Three Imaginary Girls - New Releases

Blues Funeral

Imaginary Gemma — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:06:07 +0000

8.5

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006CC0YB0/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

With his bass-baritone register and emphasis on sordid narrative, Mark Lanegan bears many similarities to Tom Waits and Johnny Cash. But while you love their gravelly voices because of the stories they tell, you love Lanegan’s stories because of his leathery voice: handled by Mark Lanegan, even the alphabet would sound profound. Unlike his melancholy storytelling compatriots, Lanegan’s singing holds up to a fuller sound, and even demands it. Occasionally, though, his looping, unhurried songs have walked too fine a line between hypnotic fascination and mind-numbing boredom. But when the tissue paper layers of his songs build to sufficient thickness, it’s impossible not to be swept away, as evidenced by Blues Funeral.

Blues Funeral is the first album released under the name Mark Lanegan Band since 2004’s Bubblegum, but don’t think Lanegan hasn’t been busy. He has released albums with Isobel Campbell, The Twilight Singers, Soulsavers, and The Guttertwins, in addition to making numerous guest appearances in the meantime. Despite eight years and nine albums separating them, Blues Funeral follows logically from Bubblegum. Blues Funeral is the more cohesive of the two, yet rarely dips into monotony. Guest appearances by frequent collaborators, Josh Homme, Greg Dulli, and Jack Irons connect the album to Lanegan’s other projects.

Blues Funeral is best enjoyed in its entirety in a darkened room, through headphones, with a bourbon in hand. Throughout the whole, lyrics are placed front and center, where, like the Man in Black, Lanegan yearningly explores unwholesome themes with only a flickering hope of Christian redemption.

“Gravedigger’s Song” opens with the urgency that is sometimes lacking in Lanegan’s music. Surrender to the narcotic effect of Lanegan’s voice and float away on the tides of “Bleeding Muddy Water” and “Gray Goes Black.” “St. Louis Elegy” washes you onto a dusty shore littered with tumbleweeds to join the shuffling slave march of the hopeless. The aching flow is broken by the surprisingly effective beat of the aptly named “Ode to Sad Disco.” The song is only slightly out of place and worth the interruption. It is easy enough to dive headfirst into the inviting void of “Phantasmagoria Blues” that follows. Just when you’re hopelessly lost in the darkness, the album peaks with “Harborview Hospital.” Here Lanegan sounds his best, lightened and offset by a transcendent meteor shower of atmospheric synths. The album closes with “Tiny Grain of Truth,” which takes a step back from the vocals. In their place, guitar effects work like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, allowing you to break back through the surface after submersion in the shadowy, suede and canvas world of Mark Lanegan.

The album’s release date is February 6, but you can listen to it streaming on KEXP now. US tour dates have not yet been scheduled.

...when the tissue paper layers of his songs build to sufficient thickness, it’s impossible not to be swept away, as evidenced by Blues Funeral.

The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy

Imaginary Steve — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:28:08 +0000

8.5

http://store.easystreetonline.com/rel/v2_viewupc.php?storenr=375&upc=65517311222

the-stars-are-indifferent-to-astronomy.jpg

The moment I hear a song written by (Nada Surf vocalist/guitarist) Matthew Caws, it takes on considerable meaning. It can be a snippet of a lyric, a certain chord change, a vocal melody, but there's always something -- and as a result, Nada Surf albums are, without exception, difficult for me to process. Which is a little odd, since the songs themselves and the corresponding recordings are generally pretty straightforward. The more I question why, the more I become convinced that it's all about emotion.

After the listen, the hard work begins: either figuring out what it means to me, or being at peace with the uncertainty and absorbing the music from there. Nada Surf inhabit a very short list (REM, Radiohead, Teenage Fanclub, and The Beatles come immediately to mind) of bands I enjoy on an uncommonly personal level -- so much so that I'm almost embarrassed by the depth of feeling. Having at least one foot firmly settled in reality, I realize that "Inside of Love" wasn't written about me. But it burrows its way into my heart so completely, there are times when that reality is hard for me to recall. I have little doubt that it's this very intimacy that has garnered Nada Surf a loyal, loving fan base that shows no signs of abating.

The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy, the band's 7th LP, is perhaps most akin to 2005's stellar (no pun intended) The Weight Is A Gift. As with that record, most of the songs on Stars inhabit a similar sonic area code, standing in contrast to 2008's more eclectic, though just as rewarding, Lucky LP. The vast majority of Stars' ten tracks are mid- to up-tempo power pop numbers which, in less skilled hands, would surely lack the impact that Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot are able to conjure. Such is the advantage on a nearly two decade-long musical partnership.

While Caws seems a bit preoccupied with mortality on Stars, he refreshingly, rather than lamenting-ly, appears to view growing older more as an opportunity than an obstacle. You would be hard-pressed to discover a more life affirming collection of songs, much less one positively exploding with great hooks.

It appears as though the idea with Stars was essentially to avoid over-thinking: seventh track "Looking Through", for example, was recorded the day after it was written. The result is an album that immediately sounds familiar, not because it's a retread but because Nada Surf have so aptly captured the shimmering, lovely essence of what makes them so enchanting in the first place. Opener "Clear Eye Clouded Mind" bursts with punchy, high energy guitars and (of course) flawless harmonies. I suspect it will be a highlight of live shows on their current tour and beyond. "When I Was Young" is no less than an indie-riffic masterpiece, slowly building into a heart-wrenching instant classic.

Though I didn't really need further convincing, Stars reaffirms Caws' place as perhaps the greatest writer of pop tunes in America (all due respect to Adam Schlesinger!). With Nada Surf, what you ~~see~~ hear is what you get. And in this instance, that's a beautiful thing.

Heavy rotation: Nada Surf, Tennis

imaginary victoria — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:51:21 +0000

In a land where we are inundated by new music on a weekly, if not sometimes daily basis -- few things feel better than starting a nice, fresh playlist of tracks that have made the cut (in both the new-release new and new-to-me new ways). I like to organize mine by month, so at a moment's glance, I can see what's new when a friend is looking for something to woo her ear, or what to pull from for a DJ night. That first playlist in the first folder of the year holds special appeal for us over-organizing audiophiles, and while it's already starting to flesh out with some new-to-my-rotation tunes -- "For The One" / WATERS, "Goodness Gracious" / Heligoats, "The Dreamer" / Tallest Man On Earth -- one of the first outright new tracks of 2012 that's become stuck in my proverbial craw is Nada Surf's "When I Was Young".

Slated for release later this month, and undoubtedly one of the many songs the crowd will be set to swoon for when they take the stage at the Tractor on February 2nd, this song has the same kind of intimate-cum-cinematic appeal of Band of Horses' "Funeral" -- the kind of track you turn up because the opening strains start to pull at your heartstrings, and before you know it, you're thrown into this building, accelerating wall of indie-rock, while those signature vocals hold steady and soothing. If the rest of the album is anything like this, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy will absolutely have a firm place in your top-ten list of 2012, local or otherwise. {band official} {preorder at Barsuk}

Imaginary Interview: Jyoti Mishra – feeling blue in White Town

Matt Schild — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:29:41 +0000

There’s always a bit of melodrama involved when a indie singer/songwriter or emo type in his early 20s writes about his life-destroying breakup: Dudes, you’re in your twenties, you’re supposed to have a horrible romantic life. Things get a lot more devastating to listeners when the songwriter is White Town’s Jyoti Mishra, an indie-pop veteran in his mid-40s and he spends an entire album sorting through the wreckage of his personal and romantic life after a decade-plus marriage goes down the tubes on Monopole. It isn’t quarter-life odes to The One That Got Away, but lamenting the irreplaceable loss of The One. For a guy best known for his 1997 mega-hit “Your Woman,” it’s a startlingly direct look inside his personal life.

It’s not like Mishra hasn’t attempted to distract himself from his loneliness. He started (and dropped out of) sociology and creative writing programs at the University of Derby. He buckled down and Monopole as the second release from his own label, Bzangy Groink, handling virtually everything from song inception to fanzine-level press. Still, there are events that define a life, and it’s hard not to come away from Monopole, with its start-to-finish chronicle of his wrecked relationship, with the feeling that Mishra will never be able to truly put the past few years behind him.

TIG: After all the misery that’s helped inspire this album, does it feel like it’s behind you with the release of this album?

Jyoti Mishra: It’s been a weird process, as you know. It would have been a lot sooner, because the last album was 2006, 2007. With divorce stuff and my parents being ill, it’s been difficult to get a continued bit of time to keep working. It’s taken much longer than I would have liked. I’m not like through the thing of being through it yet. It’s still in the process. It’s not like it’s a past album yet. When it’s a past album, I’ll be able to draw on it. It still feels too current. Everything I’m singing about on it feels too now, you know?

Is that because you’re so involved in every aspect of it, handling all songwriting, performing, recording, album art and running the label, are you more immersed in the emotion tied into the songs?

JM: I think if I handed it off to anybody else, even down to the videos and stuff. I know it’s my own fault, because I’m too much of a control freak. I want everything to be right. It’s partially based on bad experiences before, which were a long time ago. I’m talking about EMI stuff. When you work really hard on something and get a graphic design back that’s just awful, it kind of puts you off to working with other people again. [Laughs] I know there’s probably great people out there that I could use, but I’ll just do it myself, even though I’m not really a graphic designer. I just knock up something that will do.

After having problems with other people in the past, do you get to the point where it’s just easier to do everything yourself than try to explain your ideas and struggle with other people?

JM: I’m not a trained graphic designer, so it’s always going to be worse if I do it myself, because I haven’t got that knowledge or craft, but it will be better than someone doing a botched job, like a slick botched job. The same with videos; I’ve already made a few short films. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m sure if I had the money and the ability to hand it over to a proper director, I’d get back the videos that were vector-edited and all that kind of stuff. But, A) who can I find to do it, and B) I can’t afford it. It’s like you just do it yourself. It’s partially political, and partially no money.

I think that’s why a lot of the original DIY stuff died off. A lot of people rewrite history and say, “Oh, it’s because they wanted to be independent,” and all that. Often, it’s because you couldn’t afford to do anything else. You just had to. People laid out fanzines on typewriters because who’s got the first version of Quark Xpress when it came out? You didn’t have that kind of stuff. You had to do it on typewriters.

The best way to force yourself to learn anything is to jump in the deep end and say, “This has to be a finished product,” isn’t it?

JM: In the end, I ended up doing the design for the EMI albums. They took me to all these graphics people and we went through the process. I got this hideous thing back. I just said, “Look, I’ll just knock something up.” Actually thinking about it, apart from a couple of EMI singles, which were horrendous designs, everything I’ve produced has been designed by me. You can tell. If you look at the very first album, which is very, very laid out in a word processing program, because I didn’t have access to (desktop publishing programs) up to now, I think it’s got better. [Laughs] I only do it once every three or four years, so I don’t get much practice. If I was designing an album a week, I’d probably be a lot better by now. The same with the videos. When I finally do the 10 or 11 videos for this album, by the time I’ve done those I should be a lot better at making videos.

Why did you choose to make a video for every track on the album?

JM: It’s a twofold thing. First of all, I love film and am an ex-film student. That’s part of my wanky background. I like thinking about narrative visual flow. I love the old “Your Woman” video. That was directed by Mark Adcock. He came up with all the ideas, but we talked about it loads. We were both into the same stuff, like German expressionism, and not having typical slow motion. Still, now 20 years later, I see so many videos that are slow-mo because they can’t think of anything else to do! It’s like, “Let’s have a shot of that band hitting some drums in slow-mo because it looks more expressive and powerful.” No it fucking doesn’t. It just looks stupid. Or the live videos! We know you’re not plugged in. We know you’re not playing the song. What’s that about? It’s OK if it’s Coldplay or U2 or something like that. You expect them to be shit and boring.

When it’s a new band of twentysomething kids that are meant to be a punk band or something, you think, “Already? Already you’re doing this?” It’s like a genre convention. They’ve seen what rock videos are meant to look like, so they want theirs to look like that. The same with Auto-Tune. People hear Auto-Tuned vocals and they want their vocals to sound like that, whether they can sing or not. I heard, I can’t remember the band, a proper lo-fi, shambling indie band. They were sort of like an All Girl Summer Fun Band, which I love, they were that kind of style, but they Auto-Tuned the vocals! The vocals, which are meant to be a bit out of tune, a bit shambly and Pastels-y and Marine Girls-y were just in tune, and horribly in tune. Like, it made you want to tip your head sideways like a dog in tune.

Why do you think Auto-Tune’s become so widespread and accepted instead of being reviled?

JM: I think the basic reason is because people are twats. People are just imitating monkeys. They just hear someone. I’m not knocking the guy, he might be lovely and really good to his mum and all that, but when the Owl City thing came out, all these people who said they loved it, had they never heard Postal Service? It was just a slap in the face for anyone who’s ever heard Postal Service or anything that Ben Gibbard’s ever done. (Owl City’s Adam Young) just ripped his style completely. Then he Auto-Tuned it, and it was, “This is a modern thing! This band is like this.” Well, Ben Gibbard sings like that live. I’ve seen Death Cab live. He sings more in tune than he did on the record! The man’s a fucking tuning robot. He’s never out of tune. He didn’t need that. His records are a correct representation of how he sings. He’s a beautiful, wonderful singer

I’m not so good. I’m not so tuneful. When I’m recording stuff, I want it to sound like me. Otherwise, people hear the record and they come to the shows and are, “Well, he’s shit. He sounds nothing like on the record.” I know you can use Auto-Tune live now, but that just boggles my brain why people would do that.

I hate what I call ProTools punk now. Everything is beat-detected into time, everything is Auto-Tuned, all the guitars are looped about and jumped about. If you think about it, and I’m sure you have, the records that come out now are more electronic than the records Kraftwerk made. There’s less manipulation on a trance or house or dubstep record. People just get some sequences going, and just taped it. With modern guitar rock, I’ve seen bands with studios machine songs. They just take a second of one guitar from somewhere, and stick it on another second of guitar and take some feedback and make the start exciting, even though it wasn’t really there.

That eventually comes back around to haunt bands when they try to perform and can’t even approximate their album.

JM: It’s a valid artistic thing to do. I don’t mind Aphex Twin doing that. I find it a little bit weird when a rock band does it. Just record the shambling live sound, and leave it at that. One of the things that this album is about, apart from my horrendous love life, is just trying to do something that feels – I’m sounding like Neil Young, aren’t I? – that feels more raw and more real and less worried about how it’s received. If a musician says they don’t care what people think about their record, they’re lying. Every musician is always worried if you have half a brain thinking, “How’s it going to sound?” That’s just how you record stuff.

With this thing, I was thinking I just wanted to do it so it’s not fashionable or like a dubstep breakdown, you know what I mean? No ravey synths going on for no reason.

Was it difficult to break from all the modern influences that seep into your songwriting unconsciously?

JM: Yeah. With the songwriting process, I mostly write on guitar and transfer it to either guitar or keyboards. The song is just a song. I have to decide how to frame it. Is it a synth song or is it a guitar song? What serves it best? Then, you kind of think, “What should I use?” The electronic songs on the album, they’re pure electronic songs. How do I frame them? Do I try to make them sound more contemporary, or do I do things that I like, which is going to make them sound more ’80s-ish? In doing that, is it going to make them sound ’80s contemporary? You can go around in circles and go mental. You think, “Oh God, that sounds too ’80s. People will think I’m trying to be ’80s.” Then you have to stop yourself and go, “Fuck it. Do I like this sound? Does it suit the song?”

Is it tough to write a song on the guitar then take in in a direction on other instruments?

JM: It’s not actually something I invented. Depeche Mode used to do it. It was an old trick of theirs. When they started off, they were a guitar band and they switched to synths because they heard Gary Numan and liked it. It’s good to do that. Also, I will go the other way. I will write things on keyboards and move them to guitar because you end up with these songs that if you’ve been writing a long time, you have a specific way of approaching an instrument, a rut. It’s hard to keep out of those ruts. If I write something on the guitar, I do chords I wouldn’t do on a keyboard, and when I transcribe them, it’s all, “This goes to what now?” I’m trying to play them and it’s all weird shapes and vice versa. Things I write on the keyboard, when I move them to the guitar, I can’t play them because I’m a shit guitar player. I’ve now been recording myself for 29 years now, so I need to find ways of not being comfortable in the studio.

Do you spend a lot of time developing songs as recordings verses traditional songwriting?

JM: A lot of the time I spend is what I call mooching time. The only way I can describe that is, if you’ve ever read any books by or about mathematicians, they’re always going on about how they were trying to work on a problem and they couldn’t do it, and they went for a bike ride or walked over the river or went to the café and suddenly it clicked in their head. It’s the same with songs, for me at least. Every song on that album, or anything I’ve ever done, comes from this weird kind of feeling inside me that something is kind of wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s kind of disquiet. You feel unsettled. It’s like you can kind of see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look, it’s not there. It’s a kind of weird feeling. Then I kind of know that’s a song. I’m feeling something and I don’t quite know what it is. You have to write the song to get out what the feeling is.

To a certain extent, once you’ve done that, that’s cathartic. It reduces or minimizes it, if you do the job well. If you do it badly, it’s still there. So, it becomes like a mathematical problem in my head. I’ll have this feeling, but I won’t have a handle on what it is that I feel. Then I’ll go and do mooching time, which is going to a café or taking photos or doing something that is not related to music at all, and then the song will come out. Like, I’ll have a lyric just come into my head, or I’ll have a stanza or sometimes the whole thing will just pop into my head. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t sit in the studio bashing away at stuff. I have to have the feelings first, then the idea and then the song writes itself. It’s really easy.

So you need to have a weird feeling to seed a song?

JM: The more emotionally unstable I am, the more I write. It’s been a really bad three or four years, but in terms of writing, it’s been amazing because I’ve just been writing and writing and writing. Sometimes I’ll write three or four songs in a day. I’m not saying they’re good songs, but I’ll do them and they will mean something. I don’t know if they mean enough to play to other people, but they work for me. Out of those songs, I’ll pick things that I think are worth other humans’ ears. Writing isn’t a problem for me. I thought as I got older, it would be. In fact, it’s gotten easier.

After you exercise those weird feelings by writing songs, do you have emotional flashbacks when you return and listen to that song later?

JM: Yeah. Sometimes it does, especially when you’re mixing them. Doing the album was a little – a little? I’m exaggerating – it was hugely strenuous. If I’m mixing a song, I usually listen to it 40, 50 maybe 60 times if it’s a difficult mix. Then, it comes to mastering, I have the body of songs and I have to master them. On the album, you know that there are electronic tracks next to feedback-y guitar tracks. It wasn’t easy to balance them all together and make them feel like some kind of whole, because they are really hard to have them sit next to each other. During that process, I had to listen to the songs at least 100 or 150 times each, altogether. When you go back, sometimes you go back and listen and go, “This is horrendous. I don’t want to listen to this anymore, but I’ve got to mix it,” and it’s like picking a scab. Other times, you go back and you listen and you hear it and think, “This is OK. I did OK on this.”

You’ve always seemed to be very straightforward with your music instead of dressing it up or complicating it.

JM: It’s not poetry. You don’t need a thesaurus to work out what I’m writing about. When I was doing creative writing in Uni, which I’ve dropped out of, I had this end-of-year project and you had to write about a book of poetry. You had to write about poetry. I said to my lecturer, “Can I write about a science fiction book instead?” [Laughs] She’s like, “Are you submitting science fiction stories? You need to write about poetry.” I’m like, “Well, I don’t like poetry.” She’s like, “Why do you write poetry?” “I write poetry that I like. I don’t like reading it.” Of course, her response, which is true, was, “You need to read more poetry. There will be stuff out there that you like.” What I said to her was, “I don’t want to read stuff that’s trying to be clever.”

I don’t want to read stuff where I have to rub my fucking chin and go, “Oh! Interesting!” Just say what you fucking mean. I don’t have time to hang about. Nobody else has time to hang about. Just fucking get on with it and find a way to say it.

{Photo by Natalie Barratt.}

white_town_mishra.jpg

TIG: After all the misery that’s helped inspire this album, does it feel like it’s behind you with the release of this album?

After having problems with other people in the past, do you get to the point where it’s just easier to do everything yourself than try to explain your ideas and struggle with other people?

Heavy rotation: fall edition, part I

imaginary victoria — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:25:45 +0000

Autumn is upon us, and once again, we've found ourselves happily submerged in a sea of grey mornings at the local cafe with headphones on, poring through new releases and marking our calendars for upcoming shows. And in case you're in one of those spots where you had to put New Release Tuesday on the back burner for a bit, we'd love to help you catch up! Part one of two, this post features stuff we heart to the maxx that also has a live show coming up in November -- and PS, we've got tickets to give away for almost everything featured here! Read on:

Who: tUnE-yArDs, aka Merrill Garbus

What: new(ish) album from earlier this year, upcoming show, all-around awesomeness
Sounds Like: super-melodic, experimental freak-out tribal chanting over sweet beats + some very catchy sing-a-long-y vibes
More info at: http://tune-yards.com/
Playing: The Neptune on Sunday, November 20th

Short version? One of the stand-out small-stage acts at Sasquatch! 2010, plays huge venues now, not to be missed. Long version: tUnE-yArDs -- which is comprised mostly of a lady-genius named Merrill Garbus, along with some loops and accompanying musicians depending on where and when you catch her -- is not like any other band out there today. It's part crazy catchy beats, part tribal warpaint, part musical catch-and-release, and all amazing. 2009's Bird-Brains kicked our asses, and 2011's w h o k i l l took things to a whole 'nother level. Buy both albums and make sure you're front and center for her Neptune appearance later this month.

Who: We Were Promised Jetpacks

What: new album, upcoming show, mosh potential
Sounds Like: straight-up indie rock, big guitars, angst, Scottishness
More info at: http://wewerepromisedjetpacks.com
Playing: Neumos on Tuesday, November 15th

Emperor X hid a secret b-side in Seattle. Has anyone found it yet?

imaginary liz — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:44:46 +0000

It takes a lot of coordination to properly release a record these days. After you spend all that time writing and recording songs, there are shows and tours followed by buckets of time needed to coordinate with blogs, radio, friends, random contacts, twitter, and facebook to let everyone know you've got a record coming out. It's a lot and is the reason that I've always thought (and feared) that the best bands rarely get to see the light of day in the avalanche of media.

Last week, Bar None released a record that did more than just the usual. Emperor X's new album, Western Teleport, is a full album release with 40 b-sides (called nodes) that are being released on the internet via a GPS scavenger hunt. I'm not sure if it's been discovered yet, but apparently a Western Teleport operative has hidden a node in Seattle and someone needs to find it to release it to the world. The full explanation is on the Western Teleport website, which you'll need to read for yourself because this concept is so intense that I'm not sure I actually understand all the components that make it so cool.

Three from the Stacks: Imaginary Amie's CD Picks

Imaginary Amie — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:32:42 +0000

It's time once again to bring some good stuff to your attention! This list is compiled from purchased CDs and things grabbed from the Imaginary mailbag (Have I mentioned lately how much I love writing for TIG? Because I do. I truly, truly do).

The Drums - Portamento: Look, it's no secret that I've been in love with The Drums since I heard "Let's Go Surfing", but I wasn't prepared to be as blown away by their sophomore album as I was. I mean, seriously. From track 1 (the super-catchy "Book of Revelation") to track 12, this CD is pure perfection with the same bouncy, poppy beats of their self-titled debut -- somehow sounding familiar and brand new at the same time. Standouts: "Hard to Love", "Please Don't Leave" and "I Need a Doctor". Oh yeah, and they're playing October 12 at The Crocodile! (Guess who'll be in the front row?)

Prison Boxing

Imaginary Steve — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:27:07 +0000

8.1

http://www.sonicboomrecords.com/catalog/default.aspx?searchbox=cataldo

prisonboxing.jpg

Earlier this year, some friends and I set out to see Cataldo play a show at Neumo’s in support of The Globes and Say Hi. Once we’d contended with a malfunctioning parking meter, we waltzed in just in time to catch the last two or three minutes of their set. One can, however, gather quite a bit from a couple minutes of great music. Upon hustling a rough copy of their new LP Prison Boxing, my deep appreciation for this ensemble was solidified.

Initially, I was reminded of Hey Marseilles (an equally excellent band in which drummer Colin Richey does time) but that’s an oversimplification. Think Colin Meloy sans the prog rock and historical fetishes -- and you’re still not all the way there. The brainchild of Eric Anderson, Cataldo offers up an effortless blend of pop and folk immersed in elegant arrangements and radiant melodies. Thankfully, even when things get a bit simpler, the results are still fulfilling. On the masterful “Things You Need to Know” the proceedings are just as remarkable when Anderson’s voice is accompanied by a barely-there acoustic guitar. When the arrangement fleshes itself out past the three minute mark, the subtlety that reigned previously takes on even greater meaning.

The real jewel on the album is “Cash on the Barrel.” If there’s been a lovelier composition to release by a Northwest band in 2011, it’s been conveniently wiped from my memory. The keyboards gently echo across the speakers with nuance not unlike a Mike Mills piano part from some long lost outtake from REM’s Automatic for the People. When Anderson asserts “What is more infatuating than infatuation?", I dare you to keep your heart from falling to pieces. I, for one, contend that a song reaches elite status when I find myself unable to shut the hell up about it. So goes my relationship with this superb pop confection.

So, my fellow music lover, I implore you to buy this record as soon as is humanly possible. Let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re obviously a fan of local music and Prison Boxing is very much in the pantheon of great Seattle area LPs of the past several years. Moreover, see Cataldo live as often as you can (your next opportunity being October 8 for Seattle Weekly's REVERB music fest in Ballard.) Budget some time to find parking though, because even though a mere two minutes of listening will yield much enjoyment, a full set will no doubt be purely blissful.

{Cataldo is playing Seattle Weekly's REVERB Festival this Saturday, 10/8 at 6pm}

Initially, I was reminded of Hey Marseilles (an equally excellent band in which drummer Colin Richey does time) but that’s an oversimplification. Think Colin Meloy sans the prog rock and historical fetishes -- and you’re still not all the way there. The brainchild of Eric Anderson, Cataldo offers up an effortless blend of pop and folk immersed in elegant arrangements and radiant melodies. Thankfully, even when things get a bit simpler, the results are still fulfilling. On the masterful “Things You Need to Know” the proceedings are just as remarkable when Anderson’s voice is accompanied by a barely-there acoustic guitar. When the arrangement fleshes itself out past the three minute mark, the subtlety that reigned previously takes on even greater meaning.

The real jewel on the album is “Cash on the Barrel.” If there’s been a lovelier composition to release by a Northwest band in 2011, it’s been conveniently wiped from my memory. The keyboards gently echo across the speakers with nuance not unlike a Mike Mills piano part from some long lost outtake from REM’s Automatic for the People. When Anderson asserts “What is more infatuating than infatuation?", I dare you to keep your heart from falling to pieces. I, for one, contend that a song reaches elite status when I find myself unable to shut the hell up about it. So goes my relationship with this superb pop confection.

Wild Flag

Chris Estey — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:03:05 +0000

8.5

http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Flag/dp/B005DLBL4U/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

wild_flag_wild_flag.jpg

Wild Flag is a quartet love affair smooshing Portland and D.C.-based warrior women together, combining the velvety and violent vocals/guitars of Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rebecca Cole (The Minders) with the superb shuffle and stomp of mighty drummer Janet Weiss (S-K, Quasi, etc.).

Wild Flag is a rock album that needs to be in everyone's playlist this year, as it constantly excites and snuggles up to the listener with openly emotional attempts at romantic music-fandom bonding ("Romance"), twists and turns about feeling hot and cold with mysterious scratches ("Something Came Over Me"), whilst a whole lot of skittery guitars tweak and even psyche-chug above Weiss's skin-rattling fury. It's boss.

Sounding as fresh as a debut by a Go-Go's era femme-powered new wave band made up of grown-up punks, all of those great garage gal voices bringing to mind glories recent (e.g. The Woods, by S-K) throughout, but also the brutal, passionate art-pop rants of Lene Lovich ("Boom"), and even early 70s feminist rock ("Glass Tamourine"). Dub bass notes dangle with Elastica-sharp guitar tones ("Short Version"), and all out expansive American Patti Smith-esque rock anthems spill towards the end of the ten track full-lenth ("Race Horse," "Black Tiles"). It never holds back, tapping into poetic blues bluster as much as synthy, snakey post-punk come-ons. It's a dirty, happy, dark rock and roll album. It's got a sweet face and creepy tattoo'd hands with black painted nails slithering up your white t-shirt. And it wants to dance and have some fun and there just might be a little danger involved.

The self-titled debut (and hopefully not first and last album) by Wild Flag does bring up some questions about supergroups. You get plenty more for your money for sure, as eight of these ten tracks seem like great seven inch singles and the other two are expanded twelve inch deep dish cuts all on their own. And you don't need to memorize the pedigree or back catalogue to appreciate the immediate, fusing genius. Opener "Romance" is a heart-warming ode to inclusion and Le Tigre-style love between artists and fans and fans to fans and artists to artists, and it's far too late to describe horny, playful, literate rock made by adult women as "empowering" (that story was confirmed by 1981, at least in my generation).

But I do wish there was a "Modern Girl," something a bit more stripped down and a lot more vulnerable, a change of flow in the blast. I love it all in my face, it's great, and this love letter to several decades of ace underground rock-for-rock's-sake is irresistible. Think more of The Cars (a bunch of great vets resetting their controls to refresh) than the New Pornographers (a mad scramble of new boots and contracts), and the steady quality of the songwriting won't be any let-down. And those voices, oh.

Sky Full of Holes

Imaginary Steve — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:13:09 +0000

7.7

http://store.easystreetonline.com/rel/v2_viewupc.php?storenr=375&upc=63445722472

20110722_fountains_of_wayne_sky_full_of_holes_47.jpg

More than a great percentage of people I’ve met, I’m someone who likes things I can count on. This might explain everything from why I’ve worked only two jobs over the past decade to why I always pack my cigarettes exactly eight times. OK, “I’m nuts” might be a better explanation for the latter but I digress.

With all this in mind, Fountains of Wayne are, in many ways, the perfect band for someone like me. They figured out early on what they were good at and stuck to the script. When a new FoW record drops, you’re guaranteed to be treated to flawlessly constructed pop songs with tight yet exceedingly simple arrangements. They’re the most reliable three and a half minutes in rock n roll. Suffice to say, Sky Full of Holes continues in this vein.

That said, FoW’s fifth full length is hardly a carbon copy of their previous catalog. Most notably, they’ve dialed back the punchy electric guitar approach that has been something of a staple. Sky Full of Holes relies much more on mid-tempo, largely acoustic backdrops. About half way through, I found myself thinking a lot about The Get Up Kids. In particular, how Kansas City’s finest followed a half decade of fast paced power pop with the Scott Litt-produced On a Wire, which seemed to boast nary a distorted guitar. And after hearing SFoH a few times through, this comparison seemed even more apt. In both cases, while the arrangements were a departure, the songwriting aptitude remained essentially the same.

Lead track “The Summer Place” shines with Beatles circa Help! swagger and features a protagonst who feels nostalgia for a time in her life that most would surmise actually kind of sucked. Among their many virtues as storytellers is FoW’s ability to create a sympathetic identity for a character within the space of just a moment or two.

“Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart” earns a spot among the very best Fountains of Wayne singles. It’s the latest in a parade of Chris Collingwood-penned gems fully deserving of a Top 40 status it’s unlikely to attain. This is also the moment where the band come closest to their vintage sound.

Fountains of Wayne have always emphasized emotion and melodic content over, say, cerebral lyrics. “Hate to See You Like This” is a good example. It boasts a lovely, aching melody that nullifies the fact that the lyrics could have been written by a less folksy, more compassionate Dr. Phil. Besides, Dr. Phil’s songs are shit.

While Sky Full of Holes isn’t quite as consistent on a song-by-song basis as FoW’s first two LPs, it stands up well against their output over the past decade. As this disc illustrates once more, heartfelt simplicity almost always trumps unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, I’ve got a milk crate full of Rush records you might enjoy. Otherwise, I invite you to bask in the glory of Sky Full of Holes. It’s proof positive that Schlesinger and Co. remain craftsmen of top-shelf pop songs.

Recommended show + free tickets: Jesse Sykes {8/4}

imaginary victoria — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:28:21 +0000

There's a sad-hearted party going on next Thursday, and you're invited.

Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter will be taking the stage down at the Showbox at the Market a week from tomorrow {8/4} in celebration of the new release, Marble Son. Already hailed a triumph by folks who've gotten their hands it, Marble Son is definitely cause for cheer, even though the content is shot through with melancholy leanings. Here's a little more about it from Jesse:

I liked the idea of something beautiful that may or may not be appreciated in its own time... of course, a statue comes to mind. They seem to last forever and are beautiful and viable even as they disintegrate. Some were built so well that their dissolution is almost more powerful because it exposes the process and the bare essentials are revealed - we are left with an arm, a torso - and sometimes those parts say enough. There's a line in the song "Marble Son" that goes - "Oh marble son why cant I love you more? I wish I'd found you beautiful before." Many things I didn't see beauty in when I was young, I find beautiful now, and visa-versa.

White Orange

Chris Estey — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:42:32 +0000

8.3

http://press.badabuzz.com/whiteorange/

WhiteOrange.jpg

It's no surprise that Portland, OR band's White Orange is fronted/fully finessed by a hands-on studio owner and full-time acid-axe victim. Adam Pike sits in the corner of Pac NW's rock dungeon basement, egg-shell sheets all over the incense-drenched walls, orange crates of the most lysergic-infused hallucination-crunch hard psyche LPs near his feet, as he plays with some gimmicks box and weird tuning and drops long cigarette ashes into the denim cuff of his greasy jeans.

His self-titled nine track White Orange album easily shows why his Toadhouse Recording House skills are in such frenetic demand: Any raunch riff-based band (for example, Red Fang, Norska, Rabbits) would crave to sound this futurist and primitive-brutal all at once. Pike is a Sinatra of the dummy-headed bad-trip existential vocal, spinning turgid journeys through The Sword and Nebula style virtual reality doom stomp. Contemporary artists of this style often have the licks, but don't have the bottom end; White Orange cranks and throbs deep inside the crust of the lurch-groove ("Middle Of The Riddle"), then sprightly trills into pure cosmic pop pleasuring ("Dinosaur Bones").

The tempo from box-cutter opening "Where" to drain-dirge "Sigourney Weaver" features changes which aren't break neck, and often the layering of simple rhythms with basic chords beneath it all shows Pike knows his "rock" as much as his "art." Every element is clever, like with Queens Of The Stone Age, but sounding more 19 and life to go than mass-expressive vets. That's the thing: It's somehow both post-grunge, with a more innocent transgressive vocal style (almost but not quite 1970), and pre-pomp irony. It evades those excesses by glorying in its own.

A confession: The album's gorgeous/grotesque cover at first kept me from examining the sounds within -- I wanted to frame it more than play it. That was a big mistake, as this isn't the sort of experimental psyche-outs better left out to freak out the non-heads, and much more the kind of incredibly catchy showcase for a real songwriter set lose with self-created playfulness. This isn't an album to own to feel cool -- it just looks like it. It's more an album to play over and over again, before passing out on that filthy couch alongside your also-tripping heavy rocking comrade. Just remember to snuff those butts out; basements can burn up.

After Nights Without Sleep

Chris Estey — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:09:56 +0000

8.1

http://www.amazon.com/After-Nights-Without-Sleep-Curtains/dp/B005085RQE/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

curtains-for-you-cover.jpg

Somehow trimming off their more nostalgic musical tendencies for a timeless power pop sound, and adding a new invigorating and unusually sensitive approach to lyric writing, After Nights Without Sleep sounds like its title: That bizarre buzz of being up too long, and thinking too much, and not being able to settle down yet. It is bracing morning rock filled with overflowing emotions ("thick as bacon grease left out in the plan," from "Eggs Over Toast"), somehow as sobering and intoxicating as a triple espresso-infused Irish coffee drink.

Nick Holman (bass/euphonium/vocals), Peter Fedofsky (piano/vocals), Mikey and Matt Gervais (lead vocals and guitar, lead guitar/sax/vocals, respectively), and drummer Davey Lawrence still stock every song with oodles of chattering keyboards, shimmery but sinewy guitars, a deft rhythm section able to shuffle between all the mid-late period British Invasion bands they can evoke. It's one right after the other in the music hall-level "The Wasteland," which is both as heart-pinching and ambitious as a young nimble Nilsson. There the album gets its title, and that jabbering, hallucination-plagued-by-heartache friend describes his plight best there. It is then relieved by the beautiful loser gasser "Bronx Zoo Hobo," like many here a tumbling back pages of coming to terms with a world of failure and flavor. It's interestingly reminiscent more of early-mid kitchen sink garage operas made by Jellyfish and the like, than the 60s artists which inspired them and this band's own first one. It's a nice toggle.

But there's miles of tough assessment before these peaks, with two of my favorite cuts, the love-is-a-battlefield anthem to napalm most others, "The Great War," and its rolls and fills matching the fear and action described in being ("the sky rained fire through the night"). Shattering mid-song unpacking: "This is the part of the story where you go down asking for mercy and help." (Ouch!) The next track, the fourth on the full length, "Cold Wind," is the saddest here but also the best: It's a smoothly catchy, hidden-caustic taunt of painful reminders that "death is not behind us," and that doubt and pessimism tends to scare off the "best friend we ever had. We're not better left alone."

The tightly controlled, top-flight of the flange and FX boxes and fluid back-beat on that track alone kills all the criticism of too-cleverness and throw-back fussiness some made about the first album. The rest of After Nights Without Sleep will certainly keep you up as well, somehow agitating the soft side of your soul as all the nice blankets of baroque sound wrap around your ear feelers. Again, a strange mix, but more meaningful and more rocking than a precocious debut which would have been hard to compete with in the first place, let alone surpass. Which it has, deeply and richly.

{Curtains For You play on Thursday, June 30, at the Columbia City Theater. Presented by Team Up for Nonprofits and KEXP, benefitting Art Corps! Doors open at 8:30pm, and Kelli Schaefer opens. $20 advance tickets, $25 at the door.}

They've played sold out gigs with The Head and the Heart and The Posies, where this five-piece "retro-pop" band snagged frequent raves from bloggers among the fan-thronged crowds; made the Top 10 band list in City Arts Magazine; and got KEXP play for their dizzying debut What A Lovely Surprise To Wake Up Here. But now Curtains For You are raising the stakes artistically, releasing an album as punchy and psychically provocative as Dear 23.

Somehow trimming off their more nostalgic musical tendencies for a timeless power pop sound, and adding a new invigorating and unusually sensitive approach to lyric writing, After Nights Without Sleep sounds like its title: That bizarre buzz of being up too long, and thinking too much, and not being able to settle down yet. It is bracing morning rock filled with overflowing emotions ("thick as bacon grease left out in the plan," from "Eggs Over Toast"), somehow as sobering and intoxicating as a triple espresso-infused Irish coffee drink.

Black Up

Chris Estey — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:41:21 +0000

8.5

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Up-Shabazz-Palaces/dp/B004UA8DUU/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

shabazz.jpg

Once you do something extraordinary, the universe gets in the way. People almost seem to be willing you to fail by praising your breakthrough effort, the burst of vision that placed you inside (the center of the world). Near the end of Black Up -- Shabazz Palaces' first full length but second major statement -- evolution is described as passe. Cyberspace controlled by profit-cops and the grid lurked on by the greedy are corny topics, but fools still eat anti-matter and trifle. So we proceed with icy and persistent recognition.

But Palaceer Lazaro (revealed to be Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler of 90s jazz-rap Digable Planets, now in the backyard of cyber-barons and baristas) sprawled cosmic surveillance and urban physical backwaters all through Shabazz Palaces' primary EP announcements, too. Those two discs featured "Kill White T" and "4 Shadows" and "Sparkles" and if electronically throat-modulated / mbari percussionist Tendai Maraire (the Billy Cobham of beats) didn't slyly perplex your attention with his very precise rhythmic pointillism, then Butler would wipe you out with very detail-oriented short stories about Barbara, cocaine, and partying in a Death Star (because it's no longer a rocket for science fiction rock and roll, it's all earth hip-hop and the ship has flown).

Digable Planets' two LPs, Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Blowout Comb, and the flipped out big heat of Cherrywine (Butler's last joint) were so much older then (the 90s), they're younger than that now (let's go back to Bambaataa and start the whole goddamn thing over again). It's year zero, and all of that sounds like, well, crossing over jazz and rap. Black Up, the first full-length in form, sounds maybe like where jazz was going in the days of Rahsaan Roland Kirk but sliced and dropped out with the digital developed in the next decade.

Me? It's just great pop music made by smart, nice, real men who actually own real stereos but make songs for those of us with iPods. I don't know my God-hop from my Sequential Circuits, I came to learn. Butler emphatically uses synesthesia in the lean electro-funk tradition, with juicy lips, deception being the truest act, philosophy is cruelty, catchy yes trendy no, up or don't toss it at all (not in that order) matched with I lost the best beat that I had in a rhyming scheme teenagers in high school speak words to first year of English. Yeah, "free press and curl" starts with the most basic of rap flows, just like a punk band might throw a mundane tantrum from the top to then melt you down with the rest. It's a three part suite around that, as amorphous and mystifying as anything they put out last year on the first two mini-albums.

THEESatisfaction's sweet voices are mince-mixed into children's ghost cries around jail cell echo backing doo-wop and keys-vibes for "the echo from the hosts ..." and things are definitely getting supernatural. I don't know where this space is, but when Butler accosts, "Who do you think you are?" I feel more in tarnation than Job before the Lord. A slain spirit of 70s soul grifts around the next jam, "Are you ... Can you ..." while it describes a near death experience or a new romance.

"A treatese ..." is the new "I Need Love," a confident but sweetly polite come-on in this realm -- a beautiful fantasy swirling between the ice and the cran and the vodka -- but he does definitely want to be in there. It's silly and fun and should shock all the critics in NYC who want to see this as some sort of Twin Peaks Pac NW death disco dub. The Barry Adamson-style noir OST of "Endeavors" brings back the femme vox, and the TS gals sound great enticing some detective to lose his shit on some sort of bullshit case. Well, I'm seduced at least (and saxed up, "forever and never").

"It's appealing" and "it's a feeling" ... "forever and ever" and "forever and never." Something's happening here with the use of how words are said, and you could call that spoken word I guess, but no one is gesticulating like they're cutting bologna at the deli after school. It's an old rap trick but far closer to Last Poets than (pick your gangsta). And this can't be said enough, this is hip-hip rooted back to "right on" (said not in irony) rap, and the suggestion that perhaps this is just the new black rock, in the way that James Blood Ulmer cranked riffs and Bad Brains fuse-fried punk and dub, shouldn't be the insult many might make of it. (That's supposing the phrase "black rock" isn't redundant or racist to begin with.)

It's a thing. An album, like a novel, something happened, like a really good movie by an auteur. You talk about it, it's a record to talk to you and enlighten you and entertain, yes, but yeah total illumination doesn't repeat. (Like Malcolm X meeting the white woman on the plane, she's a little disappointed in the lack of savagery in that sharp suit.) Can we blame Shabazz Palaces for delivering a very, very good album?

You do get caked up (too high) and faked up (you're being pimped) on the more taunting again "Youlogy" but none of the valleys have the same woozy and bitter dip as last year's raps. Maybe indie press success has been good for the narrator of these songs? It's definitely mellower this time out and the asphalt isn't quite as hot. You can walk through the end of the world with these ghosts, and it's actually refreshing they're more companions than mockers. Do I dare mix the artist with the art? As Sir Mix A Lot just spoke in City Arts, every city has a Broadway. That can be taken a couple of ways: But he meant our Broadway, not New York's. And our Broadway is pretty peaceful, conducive to creativity, a little mysterious, occasionally scary, but made that way by being on its own. Sort of like Butler in Seattle. Celebrate his peace and his peace given to us.

{Shabazz Palaces play on Thursday, 6/30 AND Friday, 7/1 at Neumos!}

Introducing Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground

Chris Estey — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:27:01 +0000

8.2

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004MWNAW2/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

kaykay2011album.jpg

{On Sunday, June 12, 2011, Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground will be playing a record release show for this album with The Young Evils and The Can Can Castaways at the Triple Door. If all of this sounds extraordinary to you, we love you as much as we love those artists and that venue -- and that is loads and loads.}

Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground sounds as if freak rock died and went to heaven in 1971, instead of the miasmatic personal singer-songwriter purgatory that actually mostly formed that year's musical output. This is appropriate, as the band was spawned from the early demise of Gatsby's American Dream, a much hyped Seattle-based band that many people planned on dancing to and singing along with for years. But like the 60s, the dream was over. It's just that no one told Kirk Huffman and Kyle O'Quin that they could have an even better time with the funkier, psyche-stirring topical cabaret KK&HWU, especially when master musician and band-butterfly Phil Peterson was brought on board for their double-down debut.

The history of the band is occluded by V2 signing them and then dying on the vine; the Live At The Pretty Parlor DVD and sold out shows at the Triple Door have bolstered the legend but it never quite coheres in the minds of regional writers. But once they get the story scribes go suitably ape-shit over a local band as courageous and supremely constructed (up to eleven members at times) as any from Sufjan Stevens to I'm From Barcelona, but with their own mescaline-BBQ bite.

Introducing Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground has been swinging wild on the cyber-vines for awhile, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't hunker down and purchase a hard copy as they now hit the streets this summer. It's probably going to look gorgeous in your collection (as this group is artistically ambitious in everything it does, from sprawling, senses-exploding live shows to massive movements in every arrangement, to sure-is-pretty packaging), perhaps even as gorgeous as it sounds: Bold, sweet-pop blizzards ("Diggin'"), bittersweet bonbons ("Paychecks and Pipe Dreams"), and buoyant dancehall anthems ("Sweet Strange Dreams") alike.

That all this string-strung and head-choir hootenanny and hullabaloo can contain wonderfully stream of conscious happily low life narratives so effectively ("All My Friends Are Passed Out") and with such sublimely subtle storytelling ("Oh Lord, I Hate You California") makes Kay Kay not only the part band of Seattle, but fully capable of releasing an album you can swim around in alone or frantically obsess over in a crowd. I am a recent newcomer, having missed the previous releases, so this was all pure joy to me once it hit my ear-veins. Unlike their spent pals at the end of the party, at the end of this marathon full length, I won't be coming down for awhile. And am looking forward to seeing/hearing them play every chance I get from now on.

Beauty Parlor: hey, all you pretty things! {new record review column}

Chris Estey — Mon, 30 May 2011 16:23:14 +0000

I'm going to start this new "album round up" for Three Imaginary Girls with the above recent You Tube video for Sean Rowe's "Jonathan": (1.) Because I think it's the best song off of his recent Magic album (recently given full treatment here) and though it's been out a while the video is new. More-so, it's starting my summer off all rum and cola-sweetly, buzzy and bubbly at dusk-time, and I want to share it with you because the tune still grabs my attention. (2.) That's to help set the tone for a regular column that will primarily focus on the best songs on the albums I'm playing, while taking care of full length business as economically as possible. This doesn't mean I won't be doing more full length album reviews; but they might get the test-run here before they get the full heat treatment. Or, as in Rowe's case, I might remind you dear reader of previously scribed-about music that I think needs further attention, probably due to a bright jelly ear-worm melting in the candy jar of my brain.

Now to a hit and run consumer guide starting in my iTunes, and running into my headphones and down through my fingers briskly with the assistance of a jar of cold, strong coffee and soy milk:

Happy hour: yesterday's live David Bazan webcast = win

imaginary victoria — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:59:24 +0000

Thanks to an invite from the lovely folks over at Tiny Human / Barsuk, we spent about forty-five minutes after work yesterday swooning in-person to David Bazan's live Ustream webcast {which, if you didn't catch it live, is archived for your viewing and listening pleasure here}. Talk about happy hour! Initially set up to be a four-ish song quickie set that we were stopping to catch a glimpse of, the webcast turned into almost an hour's worth of performance and Q & A, including songs from the brand-new release strange negotiations as well as some choice back-catalog cuts.

It was an absolute privilege to attend, and while we're still gushing, let's add the fact that we literally can not say enough good words about strange negotiations and all it's inherent amazingness -- especially so soon after the homerun hit of Curse Your Branches. We're still absorbing the album and will have a full review up soon, but in the meantime, the three words that matter most about it are as follows: buy this record. We promise, you won't regret it.

Helplessness Blues

Chris Estey — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:40:48 +0000

9.5

http://www.amazon.com/Helplessness-Blues-Fleet-Foxes/dp/B004LL1HM4/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

FF.jpg

Say you're trapped. By illness, by isolation. When I was an asthmatic kid, trapped in my parents' trailer on hot, pollen-piled summer days, the best thing I could think of was the Cascade Mountains. We would drive from the Tri-Cities to Seattle a few times during the year, and it was so refreshing to the spirit to see the snow-capped peaks, feel the brisk air pulling into the lungs, the 70s sounds of soft rock swirling on the car radio.

It was the perfect antidote to being the youngest in a family of hard-drinking black sheep, alone in the noise of my rebellious siblings, the deep bass of my father's jazz, the yelling between my parents. I would shroud myself in my sister's Neil Young albums, and dream about the next time we drove over "the Pass."

"So now I am older / than my mother and father," Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold sings on the opening track to their new (second) (Sub Pop) album, the (Shins, Built to Spill, et al) Phil Ek-produced Helplessness Blues. "Than they had their third daughter / Now what does that say about me?" Yeah, adults seemed to get older faster back then, right? But for those of us with so many burdens, health-wise, of spirit and body, we seek that bracing clear and clean moment.

The way the barbershop-of-monk's voices on this track float around Pecknold's hymn to himself, in ways musicians can describe but people who write about music alas can only describe and compare. "Oh man, what I used to be? Oh man, oh my, oh me." This is "Montezuma" and he sings of jewelry tarnished too quickly, thrown into the tomb too soon. It sounds like an endless Sunday, a kid stuck inside a house on a bright, sunny weekend day she can't be part of. It's all regret, but that doesn't mean it isn't awesomely beautiful.

Please trust me: This album is no burden. It isn't an album you have to like, or have an opinion of. You can leave it to others, it will be found otherwise. Its sonic riches never stop giving, so don't begin anything you can't finish. Morgan Henderson has brought in his upright bass and woodwinds since last we heard Robin's old friend Skyler Skjelset (acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, water harp), Casey Wescott (keys, Marxophone, music box, Crumar bass, Moog, Tremoloa, Tibetan singing bowls, harmonium, etc.), Josh Tillman (vocals, drum kit, percussion), Christian Wargo (vocals, bass), and some additional players.

Musically, this is something to put on the shelf with Astral Weeks or Blue of anything any older friend set you on. Something comfortable, and maybe got you high or buzzed on caffeine, and played the full way through without speaking once (when they usually yammer all the time through everything else).

"Bedouin Dress" is about debt that can't be repaid, "the only regret of my youth." This second song doesn't sound like it's heading anywhere too interesting in the first few bars, but then some weird pipes clamber about and the lyrical metaphor is extended about (eternal) returning and it's like those alarming Paul Simon ballads about reluctant prophets that glimmered all over AM radio among the novelty songs and riff rock. "One day that's mine," as if the moment can be held. "In a geometric patterned dress." You begin to notice the patterns, on returning.

The title of the album gets carried along by each track, and its obvious link to Young's own "Helpless," one of his most autobiographical songs. "Sim Sala Bim" is a burst of chimey exoticism closer to their long-ago debut, reminding us that Fleet Foxes did the sophomore auteur-in-the-70s-style, when rock music fans had to wait three years between masterpieces. A taste of D. Jurado is in there, though, telling us it isn't a reissue track from a lost gem of an LP. Next up abruptly, "Battery Kinzie" thrushes with imagery of physical decay and spiritual servitude, with a timpani-driven sand march walking through the dawn ("do not wander through the dawn").

If I was making my own high concept mix of this album to remember how I want to, the way that Scott Miller (Game Theory, Loud Family) does with Pro Tools for songs in his nifty song-by-year book "Music: What Happened," it would probably begin on the fifth track, "The Plains/Bitter Dancer." RIYL: Richard Thompson's end of the rainbow falling from grace death waltzes, a more mordant Crosby Stills & Nash than your gentle bearded uncle is used to, the kind of FM transmission that chills you at the beginning of a Saturday morning in which you are to face the first day after a shattered relationship. "Tell me again my only son / Tell me again my only one," reminding us of the rose and the briar and Lord Randall in its first half, the murdered girl, the slain love, your heart's martyr. The second half of the medley is an Ennio Morricone gospel shuffle, the choir voices not even needing Joan Baez to accompany the finale after the execution of a couple of anarchists on screen.

"Helplessness Blues" is back to the too-smart, allergic, anti-cog of Simon's songs, its strumming could be from an urban basketball court, sent to parents who never thought their wayward son had a chance. My own parents are dead, but I have the feeling Pecknold's folks can hear the Nic Jones and Bert Jansch and John Jacob Niles in all of this and be proud of their depressed, so aware child. If he was my kid I would play this album over and over, giddy from a lad admitting things we wait generations for songwriters to confess. "I'll come back to you sometime soon, myself."

This is the center of the album (not just its initial single). That you can destroy something beautiful, or watch it being crushed and thrown into a fire and thus complicit in its demise, and know that you will benefit from this destruction. Because it means that you will have something to say, a song to sing, because something was sacrificed for you. And it may have been your own happiness. In order to remain helpless. As Nick Cave told me for the Karen Dalton In My Own Time liner notes, "Artists are salty bastards." Sometimes salt preserves what you want to make, but is far too strong to taste for those who love us. Thus, according to the most recent issue of Uncut (in an interview with Allan Jones), we find out that Pecknold lost love during the creation of the album this song is the title track for. And he continues to wonder throughout, could there have been any other way? "Someday I'll be like the man on the screen." A hero, perhaps? Even merely a lover?

"The Cascades" is a string-swept space without words, in which the final half of the album begins. It starts anew with "Lorelai" which at first seems like the necessary transcendent pop song required for a wide-screen drive-in end of a decade album like this. "Norwegian Wood" and Dylan's "Fourth Time Around" has been noted (thanks, Mr. Jones), but I hear a lot of Fleetwood Mac too, before and after Buckingham/Nicks.

This track would have probably been my first pick as a single track, even before you hear "I can see now / we were like dust on the window. I was like old news to you then." The great thing about all these groups I've been comparing the Fleet Foxes to, especially Mac and Simon, is how sad and nostalgic they seem for a moment just occurring. As if you need that sadness, to make the love meaningful. The lover just out of reach must be miles and years away, for the reunion to be so warm, so wanted, so real. I once remember reading a Japanese short story about a woman who only thought about her lover when he was gone. That was the only time her heart could articulate itself, was when he was present only in memory. Wish I could remember the name of that story.

"Someone You'd Admire" sounds like it would be a positive vibes song, but but it's really a chorale of resignation. A doomed one, at that. He probably won't be someone you admire, is what he's saying. Because the singer is trapped to this, to creating out of his pain and aloneness, and such a wish is as brief and hesitant to truly feel as this ballad. I once had a therapist who burst into tears -- twice -- because she said she pitied what my mind did to me. How it seemed to long to hurt me, to keep me from being good to myself, in her opinion. A counselor cries once, she might be having a bad day, you know? And another, a job counselor, who met with me after I got off the night shift, who said I smelled like death. I couldn't get that out of my mind (the smell of death) and she hadn't been emotional about it at all.

"When you talk you hardly even look in my eyes / in the morning." This will probably be the most popular song, "The Shrine/The Argument," which in its long, lean body cycles between near deathly quiet and big raga bursts of more timpani and chanting. "Green apples hang from the tree / they belong only to me." This is the song that sounds most like the world's casket lid closing, even if the earlier "The Plains/Bitter Dancer" was supposed to be the death dirge. The horns squonk and squirrel out from a black pyramid at the center of the track, like a slow dub of the ones in the Violent Femmes' notorious track "Black Girls," although I think Dolphy or Kenton's cacophonous work with Bob Graettinger might have been more in mind. No resolution, either, they just scamper off like half-stepped-on scorpions into the dimming corners of a sound-desert.

"Blue Spotted Tail" is still tear-stained, but it's a soft weeping after the long-pent burst, the blaze of sun faded behind the buildings now that you're back in the City. Pecknold softly hums, as it trains into Wargo's vocal arrangements for the only (near) straight-ahead rock song here, "Grown Ocean." This would probably be the easiest place for people to begin with the album, and it's telling about Fleet Foxes -- especially now -- that they chose to make it an anthemic epilogue, sweeter on the nerves and about licking wounds, but not beginning this inner odyssey with it. You have to earn it, the way that these musicians had to work so very hard to create something they would feel like owning. The most important thing to know is that they have. And now we have it, too.

{Fleet Foxes played to a SOLD OUT house at the Moore last night, and are playing another tonight (5/3)!}

Forever Today

Chris Estey — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:55:14 +0000

http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Today-Im-Barcelona/dp/B004REP30C/?tag=wwwthreeimagi-20

barcelona.jpg

I'm From Barcelona is about to release its third album, Forever Today, which is the most happy-making album I have heard in years. It creates "bellies full of butterflies," sounding like a pot-soaked circus of happy freaks playing in the city at dusk, belting out piano-pounded anthems of joy and fun, fun, fun.

It's a popping party disc for depressives, filled with tickles and kisses and not even the strange electronic distance of house music in its search for trainspotter-into-dance floor utopia. Hand-claps and handed-out percussion about, wrapped around the expressive everyman voice of Emanuel Lundrgren, and I'm sure manifestos will be written against it by buzz-kills and downer-sounding doom lovers the world over. But its pretty pleasures will not get out of my head and I really, really needed it this still-cold spring.

27 people officially fill out the band (?!), which is like half of their homeland Sweden, right? Mostly played out and captured in two spring-loving blasts in Gothenburg in a little less than a week, it doesn't sound anything like those chilly, nasty little bed-sit operas to heartbreak most indie labels are releasing these days. Media sources as mainstream as The New York Times and Rolling Stone have given into the sincere "charm" of the band, which starts here with the tweeting, bouncing giddies of "Charlie Parker," roiling along to "Sing to me now bird, sing to me now bird!" Trying to reach out to the ones in the night, "the broken heart and the failure." Like Jonathan Richman and Phranc at their most life-affirming and love-lifing, Lundgren is in this world to stay and spread a little 4/4-and-horns anchored celebration. You embrace his intoxicated gratitude and sobering passion with the sincerity of purity that it's put into your ears.

Next up on the album is "Get In Line," an ironically mass-chanted chorus with a perineum-pulling electro-bassline, and the first single that has been crackling over indie rock radio since February. Lundgren can feel a psychic pull from the city, "something moving inside everyone." He and his revelers bring the laughing disco to the twee, and this is made absolutely clear on the bubbles and bursts of the clap-hysteric chorus. "Battleships," the very best track on the album, comes up third, repeating over and over again, "I just wanted to see you my honey." And yeah you fucking believe it. You may not even need the piles of keyboards, backing vocals, electronic drums to drill it in.

The warnings of "Can See Miles" ("they're pretty and they're smart / don't let them get to you") and "Dr. Landy" hint at things a little darker, but otherwise it's "Always Spring." I wholeheartedly recommend becoming enraptured by Forever Today, even if I have to mention that it reminds me either of the best-recorded 80s Christian rock album or gay theatrical music collection ever recorded. You know, that completely unironic giving to liberation, transcendence, yet still immersed in jingly pop-rock that rarely shows dystopia or disenchantment, but exists wholly in itself to fight it. "Somewhere it's summer," Lundgren sings, "somewhere it's always spring." What's wrong with an album length smile, anyways? And I bet it makes everyone beam like crazy live.

Imaginary Interview: Zac Pennington - Parenthetical Girls continue their dazzling & dark EP series

Chris Estey — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:27:47 +0000

First, the Not Safe For Work/School/In front of blushers new video for Parenthetical Girls' "The Pornographer":

Parenthetical Girls: The Pornographer (NSFW) from Parenthetical Girls on Vimeo.

And now my lengthy conversation with P. Girls' vocalist/songwriter/instrumentalist Zac Pennington, conducted a couple of weeks ago after the third EP of their spleen-kicking, air-ceasing, head-dizzying Privilege releases came out. A gorgeous combination of synth rock and sin city, noise pop and quasi-classical, when stacked together the EPs form arguably my favorite release of the past few months. And there are still two more releases in the series to go. Hence, the heights and depths Zac and I soar and plunge to below:

TIG: I'm drinking a low priced but tasty Scotch Whiskey as I listen to your Privilege Pts. 1 -3 and prepare these questions. Do you intoxicate to create? Perform?

Zac Pennington: I have a fairly weak constitution all told, and my body has a particularly adverse response to alcohol: it makes me incredibly tired, and I tend to feel hangover effects within an hour of consumption. In more heroical times past, I used to use alcohol as a duller of creative self-doubt and second-guessing, but its effects are too unstable for me—I never get anything done. I enjoy more practical and productive vices these days.

When we’re performing, a certain level of personal transcendence is ultimately ideal for embodying the atmosphere of our music. I can’t decide which is the worst part of that sentence: “Personal transcendence” or “embodying the atmosphere”. Ultimately what I mean to say is that in order to communicate a specific sort of emotion in a pop music context—an emotion that’s probably much bigger, more direct, and more interesting than the messy, vain, and docile human trying to convey it—a person has to sort of become that emotion. (This isn’t to say in the sense of some sort of Dionysian catharsis or whatever—I’m/we’re way too self-conscious for that.) Sometimes this necessitates indulgences. Caffeine is especially important for me. I don’t treat my body very well when we’re on tour, but I don’t imagine that many people do.

I link to all ages shows, so that's why I asked. Do you prefer your listeners to your work soberly -- and if not, what would you personally recommend to accompany your music?

Zac: I’d never really thought about it, honestly. We’re not a group that people tend to gravitate to in order to have a good time—so you would have to assume that any imbibing would be done out of misery more than mirth. I wish we were more of an MDMA group, now that you mention it. I don’t imagine that’s in the cards, unfortunately.

Are there specific reasons you've chosen to follow up your last full length, Entanglements, with three four song EPs? What are they?

Zac: Privilege is an experiment. Until Entanglements, I had released the majority of Parenthetical Girls’ material via my own label, and had done so with the freedom to take liberties wherever I wanted to with format, packaging, promotion, etc. When we released Entanglements, we decided that the time was right to make a more traditional go of it—we did all of the logical things that an independent pop group in our position is supposed to do, save making a particularly accessible record. Besides not being especially fruitful for us, the whole process felt off. If we’re destined to be bridesmaids regardless, we may as well do things exactly the way that we want them to be done.

Beyond that, our pace is just totally glacial. The notion of spending another two years working on another ridiculous concept record seemed deeply unappealing, and with the increasing irrelevance of the traditional album format, it felt like an interesting challenge to devise more creative ways of conceiving and releasing music. The results of this experiment have yet to be fully tabulated.

I think of the EP as the best medium for rock and roll. Singles are too narrow and albums are too much. Do you have an opinion about this, and favorite EPs yourself?

Zac: I whole-heartedly agree. The EP is given such short shrift by most contemporary musicians—it’s usually just a dumping ground for half-thoughts and toss-offs. But the EP is totally ideal for conveying discrete conceptual ideas in a way that’s neither undercooked nor bloated and pretentious. EPs are compact, efficient, and perfectly digestible. Slender Means Society—the boutique label that I run—has a long history of almost exclusively EP releases: Final Fantasy/Owen Pallett, Xiu Xiu, Grouper, The Blow, Lucky Dragons, The Dead Science… they’ve all released EPs on Slender Means Society.

Some of my personal favorite EPs include the self-titled Sonic Youth EP, This Heat’s Health & Efficiency, Come On Pilgrim by The Pixies, Beware by The Misfits, The Bad Seed EP by The Birthday Party, Slates by The Fall, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, and Green Cosmos by Deerhoof.

Why is Privilege the umbrella title for this series?

Zac: Privilege initially began as a concise concept EP that was meant to fuse 20th-Century Minimalist aesthetics with straightforward Pop music—a series of four songs about class and the personal politics therein. Around the time that we began working on that project, the line-up for the group (as it often does) shifted, and so I decided to lump those songs into a greater work. I had sort of fallen in love with the phonetics of the word by that point, and with its suggestiveness. The theme of privilege is surprisingly elastic. Besides, the idea of putting the word “privilege” across such a plainly narcissistic object was just too good to pass up.

The body. Sort of a beautiful, fucked up thing isn't it?

Zac: It’s a horror that every one has to face on a daily basis. It’s a shell and a cell and a heavy-handed metaphor all in one. The body is the perfect landscape for popular music.

Is anything eternal?

Zac: Hope. Unfortunately.

Are the topics in your lyrics -- about car crashes, bodily functions, deformity, transgressive seduction, and bizarre violence ones you're fascinated with personally, or are you simply making arresting art?

Zac: I guess I don’t really think of the topics in our songs as inherently very transgressive or inflammatory, though I acknowledge that in the realm of pop music they aren’t exactly the norm. I decided a long time ago that I could only devote my life to the practice of pop music if I felt that I had something new to say about it. I’m not interested in writing traditional love songs, or writing from the exhaustively well-worn point of view of the “sensitive masculine identity”. While this has made for a great deal of the music that I think of as totally formative, shit is more often than not boring as fuck.

At the same time, I’ve always been absorbed by with the beauty of somewhat morbid fascinations and ideas—things that rarely find their way into accessible pop music in sincere and thoughtful ways. I felt that the only way I could justify my role as a songwriter was by exploring something that I related to intimately, and that I felt hadn’t been otherwise voiced in a way that I felt entirely satisfied by.

Entanglements had a lot of ornate organic string-led arrangements going on; these twelve songs have an even broader musical scope, with wildly cinematic synth-pop ("Young Throats"), avant noise-rock ("The Common Touch"), torch ballads ("Found Drama l"), and grit-teethed rockers ("The Pornographer") spread over the six sides of vinyl. How on earth did things get so out of hand (in such a good way)? Have there been other such incredibly diverse records that inspired this melee, or is this a unique desire on your part?

Zac: Diversity has been part of the beauty of the Privilege project: we work in vacuums within each session, and work to make each concise recording as distinct as you might a full length record. Truth be told, we are creatures of self-sabotage: just as people seemed to begin to care about our humble home recordings we 180’ed with a dense orchestral record, and just as we began to gain some momentum with Entanglements, we found a myriad of other tangents to explore. Parenthetical Girls have never had much of a “sound” per se, and I think that’s been alienating to a lot people. For us, the disparity feels strangely organic. Everything we’ve ever made sounds like Parenthetical Girls to me.

What role did music journalism play in shaping your own music making? You've been an editor and a critic yourself; are you making the music you wish to hear? Has this changed over the course of PGs, with all the different forms its taken and sounds you've made?

Zac: I think what drew me to music journalism is in many ways the same thing that drew me to music making—I am a fairly particular person by nature, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “discerning,” I do perhaps view the world through generally critical (some would say cynical) eyes. I’ve never really pretended to know what is quantifiably “good” or “bad,” nor have I ever really had a sense that my particular taste was in any way superior to anyone else’s—I just simply have a fastidious personal aesthetic that I’m perhaps too quick to communicate.

In music criticism, I found a place to actively define that aesthetic, but it led to a really toxic and parasitic relationship with music—writing so actively about what I thought was wrong with the pursuits of others, rather than trying to create something aesthetically valuable to me. It made me hate music, and loathe myself for what I felt was mostly a destructive urge inside of me. My relationship with music journalism at this point is almost entirely inverted. I’m playing penance for the years of callous, mean-spirited rock critique. I think my dues are nearly paid.

When I call something "record collector rock," I usually mean it as a bit of a backhanded compliment -- there are songwriters who are making pop music for people who get thrilled from cultural "recognition." With Parenthetical Girls, it seems more like a literary device that you lyrically reference so much new wave, post-punk, and other genres and artists. Sort of like a musical approximation of how good writers catch flakes of Nabokov, Chekhov, and others in their work. Why do you do this so much ("the kick inside," et al), and are there inside jokes tying song topics to musical references?

Zac: I’m a sucker for context. For re-context. It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive Morrissey fan, and from very early on I’ve been fascinated by the rampant creative plagiarism exhibited throughout his entire career. I think for Moz, it’s been a way of further aligning himself with the cannon of what he sees as his literary significance—the same kind of self-mythology he used when he turned all of his teen idols into cover stars… endorsement by proxy. He has always been fond of that old “genius steals” adage of Wilde’s. The idea of forming self-mythology by donning the mythology of others has always been a really interesting one to me.

For me—and believe me, I’ll be apologizing for this one—I think of it as more akin to pop dramaturgy. An effective pop song is fairly limited in the information it can convey: it’s brief, it has a generally constrained structure, and its most important objective is to express an emotion. Using words or musical motifs that other people have used in other contexts allows a song to be more multifaceted—to suggest more avenues and extra-textual narratives and ideas—without necessarily detracting from the concise power of the pop song.

I don’t think that there is really anything wrong appropriating other people’s ideas as long as it’s done unabashedly, and with intellectual intent. I’ve never plagiarized a work without being fully convinced that I was contextualizing it in a way that gave it new meaning. There are a lot of jokes. “Ellie Greenwich” perhaps has the most recognizable sonic punchlines. I gather that most people think that we take ourselves very seriously, or just don’t think we’re very funny.

It helps that you subvert the musical forms as you sing about them, too. On Facebook we briefly discussed the song you made which referenced CRASS's satirical take on the love song ("Our Wedding"), which also ended up as a hoax played on readers of the UK bridal Loving magazine. Which song is this of yours and, for example, why did you wish to "work with it"?

Zac: We borrowed elements of the melodic structure of “Our Wedding” for a song called “Young Eucharists.” Perhaps it’s buried enough that it doesn’t read. “Our Wedding” is a philosophical mindfield—the more pendantic/conceptual reasons for borrowing from it are myriad, and fairly straightforward in a comparison between the two songs, I think. But to be honest, in the case of “Our Wedding,” I had always just been struck by how effectively melodic that song is—and how funny. In the context of CRASS’ discography (along with that fabled Crassmas 7”), it’s just very remarkable and inspiring that a band renown for its humorlessness and absence of musicality could pull such a coup so convincingly. Onion layers.

What magazine would you like to sneak a sartirical song on to a sampler of? And what would you like to make fun of?

Zac: Do they still print magazines? I’d love to do a Gary Glitter-style Jock Jam for some knuckle-dragging sub-Maxim.

Also, what are some genres or artists you've sampled (details kept discreet, of course) -- and those you would like to sample that you haven't tried yet, but would like to do more so?

Zac: To clarify semantics: we reappropriate and plagiarize rather than “sample”—we’ve only ever used one actual song sample, and it was a very long time ago. But in terms of borrowing, we touch on more or less anything that finds its way into my record collection. It’s not all that different from most derivative contemporary pop bands, snatching up Buzzcocks and GBV riffs and then reselling them as their own—we just foreground that process, commenting on it directly rather than pretending it’s not there. This inherently changes its meaning in some way, but I/we tend to use elements in ways that subvert their initial meanings to begin with. Either that, or it’s just intellectualized robbery.

What is the line up for the band right now, both for the three EPs and what we expect to see/hear live?

Zac: The only members that have stayed consistent throughout Parenthetical Girls’ convoluted history are Jherek Bischoff and myself. Though it features contributions from a number of other (((GRRRLS))) past and present (Matt Carlson, Rachael Jensen, Sam Mickens, and Jonathan Sielaff all make appearances), the Privilege project is foremost a collaboration between Jherek and I. The live band remains in flux—turn-over is high, and it’s difficult for me to explicitly state what it will look like from one day to the next. I can say that anyone paying attention will probably not recognize most of the people on stage the next time they see us. To paraphrase: If it’s me and your Granny on bongos, it’s a Parenthetical Girls gig.

Can you tell us about a little about the artist for and the phenomenal artwork on these covers for Privilege?

Zac: Jenny Mörtsell is a Swedish illustrator living in Brooklyn. As our discography can attest, I really admire illustrators with a strong and recognizable personal aesthetic, and I decided a couple of years ago—without her knowledge or consent—that Jenny would illustrate the Privilege series. I love her work so much. I begged her to be a part of this basically no-budget project in spite of the fact that we couldn’t quite meet the rates that she regularly (and rightly) pulls for her work, and she kindly agreed. I can’t say enough nice things about her.

Plans now? Combining it all into a full length; look for a label to do so; tour-wise?

The Privilege project won’t be concluding until we’ve finished the fifth EP—the fourth is recorded and waiting to be mixed presently. Beyond that, plans are a little hazy—we plan to compile the best of the five EPs into a proper album, but nothing is totally concrete at present. We will be touring again soon. It has been too long.

First, the Not Safe For Work/School/In front of blushers new video for Parenthetical Girls' "The Pornographer":