The Black Hollies profiled, for the Portland Mercury.

Windsor for the Derby reviewed, for Paper Thin Walls.

One: Ben Gibbard and Mark Kozelek talk songwriting, geography, and more.

Two: Grayson Currin on Ecstatic Sunshine.

Three: I can’t maintain much of a critical distance with respect to Oxford Collapse, but suffice it to say — “Amongst Friends” from their upcoming 12″ on Comedy Minus One is damn good.

Four: Also: lots to announce on the ERMP page, including pretty much the entire June 28 bill and more artists for June 7.

Sometime this evening, I’ll be back with thoughts on last week’s Yeti 5 release party; I swear…

One: Good news from Chicago, as the event promoters ordinance appears to be headed for an overhaul.

Two: Do you like literary, absurdist humor? If so, you will find this amazing. (I did.)

Three: Jessica Winter on the literature of procrastination.

Over the weekend, I visited the Melville House storefront in DUMBO to pick up a gift for a friend. Along the way, I also picked up Jen Angel’s history of Clamor magazine — said storefront also stocks selected titles from other publishers, including Akashic, PM Press, and Verso. I spent a fair amount of time looking at what was prominently displayed, and given that Melville House’s recent titles have ranged from Bernard-Henri Lévy’s essays on geopolitics to Tao Lin’s absurdist, moving fiction and poetry, that covered a lot of ground.

Good design has a way of pulling you in, though, and references to my home state multiply that. Which is a lengthy way of saying that I was rapidly attracted to Christian Bauman’s In Hoboken. I haven’t picked up a copy yet (I’m in my reading-nonfiction-while-writing-fiction mode at present) but I expect I will before too long; it seems to fall into a small but outstanding pocket of literature, namely: the Jersey Rock Novel.

By hook or by crook, I’m going to write an essay on this somewhere, sometime — suffice it to say that the Jersey Rock Novel is a combination of three of my favorite things that also is one of my favorite things, which is something of a neat trick.  Tom Perotta’s The Wishbones definitely fits into this category, as does Rick Moody’s Garden State. (Incidentally, Moody’s introduction to a late-90s paperback edition of the same remains one of my favorite pieces of writing about music, and about music’s ability to inspire other creative works, that I’ve ever read.) The first lengthy work of fiction I ever completed to any satisfaction — a novella called “The Driver North” that I worked on from 1999 to 2003 or so — is probably my own attempt at the subsubsubgenre, albeit filtered through a hardcore-kid sensibility*.

Either way: the Jersey Rock Novel essay. Watch for it. I swear.

*-an aside from an aside: one of the major plot points involved a onetime hardcore vocalist eventually reaching the proverbial heights of fame. In the late 90s, when I was initially conceiving the plot, this seemed deeply surreal; by the time I’d finished up a cohesive draft…not so much. One of these days, I’ll get a time machine and tell my twenty-one-year-old self that one of the guys from Racetraitor will go on to be in one of the biggest rock bands in America, which will simultaneously blow his mind and be a ridiculously stupid thing to do with the fabric of space and time.

As someone with an interest in a lot of what’s happening in Chicago arts-wise right now, Jim DeRogatis’s coverage of the proposed promoter’s ordinance there as is well worth a read. From where I’m sitting, it sounds pretty ominous to me, especially given that (assumably) the reading I took part in last summer (sponsored by a literary broadsheet; band playing throughout) would probably not have happened under those conditions.

One: Nico Muhly on Helen DeWitt.

Two: Ezra Klein on the Kindle.

Three: In related news, the Oxford English Dictionary goes online-only. (Via Maud Newton.)

By way if reply, a photo of what my glasses now look like:

In other words: it was awesome.

One: Kingsley Amis and James Bond, plus surreal cover artwork.

Two: Largehearted Boy talks books with Michael Carreira of Cryptacize.

Three:  Todd Dills on Birmingham politics.

For those of you in or near NYC: there’s an announcement on our first show of 2008 now up on the East River Music Project website.

One: In which the mothers of numerous indie rockers talk indie rock. Specifically, their children’s.

Two: New York on The Night Marchers.

Three: Souvenirs + installation art = kinda genius.

1.
So: how was the No Age show at Bowery, you might ask? As more than a few have said: uneven. I did think that it sounded better than, say, the time I saw them outside at Emo’s — while tight, something seemed to have drifted into the mix that leveled off their sound. At the Bowery Ballroom, that wasn’t present, and at their set’s peaks, you had sheets of noise and full-blown punk energy coursing through the room.

2.
That said, the ambient interludes (which work brilliantly on Nouns — more on that in a second) never really clicked; at times, it felt like watching two dudes tinkering on stage. Which is totally cool, except that not sixty seconds earlier, those dudes were (to borrow a phrase from the band currently coming through my speakers) raging full-on. I think there’s a way to pull off that divide live, but they didn’t seem to have reached it yet.

3.
One aside: though High Places does draw from a similar busted-speakers aesthetic, their set fared a lot better. In part, I’d say, this was due to the unrelenting pulse of their music: while the group’s airier elements were in place, the low end served both as a constant and something to fill the room.

4.
One of the definite highlights of No Age’s set was the song “Eraser“. Dear lord: frenetic beats and bursts of noise — had this song been around when I was eighteen, I never would have struggled to reconcile my dual loves of punk rock and The Boo Radleys.

5.
I picked up a copy of Nouns at the show, and my initial reaction is “fantastic”: it’s got that visceral hit and enough intellectual changeups to keep the brain working.

6.
It’s worth mentioning here that No Age’s contribution to Stereogum’s recent Björk tribute is far and away the highlight of the piece. Ironic that it’s a bonus track, then, but still — unlike some contributors, they do (for me) the best job of internalizing their choice of cover and making it feel organically theirs. Admittedly, covering Björk can be a trying business — I still remember being underwhelmed by Twilight Singers’ cover of “Hyperballad”, which I’d expected to be amazing — but they pull it off.

I have a review of Joan of Arc’s “A Tell-Tale Penis” up at Paper Thin Walls, along with a brief q & a with Tim Kinsella. (Obligatory link to my JOA-inspired short story “Party Able Model” here.)

One question-and-answer that was cut from the final version that appeared on PTW was this, which also delves slightly into Make Believe’s new disc:

Boo Human and Make Believe’s Going to the Bone Church are being released closely together, and share many of the same musicians. Was there any cross-pollination between the two albums?
Not really. Past records, like the first Make Believe record and Joan of arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain were both made in much more overlapping manners and though the two bands definitely exist as yins and yangs of each other for me, this is now true in a much slower and less immediate way than was true a couple years ago. Also, in the past, both bands have been more collaborative efforts by all of the same people and this was much less true about this Joan of arc record. And the Make Believe record had been done and fixed in solution for 3 months by the time the first Joan of arc recordings happened and though of course 3 months is not too long of time, it’s a good cushion between some creative endeavor being entirely wrapped up and another one with its own specific requirements and demands being embarked upon.

One: Matthew Perpetua offers multiple perspectives on No Age.

Two: Molly Templeton provides select links to the ongoing debate on summer movies, superheroes, and dudes.

Three: SB on feminism, Grand Theft Auto, and street hockey.

Four: Reihan Salam asks where Santogold stands regarding the Democratic primary.

1.

I’ve been listening to Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue a lot lately. Specifically, I’ve been listening to the third of three pieces that comprise the album, “The Only Tune”, and I’ve been doing so in a way that borders on the obsessive. Mothertongue, as works go, marks an interesting shift for Muhly in comparison with the pieces collected on his earlier Speaks Volumes. On “Keep In Touch”, heard on the former album, the voice of Antony Hegarty gradually enters, singing wordlessly and mournfully over strings. His voice, though, seems intact: one could reasonably assume that Hegarty’s vocals heard here were a linear translation of what was initially recorded. The use of vocals on Mothertongue mark a significant shift: Muhly has embraced manipulation, and the vocals that appear on the album’s three pieces — particularly “The Only Tune” and “Wonders” — are manipulated and edited as confidently as anything emerging from the laptops, sequencers, and decks of a top-flight producer.

“The Only Tune” reunites Muhly with Sam Amidon; Muhly had previously provided orchestrations for Amidon’s All Is Well, released earlier this year. I’ve written about the album elsewhere; essentially, the combination of Muhly’s slow-building arrangements and Amidon’s restrained, moving delivery made for a wrenching, immersive experience; one in which centuries-old lyrics sounded fresh and revitalized. Amidon’s delivery is peculiar: he’s able to wring tiny moments of pain out of a seemingly deadpan delivery. It’s this aspect of his vocals that Muhly slowly dissects over the course of the piece, slowing down and vivisecting lyrics, stanzas, images; essentially releasing the subtext and elemental horror found in traditional lyrics: murder, betrayal, and the fashioning of something primal and shocking. It’s hard to imagine this piece working without Amidon’s peculiar delivery, but “The Only Tune” becomes a grander work than a more straightforward delivery of its source might have been.

2.

In a piece originally written for the Guardian, Mulhy praises the work of the composer Son Lux, noting the sacred undertones of his work and placing him in a longstanding tradition of Anglican music. Lux’s album At War With Walls & Mazes was recently released by anticon., a record label best-known for a progressive, collaboration-friendly strain of hip-hop. It’s a hard album to categorize: Muhly is spot-on in his assessment, but it likewise doesn’t seem out of place released by the same label responsible for 13 & God, a collaboration between members of the German avant-pop group The Notwist and anticon. founders Themselves.

While the blurring of lines between rock and classical has been well-documented in recent years, the case could be made that a similar process is unfolding between hip-hop and classical. Besides the aforementioned Son Lux, I’m thinking of Alex Ross jolting an audience at Sound Fix last November by playing an excerpt of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre (”Tancas serradas a muru”), wherein a looped, loping beat underscores Dawn Upshaw’s vocals. I’m thinking of dälek’s collaboration with Anti-Social Music (reviewed by Daphne Carr in its live form here) and their more recent split 12″ with Austin’s My Education, in which Arvö Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” is re-interpreted.

3.

That said, some of this debate makes me think back to one of my first points of exposure to 20th-century classical composition. I’m going to admit my general lack of knowledge of the subject first and foremost — what information I do have largely comes through the patience of good friends who’ve been willing to help with the (sizeable) gaps in my knowledge. Between that and my occasional references in this space to my misspent alt-rock youth, it’s probably not a huge shock that the aforementioned first point was, in fact, the mid-90s recording of Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Which I initially picked up because, hey, it had Tom Waits on it, and proceeded to rediscover it about a decade later.

All of which does lead me to wonder, in a circular way: are the folks checking out Nico Muhly’s work due to the Antony/Will Oldham/Björk/Rufus Wainwright connections — i.e. those of us who come more from the rock/pop side of the equation — delving more into the world of classical as well? And on the flip side, how many of the fairly substantial number of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound fans will note Bradford Cox’s abundant praise for Pauline Oliveros and use it as a cue to pick up some of her work?

Last Friday, after boarding the L train, I arrived at The Silent Barn most of the way through Fiasco’s set. Bad timing on my part: what I saw of their set I really enjoyed, and the strain of thrashy hardcore that they played seemed especially suited for the DIY space in which the show was held. (When I descended into the basement, I might as well have been back in Jersey a decade earlier, though minus the beard.)

Vivian Girls closed out the night with a brief, high-energy set. I’d enjoyed seeing them at SXSW, and I dug them this particular evening as well. It’s moody music that’s played with enthusiasm, and its position between harmony-driven pop and raging noise is precarious but spot-on.

I’d come out that night to see Abe Vigoda — who had earlier played on the rooftop, apparently — and overall liked what I heard. Their sound was a little cleaner than what I’d expected from their debut Kid City — though given that a new album is on the way later this summer, that may just be a natural progression. The guitar sound reminded me a little of caUSE co-MOTION! — both hollow and spacious, fraying and pinpoint — though the use of rhythms and alternating vocals suggested something else entirely. Overall, an energetic set with some entertaining banter between songs. When I saw Abe Vigoda’s contemporaries No Age at SXSW earlier this year, I found myself wondering just how large a venue they could play before their sound would stop translating properly to it. Though the two bands have a similar aesthetic, I don’t see the same thing being a potential problem for Abe Vigoda — though it should be said that (a)I’m getting into the realm of the extremely theoretical here*, and (b)it’s entirely possible/likely that I’ll leave No Age’s Bowery Ballroom show tomorrow with my mind blown, fully embracing their ability to play Webster Hall/Summerstage/Keyspan Park in the future.

*-one stop removed from fan fiction. Oh lord. I can see it now.
“‘Thank you, Dean Spunt,’ Batman said. “The next time you’re in Gotham…’”