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Child Actors
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Mike Pace was the vehicle behind our favorite indie whiz-kids Oxford Collapse, from 2003 to 2009. In my opinion, though I happen to know it differs from Pace’s own, their best material to date was their last album, 2008’s Bits, which received a 7.8 in pitchfork. Now, I have to admit, I was attracted to the review, and the album, because it seemed to handle the topic of partying pretty thoroughly and unabashedly, and indeed, on first listen, I found it to embody the stupidness of a roving drunk, repeating the same phrase like six times in the first song, over the course of about a minute. Luckily for all of us, that album went on to produce literally some of the funniest indie rock lyrics of all time: “They’ll never be more than siblings / And I blew it with all of mine”… “Sometimes second cousins won’t follow you home agaaaain!”, the amazing thing being the serious, damaged tinge in the singer’s (I don’t think it was Pace on this song) voice as he said these things.
You can listen to “Summer Lawns” online now, which I guess makes it the album’s lead single (as far as I know the album is due out in January), and it’s definitely ripe with the fruitful pop bliss that Bits delivered so consistently (I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to Bits over 100 times).
In the meantime, also, Mike Pace has been busy with “Worst Gig Ever,” a weekly radio program broadcast with a friend from his home in New York that basically involves interviewing various artists, such as Kaki King, et. al., and having them go on to describe their own nightmares of touring. They do a great job introducing the motifs of the music before they bring the artist on, and it seems very nurturing of the scene and the craft of live performance. Don’t believe the Axel Rose/Johnny Rotten hype; all that crap’s disposable anyway. True rock artists have always also been activists too.
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Indigo Girls
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From the way it sounds, Billboard’s summertime hype of “Indigo Girls to Enter Studio in Fall” could be somewhat cause for excessive anticipation; it sounds like it still could be a while before we get the record, from what the girls have been saying. Amy Ray told Billboard that she’s “got a few songs,” and she said her partner has a few, but from the way the producer sounds, Jordan Brooke Hamilin, it’ll be a very nice-girl intimacy fest, the sound of the vocals magnified, extra miked up and textural, possibly producing a lot of anxiety and cold feet for everyone involved, especially given all the hype. Still, it sounds like it at least won’t be an overbearing, brooding double album, like Lucinda Williams just put out.
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The Hollow of the Hand — PJ Harvey’s Book of Poetry
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Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey’s 2004 rock tour de force through the nadir of failed love, produced an insane effect on me — I was dying to get to know this guy she was pining for, restless at the prospect of reading HIS writing (“Who is left / Who writes these days / But you and me? / We’ll be different”). But so many times in life I’m disappointed, and oftentimes artists like this have a way of replenishing and enriching the world around us, in our minds, which can create the phenomenon of making us forget that it initially came from their own muse, in the first place. Anyway, I’ll be on this. Harvey in her lyrics had a way of doing what no one else had ever done by being a female and being very bold, but also being very damaged and pertinent, at the same time. Along with her guitar skill, she’s always also been quite the venerable verbal grappler.
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HEALTH/Haxan Cloak
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Boy, where’s the love for LA these days in music criticism? First of all, I’ve found The LA Record to be the most unimpeachable online journal, and unlike most others, they don’t have a bias in favor of their own coast: I discovered Baltimore’s riveting Entrance Band on there, evaded by the oft-exalted sweeping hand of pitchfork.
And these poor boys have had their electric guitars taken away by the school corporation. Just kidding, but all LA bands that were rock at some point in the late ’00’s have adopted an electronica m.o., whether they be Liars, Abe Vigoda or the aforementioned (the other choice being to just start sucking, like No Age, smh)… THIS is the urban music of the promising but woozy 20-teens, THIS is the ambient dirty work.
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Sleater-Kinney
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This will be primarily be entertaining for the fact that it will offer an opportunity to make fun of Carrie Brownstein, and Northwest women in general who have a tragic lack of self-consciousness and artistic inhibition. Billie Joe Armstrong said of the making of the epic 2004 American Idiot, something along the lines that, when you’re nervous before the production of something, it usually means that that something is of substance, and it will end up really meaning something to the listener. Well, suffice it to say this nugget of motif sadly seems to elude the S/K reassembly: Brownstein has been a regular female Seth Rogen, trumpeting the overproduced and desultory Portlandia, and now mouthing off full of herself to the press: “Sleater-Kinney isn’t something you can do half-assed.” She’s right, maybe you have to be a total ass.
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Generally, more tree-hugging douche bags continuing to oppose fracking,
This despite the fact that it’s triggered a magnanimous boom in the economy and driven gas prices down, while not hurting or killing a single Iraqi (should the government regulate the hunting of Iraqis?) I even talked to a Notre Dame professor here in my hometown who was FROM a fracking nucleus of upstate New York, and he was in favor of the drilling, recognizing that it’s a diplomatically healthy practice, always, deriving energy on the homefront and quitting all this vituperative imperialism in the name of our gluttonous country.