitions of Iota Pachyderm

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 13, 2012

http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/13/lynchburg-based-instrumental-band-talks-sonic-ambi-ar-1763636/ 

WHO: Iota Pachyderm with Circles and Waves

WHEN: March 17 at 9 p.m.

WHERE: Manga, 2496 Rivermont Avenue

INFO: (434) 846-2585

The guys in Iota Pachyderm are serious players with serious chops and serious ambitions. Check out either of the two live full-concert recordings the Lynchburg-based five-piece instrumental band have up on Soundcloud and you'll quickly appreciate the range of their sonic vision, which incorporates complex polyrhythms, funkified grooves, improvisational jazz, rock-hard guitar riffs, and heady psychedelic explorations. But try to get a straight answer about something as simple as how the group — guitarist Will Diefenderfer and Zac Cox, keyboardist Andy Poindexter, bassist Charlie Boyd, and drummer Ken Brand — first formed, and their general demeanor takes a decided turn in the direction of comic relief.

       "I was shooting speedballs outside of school," riffs Boyd, the band's resident humorist and a familiar face to anyone who's spent any time in the general vicinity of Mangia. "Then, a couple of guys who were up to no good in the neighborhood starting making trouble. I got in a conversation with Will Dief and my mom got scared and said, 'You join Iota Pachyderm for a change.'"

       Okay, sure. But, really? Poindexter picks up the slack: "I spent eight years in Newport News, came back here, and was hanging out at Rivermont Pizza when this bouncer with long hair and a beard who looked like a Norse god took an interest in the fact that I played keyboards," he recalls, referring to the tall, blond, bearded Diefenderfer, a ubiquitous RP presence who’s Iota Pachyderm's de-facto voice of reason. "He invited me to come out and play some music with these guys, last August and we took it from there."

       Diefenderfer, whose imposing presence is offset by his soft-spoken manner and, on this particular occasion, a t-shirt emblazoned with the progressive quip, "The Voice of Change," steps in to clarify: "I started running sound for Bigfoot County," he explains, referencing the local Grateful Dead cover band, "and they had a practice spot downtown. So, I just asked all these guys to come down there and start jamming with me. It was just us just jamming for a while with another drummer. . . And then we started writing."

       "We wrote our first song within five minutes of Ken sitting down behind the drums," Cox chimes in. "It's called 'Diddlelogue.’"

       The eight-minute epic that is "Diddlelogue" came together in much the same way Iota Pachyderm's other songs are "written," which is to say that it's more about a process of the entire band working through riffs, grooves, and melodies until something good happens, than one person delivering a finished verse-chorus-verse composition to the group. "We record and listen back and then we take what we like after we've gone and listened back to the track," Diefenderfer explains. "For the sake of naming the files I try to come up with something. And on the day we made that song Charlie did this little monologue in a Bill Cosby accent that was totally hilarious. What did you say Charlie?"

       "If I was a kind of Diddlelogue," he begins in his best marble mouthed Jello Brand Pudding voice, "what kind of Diddlelogue would I be?" Then, after a short pause, he delivers the random punchline: "Raspberries.”

       As for the band’s somewhat obscure name, Diefenderfer chose it because, like “jumbo shrimp,” it’s essentially an oxymoron. “Iota is a very a small thing,” he explains. “And a pachyderm is a very large creature with extremely tough skin. So it means something like ‘tiny giant.’”

       It may be a mouthful, but the name also accurately captures something essential about the band’s more brainy prog-rock excursions. But if there’s one thing there’s not total agreement about among the Iota Pachyderm five, it’s how to easily characterize their sound or even the mix of genres that goes into the music they create together.

       “It has an element of jam to it,” Cox offers, before Boyd quickly cuts him off at the pass. “We are not a jam band,” he retorts tersely.

       “Zac and I are probably the only ones here who are okay with us being a jam band,” Diefenderfer, the peacemaker, says. “I think what's happening when we all get together and play is that, because we don't have a vocalist, it gives us a chance to all put a little of ourselves into the music. And we all have various different backgrounds, and various things that we like to listen to. And all of that comes together and into what we do.”

       “But what keeps it from being too jammy,” Boyd interjects, “is that we've got all these explorative sounds and all of this psychedelic stuff going on in the melody side with the guitars and the keyboards, but the rhythm section and even the melodies are not what you'd expect from a jam band. I mean, we have a lot of funk and hip-hop on the rhythm side. It's like if you had a post-rock band that played psychedelic classic rock.”

       Everyone seems reasonably pleased with Boyd’s summation. But as the band prepare to head back into their cavernous practice room, which used to be a Virginia School for the Arts dance rehearsal space, Diefenderfer mentions another element Iota Pachyderm are hoping to add to their mix as they move forward.

       “One of the directions I want to go with this is using samples of some of the world's greatest thinkers and incorporating that into our music. People like Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Stephen Hawking, talking about consciousness and the universe and scientific ideas. The audience we want to go after are kids at festivals — kids who want to just daze out and listen to music. But I want to inspire them to think. We want those people to enjoy our music, but to also have 'Aha' moments. Those are the things that impact you heavily. And those are the things that you end up remembering.”

       Of course, there’s also Boyd’s rather memorable “Diddlelogue” spiel, which is generally how the band, however serious their intentions may be, tend to introduce the song. . .