I’d written about it a few weeks ago but since then have continued to reach for the CD over and over again, immersing myself into her introspective storytelling and her gorgeously husky and unvarnished voice. When I first wrote about Crain, I quoted a reviewer who said she evokes “Judy Garland singing Neutral Milk Hotel songs,” and the more I listen, the more I think that may be the most perfect comparison a music writer has ever scrobbled together.
The Chicago music blog Hear Yarecently featured Crain & Co. on an acoustic session of five songs, including several not on the Confiscation EP. Here are two songs from the session; you can get the rest here.
I only wish for a live version of my favorite song off the album, the devastatingly gorgeous “In Smithereens, The Search For Affinity.” That cut alone is worth buying the EP for — the shimmery haze of melody that’s reminiscent of some of my favorite Mazzy Star, and breathtakingly stark and resonant lyrics like these simple ones:
“I won’t say I’m needy but I won’t say I’m fine
… Can’t we just be two troubled souls in need? And nothing more to speak of?“
I am a big fan of the humble melodies of Jake Troth, formerly of the San Fran Bay Area, now relocated to Savannah for school. While he studies design and other fluidly creative mediums, he’s still producing music non-stop, because it makes him happy. That’s a very good reason. It makes me happy too, also because he wants to give away his latest (very fine) album through Fuel/Friends.
Now just because it’s free, please don’t think that means “not good enough to sell.” That is not the case. I do love Jake’s work, and I think he easily has the talent to hang in the big leagues. But there is also a fresh and unassuming quality to this eminently listenable album. “For The Best” reprises some of that virginal ’50s high-school-dance feeling that I so loved on his earlier tunes, while cuts like the supershort “Hell Fire” echo the earliest rawness of My Morning Jacket (circa Tennessee Fire).
Here are some thoughts on Blind Contours, from Jake:
“The album is a reaction to various conversations about God and religion with those in my life. Everywhere I’ve been in the last year, these conversations pop up out of nowhere and I felt like they were influencing so many thoughts that I had to write songs to release the emotion I had about it all.
I really fell in love with simplicity and the idea of creating something I can listen to over and over again. I had a ton of emails from people who liked the songs I spent the least amount of time writing, so I went about the entire record like that. I would stay up late watching Conan or Entourage re-runs, eat something, write a song, record it, go back to it in the morning and touch it up, and repeat.
I have far too many ideas for different mediums in my life to concentrate on being a rockstar or the next (insert name of popular singer-songwriter). At school I found that writing songs makes me happy, and hopefully makes others feel the same.”
NOTE: He’s still doing that thing through his Jacob Rogers Clothing line where you order one of his hip designs and it includes an original EP of music as well. Can’t complain there.
Akron/Family is not a family in the genetic sense, but they coalesce onstage into an entity that’s a little harmonic, a little psychedelic, all freak-folky like Devendra Banhart and jamming some into prog-rock territory — but also steadfastly defying any one classification. Formed in 2002 in a Brooklyn apartment and now sometimes living in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the band is also clearly not from anywhere near Akron, Ohio. A study in contrasts, if you will.
I saw them play at Coachella with members of San Francisco’s The Dodos on-stage, and I remember being mightily impressed that they had not one but two joyful drummers. After the departure of founding member Ryan Vanderhoof (he apparently went to live in a Buddhist Dharma center in the Midwest) they’ve also rounded out their touring lineup with the band Megafaun. A family indeed — one that weaves their audience into a full-participation spectacle.
To get an idea of their ardent live show and touring philosophy, check out this feature with a show at The Independent in San Francisco:
Reviewer Dennis Cook wrote after seeing that show that “watching them leap and cavort in SF, one felt part of some beautiful cataclysm that precedes growth . . . Whether your mind agreed or not, your body will respond instinctively to their fluctuations. More than once I found my eyes had shut and my body continued gyrating, drawn ever closer to the flame they stoked onstage. Akron/Family is writing a 21st century non-denominational hymnal, free of any New Age stink or hippie laziness. What they did in San Francisco was tap into the great currents of the universe and share that energy and unfiltered beauty with us.”
Serious Lennon influences permeate the album, both from the ’60s Beatles harmonies and on into the experimentation of the following decade. On tracks like “Phenomena,” frontman Seth Olinsky’s voice is Lennonesque both in its timbre and in its raw vulnerability (reminds me of this demo), before it freaks out a little bit. Their music meanders through sunny fields, jumps around in bold zig zags, and spaces out into the new frontier — sometimes all in the same 7-minute track. As a sampling: two very different tunes from their 2007 album Love Is Simple (Young God Records):
This song is a crazy cacophonous party out on your street corner, and I’m pretty sure there are some passing Hare Krishnas involved: Ed Is A Portal – Akron/Family
And this tune — just absolutely lovely, hazy, gauzy. Over a straight-up “Strawberry Fields” opener, it feels like when you’re a kid and you try to float underwater at the lake, looking up at the sun through the wavery green water.
Dave Smallen used to front the now-defunct Oakland, CA band Street To Nowhere. He’s delightfully whip-smart, as evidenced by the writing in his blog, and also generous – releasing a free solo tune via his website. He says, “I wrote ‘America’ in October 2006 after getting home from my first national tour. I consider it a personal song, not a political song, but I want to release it now while people are very concerned about our country, which I think is actually a beautiful thing.”
A lot of sentiments seem to diminish and dissipate through daily life as we grow up into adults who hold jobs, buy groceries and maybe even do responsible things like invest a fraction of our paychecks into some Orange ING account somewhere.
Me, I was once 15 and I once listened to a lot of Nine Inch Nails. Whole worlds of emotion, rage, angst, sex, God, fear and doubt all unveiled themselves to me through albums like Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. And now I’m 29 with a whole lot more living behind me, and even as life looks so different, there’s still something in me that is drawn to the stuff Trent Reznor is creating. I was surprised by that last night, in the unseasonably crisp night air of Red Rocks.
Nine Inch Nails has not gone anywhere, I am very aware of that, and of all the inventive and intelligent music that Reznor continues to produce (even bucking the commercial norms by releasing his latest album The Slip for absolute free). But I will admit that my affinity for regularly listening to him has waned, partly in the face of so much other new music and also partly because I’m occupied with things like acoustic singer-songwriters with soaring harmonies. I have, in a word, gone a bit soft.
Reznor is not only a sonic genius, but he is a man who scribes some of the most ragingly incisive and achingly honest lyrics of anyone out there. At last night’s sold-out show, NIN absolutely blew me away with a dazzling, LOUD, intense performance. My friend Adam saw them last month; it was his 22nd show and he’d place it in the top 3. This was my first actual Nine Inch Nails show (saw Trent acoustic in 2006), so count my face as summarily melted — definitely one of the best rock shows I’ve seen in years.
The one thing I didn’t expect was how I felt a churning, pent-up intensity building somewhere in my gut throughout the show — a simultaneous tension and physical catharsis, a release. There’s something irreplicable about yelling along with 10,000 people to lyrics like, “I wanna break it up, I wanna smash it up, I wanna fuck it up, I wanna watch it go down” (when seriously the last thing I broke was a favorite pint glass, on accident). I didn’t expect it to all feel so real.
The current band lineup (Freese, Finck, Meldal-Johnson, Cortini) helps Trent make some of the most blistering industrial rock music you can see in concert these days. They also did it while looking damn amazing. The light show aspect of the night was nothing short of breathtaking — between shimmering LED curtains of white that repelled away from Trent’s body and he moved closer, to sound bars of blue that rose and fell across the front of the stage through Trent’s taunts of “Hey pig piggie pig…” — it was unparalleled. We felt like kids, the way my friend and I kept oohing and aahing whenever the display made our jaws drop once again.
If the groundbreaking Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989, that means next year it will be 20. But even stretching back to the beginning, the songs that NIN performed from that record last night sounded as vital and current to me as anything I hear on the radio — nay, more vital, more current. I have always appreciated Trent’s vulnerability in his lyrics, and going live through the ebb and flow of spiritual questioning with him on songs like “Terrible Lie” still got me. For all the hatred and anger in that song (“You made me throw it all away, my morals left to decay…” ) he then flips immediately to a childlike pleading, “I want so much to believe.” It was something of a masterpiece then and it still felt that way last night.
Check out this mysterious video that just surfaced of “Down In It” into “Head Like A Hole” – no lie, I just got goosebumps watching it again:
There was an oasis in the middle of the set where the band recreated the spectral sonic landscapes of the Ghosts I-IV instrumental album and got all prog-rock with ukeleles, marimbas and heaving symphonies of string instruments. Some would call it indulgent, but I thought it fascinating. Now if only they’d found a way to put “The Perfect Drug” (possibly my favorite NIN song) somewhere in the set…
NINE INCH NAILS RED ROCKS SETLIST, SEPT 2, 2008 999,999 1,000,000 Letting You Discipline March Of The Pigs Head Down The Frail Closer Gave Up Me, I’m Not Vessel The Great Destroyer 5 Ghosts III 6 Ghosts II 19 Ghosts III Piggy (Ghosts remake) The Greater Good Pinion Wish Terrible Lie Survivalism 31 Ghosts IV Only Down In It Head Like A Hole Reptile God Given Hurt In This Twilight
In the closing moments of the show, after Trent talked about both how much he loves playing Red Rocks (“Tonight, I can see every single one of your faces”) and how unseasonably cold it was (“I don’t even know if I match, I just put on everything I own”), NIN stripped it all back and the almost-hesitant opening notes of “Hurt” floated over the sea of people.
So maybe it was just me, and the very specific and personal things about my night last night, but I don’t want to forget sentiments like the beautifully sad ones that Trent surgically excises. For as many times as I’ve heard “Hurt” on the radio, I felt such a huge and surprising resonance as Trent and then the whole crowd passionately swore, “If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.”
Holy crap, it’s already September! I ushered out the unofficial end of summer/Labor Day Weekend with a camping trip that found me sleeping in a real, live, badass teepeeafter being eaten alive by mosquitoes while making several s’mores.
AND I got five bugbites on my face. That’s just hot any way you look at it.
I’ve also been developing Space Bar Wrist (new ailment) while trying fruitlessly to crack the leader board on the new awesomely ’80s Monolith shoot-em-up video game where you can win all-access passes to the fest (Sept 13-14). And I think the scorer is broken because I’m not that bad.
Tunes for the week!
Kiss Me Again Jessica Lea Mayfield Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers says that 18-year old Ohio native Jessica Lea Mayfield is “the most exciting new artist in the scene today,” her debut album With Blasphemy, So Heartfelt was produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys (she sang backup on Attack & Release), and the album also features vocals from two members of Dr. Dog. These are all more than enough recommendation for me to listen to her, and I love what I hear. Similar to the fabulous Samantha Crain, Mayfield has a dusty, echoey old-time sound to her mournful music that gets under your skin. She’s playing a slew of upcoming shows with the aforementioned fan bands, as well as My Morning Jacket, and her album is out Sept 16th on Polymer Sounds.
Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare Matt and Kim Yeah! Brooklyn duo Matt and Kim turned in one of the single most enthusiastic performances that I saw at Monolith last year, a cataclysmic explosion of spirited yelling and jubilant rhythm. This song is a shiny new free download from their upcoming release Grand (RCRDLBL), and opens with such a sunny simplicity that it could be one of those homemade ditties you would compose on your new Casio keyboard on Christmas morning, using the program function and your siblings’ handclaps for backup percussion. I love it.
Kicking Bird Wovenhand There is an unrelenting wilderness, a near Western riot in this song from David Eugene Edwards, the Colorado solo artist behind Wovenhand. Various folks have tried to nail down the sound of this former 16 Horsepower frontman with analogies like, ‘Bauhaus meets Billy Graham’ or ‘Nick Cave and Johnny Cash in a shootout in Deadwood.’ It conjures up a whole other world on the edge of some sort of Southern friend apocalypse. Ten Stones is out next week on the Sounds Familyre label, and the current tour hits Denver on October 25th (and looks something like this).
Furr Blitzen Trapper So, do you remember that scene at the very end of Dazed & Confused where freshman Mitch lays back on his bed with the headphones on, after that beautiful and crazy night, and a huge smile spreads across his face while the record player spins? In that moment he’s listening to “Summer Breeze” by Seals & Croft but if they were looking for alternate substitutions that captured that same feeling, allow me to recommend this new song from Portland’s Blitzen Trapper. Yes, the album cover makes it looks like an especially woodsy death metal band, but just take a listen to this goodness — with those ear-catching lyrics about mothers shouting through the fog, the listening for the angels, and curling up underneath a dogwood tree. BT hits Monolith Sept 13th. Hurrah!
No One Does It Like You Department of Eagles The first thing we should establish is that Department of Eagles is not a particularly scintillating division of your local rangers outpost, but actually a side project band of Daniel Rossen of the Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear. He must be a big fan of native wildlife, what with the bears, the eagles. Either that or pro football. In any case — this song is all delightful retro-psychedelic fuzz with pieces that alternately recall the Beach Boys and tunes like the 1966 hit “Little Red Riding Hood.” Plus, the b-side to this first official single is a cover of a JoJo song, so really — come on.In Ear Park is out October 7th on 4AD.
I don’t have a holiday today like all the rest of the U.S. seems to get — the institution of higher education where I work chooses to hold the first day of school on Labor Day each year. You know, just to be fun.
But the convocation address in the celestial Shove Chapel this morning was given by CC alum Aaron Shure, who is now a sitcom writer (Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office). In addition to giving a very funny speech to all the fresh-faced incoming students about the paths we take to being our authentic selves, he read a quote from Miles Davis that I’d not heard before, but struck me as worth repeating:
“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” –Miles Davis (American jazz musician, 1926-1991)
Yep.
Monday Music is in the works, and coming later today.
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
Lately I am completely enamored with the music of Samantha Crain and the Midnight Shivers and their Confiscation EP (out now on Ramseur Records).
(out now on 
Reviewer Dennis Cook wrote after seeing that show that “
Name: Heather Browne
