Queen City Spotlight: Houses

In addition to being a mile high, Denver is also known as the Queen City of the Plains, since we are regally awesome. We have a feisty and fertile music scene here, and this occasional feature aims to spotlight the best of our music to the rest of the world.

Houses is such a curt, domestic, common name for an uncommonly good band. Recently formed and already attracting major word-of-mouth buzz, the smart music of Houses is as expansive and refreshing as it is unclassifiable. Sometimes it shimmers and chimes, other times it just plain squalls with rock and roll — but it seems firmly rooted to me in shades of an earthy sepia.

A big, exuberant, Denver-style collective of at least eight members (and all their varied instruments), Houses is formed around the core songwriting duo of Andrew James Hamilton and his wife Kinsey Hamilton. Joining them are members of several other excellent groups in and around Denver (such as Widowers, Blue Million Miles and the perhaps-defunct Hearts of Palm).

With Bishop Allen-type plans for year round domination, Houses is releasing one EP for each season of 2009. I’m having fun divvying up all the songs on their MySpace player into speculative seasons. It seems clear to me that instrumental sojourns like the surf-guitar-laced “Beach Song” radiate waves of August heat, and the pensive “North Sea” is a brilliant shade of arctic January white — or maybe December with those faint sleigh bells chiming.

But this next track might be more like the hazy smell of burning leaves in late October. I am totally and completely in love with it — the way it starts out with a classy, bluesy organ melody that anchors throughout and builds into a singalong that feels like The Band at the San Francisco’s Winterland, early 1970s.

By the last minute, the song explodes like fiery sunrise, just like they promised it would. We’ll see the sun again indeed.

We’ll See The Sun – Houses

For more listening, last month’s show with Everything Absent or Distorted is up over on The Flat Response.

And one of those EPs (presumably Spring) is being released tomorrow night (Friday) at the Hi-Dive, in a show with other local luminaries Elin Palmer and Ian Cooke.

When Houses played with The Morning Benders and The Submarines in February, the Denver Post’s review claimed that although it was “only the band’s fifth show … it was so well executed that it should put most Denver indie bands on notice.” That’s a show I got real close (meters) to seeing, but lots of wet snow and maybe some tequila stopped me from actually making it inside. Sigh. I shant be so foolish again — I really am looking forward to seeing a lot of Houses in 2009.

ALSO: Speaking of local news, the review I wrote for the Denver Post on the Gaslight Anthem show is now live, for your viewing pleasure, as are the pics I shot in the review for Clem Snide. And check this video I shot of Gaslight on Friday night — easily my favorite video I’ve captured all year so far.

[thanks to the formidable namer-of-things Sean Porter for thinking up this series title!]

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

–Wendell Berry

What I am listening during the long convalescence.

Monday Swahili Death Flu Roundup

True story — I was all set to write about good music this week and then I got sledgehammered Sunday by some virulent strain of Swahili Death Flu (what I am affectionately calling it) and ended up literally laying on my bathroom floor instead, for many hours. I just returned from the ER where I got pumped full of shiver-inducingly cold IV fluids and injected with anti-nausea stuff.

The best part of the visit may have been the desk clerk guy who remained hidden from my view but often belted out Kinks songs with great vigor. It’s the little things in life, you know?

More later.

celebrate the day by putting things where they don’t belong…

Today Sufjan Stevens posted a very old cassette-tape recording that he wrote in his college dorm room about Sofia Coppola. Par for the Sufjan course, the song is humble and lovely and pensive (all minute and forty-seven seconds of it), with a taut string of some undefinable wistfulness running through the banjo plucks.

In the accompanying story, he kicks around ideas about names and name-songs, and the time in his life when he wrote this. It is a fascinating insight into his fire-hydrant creative process and the way we grow:

My older self, glancing back over simple chords and hazardous poetry, likes to think I’m older, wiser, more mature, more eloquent, more artful, more poignant, more contemporary. But that’s unfair. The concept has changed but the approach has always been the same….
[read the rest here]

Sofia’s Song – Sufjan Stevens

I’m pretty sure that one reason I like this little wisp of a song so much this week is that the “putting things where they don’t belong” lines echoed this poem, which has been looming large in my brain all week, taking up a lot of my thoughts.

[lost/found penny, photo credit Nicky Thurgar]

Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night…

THIS is pretty much why I see live music (from last night):

AND: Yay! (Why yes, I am a dork)

AND: News from the band — they are planning to start recording a new album in January, out Spring 2010.

Brian Fallon solo acoustic album to follow later next year.

My actual review is showing up for the Denver Post, I’ll have that processed and written soon. Once my ears stop ringing.

There was a war baby, somewhere across the sea

Tomorrow night and Friday, I am anticipating two rather blissful nights with The Gaslight Anthem. Thursday surprisingly brings them to the Black Sheep in my neck of the woods, and the chance to see this raging powderkeg of a band play in a little cinderblock club out on the strip by the pawn shops. It’s $12, and I have a feeling this will be the last time you can see them in such an intimate venue — they are rumored to be the openers on Green Day‘s upcoming megatour. Friday brings them up the highway to Denver’s Gothic Theatre and I plan to be there as well. Notable openers are the Heartless Bastards.

The music of the Gaslight Anthem carries the urgency of youth mixed with the weight of decades past. On The ’59 Sound (one of my favorite albums of last year), sometimes it is hard to tell which generation they actually belong to. I have been enjoying this iTunes-only bonus track from the album specifically because it feels like it’s a story that’s coming to me from a long way off.

Once Upon A Time (bonus track) – The Gaslight Anthem

If my sources are correct, I think this is a cover of the band Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise from their 1996 album. Go figure.

[Thanks John! Photo credit Gaelen Harlacher. “live fast, die awesome.”]

Pretty & Nice make me feel young

It was worth the drive on an otherwise quiet Sunday night to see Boston’s Pretty & Nice at Denver’s Hi-Dive. After loving their album last year, these guys were the first band I saw at SXSW (in the sparkly pink Beauty Bar) and I was mightily impressed.

This weekend I realized that their angular music is so rad simply because it juts and leaps and shines with threads of punk, woven with catchy melodies….and makes me feel young.

Go see these guys if you get a chance.

PRETTY & NICE SPRING TOUR
Apr 23 – Holy Mountain, Seattle, WA
Apr 24 – Blue Lamp, Sacremento, CA
Apr 25 – Zami Co-op, Santa Cruz, CA
Apr 26 – Knitting Factory, Los Angeles, CA
Apr 28 – Modified Arts, Phoenix, AZ
Apr 30 – Emo’s, Austin, TX
May 1 – Super Happy Fun Land, Houston, TX
May 2 – Spanish Moon, Baton Rouge, LA
May 3 – Swello Venue, Jackson, MS
May 6 – Backbooth, Orlando, FL
May 7 – New World Brewery, Tampa, FL
May 8 – Propaganda, Lake Worth, FL
May 9 – Drunken Unicorn, Atlanta, GA
May 10 – Milestone, Charlotte, NC
May 11 – New Brookland, Columbia, SC
May 12 – Local 506, Chapel Hill, NC
May 13 – Soapbox Laundro Lounge, Wilmington, NC
May 14 – Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY
May 16 – Rock N Roll Hotel, Washington, DC

…you’re only an echo

Most days Monday through Friday while I sit and type and answer questions and plan important things, my day is pleasantly peppered with my friend Dainon sending songs and other things that bring me joy. Lately, this dayjob of mine has been quite busy and lots of the stuff I’m connecting best with comes from him.

Today a song popped into my inbox that I loved from the get-go.

Salt Lake City artist David Williams is preparing to release a rich live EP called Wyoming, and the last track on it is a live version of his song “Echo.” Joining him on vocals is the lovely Laura Gibson, a folk artist whose voice I adore (see here). That, and some otherworldy vibrating saw (or…theremin?) being played throughout — gives me chills.

please don’t save me
well i feel i’m wandering….

you’re only an echo
only an echo

Echo (featuring Laura Gibson) – David Williams

This song has also been adopted by Band of Annuals (previous post), who I am growing to love more and more by the week. Watch their arresting version:

For my four readers in Utah, David Williams is having a fundraiser show on Sunday at The Loft to pay for mastering his upcoming album (in July). The $20 ticket gets you a the live show, the concert-only Wyoming EP, the album once it comes out this summer … and some pre-show beer! Tickets are limited to 75.

What a deal. I’d go.

Monday Music Roundup

Spurred by an article I read on the Wall Street Journal site this morning about the movement to ban Comic Sans (and other “fonts of ill will”), I’ve been thinking about typefaces today. One of the hardest things about this new site was the damn typeface. Are you aware, dear reader, of the boggling array of choices one has when selecting the visual representation of their words? And that everyone’s computers may see it differently anyway?

Talking with the guys who laid out my new site often boggles my mind. They send me links to whole sites discussing typefaces, almost as if it were a fetish (is it? It is, isn’t it). They compose sentences like, “I find something pleasingly humanizing about slab-serifs.” It is a whole other world that makes my head spin. A pleasing distraction. As I threatened to them over email a few minutes ago, I am going to start dropping serious typeface knowledge at bars, and then run off with a rich font heir.

When I’m not geeking out over the appearance of my written words in this digital age, I am listening to some new tunes. Of course.

Angela
Jarvis Cocker
The first single from his second solo album, Jarvis Cocker himself (of Pulp fame, and one of my favorite smarmy smarm voices) took time to answer a few preemptive questions about the release. My favorite is: “#3 – HAS JARVIS GONE ROCK? No – but during the course of touring his last record he discovered that, with this band, he COULD rock & so he’d be a fool not to. (When the situation demanded it).” Clearly.  Further Complications was recorded in Chicago with Steve Albini while the band was in town for the Pitchfork Music Festival, and is due 5/19 on Rough Trade.

First Person
Jenny Owen Youngs
This slip of a track (it’s all of forty seconds) starts of Jenny Owen Youngs‘ sophomore album in completely irresistible fashion. All handclaps and ukuleles, this seems like a tune Feist could choreograph something for. Following the success of her ferociously honest Batten The Hatches, her new album Transmitter Failure (May 26, Nettwerk) is richly orchestrated, backed at times with the string section from the Spring Awakening musical (oh, I liked that post).

Magic Show
Electric Owls
After years fronting The Comas, Andy Herod decided (in his words) to “stop playing music for a while because being in a band was ruining my life.” He tells the story of leaving New York City, sitting late at night as a house party wound down to the strains of Neutral Milk Hotel, and how he “just started pulling out all of this old stuff and listening and remembering and learning all over again what used to really electrify my heart.” Recording with local Asheville, North Carolina musician friends under the name Electric Owls, the shimmering and authentic result is an album called Ain’t Too Bright, out on Vagrant Records on May 5. This is just what I needed today.

The Boy From Lawrence County
Felice Brothers
Does anyone else think that this dude should get together with the girl from North Country? Seems obvious to me. Last year The Felice Brothers knocked me flat when they came in all whirling dervishes of accordions, wonderfully wordy lyrics, and pure undiluted joy in concert. The sophomore album Yonder Is The Clock (out now on Conor Oberst’s Team Love label) is largely a pensive, gorgeous, twilight album. This song grabbed me on the long drive home Sunday night — so resigned and wistful. It sounds like it already happened a long time ago, the quietly plucking banjo plunking like rain on a cabin’s tin roof, just starting to fall or right after the storm has passed overhead. “Roll on old silver river through the Iron Range, past the sleeping trains that wait. Gold and amber petals in your water wade.”

Born A Man
Clem Snide
I found myself in a conversation at the Clem Snide show on Tuesday night with my friend Luke (the wonderful illustrator responsible for that Fuel/Friends header logo above!) and we had to keep straightening out in our minds how Clem Snide is the band and Eef Barzelay is the frontman. However you say his first name, Eef is a songwriter that impresses me in the league of John Darnielle and the Decemberists — you know, the kids who could have soundtracked an SAT study party. I cleaned out the merch booth after his incisively impressive set, picking up more discs to get acquainted with his extensive catalog. Their newest album Hungry Bird (429 Records) is represented well by this vivid song that hit me the hardest during his set, with its bluesy melody that somehow manages to feel effervescent. When Eef repeated the line over and over again – “We are just bracing for the impact by loosening our limbs…”  something in my chest tightened. “Every single one of us has a kitten up a tree.”

Pause to rock on Record Store Day

Yesterday was Record Store Day and I got completely stymied in all my attempts to be anything but a snowed-in sister seeing my long-gone brother (he is back from France after eight months, and we just hung out at my parents’ house all day yesterday, eating cinnamon rolls). So instead, today I clickety-clicked through YouTube, vicariously living through all the wonderful performances popping up on there from independent record retailers across the country:

The excellent Salt Lake City band Devil Whale (courtesy of Dainon):

Silversun Pickups – “Lazy Eye” at Rasputin Records in Berkeley:

Avett Brothers at Grimey’s in Nashville – “Paranoia in Bb Major”

This crowd singalong from Mute Math (“Peculiar People”) is downright buoyant:

…and this Beatles cover from Record Store Day in Portugal may just be the effing coolest thing I’ve seen in a while (courtesy of musician Samuel Úria):

There are dozens more, like Graham Coxon or Patrick Wolf in London, Manchester Orchestra in Atlanta, or…Cheech and Chong in Australia?

God bless independent record retailers! How did you spend the day, dear reader?