Earnest for a ch

Nana's

Earnest change of pace-- I feel now's as good a time as any to give my favorite venue in da world a plug. It's my friend Matt's house across town in Valley Stream (Woodmere, really) and it's called Nana's. Nana's was once Matt's grandma's house but he came to live there because a tree crushed his bedroom in his old house during that one weekend earlier this year when there were hurricane force winds. Matt made the good call to then turn his newfound crib into a DIY venue, which has come to host free house shows (free beer for bands, though I'm told this was initially applicable *only for Slothbear*) ~every other Saturday since the beginning of the summer. The 'Grand Opening' show, which was a record release party for the very sweet LP Matt's band SDLK made, blew me and the rest of Da Bears away (Doug actually got lost en route). The haunt has since served as a consistent source of good, hospitable timez for us and the rest of our own little corner of Alt. Look how much fun we've had!:



There's actually a show there next Friday which I would indubitably attend if I were stateside, featuring SDLK, Gaza Striptease and Highway Gimps. On the 21st, we'll be sharing the bill with fellow Nana's favorites Anna Bradley and The Labor Daze (as well of SDLK of course). The last scheduled show of the summer is the 27th, which should hopefully feature Lost Boy ? and perhaps even Fuck Explorer, if we can get a hold of those guys (very standoffish, major pricks). After that, Matt's gonna knock down some walls and turn the place into a studio wherein SDLK will begin recording new material. Shows will pick up again, though perhaps not quite as often. I urge any band which any semblance of an interest in playing Long Island (just outside Queens, and near Green Acres mall, home of the Murderplex and the Walmart where that employee got trampled) to get in touch. Likewise, I encourage any Indy Rock Enthusiast to come down and check out a show sometime-- I mean, it's fucking free, u miser.

dying for bad music rates Fuck Explorer EP as highly as Qids

http://dyingforbadmusic.blogspot.com/2010/08/slothbear-2010-qids-fuck-explorer-2010.html

kinda bummed about how josh broke all the indy rock reveiws rules

consider the series officially retired

Indy Rock Reviews::: Julian Lynch- Mare

By Josh Ginsberg

Julian Lynch is one of a handful of presumably New Jersey based musicians like Liam the Younger, Fluffy Lumbers and Big Troubles who have become featured on Pitchfork in a manner inseparable from Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential cabinet to me. Associated with Underwater Peoples, a label/collective/something or other from the Garden State, Lynch’s new album Mare, a very enjoyable bedroom rock album, is one of the best the collective has produced. Part of what attracts me to Mare is the notion that many other albums of its kind exist, some better and some worse on Macbooks or 4-tracks scattered among college dorms all over the United States, but that this one stands out against the rest for one reason or another. I don’t mean to disparage Mare. It is quite good.

Apparently, Lynch is making records concurrently with getting his PhD in Wisconsin, if I’m not mistaken. Mare sounds like the work of a highly talented music lover (especially when assuming, as I am, that Lynch plays every instrument) more than a musician (which the Lynch of my mind, who is playing all these instruments quite well, undoubtedly is). The Julian Lynch of my mind is someone who is eking out his musical ambition and talent during the down time of a rigorous previous engagement. Fortunately for Lynch, he is getting critical recognition from juggernauts like P4k, which must be very gratifying. When I checked out Lynch’s Myspace the day after his album was given Best New Music, his tour of the South has a single date listed, with the rest of the dates listing a city and “TBA” or “Need Help!!!”

Mare is an enjoyable listen. It is not a rich tapestry of sound per se. It is faded and muted in ocherous tones: a pale wheat blond, a distant red, a whole lot of soil. The instrumentation ranges from sparse, down-tuned percussion, drums that sound like canyons loosely bound with cloth, to layers of icicle like strands of strummed and plucked acoustic guitar strings to a bass clarinet that sounds on the verge of implosion, rifts of time’s passage along its body affecting its tone and blemishing its appearance. On Mare all the instrumentation is both cohesive and impressive, in a way that has more with atmosphere than chops, but is not devoid of the latter.

If the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” was eviscerated of the pristine grandeur and sweeping resolve with which it was stuffed and was refilled with a slinky auto-wah and intentionally inauthentic sounding marimba via keyboard melody, it would come close to approximating the album’s title track. Opener “Just Enough” establishes that Lynch uses a similar guitar playing style to Matt Mondanile and Martin Courtenay, who in turn lifted it from Ira Kaplan and Lee Ranaldo, but allowed it to bleach out in the sun and mellow. The melodies are a little stranger and more off kilter sometimes treading Pavement territory, but they are still very decidedly evocative of Real Estate and Ducktails, despite a sound more removed from the beach and more akin to Woods and the woods. There is a weird depravity about Lynch’s guitar playing on “Just Enough” that I find rather enrapturing. The farfisa organ in the background is exemplary of the nice subtleties which spring up all over Mare.

The percussion is impressive throughout the album, as is the dim ambience against which it is set. “Still Racing” is one of the album’s best cuts. It features a choir of hushed Lynches singing atop a thick safety net of acoustic guitars and mandolins. The song could have been at home on Young Prayer by Panda Bear. “Ears” also evokes Animal Collective, albeit in a different way. Lynch sings in a falsetto which evokes Beirut’s horn arrangements in timbre in tandem with Avey Tare. The guitar solo is impressive and sounds as if its notes are stuck in glue or honey, each note sustained giving way into a spill of hot white hum. It is the most traditionally cathartic crescendo on the LP. The furious clarinet playing on “Ruth My Sister” is impressive as well, evoking Bruce Springsteen, Bleeding Gums Murphy, a panorama of back alley imagery and that new Ariel Pink album (just a bit) to me. Another one of my favorite songs on Mare is “Travelers.” Think forests, dystopian guitar licks and avoiding tripping on tree roots while maneuvering frantically as best as possible for an approximation of what it’s like to listen to.
RATING: 4.4
BETTER THAN QIDS?

Proto-Indy Rock Reveiws: Veckatimest

Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest
By Josh Ginsberg

As I write this, in a sticky basement, I am in the midst of an unusually warm April and Veckatimest is slated for release on May 26th. What I’ve been listening to is the “low quality leak” that turned up in a sendspace link on a friend’s facebook status in early March. Veckatimest is named for a small island in Dukes County, Massachusetts that I have never visited. I cannot liken the waves of effervescent, vintage American pop that Grizzly Bear condensed into the four minute bliss of “Two Weeks” to a picnic on that island’s shores. I cannot compare Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste’s elaborate guitar playing to the dense tree line, which weaves meticulously, creating an almost psychedelic aerial view or that guitar sound/forest’s impenetrability, dense unyielding space with only slight crevices left to slide deeper into. I cannot compare “Dory,” from experience, to the clear, foamy, creek that cracks through the foliage of the forest floor, lined with flat, slate-grey stones. Nor can I liken the reflection of closer “Foreground” to the view from the beach at night, at the flickering lights of some small, quaint harbor on the Massachusetts mainland. But those are the images inseparable to me from Veckatimest’s sounds.

Grizzly Bear crafted a stellar album. Bassist/Clarinetist/Flautist/Producer/Arranger Chris Taylor mixes the songs flawlessly. His bass guitar playing is excellent, and his sound manipulation, which is exemplified best on the instrumental potions before the second verse of “Fine For Now” is shimmering and enchanting. The most fascinating thing that Taylor accomplishes is the creation of a heavenly, ethereal arrangement, which the orchestral and chorale arrangements augment. He arranges strings beautifully and subtly on “About Face” and they never sound superfluous or forced. The quintessential example of his aplomb as an arranger and composer can be spotted on “I Live With You,” which begins with Taylor’s signature woodwinds, and a harp, before a low section of strings cuts in and the song gives way to a women’s choir, who can be heard laughing and talking to one another if you listen closely enough to the parts where they drop out. Chris Taylor is a peer to Van Dyke Parks or George Martin if I’ve ever heard one.

One of Taylor’s most essential contributions to the band is his innate ability to balance the different singing voices of the members, particularly the two lead vocalists, the lush, soothing, snow-capped vocals of Ed Droste and the quivering voiced Daniel Rossen, who seems capable of necromancy at his most sinister moments. The two men sing together on most songs, and while it is easy to peg a song like “Fine For Now” a Daniel Rossen song, because he sings the lyrics, the song wouldn’t be the same listening experience if not for the sheets of Ed Droste’s harmonies. While Rossen sings the lead vocal on the pre-chorus of “Fine For Now” it is Droste’s soaring backing vocals that steal the show. Rossen and Droste don’t harmonize like the Dead, Beach Boys or CSNY. Their harmonies are more evocative of the infrequent but perfectly complimentary harmonies of Thom Yorke and Ed O’Brien or the duel lead vocals of Avey Tare and Panda Bear; both voices are distinct melodic entities more than harmonic ones. After a chorus punctuated by a guitar part that is sublime in a sense that is strictly in tune with Edmund Burke’s conception of it.

The guitar is evocative of harrowing cliffs and mountains that taper endlessly, piercing the holiness of whatever heavens may lie above, Droste vocalizes a passage that may have been played out on the electric guitar by a different band, but Grizzly Bear display their immaculate ability to sing. “Two Weeks” is led by Droste, who sings the simple, plaintive lyrics. But the strongest hook on the entire album is the three-way harmony between Rossen, Taylor and drummer Christopher Bear, that is sung between Droste’s lines.

Songs like “All We Ask” find Rossen and Droste switching off between verses and choruses, with Rossen singing the swinging, “faltering,” chorus, evocative of jazz-age cities, streets crowded with taxis, sidewalks swarming with neatly dressed pedestrians, straight off the page of some F. Scott Fitzgerald story, as a choir of Drostes sigh forlornly. The song’s bridge, on which a pew of Grizzly Bears, most prominently Droste, laments as the song draws to a close, “I can’t get out of what I’m into with you.” Droste and Rossen also sing excellently without each other’s help. Rossen’s vocal melodies are some of the best on the album, especially his fierce, tormenting vocal on the chorus of “Southern Point,” which manages to sound like Armageddon while being entirely void of melodrama. His next best solo performance occurs during the vocal passages when he is not pitted against the women’s choir on “I Live With You,” which shows his ability to let his vocals soar, a hard thing to prove yourself worthy of for someone who sings co-lead vocals in a band with Ed Droste. It is strange to think back to the days before Rossen joined the band, as he is every bit as essential as Droste, and contributes an incredible amount to the band with his guitar work and songwriting.

On Veckatimest the acoustic guitar is still featured prominently, such as on songs like “Southern Point,” or “Dory” or “Hold Still.” However, on most of the album, it is the electric guitar that is more prominent. The electric guitars evoke the raw, dry volume of pre-1975 Neil Young, but they are dampened with reverb and frayed with short delay. Passages like the climactic point on “Fine For Now” pop up on many of the album’s songs, including the should-be single, “While You Wait For the Others.” That tone echoes late sixties Americana while still sounding at home amongst the guitar work of bands like Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Abe Vigoda. The extended instrumental intro of “All We Ask,” cloaks the picking of Yellow House in the same tone used on Friend EP tracks like “He Hit Me.” One of the best guitar moments on the album is one of the most ambiguous. The little, bursts of reverb moistened guitar that bloom like sonorant cactus flowers on “Ready, Able” almost sound like a sample, because of how quickly they blossom from non-entities to flourishes to nothing again. This is another instance in which beautiful short delay is employed.
Veckatimest also boasts an incredible keyboard sound. The keys that open “Two Weeks” sound more like a sunny, Kentucky garden or stretch of hills than any Lynard Skynard riff ever could. The high-end electric keyboard arpeggios of the songs chorus bore tiny little wasp nests into the listeners’ subconscious, and remain rooted there until re-listened to.

The most impressive sound on the album is the drum sound, which is produced immaculately. Christopher Bear plays beats that heavily utilize toms, but unlike the taut tom sound of seventies rock or the loose sound of tribal music. His percussion is mixed almost subliminally. Where another drummer might pump up a song with a driving, two armed assault on a snare drum, Bear achieves that same dynamic before the chorus of “Southern Point,” with nothing more than cymbal wash. His driving beat through the chorus mixes a snare pattern that could’ve been pattered out by a soldier marching through the wintry woods of 1778, and plays a fill that is more akin to Jamaican music or Metal than the “indie rock” it will lumped together with. The album’s most noteworthy drum pattern is the beat of “Two Weeks.” “Two Weeks” only hardly suggests the odd, syncopated beat that carries it, while riding its waves the entirety of the song. The beat is based around the rims of snares and his swiftly pinched high-hat. It might be the last thing the average listener would point out, but it’s one of the first things that hits. Christopher Bear’s jazz training is especially apparent on the end of the song. While Ed Droste manipulates some strange device that creates bright, melodic oscillations, pitted against what sounds like a tremolo-drenched electric guitar, Bear assaults with bells of his ride cymbal with more finesse than any of the jazz greats of the bop era. Not once does
Christopher Bear surrender his distinct style for a bland rock beat.

The songs on Veckatimest are more or less all top notch. Veckatimest features songs that are all memorable and that don’t bleed into each other as the songs on Yellow House sometimes did. The album is brighter, although, minor key melancholia is evoked at some point throughout at least half the songs, such as on the chorus of “Ready, Able,” the verse of “Fine For Now,” or the late-night-side-of-the-highway piano lines of “Foreground.” The only shortcoming of the songs is the occasional lyrical dud. The Grizzly Bear guys aren’t really elaborate wordsmiths. They aren’t bad lyricists per se, but they offer quatrains of seemingly meaningless, sometimes prosaic ramblings or non-sequiturs, best exemplified in the chorus of “Two Weeks,” which reads “Would you always / Make it easy / Maybe sometimes / Take your time.” Ed Droste isn’t exactly saying something poignant and if his execution is something shy of adroit, but that doesn’t detract from the song’s merit. I thought the lyrics of the verse (“Save up all the days / A routine malaise / Just like yesterday / I told you I would stay”) were good until I read them on paper and realized they were sort of juvenile and disjointed. Grizzly Bear are simply not a lyrics band. The best lyrics on the album are probably those on “Dory” which opens, “Oh wildly cohering in a watery deep….”

Veckatimest is the first truly consistent album of Grizzly Bear’s career. Yellow House is a much “cooler” album, but where Yellow House creates a distinct and fascinating horizon of sound that melds pre-War Americana, pastoral woodwinds and the fiercest acoustic finger picking and guitar webbing this side of John Fahey, Veckatimest offers twelve hooky and neat songs. Song albums are never as “cool” as album-albums, where a really cohesive and distinct mood is created and explored until the breaking point but they’re a lot more enjoyable to listen to. Grizzly Bear have released a greatest hits worth of great songs between their debut Horn of Plenty in 2005 and their Friend EP in 2007, but never before have they crafted an album as great as Veckatimest.

Indy Rock Reveiws: Small Black

Small Black, Big <3
By Josh Ginsberg

Small Black is probably the first band I’ve liked from Long Island that I have not been a member of. In the wake of emo Long Island has become associated with the cranky inhabitants of suburbs, self-mutilation and skateboarding at malls instead of the cerulean water that tickles its forks, the radiant flora that spring up from its earth and the modest but lovely fauna that carouse among the flowers. Small Black doesn’t evoke those things--they’re not Real Estate!!!--but they miraculously evoke an image of the mystic apocryphal nineteen eighties Long Island I was conceived on and born during. Small Black evokes the steamy, foggy streets I’ve walked down many times, wearing a hoodie and thinking about a girl. Their great self-titled five song EP catches me between the contradictory emotions roused in me by kids smoking pot in and around swimming pools. Small Black makes me disdain the spoiled aimlessness of “Long Island adolescence” but also makes me long for an amble past a local duck pond, holding hands high.

Small Black is “glo-fi,” a trippy, mellow brand of lo-fi that sounds a lot like the Ninja Turtles Soudtrack cassette I used to listen to in bed at night in 1993. The lo-fi recording creates a haze not unlike a moist summer night, which obscures the sound as sfumato might a painting. Small Black sounds sort of thin and tinny on bad speakers or when played too quietly, but on good speakers or loud in headphones it sounds great. The EP opens with the same low-end drum loops the keyboards you find left out for the trash boast. “Despicable Dogs,” isn’t a far cry from New Order’s “Temptation,” but the longing is even more palpable. This super-cool Pitchfork approved jam also evokes Neon Indian and Washed Out. Lyrics are close to indecipherable but reference smoke machines and being lost in the woods. The dizzying physical sensation of running and ducking, drunk, breath visible in front of your eyes, is unmistakable and inseparable from the listening experience.

“Weird Machines” implores the listener to lie upon a mattress. It is darker than “Despicable Dogs” and its keyboards would evoke “This Heart’s On Fire,” if the rest of the song were not eviscerated of raucousness and pomp. Its chord progression is more melancholic, similar to the EP’s fourth track, “Pleasant Experience,” a song reminiscent of Neon Indian’s “6669 (I don’t know if you know).” Spacey and subdued, the song gives way to a fluttering of eyelashes, a synthetic mandolin a galaxy away and a chorus of opaque sensation. Something is hard to pin down. The percussion and winking bass line of the EP’s anthemic via anti-anthem,“Lady in the Wires,” is a pleasant way to end the EP. And things grow even murkier and more indecipherable as melodies grow more uplifting on the track’s long build.

Centerpiece “Bad Lover,” is infectious. It is the most danceable song on the EP, but really lends itself to a drowsy sway. Love is wasted and ambient guitars, pushed back beneath an astral synthesizer and percussive loop, evoke Loveless only slightly. Listening to “Bad Lover” reminds me of sitting with my legs up on a bed, leaning toward a lover’s warmth and shifting my weight to one hand as I bring my opening mouth toward hers. The pulse of the song’s chorus feels the same as the comforter and mattress recoiling under my palm and looks like the specter of an approaching face beneath closed lids. Posture is self-consciously straightened and in this immersive dorm room or park bench of sound the sense of touch is made immaculately and inexplicably present. Josh Kolenik reminds a listener of the realization “You are not in love,” a poignant one when the number of women kissed and kisses per woman grows inversely. “You were running off to / Perhaps to see her,” he sings over groupings of notes too crushed, too hushed to be chords, “Drawn to the site / Moving bones.” Small Black seems almost self-referential when two voices sing of “Drifting fog,” and either “Rain under water,” or “Laying underwater.”

Small Black were great live. I was lucky enough to wander into their set at U-Café early into the semester. The songs sound even better with a real rhythm section playing them and Small Black’s set may have been one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had at a show. Now signed to Jagjaguwar, I assume that a more proper release from Small Black will surface before the year is through. For now their EP will make ambling through a flurry or crunching over see-through snow a little more worthwhile. Too bad those guys pretend they’re from Brooklyn.