popwreckoning

The Cloud I’m Under is the experimental-synthpop laptop project of an individual who supposedly lives in New York, prefers to remain anonymous, and claims to have been making music since the age of six. He’s been steadily releasing digital EPs every couple months with titles like There’s More To Life Than Indie Rock and Roll, My 80’s Comedown EP, Lo-fi Kids With Electro Dads EP, and in the time since I began writing this review and now, he’s already posted another one, called the Someone Has Foiled Our Plans EP. As with many lo-fi projects that pump out albums at a frenetic pace, the differences between each of these releases is understated: each sounds hushed, flush with hip, synth-centric influences like New Order and Berlin-era Bowie, and like they were created by someone awake late at night, alone.

The six song John The Carpenter EP is divided between the pop songs that make up the first two thirds and the synth experiments that make up the last. On those first four songs, it’s clear that The Cloud I’m Under has an obvious grasp on pop structuring and hookcraft, best displayed by the snakey, whispered melodies of the goosebump-y “Smile Awkwardly” and leather jacketed “Still Friends?”. The sinister, ambient title track has some experimental tendencies (or is just kind of weird, particularly that bobbing synth line that kind of hovers around for a bit), but buried beneath the layers of reverb it’s also got a bit of a sweet tooth.

The last two tracks on the EP are “Accidental Nap” and “Pfft And It’s Gone”; the former an ominous ambient synth piece, the latter’s florescent, cascading melody sounds like SNES-era videogame music.

As with all of The Cloud I’m Under’s work though, the bland digital production of John The Carpenter mars the final product, making it sounds like it was recorded in Garageband or Reason or whatever we used in my grade 10 music class. It takes the edge off the songs, making them sound cheap (in a bad way) and bloated. Though some compression and more live sounds are recommended, check off The Cloud I’m Under’s box for “interesting.”

Downloads and more mp3s from The Cloud I’m Under are available here.

Challengers, the New Pornographers’ last album, was not only their most underrated album, but might’ve even been their best. It may not have been the fun, colorful pop normally expected from the Pornos, but its then-newfound (and profound) maturity could be appreciated on its own terms if given the time and patience it required. In the years since that album, it appears as though frontman A.C. Newman has returned at least in part to the jubilant pop he’s known for. The Porno’s latest album, Together, finds him injecting the band’s trademark saccharine energy back into their songs, but at the same time, continuing to explore the more mature sounds (cello it up!) and themes of its predecessor.

The first half of the ten-song Together is exactly what anyone would hope that mature-but-still-energetic sound sounds like. Tracks like “The Crash Years” and “My Shepherd” are among the hookiest songs Newman’s ever written. At the same time, their ornate arrangements and more thoughtful, reflective lyrics give them a depth no one would ever have expected from the Pornos ten years ago. Dan Bejar’s punchy “Silver Jenny Dollar” is there also, benefiting in no small part from a stunning piano-laden arrangement and Neko Case’s backing always-incredible candy-colored vocals.

The second half of the album is a bit of a letdown after the spectacular heights of its first half. Though Bejar’s climactic “Daughters Of Sorrow” holds its own, the weird reggae (or whatever it’s trying to be) of “Bite Out Of Bed” just doesn’t work and messes up the flow of the album. Closer “We End Up Together” drags on three minutes too long, something made worse considering it’s not all that great to begin with.

It wouldn’t be right to call any album with as many amazing (and half decent) songs as Together a disappointment, but with just a couple more it could’ve been a masterpiece. As it is though, there’s enough to enjoy on Together. And what there is to enjoy, is among the Porno’s best work yet.

01. Moves
02. Crash Years
03. Your Hands (Together)
04. Silver Jenny Dollar
05. Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
06. My Shepherd
07. If You Can’t See My Mirrors
08. Up In The Dark
09. Valkyrie In The Roller Disco
10. A Bite Out Of My Bed
11. Daughters Of Sorrow
12. We End Up Together

Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn’s always had a bit of a soft spot for sentimental, almost cheesy stuff. Teenage love, characters who like to hang out and listen to records and go to concerts and parties are big concerns in his songs. The Hold Steady’s latest album, Heaven Is Whenever, seems to revel mostly in this territory. Gone are the druggies and hoodrats and ‘killer parties’ of previous discs, instead, at the heart of Heaven Is Whenever, it’s the salvation that kids find in rock n’ roll music that Finn seems predominantly concerned with. The result is The Hold Steady’s most harmless album, but in some ways also their warmest, as though Finn wrote the album more interested in himself connecting directly with adolescents than telling compelling tales likely derived from his own adolescence. “I know what you’re going through/I had to go through that too,” he sings in “Soft In The Center,” addressing kids directly like some kind of indie-rock father figure.

The approach, however, is double-edged: there’s nothing here as remotely intense and hard hitting as something like “Cattle and the Creeping Things” or exciting as “Chips Ahoy!” Finn’s host of kookie characters are still around, but he doesn’t name them directly, and the exquisite details he’s always been so gifted at relating are largely absent. It’s not so much that the album is lyrically weak, as it is simply not as incredibly strong as other Hold Steady albums. On the other hand, on songs like “We Can Get Together” Finn still unleashes showstopping lines like, “Heaven is whenever/We can get together/And listen to your records.” And in the same song, the displacement of the line: “He wasn’t just the drummer/He was the singer’s younger brother/I still spin that single/But it don’t sound that simple anymore,” gives it an ominous weight as you wonder what happened to the drummer, and why did it affect Finn so much to think that he was “someone’s younger brother?”

Musically, Heaven Is Whenever might be The Hold Steady’s strongest and most consistent album. The choruses are bigger and better than ever, especially in “Soft In The Center” and “Rock Problems,” and then embellishments like the killer harmonic guitar solo in the latter track and the gorgeous slow-dance waltz that closes “We Can Get Together” top things off wonderfully. The Hold Steady are still writing songs with three or four big chords, but they’ve managed to use them well throughout the album.

Depending on what the person listening likes most about The Hold Steady, Heaven Is Whenever could be either their favorite or least favorite album. Even for those who might think that the songs lack the punchiness of an earlier, more street-wise Hold Steady, they lack none of the band’s big heart.

Track Listing:
1. The Sweet Part of the City
2. Soft in the Center
3. The Weekenders
4. The Smidge
5. Rock Problems
6. We Can Get Together
7. Hurricane J
8. Barely Breathing
9. Our Whole Lives
10. A Slight Discomfort

For some reason, after Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s third (and best) album, Howl, the relevancy of the band suffered a bit of a drop off. Baby 8 came out and all of a sudden people were complaining that BRMC were too stylish for their own good, past their time, and just generally unnecessary. Actually, the album’s not all that terrible. BRMC’s music never changed much in terms of style or quality; it never got any worse, but the world around them changed and BRMC were berated for not taking risks and allowing their music to become somewhat predictable. Beat The Devil’s Tattoo doesn’t mark a new turning point or anything like that. BRMC do everything they’ve done before – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s neu-gaze rockers, Howl’s back porch ballads – successfully consolidating it all on a kind of mission statement of an album. However, the lack of a challenge sees the band’s songwriting falling into what feels at times like routine rather than inspiration.

Even so, Beat the Devil’s Tattoo still delivers a couple solid standouts. “Bad Blood” drops the rough edge just a tad to allow a luminescent chorus to take flight, and piano ballad “Long Way Down” returns them to the weighty romantic melancholy they showed such a knack for with “Howl.” On the other hand, the aforementioned back porch style ballads here – “Sweet Feeling” and “The Toll” – that once seem so novel for the band now just feel somewhat rudimentary. Fuzzy raves like “Evol” lack the melodies to keep things interesting.

Beat The Devil’s Tattoo is exactly what we’ve come to expect from BRMC: badass, super stylish road rock played with gusto and conviction. But as time goes by, it’s getting hard to remember that there was a time when this band could really prove that they were more than that.

Track Listing:
1. Beat The Devil’s Tattoo
2. Conscience Killer
3. Bad Blood
4. War Machine
5. Sweet Feeling
6. Evol
7. Mama Taught Me Better
8. River Styx
9. The Toll
10. Aya
11. Shadow’s Keeper
12. Long Way Down
13. Half-State

Bear In Heaven is an experimental indie-rock band from Brooklyn, New York whose latest album Beast Rest Forth Mouth was recently released to significant critical acclaim, even receiving Pitchfork’s much-coveted ‘Best New Music’ designation. After being personally blown away by the album, I rushed to get an interview with frontman Jon Philpot to find out how Bear In Heaven began and how it feels now to be in a rising indie band. The interview was conducted just a couple days after the Pitchfork review.

Marc Z Grub, PopWreckoning: So tell me about your week, Jon.
Jon Philpot, Bear In Heaven: My week? My week has been pretty crazy.Lots of interviews with web people and people from magazines and also lots of emails from people in Europe, which is cool.
MG: Was it like the Pitchfork review went up and suddenly the phone started ringing?
JP: Essentially, yes. I am as amazed as anybody about how incredibly powerful Pitchfork is. And I’m happy to have received the good side of it. It’s really cool. I never knew it existed like this.
MG: Yeah, this sort of ‘OMG, Pitchfork is so powerful!’ thing keeps coming up with bands I talk to. It’s pretty amazing. So, this [album, Beast Rest Forth Mouth] is your second album, right?
JP: This is our second full-length record and we also have an EP that I did on my own way back before any of the guys that are in the band were presently in the band. And there’s also a dance EP we made for this record out of [the song] “Wholehearted Mess.”

MG: So can you tell me how Bear In Heaven originated?
JP: It started basically with just me. I was making bedroom-style music but kind of pushing it a little as far as what I was trying to record. Then people kind of got excited about stuff that I was doing and then I got a record out – that little EP I was telling you about – called Tunes Nextdoor To Songs. And then the guys joined the band: the guys that are in the band presently. We lost two members – one is David Daniell, who’s actually gone on to a really successful solo experimental guitar kind of career. He moved to Chicago and started doing that. And then the other fellow is James Elliott and he played with School Of Seven Bells for a while. I think he actually recorded on their Alpinisms record and then he also has the really fruitful kind of awkward dance music project that he’s doing too [ed. Ateleia]. And then the four of us that are left just kind of kept going.

MG: And how did the four of you get together?
JP: [Keyboardist/Guitarist] Sadek (Bazarra) and I are friends from Atlanta. We actually dated the same girl, that’s how we know each other, oddly enough. Not at the same time though, at different times. [Guitarist] Adam (Wills) and I worked together at a studio, at this kind of video-making studio and then when I moved up to New York, he moved up kind of shortly after and we just maintained the friendship. And [drummer] Joe [Stickney] and Adam actually went to school together, so that’s how those two guys knew each other. And then we just kind of started playing altogether. Actually, we got a practice space and it was all the people that I told you about, minus Joe, and we were playing music without a drummer for like, a long while. And that was kind of weird but we were doing it, we were playing. And then Joe came in and we were like, “oh, now we’re a band.”

MG: Has having a full band changed the way that you write and changed the way that Bear In Heaven sounds?
JP: Yeah, it did, I mean it limited the palette in like a good way because before it was like you’re just making music and you think about, “oh, what sound could I put here” or, “what sound could I put there” and “do I know anybody who plays cello or harp or trumpet or something” and you just put all those people on the record because that’s what was going on. And your pallet is super wide or at least my pallet was super wide, you know, I knew all these people doing different stuff.

Now that we’re like a band and want to make music that reflects what we’re doing live, it’s limited the palette and made us sort of more cohesive I think. But we still have these weird elements of what I was doing in the past or something. Like when we started playing altogether, we were playing the songs I had recorded on my own. We were kind of trying to translate them in a weird way. We had synthesizers and samplers and we were trying to translate these weird very personal-time songs, none of the timing was in any kind of normal counts or anything like that. It was basically like a cluster fuck. But that, I think, that kind of helped us learn to do things more efficiently, but also kind of keeping some of the weird ridiculousness that I guess I was doing on my own. Basically, I didn’t really know what I was doing: just kind of experimenting.

MG: I was trying to think about how to describe your guys’ sounds in terms of influences or likenesses to other bands and I was having a really hard time doing it. Where would you say the Bear In Heaven-sound comes from?
JP: There are so many things that have shaped [the sound]. I guess Talk Talk was a really big influence at one point; those guys were making really cool music. I think everybody in the band would say something different though. I really like Jerry Butler. You know, it’s been funny reading people trying to figure out what we’re doing and we’re not trying to do a thing that sounds like something else, we’re just doing our thing. Does that make sense?
MG: It does, because you guys really do not sound like any one other band or thing in particular. I thought you guys definitely sounded very 2009, but I couldn’t point to any one band or movement in particular and say like, “They’re trying to do that.”
JP: Yeah, like it’s not because we don’t want to. I mean, like we know we sound like whatever else is going on, there is definitely that, [but] there’s not really a point in trying to be like another modern band necessarily. We’re just trying to do what we do naturally and [we’ve been] kind of way under the radar for a long time so we just kind of kept doing what we were doing. A lot of times we’ve failed. We’ve had a lot of failures and also some minor successes here and there and we’ve made friendships in the music community that we value. We’ve been around playing for about five years, but I don’t know. I heard one guy on Facebook or Twitter or something compared us to Moroder and Toto.
MG: Giorgio Moroder?
JP: Yeah. (Laughs)
MG: I guess that’s not a horrible comparison, but any band that I’d try to compare you to, it would be like, “not reeeeaaaallllyyyy.”
JP: Yeah, we come from such a wide background I guess. I mean all of us independently come from such a wide listening background, it’s stuff that it’s just gotten in our brains and we don’t even know what the hell it is anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that I really like, like you can definitely put Jerry Butler and Talk Talk down there, those guys are great. But if you talk to Adam he might tell you there’s some RnB thing that just hit him hard or something like that. Oh, and Prince. Prince is great.

MG: You all said you come from different background, what kind of background would you say you come from?
JP: Musically, uh– a late bloomer. I didn’t start playing music until late in the game, but when I did start playing I was really into minimalism and experimental music and that kind of stuff. Not necessarily like pop tunes, though strangely, the older I get the more I really like pop music and rock. Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll still listen to some ‘out’ electronic shit and I think that that’s kind of where my heart will always be. I definitely have to say when I heard about Tony Conrad and that band AMM, I was like, “This is music?” I mean, it was confusing that that could actually be music.

MG: How old were you when you started playing music?
JP: I probably was 19, maybe.
MG: How old are you now?
JP: I’m old. It’s kind of funny. I’m 35.
MG: Oh wow, it took a long time to get to ‘Best New Music,’ but you got there.
JP: (Laughs) Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I mean I’ve been in other projects that have kind of just totally gone under the radar and weren’t even for this particular crowd at all.

MG: You said you guys had a lot of failures, could you tell me about maybe about a couple of your massive failures?
JP: Well, as far as live shows go, one of the bigger failures we had was when we headlined at The Knitting Factory. That was a terrible show. It was one of those shows that we were like, “Jesus Christ, are we gonna continue this?” But we pushed through, thankfully. We ended up having a good show a couple weeks after that. But that show in particular was terrible. It was the night of the Palin-Biden presidential debate and everybody’s eyes were glued on the television. Nobody came out to that show, maybe five people in total. It was a pretty rough experience. And then I guess, you know, not to put any hate on the last record we did (Red Bloom Of The Boom), but we were just making music that we kind of had to get it out, get it out of our system. These like long songs and they were not necessarily for everybody-
MG: Pitchfork still gave you a good review on that one though, they gave you like a 7.8, which is pretty legit.
JP: Yeah, yeah, no, we were really gracious that we got that. That actually helped too. But you know, that record was more of, like, we just had to get that record out of us. And it was good that we did. And it’s weird whenever I listen to it, there’s like so much space and we just were taking our time. But in this climate, it seems like the attention span just isn’t there on a record. All the songs that you hear on this record were at one point over seven minutes so we’ve cut it back and you know, we’re trying in a way to make it fun for us and fun for the audience. We’ve definitely learned a lot over the course of trying to make these songs the way that we want to make them and the way that we do make them.

MG: And how else is this album different from the last one?
JP: It’s just more ‘honed in’ on what it is we’re doing. I think we are actually ‘figuring it out.’ We’re figuring out our process; we’re figuring out our systems. We’re kind of a nerdy band a little bit, we’re kind of pecky, but it’s been kind of fun, it really has and it opens us up to doing different sounding stuff, I think. We want to make stuff that not just us would enjoy.

MG: So what’s next for Bear In Heaven? What are you guys feeling in terms of your next step?
JP: Music videos and then going on tour as much as we can. And between all that, just kind of get back to writing and stuff like that, which is cool. We’ve always had more songs written and recorded than are out so we finally caught up with ourselves. [We can finally] take the stuff – like a freakin’ hard-drive full of sketches – and be like “alright, those ten, make something.”

MG: Are you feeling like you’re going to be making any stylistic changes?
JP: I don’t know, we’ll just feel it out. We’ve not like had a plan like that ever, so we’ll keep hopefully just stumbling along. Maybe we’ll land on something good.

Bear In Heaven: website | myspace

On the album Another Side Of Bob Dylan, in the song “My Back Pages,” Dylan sings, “But I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.” True, that was a kiss off to the “protest songs” thing he’d been pigeonholed with and wanted to escape, but on his next album, he not only abandoned that particular stance, but stylistically began embracing rock and moving away from the acoustic folk that had dominated his music up to that point. In the song, he words his “declaration of intent” paradoxically to increase the power of the statement, but really it makes perfect sense: he had been playing the (older) music of the past up until that point and now he was going to play the (younger) music of the then-present and future. Of course, Dylan never entirely abandoned folk, but rather, he advanced it by electrifying it, filling it with amphetamine-fueled beatnik-inspired poetry and abandoning the limiting three chord structure of traditional folk to pen otherworldly epics like “Ballad of Thin Man” and “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.”

The past can’t be ignored, but it’s no place to make a home, or worse, a career. Elvis Perkins and The Dimes aren’t so much folk revivalists as they are folk preservationists, with the latter act going so far as to base the songs on their first album on stories they found in depression era newspapers preserved beneath the floorboards of the guitarist’s house.

The two acts draw inspiration from Americana of more or less the same time period, but they differ greatly in their aesthetics. Perkins’ approach is kind of goofy and not adverse to more electric instrumentation and idiosyncratic brass arrangements. The title track for instance, despite its morbid subject matter involving dedication “till doomsday,” is a jovial, bouncy folky tune with a traditional melody Perkins sings in his quivering, exaggerated tenor.

Perkins’ strength lies in his large, charismatic personality. It’s enough to carry the music, but his music isn’t original enough to carry itself. All the songs on The Doomsday EP are based on traditional folk structures and the lyrics have their roots in either the religious or archaic. Admittedly, in “Gypsy Davy” the topic of underage girls is still relevant, but it’s sung in away that suggests some kind of creepy 19th century perspective. And the straightforward “Stop Drop Rock And Roll” feels like nothing more than an energetic exercise, like something played to warm up the band. Perkins is simply repackaging music that’s been around for decades. He’s not updating it or drawing on it for inspiration like Bob Dylan or Bright Eyes or M. Ward; he’s just remaking it with a funny voice and an electric guitar.

The Dimes fare somewhat better, largely because their songs aren’t so strictly traditional in their structure. The arrangements are very in keeping with the sounds of the period, and the band use all kinds of sounds of the period to tremendous effect: sweeping harmonies are everywhere, supported by various rustic-sounding stringed instruments and all kinds of little bells and whistles. Over the course of The King…, The Dimes try out a selection of musical outfits. In “The Liberator” the band sound dark, brooding singing about the abolitionist newspaper the song is named after; the moving “Save Me Clara” is sung from the perspective of a dying man, begging in vain for “Clara” (apparently Clara Barton, a nurse during the civil war) to save him from his fate; the wispy, ornate “Ballad Of Winslow Homer” is about an American painter of the time who for a period painted scenes of wartime; “Webster Thayter” is a twangy tune about a judge who condemned two men to death, despite the fact that there was very little evidence to suggest they actually committed the crime they were accused of.

The Dimes’ devotion to the past is so deep-rooted and expansive that with a Wikipedia page open, it’s hard not to be pretty impressed by what they’ve accomplished. But despite the strength of the music (which is considerable), in steeping the album so strongly in the past they’ve distanced it from themselves. The emotions don’t quite ring true, but seem secondhand, like echoes from some elsewhere, which they are. And true, an artist can put himself in character and deliver great work, but The Dimes just don’t quite manage to pull it off entirely on The King… Maybe it’s because they focused too much on the history and not enough on the emotions involved, or maybe because they sound too young, or too clean.

The artistic and commercial success of Fleet Foxes and M. Ward and any number of great contemporary folk and Americana artists prove that the genre is still as valid and full of potential as any other, but looking at great bands and artists like the aforementioned, it’s not greatly apparent that there’s a thin line between paying tribute to the music of the past and indulgently recreating it. But there is. The past had its music, its stories, and its culture and those aren’t going anywhere. It’s up to the artists of today to give the present its own music, stories and culture.

Elvis Perkins: website | myspace | @ bonnaroo | @ sxsw
The Dimes: website | myspace

Alabama folk singer A.A. Bondy recently released his second solo album When the Devil’s Loose this past September and has spent much of his time extensively touring and hitting the festival circuit.

Our writer Marc Z. Grub caught up with Bondy on the phone to ask him a few questions.

.Listen to Marc’s full interview with A.A. Bondy.

A.A. Bondy: myspace