Horseback and Locrian’s unsettling LP lets you fall prey to your own demons
Horseback/Locrian – New Dominions (Utech Records)
I’ve been glibly going about my social media saying that New Dominions, the fantastic, dread-inducing new collaboration between heavy music boundary pushers Horseback and Locrain, is the perfect soundtrack for a haunted house. There’s a lot more going on here than that, compositions that explore space and create tension in a way few other artists can even approach. Still, as I lay here in my dimly lit bedroom, allowing their unsettling sounds to wash over me, I can feel the fear welling up in the bottom of my stomach. There’s something genuinely terrifying about what these collaborators have created here, and it’s the record’s greatest strength.
It’s an asset that floored me on my first listen through the record, mainly because I didn’t see it coming. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but for the first minute or so, I was a little disappointed. There was nothing much happening. “The Gift,” the first of two tracks on this one-side LP, starts with lazy static blowing about and a drawn out ringing, like dragging a hammer on the outside of a bell, cutting through the background in regular intervals. There’s menace in the ringing and in the static too, but it pales in comparison to the more arresting moments in each band’s catalog.
From the lumbering monstrosities of The Invisible Mountain to the sci-fi rage of this year’s Forbidden Planet (re-released as part of The Gorgon Tongue), Jenks Miller’s Horseback project has managed to be imposing in a variety of ways. Locrian’s two 2010 LPs, Archetypes and The Crystal World, dished out all-consuming apocalypses, the former creating a cruel techno-future out of harsh electronics, the latter creating a chilly wasteland from strung-out guitar and the occasional hissing vocal. The two have been so good at invoking hopelessness and despair, I must have subconsciously expected for them to come out guns blazing, firing for the heavens.
But that has never been the M.O. for either outfit. They build elements slowly, patiently manipulating your senses until you’re ready to go wherever they want to take you. New Dominions takes this disarming subtlety farther than either group has done on their own. “The Gift” doesn’t change much over its duration, but that’s the source of its impact. Its formula evolves just enough to build bone-rattling anticipation. The static ratchets up slightly, the metallic scrapes are joined by sly prickles of sound, some steely, some electronic. You know there’s something coming around the corner, but you don’t know what. After a while Miller’s rasping vocals reveal themselves quietly, croaking and gasping like a corpse clawing his way out of the crypt. His groans take on the fears your mind builds up over the course of the song, bolstering it into something truly chilling.
The second track, “Our Epitaph,” operates similarly, though its longer running time allows to build even more nerviness. Slowly throbbing bass dominates the track, wispy feedback whirring in the background. Piercing guitar rings through as do distorted, far-off voices. Further on, a voice that’s just too quiet to make out takes hold. His foreboding tone suggests a warning, and the fact that you can’t quite make him out makes it all the more unwitting. Even if you could hear him, what he says wouldn’t make it any better. “In the atmosphere/Looming overhead/Contaminated blazes,” he says in a monologue that paints the world at its end. The words would be scary enough, but instead the artists allow the listener’s mind to do the damage on its own.
It’s for this reason that I stand by my claim that this could be the soundtrack for the greatest ever haunted house. Locrian and Horseback allow the haunting recesses inside their sound to set the mood, forcing the listener’s mind to contemplate the petrifying uncertainty within. Turn off the lights, throw this record on and your home or apartment will instantly become a gripping house of horrors. Go ahead, try it for yourself. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Ty Segall bids ‘Goodbye Bread,’ not Goodbye Fuzz
Ty Segall, Goodbye Bread (Drag City)
Goodbye Bread is supposed to be the album in which Ty Segall, garage-punk wunderkind, sheds the scrappy fuzz of yesterday (almost literally yesterday, too, given the prolific nature of his output) and buttons up for a more concentrated songwriter’s showcase. “What excites me right now is the idea of doing a record that’s pretty clean and focused on songs,” he recently told Pitchfork.
Thing is, clean is a relative term. If we’re talking the same sort of clean as a bedroom with dirty laundry so tightly stuffed into the closet the door won’t properly shut and a bed made by dashing a comforter across rumbled flat sheets, then sure, Goodbye Bread is a clean-sounding record. Segall has merely shoved his garage-grime into corners that might not be noticed by a passing glance. Sure, the chiming guitars on tracks like “I Can’t Feel It” and “I Am With You” or the choirboy falsetto we hear on the title track and “Fine” make for great bluffs (and, it should be conceded, great tracks, too).
But with “California Commercial” (which also appeared, in different versions, on Segall’s Daytrotter Session and his Live in Aisle 5 LP), Goodbye Bread also finds Segall veering closer to hardcore — at least from a songwriting standpoint — than he ever has. The normally elliptical lyricist swaps his M.O. for a direct and cynical assault on California boredom and complacency. Key line: “Will you marry me?/ You can be my wife/ I’ll have lots of money/ You can settle for me/ I’ll still think you love me.” This is, after all, the Laguna Beach-raised punk who watched his town spoiled by the influx of MTV’s film crews. “Now it’s just the TV show,” he said in the same interview with Pitchfork. “There’s nothing original or cool there anymore. I’m a little bitter about it, but it’s a beautiful place.”
And he’s indicated that the rest of Goodbye Bread is also a response to the wave of beach-y bands copping West Coast imagery and sounds without, y’know, being from there. He told John Norris in Interview Magazine, “I interpret it differently, maybe because I’m from California. And so kind of the idea of the record was the California apathy, or listlessness. With this pretty scenery around, but it’s also dark and depressing in a way, while it’s beautiful. That kind of theme. So that intrigued me, because it’s not all just smoking weed and skateboarding and palm trees.”
It’s a departure from the insular focus of last year’s Melted, which Segall has said was an album preoccupied with anxiety and mental instability.
But the “California apathy” is never visited again as directly in “California Commercial” — except, perhaps, in “I Am With You” when Segall declares, “I’m sick of the place with the fuckin’ fog.” Instead, Segall becomes an anxious narrator seeking some sort of excitement. “Oh won’t you take me to the hill/ Put me in that Coupe de Ville/ And tell me that you that you love me still?/ We could get out of here.” he begs in “You Make The Sun Fry.”
But, though his voice is more prominent, and his songs more immediately sing-alongable, Ty Segall hasn’t really cleaned up his act. “My Head Explodes,” offers a clear example of the new impulse, opening with easygoing, acoustic strumming and drums that clatter tastefully behind him. A minute and a half in, though, and Segall’s growling distortion roars back to life. He’s offering more bait to his blown-out hooks, but the speakers are still gonna rattle. Even “Goodbye Bread” with it’s lonely electric guitar and falsetto vocal features a spare bass line that I can attest from first-hand knowledge will, with appropriate volume, render a Honda Accord’s rear-view mirror useless from vibration.
And while Segall’s Brit-born influences — The Beatles, The Kinks, T. Rex — feature here more prominently than ever, the punk sneer of Black Flag and X aren’t lost. Nor is the fuzz-bliss garage that brought Segall to San Francisco to join the scene that birthed Thee Oh Sees and The Fresh & Onlys. Segall is the same scrappy upstart wrapping San Francisco psych into nuggets of SoCal skate rock. Like his neighbors, collaborators and labelmates in Sic Alps, Segall is turning AM Gold into crackling lo-fi gems. And that’s a good thing.
When the first seconds-long preview of “I Can’t Feel It” found its way to Drag City’s mailorder website, the crystalline, chorus-pedaled chime was surprising. Inside Goodbye Bread, it’s a glimmer of sunlight in a surge of surf-foam.
The Shirks shed no tears for notoriety
The Shirks, Cry Cry Cry EP (Grave Mistake)
“On Time,” the second of three songs on The Shirks’ fourth 7-inch, declares the band’s intent in no uncertain terms. “I’m on time for a good time,” becomes its rallying call. It’s an unsubtle and unambitious mission statement, but it suits the band’s 90s garage-rock primitivism. The dominant riffs don’t vary much between songs, leaning hard onto the bouncy rhythms of early-60s rock & roll and 70s punk. Fleeting licks — like the gasps of Exploding Hearts glam that fills space in “On Time” — suggest the band’s extensive familiarity with its chosen genre.
I hear the same infectious energy that keeps me coming back to records by Cloak/Dagger and Overnight Lows, and for its seven and-a-half minutes, Cry Cry Cry is a joy to listen to. I do wonder, though, how these songs would fare on a full-length crowded with more of the same. Primitive rock & roll tends to be a codified sound, reluctant toward divergent influences and practically insuring anonymity among its practitioners.
For The Shirks, whose web-presence is nil, this might not be a concern. And on this EP, it’s certainly not a problem.
Video: All Tiny Creatures – “An Iris”
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Rare is the music video that actually reveals or re-enforces something essential about the musician whose work provides the video’s raison d’être. But All Tiny Creatures are a rare breed to begin with. The band’s understated Michinori Saigo-directed video for Harbors single, “An Iris” — which features vocal contributions from both Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The Caribbean’s Matthew Byars — is an elegant, if deceptively simple, means of describing the essential character of All Tiny Creatures. It’s surreal, but not in a confrontational manner.
As giant blue spheres float, roll and bounce across a clean, quiet Tokyo, “An Iris” unrolls its steady and layered arrangement. Vernon’s familiar, warm falsetto is a comforting smear, here. The spheres do no damage; they don’t even interrupt the city’s inhabitants as they carry on paying no mind to the strange orbs in their midst. The spheres, despite their mysterious appearance assimilate quickly into the city’s motion.
Likewise, the music is a seamless and fleeting thing, deceptively simple and calming, though it’s approachability and genial demeanor is strange, considering how easily it could transform into something more challenging, if no more engaging or stimulating.
The blue spheres (Calling them blue balls just doesn’t seem appropriate) appear again in All Tiny Creatures’ press photos (see below).
There, too, the orbs are obvious, but unobtrusive; odd, but charming. It’s an image that nicely complements the unusual but alluring music All Tiny Creatures make.
Hopscotch, Moogfest and the diminishing returns of sharing bands
About two months ago, Raleigh’s Hopscotch Music Festival announced the line-up (the first wave of it, anyway) for its September 2011 iteration. Swans, the influential and fantastic art rock band that formed in the same late 80s NY scene that gave birth to Sonic Youth, would play their first show in North Carolina in decades. Festival curator and esteemed Independent Weekly music editor Grayson Currin wrote a suitably triumphant post to mark the occasion, focusing on how much he loved the band in his younger days and how all the hard work to get them — they had tried and failed the year before — had been rewarded. It was a coup, nabbing an underground legend that had only recently begun touring again after a near 10-year hiatus. The set would be an event in the truest sense of the word.
A few weeks later Swans announced stops in Charlotte and Asheville, immediately following their Hopscotch appearance. It diminished the impact slightly, but that was OK. Hopscotch had a lot else going for it — an evening with revered composer Rhys Chatham, a rare appearance from drone metal icon Earth. But most importantly to the casual fan, they landed one hell of a marquee name. The Flaming Lips, the bubble-bound crowd-surfing, confetti-and-light-show propelled psych rock band that every music fan worth their salt at least has a strong opinion about, would headline the festival. But again, the fest had some of its thunder stolen as Asheville’s Moogfest, the state’s other large indie music festival, announced the Lips would headline that late-October festival as well.
An event, like a revered and exciting band hitting the stage, can only generate a certain amount of excitement in one area. When more than one city within that area share such a happening the jubilation it generates spreads out between the two, meaning that neither are as colossal of a deal as one occurrence would be on its own. This is the case with two of Hopscotch’s two biggest names. If these bands were just playing in Raleigh, their appearances would be earth-shattering to everyone around North Carolina with a respect or love for their music. Now, Charlotte and Asheville fans will focus their excitement on their own close-to-home chances to see these bands. As it stands now, we have more chances to see the Flaming Lips and Swans, but the scope of each seems slightly diminished, just not quite as exciting as that first opportunity was on its own.
I’m not really blaming anyone here. Hopscotch has to book the bands it can book, and they get credit here for announcing all of their moves first. Even if they knew that Swans and the Lips might play elsewhere in the area, they were still huge gets for a festival that’s only in its second year. The Charlotte and Asheville shows for Swans make sense, allowing fans who might not want to go all in for a pass to Hopscotch a chance to check out the band on its own. Moogfest’s choice to run with the Lips is less agreeable but still understandable. Sure, they could have grabbed another headliner that would have set them apart from Hopscotch, and yeah, the fact they announced their line-up second makes them seem a little like a copycat. But booking the Flaming Lips is still good for them, and there are many in Western North Carolina who are overjoyed they too will have a chance to check them out.
Still, even though there’s not really anyone to blame, this is a frustrating case of diminishing returns. It’s hard to feel absolutely elated about your one chance to see that band you’ve always wanted to see when they’re playing another show just down the road. If the Super Bowl went on tour once a year, a ticket wouldn’t be as priceless an acquisition. That’s a bit of a stretch because music will always work differently than that, but the effect is similar. The fact that Asheville and Charlotte now have similar shows lined up takes away from Raleigh’s big day. You’ll still get to see it, but you won’t get to say it was the only one.
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