Discovery: “Worried Mind” from the Deep Vibration’s new album ‘Strange Love’

The Deep Vibration

facebook.com/pages/The-Deep-Vibration/40735125499

Of all the bands who have played Twangfest over the last 14 years, the Deep Vibration is one of the most controversial. Not because it took the stage and preached politics (that would be another band), berated the audience (yet another band) or destroyed the backline (one mic stand fell over, not a crime). Some found the Nashville rockers’ assault on blues and country too haphazard, too dissonant, or maybe lead singer Matt Campbell was just too theatrical in his gesticulating, teetering, moaning delivery.

I love the band, without apologies, hooked on a single EP Vera Cruz, which came out in 2008 on Dualtone. Since then, the Deep Vibration has been keeping a relatively low profile, surfacing only for a Daytrotter session here, a Paste video there.

With Strange Love, the band’s first full-length album (just released digitally at iTunes and Bandcamp), Campbell and company turn up, get down and push all the rock & roll & blues & punk & post-honky tonk buttons. It’s not a record showing up on buzz lists, but it’s one of the best albums of this still young year.

On the track “Worried Mind,” the group cops the moves of any number of Dylan electric blues; it never feels like an homage nor quite outright theft. The pacing is at once lurching and deft, the singing wasted and charismatic, the playing — from the horns to the organ to the tambourine — in the pocket and out-of-hand. It’s a potent and polarizing sound; for me, it’s been worth the wait.

Listen to the whole of Strange Love at Bandcamp.

“Worried Mind” — The Deep Vibration

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Posted by | February 4, 2011 | Music | Comment 

Discovery: Brown Recluse spins up strange and charming pop

slumberlandrecords.com

If ever there was a band that needed a new name it’s Philadelphia’s Brown Recluse. Just typing the words skeeves me out.

I first ran across the band — led by Timothy Meskers and Mark Saddlemire — in 2009, via the EP The Soft Skin, and specifically the song “Contour and Context,” with its drifting bridge and muted trumpet riffing. I heard strains of two of my favorite across-the-ponders, the Zombies (who, rumor has it, are working on a new record) and the Clientele, and looked forward to hearing more.

This winter, Brown Recluse is releasing two albums, Panoptic Mirror Maze (self-released, January 18) and Evening Tapestry (Slumberland Records, February 15). The band is sharing a fetching track from the album at Soundcloud and you may also download a weird non-album single from 2010 at bandcamp, or below.

Brown Recluse – Orgy of the Damned (Conshohocken Curve)

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Brown Recluse “Impressions of a City Morning” by Slumberland Records

Posted by | January 22, 2011 | Music | Comment 

Discovery: The Bigger Lovers are back with “Little Giant”

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A re-discovery to be sure, as I’ve long held a soft spot for these luckless Philly power pop guys. To say they were doomed is to give the impression that fate ever cared about them in the first place. They did play Twangfest in 2004. And I still remember how good they were.

The Bigger Lovers effectively called it quits in 2005, “it” being making bittersweet and sometimes bold rock music, somewhere between the Attractions covering the dB’s , or at times like a detwanged Beechwood Sparks. Their 2001 debut album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, still sounds bracing and fun and prematurely frustrated with cult status.

The band has regrouped to reissue that first album, play a few shows and cut a few tracks with Tony Goddess (of Papas Fritas). You can hear one of those tracks below, the modestly sardonic and wonderful “Little Giant.” Starting February 1, head over to the Lovers’ bandcamp page and pick up the whole Maxi-Single, featuring 3 more songs.

The Bigger Lovers – Little Giant

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Posted by | January 19, 2011 | Music | Comment 

Discovery: La Sera’s devilish wall of sound

Katy Goodman

myspace.com/iamkatygoodman

Phil Spector deserves to be in jail, but — along with whatever else you might say about the producer — his influence endures. The “wall of sound” was everywhere in 2010, from Crazy For You by Best Coast to The Fool by Warpaint, on through Conquest by the Scruffs. I could go on.

With her new solo project La Sera, Katy Goodman (of Vivian Girls), shows how closely she’s read the writing on that wall, specifically the sonic signature of Spector’s deathless Christmas album. She’s refashioned it as a lovely, dense and not quite inscrutable single “Devils Hearts Grow Gold” (from the album La Sera, due out in February on Hardly Art). The voices build like a tower of snow, the bass gurgles, one guitar chimes like a pretty bell and one guitar slides in and out like an ice pick, and the tambourine beats like an obsession. Maybe there’s too much going on, maybe I have no idea what she’s singing about, maybe I can’t stop listening to it.

La Sera on Myspace.

La Sera – Devils Hearts Grow Gold

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Posted by | January 10, 2011 | Music | Comment 

Discovery: Twilight Hotel’s “Mahogany Veneer”

twilighthotel.ca

Brandy Zdan and Dave Quanbury are the core duo of Twilight Hotel, an Austin-based group, originally from Winnipeg, that’s been around for some 8 years, releasing records that have found notice in their native Canada; elsewhere not so much. Zdan and Quanbury (you can see why they opted for the name Twilight Hotel) released their third album, When the Wolves Go Blind, this year, a record cut in the Kingsize studios in L.A., with assistance from engineer John Whynot (Lucinda Williams and Blue Rodeo) and Tom Waits’ drummer, Stephen Hodges.

“Mahogany Veneer” is a song from that album. It begins with a deep breath and a pathetic fallacy:

I met you in the forest
where the Borealis shine
And every fish in that old lake
could tell that you were mine

The singer can’t be serious, or can’t expect the listener to take him seriously. And then the song unfolds, the melody refracts a hundred songs you’ve heard before but can’t name, driven by couplets that deepen along the way.

The lovers light out together, why we don’t know, but the journey leads from Manitoba to New York to Memphis to New Orleans, following the river. The old life falls away “like mahogany veneer.”

When we got to New Orleans
We found a city on its knees
homes hung with shadows
streets lined with weeds

By the end of the song and the journey, the two have seen enough. They hear about suicide and attend a funeral and witness homes burning in Nashville. It’s an elliptical sojourn, the kind only two young romantics can take, and they convey that uncanny feeling of being haunted together and finding purpose in those feelings. The low guitar notes echo, the light percussion marches along, and the song ends.

Radio was static
moon was out of sight
I watched you sleep beside me
turned off the dashboard light

Twilight Hotel – Mahogany Veneer

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Posted by | November 30, 2010 | Music | 1 Comment 

Discovery: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s pop sway

SSYBY by sophie parker

myspace.com/boris / Sophie Parker

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin is a few months late for the Summer Jam of 2010 sweepstakes, but I’d like to take this opportunity to retroactively nominate the Springfield, Mo. indie rockers.

“Sink / Let it Sway,” from the new album Let it Sway is a flawless (OK, the slash in the title makes it hard to announce on air), 3-minute flare from the heart of the power pop sun: From the kick drum bomp and toned-up guitar (if that’s not a Jaguar through a Fender Deluxe, I don’t know what could be), to the attention to detail (hear those intricate harmonies in the first 10 seconds?) and the bah-bah-bah at 1:40, the tambourine to the minimalist keyboard grind, the handclap-and-hard-driven-guitar outre to the lyrical hooks. I never believe pop fans who say they don’t listen to lyrics. Do they really think “MMMBop” would be “MMMBop” without Mmm-bop? And no, SSLYBY hasn’t gone bubblegum, but from the witty opening lines — “Pretty girls don’t just park where they want to / They gotta go around in circles like we all do” — to the recognition that “everything is not OK,” the band gets the simple but necessary psychological insight of pop therapy: “No miracle is gonna happen when you feel that way — Hang low but you gotta let it sway. Come on now!”

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin will be at the Firebird tonight, August 31.

SSLYBY on Myspace

“Sink / Let it Sway” – Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

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Posted by | August 31, 2010 | Music | 1 Comment 

Discovery: Dan Mangan revisits the road song

Dan Mangan - Photo by Shea Pollard

Shea Pollard / myspace.com/danmangan

Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Dan Mangan has been catching a bit of bloggy buzz lately, but no need to count that against him. All of 27, he’s been recording since 2003, and just found a US release for Nice, Nice, Very Nice on the Arts & Crafts label this past week.

“Road Regrets,” the first track on that album, takes the archetype of the rock & roll road song, and manages to rise above cliché, largely owing to the shifting tempos cutting against the otherwise foot-to-the-floor acoustic guitar rhythm and the nauseating feeling that we’ve covered this landscape before. Mangan knows whereof Dylan sang: He’s “waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice,” but he won’t wait for long.

The price may just be a good song, and this one starts out tensely: “We’ll drive until the gas is gone, walk until our feet are torn, crawl until we feed the soil. Film the whole thing.” By the 3 minute mark, the song is traveling at fanatical speeds, the organ is pealing like the siren of an approaching ambulance and the singer is howling at his memories and whatever put him on the road “that takes you back to where you came” in the first place.

Mangan will be opening for the Wooden Birds at the Old Rock House on Sunday, August 22, 2010.

Dan Mangan on Myspace

Dan Mangan – Road Regrets

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Posted by | August 16, 2010 | Music | Comment 

Discovery: Meridene, nervous rock from Eau Claire, Wis.

myspace.com/meridene

For all I know, Eau Claire, Wis. is the next Brooklyn, but I’d just as soon it stay the town of my imagination. Thick woods, roads with no shoulders, lakes lined with custard and cheese shops, and a river you can ice fish in the winter.

OK, so obviously I’ve never been there, and little about rock band Meridene takes me there. Part Shins pop, part pre-flame-out Strokes, the four-piece band is more anxious, twitchy and amped-up than the names that surround them. The band recorded its new record, Something Like Blood, in Bon Iver’s studio in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and got production help from Brian Moen (Peter Wolf Crier).

The album is due out on Amble Down Records September 28, 2010, but the band has pre-released a single, “Gone, Baby Gone,” that races along nicely on clattering drums and sleigh bells, and a smart chorus that looks for “the final truth” no matter how much it might sting.

Meridene on Myspace

Meridene – Gone, Baby Gone

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Posted by | August 9, 2010 | Music | Comment 

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