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4 COWBELL

> music

04 tUnE-yArDs Merrill Garbus rounds up a posse

10 The Kills Insufferably cool, impossibly good

16 Get mellow with

Panda Bear

18 Times New Viking� Font of lo-fi goodness

28 Working� Holiday Coachella artists weigh in on their favorite record stores, first records for Record Store Day

31 Lead Review On Smoke Ring for My Halo, Philly freak folkie Kurt Vile cools out

32 CD Reviews About Group, An Horse, Baby Dee, Boris, Bill Callahan, Crystal Stilts, Frederik, Hatchback, If by Yes, Low, Roy Orbison, the Strokes, Sin Fang, Timber Timbre, Mike Watt and morecover photo by gene smirnov

Morbid Fascination

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> more

42 Green Mind Sierra Club head Michael Brune on the state of environmental activism

45 Books Daniel Clowes’ sympathy for the comics nerd

> movies

44 Love Your Work Broadcast News’ bizarre love triangle

48 Fear and Loathing� A batty stop on Gilliam’s long, strange trip

52 Tindersticks and Claire Denis’ uneasy alliance

50 Less Beaten Paths Stan Michna reviews Jolene and Casino Jack

steve earle stares death in the eye in I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

Steve Earle, March 8, 2011, in New York City. Photographed by Gene Smirnov.

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Space Jams Sorta-one-woman-show tUnE-yArDs moves in for the k i l l / by Julia askenase

Merrill Garbus has a lot on her mind. When I reach her

on the phone, it’s barely 8 a.m. in Oakland, Calif., where the New England native better known as tUnE-yArDs now re-sides. She’s been awake, though, journaling the details of a whirlwind European promo trip, from which she’s still shaking off the jet lag.

“I tend to get up and try to clear my head of whatever’s in my brain from the night before,” she says. It must be a hefty load these days. In our brief conversation, the keenly self-aware musician reveals a wide range of topics she’s been wrestling with, from cultural appropria-tion to creative autonomy.

tUnE-yArDs debuted with 2009’s BiRd BrAiNs, a raw, lo-fi affair whose sounds Garbus captured on a handheld voice recorder, then lay-ered to patchy (im)perfection. It landed her an opening spot on tour with the Dirty Projectors, where she enamored audiences with a dynamic live show, looping her alternately bellowing and whispery vocals, ukulele strums and drum-rim clitter-clatter to big-band proportions.

Her unexpected success—not to mention a tasteful little spot in a BlackBerry Torch ad—allowed Garbus to pay off all her debt with room to spare toward her self-produced follow-up w h o k i l l. Ultimately, she reconciled the qualms over her newfound funds by reaching out to lo-cal musicians, whom she couldn’t have hired before.

More money also meant more studio polish, which made Garbus uneasy. “It’s that idea that things are more pure under maybe harsher conditions or when they’re made out of struggle or some-thing,” she says. But w h o k i l l is by no means overproduced. Rather, it provides greater clarity to her DIY genre exploration—across hip-hop, folk, punk, African music and more—for a sur-prisingly cohesive, more accessible whole.

w h o k i l lApril 19[ 4AD ]

photo by AnnA m cAmpbell

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But their allure was undeniable: Hince was the older, swaggering Brit who went by the name Hotel and won the heart of supermodel Kate Moss; Mosshart was the younger, loose- cannon American who played in Flor-

ida punk band Discount at age 14 and was later reborn as VV. When 2008’s Midnight Boom dropped, the Kills drew blood on the mainstream, thanks largely in part to the snide and sharp singles “U.R.A. Fever” and “Cheap and

Cheerful.” A year later, Mosshart be-came an even bigger force to be reck-oned with when she joined Jack White in the Dead Weather. Yeah, the Kills are that cool.

Got the stereotype in place? Good. Now get over it. Do like the Kills do: Put their music ahead of their hype.

“That exposure is reserved for one thing, and the interest in the music is reserved for another,” says Hince of the differing reasons why people be-come Kills fans. “It doesn’t cross over as easily as people think, thank fuck-ing God. We started off playing squat parties. After Midnight Boom, a lot of people came to see us, and when you discover a band, you think they were in the wilderness before you discov-ered them, but it’s not true at all. We’ve

Deceiving LooksSubstance and style tag up on The Kills’ breakout Blood Pressures / by Jeanne Fury

The insufferable cool that precedes the Kills is damn near lethal. Such roguishly good-looking and successful rock stars, Alison Mosshart and Ja-mie Hince are grotesque in their perceived ennui. The London-based duo first emerged in the early

2000s, touting the nasty garage-rock blooze fuckery of Pussy Galore and Royal Trux proportions. Their first two albums, Keep on Your Mean Side and No Wow, sucked your tongue, took your money, did your drugs and kicked you out of a moving vehicle before you managed to get your zipper back up.

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been building up pretty gradually.”“I don’t think that much has changed

that people think has changed,” says Mosshart, sounding like she just woke up (it’s 12:30 p.m.). “Maybe there’s a bigger public perception of us, more people know about us—but I think, re-ally, shit’s the same.”

And if you believe that, Cowbell has a bridge to sell you. One doesn’t go from playing squats to gaining inter-national acclaim over the course of ap-proximately eight years and have shit be the same. The dynamic between Hince and Mosshart might indeed be as comfortable and reliable as an old shoe at this point, but the Kills are put-ting more into their music than ever before. Their latest, Blood Pressures, is their greatest offering, literally and figuratively.

“There’s always been a sense of, ‘Well we’re two people, we should [write songs] like we’re two people,’” says Hince. “But we’ve been experi-menting inside those parameters for eight years, and it’s just a natural progression… We had five or six songs [written for Blood Pressures] before I really struck on a way to do it and had this idea for a sound.”

Credit the first Roxy Music album for the breakthrough. Hince became fascinated by the way different instru-ments on that album—Mellotron, clar-inet, saxophone—exuded various emo-tions and yanked on different heart strings. When he incorporated a new mix of instruments into the tracks he was working on, the rhythms gained richer textures.

But beyond Bryan Ferry, an even greater tip of the hat is owed to Jack White. Because Mosshart impres-sively pushed her limits with the Dead Weather, Hince felt the need to raise his own game.

“Jack is an amazing mu-sician and producer and musical phenomenon,” he says. “I’m competitive in music. It made me see the Kills much more focused, how different we were, and I wanted to enhance

all those things on this record. Alison got so much confidence; she became a much stronger performer in Dead Weather and, in her own right, in this duo. The things I liked about her voice in the Kills is this kind of deadpan vul-nerability. It made me realize that a bit more. It made me realize what the Kills was, I suppose.”

When asked what the Kills gives her that the Dead Weather cannot, Moss-hart doesn’t waste a second. “I mean, Jamie,” she says. “It’s a massive differ-ence. That and all the technical stuff, which is pretty boring to list out, but… Jay-mee.” She sweetly sing-songs his name, and that is the extent of her an-swer. He softly laughs “Mmmm,” and yours truly is caught suddenly and un-comfortably in their tender moment.

Mosshart’s cutesy reply is inconclu-sive, but the music says what she can’t. Of the Kills’ catalog, Blood Pressures is most indicative of what she and Hince are capable of creating together—and it goes far beyond coolness.

“We started writing about pretty obvious things on our first record because we wanted to make a state-

ment and an impact,” says Hince. On new tracks like “Satellite,” “Heart Is a Beating Drum,” and “Baby Says,” there’s still a trace of privileged distance, but without all the austerity. The shock treatments of their early days have been wrangled and molded into songs with palpable grace,

and Mosshart cements her place as one of modern rock’s best singers—one who can reach inside and cut deep. The Kills’ effortlessness that was so fabulously irksome has dissolved somewhat. Call it maturity. Maybe.

“Maturity…” sighs Hince, “I don’t know about maturity. I suppose you just get better at writing songs when you’re doing it longer; you get to ex-plore themes and emotions that are more vulnerable than before.”

“I think to do this you have to have a real innocent, naïve, childlike spirit; otherwise you become really cynical,” he continues. “And this record is defi-nitely not a cynical record. For me, it’s full of all those childish love stories and despair and bleakness, and all those things we’ve always written about.”

Arguably the album’s centerpiece, the heartbreak waltz “The Last Good-bye” knocks out the preconceived notions of the Kills’ can’t-touch-this bullshit. “I learned to cry for someone else,” sings Mosshart, depleted yet with her resolve intact. “I can’t get by on an odds and ends love that don’t ever match up.”

Ironically, that’s the song that best illustrates the complementary union that is the Kills. Hince calls the track “a victory.” “It was an example of me and Allison working perfectly together. Musically and thematically, we were coming from different places,” he says. “And I think it is a beautiful coming together of both of those sides.”

Blood Pressures will be available April 4 from Domino Records.

“ Jack [White] is an amazing producer And musical

phenomenon. I’m competitive in music. [Alison’s stint in Dead Weather] made me see the Kills much more focused, how different we were, and I wanted to enhance all those things on this record.” —JAmIe HInce

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Four New Albums You Need…DISCOVER THIS!

TV ON THE RADIO NINE TYPES OF LIGHTAfter riding the massive success and critical acclaim garnered by their 2008 album, Dear Science, the New York art-rockers are set to return to the spotlight with their new album, Nine Types of Light, releasing on April 12th. As to be expected from this uniquely distinguished band, Nine Types of Light continues to push the envelope, and represents yet another step forward in their artistic evolution. Available April 12.

ELBOW BUILD A ROCKET BOYS!Following the immense success of their last album, The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow released their fth studio album, Let’s Build A Rocket Boys! on March 8th. The new album features 11 impeccably crafted songs and the clever lyrical wit of frontman, Guy Garvey. As written by the BBC, “the reason that people love Elbow so much – beyond their astonishing musical abilities – is they make music that sounds like it cares how you are.” Now how many rock bands can you say

that about? Available Now.

JESSIE J WHO YOU AREWinner of the prestigious BBC Sound of 2011 Poll and the Brit’s Critic’s Choice Award, Jessie J is now making waves this side of the Atlantic! “With her combo of re ned musicality, reggae rhythm, hip hop attitude and rock ‘n’ roll re, pop music will never be the same, and the world will “L.O.V.E.” everything about Jessie J.” - Artist Direct.“Fierce” – Rolling Stone. Available April 12.

MOTHER MOTHER EUREKACanada’s most harmonic pop quintet are back with their third and most evolved record to date, Eureka. Complete with twelve new hook laden pop-meets-rock songs, their signature cleverly crafted lyrics and intricate harmonies, EURKEA eclipses the band’s previous work. The album was produced in Vancouver by MM’s own Ryan Guldemond

and mixed by Mike Fraser (AC/DC, Franz Ferdinand, Elvis Costello). Available Now.

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PAUL SIMONSo Beautiful or So What

Social commentary · Love songs · World rhythms · Southern Gospel

“This time the stimuli was a guitar in my lap that takes me back to Still Crazy After All These Years”

- Paul Simon

IN STORE APRIL 12th

IN STORE APRIL 12th

This is Alison Krauss’ first release since her 2007 internationally acclaimed, multi-platinum collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, which won six Grammy awards including Record of The Year and Album of the Year. On Paper Airplane Krauss rejoins Union Station for their 14th record and follow up to their 2004 Grammy Award winning “Lonely Runs Both Ways.”

alisonkrauss.comfacebook.com/OfficialAlisonKrausstwitter.com/alisonkrauss

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CD & VINYL IN STORES MARCH 29th

It’s almost unnerving how unassuming Noah Lennox is in conversation. The artist better known as Panda Bear is easygoing, almost preternaturally relaxed. His chuck-les are sincere, unforced. He refers to “this band I’m in, Animal Collective” so nonchalantly, you’d thing Animal Collective weren’t the perennial toast and sometime

bane of the indie-rock blogosphere.

Masculine intuitionNoah Lennox’s latest

Panda Bear effort aims for the heart and throat

by Raymond Cummings

It’s a late February evening, Lennox is unwinding at his mother’s house in Balti-more, and it’s no big deal if an interviewer litters the exchange with shorthand-scrawling pauses or pushes the bounds of the 20-minute window allotted by his publicist. “I’m just reheating some pizza here,” he says. “It’s mellow.”

“Mellow” is an apt—if reductive—de-scription of Lennox’s solo discography. While 2004’s Young Prayer marshaled somber, funereal tones, 2007’s Person Pitch was a soft-serve, pastel-pop mer-ry-go-round, forgoing some of the outré freak-folk idiosyncrasies Animal Collec-tive fans had become accustomed to in fa-vor of recognizable samples and the sort of translucent, intoxicating crêpe-light fare that readily invites Brian Wilson and Phil Spector comparisons.

Four years later, Lennox is back with a new batch of flavored abstractions. A few similarities can be drawn between Tomboy and its predecessor: Like Pitch, Tomboy was written and recorded in the artist’s adopted home of Lisbon, Portugal—where he resides with his wife, fashion designer Fernanda Pereira, and their two children—and was preceded by a series of limited-edition singles featuring alternate ver-sions of album cuts, seeing release on the Paw Tracks label. But where Pitch flaunted flamingo plumage, Tomboy demonstrates a heretofore absent finesse and edge. Fugues like “Carrots” and “Bros” delighted, but there was a ghostly, faded feel to them; the new songs are sharper, clearer, sticking in memory like burrs on headbands.

“[Tomboy] cuts deeper than the last one—the last one was more surface-level,” he acknowledges. “It hits harder. That was intentional. I was hoping it would pack more punch. I had this idea, this triangle of sound I wanted to set up: I wanted the vocals to be more prominent, the top part of the triangle, with the guitar and the drums as the feet.”

Though there’s something to his notion, a different shape dominates this album: the circle. “Slow Motion” and “Last Night at the Jetty” owe a great deal of their im-pact to the illusion of barely perceptible, Lazy Susan-like rotation. “Slow Motion” proceeds at a drugged, slouching shuffle, sloshing through watery, burbling effects that Saran-Wrap its vocals as looped-on-a-click-track soul claps hit with bomb

force. “Last Night at the Jetty”—a mash-note to bygone bonhomie—literally cycles and recycles through memory and its own exhausted gossamer melancholy, trying to isolate the particulars of a shared experi-ence.

“[‘Last Night at the Jetty’] was the only song where I set out with a really clear idea of the mood I wanted to set, that you had an experience that you’d never have again,” Lennox remembers. “I made this story: that all these people used to party on a jetty, and they were partying there for the last time, and they knew it. The song is also kind of a mask for what writing music meant to me versus what it means to me now.”

Elsewhere, there’s the choppy, rubber-band jolt of “Alsatian Darn,” reminiscent of pre-Before Today Ariel Pink, and “Surfer’s Hymn” trades on jittery, glittery adrena-line and sounds nothing like one would expect from an actual surfer’s hymn—it’s more prolonged wipe-out than chill post-surf hang—proffering a meth-rush of rip-pling rainbow synths. On the title track, a wainscoting of gnashing, manipulated guitars buzzes and jangles at the bottom of the mix. With its massed chords slurring from key to key and drone-like Lion King vocals, “Afterburner” would’ve fit nicely on Pitch—if it weren’t for the tectonic-shift scrapings beneath the verdant, heart-thumping tribalist savannahs.

“You Can Count on Me” is the track most likely to draw comparisons to Down There—the recent solo debut of fellow Animal Collectivist Dave “Avey Tare” Portner. It’s a freak-folk lullaby, a heavy-lidded strum fest where Lennox’s vocals are treated with an effect that makes it sound as though he’s singing from a mile away through an addled forest; meanwhile, in the sonic margins, gossipy, demonic mutterings and chatter erupt that would seem to contradict the song’s central theme.

Tomboy’s exacting nature is in part the result of the circumstances of its creation. While Person Pitch was composed “any-time, haphazardly, whenever,” in fits and starts, Tomboy was the end result of an ex-tended stretch where Lennox essentially approached songwriting like day-shift work.

“It took me a relatively long time, but I found a practice space in this building called the Interpress—it’s right in my neighborhood, downtown,” Lennox says. “I basically started treating it like going to the office every day. Because of the logis-tics of my life, it was totally different than the Person Pitch process. I’d go into the studio in the morning, go home for lunch with my wife, go back to work, go to pick up my daughter. I’d just go to the studio and do something, even if it was just learning a lot about an instrument or practicing the guitar: As long as I was doing something, the ball was rolling. I would get a lit-tle melody, develop it.”

Lennox has no plans to tour Tomboy upon its release—“I may do some brief touring here and there, but nothing big”—insisting that Animal Collective will dominate his road travel for 2011.

“There’s no record as of yet, but we’re definitely working on a live set and a group of new songs. We’ll tour for a while, then think about hunkering down and record-ing. It’s still kind of in the early stages. I can’t say too much,” he chuckles. “Can’t spill the beans. I’ve gotten in trouble for that before.”

Tomboy cuts deeper than the last one. It hIts harder. that was IntentIonal. I was hopIng It would pack more punch. —Noah LeNNox

Tomboy will be available April 12 from Paw Tracks.

17PhoTo by johAn bergmArk

LudditeFaLLacy

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So, while it wouldn’t be a major event for most bands to set foot in a studio, the fact that Times New Viking’s fifth album, Dancer Equired, was recorded outside of their living rooms represents something of a watershed. This is, after all, a band whose biggest previous leap in terms of sound quality was turning in the master for Born Again Revisited on VHS tape rather than a cassette.

Drummer Adam Elliott, who trades and often shares vocal duties with Mur-phy, says the shift was more a matter of practicality than a statement of purpose. “The reason we went into the studio,” he says, “was we came home from tour ready to record a record, and all of our mics were broken, and we didn’t have a 4-track. It was a pretty logical step.”

The band didn’t stray far from home; Dancer Equired was recorded at Musicol Studios in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio. But the difference in their sound is immediately apparent. From the stinging guitar chords played by Jared Phillips that open “It’s a Culture” on down, the album feels almost spacious compared to the distorted claustrophobia of past efforts, revealing sinuous melodies and newly discernible lyrics that could open them up to an entirely new, and substantially broader, audience.

Fans got their first taste of the album to come last fall, when Times New Viking brought a 7-inch containing the album’s “No Room to Live” along on tour with Guided by Voices. The song, which reveals a Flying Nun influence previously buried under layers of static, is built around a descending organ riff and a single snare drum, as well as another sound that threw some people for a loop. “People were like,

‘Still has that fuzz,’” Elliott recalls. “And it’s like, ‘That’s not fuzz. That’s acoustic guitar.’”

Dancer Equired is a transitional re-cord, or rather a record concerned with transitions. There’s a sense of the band reckoning with a world moving faster than anyone can keep track, and deciding

to evolve at their own pace. “The lyrics come out of a little bit of complacency, and wanting more to happen,” Elliott says. “I think a lot of the songs are about how the world’s sort of changing, but never in the right way. It’s this idea that a lot of people in our generation kind of agree with, but don’t understand—being happy with nihil-ism and being loved. We’re all screwed and the world’s crazy and information is going by us so fast, but there’s still stuff to love and care about.”

Times New Viking take baby steps toward higher fidelity by Sam adamS

If you’ve ever read a word about Times New Viking, you’ve seen the adjective “lo-fi” applied to them—and not without rea-son. The title track to 2009’s Born Again Revisited is an omi-nous miasma of shrieking keyboards, overcranked guitars and drums that sound like metal garbage cans, with Beth Murphy’s voice struggling to make its way through the pea-soup mix.

Although the band exploits technology when it suits them—“No Good,” which features Murphy’s voice and a wobbly acoustic guitar, was recorded onto her laptop—they’re devoted to the sound of analog technology, using the tools of an earlier era to comment on the present.

Elliott admiringly notes that the tape machine on which they recorded Dancer Equired was “the same one Fleetwood Mac used on Rumours—not the same machine, but the same kind.” When Elliott said ear-lier this year that he’d like to work with Lindsay Buckingham “because he would make us sound pristine,” it sounded like he was mocking the glossy perfection of ’70s album rock, but it turns out he was sincere. “I would love to record some-thing like Lindsay Buckingham,” he says. “I know he uses all Pro Tools. We’re not against the idea of recording something on a computer some day. We just don’t know anything about it, so we don’t think it’s our business to be messing with that.”

Elliott, Murphy and Phillips met in art school, and the band members retain their collective affection for the handmade, evident not just in their do-it-yourself approach to recording, but their album artwork, which is chockablock with cut-and-paste text fragments crammed into every available corner. Just as their lyrics reveal themselves piece by piece, as differ-ent fragments float to the surface on each successive listen, so are textual asides and in-jokes there for the finding.

“We did printmaking,” Elliott explains, “these archaic, antiquated methods. We’ve always just made art on our kitchen table rather than putting it into our computers. Us doing analog isn’t a statement against the digital age as much as a comment on where we come from and how we like to build stuff.”

In fact, “building stuff ” is as much a part of the band’s existence as making music. “We pretty much started a band to get out of class,” Elliott says, “but also so we could make album art, fliers and stuff like that. I think over time if you look at all of our art and our songs and our lyrics, I think they all work together.”

Dancer Equired will be available April 25 from Merge

The reason we went into the studio was we came home

from tour ready to record a record, and all of our mics were broken, and we didn’t have a 4-track. It was a

pretty logical step.” —adam elliott

19PhoTo by jo MccAughey

WEEK OF APRIL 4Karaoke Revolution Glee WiiKaraoke Revolution Glee 2: Road to Regionals WiiMaximum Racing Crash Car Racer WiiMaximum Racing Rally Racer Wii

WEEK OF APRIL 11Aladdin Magic Racer WiiBurger Bot NDSCarnival Games Monkey See Monkey Do X360Dance Dance Rev. Bundle X360Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga Art Book X360Fantastic Pets X360Fishdom NDSGem Quest 4 Elements NDSHeavy Fire Afghanistan Wii, PS3, X360Hyper Fighter WiiLego Battles Ninjago NDSMan vs. Wild X360, Wii, PS3Michael Jackson: The Experience PS3, X360Motorstorm Apocalypse PS3Patapon 3 PSPRemington Super Slam Hunting: Alaska WiiRio X360, NDS, Wii,

PS3Spongebob Squigglepants (uDraw) WiiSquinkies Bundle NDSSuper Sonic Racing WiiTreasure Chase (Brainstorm Series) NDS

WEEK OF APRIL 18Book of Unwritten Tales PCCallaway Big Bertha Golf Club PS3Conduit 2 WiiDuke Nukem: Critical Mass NDSFinal Fantasy IV: Complete Collection PSPHistory’s Great Battles PC History’s Great Battles Medieval X360II-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover PCKore Gang WiiLearn Math Preschool NDSLearn Music NDSLimbo/Trials/Splosion Man X360Louisville Slugger Baseball Bat PS3Mortal Kombat X360, PS3Mortal Kombat Collector’s Edition Guide PS3Mortal Kombat Guide PS3Playmobil Agents NDSPortal 2 PC, X360, PS3Portal 2 Signature Series Guide PS3Prince of Persia Trilogy HD PS3Rock Band Country Track Pack Vol. 2 PS2SOCOM 4: US Navy Seals PS3

/video games/new_releases

April 11Michael Jackson: The ExperienceWii, PSP, PS3, X360, NDSThe one time we tried to execute MJ’s signature spin move—the one that ends with knees bent precariously, tiptoes up—we almost broke the TV at age 11 and got sent immediately to our rooms. You’ll do better at this game. Dance like a revolutionary to “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and a ton more.

WEEK OF APRIL 25Darkspore PCExerbeat WiiHaunted PCPokemon Black & White Versions Vol. 2 Guide NDSPSM Skill Shot Tactical Rifle Attachment PS3Thinksmart Labyrinth NDSThinksmart Scotland Yard NDS

WEEK OF MAY 2Duke Nukem Forever PC, X360, PS3Duke Nukem Forever Limited Edition Guide X360Duke Nukem Forever Official Guide PS3Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale PCMini Golf Resort NDSResident Evil: The Mercenaries Official Strat Guide NDSThinksmart Crazy Machines NDS, WiiThor God of Thunder PS3, X360, NDS,

WiiThor God of Thunder Official Strategy Guide PS3Word Up (Brainstorm Series) NDS

WEEK OF MAY 9Driver San Francisco Guide PS3Hoppies NDSLego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game X360, NDS, PSP,

Wii, N3DS, PC, PS3, X360

Loving Life With Hello Kitty & Friends NDSMX vs. ATV Alive PS3, X360Mystery Quest Curse of the Ancient Spirits NDSSpongebob Squigglepants N3DSSuperstars V8 Next Challenge PS3Veggy World NDSVirtua Tennis 4 X360, Wii, PS3WRC FIA World Rally Championship PS3Yu-Gi-Oh: 5D’s World Championship 2011 NDS

WEEK OF MAY 16Brink PC, X360, PS3Brink Guide PS3Cake Mania: Main Street NDSJr. Island Adventure NDSLA Noire X360, PS3LA Noire Signature Series Guide PS3Maximum Racing Sprint Cars WiiMaximum Racing Super Karts WiiMaximum Racing Super Truck Racer WiiReader Rabbit 1st Grade WiiReader Rabbit 2nd Grade WiiReader Rabbit Kindergarten Wii

Reader Rabbit Preschool WiiRed Faction Armageddon PS3, PC, X360Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings PC

WEEK OF MAY 23Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion N3DSDays of Thunder Hybrid PS3Dead or Alive Dimensions NDSF.E.A.R. Official Guide PS3Fear 3 PS3, PC, X360Ferrari: The Race Experience WiiGabrielle’s Ghostly Groove N3DSGet Fit With Mel B WiiGummy Bears Magical Med...Might & Magic Heroes IV PCNASCAR 2011: The Game Wii, PS3, X360Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection N3DSRed Dead Redemption GOTY Limited Edition Guide PS3Reel Fishing Paradise 3D N3DSTop Gun Hybrid PS3

20 J&R MuSic WoRlD www.jr.com/snap 1-800-806-1115

We all run out of road sooner or later. But on his new album, and in his first novel, both called I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, the 56-year-old singer-songwriter wrestles powerfully with his own mortal nature, before reaching the conclusion that he’s pretty much OK with it.

“They’re about mortality,” he says from the New York apartment he shares with wife Allison Moorer and their infant son, “but not in a morbid sense. Death as a part of life. It’s probably the one thing we do all have in common, like it or not.”

The album and the novel weren’t planned as companion pieces. Earle started the book not long after Doghouse Roses, his collection of short sto-ries, was published in 2002, while the songs were composed in the years after 2007’s Washington Square Serenade. Even after all the songs were re-corded and producer T-Bone Burnett took them off

to be mixed, the album was still untitled. It wasn’t until Earle sat down to sequence the tracks that he realized “the album was about the same thing that the book was about.”

In a literal sense, there’s not much common ground. The songs on I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive tackle subjects ranging from the seafaring life of fathers and sons (“The Gulf of Mexico”) to the resilience of post-Katrina New Orleans (“This City,” a carryover from the Treme soundtrack). The novel, on the other hand, con-cerns a dope-addicted doctor bottoming out in 1960s San Antonio, reckoning with the ghost of Hank Williams and a young Mexican woman who may or may not be a living saint. But despite their differences, the album and the novel are grown in the same soil, nurtured by the hand of a man who has looked death in the eye more than once.

Morbid Fascination

S teve Earle is going to die. He’s been closer to death than he is now. In the early 1990s, when he was in the grip of a fierce addiction to heroin, the smart money would have been on him not living to see the new millennium, let alone

its second decade. He’s since cleaned up and slimmed down, but even so, it’s only a matter of time.

For former hard-living troubadour Steve Earle, the road to recovery involves accepting that it ends / story by SAM ADAMS • photos by GENE SMIrNOv

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It’s a natural time for Earle to think about endpoints. His father died in 2007, and last April, he became a father

for the third time. As he talks, 10-month-old John Henry thumps on a toy piano, suggesting he may already have music in his blood. Even now that the album’s completed and the novel written, death won’t leave Earle alone; the day before we talked in late February, the uncle who handed Earle his first guitar passed away in a nursing home, his body depleted by substance abuse.

As Earle tells it, he’s cleaner than ever. He’s been sober since 1994, when he finished a prison term for drug and firearms charges, and the hardcore troubadour now works out regularly.

“I want to live to see John Henry go to col-lege, so I’m going to have to go to the gym every day and not eat white stuff,” Earle says. “I quit smoking five years ago, so I’ve got a shot at stick-ing around for awhile. Doesn’t mean I will, but I actually think about that stuff, and trust me, he’s a big part of that.”

Earle is careful to draw a distinction between exploring mortality and fixating on it, a tendency for which he has little patience. The new album, he says, “is not about mortality as in shoegazer slit-your-wrist music. It’s the opposite of that. I’m not one of those guys who has a copy of White Light/White Heat in the front of my record collection so everybody can see it when I have a party.”

He quit reading Cormac McCarthy—a hereti-cal act for a literary-minded Texan—after The Road, his pitch-black chronicle of a father and son struggling to survive in a brutal post-apocalyptic wasteland. He’d rather read Shakespeare, or Er-nest Hemingway, or the Harry Potter books.

“I think he writes his ass off,” Earle says of Mc-Carthy. “He’s probably a thousand times the writer I’ll ever be. But I think what you write about and what your intentions are matters, and I’m not sure he means well. I don’t see any use in the way that book made me feel.”

These days, Earle writes from a position of rela-tive stability, but it wasn’t always so. On 1990’s The Hard Way, the last album he made before losing several years to drugs and jail, he sounds as if he’s singing through bolts of cloth; on “This Highway’s Mine (Roadmaster),” he can hardly be bothered to keep in time. The album, which Earle co-pro-duced, sounds thick and claustrophobic, almost oppressive. “The darkest record I ever made was The Hard Way,” he says, “and the reason it was that dark was because I was dying. I was barely able to, but I made art about what was going on around me. It was pretty glum.”

By contrast, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive sounds positively light, with the notable exception of “Meet Me in the Alleyway,” where Earle’s slurred,

Assuming that you’re

smart enough to know whether there’s a power greater than you in the universe? That just seems out there to me. That seems really radical and really arrogant. That’s fine for them. But a lack of humility would kill me. It would kill me dead.– Steve earle

22

distorted voice reckons with the ghosts of his past. The album’s linchpin is “God Is God,” a song that first saw light on Joan Baez’s album The Day After Tomorrow, which Earle produced.

Over shimmering guitar and a tribal beat, Earle lays out an open-ended spiritual manifesto, a vi-sion of a world in which God is both real and un-knowable. “Every day that passes, I’m sure about a little bit less,” he sings. “I believe in God, and God ain’t us.”

The song’s combination of faith and uncer-tainty dovetails with Earle’s 16 years in 12-step programs, a central tenet of which is the act of sub-mission to a higher power. He warned Baez before recording the song that it might make people think she was in the program, and so it has. “People have walked up to her and told her where meetings are and shit,” Earle says. “Joan’s just someone who has never had any problems with any substances whatsoever. It was happening all around her and it didn’t even dent her.” He laughs wryly as he adds, “People like that piss me off.”

The ambiguity of “God Is God,” the belief that whatever God is, he, she or it is more complex than we can fathom, is straight out of the 12-step play-book. Although fear of being force-fed Christian-ity keeps some addicts away from meetings, the language counsels them to turn their lives over to “God as we understand him.”

“I’m not a Christian,” he says. “I’m not even close to a Christian. What I’ve come to believe—and this is some stuff I didn’t even think about until I got sober—in my experience, 16 years of sobriety is only possible through spirituality. Twelve-step programs are kind of cool, because it’s spirituality with training wheels. All of us get sober because we’re desperate. We’re so spiritually damaged by the time we get to the program that we need some-thing that works no matter what. And that means no turn-offs.”

The flip side of “God Is God” is “Little Emperor,” an undisguised attack on Earle’s fellow Texan, and fellow addict, George W. Bush. “No more pomp and circumstance, no more shock and awe,” he sings over a piercing mandolin line. “What if you find out God don’t look like you at all?”

“It’s an old-fashioned finger-pointing song, as Bob Dylan used to call them,” Earle says, grinning. “It’s arguably a less mature form of songwriting, but I’m okay with it.”

In addition to his pronounced opposition to the war in Iraq and his longstanding campaign to abolish the death penalty—a punishment Bush meted out with indiscriminate relish during his gubernatorial term—Earle’s anger stems from the destruction of New Orleans, which weathered a natural disaster, but was decimated by the inad-equate federal response. When he sings that the

forces moving Bush out of Washington, D.C., are “blowing like a hurricane,” there’s no doubt which one he means.

Holding onto anger is something addicts are supposed to avoid, particularly when it comes to judging others who’ve walked the same road. But Earle isn’t ready to let bygones be bygones. “I’m perfectly proud of ‘Little Emperor’ as an artist, but maybe not quite as proud of it as a recovering person,” he admits. “I’m okay with ‘Fuck George Bush.’ I would like to forgive him for all the people that died and all the permanent damage that was done to this democracy, but I haven’t yet.”

It’s not Bush’s born-again faith that Earle faults so much as his cocksure certainty. As far as he’s concerned, religious fundamentalists and mili-tant atheists are mirror images. “Assuming that you’re smart enough to know whether there’s a power greater than you in the universe? That just seems out there to me,” he says. “That seems really radical and really arrogant. That’s fine for them. But a lack of humility would kill me. It would kill me dead.”

Humility notwithstanding, Earle has been trying his hand at all manner of art forms in recent

years. Part of the reason the novel took eight years to complete is that he started it at the same time as his first play.

The central character is Doc Ebersole, a de-frocked physician laid low by his addiction to morphine. No longer able to procure pharma-ceutical-grade narcotics, he supports his habit by toiling as a back-alley abortionist, patching up the occasional gunshot wound on the side.

At first, Graciela is just another Mexican girl in need of an abortion, seeking to dodge the shame of an illegitimate child. But as she recovers from her operation, and the nation reels from the shock of JFK’s assassination, strange things begin to happen. Addicts who come to visit Doc’s rooming house, where Graciela has taken on the role of un-trained nurse, find themselves no longer craving drugs; whores walk out the door filled with a desire to start their lives anew in some less seedy corner of the world. And there’s that wound on Graciela’s wrist, the one she got straining through a chain-link fence for a glimpse of Jackie O., that quickly heals but won’t stop bleeding.

Before he got to San Antonio, Doc spent some time on the road with Hank Williams, filling him with shots and pills until his body finally gave out. Hank’s ghost, however, is still going strong, coaxing Doc to keep using until he, too, uses himself up.

“I’d always heard that there was a doctor trav-eling with Hank, that he left Knoxville with him, and was not there when the car pulled over to the

23

side of the road and they found him dead in West Virginia,” Earle says. “Marty Stuart, who’s a real Hank Williams collector, told me the real doctor was a quack with no medical license who claimed he could cure alcoholics by treating them with chloral hydrate, which is barbiturates. But by then the fictitious character I was creating was more interesting to me than the real guy.”

Earle’s greatest challenge in writing the novel was pacing himself, resetting his internal clock after decades of compacting stories to fit the struc-ture of a song. “I’ve had friends of mine who write longer-form stuff for a living, and it blows their mind, the whole idea of writing something short-er,” he says, “especially something like a song—the whole idea of trying to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and an end in three or four minutes, which I do pretty regularly.” Considering that the book is half over before Graciela’s gifts begin to make themselves known, it’s safe to say he’s acquired the knack.

You could say Earle is pacing himself in life as well, if not slowing down at least fixing his eyes on

the horizon. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy,” he says. “I am. I start-ed having children over again at age 55, so I’m obviously an opti-mist.” He doesn’t know what the future will hold, except that he’s more likely to have one than he would have been two decades ago. Whatever comes, he wants to face it with his eyes open, collecting notes until the last.

“It’s like recovery,” he says. “Accepting the fact that you’re gonna die one day doesn’t mean that your last words aren’t gonna be, ‘Oh, shit.’”

The album I’ll Never Get Out of this World

Alive will be available

April 26 from New West.

The novel I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive will be available May 12 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

24

25

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Here at Cowbell, we can’t help but love us some Record Store Day (April 16, recordstoreday.com), that holiday of sorts where music fans like you and me are reminded of what’s really important in life: namely a kick-ass local record store. More than just hubs of commerce, a good indie record store is a gathering spot, a place of discovery, a magnet for those seeking something beyond the easily digested pabulum of the mainstream. Sure, downloading may be convenient, but do you really want recommendations from an algorithm?

Working Holiday

Cowbell’s managing editor, Andrew Bonazelli, got his fix at Northeast Ohio’s Quonset Hut (qhut.com): “It doubled as a dart place/head shop. They had Midnight Madness nights where you could line up outside Monday night for Tuesday new re-leases. It was ideal for keeping up with P-Jam and Soundgarden, while simultaneously avoiding the opposite sex.”

For publisher Alex Mulcahy, it was Gallery of Sound (gal-leryofsound.com): “An oasis of coolness right in my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. I remember how excited I was when the clerk unlocked the byzantine security system that protected cassettes from shoplifters. I bought the Rolling Stones’ Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) and played it countless times on the possession I loved more than any other, my Sanyo boom box.”

Art director Jamie Leary has fond memories of Rainbow Records (rainbow-online.com). “It was the anchor of the cool retail strip of the cool street of Newark, Del., the college town where I grew up. I remember riding my bike there as a kid, buying (ahem) Billy Joel cassettes that my ‘cool’ friend Tim convinced me were the cutting edge of rock. Later, as a college student, I would stumble in and blaze my own musical path, often through the voluminous used CDs section, from classic rock to jam bands to alt-country and indie rock and back. It is, after all, still rock ‘n’ roll to me.”

And me, I don’t know where I’d be today were it not for Bethle-hem’s Play It Again Records (piarecords.com), which introduced me to the likes of the Descendents, Fugazi, Throwing Muses and Beat Happening when I needed them most.

Cowbell caught up with 10 artists playing this year’s Coachella festival (where a pop-up record store will commemorate the joy-ous event) and asked them about the record stores of their youth. —Brian Howard

Make Every Day Record Store Day

The Black Angels playing at Rainbow Records in Newark, DE

interviews by Andrew B onAzelli and BriAn HowArd

28 photo by dain simons

DAVE KINGFLOGGING MOLLYThere used to be—there still is, actual-ly—a basement shop in Dublin just off Grafton Street, Tommy’s [Sound Cellar, owned by Tommy Tighe]. I used to go there as a kid all the time. That remains one of my favorites. It was in a little cel-lar, you know? We’re very fortunate when we do in-stores; we always do indie re-cord stores. They’re always a lot of fun. We just love collecting vinyl, it’s great to get some deals on some good old vinyl.

ALISON MOSSHART THE KILLSOff the Record in Royal Oak, Mich. I used to go there in the summertime. It had a photo booth and a cat. It had records and it was a real record store. In the town in Florida where I grew up, the closest thing to a record store was a tiny cas-sette tape store in the mall. So, going to Michigan and Off the Record was a huge big deal to me.

KEITH MORRIS OFF!Reckless Records in Chicago, Wax Trax Records in Denver, Vacation in Silver Lake, Origami in Echo Park and Finger-prints in Long Beach. In my formative years, we had a record store on Hermosa Avenue in Hermosa Beach called the Re-cord Hole, and that’s where I heard David Bowie, the Move, Mott the Hoople, Gene-sis, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Captain Beyond, Trapeze Trapeze, Mainhorse, America and a small army of others for the first time.

RAPHAEL SAADIQThere was a store back in the day called the Record Factory in Oakland. It used to be on Telegraph [Ave.]. And then there was another one called Leopold’s, and then there was Rasputin in Berkeley. Amoeba is the one I live at now. As a kid, as a musician starting out, there were

records and posters everywhere. What makes Amoeba special to me is I can walk through the store and people tell you about different music you haven’t heard before, different bands, like, “You might want to check this out.” There’s music from all over the world. It’s not just the “in” groups; it’s people and things you need to hear that you prob-ably won’t get a chance to hear that people enlighten you to just by walking into the store all the time.

SONNY MOORE SKRILLEXI’d say my favorite indie record store is Amoeba. It’s just so big and has so much to choose from, from CDs and vinyl to DVDs. And not to mention they really go

out of their way to categorize their music genres well. They’ve got just about every genre of EDM separated, so you can easily find what you are looking for, or per-haps something you weren’t.

NICK RHODES DURAN DURANSwordfish in Birmingham, which was formerly called Rockers in the 1980s. Pure old-school, still stocks loads of vi-nyl and is run by real music lovers who are knowledgeable and passionate about what they do. In America, I love Amoeba in L.A., probably the greatest record store

still open in the whole wide world. If they haven’t got it, you are really going to have to search hard to find it elsewhere. Great staff, cool vibe and may it never close its doors to the public.

WHAT WAS YOUR

favorite REcORD STORE?

Mastodon at Schoolkids in Raleigh, NC.

JOHNATHAN RICE JENNY AND JOHNNYI liked the Kemp Mill Music Store in Annandale, Va. I come from strip mall country, and I could walk to it from my house. I bought Use Your Illusion I and II there, on cassette.

JENNY LEWIS JENNY AND JOHNNYMusic Plus on Ventura Boulevard when I was a kid. The late great Sea Level (where a car crashed through the front window after they announced they were closing shop).

29PHOTO BY MEGHAN DAY

JIM ADKINS JIMMY EAT WORLDThere were a couple really good ones in the Phoenix area. One was based out of Tempe, called Eastside Records. As a kid, before you could get into bars, but after you were old enough to stay out a little bit later, that was kind of like a hangout. Another favorite is called Stinkweeds. They had a lot of bands play there, and I saw Trans Am and Low and Elliott Smith play there. Both stores were pretty involved with the music scene, very supportive. Those were the first stores that would sell our stuff; they took it on consignment.

CEE-LO GREENI used to go to Super Sounds in Atlanta. It was right across the street from the Greenbriar Mall,

our neighborhood mall on the south side of Atlanta. My mother at the time owned a store inside the mall, so I spent an awful lot of time up there. I got one of my first jobs up there and, you know, I remember very fondly getting one of my first checks—I walked across the street and I bought MC Shan’s album, and

I bought Public Enemy’s 12-inch for “Rebel Without a Pause.”

RYE RYEI’ve been to the Sound Garden, which is in Fells Point in Baltimore; it was pretty cool and dope! I did a photo shoot there, actually, and the inside of the store was creative-looking: great designs.

NICK RHODESDURAN DURANThe Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie. It was a truly excit-ing moment; I remember taking it home, removing it from its sleeve and carefully lowering the needle, then turning it up as loud as my ste-reo would go… It sounded extraordi-nary, still does today.

JENNY LEWISJENNY AND JOHNNY“Pass the Dutchie” by Musical Youth

JOHNATHAN RICEJENNY AND JOHNNY“Bad” by Michael Jackson

JIM ADKINSJIMMY EAT WORLDIt was probably Quiet Riot’s Metal Health. I bought it on cassette.

RAPHAEL SAADIQFirst record I ever bought was “Bus-tin’ Out (On Funk)” by Rick James. I got it on 45.

KEITH MORRIS, OFF!The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bought it [in] Del Amo with a $50 bill my friend Chuck found in the bottom of the fruit bowl that Saturday on the counter in his dad’s apartment.

DO YOU REMEMbER THE

First album YOU bOUgHT?

Waiting in line at the Sound Garden in Baltimore.

30 THE SOuND GARDEN PHOTO BY J MAC

31

Disgustingly

gooDOn his fourth record in as many years, Philly folkie Kurt Vile busts a chill

new music reviewed and graded for your aural pleasure

I don’t wanna change, but I don’t wanna stay the same,” sings Kurt Vile on “Peeping tomboy.” with Smoke Ring for

My Halo, the Philadelphia freak-folkie does both. on this, his fourth full-length, Vile opts to shoot from the hip, jettisoning the lo-fi, hypnotic haze of distortion and dissonance that marked his first three records in favor of a more tempered tone, more streamlined songs and a glossy studio sheen. while this approach puts the focus squarely on the strengths—of which there are many—of his songs, it does so at the expense of the tense atmosphere and frenzied psychedelic cacophony that made previous efforts, like his stellar 2009 Matador debut, Childish

Prodigy, such a thrilling and haunting listen. Still, Smoke Ring is Vile’s most fully realized release—and what he realizes is that he wants to chill out.

Vile, again with backing band the Violators, takes no time making his intentions known. If album opener “baby’s arms” doesn’t seduce you in its first 14 bars, you might as well just skip to the next disc; but if it does, you’ll definitely wanna load the bong, fill up the tub and light a candle or two. the track’s sonics set the tone for the record’s following 47 minutes—which brim with distant flourishes, finger-picked

Kurt Vile Smoke Ring for My Halo

matador

photo by shawn brackbill

32

TH

E

reviews

photo by Miki MatsushiMa

arpeggios, a percussive symphony of shakers, strummed acoustic guitars and looping ostinatos; it’s all set to Vile’s wry, conversational ruminations on love, laziness and other slacker frustrations, and delivered in his sleepy-headed stoner-speak drawl (i.e., “If it ain’t workin’, take a whiz on the world”).

“Jesus Fever”—the record’s second track and perhaps Vile’s poppiest song to date—picks up the pace with its backwards, four-on-the-floor back-beat, warped chord-progression and smart-alecky, lethargic delivery, sounding like Dinosaur Jr. with-out the thump of overdriven guitars. Its follow-up cut, the Stones-y romp “Puppet to the Man,” sees the affair kick into full (albeit short-lived) elec-tric, rock ’n’ roll swagger, only to simmer back down with “On Tour” and settle into a sequence of placid, mid-tempo meditations that stack up through the record’s mid-section and continue into its homestretch—highlighted by cuts like the Thurston Moore-fronts-R.E.M. gem “Society Is My Friend, ” the gorgeous “Peeping Tomboy” and the bluesy title track.

While Vile seems and sounds more than com-fortable to ponder his place in the world amid the calm, Smoke Ring is a record that requires some pa-tience, despite the singer’s obvious attempt to make his songs more immediate and accessible. With their attention-grabbing lyrics, memorable melodies and sheer beauty, it’s the strength of the songs that keep the record’s perpetually relaxed aesthetic from sounding too same-y. —Adam Gold

About Group Start and Complete

DominoHot Chip chap and chums’ hip chops

Start and Complete was recorded in a single day and mixed in three, with compositions that the players—a Brit alt/out panoply whose credits in-clude This Heat, Spiritualized and Derek Bailey—had minimal time to learn. So, listeners may be surprised to find that, far from a free improv excur-sion (à la the group’s first, eponymous outing for the Treader label), this is an album of heartfelt, blue-eyed bedsit soul.

The extemporaneous working method ab-solutely translates into a wonderfully congenial looseness and immediacy, but notwithstanding the undeniably masterful ensemble-based mu-sicianship on display, what it’s really about this time is the inimitable singing and songwriting of Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. Continuing in the tender, comforting vein of his band’s triumphant One Life Stand, Taylor sets his croon on swoon and unleash-es a dozen new heart-melters and bad-love ballads (plus one roiling, 11-minute funk-workout cover) doused in warm Wurlitzers and organs (plus some stray electronic squiggles), till resistance is just about hopeless. —K. Ross Hoffman

W e’re not gonna lie: We get redonku-lously stoked every time a new record drops from kaiju-rock titans Boris. oK, maybe not

every time—there are only so many hours in a day and so many clams in our bank account. Seriously, they’ve released roughly eight gajillion records in the nearly 20 years they’ve been an amplifier-worshipping rock ensemble—it’s tough to keep up. So, let’s just say that any time the Japanese trio releases a record stateside, we get super stoked, and the si-multaneous release of Heavy Rocks and Attention Please is a reminder that we really don’t need that spleen.

taken as a pair, which we highly suggest, these could easily be pegged as Boris’ Zen Arcade—the point where

guitar music goes into the great beyond, pop hooks become heavier than hell and noise experiments become acutely accessible. these albums are a masterwork of feedback and fuzz, an epic symphony of sludge and speed, a blueprint for the future of heavy music. taken separately, Heavy Rocks—not to be confused with the import-only album or the 7-inch series of the same name—and Attention Please represent two sides of a band that knows no bounds. Rocks is quite possibly the most danceable heavy music since al Jourgensen wandered out of the land of rape and honey. Attention Please—the first album to feature guitarist/vocalist Wata’s singing throughout—is psychedelic, sleek and menacing, channeling King Buzzo, Kevin Shields and Donna Summer. and both are totally worth swapping a kidney for. —Sean L. Maloney

War of the Gargantuans

Japanese axmen Boris attain inharmonic convergence

Boris Heavy Rocks

Attention Please

Sargent HouSe

33photo by goya skye

An Horse Walls

MoM+PoP MusicThey’re closing in all right We hate it when our com-

puters become self-aware, but we could use it a bit more in our songwriters. Let Kate Cooper be a model for the sapient indie pop lyricist, never on autopilot, resistant to all but the most use-ful clichés. See An Horse’s second album, Walls, wherein the singer-guitarist acknowledges her dark tendencies—among them predicting her own death while waiting for her flight to board, contemplating her “convict blood” (as all sentient Aussies might) and obsessive counting (eyelash-es, planes, windows) during long silences—and then dismisses them with a sharp flick of the tongue, i.e. lines like “that’s enough Twin Peaks for one night.”

But all of that wouldn’t matter if this album didn’t rock you right, which it does, with big cho-ruses, danceable beats (by An Horse’s other half, drummer Damon Cox) and righteously catchy delivery throughout. Walls will sit nicely next to Mates of State, Rainer Maria and vintage Rilo Ki-ley in the Pandora of your mind. —Patrick Rapa

T he Grateful DeaD’s Got nothinG on the lonG, strange trip of Bill Callahan. the charming incompe-tence of his early DiY instrumental recordings, perhaps

steered by his affection for notorious experimentalist Jandek, ulti-mately gave way to his dusty roots reinvention as smog, as well as his evolutionary shift toward utilizing both his astonishing lyrical gifts and his sonorous baritone—a rumbling vocal instrument so

rapturously deep it makes leonard Cohen sound like Bryan ferry—to their greatest ar-tistic effect. after 15 years and 11 albums, Callahan shelved the smog concept and began releasing music under his own name, retaining his often bleak outlook with occasional rays of ironically placed and executed sunshine.

Putting the Dour in TroubadourWhen the going gets dark, Bill Callahan goes darker

Bill Callahan Apocalypse

drag city

Considering Callahan’s glass-half-full-of-piss perspective, titling his third self-bannered album Apocalypse is a sure sign of a dark horizon, and he doesn’t disap-point. But the album is not an end-of-times concept epic—just a set of noirish short stories from a master of the melancholy form. “Drover” cold-opens the album with Callahan intoning somberly, “the real peo-ple went away,” his sparse roots ensemble coming in as he details the difficult trail of a cattle herder; “Baby’s Breath” plays like an irish love-gone-wrong ballad translated with nick Drake austerity and sonic Youth chaos. “america!” is a tom Waits-fronts-the-electric Prunes freakout that jazzily details the ills and thrills of the home of the brave, and “one fine Morning” closes the album like a nine-minute gospel sermon in a dusty prairie church with acoustic rev-erence and electric brimstone. Perhaps Callahan’s most substantial accomplish-ment on Apocalypse is recording live in the studio without overdubs, making the swirling textures, tempos and moods even more impressive. —Brian Baker

Architecture in Helsinki Moment Bends

Modular From start to Finnish

It’s likely more than happenstance that the early popularity of mash-ups coincided with the early 2000s proliferation of kitchen-sink indie-pop bands like Australian ensemble Architecture in Helsinki. Akin to Broken Social Scene or the Fiery Furnaces, the Aussies trade and weave disparate genre conventions, while the group subscribes to the notion that there’s no such thing as too many instruments crammed into a sonic space.

Where Architecture in Helsinki lack the Fiery Furnaces’ pretension and the Social Scene’s scope, they trump them both in pure giddiness. But on Moment Bends, the troupe withholds a bit of the pop sugar, if only a teaspoon. Restraint goes a long way for Architecture; otherwise one might risk diabetic coma. The new one doesn’t sport the transitional type of suites found on In Case We Die, but there’s still variety. “Contact High” channels Prince, while closer “B4 3D” even sounds a little sad. Still, it helps if you come into this with a sweet tooth. —Matt Sullivan

Baby Dee Regifted Light

drag cityShining onBaby Dee is one of the most

enchanting figures in modern music. Even if her (quite inimitable) literal voice appears relatively lit-tle here, her personality—a blend of sentimentality, humor, quirky theatricality and a big-hearted sense of wonder—shines marvelously throughout.

Staking out largely new territory from the fre-quently dark, confessional cabaret of her past work, Regifted Light presents a series of brief, thematically linked chamber pieces oddly reminiscent of Aaron Copland at his most populist, variously incorpo-rating strings, horn, glockenspiel, bassoon, temple blocks and more, but always featuring Dee’s deli-ciously crisp piano playing (on Andrew W.K.’s old Steinway, no less.) The four interspersed vocal numbers—particularly the magnificently silly “Pie Song”—are among the highlights, but the album plays as a cohesive suite, and despite (or maybe because of) its brevity and resounding lightheart-edness, it’s as powerful and affecting, in its way, as anything she’s done. And probably all the more readily enjoyable. —K. Ross Hoffman

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Bell X1 Bloodless Coup

Yep RocTaking command, slowlyTo most Americans, Bell X1

are a complete cipher—even after they scored songs from earlier albums on Grey’s Anatomy and The O.C. (“Eve, the Apple of My Eye” was the soundtrack to the latter’s much-hyped lesbian kiss scene)—so they’d likely be astonished that the Irish band routinely fills stadiums at home, a feat accomplished by racking up multi-platinum sales figures that broke records previously held by U2 and the Pope, not necessarily in that order.

On Bloodless Coup, Bell X1’s fifth album and second without founding member Brian Crosby, the band retains its Coldplay-channels-David Byrne warmth, with a slightly greater reliance on an electronic pulse. “Safer Than Love” could have been produced by Gary Numan, “Sugar High” blips and bops with bedroom laptop intensity, and “Hey Anna Lena” opens with a chilly Radiohead mini-malism, eventually giving way to the majestic or-chestral dynamism that has defined Bell X1 from the outset. But “Nightwatchmen” and “The Trailing Skirts of God” soar and swoon with the best of the band’s estimable and emotional pop catalog. —Brian Baker

Natalie Beridze/TBA Forgetfulness

Monika enteRpRiseWho is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows?

As a member of the Goslab art collective in Geor-gia (the Asia one), electronic artist Natalie Beridze (aka TBA) has been cranking out a catalog of work that’s attracted worldwide admirers. In 2008 she was the subject of a Forward Poetry Prize-winning poem, one of the United Kingdom’s most pres-tigious such prizes. The tongue-in-cheek verses in “Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze” were written by Don Patterson, who at the time was a 44-year-old Scottish poet who’d never met the 25-year-old musician.

On Forgetfulness, it’s easy to understand how Patterson could become so smitten. There are at-mospheric forays which collide with beat-driven minimalism that in turn get gnarled into brief, cha-otic disruptions. Throughout it all Beridze’s voice appears and disappears, often in a whisper-y, barely there sort of way. “What About Things Like Bullets” squeezes the last breath of life out of its drum loop, but it’s one of a handful of tracks that wouldn’t be out of place in the dance club. The rest of the album runs the gamut of ambi-ent music, post-industrial, minimal techno, noise and a million points in between—all of it stunning. —Matt Sullivan

photo by Sara KieSling

A fter Drums & Guns and The Great Destroyer, you might assume the title of Low’s ninth al-bum represents the band lowering its sights,

setting aside universals for a simple, colloquial invitation. After a four-year break between recordings, the longest in their nearly two decades as a band, and a couple, Alan

Sparhawk and Mimi Parker turn their attentions inward, searching—some-times painfully—for a way to co-exist with the world, and with each other.

recorded in the same Duluth, Minn., church as 2002’s Trust, C’mon manages to feel both intimate and epic, pushing through private emotions towards larger truths. enhanced by banjo, strings and lap steel (the latter courtesy of Wilco’s Nels Cline), the songs expand the band’s sound without violating the fragile simplicity at its core. the chiming glockenspiel on “try to Sleep” lends it the air of a lullaby, although it also reminds us there are some rests you don’t wake up from. Until then, Sparhawk advises, “Don’t look at the camera.”

On “Witches,” Sparhawk makes clear his disdain for those who put image before honesty: “All you guys out there trying to act like Al Green: You’re all weak,” he sings, the only time he veers close to the anger of the previous two albums. Being a tough guy is easy; it’s laying yourself bare that hurts. On “Noth-ing but Heart,” Sparhawk matches himself to the title phrase for more than six minutes, incanting it over and over as the band swells behind him (even the church’s organ gets into the act). Parker chimes in with a countermelody, trying to guide Sparhawk through the storm. there’s a sense of a journey completed, a dark night of the soul weathered and a glint of sun breaking through the clouds. If Low has lowered its sights, it’s only to look in the mirror. —Sam Adams

Inward BoundLow returns from its longest hiatus with a personal epic

Low C’Mon

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Blueprint Adventures in Counter-Culture

RhymesayeRsBack to the drawing board

Columbus, Ohio, MC Blueprint used to work with RJD2 as Soul Position, and on his own he’s a little rickety—an at-times agile rhymer (“You want a deeper meaning inside of the sentences / To play the rhyme backwards for messages”—“Go Hard or Go Home”; “I do the impossible / But I make it look easy”—“Radio-Inactive”) who hasn’t quite yet figured out how to shape that skill into defini-tive songs.

It doesn’t help that, rather than the lush sonics RJ used to provide, Blueprint’s own pretty basic beats drive Adventures in Counter-Culture, his first album in six years. The music has some ideas—the robotic snap of “Go Hard,” the eerily tense early parts of “My Culture”—but it’s often pedestrian, which becomes especially clear when he moves into straighter, more rock-like terrain, as on “Radio-Inactive,” or dabbles with dubstep beats (though not spatiality) on “Stole Our Yesterday.” —Michae-langelo Matos

Cold Cave Cherish the Light Years

matadoRSneaking strychnine-laced blow into the Hacienda

In their infancy, NYC outfit Cold Cave stalked the jagged line between dance-pop and industrial grit, with a bit more deference to the latter than the former. But Cherish the Light Years doubles as front-man Wes Eisold’s Factory Records fellatio party, a smashed stained glass gauntlet of pealing Low-Life axework, pouty Bernard Sumner-esque growls, and synthesized BPMs, moving the group further into pop’s no-man’s-land without quite coughing up “Life Magazine II.”

New New Romantic powder kegs like “Pacing Around the Church” and “Underworld USA” are as compositionally intricate are they are sonically sordid, their multitudes of moving parts criss-

crossing hungrily, lending depth to what appear at first blush to be rudimentary New Order homages that salute and condemn the prismatic admixture of exhilaration, narcissistic vacuity and mystery through which Eisold views the city he calls home. The dour “Burning Sage” seethes and hisses like a vagrant-strewn steam grate; “Icons of Summer” sics blackjack synths on disembodied car-alarm wails. —Raymond Cummings

Crystal Stilts In Love With Oblivion

slumbeRlandSeedy plantingsIf the Misfits crashed Wanda

Jackson’s party and smoked some of Joy Division’s primo hash with ? and the Mysterians, everyone’s hallucinations would be scored by Crystal Stilts’ latest album, In Love With Oblivion. The title is pre-cisely indicative of what the mood is like on the Brooklyn-based band’s second full-length. Tunes like “Half a Moon,” “Precarious Stair” and “Silver Sun” swoon hard and low, and are galaxies away from reality television and iPads. Deep, echo-ing vocals, twangy surf-punk grooves, catatonic snaps of the snare and a zombified playfulness create one delicious space oddity. But as with Crystal Stilts’ highly regarded 2008 debut, Alight of Night, darkness beckons. At first, In Love With Oblivion doesn’t feel too dangerous or seedy; but as the album progresses, so do the nefarious un-dertones. Oblivion sure sounds like a good time, but watch your back, lest it swallow you whole. —Jeanne Fury

Dag för Dag Boo

CeRemony Least metal umlaut everAfter drifting from Montana

to Wisconsin to Hawaii, and eventually to Stock-holm, the brother-and-sister duo of Jacob and Sarah Snavely weave the style of ungrounded, gypsy threads one would expect from that sort of wanderlust. Layering loose and understated guitar

lines with ghostly vocals, their band, Dag för Dag (Swedish for “day by day”) issued their debut EP on Saddle Creek back in 2009. Now the two make their full-length debut with Boo.

Dag för Dag wander into interesting sonic ter-ritory from time to time, with guitars alternating between Morricone-style plucks and post-punk slicing. Comparing them to other duos, there’s an ethereal wash akin to High Places and an asser-tive side more on par with the Kills. Lyrically and vocally is where they stumble. The first verse on the album goes, “You wanna comfort me? / I ain’t no cat in a tree / I’m fancy free.” Get it? Like Cat Fancy. Then there’s “Boxed Up in Pine,” which leans so heavily on its refrain that it’s too aggravating to ever sound catchy. —Matt Sullivan

Beth Ditto Beth Ditto EP

deConstRuCtion Solo effort isn’t a cheap knockoff

After the success of Gossip’s major label Music for Men, Beth Ditto seemed primed to replicate the popularity she enjoys in Europe here in the States. But her first solo release shows that the dancehall is far more important to her than the radio.

This EP, written with analog electro producers Simian Mobile Disco, offers great songs for the club and not much else. Sure, leadoff “Open Heart Surgery” shows Ditto at her most diva, crooning deft metaphors about heartache. But the protract-ed song lengths of three of the four tracks don’t fit in well with an indie rock party mix, and the only single-appropriate track, “I Wrote the Book,” is the weakest, coming and going with a barely hum-mable chorus. Ditto seems happy where she is, writing balmy dance numbers instead of pop hits, and if she continues to shrug off the mainstream, it’s the mainstream’s loss. —Shane Mehling

Explosions in the Sky Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

tempoRaRy ResidenCeAtmosphere for more than just Friday nightA dozen years ago, Explosions in the Sky began concocting wordless epics, blending prog’s swell-ing bombast with post-rock’s edgy energy in a true approximation of soundtracks with no movies. It’s an apt description, as the Texas quartet spent their first practice discussing films and their second ac-tually rehearsing. With that mindset, EITS have created swirling cinematic suites on their four studio albums, the big surprise coming in 2004 when the band provided the soundtrack to Friday Night Lights.

Since doing actual score work, EITS have be-come even more enamored of atmosphere, begin-ning with 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and continuing with their latest, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. TC3’s half-dozen tracks—the shortest at three and a half minutes, the longest just breaking the 10-minute mark—are marvels of aggressive ambience, as concerned with texture and mood

photo by seamus murphy

HOOP DREAMY Explosions in the Sky aim high

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as tempo and melody. To that end, EITS employ a variety of unusual instrumentation on Take Care, including Japanese singing bowls, classical guitar and percussive vocals, sculpting sound like it was a physical medium and crafting a gallery of power-fully emotive compositions. —Brian Baker

Foo Fighters Wasted Light

RCAAnother casualty in the war on foo

In the roughly 17 years since Nirvana exited stage left, Dave Grohl has remained a hitmaking force on radio—even if sometimes that seemed counter to his better judgment. The Grohl-led Foo Fighters have maintained mainstream relevance on an FM dial that’s devolved into a wasteland of Nickelback-ery, and in doing so, have spent their past three records peering over the precipice of buttrock. They’ve yet to jump that cliff, but it’s sometimes a little too close for comfort.

None of that’s changed on Wasted Light. It’s a slick and polished set, built for blasting through the airwaves. Like the rest of the band’s post-millennial output, three or four songs are badass enough to keep from dismissing it outright. “White Limo” har-kens back to the dirty scuzz that made their first album accessible but dangerous, while riff-heavy tracks like lead single “Rope” comprise the rest of the highlights. But most of this is by-the-book: Compact verses open up to arena-sized choruses with a couple ballads. Nothing surprising, but it’ll sound fresh between the latest Daughtry cuts. —Matt Sullivan

FredrikFlora

The KoRAA bittersweet harvestOne has to pause before

pairing the term “electro-folk” with the Swedish trio Fredrik. True, there’s plenty of wintry choral interludes, bells and violins atop the crystalline electronic textures within the production, but that hardly means you’ll hear selections from Flora per-formed at a coffeehouse open mic any time soon.

Rather, this LP shows the trio moving towards a sort of 21st century chamber music, particularly on gentle free verse ballads like “Naruto and the End of the Broken Ear.” At times, they evoke a vintage 4AD gothic haze, such as the haunting standout “Rites of Spring.” But Fredrik never sink into de-spair; the lyrics, when they’re decipherable amidst layers of keyboards and vocalist Fredrik Hultin’s wispy tenor, are playfully absurd and dreamlike (“The pigs will fly away / From their holy sty / Here I dream about the perfect hurricane”), wit-ness titles like the instrumental/lame excuse “I’m Pretty Sure He Said Killdren.” Riiiight, Fredrik. We believe you. —Justin Hampton

V iewed in the context of his previous work, each of Rick froberg’s bands has initially come across as a disappointment. drive Like Jehu took

the angular attack of San diego scene granddadies Pitchfork and imbued it with better hooks. But hot Snakes—froberg’s

second pairing with collaborator John Reis—really shined a light on the unique attributes of dLJ’s Yank Crime by placing an even greater premium on melody. As with 2009’s I Blame You, the latest full-length from obits may leave froberg fanatics high and dry: Moody, Standard and Poor lacks both the bluster and the sinister peaks of Pitchfork, Jehu and hot Snakes. But froberg’s magnificent guitar tone is still front and center with obits, as well as his flair for rockabilly: even the least froberg-y of his efforts to date still bears this unmistakable imprint.

it’s worth noting that I Blame You elicited multiple comparisons to the excellent ’60s era surf-rock band the Ventures upon its release. the warped surf-meets-garage sound that froberg first teased on Yank Crime (particularly “Luau”) takes even more dramatic shape on tracks like “everything Looks Better in the Sun” and “Spot the Pikey” (which features an overt vocal nod to the Surfaris’ “wipe out”). Moody, Standard and Poor even closes with an instrumental, “i Blame Myself,” that nearly encapsulates the Ventures, Link wray and John Barry’s surf-themed James Bond soundtracks. the competent, assured manner in which obits present itself here is refreshing, and the pair of tracks on which guitarist/vocalist Sohrab habibion takes lead fare much better this time around. But froberg’s driving, hair-raising chant on “i want Results” spotlights what’s missing from Moody, Standard and Poor: a challenge. —Nick Green

photo by eliot shephard

Reverb, Renown and RoteWhere has Rick Froberg’s mojo gone?

Obits Moody, Standard and Poor

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that fail to make a lasting impression. And when Jonny shoots for whimsy, the results are even worse, namely the irritatingly baroque “Bread” and the interminable, 10-minute “Cave Dance.” —Michael Pelusi

Cass McCombs Wit’s End

DominoThe troubadour’s noir-hearted masterpiece

Cass McCombs is one of those bleakly gorgeous singer-songwriters who converts musical peers and esoteric critics in a single exposure, making rabid loyalists of a certain segment of music fan. A moodily evocative melodicist and poetically liter-ary storyteller with a darkly mad streak, McCombs goes deeper and darker—even for him—on Wit’s End, his fifth studio album.

McCombs blends John Lennon’s sympathetic cynicism (“Buried Alive”), Jimmy Webb’s epic pop sensibilities (“County Line”) and Al Stewart’s ear-liest psych-folk inclinations (“The Lonely Doll”), flavored with Serge Gainsbourg’s scuffed romanti-cism and Tom Waits’ dusty beer-hall ruminations, tacked together with the iron gripped gossamer web that McCombs weaves so singularly well. All of McCombs’ melancholy talents are brought on the laconic nine-minute closer, “A Knock Upon the Door,” as he creates a Dylan-esque looped melody, holds it up to Grant-Lee Phillips’ mirror, then breaks the glass for use in his commemora-tive Kurt Weill kaleidoscope. McCombs’ catalog aches with beauty and truth, and Wit’s End may be the album that hurts the best. —Brian Baker

Meat Puppets Lollipop

megaforceSome things will never change? Like hell.

When the Meat Puppets roared out of Arizona over a quarter-century ago, their tumultuous des-ert punk found eagerly receptive ears among the likes of Kurt Cobain, J. Mascis and Stephen Malk-mus; but the Puppets’ most profound influence may have resulted from their almost pathological creative restlessness. Psychedelicized country rock, dusty punk, melodic pop/rock and every permutation between and beyond has emanated from the Puppets during their long tenure and in-famous turmoil.

The Puppets’ track record of reliable unpredict-ability has been their greatest asset, from their earliest experimentation to their 1994 commercial breakthrough Too High to Die to the comprehensive backward glance of 2009’s Sewn Together. Lolli-pop, the Puppets’ 13th studio album, is largely an extension of Sewn Together’s sonic quilt, from the psych punk sway of “Hour of the Idiot” to the acid hootenanny of “Baby Don’t” to the roots-pop pulse of “Damn Thing” and the desert glam of “Way That It Are.” Lollipop is neither startlingly groundbreak-ing or disappointingly familiar; it’s just the Meat Puppets doing what they do, which is everything they do. —Brian Baker

Hatchback Zeus & Apollo

Lo recorDingsGods and monstersFrom this vantage point, the

scintillating, Kraut-induced cosmic disco of Sam Grawe’s debut feels like a hedged bet. On his sec-ond opus as Hatchback, the San Franciscan synth-aesthete (and Dwell magazine editor) stretches luxuriously beyond commonly perceived boundar-ies of taste, proudly proclaiming the emergence of “the new age of New Age.”

That canny, if charged, catchphrase—hip-to-be-square provocations notwithstanding—seems intended to grant him, and us, greater freedom to indulge in this sumptuous music (which could also be comfortably, less contentiously labeled ambi-ent electronica) on the level of pure, experiential beauty. And Zeus & Apollo is an exceptionally, unabashedly beautiful work, if—per its classically inflected title, and Grawe’s design inclinations—more focused on forms than feelings.

But its formalism is far from minimalist or reductive. These six tracks—averaging over 12 minutes apiece—are serenely slow-moving, but constantly evolving, never static. Indeed, it’s a marvel how much color and character Grawe can introduce without disrupting his music’s funda-mental clarity and calm.—K. Ross Hoffman

Holy Ghost! Holy Ghost!

DfaFrightful ’n’ (largely) delightful

Even if your sonic proclivities tend toward the more sterile ends of ’80s pop and rock, the songs by Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser—a.k.a. New York’s Holy Ghost!—have enough tsss-bip synth sheen to them that it might give pause to even a staunch fan of the approach.

Getting Mr. Yacht Rock himself, Michael Mc-Donald, to harmonize on the album’s finale, “Some Children,” is the kind of touch that’s a couple notches too cute. Their tremolo-guitar-led grooves may not be particularly original, but more often than not, they move and leave something in the memory bank. “Hold On” glides by on Space Invad-ers-age synth arpeggios, and the catchiest chorus on the album; “Static on the Wire” is led by a funky clavinet and conga accents, washed clean on the chorus by perky, plastic chords. Unfortunately, the largely characterless singing does its own kind of washing away as well.—Michaelangelo Matos

Hyro Da Hero Birth, School, Work, Death

stereo Bang meDiaAnother rock-rap drive-by

Throughout the ’90s, rock-rap GMOs were gener-ally engineered by the dirty white boys of alt-rock, since mainstream hip-hop of that era had enough innovation and legendary drama to contend with. Fast-forward to the 20-teens, and the malaise has

apparently settled in so thick within the bloated urban industry that you’ve got Jay-Z giving Griz-zly Bear props and B.o.B. insisting himself a rock star.

Enter Houston “gangsta rock” rapper Hyro Da Hero, who came up rapping over Weezer and Re-fused, and received the time-honored L.A. main-stream makeover that spawned his debut LP. On practically every song, Hyro inveighs against the “recycled songs [and] recycled dreams” of modern hip-hop, poising himself as the genre’s maverick savior. The musical backup, however, is cookie-cutter radio-friendly alt-rock, and his perspective and wordplay fail to ignite. Sounds like he’s got some catching up to do. —Justin Hampton

If by Yes Salt on Sea Glass

chimeraElectronic project with a quietly powerful heart

All things old are new again in the music industry, so it’s inevitable that strains of Kate Bush, ambi-ent pop, mechanized tropicalia, Middle Eastern warbles and languorous dreamwave would even-tually shimmer back into soft focus. All of that and more are blown into beautifully elaborate bubbles by the sonic artisans of If by Yes on their gauzy debut, Salt on Sea Glass.

Given the quartet’s impressively arty ped-igree—Petra Haden (That Dog), Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto), Hirotaka Shimizu and Yuko Araki (Cornelius)—perhaps Salt on Sea Glass’s big sur-prise is that IbY doesn’t pursue avant for garde’s sake, as the long distance contributors congregate at an organic crossroads. In process since 2002, IbY’s songs drift along on ambient currents with jazzy insistence that can be passively soothing or aggressively powerful. Like all good subversive electronic music, If by Yes are best in the quiet moments, which require repeated and focused lis-tening to fully appreciate. Guests include David Byrne, Nels Cline and Keigo “Cornelius” Oyamada, but their appearances don’t overwhelm Sea Glass’ passionate subtlety. —Brian Baker

Jonny Jonny

mergeTry to look the other wayFrom “Everything Flows” to

“Baby Lee,” Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub has written his share of brilliant guitar pop. But with his new duo, Jonny, the Scotsman cedes the spotlight to Euros Childs, former frontman of the Welsh group Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. In sound and spirit, their self-titled debut is not too dissimilar from Childs’ solo albums, with Blake mainly busy-ing himself with vocal harmonies. Gorky’s were also responsible for some winsome gems, but the bulk of Jonny wants for real inspiration.

Occasionally, Childs and Blake happen upon an effortless folk-pop melody, specifically tracks like “Candyfloss” and “Circling the Sun,” the only song where Blake really asserts himself. But the album is dominated by brief, sparsely arranged pleasantries

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Was This It?The Strokes are back!

F ive years after an archetypically difficult third album that yielded middling re-views and a surprising degree of indifference

(even though, from this distance, its purported “experi-ments” sound like nothing more or less than energetic, inventively crafted rock songs), the five men once hailed as rock ’n’ roll’s sainted saviors have both a lot to live up to and, somehow, strangely little to lose. Angles, outward-

ly, reverts to the tightly streamlined form of the first two strokes lps—10 tracks, 34 minutes, minimal margin for excess. But the way they pack that dense half-hour betrays hardly a hint of backpedaling.

full of stylistic curveballs, compositional left turns, screwy sonics, skewed ’80s pop pastiche and fantastically scrawly soloing, this is easily the wildest and weirdest they’ve ever sounded; if not exactly sloppy, then certainly glee-fully uncalculated. true, slap-happy loss leader “Under cover of Darkness” overtly evokes their era-defining early singles (albeit with the menace re-

The StrokesBlessed

rca

placed by vaguely Footloose-ish forced mirth), but nothing else sounds remotely like the output of a formula. hence, while the sneaky syncopations and power-pop goodies of “Ma-chu picchu” and “taken for a fool” feel very nearly irresistible, it’s likely most listeners’ mileage will vary track by track, particularly in the slippery second half.

the strokes haven’t entirely lost the trade-mark tenseness (and tinniness) of their young-er days—witness the jagged, tightly wound “you’re so right” and “Metabolism”—but Angles also manifests a newfound looseness, most palpably on “Gratisfaction,” a breezy, stones-y good-times shuffle. that freewheel-ing spirit, alongside all the kitchen-sink tin-kering and the brightly trashy, plastic-pop au-ral aesthetic, sometimes comes at the expense of the band’s habitual melodic elegance (both vocal and instrumental), but more often than not it translates into a whole lot of inspired, bristly rock ’n’ roll fun. —K. Ross Hoffman

Mysteres du Serpent Mondo Neptune

BakeD tapesSpooky N’awlins noiseWhile there’s no denying the vacuum-sealed occult synth hiss Telecult Powers serve up,

the NYC duo’s vamps are conspicuously light in terms of percussion or rhythm. Gratifyingly, Mys-teres du Serpent—a new project featuring Telecult member Witchbeam!, who moved to NOLA last fall—pairs that ominous thrumming with intricate

drumbeats that vacillate between voodoo stomp and marching-band thump.

At moments on debut cassette Mondo Neptune, this fusion fosters the illusion of tribes battering bongos in haunted, monsoon-lashed jungles. At other junctures, a different dynamic is at work, pit-ting a kooky, looped beat pattern against masti-cated samples, intermittent bird-call flutes, bleat-ing could-be organs and what sounds like a cross between wanton distortion, an armada of master drummers laying into an oversize piece of sheet metal and OSHA-violation noise pollution. File this under “spine-tingling.” —Raymond Cummings

Roy Orbison The Monument Singles Collection

sony/leGacyWhat’s a Beatle anyway?

There’s hip, in the feather ’n’ headband fashion vic-tim sense, and then there’s hip in the Roy Orbison sense—that sort of uncanny coolness that exists outside of time and space, the kind that never gets old, never gets stale, that trumps something as picayune as death. Orbison, with his all-black attire and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, was the arch-hipster, and

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the mold from which all other hepcats were cast. The Monument Singles Collection—which brings together all of the sides he cut for the Nashville independent label Monument between 1959 and 1965, recorded in glorious motherfucking mono—is proof positive that his reverb-drenched warble is as relevant today as it’s ever been.

“Working for the Man” is the definition of punk attitude, even if it came out a decade and change before punk was punk; “Distant Drums” tugs the heartstrings more than any self-medicating beardo ever could; and “Only the Lonely” is one of the greatest songs in the rock pantheon. If you don’t agree, you are obviously un-hip. Also includes a nine-song DVD from the classic Monument Concert 1965. —Sean L. Maloney

The Rural Alberta Advantage Departing

Saddle CreekCanadian rockers work best looseNils Edenloff evidently has a

thing about embracing his suitors. Quite frankly, it’s a bit creepy. “If I ever hold you again / I’ll hold you tight enough to crush your veins,” the Rural Alberta Advantage guitarist sings on “Two Lov-ers.” An obsessive note to open one’s sophomore album, and it recurs throughout.

If Edenloff’s lyrical persona could stand to loosen up, so could RAA’s music. The Canadian three-piece moves in the propulsive Great Plains rickrack mode of contemporaries like Dead Confederate and Deer Tick, except it sounds like the caravan crashed and we’re sorting through a pile-up. “Muscle Re-laxants” has an overdone, rumbly backing that detracts from harmonies with bassist Amy Cole. On “Stamp,” layers of refined strings, keyboard and xylophone are pulverized by Paul Banwatt’s raucous drums. The most affecting moments on Departing make the best use of space: A large stretch of “The Breakup” is simply a snappy beat and solemn organ, and “Good Night” is built around chilling, roomy a cappella singing. —John Vettese

Sin Fang Summer Echoes

Morr MuSiC Growth spurtsSeabear founder Sindri Már

Sigfússon folds glorious surprises into his second solo album at the rate of one per couple minutes—at least. The singer and multi-instrumentalist’s montage-intensive approach takes a little getting used to—if only for the allure of its components—and he wastes no time before providing opportuni-ties to do so.

Just as the voluptuous, mostly acoustic opening section of “Choir” earns a place in our collective libido, he slams us into a new reality with frac-tured breakbeats and a gently driving backwards

electric guitar loop before piling on more novel juxtapositions. (Speaking of guitar, whoever makes Sigfússon’s amps should be tapping him for en-dorsements: He’s both a consummate player and a master of tone.)

Even with all the transitions, Summer Echoes smacks less of the progressive rock tradition than of a genteel, post-Animal Collective surreality that makes being a grown-up seem downright attrac-tive. —Rod Smith

Tied & Tickled Trio with Billy Hart La Place Demon

Morr MuSiCSomewhat satisfied ’n’ tickled, tooGive a crew 20 years, and it

will explore just about every musical style on of-fer; give a jazz drummer 50, and he’ll explore even more. So, this particular project—a collaboration between Markus and Micha Acher (the Notwist, 13 & God) and the venerable drummer Billy Hart—could have theoretically pulled anything out of their wheelhouses. But this time around, everyone plays it straight and subdued.

Hart certainly makes his idiosyncratic presence felt throughout—even with a full ensemble of horns and woodwinds swooning away, everything sounds draped atop his work. And he’s not above lock-ing into a groove, either, as the mid-tempo “The Three Doors Part 3” proves. Nevertheless, there’s a palpable lack of energy here, and it all sounds a bit stodgy. The Achers have chops from indie rock, metal and electronica to potentially bear, but they limit themselves too much. With Hart onboard, it’s a missed opportunity. —Justin Hampton

Timber TimbreCreep On Creepin’ On

artS & CraftSJust keep it on the downlowTaylor Kirk is one suave fuck.

Nobody can touch Timber Timbre’s founder, front-man and principal songwriter at crooning about murder, madness, lowlife supernature and mixed feelings about all the above. And he does it all with

a degree of heartfelt detachment uncommon even among genuinely psychotic persons and CIA op-eratives.

Though he keeps the haunted mansion sonics and bandmates introduced on 2009’s Timber Tim-bre, Kirk uses the country and blues traditions that informed it (and two preceding albums) strictly as distant points of reference for the Toronto-based trio’s fast-evolving, splatter-punk cabaret rock. Fel-low multi-instrumentalists Mika Posen and Simon Trottier carry their weight and then some, often helping Kirk nudge the band into modern classical territory, as on icy instrumental “Obelisk.” Timber Timbre’s knack for nipping everybody from Nico Muhly to (on the title track) Fats Domino lends the end result a depth and resonance that render Kirk’s hauntological explorations all the more disturbing. —Rod Smith

Various Artists Midlake: Late Night Tales

eMiSlumber party

Usually, when rock bands put together one of the many DJ-mix and/or compilation series that have proliferated over the past decade, they take the opportunity to show what diverse ears they have. Denton, Texas, quintet Midlake do the exact opposite on their edition of the Late Night Tales series (compilation, not a DJ mix), taking from a broad geographic-historical swath to present a cohesive showcase of what you might call nar-cotic folk-rock.

Tracks from Steeleye Span, Fairport Conven-tion, Vashti Bunyan, the Band (the still unearthly “Whispering Pines”) and the obscure Bread Love & Dreams ground it—not to mention Midlake’s own mush-mouthed acoustic version of Black Sabbath’s “Am I Going Insane,” which sounds cal-culated to get a few high-larious spins on an NPR knockoff near you. But the better moments are the saltier ones: Scott Walker’s theatrical-orchestral “Copenhagen,” the country-rock ramble of the Fly-ing Burrito Brothers’ “Christine’s Tune”—but not Rodriguez’s self-righteous hippie-era relic “Crucify Your Mind.” —Michaelangelo Matos

THIS MORTAL DOILY Sin Fang’s Sigfússon is our kind of beardo

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reviews

Various Artists SMM: Context

Ghostly InternatIonal

Oh so quietKompakt Records, the German

techno leader, has been issuing annual volumes of the Pop Ambient series, exploring quieter electronic areas from drones to languid laptop folk to more classically inclined works, since 2001. It’s surpris-ing more labels haven’t followed suit, but the Ann Arbor-rooted Ghostly International, which occu-pies a similar status among American dance labels, has issued an answer.

SMM: Context is the first of a promised yearly series, and like Kompakt’s recent Pop Ambient 2011, it’s a darker plunge than has typically been the case with this type of comp. Though nothing here is as deeply sinister as PA2011’s black metal-leaning “30.6.1881,” by Crato, we get deliciously deep-purple deep space from Svarte Greiner’s “Halves”; Jacaszek’s lovely, restrained “Elegia”; Manual’s “Three Parts,” which is like the crest taunting you as it dangles over the horizon; and Rafael Anton Irisarri, who usually rehashes shoegaze for the la-bel under the name the Sight Below, switching to piano. Not a bad start. —Michaelangelo Matos

Mike WattHyphenated-Man

ClenChed WrenChGracefully-Aging-Punk-ManMike Watt is billing his latest

album as a “rock opera,” albeit one without a tra-ditional narrative or libretto. The 30 short songs on Hyphenated-Man directly reference characters in the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, while Watt’s typically abstruse lyrics reflect frag-ments of his own personality. That’s a long wind-up for something presented in such a loose and lo-fi manner, but anyone who approaches Hyphenated-Man without a cursory awareness of Watt’s odd career trajectory might be left dumbfounded.

It’s probably the closest he has come to re-capturing the sound of the Minutemen’s classic Double Nickels on the Dime, but with Watt’s trade-mark slap-bass and stern vocals filtered through the lens of jazz, funk and the more melodic aspects of the SST catalogue. It’s something Watt provides a handy metaphor for on “Confused-Parts-Man,” and like all great puzzles, it just takes a little time and effort to put those “mangled-up parts” in order. —Nick Green

Zomes Earth Grid

thrIll JoCkeyThe song remains the (ass-kicking) same

Unlike 2008’s Zomes, Earth Grid’s not-quite-geometric black and white art scheme befits Asa

W hen ViVian Girls made their splash a couple years ago, the knock against the Brooklyn indie-fuzz-pop trio was that it

wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Guitarist Cassie ra-mone and bassist Kickball Katy (still among the funniest names in rock), the group’s two constants, wrote breezy girl-group knockoffs and sprayed them out from cheap-sounding

amps—just like a dozen or a thousand bands before them. the deliberate lack of muscle on the band’s self-titled album and hesitant live shows turned off as many as it turned on. road work toughed them up, as 2009’s Everything Goes Wrong demonstrated, but Share the Joy sounds like a retreat. some of it is the drum-ming: Fiona Campbell, the Girls’ third stickswoman, brings a lot less propulsion than ali Koehler did on Wrong (Frankie rose played on the debut). the middle section of “lake house” sounds like it’s getting ready to rev into higher gear, but then stays resolutely in first.

rave-ups aren’t really Vivian Girls’ real strength anyway. Share the Joy is best when its songs hark back to surf-rock that lurches between brooding verses and crashing choruses, as on the snarling “trying to Pretend” and the tenser “sixteen Ways.” But even when Vivian Girls aim for charm, as on “take it as it Comes,” an old-fashioned, tongue-in-cheek girl-group advice song (“think with your head, girl, not with your heart / if you want a love so true”), most of this album sounds worn down rather than winsome. —Michaelangelo Matos

One Step Forward…Are Vivian Girls regressing?

Vivian Girls Share the Joy

PolyvInyl

Osborne’s jones for stolid, meditative repetition. For the most part, Grid boils Zomes’ Zen DNA down to just the barest essentials, then marinates them in codeine cough syrup: staggered, blaring bass riffs; denatured organ or synthesizer chords in hypnotic gaggles; suspended-animation “We Will Rock You” bass-drum thumps so hollow that they seem to be happening, live, at some outdoor concert venue three miles distant.

Notes and levels of intensity vary, but what Os-borne does, over and over again—offering minor

variations on a theme, conjuring a lysergic ebb and flow that dominates the entire album—is demon-strate the undeniable resilience of metronomic per-cussive boom and bloodshot keyboard pow. Wrestle against the Xanax undercurrent, and Earth Grid’s finer points leap out at you: similarities between “Spiraling” and the closing theme to Ocean’s Eleven, the uncharacteristically daring guitar distortion that opens “Step Anew,” and the album’s subtle, late-inning shift into bone-rattling, heavy-treble sound saturation. —Raymond Cummings

photo by nolan conway

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ROLLING STONES

THE ROLLING STONES SINGLES (1971-2006) Not enough Rolling Stones singles for you? On April 19 get this amazing box set, 173 tracks over 45 CDs, recreating the original 7” single releases in miniature picture sleeves.

BROWN SUGAR a special limited 7” release for Record Store Day with “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch” and “Let It Rock” a hard to fi nd song from the Sticky Fingers sessions

7”SINGLE

rollingstones_full_0411.indd 1 3/23/2011 12:59:17 PM

So March marks one year for you as the Sierra Club’s executive director. What is the state of the Club’s union?We just celebrated the defeat of the 150th proposed coal plant in the United States, which is significant because coal is the larg-est source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, the largest source of mercury poisoning in the country, and [the source of ] thousands of tons of toxic wastes in our air and water and atmosphere every year. So, by stopping the construction of new coal plants, we’re also allowing for clean energy development to accelerate around the country. That’s probably the biggest victory that we’ve had.

Your most recent initiative has been to fight Republican attempts to weak-en the EPA’s authority. Where does that stand now?We’re faced with some significant threats to the EPA’s authority coming from Con-gress, and that’s our top priority moving forward. The bill [H.R. 1] passed the House, but we don’t think it has any chance of get-ting through the Senate and certainly not

past the President’s desk. So, we see it as just another example of our opponents be-ing out of touch with the majority of the American public, who actually want the EPA to do its job, and want to protect pub-lic health and make sure that we have clean air and water. We have been mobilizing Sierra Club members in every state around the country to pressure their legislators not just to defend the EPA’s authority, but to make sure that the standards that the EPA is enforcing are updated and are rel-evant for the 21st century.

Why is this legislation in particular such a top priority for the Club?Because we have the EPA to thank for preventing literally thousands of deaths every year from air pollution and water pollution. The pollution that comes from oil refineries or coal-fired power plants or industrial facilities across the country are significantly reduced because of the work that the EPA does to make sure that com-panies are following the law. I think the thing that most people don’t know about the EPA is that when it issues these rules,

it does so in a way where not only are we preventing more deaths or preventing more people from getting sick, but we’re doing it in a cost-effective way. We’re lit-erally saving money at the same time that we’re saving lives. The reason there are so many attacks on the EPA is because oil and gas and coal companies are threatened by what they do, and so they’re fighting hard to maintain the status quo.

Michael Brune, head of advocacy powerhouse the Sierra Club, talks about the state of environmental activism / interview by Shaun Brady

Standing Tall

Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune celebrat-ed his one-year anniversary on the job the way any self-respecting environmental agitator would: picking a fight with Republicans. In February, Brune announced that the Club was launching a new campaign to battle GOP efforts to block Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air pol-

lution rules. Brune stopped to assess his first year at the helm in preparation for a lecture at his alma mater, West Chester Univer-sity. Our chat with him covered coal, clean air and water, toxic messes and New Jersey.

42 photo by loir eanes

How do you deliver this message be-yond the ears of Sierra Club members so that you’re preaching to more than just the choir?Just by making [it] very clear that the so-lutions that the Sierra Club is proposing will make a very positive impact on the lives of everybody in our country. If you care about clean air and clean water, then the Sierra Club’s your friend. If you care about parks and wilderness areas and pre-serving healthy forests, then you should be standing with the Sierra Club, because we stand for those values, too. A lot of times, our opponents will attempt to vilify us as being anti-American or anti-business, when we’re anything but. The Sierra Club is made up of Republicans and Democrats, people from rural and urban areas, and we have a very broad purpose of trying to make our country and our planet a better place to live.

With so many threats to our environ-mental well-being, how do you set priorities for the Club?The top priority for the organization is to fight climate change and, in doing so, to move our country beyond coal. As I men-tioned before, coal is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, it is the dirtiest form of energy that we have, and it also is holding us back from creating more jobs by developing clean and renew-able sources of energy like solar and wind. So that is in fact the biggest priority for the Sierra Club in our history—we’ve got more staff and volunteers devoted to mov-

“ The reason there are so

many attacks on the EPA is because oil and gas and coal companies are threatened by what they do, so they’re fighting hard to maintain the status quo.” —michael brune

43PhoTo courTEsy of siErrA club

ing America beyond coal than we’ve ever had. The other thing that we’re working to do is utilize technology to connect with individual members and supporters as ef-fectively as we can. The Sierra Club is the largest grassroots environmental group in the country, and so we want to make sure that all of our volunteers and supporters have the tools they need to organize in their own communities.

Where does your personal interest in environmental activism stem from?I grew up in New Jersey, which is both a beautiful place to live and also the scene of probably some of the most toxic places in the country. So I had both the benefit and burden of seeing the consequences of good organizing that helped protect some beautiful places, and also bad industrial behavior that helped to destroy other beau-tiful places. My wife and I have two young children now, so I think every day about the world that they’re growing up in and there’s no shortage of motivation to try to make it a little safer, a little healthier and just as beautiful a place as it was when I was growing up.

You’re about to return to speak at your alma mater. What did you learn at West Chester that has benefited your work with the Sierra Club?Well, I studied economics, finance and ac-counting at West Chester, so what I credit my time there with is helping me to under-stand how the business community thinks and works so that the solutions we’re pro-posing here at the Club help to respond to the economic needs that we have as a country. It’s been very important for me being in the environmental movement to have a grounding in economics so that we can think about what a more just and sus-tainable economy would look like.

As an environmental figure, do you have any guilty pleasures?I do have a weakness for ice cream, but I don’t think that has a bad environmental footprint. I will confess that I do have a deep longing for a larger television screen, and I’m waiting for an energy-efficient one to come on board. I travel a lot, so my wife says that I have to stay at home enough to get a big screen, but I’ve been thinking that once the baseball season starts it would be nice to have a bigger screen to watch it on.

Do any stories come to mind that il-lustrate the work of the Sierra Club on a more human, less abstract level?The thing that I think many folks don’t know about the Club that really makes it unique is that we’re volunteer-led. There are more than 10,000 volunteers at the Si-erra Club who have titles. There are more than 70,000 volunteers who are spending at least 15 hours a week with the Sierra Club. So, last year when the oil spill happened I found myself down in the Gulf several times throughout the spring and summer, and it was fascinating to meet with some of those Sierra Club volunteers. One person had worked on an oil rig for 35 years, but he loved the Gulf and knew what it would take to hold oil companies accountable; he knew where the shortcuts were. Another volunteer in the same group was a marine biologist and had been studying the effects of smaller oil spills on marine mammals in the area. Another volunteer used to run a commercial fishing operation and took me out on his boat. So, I think the great thing about the Sierra Club is you have people who don’t get paid, who don’t get their names in the newspaper or their faces on TV, they have their day jobs, and on week-ends or nights or vacation hours, they’re taking whatever time they can to learn about their environment and about their community and to figure out how to make as much of a difference as they can. I find the fact that people have such a pure sense of ideals and are working selflessly to try to advance them really inspiring.

When we look back on your 10th an-niversary in the position, what do you want to be telling us?I’d like to say in 10 years that we are get-ting more of our power from clean energy sources than dirty. In 10 years, we should be getting more power from solar and wind than we are from coal and oil and nuclear power. If we can do that in 10 years, then maybe I will go off and write my memoirs and have a vacation on a beach.

For more on the Sierra Club or to join, visit sierraclub.org.

If you care about clean

air and clean water, then the Sierra Club’s your friend. If you care about parks and wilderness areas and preserving healthy forests, then you should be standing with the Sierra Club, because we stand for those values, too. ” —michael brune

Brune with his son.

44 photo by lorI eaneS

/books

But even Clowes newbies—or those who first encountered the story in the pages of New York Times Magazine, where a shorter version was serialized in 2008—will get the picture from the opening panel, where bald-ing, bespectacled Marshall sits slumped at a coffee shop table anxiously awaiting, and plainly dreading, a blind date.

Clowes stretches out Marshall’s agony for 12 of Mister Wonderful’s terse 70 pages, giving us plenty of time to get acquainted with his self-loathing interior monologue. He runs through nightmare scenarios in his head, thinks back to the ex-wife who slept with all of his friends and muses on

the six-year drought that ended when he slept with an “unstable, crank-snorting so-ciopath.” The blocks of text that represent the voice in Marshall’s head blot out faces and voice balloons, obscur-ing the world around him and trapping us in his raw-nerve POV.

Marshall’s date finally shows, and she’s a looker, but she’s also a mess, still reeling from the end of a 15-year re-lationship that fizzled when she started mentioning kids. The rest of Mister Wonder-

ful lays out the events of the night and the morning that follows, a painful parade of unfortunate encounters and misjudged reactions that unfolds like a slow-motion car wreck.

Clowes’ precise linework opens up to admit swaths of color, the blocks of empty space conveying both solitude and possi-bility. It’s a brief tale, but it’s powerfully and sympathetically told, with just enough of a lift at the end to prevent you from slit-ting your wrists. Head back to the begin-ning, and you’ll find the story deepens with each rereading, like a seemingly minor life event whose significance becomes appar-

ent only in retrospect. Mister Wonderful isn’t as

virtuosic as Clowes’ previ-ous collection, Ice Haven, or as far-reaching as The Death Ray, due later this year. But it’s perfectly formed and el-egantly gauged to say just as much as it needs to and leave the rest up to us.

Clowes Captioned

Daniel Clowes began his career satirizing losers like the vituperative comics nerd Dan Pussey, but over the years, he’s grown more sympathetic to their plight—or perhaps more willing to admit that he was one all along. ¶ To anyone who’s spent time browsing through the pages of Clowes’ comic book series Eightball, where the stories that

became Ghost World and Art School Confidential first appeared, it’s obvious that the title of his latest collection, Mister Wonderful, is meant to be taken ironically.

Mister Wonderful: A Love Story will be available April 12 from Pantheon.

The Ghost World creator shows empathy for the comics nerd / by Sam adamS

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45excerPt courtesy of dAniel clowes

In between changing the world of comedy and hanging out with showbiz pals, Brooks had mem-orable small roles in movies here and there. He was the good guy campaign worker who palled with Cybil Shepard in Taxi Driver. He died on his honeymoon in Private Benjamin. And ev-ery single one of his Simpsons appearances has been bulletproof, from Cowboy Bob the RV salesman to Jacques the bowling instructor to fake Bond villain Hank Scorpio.

But Aaron Altman was something different, the first time a role had been written for Brooks in

mind (by his good pal, and no relation, James L. Brooks). It helps that Broadcast News is built on a perfectly balanced acting tripod. William Hurt, a rising star and mark of quality, played Tom Grunick, a hand-some anchor who is better looking than he is a journalist. Holly Hunter, making only her second movie (!) and cast two days before the

start of shooting (!!), plays impossibly high-strung producer Jane Craig (based on increasingly legend-ary CBS producer Susan Zirinsky). Brooks plays Aaron Altman, the reporter who quietly adores Jane, who also happens to be his best friend and producer. Jane is attracted to Tom, who for her em-bodies the lowering of journalistic standards. Tom and Aaron alternate between loathing each other and having a strange, entirely unspoken alliance—that they are both in love with the same woman does not make it easy.

Brooks sketches out Aaron’s character quickly. We see him doing an Ah-nuld impression on the phone with Jane—she goes to him for laughs and because he’s a smart guy, but he’s very much in the friend zone. Later, we see Aaron and Jane editing a story on a mercenary who has returned from Africa. She’s looking at the screen; he makes a comment and looks at her adoringly. It’s a very quick moment, but it tells you everything about both of them.

James Brooks gives his lead absolute money-shot lines throughout (“I can’t believe I just risked my life for a network that tests my face with focus groups”), but it’s not just his exceptional gifts as a comedian that make it work, it’s his gifts as an ac-tor. He and Hunt play off each other with a subtle crackle. At a party, Aaron and Tom find themselves on a balcony together. Tom is amazed to be in Wash-ington: “What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?” Aaron, contempt barely concealed, smiling with teeth: “Keep it to yourself.” Later in the conversation, Aaron asks Tom if he knows all the members of the Cabinet.

Tom refuses to take a test for him: “Yes, Aaron, I do.”

Aaron: “All 12?”Tom: “Yes”Aaron, voice rising slightly, like a mean child:

“There’s only 10...”Tom: “You’re feeling good, aren’t you?”Aaron: “I’m starting to, yeah.”

Albert Brooks bleeds and leads as Aaron Altman in Broadcast News / by Joe Gross

To look at his often pants-wettingly funny output as writer/director/star, it’s tough to remember that Albert Brooks trained first as a mere actor. Yup, the man who gave the world the visionary proto-reality-show comedy Real Life, the brilliantly cringe-induc-ing relationship tour de force Modern Romance and

the midlife crisis ode Lost in America was at one point perfectly content to hit the boards. A few early breaks and he might have been, I dunno, Alan Thicke? (OK, probably not.)

* Directors often get all the credit when it comes to great films, and great TV shows are often seen as ensemble pieces. But what about the actors who help elevate a flick to classic status, or the unsung stars who take a show to the next level? Each month, Love Your Work looks at the actors who rescued a project from failure or added that extra layer of awesomeness.

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Love Your Work*

What’s key here is the knowledge that not even Aaron probably knows why he’s being so hard on Tom. Is it because Tom is a bad journalist or is it simple, petty jealousy—either about Tom’s career or the romantic competition? Brooks never entirely tips his hand. And he goes to Tom for anchoring tips when he gets a chance to anchor the evening news, which goes exceptionally poorly when he gets the greatest case of flop sweat ever captured on film.

Brooks also gets a tour-de-force comedy scene. Shut out of reporting a big story, he goes home, turns on some music and starts to get hammered. (“I can sing / while I read / I am singing / and read-ing, BOTH!!!!!”)

But he gets to show off his dramatic chops in the movie’s pivotal scene. After his an-choring disaster, Jane visits Aaron late at night, then tells him she has to meet Tom. “I think... I might be in love with him,” Jane says, her voice cracking.

Aaron’s face plummets. “I knew it,” he all but mumbles. His voice rises. “Get out of here. Go on, get out of here.”

Jane retreats. “YOU GO TO HELL!” Aaron screams, knowing

full well Jane is easily startled and hates being yelled at.

She screams back, “THIS IS IMPORTANT TO ME!”

Aaron is now as serious as we’ve seen him. This is not an expression audiences see all that often on Albert Brooks. “Siddown,” he says to Jane, about to deliver what he is beginning to suspect is the speech of his life. “Don’t get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the Devil.” Jane is pissed and stalking around Aar-on’s apartment: “This isn’t friendship.” “What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?” Aaron says. “I’m semi-serious here... he’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation... he will just bit by little bit lower

our standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit.” He is full of disdain and rage and frustration. “And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen.”

She does not care. Almost as an aside, he says, “And he’ll get all the great women.”

It’s a laugh line, but she screams at him, “I think you’re the Devil.”

“You know I’m not,” Aaron retorts. “I think we have the kind of friendship where if I were the Devil, you’d be the only one I’d tell.”

He’s not wrong, but Jane is still furious: “You were awfully quick to run after Tom’s help...”

“Yes,” Aaron yells again. She’s startled. “I grant you everything! But give me this: He personifies everything you’ve been fighting against. And I’m in love with you.”

She did not see this coming. “How do you like that?” Aaron says. “I buried the lead.”

He almost staggers over to the couch and sits down. It’s all out in the open. “I’ve got to not say that out loud—it takes too much out of me.” He is completely vulnerable and she has no idea what to do. Brooks has knocked the scene out of the park—rarely has a monologue that dips between drama and comedy been delivered so strongly and with such tight turns.

As the movie goes on, it’s clear that this is where Aaron starts to stop loving Jane. There are stellar moments to come in the film (Aaron and Jane at the cafe is another exercise in humor, frustration, sadness and spite), but it did take too much out of him. And almost us.

Broadcast News is available now from the Criterion Collection.

above left: Albert Brooks as Aaron Altman and Holly Hunter as Jane Craig right: William Hurt as Tom Grunick

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Like Thompson, whose (bad) trip be-gan with an assignment to cover a mas-sive off-road race, Duke spends a day lost in the dust clouds churned up by motorcycles and four-wheelers before retreating to the synthetic splendor of Vegas itself, a horror show of carefully controlled debauchery that turns his stomach and preys on his mind. The patrons of a revolving cocktail lounge, one of whom exults, “I’m really starting to feel that drink,” transform into giant, scaly lizards, and the whorls of a patterned carpet become pulsing tendrils, ready to pull Duke and Gonzo into the depths. The horror of the war in Vietnam and the unseen spectacle of a Debbie

Reynolds concert bleed into each other, the Silent Majority’s ultimate victory over the spent promise of the counterculture.

Fear and Loathing’s wild-eyed, wide-angle inten-sity is very nearly too much. But just before your senses shut down in protest, Gilliam breaks the tension with a flashback to mid-’60s San Francis-co, what Thompson lyrically called “the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally crested and then fell back.” The scene, in which Depp for a mo-ment stands face-to-face with the real Thompson,

recasts the movie as a tragedy masquer-ading as farce. Duke and Gonzo retreat into their fantasies because they have nowhere left to go.

Like 1985’s Brazil, Fear and Loathing is a cautionary tale about the power, and the dangers, of escapism. (I shudder to think what the friends who thought it was a bright idea to get high before seeing it must have endured.) It’s a lesson Gil-liam himself often forgets nowadays, as witnessed in the pop-eyed monotony of Tideland. Although he’s finally extricat-ed himself from the mire of his aborted Don Quixote movie—see the devastating documentary Lost in La Mancha for the

tragic story—he’s permanently settled into a bunker mentality that prevents him from hearing even con-structive criticisms. (For someone who so loathes the corporate mentality, he does love his yes-men.) In retrospect, Fear and Loathing might be Gilliam’s own high-water mark, although with luck the tides will be going in and out for years to come.

Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.

Terry Gilliam is not a director for whom the word “enough” holds much meaning, which made him a dangerously apt fit for Hunter S. Thompson’s su-premely excessive journey into America’s neon-lit heart of darkness. Like Thompson’s book, which kicks in the door with the opening line, “We were

somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold,” Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins in mid-scream, with Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp), and his drug buddy, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro), ripping down the road as they ingest massive quantities of controlled substances. Their convertible careens wildly as they dodge hal-lucinatory bats, the first of many phantoms to prey on their addled consciousnesses.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is available April 26 on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

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Bats Entertainment Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is but a pit stop on Terry Gilliam’s long, strange trip / by Sam adamS

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If the film community reluctantly em-braced Jolene—completed in 2008; released in 2010; ambivalent critical

reaction—the explanation may reside in its source: E.L. Doctorow’s short story, Jolene: A Life.

As Doctorow once observed, most con-temporary fiction is haunted by the spectre of the motion picture industry. Like films, stories now begin in the middle (to capture the immediate attention of armies of the ADD-afflicted, I suppose), the remainder merely an exercise in letting the audience catch up.

With Jolene, however, director Dan Ireland re-fused to tread the beaten path and struck out boldly into the tall weeds, deter-

mined to tell the story as written. (A rela-tive newcomer to directing, Ireland’s long list of Producer credits is predominated by literary adaptations, including three directed by bad boy Ken Russell.)

Part Candide, part Badlands, and spiced with Lolita and Day Of The Lo-cust, Jolene tracks chronologically the 10-year odyssey of the title character (a career-making performance by Jessica Chastain, reminiscent of a young Sissy Spacek), from 15 year-old red-headed foster child, to independent woman. Yet for all her heroic if misguided striving for a better life—what film and story are really about—Jolene is neither particu-larly sadder nor especially wiser for all her experiences.

Experiences? Child bride—she marries a dope “with not much up-stairs,” Jolene declares in

one of her voice-over explanations—then sex kitten for her husband’s uncle; stint in a juvenile asylum, there discovering her talent for art, and the suffocating love of an older lesbian attendant; tricking her way cross-country with fat, slobbering truckers; marriage to a cool, tattoo dude

who already has a wife and child; stripping in Vegas and tasting the high-life with a mobster; and failed marriage (and motherhood) to a trust fund wife-beater, ulti-mately losing custody of her child.

Finally established in Los Angeles as a graphic novel inker, she fanta-

sizes about becoming a movie star and re-turning to where her waiting child will run to her famous, outstretched arms—a delu-sional vision on which the movie closes.

Beautifully shot by Claudio Rocha—sun-kissed images contrast with distress-ing events, suggesting what is at heart a black, black comedy—Jolene’s animating force is inseparable from the committed performances of its supporting cast, in-cluding Dermot Mulroney as sleazy Uncle Phil, Theresa Russell as his possessive and (rightly) suspicious wife, Frances Fisher as the love-hungry attendant, and Rupert Friend as Coco Leger, the bigamist dude.

Jolene deserves a better fate than to be marooned on Cult Island.

Talk about benighted. First Casino Jack loses one of its supporting players, Maury Chaykin, seven months before

its release. Then director George Hicken-looper dies suddenly, barely two months before the film’s theatrical release. And struggling to find its place in the sun, Ca-sino Jack found itself stunted in the giant shadow of the documentary, Inside Job.

Yet Casino Jack is not Inside Job’s rival or substitute; rather, Casino Jack is both its precursor and complement, a brash, hip take on how those creepy, sanc-timonious bankers of Inside Job had their path to America’s highest elected (and eas-ily corrupted) lawmakers greased for them in the first place by the likes of brazen su-perlobbyist Jack Abramoff.

“Satire,” noted George S. Kaufman, “is what closes Saturday night.” And perhaps that, too, explains why Casino Jack has been criminally neglected. For satire it is, and of the best kind: it not only chomps on and ridicules the men (and they’re most-ly men) who would misrule us, but also names names, from former-ratcatcher-to-Speaker-of-the-House Tom Delay, to the Machiavellian squid Karl Rove, George Dubya’s two most loyal go-to guys.

At times, screenwriter Norman Snider’s bracingly profane and savagely funny ac-count of Abramoff ’s and henchman Mi-chael Scanlon’s manic quest for money and influence moves like a Shakespear-ean tragicomedy on crack. Yet the seem-ing craziness works—Hickenlooper knew crazy, having directed Hearts Of Dark-ness— not only because of its direction, but also because of its script and uniformly excellent supporting cast, especially Jon Lovitz as low-rent gangster Adam Kidan, and Barry Pepper as Scanlon.

Anchoring it all is Kevin Spacey’s Jack Abramoff, as commanding and witty a performance as you’ll ever see. (Like Edward G. Robinson, he seems to be on-screen all the time—though he isn’t—able to deliver rapid-fire, so-liloquy-sized chunks of dialogue flawlessly.) Is there a better film actor alive today?

And if there’s a better film than Casino Jack about the venal hypo-crites who’ve driven the world to the brink of economic disaster, it has yet to appear.

Questions or comments? Email stan@sunriserecords.com

Less Beaten Pathsessay by STA N M I C H N A

Casino Jack will be available April 26 from Entertainment One.

Jolene will be released April 26 by Entertainment One.

Jessica Chastain and Rupert Friend in Jolene.

needle 51

The films of Claire Denis do not reveal themselves easily. Mood is foregrounded over narrative; detail over expli-cation; glances over confessions. Her work is primarily sensual, bypassing the brain, making the heart quicken or the gut coil long before the viewer has consciously analyzed what they’ve seen. ¶ In Tindersticks, Denis

has found the ideal musical analogue for her visual approach. While it would be easy for music to overwhelm the director’s delicately maintained atmospheres, especially for six guys used to wielding electric guitars and drums, the British band’s own romantic, lushly orchestrated approach to rock songs proved a perfect match for her oblique vision.

all the time in the world

Claire Denis Film Scores spotlights Tindersticks’ unique relationship

with the difficult and iconic French director / by SHaun BraDy

“I think that’s how we feel about mak-ing music,” says Tindersticks vocalist Stuart a. Staples from his home studio in central France. “When you write a song or any piece of music, you need to leave space for people to step into and figure things out for themselves. To not know everything in front, to not make every-thing obvious, that’s what creates mys-tery and makes you prick your ears up. So, that’s something I’ve never really had to think about in working with Claire; that part of it has been very natural.”

Tindersticks or its members have scored more than half of Denis’ 10 fea-

/movies

52 needle photo by RichaRd dumas

tures, nearly every one she’s made since 1996’s Nénette et Boni. The sole exception is Beau Travail (1999), her French Foreign Legion rewrite of Melville’s Billy Budd, in which she utilized pieces of Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of the same story. All six soundtracks are now being released, four of them for the first time, in a new box set, Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 (Constellation). Tindersticks will also be making a series of live appear-ances performing the music with accom-panying visuals in the spring.

“The best thing about working with Claire, and maybe the most difficult thing, is that she wants our input right from the script,” Staples says. “There’s never been a situation where she says, ‘I want some-thing that says this, here.’ Once she gives us a rough edit, it’s almost like a blank canvas, and that’s when the conversation starts. That’s also how she likes to work with her actors, her cinematographer, her editor. She gives them space to express themselves, and I think that only comes with a sureness of vision.”

All agree that the relationship official-ly began after a 1995 Tindersticks con-cert in Paris, though Staples admits to being a bit hazy on the details. “In those days my nerves always got the better of me,” he says, “and I often got maybe too drunk before and after shows, so it’s a bit vague to me.”

Denis had been listening to the band’s second self-titled album while writing the script for Nénette et Boni, and found some resonance between their songs and her work-in-progress. In particular, she was drawn to the darkly comic song “My Sister,” in which she found some strange echoes of her own story about two sib-lings. While they’d long been fans of soundtrack music, strains of which are evident throughout their richly cinemat-ic songs, none of Tindersticks’ members had ever attempted to score a film, which proved a challenge.

“Our first three albums go off in so many different directions,” Staples says of the band’s eccentric songwriting. “Working on Nénette et Boni was the first time we had to make something that was concen-trated and concise, that had a beginning, a middle and an end, and for it to make sense. I think it had a big effect on us.”

Their approach, inspired by Miles Da-vis’ soundtrack for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur

pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), was to simply watch the film as a band and react to it musically, using an agreed instrumental palette focused on the light, airy feel of vibes and glockenspiel.

“How Claire works is unusual because it’s not plot-driven,” says co-founder/vio-linist Dickon Hinchliffe over the phone from Bristol, England. “It’s very much about entering a more sensual world, one in which the psychological aspects of what she’s doing outweigh the obvious storytelling elements. But in some ways that made it easier for us when we first

started, because that’s what our music was all about. So, it wasn’t like all of a sud-den someone asked us to score Rambo.”

Still, their next collaboration was a drastic departure for Denis. The bleak, vi-olent Trouble Every Day made the idea of all-consuming passion very literal, with sex culminating in cannibalistic acts. The score wound up being built around the title track, a desolate torch song with the feel of a velvet noose. “Claire said the whole film was about the moment where a kiss becomes a bite,” recalls Hinch-liffe. “She wanted the music to feel very sensual, but also have a touch of violence about it, so that at any moment it could swing one way or the other.”

The next two films ended up being solo efforts—Hinchliffe

wrote for Vendredi Soir (2002) while Staples composed L’intrus (2004)—co-inciding with a period of uncertainty for Tindersticks. Hinchliffe finally left the band to concentrate on film scoring full time; his credits include the Dustin Hoffman/Emma Thompson romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey, Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls and last year’s Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone. He’s currently working on director Michael Mann’s new HBO series about the underbelly of horse racing, Luck.

Staples’ music for L’intrus reflects the dark times the band was going through (during which he unwisely, and unsuc-cessfully, also attempted to quit smok-ing). “The band were in a kind of a tur-moil,” he says, “not knowing if this thing that we’d been living and nurturing for 13 years was going to carry on. I think we all kind of felt very alone at that time. I needed to make something almost anti-music, I suppose.”

Tindersticks reformed in 2008 with original members Staples, David Boulter and Neil Fraser, along with a new rhythm section, and has since scored Denis’ two most recent films: 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and White Material (2009). The latter, an exploration of post-colonial Africa inspired by the director’s childhood, is one of her most difficult works, and was apparently no easier to create.

“White Material was difficult because it’s very ambitious,” Staples says. “We got to a point where we turned the im-ages off and went on our journey with the film for a while, and then came back and met it. I think that maybe what we gave Claire helped her find the final shape of the film.”

The relationship between filmmaker and composers has evolved over the course of 15 years, to the point where each undeniably influences the other.

“If we hadn’t found this rela-tionship with Claire, we might not still be here,” Staples says, “still be excited and frustrated about making music. It’s creat-ed points along the way where we’ve had to get out of our own little world, our own journey, and get involved in something else. Then when we finish that, we come back to our stuff and we’re changed.”

claire said the whole film was

about the moment

where a kiss becomes a bite.”

—Dickon Hinchliffe on Trouble Every Day.

Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 will be available April 26 from Constellation.

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/movies/new_releases

April 19The King’s SpeechDirected by Tom HooperWhat’s this—a Best Picture winner that actually deserved it? Be still our elitist hearts. Although we would have been perfectly fine with The Social Network dominating the Oscars as well, Colin Firth utterly inhabited the role of Prince Albert, and was backed up more than ably by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush. [The Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay Entertainment]

54 NEEDLE

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I

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April 19SomewhereDirected by Sofia CoppolaMichaelangelo Antonioni frequently commented on the vacuity of the bourgeoisie. Sofia Coppola clearly admires the Italian director’s mastery of arresting still imagery to underscore the monotony of empty lives; much like in Marie Antoinette, she emulates him here, observing a scumbag actor’s tenuous relationship with his daughter. [Focus Features]

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/movies/new_releases

April 26South park: The Complete Fourteenth SeasonEven though this show is currently arranged to air ASAP if needed, the pop culture obliterations felt a little more rote this season (Jersey Shore, social networking). That said, the three-episode Mysterion arc was one of the more inspired, ludicrous and gleefully offensive SP exercises yet. [Comedy Central]

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BitesJoe Cocker Civilized Man/CockerCold Cave Cherish the Light YearsCrack the Sky CutCrack the Sky GhostCreepersin Faster CreepersinAdam Cruz MilestoneMatt Cusson One of Those NightsWolfgang Dauner Tribute to the PastA Diane & Wild Divine Alala Diane & Wild DivineDJ Screw 3’n the Mornin’ Part TwoDJ Screw All Screwed UpDodheimsgard 666 InternationalD Douglas & United... Brass Ecstasy at NewportKit Downes Quiet TigerGlen Drover MetalusionRichard Durand Wide AwakeBill Emerson EclipseEngrained Deep RootedPhil Everly Phil EverlyFen EpochThe Fleshtones Roman Gods/Up-Front…

PlusFM Static My Brain Says Stop, But My

Heart Says goE Furman & Harpoons Mysterious PowerGreylevel Hypostatic UnionTrilok Gurtu MassicalHa Ha Tonka Death of a DecadeBobby Harrison AnthologyHellfighter Damnation’s WingHi-Power Ent Presents Latin Rap and videosHi-Power Ent Presents Neighborhood Music 2Hot Tuna Steady as She GoesAbdullah & E Ibrahim Sotho BlueBilly Idol Billy Idol/Rebel yellEtta James Essential Modern Records

CollectionJefferson Airplane Flight Log (1966-1976)Jethro Tull Heavy Horses/Songs From

the WoodDiana Jones High AtmosphereGeorge Jones Radio Lover 1980-1989: A

Critical AnthologyJim Jones CapoKampfar MareThe Kills Blood PressuresAndy Kim Happen AgainKingdom Come Rendered WatersKomor Kommando Oil, Steel & Rhythm

Lenny Kravitz 5/Are You Gonna Go My Way?

Lantlos LantlosGee Hye Lee Geenius MondayLucky Luciano Money BagsCurtis MacDonald Community ImmunityMalakwa Street PreacherHenry Mancini The Complete Peter GunnManhattan Brothers The Very Best of the

Manhattan Brothers George Michael The LowdownMidlake Late night talesMignon Kiss of DeathDan Milner Civil War Navy SongsRonnie Milsap 20-20 Vision/Night ThingsMint Condition 7Mountain Nantucket SleighrideMovits Out of My HeadMy Inner Burning Eleven ScarsNegura Bunget Focul ViuGretchen Parlato The Lost and FoundPastor Troy H.N.I.C.Peter and Gordon Lady Godiva/Knight in

Rusty Armour/In London for Tea

Placebo Black Market Music/Placebo

Power Quest Blood AllianceBilly Preston I Wrote a Simple Song/

Music Is My LifePsy’aviah feat. Ayria Into the GamePutumayo Presents Rumba, Mambo, Cha Cha

ChaQuintessence Rebirth: Live at Glastonbury

2010Gerry Rafferty City to City/Night OwlRasputina Great American

GingerbreadRed Hot Chili Peppers RHCP/Uplift Mofo Party

PlanResidents Meet the ResidentsBrian Robertson Diamonds and DirtLeon Russell The Best of Leon RussellSharks The Joys of Living 2008-

2010Shiva’s Quintessence Only Love Can Save usSinister Altered Since BirthDallas Smith & Boys... Dallas Smith & The Boys

From ShiloThe Smithereens 2011Sons of Seasons MagnisphyriconTerell Stafford This Side of StrayhornThe Submarines Love Notes/Letter BombsYa Tafari UtopiaThorms vs. Emperor Thorns vs. EmperorTimber Timbre Creep On Creepin’ OnU.D.O. MastercutorU.D.O. Mission No. XVains of Jenna Reverse TrippedThijs Van Leer Introspection 3Various Artists Angel Air Rocks: War

HorsesVarious Artists Authenticite: the Syliphone

YearsVarious Artists Decline of Western

Civilization: Metal YearsVarious Artists Motor City HitsVarious Artists Music for a Royal WeddingVarious Artists Music to Die For: Death

DiscsVarious Artists The Bristol Sessions 1927-

1928Vicious Rumors Razorback KillersVigilante The New ResistanceVintersorg JardpulsWildcookie Cookie DoughMitch Winehouse Rush of LoveJonathan Winters Final Approach

Yung Ro Go Hard Texas 2John Zorn Nova ExpressZ-Ro & Agonylife Street Legends

APRIL 12African Head Charge Voodoo of the GodsentAzam Ali From Night to the Edge of

DayAtmosphere The Family SignAutechre EPs 1991-2002Ian Axel This Is the New YearBearsuit The Phantom ForestBell X1 Bloodless CoupGeorge Benson Beyond the Blue HorizonT Burton/D Elfman 25th AnniversaryThe Byrds The Essential Byrds 3.0The Church StarfishBrett Dennen LoverboyBob Dylan Bob Dylan in Concert:

Brandeis UniversityMatthias Eick SkalaThe Feelies Here BeforeFigurines FigurinesRory Gallagher Irish Tour ‘74Howe Gelb & A Band... AlegriasGoldberg Sisters Goldberg SistersG. Goodwin Big Phat... That’s How We RollGypsyblood Cold in the GuestwayIro Haarla Quintet VespersHate Forest To Twilight ThicketsHauschka Salon des AmateursJimi Hendrix South Saturn DeltaLisa Howard Songs of Innocence &

ExperienceFreddie Hubbard First LightGregory Isaacs Lonely LoverJamaica No ProblemJeniferever SilesiaJoan as Police Woman Deep FieldJonny JonnyCarole King The Essential Carole KingA Krauss & Union... Paper AirplaneLake Giving & ReceivingJames Leg Solitary PleasureLetlive Fake historyLittle Scream The Golden RecordLow C’monA Lull ConfettiMack & Malone Money MusicDave Matthews Band Live at Wrigley FieldD Maxwell & O Spann Conversations in BlueMazes A Thousands HeysThe Milkshakes 107 Tapes

Queens of the Stone AgeQueens of the Stone Age

Apr 19 The raunchiest rock cover short of Black Crowes’ Amorica

houses a ton of incredible songs. Not quite as essential as Rated R, but this is QOTSA at their peak. The reissue offers a remaster, as well as three bonus tracks on CD and double vinyl (the latter coming with a download card, natch).

/music/new_releases

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ALSO AVAILABLEBORN OF OSIRIS

The Discovery

OBSCURAOmnivium

DMXGreatest Hits With A Twist

ALEXI MURDOCHTowards The Sun

J ROCCSome Cold Rock Stuff

JIM JONESCapo

UNWRITTEN LAWSwan

CAM’RON & VADOGunz n’ Butta

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by Entertainment One Canada

NEW ALBUM Dagger MouthIncludes the single Bring Me Down (feat. Saigon)AVAILABLE IN STORES APRIL 12TH

NEW ALBUM

Monsta Pacific Coast HighwayJohn Oates Mississippi MileAgnes Obel PhilharmonicsOld Calf Borrow a HorseOne AM Radio Heaven is Attached by a

Slender ThreadRoy Orbison Monument A-SidesRoy Orbison Monument SinglesPanda Bear TomboyPhish Live Phish 10/30/2010

Boardwalk HallPhish Live Phish: 10.26/10 Verizon

Wireless ArenaPonytail Do Whatever You Want All

the TimePrema Hara Tears of LoveThe Pretty Reckless Light me upDon Sebesky Giant BoxPaul Simon GracelandPaul Simon Paul SimonPaul Simon Paul Simon in ConcertPaul Simon So Beautiful or So WhatPaulSimon Still Crazy After All These

YearsPaul Simon There Goes Rhymin’ SimonSoundtrack Frankie & AliceSoundtrack Lemonade MouthD. C. Speer & Helix Leaving the CommonwealthNikki Sudden Playing With FireD Suomi & Minor... Go, and Sell All Your ThingsThee Spivs Taped UpThursday No DevolucionTrampled Under Foot Wrong Side of the BluesAlexander Tucker

DorwytchStanley Turrentine Salt SongTV on the Radio Nine Types of LightVarious Artists Words for youVivian Girls Share the JoyMarc Wasilewski Trio FaithfulYoung Widows In and Out of Youth and

Lightness

APRIL 192tone Cali RollercoasterTheBad Plus Never Stop (Deluxe Edition)Badlands BadlandsBadlands Voodoo highwayHank Ballard Tore Up Over YouMike Birbiglia Sleepwalk With Me LiveBlu Her Favorite Colo(u)rBlut Aus Nord 777Bombino AgadezBreaking Laces When You Find OutBurzum BelusBurzum Burzum/AskeBurzum Daudi BaldrsBurzum Det som Engang VarBurzum FilosofemBurzum HlidskjalfBurzum Hvis Lyset Tar OssKimberlyCaldwell Without RegretCam’ron & Vado Gunz N’ ButtaCircus of Power VicesRosemary Clooney Sophisticated LadyCrauchan Blood on the Black RobeCynthesis DeEvolutionDarkthrone The Cult Is AliveDel the Funky Homo... Golden Era Triple PackDixon Bros/Callahan... The Dixon BrothersFats Domino I Found My ThrillEliza Doolittle Eliza DoolittleDorrough Music Dorrough Music Gangsta

GrillzPee Wee Ellis TenorationRoger Eno AnatomyEvoken QuietusFaithsedge FaithsedgeEddie Fisher Song of the Dreamer

Foundation When the Smoke ClearsJulie Fowlis Live at the Perthshire

AmberGorillaz The FallGraveyard Hisingen BluesHaeresiarchs of Dis In Obsecration of the Seven

DarksSammy Hagar Street MachineBill Haley Hook, Line and SinkerHarriet Tubman Band AscensionHelix Walkin’ the Razor’s EdgeSteve Hillage Live in Germany 1977Hi-Power Ent Presents Chicano Rap ConnectionHugh Hopper The Stolen HourI’m From Barcelona Forever TodayIllmind Behind the CurtainIlo Exit 110Miles Jaye AttenergyJack Jezzro Jazz Tastings: Light JazzLacrimosa SehnsuchtLanu Her 12 FacesGB Leighton Hope 1 MileLes Nubians Nu RevolutionSam Levine Smooth Sax RomanceJerry Lee Lewis BreathlessALife Divided PassengerLil C H-Town Chronic 5Lower Than Atlantis World RecordMax B Domain Diego Vol. 2Montrose MontroseBuddy Morrow The Essential CollectionZoe Muth & Lost... Starlight HotelRick Nelson Million Sellers/Rick Is 21The New Black II: Better in BlackShaman OriginsPantha du Prince XI Versions of Black NoiseWalter Parks Walter ParksPearson Sound... Fabriclive 56: Pearson

SoundPendragon PassionPeriphery The Icarus EPLucky Peterson Every Second a Fool Is BornThe Pilot in You First BornQueens/Stone Age Queens of the Stone AgeQuiet Riot Quiet RiotRainbow Live: Dusseldorf Philipshalle

09.27.76Johnnie Ray The Atomic RayMarty Robbins Mr. TeardropSabaton Attero Dominatus (Re-

Armed)Sabaton Metalizer (Re-Armed)Sabaton The Art of War (Re-Armed)Sky Saxon The King of Garage RockKlaus Schulze Big in Japan: American

EditionPete Seeger The Complete Bowdoin

College ConcertSepticflesh The Great MassBrian Setzer Orchestra Setzer Goes Instru-MENTALSlim Thug: Boss Hogg Serve & Collect 3Solar Fragment In Our HandsRalph Stanley A Mother’s PrayerTommy Steele The Real SteeleBecca Stevens Band WeightlessStrontium Police AcademySylosis Edge of the EarthTaletellers RadicalizerTerry & The Pirates Doubtful handshakeTrae 48 HoursMikeTramp/Circuz Stand Your GroundTune-Yards WhokillUnholy From the ShadowsUnholy GracefallenThe Unthanks LastVarious Artists Covered Like a HurricaneVarious Artists Eric Clapton’s JukeboxVarious Artists Houston Might Be HeavenVarious Artists Rough Guide to KlezmerVarious Artists Rough Guide to Paris

LoungeJosh White Blood Red RiverDaphne Willis Because I CanJim Wilson Sanctuary by the SeaWinds of Plague Against the WorldG Young & Other... We’re All in This Together

APRIL 26About Group Start and CompleteEric Alexander Don’t Follow the CrowdArmor for the Broken The Black HarvestGeorge Benson In Flight (The Deluxe

Edition)BT These Humble MachinesMatthew Cooper Some Days Are Better Than

OthersDirty Vegas Electric LoveThe Donkeys Born With StripesThe Echocentrics SunshadowsEphryme DopestylevskyExplosions in the Sky Take Care, Take Care, Take

CareJoe Fiedler Trio Sacred Chrome OrbFresh & Onlys Secret WallsTom Glazer A Treasury of Civil War

SongsEtta Jones & H Person The Way We WereJookabox The Eyes of the FlyPat Jordache Future SongsPrem Joshua & Band Luminous SecretsSteveKhan Parting ShotDavid Kilgour/Heavy... Left by SoftLions!Tigers!Bears! Shallow Waters, Endless

DepthCassMcCombs Wit’s EndMemphis May Fire The HollowNine 11 Thesaurus Ground Zero GeneralsOf Montreal The ControllersphereRachel Platen Be HereBonnie Raitt Nine LivesReligious Knives SmokescreenSilverstein RescueEmilie Simon The Big MachineTexas in July One realityTimes New Viking Dancer EquiredTindersticks Claire Denis Film Scores

1996-2009Various Artists Take Action Vol. 10J Webb & Webb Bros Cottonwood FarmThe Wombats The Wombats Proudly

Present… This Modern Glitch

Lady GagaBorn This Way

Apr 19 If you’re one of those people whining that the title track

sounds too much like Madge’s “Express Yourself,” please do yourself a favor and never listen to pop music again. Duh, it does. On purpose. It’s also one of the most inclusive, gay-friendly songs to ever infiltrate the mainstream. Gaga—who rips of Kylie way more—gets a pass here.

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