VOLUME

Named after singer Josh Kasselman’s past family home on Harpeth Trace Drive in Nashville, this L.A. trio has a great reverence for the past. Their vintage pop has both a melancholy and dreamy feel that can change from optimism to despair all within the same song and, ultimately, transcend time.

Co-produced and engineered by Raymond Richards at his Red Rockets Glare studio in Rancho Park, On Disappearing is a 35-minute collection of wistful yet haunting music led by Kasselman’s high-pitched, ethereal vocals and storytelling lyrics. With influences like The Zombies, Galaxie 500 and The Clientele, The Harpeth Trace has created its own sound that appears to be mellow but forces its listeners to engage.

On the opening track “Summer, Two Weeks,” Kasselman sets the tone for the rest of the songs, creating a Twilight Zone effect that borders on eerie. Singing “We can travel around any way that we please / I travel by train on both of our knees / We are everything,” he welcomes listeners on the band’s psychedelic, dream-pop journey. The next track, “Georgia May,” has a more twangy feel, dominated by a variety of sounds and instrumentation. While this song is meant to tell a story, Kasselman’s languid vocals make the lyrics less audible and the story more mysterious.

“Locked Out and Wandering” and “Dead Eyes” prove to be some of the strongest tracks on the album for their powerful imagery and beauty, despite the latter’s rather morose lyrics and fragile protagonist. Another standout is “The Numbers in Your Hair,” which is more upbeat and reminiscent of The Kinks, and allows Rob Poynter’s drums to take the spotlight for a moment.

On Disappearing is an impressive recording that lures listeners in from the start and keeps them coming back for more; as soon as the record ends, its hard not to want to take The Harpeth Trace journey again and again.

Songs:

1. Who Knows Where You Are [4:23]

2. Georgia May [2:49]

3. Two Plainclothes Cops [4:47]

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From its slippery five-note clarinet opener to the ragtime-and-blues rhythms that follow, First Light wears its yearning for the gentler days of yore on its sleeve. Literally – the album sleeve features Turner Cody , sometime bassist for Herman Düne, and his musical crew in front of a graffiti-scrawled Brooklyn wall. Cody, bearded and black-suited, stares out from beneath the brim of a fedora like a 19th-century angel of death. First Light , Cody’s second solo offering, bounces along like an exuberant retriever with layered guitars, Wurlitzer and shuffling percussion, while Benny Goodman-style clarinet, viola, glockenspiel and soft backing vocals slip in and out like friendly neighbours.

Each track tells a goofy, tender, rueful tale, skipping from contemporary New York to the Midwest of a century ago. Cody’s warm, faintly nasal voice recalls Neil Young on Heart of Gold or a younger, gentler Dylan, while his lazily rapid-fire delivery and exaggerated American vowels are unmistakably of Jonathan Richman-Jeffrey Lewis extraction. The lo-fi production and mostly live takes lend the album an aura of ramshackle charm, especially in the instrumental solos, but it’s the sound of a relaxed yet tight outfit with skill and familiarity to spare.

The instantly appealing ‘Camptown Ladies’ is a rollicking tale of a down-on-his-luck musician. After an accordion-selling mission gone wrong, Cody deadpans, “They left me on the 14th floor, strangled like an albacore, screaming like a eunuch cockatoo.” The album’s title track asserts itself after a few more listens. It’s a softly burbling delight, Cody’s voice velvety and wistful as he reassures his companion, like a cheery TS Eliot, “I’ve seen apparitions too; I’ve heard them weep forlorn. Their fate is not what waits for you – your rose is not so thorned”. But those are rare moments of optimism. On the sunny-tempoed heartbreaker ‘Underground’, he begs, “Mama, take me down to where the trumpets do not blow so loud… Mama, take me down to where the neon lights don’t glow so proud”. Though the last few tracks of the 14 begin to blend into one another, Cody’s winsome delivery is always enthralling and affecting. Listen after listen, First Light remains a tender yet spirited delight.

by The Line of Best Fit

Songs:

1. Irene [2:29]

2. See You Slumber [2.22]

2. First Light [3:18]

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As a spin-off of a spin-off, The Cave Singers, the roots-centric folk band started by Derek Fudesco of both PGMG and MCD fame, is pure Good Times in that it overshadows not only the band it has spun off of, but its genesis as well (that is, of course, if Pretty Girls were Maude and Murder City was All In The Family).

Seemingly taking its cues from the number of joints rolled on somebody’s copy of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the Cave Singers’ impressive debut Invitation Songs clearly aims to meander in an entirely different direction than the guitar-heavy impetuses of Fudesco’s previous pair of sonic endeavors.  Utilizing such unpunk instruments as banjos, washboards (occasionally played on here by PGMG vixen Andrea Zollo) and melodica (but not in any way like Augustus Pablo), Invitation Songs barely have the sleeve space to hide their influences here.  Any learned music fan can instantly recognize the ghosts of such roots-tastic classics as Ugly Casanova’s Sharpen Your Teeth, Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground and even Sixteen Horsepower’s Sackcloth & Ashes that pop up in some way, shape or form throughout this ten-song sentiment (thanks in part to frontman and former Hint Hint singer Pete Quirk’s nasally delivery, which comes off strangely enough both everything and nothing like that of either Isaac Brock, Gordon Gano, or David Eugene Edwards, respectively).

And while Invitation Songs does not quite achieve the air of authenticity reached by the aforementioned trifecta of classic records, it certainly gets an A for effort upon hearing such key tracks as “Elephant Clouds” and “Royal Lawns”, both of which bristle with pure rustic charm and backwoods sentiment.  But still, for as good as Invitation Songs may be, you can still tell that these are young, modern guys who used to do post-punk attempting to sound all old-timey and Guthrie-esque—albeit played quite well, mind you.

At any rate, Invitation Songs is one of the most genuine pieces of new music to come out of the hipster-infested woods in all of 2007.  I can’t wait to see what this most worthwhile spin-off of a spin-off has in store for next season.

by PopMatters

Song: Dancing On Our Graves

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Department Of Eagles‘ first effort, The Cold Nose (a.k.a. The Whitey On The Moon UK LP), was an unassuming collection of down-tempo instrumentals, squiggly electronic pop, and even the odd hip-hop goof—it was fun in a “friends fucking around” way, but too unfocused to be memorable. If In Ear Park sounds like the work of a different band, that’s because it is: In between, songwriter Daniel Rossen joined avant-folk group Grizzly Bear, then returned to DOE co-founder Fred Nicolaus with multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor and percussionist Chris Bear in tow. (With three-quarters of Grizzly Bear represented, it may as well be rechristened Department Of Ed Droste’s Not Here.) Although Rossen supposedly used In Ear Park to explore songs outside the mold of his main gig, there’s little evidence here to bear that out. The title track’s woodwind flutters and acoustic trills, the haunted doo-wop of “No One Does It Like You,” the minor-chord gallop of “Around The Bay”—all readily replicate Yellow House’s shifting, autumnal moods and dizzying atmospherics, much to their credit. There are minor quibbles: Rossen, a fan of skewed pop pastiche in the tradition of Van Dyke Parks, translates his affinity for Tin Pan Alley too literally on the cheesy “Teenagers,” and cannibalizes his own “Little Brother” on “Phantom Other.” But in the absence of a new Grizzly Bear album, In Ear Park provides a valuable service while showcasing Rossen as a skilled composer and arranger in his own right.

by The Onion (A.V. Club)

Song: Waves of Rye

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Forget anything you have maybe heard or read about this record. If it doesn’t say how great, how supercharged, or how monumental it is, then whoever wrote it or said it doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about! 5 years in the making and Doug Martsch and crew are back and better then ever. Starting with an 8-minute plus fist in the air opus that makes your heart start racing and your whole body bolt wide awake.

While so many of their indie rock contemporaries have either broken up, burnt out, or become static recorders of nostalgic nothingness, Built to Spill prove that you can get older and better and wiser. Listening to this record over and over and over as I have, I’ve realized how wise Doug Marstch actually is about life and living. This is someone as in touch with his present moment as he was when he was 21. That’s something that seems to be so lacking in most rock music. It’s not rare for people to be really insightful and interesting and living in the moment when they are 21 or 22 and just coming of age but all so often as they get older they seem so out of touch and disconnected with what growing and learning and changing is all about. Martsch seems to have embraced all of that so well and this record is like the masterpiece of that maturity. Not the kind of “maturity” I talk about when people start making softer, safer records. This is the real kind of maturity. A group growing into themselves so perfectly. Guitars twisting and twirling and ringing so true. Melodies that build and bloom and take such nice form. While so many of the bands they helped influence (Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, etc.) have gone on to reach greater commercial success, you get the feeling that they couldn’t care less. It doesn’t seem too far fetched to start thinking about Martsch as his generation’s Neil Young.

Timeless, iconoclastic, always stretching and exploring, even at the risk of failure. Martsch is someone who with their words and guitar makes you feel like you are being given the kind of jangly indie rock hug that you never want to end. Highly recommended!

by Aquarius Records

Song: Goin’ Against Your Mind

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Mona Bone Jakon only began Cat Stevens‘ comeback. Seven months later, he returned with Tea for the Tillerman, an album in the same chamber-group style, employing the same musicians and producer, but with a far more confident tone. Mona Bone Jakon had been full of references to death, but Tea for the Tillerman was not about dying; it was about living in the modern world while rejecting it in favor of spiritual fulfillment. It began with a statement of purpose, “Where Do the Children Play?,” in which Stevens questioned the value of technology and progress. “Wild World” found the singer being dumped by a girl, but making the novel suggestion that she should stay with him because she was incapable of handling things without him. “Sad Lisa” might have been about the same girl after she tried and failed to make her way; now, she seemed depressed to the point of psychosis. The rest of the album veered between two themes: the conflict between the young and the old, and religion as an answer to life’s questions. Tea for the Tillerman was the story of a young man’s search for spiritual meaning in a soulless class society he found abhorrent. He hadn’t yet reached his destination, but he was confident he was going in the right direction, traveling at his own, unhurried pace. The album’s rejection of contemporary life and its yearning for something more struck a chord with listeners in an era in which traditional verities had been shaken. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Stevens had lost none of his ability to craft a catchy pop melody; the album may have been full of angst, but it wasn’t hard to sing along to. As a result, Tea for the Tillerman became a big seller and, for the second time in four years, its creator became a pop star.

by All Music Guide

Song: Father and Son (BBC, London 1971)

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If the ten-minute opening title track “Deadwing” isn’t proof enough, then the ensuing remainder of the CD of the same name certainly makes a bold statement that Porcupine Tree is back with a vengeance. 2002’s debut on Lava Records In Absentia was at the time the bands boldest, most commercial, and certainly heaviest record to date, that is, until Deadwing. Steven Wilson has fully embraced his love for heavy metal and atmospheric rock music, merging the two styles very convincingly here, surely his relationship with progressive death metal band Opeth greatly influencing his writing style these days.

The title track is a compelling mix of prog rock, catchy alternative, and crushing metal, littered with Wilson’s searing guitars and Richard Barbieri’s clever keyboard work. However, the crushing “Shallow” is easily the heaviest track the band has recorded yet, with thick beefy guitars, aggressive rhythms, and Wilson’s forceful vocals. This is metal with a capital “M”! On “Lazarus”, the band switches gears for a gorgeous pop rock tune that recalls Wilson’s side project with Israeli singer Aviv Geffen called Blackfield, complete with lush lead & backing vocals and the majestic piano of Barbieri. The melodies and hooks on this one are simply tremendous.

The band mixes symphonic rock with industrial and funk sounds on the groove -laden “Halo”, complete with a frenzied guitar solo from King Crimson legend Adrian Below and Wilson’s distorted lead vocals. Fans of Porcupine Tree’s earlier space rock style will love the 13-minute extravaganza “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here”, a tune that scratches the Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream itch quite nicely, yet retains the modern PT sound. Lots of multi-layered vocal harmonies on this, as well as acrobatic and soaring lead guitar work from Wilson, plus many varied keyboard textures. Check out the daring middle section where the band switches from ambient space to down and dirty thrash metal, complete with crashing drums from Gavin Harrison, nimble bass work from Colin Edwin, Wilson’s pummeling guitar dirges, and Barbieri’s raging organ. If you dug the last Dream Theater album, this tune will put a big smile on your face. The band goes through many changes of tone, mood, and tempo here, and this is easily one of the bands most ambitious tunes in years.

The band travels back to Earth for another pleasant and tuneful pop song with “Mellotron Scratch”, which features plenty of engaging harmonies and multi-part vocals. Again, fans of Blackfield, as well as The Beatles, will love this song. The band returns to more riff-based material on the heavy “Open Car”, this one a more straightforward rocker that has a catchy verse to go along with some meaty guitar chords. More crunchy guitars meet futuristic and ambient keyboard washes on the complex “The Start of Something Beautiful”, a song that sees drummer Harrison lay down some funk/jazz drum licks while Wilson and Barbieri conjure up the perfect meeting of thunder and space. The band returns to the Pink Floyd-influenced soundscapes for a classic Porcupine Tree epic called “Glass Arm Shattering”, which sees Wilson’s haunting, dreamy, washed out vocals soaring over spacey keyboard settings and liquid guitar patterns. A wonderful end to a wonderful album.

by Sea of Tranquility

Song: Arriving Somewhere But Not Here

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Hovering in the shadows comes Apse’s Spirit, a mesmerizing album where the shrouded world of Gothic gloom meets the outer stratosphere of space rock. Although laced with vocals and haunted by moody melodies, the 11 tracks within are less songs than instrumentals interconnected by their melodies, rhythms, and thick atmospheres. It’s an unusual set, and a subtle one, making it difficult to hang on a descriptive peg, but for starters imagine Dark Side of the Moon era Pink Floyd covering Joy Division (but nothing as accessible as “Love Can Tear Us Apart”). Toss Adam & the Ants rolling rhythms into the mix, add dollops of western guitar, turn on a dry ice machine, and stir thoroughly. The atmospheres are dense and intense, the melodies moody, the rhythms variable, sliding between the Ants’ tribalism, doom dance, martial marches and, in the case of “Ark,” Latin beats. They are the driving force of each piece, their shifts heralding a change in mood and focus, over which the melodies splay. The latter are handed off between guitar and keyboard, the former particularly evocative, the latter more versatile, bringing forth classical elements, cathedral auras, and genre bending sounds. Read what you will into the music within, this reviewer sensed an epic tale of the arrival of Europeans in the New World, starting with the Vikings sailing down “From the North” to discover a land populated by “Legions” of indigenous peoples. From the south, the “Shade of the Moor” spread out from the Caribbean into the Americas. Colonies fail, the natives are decimated by disease and war, but the Europeans keep coming, both communities’ “Spirit”s haunting the land to this day. However one chooses to interpret the set, its mood and music casts an unbreakable spell, leaving the listener haunted by the images evoked and the atmospheres conjured up.

by All Music Guide

Song: Legions

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White Denim pretty much define the idea of a ‘glorious mess’. For a moment, on playing their first single, the terrific “Let’s Talk About It”, it was possible to think that this might be a hot new, entirely marketable garage band in a similar way to how, say, The Strokes, or The Hives once were. By the time the single had unwound, broken down, and kicked magnificently back in to life, it was blindingly obvious that nothing so simple could possibly be the case.

As this great debut album unfolds (at times, completely unspools), it becomes apparent that’s how this Austin, Texas band prefer to go about things. A band plugged into some recognisable sources – Black Flag, Minutemen – but with some arguably far less recognisable ways of doing things, not least their penchant for mildly psychedelic digressions, White Denim have made a garage-rock album that at the very least forces you to think differently about your garage.

At times, as on “Darksided Computer Mouth”, with its crisp guitars, and the ironic declamations of singer/guitarist James Petralli, the band can sound like some primal version of LCD Soundsystem. Certainly, throughout Workout Holiday, in spite of initial appearances, the band proves themselves unable to take the route one option with their guitar music: as with the MC5-in-dub of “All You Really Have To Do” or the looped Afropop of “Don’t Look That Way At It”, they’re unafraid of casting their net wide and weird to create their desired effect.

But while LCD use this formula to produce polished, minimal dance/rock, White Denim do so and create an impressive, maximal splurge. They’re a marvellous vision of disorder, perhaps the Dorian Gray-like picture in James Murphy’s attic.

In the end, that may be the band’s best trick. This is undoubtedly music that has been thought out, strategised and worked over again and again, but it couldn’t sound less like it. Ultimately, Workout Holiday is a party record for thinking people, and it’s a smart time to join them.

by Uncut

Song: All You Really Have To Do

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The Wave Pictures are a deeply personal band – their lyrics full of intimate detail, the semi-lo-fi quality of their recordings covering the music in a layer of cosy crackle. They illicit personal responses to their music: see how Emma Lee-Moss described the band, back in November, as making her feel like an “idiot girl in a poodle skirt swooning over a matinee idol”. I know what she means. My poodle skirt aside, the group, a three-piece from a London, write music whose lilting effervescence paints life with a kind of sepia nostalgia, an intoxicating blend of 1950s riffs and failed, baffling relationships – you can’t help but become wrapped up in it. It’s no coincidence lead singer Dave Tattersall has toured with most of the leading lights of the New York anti-folk scene, there’s definitely a shared aesthetic here, a dedication to specificity that lends every song the same warped candour as some discarded notebook. Although it feels like they’ve only just appeared in the public consciousness, The Wave Pictures have been going for years, releasing half a dozen self-recorded albums already – Instant Coffee Baby is only the most recent incarnation of an already polished act.

If, previously, The Wave Pictures were slightly too indebted to The Modern Lovers, here they sound like a band finding their own voice, one that treads the line between Hefner (Darren Hayman appears on the album) and the Herman Dünes (whose sister Lisa Li-Lund here sings backing vocals). Like Herman Düne’s Giant, the album seems to exist in a self-contained summer bubble of red wine (‘Red Wine Teeth’) and renewed hope (“it’s fantastic to feel beautiful again!” they cheer on ‘Cassius Clay’). Unlike Giant, they’re still a ramshackle quality to the production, the kind of slight hum and buzz that makes old recordings feel homely and imperfect. The best track on the album, ‘Strange Fruit For David’, is full of what makes Instant Coffee Baby so endearing, those warbling vocals, the sing-song chorus with its garbled imagery: “a sculpture is a sculpture, marmalade is marmalade, and a sculpture of marmalade is a sculpture, but it isn’t marmalade…”. You feel like Tattersall is singing with you, rather than at you, the songs themselves full of secrets and stories he’s bursting to tell.

by Drowned In Sound

Song: I Love You Like A Madman

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Scott Walker’s success as a teen idol singer of Spectorish ballads with the Walker Brothers in no way prepared listeners for the mordant, despairing lyrics of his solo debut. To compound the surprise, he does his best to imitate the vocal girth of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra on this mix of original tunes and covers, which also features sweeping, bloated orchestral arrangements. It was hardly rock, and pop of a most oddball sort, but it found a surprisingly large audience — in Britain, anyway, where it reached the Top Three in 1967. Poke behind the velvet curtain of the languid MOR arrangements, and one finds a surprisingly literate existentialist at the helm of these proceedings. His lyrical nuances were probably lost on his audience of predominately teenage girls, though they’ve earned him a small cult audience that endures to this day. Besides presenting three of his own compositions, Walker covers tunes by Weill/Mann, Tim Hardin, and Andre & Dory Previn on this album, as well as three songs by his favorite writer, Jacques Brel. Highlights include his exquisitely anguished rendition of Brel’s classic “Amsterdam” and his dramatic cover of the early-’60s Toni Fisher pop ballad “The Big Hurt.”

by All Music Guide

Song: My Death

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In 1969 Mayo Thompson released his first solo record, Corky’s Debt To His Father. Departing from his avant-garde psychedelic band, Red Krayola, Thompson created a record that evokes the spirit of Alexander Skip Spence, but makes things a little more country than spacey. Keeping in mind Thompson’s unconventional style of singing and his occasionally peculiar guitar tunings, this record probably will not make much sense to the listener on the first play. However, whatever attention you give this record will be repaid equally with an enchanting and totally unique listening experience.

The song “Horses” from the album is a particular favorite of mine. Skittish drums keep the canter of this song at gate-jumping pace, while Thompson’s vocals gracefully post over his lyrical horse…or maybe that is his heartbeat. Another beaut is “Dear Betty Baby.” Downbeat horns and lyrical musings fill this song with quiet poetry. This is Thompson as the romantic troubadour, the wandering minstrel, trawling the seas of love and story telling.

by The Walrus

Song: Oyster Thins

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