Kate Izquierdo

NoisePop 2008: Cursive

2008-02-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

The group Cursive doesn't play indie rock – they reconfigure it, tearing melodies to pieces with sharp cello parts and stitching them back together with swelling guitar riffs. The Omaha-born quartet has spent the better part of eight years crafting a turbulent, orchestral rock that blooms, rumbles, and lurches to multiple pregnant pauses. But lest you peg them for precious artistes, Cursive's lyrics have a depth and directness that steer you straight. As lead singer Tim Kasher warns in their song "Art is Hard," "the art of acting weak" is part of an indie mythos that serves "to boost your CD sales." With their acerbically twisted morality tales and chaotically scored tunes, Cursive have become a cornerstone of rarified pop.

In the normal scheme of things, getting to open for the Cure -- a band Cursive have been favorably compared to more than once -- could arguably be called a career highlight. Acclaim from national magazines for their 2003 album The Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek) wouldn't be too shabby either. But back in 2004, after four albums and relentless touring, the members of Cursive were fried. "It was kind of like, 'maybe this is a good time to stop' because we'd been doing it for so long," remembers bassist Matt Maginn. "Ugly Organ's success was a surprise
for us. We had to get our heads clear." more

NoisePop 2008: Judgement Day

2008-02-27T16:18:00.000-08:00

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Judgement Day has arrived, and it sounds like ... stringmetal. For the uninitiated, stringmetal happens when you get a classically trained violinist (Aaron Patzner) who has worked with the likes of Bright Eyes, The Faint, and Audrye Sessions together with his classically trained cellist brother (Lewis Patzner), both of whom love deep, dark metal. After being forged in the heat of busking sessions on the streets of Berkeley, the band became a trio with the addition of drummer Jon Bush. Kings of arpeggiated madness, Judgement Day will soon be sawing away at a club near
you. more

NoisePop 2008: Darker My Love

2008-02-27T16:03:00.001-08:00

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Hailing from LA, Darker My Love is the sound of a fuzzed-out psych-rock dream seen through black sunglasses. With distorted guitars and echo-y, disaffected lyrics, the band generates layers of static and dissonant fog that envelope the steeliest of non-believers. For all their laidback behavior, however, they're an entertaining bunch who -- if you believe their Darker My Dudes blog -- enjoy driving convertibles into chain pasta restaurants and opening up for the Jesus and Mary Chain. Automotive mishaps aside, Darker My Love brings a rock that is sometimes shadowy and gritty, keeping them a tremolo bar above the rest. more

NoisePop 2008: The Blacks

2008-02-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

In the grand tradition of rock trios like Concrete Blonde and, more recently, the sexily angry Husbands, the Blacks have set up in your garage and they're gonna keep you up all night. Mixing reverb-drenched guitar, accusatory vocals, and big waves of tambourine, this sometimes local, sometimes New York-based ensemble brings their petulant shoegaze punk -- as heard on the recently released Tricycle Records album Nom de Guerre -- to a venue near you.more

Super Furry Animals

2008-02-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

Furries, for real: Venus! lays Gruff Rhys and company bare

Super Furry Animals are a mischievous lot. Having marked the universe with their tech-pop grandeur for 15 years, they must now keep the world wondering where their music will pop up next and in what form. For their new album, Hey Venus! (Rough Trade), the Welsh quintet maintain their love of vast, Donald Fagen–esque noodling but have stripped down into a craftily introspective niche. In keeping with their new sound, they have a secret weapon in the studio, and it isn't bleeding-edge sonic wizardry or Timbaland at the desk. It's a dulcimer — a hammer dulcimer, to be exact, and it's wielded on some songs with as much aplomb as any siren, blip, or squawk that's graced any of their previous seven full-lengths. What gives? "For some reason, [the album] has a 'band playing in a room' kind of mood," lead vocalist Gruff Rhys offers simply, speaking on the phone from Cardiff, Wales, in early January. "Nobody brought any samplers to the recording sessions."

Super Furry Animals emerged from the Welsh capital city amid a wave of other acts, effectively marking a movement that included bands like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Catatonia. The core members of the group had originally come together as a techno outfit — a background that set them apart from their contemporaries. The group's first album, Fuzzy Logic (Creation, 1996), saw the combo establish its mastery of cheekily strident pop tunes. Its next release, Radiator (Flydaddy, 1997), upped the ante with an inventive melodic complexity that the Furries had obviously already mastered.

The band made its mark by continuing to issue fearless, originally crafted indie rock that stemmed at least in part from Rhys's schizoid musical background: he was in a jangle-pop band called Emily before moving on to noise ensemble Ffa Coffi Pawb. The Furries' next release, Guerilla (Flydaddy, 1999), is a densely layered technorock symphony that ranges between the cheeky blips of songs like "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)" and the introspective balladeering of tracks like "Fire in My Heart." Each disc since has been notable for a particular reason, whether it's an all-Welsh double album (2000's Mwng [Placid Casual]), a special DVD with a video crafted for each song (2001's Rings around the World [Sony]), or the quirky explorations into spaced-out country rock and überharmonic ruminating on recent albums Phantom Power (XL, 2003) and Love Kraft (XL/Beggars, 2005). Hey Venus!, Rhys explains, is partially based on the mellow mood he described earlier in our conversation. "In the past I wrote all the lyrics, and then the last two years [the band has become] more confident and has started to bring complete songs to the soup." He pauses, then confirms, "I suppose this was a songwriting kind of record."more

X

2007-12-20T13:45:00.000-08:00

Under their black sun - X marks the spot in punk's Cali past and a fantasized future

I have a fantasy that 100 years from now all formalized history as we know it will be lost. Museums will lose funding and fall by the wayside. Libraries will find their contents spontaneously dumped onto city streets. And those curious enough to wonder what came before will be left with the chunks of culture that have outlasted apartment moves and world wars: personal detritus and castaway junk. Eventually, this future generation will stumble upon faded photos of a queen in a tiara and a potato-sack dress. Her king had a pompadour, and their soldiers were regal. Her name was Exene Cervenka, and she was the queen of Los Angeles. Would it really be so bad for a band to be remembered as royalty?

X is usually remembered as the collaboration between vocalist Cervenka and bassist John Doe, but the band was actually founded by guitarist Billy Zoom. Already an accomplished musician who had toured with the likes of Gene Vincent and mastered his own special blend of elaborately structured punkabilly, Zoom placed an ad looking for musicians in the Los Angeles Recycler in
1977. The guitarist, in his typically wry fashion, is reluctant to sprinkle the golden dust of nostalgia over his initial meeting with Doe and merely cracks via e-mail that the latter "had really cool shoes, clever lyrics, and looked OK."

Doe brought more than his songs and his shoes to the table, though. He had met budding poet Exene Cervenka at a writing workshop and, impressed by her work, had encouraged her to join a band. Although the distance between poetry recitals and fronting a punk group might seem like a quantum leap, Cervenka soon realized that the two are quite similar. "It was more like punk poetry," she explains over the phone on her way to Milwaukee with the Knitters. "You would allow yourself to get really angry while you were reading. It wasn't rigid sitting down. It was a free-for-all!" Cervenka exceeded the boundaries of her diminutive stature, evolving into a lyrical punk princess — a heady mix of tiaras, anger, and lipstick decades before the so-called kinderwhore girl bands of the '90s aspired to do the same. more

Jesu

2007-10-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Hail "Conqueror" - The heavy evangelism of Jesu's Justin Broadrick

"Is that the venue? It looks like a shack!" Justin Broadrick says, and his bandmates laugh uproariously. They've just pulled up outside their venue in Austin, Texas, and it's not looking good. "Sorry," he apologizes to me on his cell phone. "It looks like a shed!" Broadrick is only joking, in surprisingly good spirits for being sick and a man who has a reputation as the king of bombast, the creative force behind the grindcore of Napalm Death in the '80s and the psychotic industrial blast beats of Godflesh in the '90s. Instead, he is disturbingly good-natured and genuinely concerned about taking the ethereal doom of his latest musical incarnation, Jesu, on the road while being ill. "It's infuriating," he confesses. "It's not like we're here every six months or anything." His words ring with a touch of wistful evangelism, as though there's a message that needs delivering.

That new missive is Conqueror (Hydrahead), Jesu's second full-length and a bleakly epic knight's tale where melodies spiral upward into ominous gray clouds of static to create ingenious, thundering shoegaze. It's a rude awakening for anyone expecting the tortured howls and demonic riffage of yore, but in many ways it's the obvious next step, particularly for someone looking to introduce pop music, his long-harbored love, into previously uncharted terrain. Conqueror, Broadrick explains, was created with an aim of "extreme prettiness and extreme heaviness at the same time. I guess we're taking melodies that are derived from popular culture and juxtaposing that with a sound which is basically rooted in extreme music." Where Jesu's last EP, Silver (Hydrahead, 2006), offered a more straightforward dose of anthemic pop crushed under the weight of plodding beats, Conqueror crackles and glows like a low-pressure system, trapping its dirgelike sound before releasing it into crashing cymbals and Broadrick's low, clear, mournful vocals. As pop music goes, it is nearly impenetrable, with hints of Broadrick's earlier works readily apparent throughout.more

KUSF's 30th Anniversary

2007-08-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

KUSF keeps on keepin' on, sending rad signals our way - Photo, Charlie Russo

The workroom of KUSF, 90.3FM has always looked just this side of combustible. It's a second home to the radio station's new-music volunteers, a tightly packed DIY office space papered with band posters from top to bottom. Ancient desks are pinned against each wall, one holding a beat-down stereo. Two huge metal-hinged lockers loom in the corner, monoliths stickered beyond recognition with archeological layers of rock 'n' roll's past. I stare at them and try to remember the exact location of a Barkmarket sticker I myself put up more than 15 years ago. No dice.

Down the hallway — KUSF is crammed into a lone walkway in the basement of Phelan Hall on the University of San Francisco campus — Program Director Trista Bernasconi is helping a cultural producer get his next show sorted out. Platinum records hang on the walls behind her, a reminder of the respect the noncommercial station has commanded from the musical community since its inception in 1977.

But high-caliber programming was almost no match for the university's management, which sought to sell its license in 2006. "Last year the university tried to sell us, and their main thing was that we were not connected to the students," says Bernasconi, a 10-year station veteran and former USF student. "It's hard because San Francisco is expensive and [students] have to work so many jobs, but there's been a major push to get more involved." more

The Horrors

2007-06-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

UK band the Horrors freshen up the Goth aesthetic

Gazing disdainfully from the cover of their album Strange House (Loog), the Horrors greet listeners with the air of Edward Gorey characters on a smoke break. Together, they are a scarily beautiful organism: a slick plastic spider with 10 spindly legs and a penchant for manic, blood-soaked coffin rock. Their shows, in contrast, are short, riotous affairs that revolve around a schizoid brand of gothabilly and the shrieks and antics of lead vocalist Faris Badwan. The Horrors have graced the cover of NME, dumped garbage on industry bigwigs at South by Southwest, and amassed a throng of fans worldwide. They've also, of course, sent the pointy-shoe market skyrocketing.

The Horrors were born, appropriately enough, in the bowels of a rotting Victorian hotel, the home of the fashionable Junk Club in Southend-on-Sea in London's neighboring Essex County, in the summer of 2005. Rhys "Spider" Webb, keyboardist for the Horrors, recalls that the transition from clubgoers to band was not a prolonged one. "We were actually sitting around a table, and it was, like, 'Let's go into the studio for rehearsal next week.' Faris had a couple of cover versions he wanted to work on. We've been playing ever since, to be honest."
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Konono No. 1

2007-04-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Konono No. 1 prove that good things can happen in Kinshasa

Electrifying a thumb piano sounds about as unlikely as, say, strapping a jet engine onto a surfboard. That very action, however, explains the central mystery behind Congo's Konono No. 1. But don't expect an esoteric creation myth from founder and likembe virtuoso Mawangu Mingiedi, who explains that his feedback-rich music exists simply "because it's a very soft-sounding instrument and Kinshasa is a very noisy town."

The likembe has a gentle, waterlogged twang, like a mouth harp encased in Jell-O. It is as native to the Congolese sound as the ancestral hum of the Bazombo trance music brought to Kinshasa by Mingiedi when he left his hometown on the Angolan border after the death of his father. Answering questions with producer Vincent Kenis via e-mail, Mingiedi describes Bazombo as "the cradle of our music. There's a little bit of it in whatever we play." more

SXSW - Sat, March 17th

2007-03-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

Live from Scotland: Shitdisco

Every year, you swear to yourself that you will find alternate routes to maneuver the Sixth Street on St. Patrick's day, and every year you forget or get too loaded and find yourself backstroking through a sea of jello-shot hoovering, stiletto-tottering, verdantly outfitted U of T students looking to whoop it up. They're a surreal injection into the conference populace, who are now starting to show the effects of four solid days of drinking, schmoozing, rocking, and ricocheting from venue to venue. Our forearms are purple from wrist to elbow with stamps, the plastic day party wristbands are cutting off our circulation, we're sunburnt, and, oh, yeah, maneuvering on about four hours of sleep. We're all ratcheting up to that level of cranky that can only be healed with a two-day nap or a lot of valium. more

SXSW - Thurs, March 15th

2007-03-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

The Horrors' Faris Badwan

By Thursday, the rainstorms had gone, the sun was blazin', and the Black Lips have lost their bass player. In Mexico. No matter, as they bring a good facscimile of their Sandinista flavor replete with a boy-on-boy guitarist make-out session. How can you suck face with a big ass gold grill? Very carefully.

Dusk led us to Jon Langford and Sally Timms "recalling the Mekons," which loosely translated meant playing a few Mekons songs and commenting on how being in a seminal punk band didn't exactly put them on the map. Introducing a cover, Langford commented that it was not a Mekons song, "like most of the songs in the world aren't. And not on the radio. Like all the Mekons songs." more

SXSW - Wed, March 14th

2007-03-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

I'm running way behind schedule today - nursing the first jack 'n' coke of the day, and watching Dirty on Purpose from Brooklyn. It's a wide-open, delay-drenched moodrock, a mercifully good start to Thursday afternoon.

We got in last night amidst horror stories of flashflood warnings and t-storms. Of our intended hitlist, we nabbed moments with the Pipettes, Matt and Kim, Illinois, Hank IV, and Cyann and Ben. more

Band of the Week: Land of Talk

2006-12-05T22:29:00.000-08:00

Hometown: Montreal, Canada
Fun Fact: If you call the band out on popular indie blog, Brooklyn Vegan, expect a reply.
Why It’s Worth Watching: The band specializes in sparkling, complex rock with pristine, come-hither vocals.
For Fans Of: Blonde Redhead, Metric, Cat Power, PJ Harvey

There currently seems to be two camps of people out there in the world - those who have never heard of Montreal buzz band Land of Talk, and those who absolutely adore the group. The trio has been slowly amassing a base of devotees thanks to a relentless touring schedule. Case in point: the band members spoke to Paste by shouting into bassist Chris McCarron’s mobile en route to Ontario where they were wrapping up a string of opening dates for the Dears. High-profile gigs in their adopted secondary home base of New York have made them darlings of that city’s blogerati as well.

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Ettrick

2006-11-28T23:09:00.000-08:00

Black metal, free jazz, and improv skronk — these are the things Ettrick are made of

"Ever heard of Wisconsin Death Trip?" Jacob Heule asks. Ettrick's alto sax–playing half and I are in my living room discussing the rigors of life in the Midwest as they pertain to the metal-listening youth of today. Heule, a Wisconsin native, has jokingly — or maybe not so jokingly — cited Michael Lesy's book about the disintegration of the 19th-century town Black River Falls as we make loose connections between freezing cold weather, insanity, and locales that death metal and its fans call home.

He's certain of one thing: "Black metal is the perfect stuff when you don't feel like a human anymore. When I was a receptionist at a medical center, I got really into it because I just felt terrible about certain things. It was a dehumanizing job. Cold, bleak black metal — I could relate to it." more

Archie Bronson Outfit

2006-11-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA, 10/18/06

On nights like this, The Bottom of the Hill hangs open like an empty doll house, black and littered with detritus of play dates past. Strands of Christmas lights illuminate the bar and twinkle over a small, tightly knit crowd. Restlessness in this space is contagious - it’s possible that people will stick around for half a song, chug their beers, and bolt. The band shuffles in quietly, a British trio with one drum kit, two guitars, and three beards between them. People shift their beers and stare expectantly into the void.

It's impossible to say what arrives in the ear first. Is it the skittering, relentless drums that drive the Archie Bronson Outfit onslaught? It might be the guitars that clang and clink like hollow bottles thrown across a room. Then there’s Sam Windett’s voice - a rattling wail that pierces the percussive waves with no sign of letting up. Either way, after about thirty seconds worth of “Cherry Lips,” the crowd is about as rapt as cynical indie rocker types can muster. more

In Bed with the Long Winters

2006-10-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

Masterfully eloquent longing -- of the drunken rapist kind.

It's become popular to characterize the Long Winters' John Roderick as an intellectual ronin of sorts: a librarian without master who travels the countryside lending his songs and wisdom to brainy 826 benefits. Others reject this stuffy veneer outright, preferring to embrace him as a lovable vaudevillian rogue of the "song, dance, seltzer down the pants" variety.

Still, Roderick is well aware of his reputation as a mysterious dude, explaining, "It's never been clear, even to the people close to me, whether or not I might actually be an emotionally abusive, exploitative, drunken rapist posing as a sensitive singer-songwriter, and that's an ambiguity that I cultivate." more

Lily Allen

2006-10-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

UK ska-pop princess Lily Allen rules the Euro-singles school

For those of you living in a cool-free cave out by the FM tower, Lily Allen is hot property. Her first single, the ska-tinged "Smile," has topped Britain's charts and has been oozing out of iPods and shopping malls alike as the song of the summer across Europe.

Allen's album, Alright Still (Regal/Parlophone), is a collection of rocksteady pop that veers between sweet crooning and sassily blunt day-in-the-life raps ? la "Cool for Cats." (In fact, she covered Squeeze, citing "Up the Junction" as a favorite song.) Like Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford, Allen doesn't shy away from the seedier side of London life, taking on would-be suitors in bars, catty girls in clubs, the occasional crack whore, and an obvious favorite, the loser ex-boyfriend. On "Smile" she laments, "When you first left me I was wanting more/ But you were fucking that girl next door/ What ya do that for." more

Writing Wrongs

2006-10-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

Billy Bragg keeps the progressive home fires burning and cynicism at bay

If there's one person you would expect to condemn the present state of America's political affairs, it would be Billy Bragg, right? Surely Britain's punk poet laureate should be grabbing every microphone within reaching distance to decry the evils of our current administration. But surprisingly, his reaction is quite the opposite. "I'm encouraged by the results of the last two elections, because I believe that America has not yet decided what kind of country it's going to be in the 21st century," he says on the phone from Winnepeg.

Bragg is currently on a bit of a multitasking tour to showcase his two latest works: Volume II (YepRoc), a box set, and The Progressive Patriot, a book. While Volume II is an expected retrospective that covers the second half of Bragg's career from 1988 onward, The Progressive Patriot is uncharted territory for the singer-songwriter, a treatise that addresses Britain's national identity, the emergence of organized racism, and the political road that weaves between the two. more

This tune's for you

2006-08-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

Catching up with What Made Milwaukee Famous

We've all been there. You're entranced by some wonderful song that you can't live without,only to buy the album, hunker down to listen, and find it full of duds. Your purchase ... sucks. What a weird and wondrous experience, then, to cram What Made Milwaukee Famous into the stereo and be greeted with a crayon box full of pop, each song shaded a little differently than the last and highlighted with quite arguably some of the best pop vocals around.

Named for a line in a Jerry Lee Lewis song, Austin's WMMF formed when vocalist-guitarist Michael Kingcaid put out ads in the Austin Chronicle. Kingcaid, having survived the demise of previous bands, eschewed live performances for a year, opting for an extended period of introduction. He explains, "I had the blueprints, at least in pencil, for a long time. None of us knew each other initially. We didn't want to jump out and play any shows when we weren't ready to sound our best." more

Jason Lytle of Grandaddy

2006-08-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Photo: Debra Zeller

Café Du Nord, San Francisco, 8/09/06

Jason Lytle once mentioned in an interview that as a child, he would draw playmates for himself in dirt with a stick. A creative solution to an emotional predicament like loneliness, and one that goes a long way toward explaining the music that would spill out of him in later years with indie giants Grandaddy. While the demise of the band is heartbreaking to many, what survives is a long legacy of storytelling, of stainless steel covered in ivy, dusty roads and drunken robots, and melodies that question technology even while celebrating it. While it’s an indelicate dance to maneuver, Lytle has recently embarked on a series of shows that acknowledge Grandaddy’s past while hinting at his designs on the future.

This show, the first of two at San Francisco’s Café Du Nord, had all the familiar trappings of a Grandaddy show in microscale. The stage was a makeshift campsite of keyboards, a card table, and the requisite beer cooler – itself re-purposed to hold more keyboards. Lytle invited Rusty Miller, lead singer and guitarist of Jackpot, to round out the sound and harmonies. Up to their ears in guitars and appliances, the two faced each other in the near-darkness, illuminated by a small, antique-looking lamp. “From Target”, Lytle explained, lest anyone in the crowd find his set-up too refined. more

Gnarls Barkley

2006-07-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

The Fillmore, San Francisco, California, 7/19/2006

In any other context, the vision of Cee-Lo at the helm of a sold-out venue full of screaming girls would be, let’s face it, something of an anomaly. Yet such is the beauty of a internet-fueled economy where a knob-tweaker like Danger Mouse and a singer/rapper better known in hip hop circles than most teenager’s ipods can come together and crack the scene wide open with a concept like Gnarls Barkley. The trouble with an international hit like "Crazy," their thumping anthem to suicidal psychosis, is that fame has escalated beats and good fun into a marketing mania. Gnarls Barkley is almost too well known for its thematic costuming, its dual-star line-up, and the hype constructed around its fictional namesake personality. The cynic in me quietly worried that I was about to be subjected to something that was more kitsch than content, more DAT than dope. How would Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse turn their 30 minute Technicolor trip hop romp, St. Elsewhere, into a viable set of songs?

The answer, apparent the minute the band came out dressed in its signature hospital- themed OR scrubs and nurse outfits, turned out to be sheer physical volume. Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, had employed a veritable performing army that fanned out across the stage: three back-up singers, the required “backbone” of drummer, bassist, keyboardist, guitarist, and an electric string quartet. Throw in the mighty Mouse himself, and the songs became a blast of stereophonic rainbow, each presented as slightly looser jams of the recorded originals: the jangly Motown beats of "Smiley Faces," their cover of "Gone Daddy Gone," and the sexy swamp rock of "The Boogie Monster," a song that Lux Interior would be proud to cover. more

Deep Wound

2006-06-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

The enigmatic Nurse with Wound returns to the operating theater

For more than 20 years, Nurse with Wound, the working name of British sound artist Steven Stapleton, has existed in recorded form only. With every performance that he has given since the mid 80s, he has been adamant that his presence on a stage does not constitute a Nurse with Wound event. Until now.

By some great spin of the cosmic dial, San Francisco has been rewarded with two performances by Stapleton under the Nurse with Wound mantle. The first night will be a performance of NWW's bleakly gorgeous oceanic masterwork Salt Marie Celeste, with a second evening devoted to a separate set of pieces.

It's common knowledge that Stapleton is completely removed from the heart of the London music scene, having pulled up stakes in 1989 to move to, of all places, a goat farm in Ireland. Nurse with Wound has remained prolific in its current bucolic environs, releasing an absolutely ridiculous number of albums and collaborating along the way with Stereolab, the Hafler Trio, Jim O'Rourke, and most notably, Stapleton's closest friend and frequent studio mate, David Tibet of Current 93. The relationship between Stapleton and Tibet has been immensely fruitful, no small feat considering the strong personalities of the pair. One of their many collaborations took place not in a studio but in London's Horse Hospital gallery, in 2002, as part of an exhibition that included audio art to accompany the viewing of visual pieces they also created. The music, found on Salt (Dutro, 2002), comprised two pieces, one by Current 93, the other by NWW. Stapleton later expanded his piece into the aforementioned Salt Marie Celeste, released on CD in 2003 on PanDutro.
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2006-05-24T16:38:00.000-07:00

The Walkmen
A Hundred Miles Off
(Record Collection)

After tasting the kind of success that would impress Pitchfork readers (in the form of a Saturn commercial and the adoration of the collegiate masses), the Walkmen could've easily coasted on the fumes of their music: the ringing guitars and powwow-summoning drums and singer Hamilton Leithauser’s howling vocals and cynically curt lyrics. Instead, the New York quintet got bored. They were apparently so uninspired by the lauding masses that bass player Peter Bauer and organist Walter Martin have actually switched places just to shake things up.

It's that willingness to experiment that informs their third album, A Hundred Miles Off, a collection of songs that is all over the musical map in the best way possible. The band roam from the summery, almost Polynesian reverie of "Louisiana" to the laconic observations of Fleet Week in "Lost in Boston" (which is probably the first song in history to rhyme Boston, chocolate, and exhausted) to the thrash-punk of "This Job Is Killing Me," with nary a look back. Along the way, Leithauser's barking, accusatory tenor sweetens up to nail some impressively high notes in the name of — dare we say it — contentment? But don't get comfy — there’s no question who’s running this tour. “Stop talking and listen to me,” he commands. “I’ll tell you of every dream.”

Sometimes glowering, sometimes glimmering, A Hundred Miles Off maintains the blustery ire and melodic beauty we've come to expect from the Walkmen without rehashing what's come before.

Hot To Voxtrot

2006-03-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Austin's cult heroes tap the smart lyrics of Britpop and the infectious energy of the dance floor

Just broke up with the love of your life and thinking about hurling yourself in front of a BART train? Voxtrot is probably not your band.

They sing about broken-down love, but they don't want your tears. They write pensive songs of life, yet they aren't big on the wallowing. Voxtrot wants their audience dancing, and not just the sexy people or that tweaker at the back of the club who was grooving to the sounds of the cash register before the place filled up. Everyone. It's a pretty radical notion for your pensive, cardigan-wrapped indie kid. Just what are these people getting at?

The buzz on Voxtrot has gotten to be almost deafening, with their recent EP, the jangly Raised by Wolves (Cult Hero), sending people into apoplectic fits of adoration. When Spin.com chose Voxtrot as Band of the Day, the site described the release as "a stunning mini-collection of John Hughes–heyday paeans, twitchy pop, and surging, Strokes-y dance floor fillers." While the skiffle pop and breathy vocals of a song like "Start of Something" signal homage to the Moz, the band just as easily recalls the sarcastic wit and crooning vocals of the Housemartins, not to mention the frenetic urgency of Wire.

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