The Stranger

Lords of the Ring

Christopher Hong — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 14:30:00 -0700

Can you smell what Bumbermania's cooking? by Christopher Hong

Bumbershoot returns to Seattle this weekend with Bumbermania, the festival's inaugural foray into the international folk art of professional wrestling. The matches are presented by Tacoma’s Grit City Wrestling, the newest local school offering classes to prepare aspirants to the squared circle. An oft-quoted cliché purports that wrestling, “ain’t ballet.” While Terry Funk and Swan Lake seem worlds apart, there are similarities—physical discipline, complete dedication to body-altering performance, and the desire to perform in the brightest spotlight.

If Bumbermania will be your first live wrestling show, imagine a scene that blends the communal spirit of football crowd chants (domestic and international) with the audience participation of Rocky Horror and you get something that resembles wrestling’s typical audience. Yelling at performers is generally encouraged as wrestlers thrive on crowd volume to push them through the risky stunts and crashes both in and out of the ring.

Ringside photographer for SOS Pro Wrestling, and an experienced freelancer covering everything from sports, weddings, portraits and pets, Jamie feels that capturing wrestling is more complex than her other gigs. “It’s way more than just sports photography—it’s journalistic and it’s portraiture. There’s a lot of drama and you’re helping tell that story. Plus, weddings feel less stressful now since I don’t have to worry about chairs flying at my head.”

Bumbermania's talent comes from all over the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon, and Vancouver BC—and each day features two sets of matches in the afternoon and evening outside of MoPOP. Because it's a locally themed show, wrestlers will step outside their usual gimmicks to become avatars for NW icons in cosplay combat. For example, as a nod to hip-hop’s 50th anniversary (as celebrated in MoPOP's current collection of exhibits 50 Years: Honoring 50 Years of Hip-Hop History) the old school will face off against the new with Broadway posse boss Sir Mix-a-lot trading body slams and dropkicks with Macklemore repping his Bogey Boys fashion faction (and Kendrick stans).

Greg “Namor” Sage, survivor of the infamous Ramones Orange War of 1995. CHRISTOPHER HONG

It may be the first Bumbermania, but this isn't combatant Greg “Namor” Sage's first foray into Bumbershoot battle. Sage was 16 when he watched the Ramones at Memorial Stadium in 1995. “It was very hot and they were giving out oranges for people to stay hydrated," he said. "At the end of the show, the crowd formed two masses at each end of the field and people were just throwing oranges and peels at each other. My friends and I ran through the middle of the ‘Orange War,’ and got destroyed. It was amazing!”

Another performer with festival history is “Verified” Steve Migs, who co-hosts KISW’s morning radio show. Migs can’t wait for his second taste of Bumbershoot glory—his former band Peter Parker played the fest at the venue formerly known as EMP’s Sky Church in 2002. “I don’t know how many people can say that they have performed at Bumbershoot as a drummer and a wrestler! It’s crazy to think that was 20 years ago with my old band and this year I’ll step out from behind the kit and into a wrestling ring!”

2022 Queen of Thorns champion Rebel Kel. CHRISTOPHER HONG

Established local talent Rebel Kel and rising star Amira Lukens are also on the Bumber bill. Known for chokeslams and boots to faces, Kel trained at the esteemed Buddy Wayne Academy, she’s held multiple local titles, and was champion of DOA Wrestling’s second annual Queen of Thorns tourney in 2022. Despite her accolades and fighting spirit, the rangy athlete billed as “The 6-foot Stunner,” is reflective when thinking about her wrestling education. “The hardest thing for me to learn in wrestling was to let go of self-doubt and to love myself exactly as I am.”

Before graduating to perform inside the ropes, Oregon Pro Wrestling student Lukens regularly traveled 220+ miles from Salem, OR to set up rings at various promotions. When you’re a rookie wrestler part of paying your dues is helping with the physical labor of assembling and disassembling a ring made up of a steel frame, topped with wooden 2x4s, thinner than you’d think foam padding, and stretched canvas. Looking back on her first full year on the indie circuit as a wrestler, Amira recalls her first match in the same 2022 tournament won by Rebel Kel.

“My debut match I lost to Su Yung and was eliminated in the 1st round but it still felt so wild to finally get to wrestle in the ring I had set up so many times," she said. "Fast forward to this year and instead of being eliminated, I was overwhelmed to be the tournament champion! It was so rewarding to experience that with all the fans and people who supported me as I blossomed in the past couple years and it meant something more to me than I can explain. My life has basically become consumed by wrestling I can’t wait to see where it takes me.”

Bumbermania takes place in the Recess District at Bumbershoot on Saturday and Sunday at 4:30 pm and 8:30 pm.

Album Reviews

Megan Seling — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:00:00 -0700

New Albums from Le Loup, Modeselektor, Wiley, The Go Team, and more by Megan Seling

C.O.C.O.

Play Drums + Bass

(K)

1/2

C.O.C.O. (pronounced "see oh see oh," btw), is the Olympia duo of Chris (C) Sutton and Olivia (O) Ness. The two do exactly what their third full-length promises: They play drums and bass. Nothing more, nothing less.

As they've been doing it for the past seven years, Sutton and Ness have tamed the rock-and-roll beast, making their dance combo purr like a lo-fi kitten. Their well-established style of swapped vocals and musical simplicity are highlighted on tracks like the rollicking "For You," the cocky "We Gotta Right," and the tiki-hut jam "Much to Learn." But the most innovative part of Play Drums comes during the final trilogy of songs.

While the majority of C.O.C.O.'s songs are free of unnecessary flourish—as organic as possible while still being plugged in—the aptly titled instrumental "Asteroids" lands a good dose of outer space by way of distortion, atmospheric guitar feedback, and unidentified flying noises. It's a dance-off on another planet. "High Low" brings things back down to earth. Sexy bass flirts with the subtle snare while Ness does her smoky siren croon. "The End" explodes into a party of drum rolls and friends (I assume) hooting and hollering in the studio—it's the way things would end if the band had been playing in your living room all along. MEGAN SELING

LE LOUP

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly

(Hardly Art)

File Le Loup under electro-banjodelica—this is the album Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel would record if he underwent a Lawnmower Man–type brain boost and suddenly faced an existential crisis of faith. Only Castanets' 2005 sleeper First Light's Freeze incorporates banjo with as chilling and eerie results.

Yes: chilling banjo. It's the lead instrument here, picked delicately by Le Loup mastermind Sam Simkoff, recalling a Deliverance-style faceless foreboding, though more damning. Simkoff's banjo seeps quietly through dark woods and mingles with wisps of transistor radio, ethereal vocal harmonies, and soft forest-floor rhythms. Or it's dropped altogether in favor of front-porchy hand claps and a mist of digital fizz and humming synth chords—as on the sinister, intriguing "We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!"—to make for deliciously mysterious freak-folk grandeur. Though minimal in his approach, Simkoff is going for a thematic blockbuster; just check the album title. "Oh this world was made for ending" becomes an endlessly looped mantra in "Planes Like Vultures," and on "I Had a Dream I Died," the album's funereal closer, backed by a looped and refracted chorus, he repeats "This is the end..." until the sample dissolves into squelched, staticky feedback and, finally, birdsong.

It's powerful stuff. Songs bleed into one another and fade in and out like movements. Starting off with "Canto I" and ending with "Canto XXXVI" (a reference to Dante's Inferno), there's a vague but definite narrative continuity here, a diffuse tone poem that blearily stalks between life and death, never settling for either. JONATHAN ZWICKEL

MODESELEKTOR

Happy Birthday!

(Bpitch Control)

1/2

Modeselektor's debut full-length, Hello Mom!, succeeded in part because of a certain element of surprise. For those not following the duo of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary's odd 12-inch singles and compilation appearances, the album must have seemed to come out of nowhere. And its eclectic yet thoroughly synthesized mix of electro, dub, hiphop, breaks, and ambient kept the listener guessing from track to track, never sure what mode these selectors would land on next.

The duo's sophomore effort, Happy Birthday! (both Bronsert and Szary are new fathers), may have fewer shocks in store—in fact, it sometimes feels like a retread—but this sequel more than makes up for the familiarity with Modeselektor's signature, impeccable sound design. Synths bounce and squiggle, tones ping like sonar or bubble up and burst, beats and samples pulse and disintegrate.

Some guests from the first album return here—French rap crew TTC add their vocal charisma to digitally stuttered club creeper "2000007" and Rhythm & Sound crooner Paul St. Hilaire delivers the coolly Teutonic dub ballad "Let Your Love Grow." Some new collaborators show up as well, notably a typically ethereal Thom Yorke (he's a fan) on the dubstep-steeped "The White Flash," Berlin-based hiphop puppetry troupe (seriously) Puppetmastaz on trunk-rattler "The Dark Side of the Sun," and Otto von Schirach on the demented Miami bass of "Hyper Hyper."

Even with such company, the star is always Bronsert and Szary's productions. The album's unabetted tracks—the playfully menacing "Happy Birthday," with its loping guitar and deep, punchy bass; the ghostly, clave-driven "Godspeed;" the caustic arpeggios of "Sucker Pin" and "Black Block;" the soft-focus haze of "EM Ocean" and "Edgar"—only further cement Modeselektor's place in 2000007 as producers of formidable breadth, depth, and skill. ERIC GRANDY

WILEY

Playtime Is Over

Given that UK grime producer/MC Wiley has announced plans to retire from record making (aside from a possible, occasional behind-the-scenes gig), not to mention the no-really-I'm-serious tenor of its title, you'd be within your rights to think his second solo album might drag along. This notion takes roughly 10 seconds of listening per track to disabuse. Musically, the range of Playtime Is Over is exuberant, almost carefree—bulbous bass and playful scare-flick violins on "Bow E3," musty, phased strings on "Baby Girl," floating bells on "Letter 2 Dizzee," the piping little tunelet propelling "Getalong Gang." None of this will sound unprecedented to those familiar with 2004's Treddin' on Thin Ice (or In at the Deep End, the 2005 disc Wiley produced with his crew, Roll Deep), but it's an impressive array nevertheless.

The lyrics are another story, though not to the degree you might think given Wiley's apparent dissatisfaction with his own career path. Playtime Is Over isn't dour or bitter; even "Letter 2 Dizzee," about the Rascal he once mentored, attempts to bury the pair's hatchet: "What's going on, brother?/I got to the stage where I wouldn't never judge no other/No race, no creed, no human, no color/Nothing ain't changed except I'm the best now/It doesn't matter, I'm still your big brother... We've made up a lot of ground." But his spirits aren't really in his boasts; you remember "Bow E3" not for its shouts to his East London neighborhood but for that beat, those hand claps, that b-line. Wiley is a producer first; his intended stepping back from the mic makes all the sense in the world. MICHAEL-ANGELO MATOS

PINBACK

Autumn of the Seraphs

(Touch and Go)

1/2

Pinback are a band of remarkable consistency. While the band's core songwriters, Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV, get their kicks out in a myriad of solo and side projects with varying degrees of quality, Pinback continues to deliver with all the precision and excellence of a finely tuned Swiss watch.

Pinback's songs have a linear quality, their trajectory and design apparent from the start. But their catalog doesn't resemble a straight line so much as it does a Möbius strip, with every album returning to and refining the same sense of ambience and melodic approach. Their latest, Autumn of the Seraphs, is another salve of intricately assembled musical arithmetic and sleepy melodies.

Autumn of the Seraphs starts with the up-tempo "From Nothing to Nowhere," with its mix of calculated urgency and dreamy choruses, before settling into more laconic territory with songs like "How We Breathe" and the acoustic ennui of "Walters." But the highlights come in the last half of the album's sequencing, where deeper hooks take hold in the bass grooves and the bits of synth and electronic punctuation are more smoothly incorporated into the overall aesthetic. "Blue Harvest," has the nimble touch of the Police, and songs like "Subbing for Eden," and "Devil You Know," neatly shift between loping verses and cyclical, oceanic choruses.

So it goes that Autumn of the Seraphs will not offer any big surprises to Pinback fans, but why should it? The customary layers of gauzy vocals, sharp guitar lines offset by syncopated bass, and the mechanical precision of their songs is as solid as ever; the complexity of the arrangements only somewhat diminished by their familiarity. CHRISTOPHER HONG

THE GO! TEAM

Proof of Youth

(Sub Pop)

When Brighton's the Go! Team released its debut on these shores in March 2005 (over a year after its UK/European bow), the "group," aka sampler fiend Ian Parton, wore its influences on fluttering French-cuffed sleeves. There was no mistaking an appreciation for late-70s block parties, piano ballads, and TV themes, all cobbled together with equal parts electro and indie rock. This brassy, iPod-friendly amalgam of double-Dutch treble bombs and bombastic percussion wooed and won the hearts of bloggers, advertising agencies, and booking agents, requiring Parton to recruit a cadre of musicians and one MC to translate the sampledelic Thunder, Lightning, Strike for the stage. Now, after several summers of festivals—an eternity on the internet—the six-person strong Go! Team brings their buoyant approach back to the record shelves with another cheer-worthy, if not quite as blue-chip album.

On Proof of Youth, the blissed-out pastiche is intact, even more overtly so. Elements collide with a fierceness, as if the front stoop of 227 or What's Happening Now! was blitzed by Michael Knight in KITT. On highlights such as "Fake ID" and the "Keys to the City," bristly Sonic Youth/Pastels guitar jitters and melodic pirouettes—triple axels, really—are corralled by horns like cowboy yelps. "Flashlight Fight," features Chuck D and finds the Go! Team doing Bomb Squad as if laid down by the Daptones in a Sergio Leone sandstorm, while "I Never Needed It Now So Much," featuring Solex, pulls on Vince Guaraldi's jazz whimsy. There's nothing as unabashedly wistful as select swatches of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, though a couple tracks come close.

Taut production distinguishes Proof of Youth from earlier Go! Team material, giving the album a more focused, forward velocity than the breezier, swinging Thunder, Lightning, Strike. But Proof of Youth doesn't stray too far from the formula. This album won't overly distress or impress those familiar with the Go! Team's bedrock-solid bubblegum, but it should please plenty. TONY WARE

Gout

Ague

Scurvy

Dropsy

1+0=Infinity

Christopher Hong — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:00:00 -0700

Tiny Vipers Offer Hands Across the Void by Christopher Hong

Tiny Vipers' Sub Pop debut, Hands Across the Void, is an album about hope and desolation, about how those opposing senses feed on each other despite our best efforts to control them. The album is a marriage of other dualisms as well: the individual and the infinite, the mundane and the fantastic, the forest fire that ravages and the resulting ash that gives birth.

Jesy Fortino, the solo songwriter behind Tiny Vipers, has long dwelled in the parallels and contradictions of expansive ambience and severe minimalism. In Hands Across the Void, Fortino delivers an album whose spare arrangements belie its fullness. In the phantom landscapes conjured by Tiny Vipers, it's as if one plus zero equals infinity.

With little more than her plaintive voice and skeletal guitar lines, Fortino crafts a rich mythology of songs that evoke and elegize the hidden mysticism of the everyday world. While she has professed severe stage fright in the past, in the studio, Fortino is at her most self-assured and confident. Her voice has lost some of the sharpness of her earlier, self-released demos, tempering its steeliness for a subtler warmth and depth that remains uniquely distinct. Some of Tiny Vipers' tonal evolution can be attributed to collaborator Ben Cissner, whose accompaniment of barely-there guitar echoes and tastefully placed harmonic ambience contributes to the album's haunting beauty.

Hands Across the Void begins with "Campfire Resemblance," a song that Fortino says she wrote specifically as an introduction to the album. It appropriately resembles a campfire, dry and softly stirring as Fortino slowly intones, "It was a dream that brought you to doubt/A dreamlike sensation/It was a fog that washed the fire out/It was a fog that washed the fire out." Fortino's lyrics are often cryptic, emotive rather than emotional. But taken as a whole, they point toward a struggle against fatalism and a belief that one can choose to transcend the mundane.

"There are all these crazy things you can't comprehend," Fortino tells me over coffee. "Life is just too big and weird. If you're sensitive to it, there are little things that will help you out, subtle patterns you can pick up on that tell you, 'If I do this, then this will happen.' A lot of people overlook them... the hands across the void are little ways out of weird predicaments. It's like the lyrics of ['Campfire Resemblance'] say, 'It could be a lantern that guides you out.'"

But choices in Fortino's songs are rarely so clear, and the paths rarely so direct that light alone can shine the way forward. In "Shipwreck," a character is marooned and isolated, destined only to die, but simple defiance transforms the song's despair into something inspiring. Fortino sings, "We want to struggle and survive/We want to live 'cause we know that life/It's beautiful, though surreal at times."

The album's climax is the epic "Swastika." At nearly 11 minutes, the song explores how choice imbues power and meaning on symbols otherwise free of morality. Invoking images of war, fever, love, and light once more, the lyrics read like koans: "If dark were overthrown by the light/Would the night turn to day/Would it all turn to gray." A miniature song cycle in itself, "Swastika" ends by contemplating how we often carry the symbols we've granted such import into complete isolation.

It's Fortino's ability to transmute lines that could be macabre and alien into moments of familiar tenderness and vulnerability that defines Tiny Vipers. In their transcendence of simple binary oppositions, each song on Hands Across the Void resonates with the others. Like fortunes cast from bones or dice: "You could look at it linearly but the story would change if you threw all [the songs] down a different way," Fortino says. That mutability would be fine with Fortino, fascinated by the invisible relationships that guide her music and all the coincidences and contradictions such faith promises to blur.

CD Reviews

Jonathan Zwickel — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:00:00 -0700

Music by Antibalas, 31Knots, TOLSATD, and LCD Soundsystem by Jonathan Zwickel

ANTIBALAS

Security

(Anti-)

1/2

With their fourth LP, Antibalas continue to explore every nook and cranny of Afrobeat's vast storehouse of rhythms. The New York City collective spent a month in the studio with post-rock production mastermind John McEntire, filing down layers of instruments—guitar, bass, organ, percussion, group vocals, and a five-piece horn section—to reveal the sharp, steely vitals beneath.

Security is sleek and wiry where past releases were gritty and ponderous; it's the distilled essence of their sound, still full but also fully clear.

Since Antibalas's debut in 2002, Afrobeat has experienced a welcome resurgence, hooking anyone with an ear for interplay and an ass for shaking. Acolyte bands have sprung up from Chicago to San Francisco, paying homage to the originator, Fela Kuti, while adding their own distinctions (like Femme Nameless, the all-female Afrobeat crew). Even as numbers and variety increase, Antibalas has stood above them all—the first, the smartest, the hardest. Security keeps them on top of the pile.

There's something menacing and thrilling at work in "Beaten Metal," the album's opener and most titanic track. Its horn part brings to mind the authority and intimidation of "The Imperial March" from Star Wars before giving way to the mechanical percussion the title suggests. It's halfway through the 12-minute "Filibuster X" before the album's first vocals burst through the mix, Duke Amayo's sly Nigerian rap asking "What does GOP stand for? How 'bout 'Gas, oil, and plutonium'?" as the full band chants in chorus behind him.

From there, the pace slows considerably, turning from frantic and feverish to slinky and sensual, flaunting a relaxed, playful side of Antibalas previously unseen. "Hilo" is slow, dubby, echo-heavy keys-n-brass; "War Hero (Guajira)" goes call-and-response over a boogaloo break. Both songs have a '70s West Coast big-band jazz vibe. The final two tracks, "I.C.E." and "Age" feature prominent, mournful horns—the latter especially gentle and pacifying as subtle electronic flourishes swell underneath. For the first time, Afrobeat becomes a lullaby, a funky twist only Antibalas could deliver. JONATHAN ZWICKEL

31KNOTS

The Days and Nights ofEverything Anywhere

(Polyvinyl)

1/2

Sprawling and at times uneven, Portland prog-prodigies 31Knots' latest album lacks the verve of past releases. 31Knots' last full-length, 2005's

Talk Like Blood, was my favorite record of that year—heady musicianship, rich samples, and Joe Haege's bitterly literate lyrics embodied our state of war pointedly without descending into clichés and slogans. Where that album was driven by smoldering dissatisfaction punctuated by cascading guitar lines, The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere is a record of uneasy hope and weary self-awareness built around layers of piano and keyboards and increasingly divergent samples.

Not to say that the album is bad—its musicianship is virtuoso and its arrangements artful—but as a whole, Days and Nights lacks the cohesion granted by the emotional intensity of their last album. Guest musician Toussaint Perrault of Ape Shape adds a Balkan flair with rat-a-tat horns to the "Savage Boutique," a skewering of bourgeois existential panic featuring the album's best lyric: "A savage in surrender with a vicious intent/Sipping on coffee with the worry of rent/but now I walk and talk the panic just like a bitch/creeping me with frequency: deceit, deceit, decide."

But in much the same way that our present state of war is protracted by political indecision and debate, Days and Nights is lost within its own sense of dramatic opposites. Complex parts and ideas are stacked against each other unnaturally, deflating any tension or meaningful dichotomies. After two years of war, the distilled invectives of Talk Like Blood lit up my weary sense of disgust while offering much in the way of catharsis. Now, four years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Days and Nights only renews a neurotic sense of disconnect with a conflict that is tragically absent from everyday concerns. CHRISTOPHER HONG

TRIUMPH OF LETHARGY SKINNED ALIVE TO DEATH

Drunk on the Blood of theSaints and Martyrs

(Backporch Revolution)

1/2

On first listen,

Drunk on the Blood of the Saints and Martyrs is nothing more than a scattered collection of recorded ideas. But upon exploration, the recordings (the only accurate term to describe these demo-style musings) coagulate into a recognizable environment—as if once assembled, they were taped again onto an ancient eight-track and buried under an inch of overdriven sludge.

"Art School Girls I" opens the album with a repeated series of guitar clangs, but lost somewhere deep under the fog is a drum loop and some twee, jangly guitar chords that might have been part of a pop song in some other world. The record then is on its meandering course, with bed-of-cloud chords plodding behind a twanging melody on "Style Wars I" and "Style Wars II." Songs never quite materialize, and as quickly as ideas are presented they're discarded, as the record continues in its lo-fi, fuzzed-out tunnel vision. The recordings rival Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti in sheer deconstruction of production ideals, trading the crisp, clear blast of modern technology for their own distinct, muddy texture. But where Ariel Pink exists within the ethos of lost Top 40 hits of yesteryear, Drunk forsakes traditional concepts of song structure and operates instead in texture and noise.

Songs go untitled. Melodies lurk deep in the mix at the noise floor without ever rising up into focus, seemingly left and forgotten. "Art School Girls II" starts with a messy experiment of melody and static before descending into the very recording that is the "Art School Girls I" at the start of the album. But before treading covered material, it's interrupted by "We Live on the Inside pt. 2"—which is, bemusingly, the first half of the next track, "We Live on the Inside pt. 1." Amid such self-referential signals and tangents, TOLSATD reshape not only what it means to write music outside of traditional song structures, but also traditional approaches to being a band and recording music in general. SAM EWALD

Download Drunk on the Blood of the Saints and Martyrs for free at www.backporchrevolution.com.

LCD Soundsystem

Sound of Silver

(DFA)

On the title track of LCD Soundsystem's sophomore album, James Murphy sings, "Sound of silver talk to me/makes me wanna feel/like a teenager/until you remember the feelings of/a real-life emotional teenager/then you think again." It's a typically self-aware statement from Murphy, and a fitting thesis for an album frequently concerned with the mercurial nature of music, youth, and nostalgia.

Sound of Silver opens with a beat lifted from LCD Soundsystem's first single, "Losing My Edge"—a gesture that welcomes fans while acknowledging the weight of expectation. The winking update, "Get Innocuous," adds percolating bass and live drums to the former's busted Casio beat while Murphy sings spaced-out surrenders to disillusionment ("Where once you had believed it/now you see it sucking you in"). "Time to Get Away" obliquely jabs at industry bullshit over taut funk, like a cousin (or rebuttal) to former protégés the Rapture's "The Sound." "North American Scum" finds Murphy spewing snotty self-deprecation over a muted track that erupts into gleaming T-Rex/Bowie choruses. The twinkling sing-along "Someone Great" (previewed on Murphy's commissioned workout mix for Nike, 45:33) is a surprisingly genuine and emotional mourning of personal loss. "All My Friends" recovers from that bummer with relentlessly pounding piano and its toast to good company and good nights.

LCD Soundsystem has always strived to marry the disposable fun of the pop/dance record with the enduring timelessness of the rock classic. On their first full-length, that meant great dance singles sandwiched between lesser "serious" material, but on Silver Murphy manages to more smoothly combine his rockist and popist tendencies within individual songs. "Watch the Tapes" and "New York I Love You" are the album's least integrated tracks—the former is a rapid rave-up in the style of "Movement," the latter a sarcastic ballad for Murphy's adopted home—and even they feel more at home here than did the diversions on his last record. But Sound of Silver finally satisfies on the promise of early singles "Losing My Edge" and "Yeah." It's a brilliantly reflexive record. It's a perfect hybrid of dance and rock. It's the first truly classic album from LCD Soundsystem. ERIC GRANDY

Unlimited Minimalism

Christopher Hong — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:00:00 -0800

The Emptiness That Inspires Tiny Vipers by Christopher Hong

"I think a lot of day-to-day life has been stripped of any mystical, fantastic value, so I like things that put a little bit of that depth back into it," explains Jesy Fortino, the solo artist who performs under the name Tiny Vipers. Her bleak acoustic epics are rich with such mysticism—haunting and spare, Fortino's voice sears plaintively over the phantom melodies of her guitar. In a musical landscape where singer/songwriter has become less a practice and more a bland aesthetic genre unto itself, it is rare to find a voice as distinct as Fortino's.

Since signing to Sub Pop in September, Fortino has been carefully crafting an album to be released in the spring of next year. Her upcoming performance at the Crocodile—a benefit show for labelmate Pat Spurgeon of Rogue Wave, who is in dire need of a kidney transplant—will be one of very few shows she plays over the course of the next few months, as Fortino is sequestering herself to record and revise demos for the new album, which will be engineered by Chris Common at Red Room Recording.

"I'm not looking much further than the record; I've got tunnel vision," she admits. "I just want to make the best record that I can. Even if nobody likes it, I want to make sure that it's exactly what I want it to be... Focusing on recording makes me feel 500 times better [than] the live stuff—I just don't enjoy playing live. I've always kind of been torn about that. Even when I first started, I hated playing shows and I'd flip out."

In live performances, Fortino's discomfort is evident; she seems to shrink onstage between songs. Bending her head down as she thanks the audience, shadows circle her eyes from the stage lights above. As she begins to pick and pluck the steel strings of her guitar, her voice opens up a landscape of sunken ships and hazy, paranoid wastelands in which she is both the hunter and the prey.

"I had just moved back [to Seattle] when I first started the Tiny Vipers thing, so I didn't have any friends and I was really uncomfortable. When I first started performing, I got the worst stage fright; I almost had to create this fictional persona to deal with it," states a self-conscious but warmly self-effacing Fortino. "Now I'm becoming more comfortable, so I think the music is becoming more honest.

"Performing can destroy you if you're not confident. Feeling confident is a good thing, [I'm] confident enough that I can go onstage and people can talk and I won't go and cry myself to sleep," she continues with a laugh.

For a performer who can appear so tense and uncomfortable onstage, the songs themselves are strident in their own unique identity, overtaking audiences with intensity and humility. Drawing upon influences as disparate as the Legendary Pink Dots, Biosphere, and Syd Barrett, Fortino paradoxically crafts rich landscapes out of austere minimalism.

"I like empty space—people-free areas like the woods, the desert. I just like being alone and I can't have that here... I listen to a lot of dry ambient music, soundscapes. Music that's too present can get on my nerves." (Appropriately enough, while she's saying this, the stereo at the coffee shop where we're conducting the interview is playing a cover of Styx's "Come Sail Away," bleated by South Park's Cartman.)

"It's kind of embarrassing but I really liked New Age music [growing up]. Like, my mom bought that Pure Moods CD—whatever was kind of trendy at the time my mom would get. We'd have Enya and that around so I listened to that for a long time... Eventually I got into more rock and roll, goth, industrial stuff. I liked Skinny Puppy a lot, Legendary Pink Dots... I went to a different school almost every year, so I never really had many friends, but I would totally try to fit in, so I would buy CDs of whatever I saw the kids wearing... I think that's what kind of substitutes for friendship when you're a teenager: music."

editor@thestranger.com

History's Punk

Christopher Hong — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 04:00:00 -0700

American Hardcore: Short, Loud, and Angry by Christopher Hong

History is reductive. No matter how crucial any single event, individual, or movement seems in the present, there is no guarantee that tomorrow it will be little more than a footnote, if not ignored completely. The problem of such historical reduction applies to the documentary American Hardcore, just as the film itself is often guilty of an overly narrow perspective. Directed by Paul Rachman and based upon Steven Blush's book, American Hardcore: A Tribal History, the documentary attempts to present hardcore's oral history. Interspersed with live footage of the bands that flourished during hardcore's first wave, the film includes recent and archive interviews with the likes of Ian MacKaye (Teen Idles, Minor Threat), Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks), Henry Rollins (S.O.A., Black Flag), H.R. (Bad Brains), and Dave Dictor (Millions of Dead Cops). Faster, angrier, and more vicious—hardcore is distinct from the punk and new wave to which it reacted.

Stripped down and bristling with bitterness, American Hardcore attempts to fill in a gap Blush perceived in rock history between the seminal punk of 1977 (Ramones, Sex Pistols, et al.) and Nirvana and grunge's ascendancy to mainstream success. Much of the history in American Hardcore will be familiar to the music's fans and particularly anyone who's read Henry Rollins's Black Flag tour diaries in Get in the Van or Michael Azerrad's excellent chronicle of the early independent scene Our Band Could Be Your Life. Loosely splitting its time between detailing the history of individual regional scenes and dealing with larger sociopolitical themes, both the film and book document a slanted perspective on the aggression and origins of hardcore.

Like the scene itself, the movie is divided between its dueling themes and philosophies. The ideological clash of thuggish violence and an emerging political consciousness in hardcore ran parallel to the social clash between working-class and suburban youth slamming into one another at shows. While contradictions can create depth, the film's messy pluralism and conflicting views of hardcore's significance nullify such key points. Vic Bondi (Articles of Faith) makes the case for hardcore's political relevance, stating, "As limited as it was, it was a manifestation of communalism, openness to humanity, of a disdain for authority that's in the best traditions of radicalism. If you're looking for radicalism in the 1980s, you should look at hardcore."

But this argument for hardcore's relevance as social protest is undercut as much by its violence, homophobia, and misogyny as it is by Blush's disregard for certain artists and institutions. Blush ignores many important publications and he dismisses as communist propaganda Maximum RocknRoll, a zine that was instrumental in building California's DIY network. The Midwest gets scant attention, despite the importance of Corey Rusk's Touch and Go record label. Women in the scene are largely dismissed as either "ugly trolls" or as the scene's "historians," although the film doesn't present much evidence of the latter. The only significant interview with a woman involves Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler, who herself was often conflicted about the misogyny of records like Slip It In.

Overall, the filmmakers tend to focus more on the anger that motivated youth toward violence than the anger that motivated them toward making change. Many of the interviews focus on rivalries between cities and gangs of hardcore kids rioting in the streets. After the Cro-Mags' Harley Flanagan smugly recounts beating hardcore kids traveling to N.Y. from Washington D.C. for a show (because he's used to fighting, "crazy fuckin' Puerto Ricans who, like, stab people,") it's extremely difficult to take Flanagan or the film seriously when he later awkwardly paraphrases Bobby Kennedy saying, "Hardcore was like a pebble that had a ripple effect."

By the documentary's end, the only thing on which various interviewees agree is that hardcore is dead. It was a brief flash of violence and musical inspiration that lasted from 1980 to 1986, and anything after that simply isn't hardcore but instead a nostalgic retread. Perhaps the most glaring omission is the opposition to mainstream corporate culture that hardcore embodied—especially considering that hardcore, like many youth movements, has largely been co-opted by the culture against which it rebelled. The fact that so much was left out of the film is as reductive as hardcore itself; American Hardcore is as short, loud, and angry with its history as it is with its music. And that isn't necessarily a good thing.

editor@thestranger.com

Aqua Boogie Rock

Christopher Hong — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:00:00 -0700

Whalebones' Titanic Jams by Christopher Hong

The Bad Juju Lounge is unusually crowded for a Wednesday night, so I head to the end of the bar where the crowd is thinnest. From the stage, Whalebones frontman Justin Deary is yelling something about, "Willie Nelson motherfuckers," before the band kicks into a set that swaggers with ballsy blues jams and wailing, woodsy laments.

Throughout the night, the room is flush with Whalebones' groaning string bends, lysergic grooves, and shack-shaking boogies. Before the show I talked with Deary about Whalebones' sprawling classic-rock influences and his desire to escape to the country. Wearing a straw cowboy hat and leaning against the wall, nice guy Justin Deary still cares what his mother thinks of him, but doesn't give a fuck about critics and comparisons.

"I've played in other bands that are more punk focused or whatever," Deary says, "but I've always loved heavy, blues-based rock, classic rock. And when I was at [my] height of listening to hardcore, punk, or noise, I still loved Black Sabbath, the Stones, Neil Young... I mean all the obvious kinds of things you would think, probably." Whalebones played their first show in April 2005 at the SS Marie Antoinette. Besides vocalist/guitarist Deary, the band's core members include Jon Treneff on drums, Kenneth Carl Gates on bass, and Amy Blaschke on vocals and keys. "Jon and I are the only original members. We've had like five bass players, many of whom have only played one show, for whatever reason. Not intentionally, but we turned into sort of a collective, a larger loose-knit group of friends who know the songs."

Live, Blaschke's harmonies cut with a songbird's clarity through Deary's warm drawl as her Night Canopy partner Nick DeWitt (also of Pretty Girls Makes Graves/Dutch Dub) alternates between strutting guitar lines and swirling keyboard flourishes. Along with DeWitt, Whalebones' rotating cast of satellite members and contributors includes Ben Cissner (Windsor for the Derby) and guitarist Joram Young of the psyched-out Bats of Belfry (in which Deary also plays).

Even with many obvious reference points, Whalebones have a distinct sound from other bands that draw on a similar combination of stoner riffs and outdoorsy inspiration. With squalling guitars and crashing rhythms, Whalebones sound oceanic and expansive in a way that distinguishes them from contemporaries like Black Mountain and upcoming billmates Oakley Hall.

"I feel like a lot of it has to do with a social influence, because we all like a lot of the same kind of stuff. When we go up to Vancouver, we'll stay with them and Stephen [McBean, of Black Mountain] will put on a record and there are certain grooves we all feel pulled toward. I don't want to try to sound like anyone else, but sometimes something does and I won't change it just for that reason."

Whalebones' self-released Spirit Quest EP, which alternates between tight riffs and spacious jams, collects rough home recordings of the band from last year along with some recent work done at DeWitt's Bainbridge Island studio. The disc's standout song is the dark and lurching "Blood Bank," in which Deary accentuates his vowels with a howl, as he sings, "Wife and family drove me to drink/So I drove/Passed out on the side of the road/And now I'm sleeping on the floor of the city drunk tank."

Recently back from a tour opening for Wolf Parade and Frog Eyes, Deary raved about a stop at Utah's Zion National Park. "It wasn't until I moved [to Seattle] that I discovered the woods, the big woods and the mountains. I try to go camping as many times in a year as possible. Amy [Blaschke] and I, we go backpacking for something like three days, a week out to the mountains or the coast. To tell you the truth, it's sort of the place where I feel the best."

With a distaste and distrust for urban life present in his lyrics, Deary aspires to retire to the country. "The reason most of us haven't completely relocated [away from the city] is the problem with making enough income to live in the kind of place you'd want out there. A little farm out on the peninsula or out in the Skagit Valley or something. [I'd] have some pigs, some goats, some chickens, and try to grow a lot of my own food and not be so reliant on... plastic."

editor@thestranger.com

CD Reviews

Andy Beta — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:00:00 -0700

by Andy Beta

BONNIE "PRINCE" BILLY

The Letting Go

(Drag City)

1/2

While The Letting Go, Will Oldham's eighth album under the "Prince" moniker, is his most opulent recording yet, he may have already given his most poignant, concentrated vocal to another man's release. His warble graced a hymn on the most recent Current 93 album; over a bed of both banjo and tamboura, it evoked Appalachia, the Scottish Highlands, and India, mesmerizing as Oldham revisited his well-trodden themes of earthly death and heavenly retribution. He also cropped up on Björk and Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack, that collaboration leading to his recording at the same Reykjavik studio she uses.

In such a chilly clime, The Letting Go is startling in its warmth: violins, violas, cellos, flugelhorns, and electric piano thaw out the chill of the last Prince album of originals, 2003's stark and unadorned Master and Everyone. Surrounding him here are Emmett Kelly on guitar, his brother Paul on bass, the Dirty Three's Jim White on drums, and Dawn McCarthy (of Faun Fables), shadowing his every breath of yang with her own yin as they provide a comforting bed.

While his earliest Palace efforts feared and trembled before the Good Book, Will's been stuck on "Song of Solomon" ever since. How his voice entwines with McCarthy on "Lay and Love" is as classic as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. And such heaving, sinuous strings make "Love Comes to Me" and "Cursed Sleep" some of the most evocative (and climactic) of his entire catalog. So while he still sees a darkness, Oldham's also propped on his elbow, basking in the afterglow. ANDY BETA

BOTCH

Unifying Themes Redux

(Hydra Head)

Before Cave-In spaced out and transformed into shitty wanna-be mainstream rockers à la 3 Doors Down and before every band was biting Converge and Jake Bannon's graphic-design style with some bullshit ink-splattered hoodie, Botch pioneered a brutal hybrid of metal and hardcore that's still viciously potent. The Northwest's answer to a sizable mid-'90s scene anchored in Boston by labels like Hydra Head, Botch remains one of the most imitated bands in contemporary hardcore.

This reissue of the out-of-print Unifying Themes Redux (originally released in 2002 on local label Excursion) is a comprehensive career retrospective and saves record nerds from besmirching the rare 7-inches that this disc collects. From the start, Botch's mix of complex time changes and brutal precision is on display with early material recorded by Wes Weresch at Tacoma's stalwart Uptone Studios back when the band was still called the John Birch Conspiracy Theory. While their sound was savage, Botch never took themselves too seriously, and their tongue-in-cheek covers of "O Fortuna," and "Rock Lobster" rock more than either track ever has had a right to.

Botch's members have moved on to other sounds with Minus the Bear and These Arms Are Snakes, but the genre they helped to define is being looted and diluted by mainstream pop in ways that parallel the ascendancy of hair/glam metal over the nebulous but universally understood category "true metal." It seems jejune to complain about the void left by a band that only disbanded four years ago, but whether you call it math rock or metalcore, Botch still slay any of today's MTV2 and MySpace also-rans. CHRISTOPHER HONG

OOIOO

Taiga

(Thrill Jockey)

Conceived and led by longtime Boredoms drummer Yoshimi P-We, OOIOO hit something of a comfortable stride on this, their fifth full-length. Like Yoshimi's other primary band, OOIOO make aggressively genreless music; from song to song and section to section they manage frequently surprising shifts into primal/elemental musical spaces that belie modern classification. OOIOO's palette, while occasionally overlapping with that of Boredoms, is unique, and has developed over the course of their eight-year career into a vocabulary that balances refinement of the band's musical character and unfettered invention. Theirs is a paradoxically formless pop sensibility; while the music's building blocks are primarily beautiful and often familiar feeling (harmonizing guitar lines, Yoshimi's deft trumpet, singing that's rooted in Japanese folk tradition, etc.), the way in which they are utilized and arranged works more in the vein of ancient trance musics or 20th-century minimalism.

OOIOO's blissful-experimental-pop-as-hypnosis MO is purer and simpler than ever on Taiga. Less spastic in its conception and execution than on previous efforts, most of the disc's tracks don't have song structure so much as a sense of gradual, natural, concerted development. The band's growth has been guided by Yoshimi's apparent personal shifts of focus in recent years to an intense communion with nature and a paganistic/ecstatic spirituality. While in less inventive and musically capable hands all of this could translate to yawny mush, with Taiga, OOIOO continue to expand the lush beauty and tingling weirdness of their vision while still stopping to smell the flowers. SAM MICKENS

CHRISTINA CARTER

Electrice

(Kranky)

With her new record, Electrice, founding Charalambides vocalist/guitarist and longtime pillar of avant folk Christina Carter extends the current experimental-music landscape's deep obsession with drone (an obsession partially spurred by the effect of Carter's work of the last several years) to the conception and construction of her songs. Beyond the base musical characteristics of "drone," she adopts in this work the concept's static, drawing-more-from-the-foundation-of-less nature by restricting herself to one guitar tuning and one key for the entirety of the record's four extended art songs.

Thankfully, Carter is an artist of enough skill and inspiration that the limited harmonic palette still yields a song suite rich in content and possessed of a hospital-bed resignation and great pining gravity. Working only with her restrainedly multitracked voice and guitars, she builds speed-of-nature songs imbedded with meditations on language, chronic pain, and water-damaged memories. Her guitars are largely shorn of sharp edges, alternately pure and pianistic or awash in jellied chorus, and her voice veers from a less bitter but no less weary Patti Smith–esque moan to pure-pretty sonorities.

With four songs in about 40 minutes, Electrice unfolds with an effective balance of improvisational looseness and solemn compositional clarity. Like the treetop swordfight in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the record evokes the feeling of a potentially infinite respite of celestial calm. SAM MICKENS

KOOKS

Inside In/Inside Out

(Astralwerks)

These English fops were the next big thing around August 3, so sorry for the delay, but this debut has just dropped in the U.S. Insta-fleeting fame aside, the Kooks' main contribution may ultimately be that they're the first of a generation that consider the Strokes elder statesmen. This debut starts with a slower, pensive stroll (not unlike Is This It), and by tune three, they've hit the clipped Motown beats and droll vox in stride.

But despite singer Luke Pritchard's recent "misquoted" quips that these post-Strokes Brit boy bands will be "bigger than Britpop," the best songs here ("Eddie's Gun," "If Only") have the greasy charm of prime Supergrass. Elsewhere, there are scruffed vocal melodies and acoustic-flecked sweet ditties that'll guarantee lass action. But even the most gullible eyelash batters might grow weary of the innocuous, bad-date lyrics. Their boyfriends might notice that the Ziggy-inspired stuff was probably copped from Spacehog.

Nevertheless, the band has oodles of that effortless musicianship and jaunty vibe that Brit blokes have apparently been taught during grade-school detention hall since the Oasis/Blur feud. ERIC DAVIDSON

HEARTLESS BASTARDS

All This Time

(Fat Possum)

With the opportunity for bands to develop their sound so rare now, it's jarring when you hear a band pushing themselves forward. The leap from this Cincinnati band's 2005 debut could span the Ohio River. The debut was a sturdy enough stomp through scruffy blues rock. But All This Time is another matter entirely. "Into the Open" opens with plaintive piano strolling in before Erika Wennerstrom's riffs and chorus cry of "Things are coming into focus" rise up. From there the band turn their formerly flabby 12-bars into swaying, string-scratched schlep-ics and rolling, misty pop, like PJ Harvey demos woozily worked up by a slumming Fleetwood Mac. The looser rhythm section swing their predominantly whiskey waltzes into the shimmering songwriting shifts. Heartless Bastards seem brighter now, more dawn than dusk. ERIC DAVIDSON

CD Reviews

Barbara Mitchell — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 04:00:00 -0700

by Barbara Mitchell

WOVEN HAND

Mosaic

(Sounds Familyre)

There's little chance that Woven Hand, the side project of former 16 Horsepower leader David Eugene Edwards, will become The O.C.'s next overnight success story. That might signal the end of the world. Then again, given the driving, tribal-gothic tone of Mosaic, Woven Hand's latest offering, triggering the apocalypse might not be out of the question.

To call Mosaic "haunting" is an understatement; the music itself sounds haunted, as if a wandering band of gypsy ghosts had inadvertently disturbed a sacred Indian burial ground. Edwards's voice is strong and otherworldly; full of sadness and longing. The music (all of which Edwards composed and most of which he played himself) is beautifully menacing and cinematic, and the lyrics continue Edwards's fascination with Biblical themes—although in an Old Testament tone, where redemption is always desperately needed and rarely guaranteed.

The album opens with the eerie instrumental, "Breathing Bull," transitioning seamlessly into the ominous, shamanistic "Winter Shaker." Halfway through the disc, Edwards picks things up with a lighter, more joyous instrumental, and then plunges back into darker territory with the lilting dirge of "Dirty Blue" and the sinister, Slavic "Slota Prow."

Mosaic is not the kind of record you'd put on at a party (unless you were trying to end the evening), but sometimes a soundtrack to a dark and stormy night—or a dark night of the soul—is exactly what the doctor ordered. BARBARA MITCHELL

Woven Hand play Tues Sept 19 at Neumo's, 8 pm, $10 adv, 21+.

WHITE WHALE

WWI

(Merge)

1/2

Despite the fact that their members hail from several notable bands—Get Up Kids, Butterglory, and Thee Higher Burning Fire—Lawrence, Kansas–based White Whale fail to exceed the conventions of standard indie-rock fare on their debut album WWI. White Whale's big, saccharine choruses and soaring hooks imbue the album with a vapid sound that vacillates between the Arcade Fire and old Britpop bands like Dodgy and Menswe@r. But despite its orthodoxy, WWI does maintain a level of whimsy through the dramatic croon of lead singer Matt Suggs (Butterglory) and the incorporation of a few very catchy synth patterns.

Virtually lifted from Dead Prez's "Hip Hop," the bass line from WWI's standout single, "The Admiral," rumbles with an odd virility that's often absent from indie rock. While the verse-chorus-verse mold quickly tires, you can't help pumping your fist at Suggs's anthemic appeal, "Who throws parties like these anymore?"

In addition to "The Admiral," there are about three other critical tracks on WWI, although the album does offer sporadic moments of swashbuckling delight. But through all its layers of pop bombast, WWI fails to accomplish anything too groundbreaking. The band's brief dabbling in lo-fi psych rock on songs like "I Love Lovely Chinese Gal" and "King's Indian" uncouthly meander into anonymity, while tunes like "Yummyman Farewell" barely climb beyond bar-band jetsam.

WWI's few charming gems do warrant some attention, and for that, this is a decent soundtrack to our foray into autumn. STEVEN SAWADA

White Whale play Sat Sept 16 at the Paradox, 8 pm, $10 adv/$12 DOS.

ROBBIE BASHO

Venus in Cancer

(Tompkins Square)

While Robbie Basho's contemporary and fellow guitarist John Fahey was known more as the kooky, belligerent character and Basho was seen as a monkish aesthete studying both the music and religions of the East, the cover for Venus in Cancer shows otherwise. Out of print since 1969, this CD reveals two naked hippie sylphs at play on the front, Basho's dedication alluding to the inspiration of one particularly "lovely Venus." Fitting then that the pleasures of his steel-string playing are both spiritual and physical. Whereas earlier Basho records were instrumental affairs focused on his fretwork, later albums (such as this one) feature the man's stentorian pipes, quite the shock on "Eagle Sails the Blue Diamond Waters" and downright testing on "Song for the Queen."

While the more renowned Fahey was steadfast and stoic in his guitar syncopations, orderly in his melding of the blues to Bartók, Basho's guitar is more impressionistic, likely to soar and wander up into unexpected plateaus. Here he draws on the traditions of Native America, Persia, and Japan for his inspirations. On the lengthy title track and the 10-minute "Kowaka d'Amour" (a live version of which appeared on Tompkins Square's fine Imaginational Anthem 2 comp a few months ago), Basho's lines seem less like orderly distillations and flourishings of technique. Instead, his exquisite fingerpicking and ringing harmonics take on the poignancy of haiku, the touch of each note resembling a natural object, like wind ruffling plumage on a crane, or a maple leaf landing on a still lake, which ripples outward. ANDY BETA

THE DIRTY PROJECTORS

New Attitude

(Marriage)

1/2

Through four LPs and now an EP, David Longstreth (AKA the Dirty Projectors) has brilliantly crafted incredibly befuddling pop music. New Attitude stands as possibly his strangest work to date.

Longstreth's genius lies concurrently in his unusual timbre (characterized by an odd, sing-speak cadence and off-key caterwauling), as well as his ability to harmoniously mash up dissonant sounds and music genres—opera and glitch hop never saw a more mellifluous confluence than on last year's concept album, The Getty Address.

New Attitude has been conceived as a pared-down electronic counterpoint to the modern classical sounds of The Getty Address. On this seven-track EP, every cello bow and guitar pluck seems to bristle with bleeps and blurps (with the exception of two brief interludes that rely solely on Longstreth's vocals and string arrangements). His skill at creating attunement out of these seemingly uncomfortable situations carries tracks like "Two Sheep Asleep," where synthetic whorls and Longstreth's trademark handclaps augment a down-tuned blues guitar line. Overall, this new-wave jamboree feels otherworldly, yet supremely refreshing.

"At the Mall" purges all the remaining tension from Longstreth's experimentation with a kitschy, art-disco climax that perfectly concludes the disc. Longstreth's vision of a "rainbow of sound," where complex forms can coexist with melodic hooks, is impeccably achieved in New Attitude's brusque 31 minutes. The experimentation can be off-putting to the uninitiated, but if you persevere, your patience will be rewarded; you too will see the rainbow. STEVEN SAWADA

XIU XIU

The Air Force

(5RC)

1/2

[Full disclosure: Sam Mickens's association with Xiu Xiu includes: former band member, roommate, string arranger, belligerent showgoer.]

Whereas once Xiu Xiu were one of modern music's most self-involved and internally focused bands, they have recently allowed more of their personal global furor to translate into polemic lyrical threads. Last year's La Forêt was the group's most consistently and explicitly political yet, but The Air Force finds Xiu Xiu again encamped in the trench of personal/interpersonal anguish.

Frontman Jamie Stewart's poetry is more intensely beautiful and florid than ever on Xiu Xiu's fifth album, favoring soul-grime filigree over some of the band's previous more economically bare catharses. On vario-speeded spoken-word album closer "Wig Master," Stewart winds on an inescapable romantic nihilism, from which thorough indulgence in the darkest and silliest corners of sexual desire seems the only respite. On the birdsong and bell-propelled bubble machine "Hello from Eau Claire," the hetero-relationship-themed pop song gets twisted beyond recognition: a song to a girl, written by a boy (Stewart), and sung by another girl (co-Xiu Caralee McElroy), all taking on a strangely multidimensional, tragic/farcical air.

The music of The Air Force (buoyed with tasteful majesty by producer Greg Saunier of Deerhoof) feels like a synthesis of Xiu Xiu's past, particularly of their dichotomous last two albums, the pop-sheen breakthrough Fabulous Muscles and the much denser discord overgrowth of La Forêt. Possessed now of a self-assured artistic inertia, Xiu Xiu refine the mining of their own personal well of misery. SAM MICKENS

PERE UBU

Why I Hate Women

(Smog Veil)

1/2

While any controversy over the title of this latest Pere Ubu redo ought to be crushed under the unassailable weight of the band's 30-years-on history of lefty art living, we'll let on that it's apparently taken from an unpublished Jim Thompson novel. And like the desperately simmering protagonists of Thompson's stories, Ubu leader David Thomas's lyrical character sketches (begun in earnest with his recent Two Pale Boys side project) drift through this record. Only with this most "rock" of Thomas projects, those characters and the band get to let their steam blow occasionally. Thomas's recent reunions with Rocket from the Tombs seem to have inspired some straight riffage here ("Caroleen," "Flames Over Nebraska") that is an interesting contrast to the songs' meekly desperate characters. But for the most part, this fine addition to Ubu's cranky, art-rock canon continues to surrealistically twist the conventions of pop songwriting we all figured had been twisted. ERIC DAVIDSON

MISS VIOLETTA BEAUREGARDE

Odi Profanum Vulgus Et Arceo

(Temporary Residence)

1/2

"Digital hardcore" never got very far, and with good reason—most of it was shit. Wanky, cacophonous, unlistenable shit done by dudes who took themselves way too seriously considering they were making the musical equivalent of a sledge hammer smashing a Zaxxon console. Or maybe that's, eh, actually what was happening. Whatever. Point is, the style had been fractured, frayed, and buried for years by the time this 29-year-old European bedroom four-tracker dug up the pieces and made them more enjoyable than they ever were.

Violetta Beauregarde belts out polyp-producing vocals over epileptic beeps and guitar shreds in 90-second spurts; her second album, Odi Profanum Vulgus Et Arceo, clocks in at 19 minutes and change. Simply put, it sounds like Atari Teenage Riot fronted by a shrieking Swiss-Italian woman instead of shrieking German men. But where ATR and their ilk had an air of self-importance and pretentiousness about them, Beauregarde knows that the stuff she's making is, as we said, shit. She even named her website ViolettaSucks.com. Liberated by this awareness, she has a good old time belting out silly lyrics like "I wish I could set things on fire with the power of my mind," or delivering volatile wake-up calls like the opening "Flanger When You Die," a blissful mess of Sparks-fueled psychosis and possibly the scariest-ever ode to an effects pedal. There are occasional moments of legitimate quality—"The Unbearable Lightness of a Farm Tractor" has a great dance-floor hook. Other moments are legitimately terrible. But what makes this record great is that, underneath all the hyperactive hostility, you can hear Beauregard fast and loose, having fun. It's something that was sorely missing before. JOHN VETTESE

DEAD MOON

Echoes of the Past

(Sub Pop)

Oregon, you never had a chance. Sandwiched between California, entertainment nexus of the universe, and Washington, the left coast's rock 'n' roll Mecca, the Beaver State's music scene was destined to be overshadowed. Though Portland has long had an underground community teeming with talented eccentrics, what it largely has to show on the national front are just blips on the bullshit radar such as the Dandy Warhols and Everclear. I challenge anyone to find a band more bullshit-free than Clackamas's Dead Moon, whose name has become synonymous with DIY ethics, tenacious self-sufficiency, and scrappy garage-punk zeal.

Now well into their 50s, Fred and Toody Cole and Andrew Loomis have endured through a legion of rough-hewn rock combos; most notably Fred's 1960s outfit the Lollipop Shoppe, whose "You Must Be a Witch" is a standout track on the original Nuggets compilation. While Dead Moon wasn't born as an entity until 1987, the new double-disc Sub Pop collection, Echoes of the Past, delivers exactly what the name suggests: decades of sweat, whiskey, and hard living packed into ageless rock anthems. For the longtime fan, there are a few surprises here, though hearing classics like "54/40 or Fight" and "DOA" alongside lesser-known album tracks can offer some fresh context. To new listeners, if these blown-out punk benchmarks don't make you either want to pick up a guitar or quit your shitty band, then they're falling on deaf ears. JOSH BLANCHARD

VIVA VOCE

Get Yr Blood Sucked Out

(Barsuk)

1/2

Kevin and Anita Robinson are Viva Voce—the husband/wife two-piece from Portland who are releasing their third LP, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, on Barsuk Records. It's honed, sinister, and arranged to be a rock record that breathes. Kevin says, "There are obvious dark qualities, musically and lyrically. We sculpted the EQ to mimic some of the darkest classic-rock records we knew. And we kept the compression to a minimum so that you could feel the rise and fall of everything."

The first five songs set the table with their Pixies-ish vocal harmonies, room-sound guitars, handclaps, and Queen-like transitions. The ghostly quiet piano interlude, "Bill Bixby" readies you for the main course.

"So Many Miles," the eight-minute centerpiece with horns, is where the record takes off. Vocal layers pile, the floor tom drives a kettle-bang pulse, and there is a swerving, slurring guitar solo. It climaxes, then implodes into drum frenzy and dissolving drone. They sing, "A lesson in lies, from fair-weather friends/Let's take a drive, the road never ends."

The signature of the record is "Helicopter." Distorted drum sounds peel off and decay in syncopated slow motion. Anita's guitar pours with the spacious geek funk of Flaming Lips, and with the slide, her chords spread into marooned bliss. This is the signature cadence of Viva Voce's unique sound. The title of the record may be Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, but the music puts blood back in. TRENT MOORMAN

AFRO-PUNK: THE ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGGER EXPERIENCE DVD

Dir. by James Spooner

(Highyellowproduction)

Dealing pointedly with racial identity in the punk scene, Afro-Punk: The Rock 'n' Roll Nigger Experience is an absorbing documentary about what it means to be black in a predominantly white subculture. Afro-Punk's director,

James Spooner, found that while DIY culture had taught him a great deal about art and politics, the essential aspects of his identity as a black man were suppressed and in conflict with being punk. It's with this baggage that Spooner traveled across the country interviewing other black musicians, promoters, artists, and fans involved in the punk/hardcore scene about their experience of race and punk.

In addition to live performances and interviews with the likes of TV on the Radio, Orange 9mm, Swiz, Dead Kennedys, et al., Afro-Punk closely follows four young black people who are active in the DIY scene, and at different stages of reconciling their dueling identities. Spooner explores many contradictions in the film, including the absurdity of a hardcore band whose lyrics deal primarily with reparations and black power, performing almost exclusively to white hardcore kids more interested in stage diving than in slavery and the abuses of the middle passage.

Some technical problems exist with the DVD, which range from minor (lack of chapters) to major (inconsistencies in audio quality). The lack of consistent mastering/mixing of the sound during live concert segments robs the film of energy in key places and is a disservice to some of the bands featured. Despite these flaws, the film is a powerful, messy, frank, and often hilarious discussion on racial identity, alienation, tokenism, and the greatness of Bad Brains. Highly recommended—even to white people. CHRISTOPHER HONG